News I Don't Need.

Yes, I know I said I wouldn't be posting anything until Monday, but my computer problems have gone from bad to worse. So I'm posting a brief note to say that things are going to get a little tentative around here for a while until I can get something straightened out. (I'm posting this from my parents' godawful 133MHz piece of junk at 26.4 Kbps.)

Brief Notes of Tedium.

Tell you the truth I had no plans of posting anything today or tomorrow. I have important school work that needs to be done by Monday that I've only barely just started on because I'm so lazy. It doesn't matter anyway since barely no one reads blogs on weekends.

In other news, my computer's still acting freaky. And the weather's turned very cold. It's been up and down all week. Yesterday it was almost seventy. Tuesday I had to get out a big coat. Last Sunday I was outside in shorts and there were butterflies flying around. Gripping, no? No.

See you Monday.

Suddenly, the day took an odd turn.

The boil on my ass made J-Walk. I always suspected my ass would be my ticket to fame and fortune, but I didn't expect it happen this way.

And if you're coming here via the link at J-Walk, sorry there's no picture of the boil. Maybe next time.

Computer Horrors.

I've been having horrible, nasty, and weird computer problems over the past week and I can't figure out exactly the main problem. In the past I've always been able to figure out and fix the various problems I've encountered. Now I'm stumped because it's like I'm having several different problems all at once. I've narrowed it down to either a dying motherboard or a screwed up Windows installation. It's been crashing several times a day. It'll crash and reboot when it's just sitting there with no applications running other than whatever Windows 2000 runs in the background. It also won't boot up properly. Sometimes when I start it all I get is a blank screen, I don't see any of the BIOS junk you typically see when you start a PC. And if starts normally then it might crash during Windows start up. This morning it crashed three times during boot up. The Application Log only shows those Zone Alarm related True Vector Engine error messages. I'm stumped. Tomorrow I'm going to put in my Linux harddrive and see if the thing behaves similarly. (And, yes, I backed up all my data.)

More Record Cover Galleries.

Any of you who've been reading this blog for more than a month (my apologies) know that I love old record cover art. Yesterday J-Walk linked to several different kinds of cover art galleries including one for old belly dance records. (Once in a thrift store I found a cache of old belly dance records, but I was too embarrassed to buy all of them so I settled for just one. Yes, I know I'm pathetic.)

I dug into the URL and came up with the source of the gallery (something called "The Retro Cocktail Hour"), and more galleries. There's an Exotica gallery, a Les Baxter gallery, and (perhaps the most interesting) Crime Jazz gallery.

What a Pain.

I have what I believe to be a boil on my ass. It's about the size of a small marble and it makes it somewhat difficult for me to sit comfortably. The boil is located on the lower quadrant of my left butt-cheek. I'm putting this revolting information in my blog in a sad attempt to appear more human and to illicit pity.

Stuff Your Face.

Today in the US it's Thanksgiving, a day set aside supposedly for giving thanks. Actually, Thanksgiving is entirely about food, not giving thanks for anything. So, in honor of this gluttonous holiday, I give you a link devoted to Rude Food. [Link via Metafilter.]

In a similar vein is Naughty Food Items.

Overflow from the Search Request Sewer.

halloween mask that says free mammograms
The mind reels.

mannequin heads wanted
The sad part is we'll never know what this person is going to use the mannequin heads for. I'd like to think this person was going get several dozen of them, build a giant slingshot, and fire them at neighboring houses, but nothing interesting like that ever happens.

Japan Class of 70's 2003 email Directory
So what you're looking for is the email address of everyone who graduated in Japan during the 70's? May I ask why?

jackin thing out at the holding the music
This search makes absolutely no sense, but still manages to come off as vaguely filthy.

i'm looking at gay porn site joke turn volume all the way up
Is this even a search request, or are you just trying to hold a drunken conversation with Google?

babosa porn
For the uninitiated, babosa is Spanish for slug. This person's looking for slug porn. I'll stop now.

masturbating freakos
I have nothing to add to this one.

television nipples
Most people call those buttons, but I find it's more convenient to use the remote.

