Complex Numbers

Revisited: "Someone's Birthday"

Well, here it is: my first blog post of 2023.

I usually post just after midnight, but obviously I was too drunk to be coherent, so I waited until I was hung over. It may be Amateur Night, but us drinking professionals enjoy it too. It's just that I celebrated at home so I wouldn't have to deal with the amateurs, or get judged by an Uber driver.

I could use this post to look forward to the new year, but that's trite. Or I could make my usual jokes about how you've already failed all of your New Year's Resolutions, but that's even triter; no, I think I'll save that for this week's Comedy newsletter. Alternatively, I could take advantage of the flipping of the calendar to announce a major change in posting format, or a new blog contest that I'll run, but neither of those things are going to happen. Well, the blog contest might happen, but it won't be dependent on some arbitrary odometer change. (I'm toying with the idea of a weekly blogging contest, where I post a prompt and you have six days to take it where it leads you. We'll see.)

But no. If it wasn't Sunday, I'd pull a random article from my still-lengthy queue and rant about it, as per usual. But it is Sunday, and I've been using Sundays to pull the levers on the Wayback Machine, so that's what you get today. Today's blast from the past is from May 10, 2019: "Someone's Birthday" 

This is a short one and a response to a 30DBC prompt (I kinda miss that activity, though not enough to jump in and work on it), and, as the title suggests, it celebrates the birthday of Sum1 .

Sum1 can be summed up with one word: mushroom. No, wait; that's not it. Toadstool? Well. Some sort of fun guy anyway.

Since I posted this, the author in question changed his username. Oddly, the old links still work. I thought they broke when someone changes their username, but apparently not.

I'm not sure whether this was the first time I made the "fungi" pun in the blog. Probably not; I've been spouting variants of it since high school. It certainly wasn't the last time. I know, I know; it's a morel failing on my part.

After all, Sum1 is the curator of "Smile! (Groan?) You Know You Love These!"  [ASR], which does almost as much to spread laughter as my own comedy does.

And this is how my sense of time sucks: I didn't realize he'd been posting those for so long. It's a regular part of my daily routine to read them.

I don't remember when I first met Sum1. It was probably in the super-secret Moderators forum, which the rest of you can't know about. I know he hasn't been around as long as I have, so really, he's just a kid.

When I wrote that entry, I hadn't met Jim in person. Since then, I've seen him... let's see... four times? Once at dinner with 🌕 HuntersMoon when he was in our area; once on his own turf in Ill-annoy; once when we took a day trip to Newport News for some whiskey; and once when he gave me an excellent bottle of moonshine (and I reciprocated with a bottle of Belizean hot sauce). He gets around because of work. I get around because I like to travel.

So anyway, to be clear, today isn't his birthday; I just landed on that post at random, as per my usual method for finding old blog posts. But, like many people on WDC, I consider Jim a friend and hope we can get together again sometime. After all, I still owe him booze.