The Dickens says, "I like cockroaches and crickets and biders." She qualifies this statement with, "I 'fraid of the bider. He got a butt!"

I tell her that it's actually an abdomen.

"Oh," she replies. "Abumen."

I've noticed this before in people who are afraid of spiders. Something about their abdomens creeps people out. Go figure.

The big weapons-manufacturing company on my route has changed their security policy again. Now, apparently, everybody who wants to be allowed access to the property has to have a badge. I told them that I'm not going to get a badge, because in order to get one I'd have to go visit their visitors center in the middle of the day. So far they've been letting me in anyway, although tonight I had the misfortune to arrive during Slow Security Guard's shift. He's a great, bovine lump of a man, who moves about as quickly as roadkill. He had to call his supervisor to ask what he should do, then he spent some time hunting for his clipboard, all the while grumbling about the new policy. I'm sure that he's upset with this policy only because it requires him to leave his comfy chair inside his comfy little guard shack and flounder about seaching for the proper forms and the pen to fill them out with.

The fact that it's people like this who stand between dangerous weapons and anybody who might decide to liberate them sort of worries me.

cds I listened to while waiting for the security guard to find his pen: Leonard Cohen "Songs of Love and Hate", Current Ninety Three/Nurse With Wound "Bright Yellow Moon/Purtle", Aranos "Making Love in Small Spaces", and Sol Invictus "The Death of the West"