Cunnilingus technique
Boy, are you at the wrong place. If I were an expert in this area do you think I'd be wasting precious time keeping a blog? Next you'll ask me the techniques of finding gainful employment.

Nerd-Fest 2003.

Sometimes it takes so little to entertain me. Yesterday I went to my local thrift store and dug a 34 year old computer book out of the moldering stacks. If you really must know the title and author, it's Computer Data Processing by Gordon B. Davis. The book looks almost brand new, but one look at the contents betrays its Model-T technology. It's got all these great pictures of punch cards and punch card machines, it's a shame I don't own a scanner or I'd inflict a huge quantity of this book's illustrations on you. I find all this stuff incredibly fascinating. Like I've said many times before, humor me.

Well, I may not have a scanner, but I am capable of digging up links at Google.

Douglas W. Jones' punched card index may quench most of your thirst for punch card information.

The Punch Card Gallery is exactly what it says it is. Clever, no?

Herman Hollerith was the first person to put punch cards to practical use in tabulating data. The company he founded in the 1890's was later named IBM.

Everything about Punch Cards is a Dutch online museum. It's in English, though. Don't worry. I know you were all in a panic there for a few seconds when you read the word Dutch.

A cultural history of the punch card. God, at this point I'm even starting to bore myself.

Holiday Heck.

This week I only have to go to school one day, unfortunately that one day happens to be Tuesday, that most miserable of days. The second bad part is I can't piss away the whole holiday goofing off in front of the computer because I have a big speech to write for next week and I haven't even started on the damn thing yet.

Why do I have to take a speech class? I haven't learned anything important, nor have I overcome my stage fright. If anything my stage fright has become worse. It's almost as if I'm going to school to learn to hate things. In the real world, I have no intention of ever doing a speech, mainly because of this stupid class. It's the same with the damn accounting classes I have to take. In a real world scenario, if anyone ever tries to get me to do anything even vaguely resembling accounting, I'm going to explode into a fit of deranged violence. One day you may read a description in the newspaper of a madman with an ax running through an office complex screaming, "Debits on the left! Credits on the right!"

Vintage Medical Illustrations.

The Macalister watercolours are a series of detailed paintings of World War I facial injuries. Interesting, but unsettling. [Link via *.*.]

Random Garbage.

The Random Geocities Page Finder isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it's sort of interesting. Unfortunately, Geocities has apparently cleared out a lot of old pages that hadn't been updated in years, so you end up with a lot of dead links. [Link via Motel Magazine.]

Humor Me.

Lunch Box Bonanza Gallery. How many of these do you remember from school.

Somewhere in a dark cabinet, my old Star Trek: The Motion Picture lunch box lurks. I plan to retire on the riches I get from its sale. Don't laugh, dammit! [Link via Coudal Partners.]

Update 11/24/03: The lunch box link, for reasons I can't fathom, only works in Mozilla FIrebird. It doesn't work with Internet Explorer, Opera, or even Lynx. I even tried the original link I found at the Coudal Partners page and it still doesn't work. I went backwards through the directories in the URL to the original page, there's no link to the lunch box material that I can see. Instead there's lots of pages on collecting poker chips and other stuff from casinos. I'm stumped.

But Is It Art?

Students at Budapest's University of Arts mistook a hanging corpse for art. (It's a great story, but it really wouldn't surprise me if sometime down the road this is debunked by Snopes.) [Link via Crop Shy Mutt.]

The Exciting World of Light Bulbs.

I hate cams for the most part, but Livermore's Centennial Bulb Cam is sort of interesting. OK, it's not, but the idea of a light bulb that's been burning for over a hundred years is kind of interesting, and with this cam you can see this miraculous bulb burning. Also the light bulb's in a firehouse, so there's the added suspense of seeing the firemen get in the fire truck and leave. OK, so that's not that interesting either. But, hey, this light bulb's been burning for over a hundred years, man! [Link via Snopes.]

Squirrels.

