Rick Hightower posted a cow-orker's email explaining why he wouldn't be in to work. It's a heck of a posting; it should be the model for all future "I'm not coming in" emails in the future.

My immune system is being unkind to me again this weekend. My coughing fits had gotten so severe that my physician has seen fit to prescribe something unprecedented to the scope of over-the-counter medication. Who would have thought that a moment's respite from expectorating one's own blood could find purchase in codeine-laced promethazine, the creativity flowing forth from one's fingers like butterflies upon each keystroke? Every moment now transpires into an out of body experience, the luminescence coalescing freely from an LCD backdrop on a disembodied sensation, trying to discern the interpretive numina of the garbage truck ever-present outside my bedroom window. Flash. Flash. Lift. And it's gone, further down the dark, to attend to another yet lonely garbage can. I can only weep at the significance. The sum of my being is available over IM and phone and email, although it is unlikely that we will commune on the same plane of understanding until my medication has metabolized sufficiently out of my biological venue. (...which does not exist in my current frame of reference - the dangerous ramblings of Descartes loom ominously at the fringes of my attentions, all material existence is possibly a malicious manifestation of some mischievous higher power, or with some degree of enforcement of a supreme effort of one's self epistemology, transgresses too closely to a soliptic weltanschauung of Rhonda Byrne proportions.)

Anyone who can get a mention of a soliptic weltanschauung deserves a day off... especially since solipsism and weltanschauung sort of are opposites in my understanding.

weltanshauung is "world view", solipsism is a particular world view. I think it works =) Google-- Definitions of weltanschauung on the Web: A German term referring to a person's worldview or philosophy. Definitions of solipsism on the Web: the view confining reality to oneself and one's experiences.

Interesting to see how translating software on the web (such as http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr) translates between English and Deutsch: DE -> EN: weltanshauung - world to striking EN -> DE: world to striking - Welt zum Anschlagen DE -> EN: Anschlagen - Fasten EN -> DE: Fasten - Befestigen Sie sich DE -> EN: Befestigen Sie sich - Fasten yourselves :-) weltanshauung of course means world view or philsophy (of life).

Interesting to see how translating software on the web (such as http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr) translates between English and Deutsch:

DE -> EN: weltanshauung - world to striking

The result is much better if you use the correct spelling "Weltanschauung" In German "hauen" does mean "to strike, to hit" so Babelfish tries its best ;-)

Still if Rick is in the habit of hiring some kind of bovine urukai what else can you expect. I always feel a bit guilty leaving my mails with just the subject "Off Ill" but that's stunning, simply stunning.

Still if Rick is in the habit of hiring some kind of bovine urukai what else can you expect. I always feel a bit guilty leaving my mails with just the subject "Off Ill" but that's stunning, simply stunning.

If i miss work cause I am sick - mine would read "out dead".

A good post a day keeps the weltschmerz away.

This disease is more prosaically known as "March Madness". -- Cedric