Last Tuesday evening marked the return of the Game Weasels to David's Coffee Place, but I must admit that this time they were reasonably well behaved, and certainly not so terribly noisy. Perhaps one reason for this was that only one male weasel was in attendance, at least while I observed them. (At some point, the Game Weasels moved outdoors to the front patio.)

I have been reading Collected Fictions, an anthology of the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges.

The translator, Andrew Hurley, has increasingly struck me as a pirouetting fool, and this after-noon I encountered what may be the definitive illustration of this foolishness.

The first paragraph of Night of the Gifts places an event of Borges's life near the intersection of Calle Florida and Piedad. Hurley presents us with the datum that Piedad's name was changed to Bartolomé Mitre in 1906, and Hurley proposes to date the story accordingly, taking a swipe at Borges for pretending that he might have participated meaningfully in a discussion of Platonic ideals at or before the age of seven.

Well, the second paragraph describes a character as elderly, and in the third paragraph that character says that in the summer of 1874 he was about to turn 13. At the time that Piedad's name was changed, that character would have been about 45. It's rather unlikely that Borges would call such man elderly (especially as Borges himself would probably have been in his seventies when he wrote the story).

In other works, Borges or his characters often use older names for places. Here, forgetful, defiant, or indifferent, he uses the older name for a street, in spite of the declarations of city officials. Woo hoo.

Very simply, Bill Clinton felt that he and Hillary were entitled to be treated by the mainstream media as the media generally treat… uhm, Democrats. Instead, the mainstream media treated Barack Obama as they do Democrats, and treated the Clintons as they do… Republicans. Bill Clinton's conviction that Obama's campaign was able to foment charges of racism speaks to the relationship that has long existed between the Democrats and the mainstream media, through which the Republicans haven't been able to do much fomenting in the last half-century. (Republicans have only been able to foment by way of alternate channels, such as talk radio, Fox News, and the right-wing 'blogosphere.)

Those of you who followed my LJ might remember that a few years ago I took care of a neighbor's Yorkie for a while.

My neighbor had a partner who had (and has) AIDS. His health had notably worsened, and so he had left, to be with family. (He later seemed to bounce-back, and when last I knew he was doing alright.)

Anyway, the two of them had jointly shared responsibilities for the Yorkie, and I picked-up some of the slack for a bit. During part of that time, the dog simply stayed with me. At other times, I was just getting him from my neighbor's apartment, taking him for a walk and returning him, once or twice a day.

I really like that little dog. I would have been quite willing to just take ownership of him, but I didn't want my neighbor to lose his dog to me in a moment of weakness, so I never suggested such a thing.

A few weeks ago, my neighbor moved from our complex to another part of the city. I regretted the fact that I would probably never see the dog again. I do, however, see my former neighbor occasionally, as he has come to David's Coffee Place.

On Tuesday, I asked him how the dog was doing, and learned that the dog had been given away. My neighbor had felt that he couldn't handle the dog's needs.

Apparently, the dog has been placed with an affluent family, and now has a privileged existence. I'm very glad of that. But part of me wishes that he'd been offered to me.

(I would in any event of course have had to clear acceptance with the Woman of Interest. Anything that cannot be kept in something like a medium-sized terrarium, aquarium, or bird cage should get her okay.)

Many people at David's Coffee Place play games — there are a fair number of chess players, and I think that there is usually a card game going on the patio. A number of people take advantage of the WLAN to play WoW.

Unfortunately, there is also a weekly meet-up of the SDBG, AKA the Game Weasels. The Game Weasels crowd those around them, physically pressing up against strangers, obliviously bumping into tables, unplugging power cords, and so forth. They somehow associate having a good time with being loud, such that their noisiness feeds on itself. And they love to play games that are tests of knowledge, but they don't seem to be very knowledgeable; their noisiness makes their ignorance hard to ignore.

Other regulars, patrons and baristi, are starting to complain amongst themselves. Some of us need to figure-out how to address this problem. Some of the Game Weasels seem like the sort who would respond well to an individual, but others seem to have an exaggerated sense of entitlement, so they are best approached by a group, or by a representative of the firm (one of the owners, or a barista).

At 12:58, Rod Pereira, owner of Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) called my cell phone and left a message on my voice mail, saying that he'd been unable to reach me by e.mail and asking me to call him or to send my e.mail address to his e.mail address.

(Geek Available got my USPS address and cell-phone number at the same as my e.mail address, when I first gave them my computer for repair, so they've had two other ways of reaching me besides e.mail. At that time, I was asked to recite rather than to write my e.mail address, so there may have been a transcription error, but Geek Available should have received a bounce-back from that — it is unlikely that AT&T has a user account with anyone of the more typical misspellings. Certainly AT&T sends a bounce-back when it rejects e.mail as spam.)

I have no desire to communicate with Pereira off-the-record, so I sent my e.mail address to his.

As I previously noted, in an interview published on 6 April, Greenspan said that there were not many signs that the economy were actually in recession, but declared on 8 April that we were in the throes of a recession.

Well, to-day,

Asked if the U.S. economy was in recession, Greenspan said: We are on the brink.

I doubt that I am alone in wishing that Alan would make up his mind.

(I just hope that I don't find Paul Volcker playing with Neopets at David's Coffee Place to-day; that gives me the willies.)

Yester-day, in the shower, my thoughts wandered onto the question of just what, exactly, is wrong with Dracula's Daughter (1936), and I reälized that its great flaw is its pedestrian cinematography. This conclusion then led me to wonder who was the cinematographer. This morning, I found that it was George Robinson. Looking at the rest of his credits, I quickly saw that he was also cinematographer for Drácula (1931), the Spanish-language version of Dracula shot, at night, on the same sets as were being used to shoot Dracula (1931) in the day. One of the various ways in which Drácula is markèdly inferior to Dracula is the thoughtless cinematography of the former.

Incorrigible, the Woman of Interest has now referred to Robinson as the man who made Drácula suck.

I have received the following from the Better Business Bureau concerning my complaint against GeekAvailable (underscore mine):

The Bureau has decided to close this complaint and consider it unresolved. You have indicated that the company's response to the complaint does not settle the matter, and the BBB has determined that the company's response does not adequately address all the issues or make a good faith effort to resolve the dispute.

When I told Rod Pereira that I would go through the BBB first, rather than court, because it would take more out of your hide, this outcome was what I had in mind. The BBB won't take a case if it has already been taken to court or to a government agency; so Pereira's record with the BBB would have remained as it had been (one resolved complaint). But I can still exercise either one (or both) of those options after an unsatisfactory attempt at resolution through the BBB; and now Pereira's record there reflects his bad faith behavior.

Of course, Pereira could have minimized the loss to his hide by refunding the evalutation fee and offering some compromise on the other costs (enough to satisfy the the BBB, rather than me), but I had a feeling that he'd let adolescent machismo get the better of him.

I am now waiting on billing records from a credit card issuer, then I will take Pereira to court. Pereira will thus be made to bear court costs on top of repaying me.