Is it me or are squirrels more plentiful and reckless than they were a few years ago? Today, it seems like every mile or so I saw one squashed in the road, but despite this, the squirrels seem hell-bent on scurrying out into the road just as I drive up. Can't they see all the squirrel carnage on the streets?

No Time.

Sorry, no real entry today. I've been busy with advisement, enrollment, etc. for next semester. And, of course, you have to take into consideration that I have no life.

Exterminate!

All this week Diamond Geezer's doing posts about the 40th anniversary of Doctor Who. I think the most interesting link he's dug up so far is The Doctor Who Video and Audio FAQ: "The purpose of this FAQ is to explain the survival of many pieces of rare Doctor Who material, either video or audio, or to explain why certain episodes are considered untransmittable from the master copies currently held by the BBC.[...]" Perhaps the most shocking (and infuriating) piece of information I read was that the BBC were still destroying old episodes of Doctor Who (and other programs) as late as 1978. Way to go BBC!

24 Hours a Day, 190,258,751 Years.

In 1960 French writer (and cofounder of the Oulipo) Raymond Queneau published a book called Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a collection of ten fourteen-line sonnets. The odd part was that the book was spiral bound and each line was on a strip so that the first line of one poem could be interchanged with the first line of any of the other nine sonnets, etc. The title of the book translated into English is 100,000,000,000,000 Poems.

The book's form is clumsy, I imagine, and it always seemed more logical to me to do it as a computer program, but for some reason it never occurred to me to look for one until yesterday. There's at least three. The first is probably the most interesting since it lets you switch the lines manually. The second and third both randomly assemble the sonnets. [Link via The Literary Machine.]

Some People Have All the Fun.

I don't read Korean, so I don't have the faintest idea what's going on in all of these photos. Since it's fun to pretend, I'm just going to say that they're just pictures from Korea's new holiday, Pretend You're Dead Day. [Link via Little Yellow Different.]

Marginally Disturbing Medical Clip Art.

In the first example the doctor strikes me as a little too evil. Look at his eyebrows. He's obviously evil and we can only fear what will happen to the old woman.

The second example is far more disturbing. Despite the crudity of the drawing style, it's quite obvious the doctor has just punched the little kid in the face.

Barbie™ Need Not Apply.

Do the inhabitants of your creepy-ass doll collection need lingerie? (Safe for work? Your guess is as good as mine.) [Link via Metafilter.]

No Thought Required.

In the past I've wished there was an easy way to transform my blog into something new and interesting. Well, now there is. The Eater of Meaning can transform this into this in just a few easy keystrokes. (Well, easy if you know how to type.) [Link via The Presurfer's archives.]

A New Kind of Disgusting.

A softdrink microbrewer has come up with turkey and gravy flavored soda for the holidays. It's unsweetened. So, I'm guessing it would be like mixing turkey broth with fizzy water. Sort of reminds me of when my sister and I were little and we thought a good flavor for toothpaste would be fried chicken. [Link via J-Walk.]

New Scam.

There's a particularly scurrilous scam that's been going around lately. (Scroll down to November 16 entry.)

Dentist (A Trip to the)

I went to the dentist yesterday, never a pleasant thing to do, but I don't mind it as badly as some people do. Unfortunately I ended up being put through some fairly excruciating work without benefit of anesthetics. Things didn't get off to a good start when the new (to me) hygienist called me Brian. "Not even close," I said.

I probably should say that over the past two years I've had an inhuman amount of dental work for reasons I won't go into here. I've been drilled, prodded, poked, scraped, ground, grappled, x-rayed, and god only knows what else. After all of that I tend to get into a false sense of security that my teeth are finally, after so many miserable years, just fine. But the dentist can always find something wrong. A filling has a "leak". There's a shadow on an x-ray. The scraping thingy is hanging on something when it gets jammed into my gums.

Yesterday something showed up on the x-ray. At first the dentist thought it was a cavity between a crown and another tooth. Then the prodding began. The man scraped, poked, gouged, and pried at my skull while I got increasingly worried. Finally he announced that it wasn't a cavity. Yay, I thought, now he'll stop. Nope. What was in between my teeth was a glob of cement from my crown that was protruding into its neighbor. Precisely why this was suddenly an issue was never explained to me, but I never asked.

The dentist took this thing called, I think, a descaler, and began working it in between the two teeth. The descaler, or whatever the hell it's called, shoots a thin stream of water out at a high velocity. It's almost painful when being used in its normal manner, but when it's jammed in between two of your teeth repeatedly for a good fifteen minutes it can smart a little. He kept working at the glob of cement, all the while jamming the descaler into my gum. Oh, and I should probably mention that he also had one of those little mirrors wedged into my gums on the other side.

After the "procedure", I stood at the receptionist's desk to write my check; I could taste blood and was shaking slightly. I found it even more difficult than normal to form coherent sentences. While this was going on the next patient was standing at the window that looks into the receptionist's are from the waiting room. I didn't look directly at him, but I could tell he was watching me. When I left I imagined him saying to the receptionist, "Whatever you do, don't do to me what you did to that guy."

Every Thrift Store's an Art Gallery.

For the past week or so everybody's been linking to lists or galleries of album covers: worst album covers of all time, son of the worst album covers of all time, record covers that never existed, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. But I'm not going to present the same damn links as everyone else. Nope. I can find my own album cover links.

It's All Under the Hat would get my award for the coolest web design I've seen recently if I gave out awards for web design, which I don't. They have a interesting selection of strange album cover art from the 50's and 60's. It's a Dutch site, so the selection isn't quite the same thing you'd get on an American site. And they have more than record cover galleries.

UN-beat-ABLE record covers is another Dutch site. What else can I say. Galleries of interesting record covers. Either you love this stuff or your don't.

Sex! Drugs! Rock'n'roll!...and some record covers comes out of Slovenia, but it's all in English. More typical of the things you'd see on an American collection of weirdo album cover art. Another page is devoted to the peculiar world of fake Mexican music from Yugoslavia. Yes, you read it right the first time.

Ever wonder what Elvis record covers from Japan looked like? No, me neither.

And to top it all off, I found a great article on the making of the Buzzcock's infamous Orgasm Addict cover art by Linder Sterling. (Warning: nudie bits!)

[All links via the unholy mix of soul-destroying boredom and Google.]

Punch the Clock.

There's a blog called Belle de Jour that's supposedly done by a London call-girl. I'm inclined to believe it because of it's matter of fact (and non-erotic) tone. [Link via Smoke Signals.]

A Dip in the Sewage Pool.

A List features alphabetically listed celebrity gossip of the most potentially libelous sort. I'm genuinely embarrassed at the amount of time I spent reading this garbage yesterday; I was mesmerized. [Link via J-Walk.]

Click Me.

It's supposedly a game. All I know is that I find it strangely hypnotic. Calming even. [Link via The Presurfer.]

Uncensored Gore.

I love Gore Vidal's essays. (I'm less enthusiastic about his novels.) The LA Weekly has an interview with him where he "[...]skewers Bush, Ashcroft and the whole damn lot of us for letting despots rule." [Link via *.*.]

Horrible, Horrible Things.

I have a vile, unspeakable thing hanging over my head that's giving me the willies. In a couple of weeks I have to give a big speech on a "controversial" topic (blah) that's going to be worth a large chunk of my grade. Why am I required to take a speech class? Once I get out of this class, I have no intention of giving any speeches in the real or the imaginary world. I'm simply not good at standing in front of large groups of people and telling them things. Logic tells me they're not going to attack me, but the idea of standing in front of a group of people still fills me with terror.

You'd think that by the end of the semester I'd be used to giving speeches by now since I've already done several, but I'm not. Actually, if it's possible, I think my fear has gotten worse. My last two speeches didn't really go that well and I think that shook what little confidence I had. This upcoming speech could cause me to completely freak out. I can see the teacher's comments now, "Next time try not to run screaming out of the classroom."

Some Kinda Love.

James Joyce's "dirty letters". I first read these in high school during my Joyce period. Reportedly Joyce's heirs didn't like that these letters were published and didn't allow them to be reprinted. Don't even ask me about the legality of them being online. [Link via Linkfilter.]

Between Thought and Expression.

Tired of using the same old metaphors? Well, why not Use Bizarre Metaphors? Example: "That’s like feeding a creampuff to a zombie." [Link via Idle Type.]

What Goes On.

It's porn. It's art. It's pictures of little pink plastic people having sex. [Link via gmtPlus9.]

5 PRINT "{CLR/HOME}"

Like a lot of nerds back in the 80's, I got a Commodore 64 for Christmas. Unlike most of those nerds, I didn't really accomplish anything with mine. I didn't learn to program, didn't hack, and didn't go on to become a dot com millionaire. But at least I still have it, and it's still in the original box. (Take that, you rich nerds!) I even have the 5 1/4 inch floppy drive, also in the original box.

Even though my ancient Commodore 64 still works, I think, I really don't feel like hooking it up to the TV. (Yes, kids, we used TV sets as monitors back then.) So, to quench my nostalgic thirst, I downloaded an emulator called VICE. I've only messed around with a little, but it's pretty close to what I remember. I even got out my old Commodore user's guide. So, if anyone needs me, I'll be in 1985.

Imitation of Life. Kinda.

Lots of photographs of old, creepy mannequins. I know it doesn't sound very inviting, but the images are quite beautiful and poetic in a creepy-ass kind of way. [Link via ORDO. I think. It doesn't seem to be on their page anymore. Tell you the truth, I don't know where the hell it came from. It was in my notes from last weekend.]

Loaded.

Interview with former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker. [Link via The Cartoonist.]

Speaking of the Velvet Underground, if you have more than a passing interest in them, then you should check out The Velvet Underground Web Page, which is jam-packed with material. And even thought the Velvets are one of all time favorites, for some reason I tend to forget this page exists.

Unparalleled Excitement.

This morning after class, I braved the insane highways for an exciting trip to the bank. After several maddening weeks, I finally got my hands on one of the new twenty-dollar bills. I didn't get just one either, I got five of them. It was almost too much for me and I nearly soiled myself in ecstasy. Then I went home.

A Dilemma.

I'll be spending the rest of the day cramming for a test in my lousy night class taught by the teacher who refuses to actually learn the material he's supposed to be teaching.

A question: If you're faced with a question on a test that deals with material the teacher taught wrong in class, do you answer the question with the correct answer and risk having it marked wrong, or do you answer it with the wrong answer the teacher taught in class?

The Longest Year of My Life.

I was all set to put up my big one year anniversary post on the 11th, I even started writing it a couple of days ago. Then I found out from Sara that my anniversary was yesterday, not today. I checked the date. She was right. It's a good thing I'm not married. ("But, dear, our anniversary's tomorrow. Isn't it? Isn't it? It's not? You mean it's today?!")

Anyway, yesterday was the official one-year anniversary of Volume 22. I've tried to post something, anything each day. In a year I think I've missed maybe two or three days. It's rough scrambling around each day trying to think of something to post, or, failing that, trying to find some suitably interesting links to fool you into thinking that there's actually content here. So, rather than blog myself into an early grave, I'm going to do what most bloggers do and only post four or five times a week. I'm not quitting or taking a break, I'm just cutting back a little. This may take some adjusting on my part. I can't imagine not posting everyday, it's unnatural.

And I'd like to thank to all the people who read, comment on, and/or link to Volume 22. You're very patient. Or masochistic.

Last Kiss

A guy bought the rights to an old romance comic book series called First Kiss and wrote new dialogue in the speech balloons. He called the results Last Kiss. (If you're curious, the technical term for writing new dialogue in comic strips, etc. is détournement.) [Link via Linkfilter.]

I Have No Clue.

It's things like Gloomy the Adult Naughty Bear that make me wish I knew Japanese. Click the links on the left side for lots of lovely images of Gloomy in action. The links on the right side don't feature Gloomy for the most part, but they're just as horrific. (Safe for work? If your boss doesn't have problems with a pink Hello Kitty-esque bear ripping cartoon people to shreds, then it's probably OK for your workplace. Maybe.) [Link via gmtPlus9.]

It Doesn't Work.

There's a (relatively) new blog called This is Broken where people submit descriptions and photos of things that are broken. In the words of the person(s) behind the site, it's "A new project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it". My favorite is a bizarre playground in Britain that's apparently located in a graveyard. (The link goes to a photo that shows a view you'd see as you prepared to go down the slide.) [Link via Daypop.]

Moving Pictures

Anima is probably the most interesting site I've seen lately. If you have any interest in the various precursors to movies and other optical stuff, then you should probably have a look. My favorite area is devoted to Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneering photographer in the 1880's who took sequential photos of nude people walking, jumping, etc. The photos have been combined into animated gifs. I've been a Muybridge fan for years, so this sort of thing really appeals to me, but the Optical Toys section will probably be more interesting to the rest of you. [Link via Metafilter.]

Lunartic.

I went out last night to view and photograph the lunar eclipse. The only other one I've ever seen was back in 2000, I think. That night was extremely cold. I got home from work a little after midnight and quickly set my camera up to get a few quick shots before totality was over. It was so cold that the shutter in my early 70's Yashica SLR froze open. I did manage to get one shot, but it was so badly exposed the moon looked like a white spot.

Thankfully it wasn't all that cold last night and I got to study the moon for about twenty minutes and get a dozen or more shots with my camera. I broke the old 70's camera a couple of years ago and replaced it with a new manual Nikon SLR. So, with decent equipment, OK weather, and plenty of time, I hope I got at least one good shot. I have several books on astrophotography, but they were annoying inexact on the amount of time I should expose the shot. It could be anywhere from one to twenty-five seconds. So I shot a lot pictures at different speeds.

The thing about the first lunar eclipse I saw that struck me as odd was how the darkened moon suddenly looked like a three-dimensional object rather than just a flat, bright disk. It looked like a reddish ball floating in the sky. Oddly, last night it didn't really seem to have that three-dimensional quality I remembered.

If any of the shots turn out half decent I'll post one and put up a link to it. Don't hold your breath waiting for a picture; I still have at least one exposed astrophotography roll that's been laying around since summer 2002.

Creepy.

Animated faces from ARSE i Am. Select the old man's face from the squares at the top of the page. The animation is easily the most vile creation I've seen online. [Link via J-Walk.]

Signs.

Over the past week everybody and their grandma has linked to the Church Sign Generator. Today I finally decided to play around with it. [Link via The Presurfer.]

Nitpicking.

Nitpickers lists lots of mistakes in movies and TV shows. Horrible web design, but interesting content if you have any interest in movie and TV mistakes. If you don't have any interest in movie and TV mistakes then I'm very, very sorry. Actually, I'm not. Deep down I just don't care.

Another Time Waster.

Scribbler is a Flash application that does vaguely interesting things to your doodles. I like it, but it crashed Firebird. [Link via J-Walk.]

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Plague Ship!

Read anything in the news about the plague ship? The proprietor of the British blog, Raised by Chaffinches, was actually on it and lived to write an entry about it. Some holiday cruise.

I Remember.

I've been in a gloomy, reflective mood lately, and I've been busy with school, so I haven't been coming up with anything really worth reading over the past week or so. In an attempt to kick myself into gear, I dug out my old "I remember" notebook that I kept for the last half of summer 2001. The technique I used was to write short autobiographical scenes that started with the words, "I remember". This technique has been used a lot, but most effectively by the late artist/writer Joe Brainard, who's usually given credit for inventing it. I've written about using this technique before, and material from this notebook I kept has ended up here on more than a few occasions. If you've never experimented with "I remember", you should probably try it; it's a fascinating way to accumulate an autobiography. It's also a fascinating way to do to do a blog.

Big and Ugly.

This morning I finally saw my first civilian Hummer. [Warning: crappy web site with lots of Flash and it doesn't work with Firebird.] It was one of the ugly-ass ones that's painted the same shade of yellow as a school-bus. Why would someone spend that much money on a vehicle and go out of their way to get the ugliest thing they can find?

More Bad Ideas.

Instead of washing your kid's mouth out with soap when he says a bad word, why not try Oops Paste? This product is one of those things that's incredibly stupid, but yet it'll probably make a lot of money. I wish I'd thought of it. [Link via Metafilter.]

Once when I was in the third grade, I think, a kid said shit and the teacher heard it. She dragged him to the sink (each class had a sink in the back of the room), held him in a head-lock, and washed his mouth out with a bar of soap while he fought and yelled. I even remember that the brand of soap was Jergens, which we never used at home (thus making it seem to me somewhat exotic). To this day, all these years later, I still can't see a bar of Jergens soap without remembering that enraged teacher with that struggling kid in a head-lock.

AAAHH!! My Eyes!

Flash animation can be an effective tool in the hands of someone with skill and talent. In the hands of someone with none of these things it becomes something else. (Warning: Don't watch this animation if you're prone to seizures.) [Link via Metafilter.]

Huh?

Is this a blog, some kind of wiki thingamajig, or something stranger? [Link via me typing in random stuff at Google.]

The Importance of Names.

Naming things is very important. I can probably understand someone from Japan naming their company Flop Design because English isn't their native language. But how do you explain an American state park called Big Bone Lick? I'm sure there's a logical explanation. There has to be.

Musty Old Notebooks.

For years and years I kept a journal. It started out as a twelfth grade English assignment that I just never stopped doing. Well, eventually I did stop writing in it after about fourteen or fifteen years. I've got four or five thousand pages of stuff in an old milk crate under my bed. I used to get a lot of enjoyment out of writing my thoughts everyday, but eventually the whole concept just got old. I also used to enjoy pulling the crate out and rereading old entries, but when I look at a lot of this stuff now I can't stand it. There's bad writing, whining, moping, ranting, and more than a few pages make me wonder if I was certifiably insane when I wrote it. But, despite my revulsion over my earlier output, I miss keeping a journal, a blog simply doesn't give me the same release.

Blah!

Goetze Candy's StrawberriCream® looks like a little chunk of raw beef. To see one of these things for the first time after you take off the wrapper can be a little disconcerting. And, to make matters worse, it tastes funny and has a nasty aftertaste that really lingers.

Longest. Search. Request. Ever.

No matter how peculiar my weeks are, no matter how much utter weirdness I'm forced to shovel through, I always have a universal constant on which to base my sanity. It's something that never wavers - an atomic clock for my mind. Understand that if my opinion of this constant ever were to vacillate, it would surely be proof of my absolute insanity. So, you may ask, "What is this constant on which you can always count to be true?" Simply this:.

And I was number one for this search, too.

Rhino Records Sucks.

Yesterday, while searching Google, I found out two Judee Sill albums I wanted have come back into print in this country for the first time in thirty years. They were reissued in a limited run by Rhino Handmade, the same label that had just put out a live Television album from a 1978 gig. My day was made. Hell, the rest of my year was made. They were all overpriced, but since this was stuff I really wanted, I put my cheapskate nature on temporary hold. I went through all the complicated nonsense you have to go through to order stuff online, and [insert long dramatic pause here] they wouldn't accept my VISA check card. I don't know why they won't take it. Amazon never has had a problem with it. Microsoft didn't have a problem with it. Spun.com didn't have a problem with it. I have money in the bank and have never bounced a check, but yet Rhino treated me like a pariah.


Well, you say, why don't you just buy the CD's from Amazon? If it were possible I would've done that in the first place, but Rhino Handmade CD's are only available from Rhino's site and are limited runs. And you can only buy their product with credit cards. Lovely way to do business, Rhino. Just lovely. Are you trying keep out the riff-raff? Don't like selling to poor people? What's the deal, Rhino?

The Rhino Handmade imprint is a pretentious sham. If I had a broadband connection I'd download all three albums and not feel one micron of guilt. The regular Rhino label has also reissued the first two Television albums with lots of bonus tracks, but I'm not buying them new. I'll wait a few months until used ones pop up on Amazon. Fuck Rhino Records.