One night years ago I was watching TV and suddenly felt hungry. I went into the kitchen and made myself a peanut butter sandwich. Back in front of the TV, I took a bite of my sandwich and realized I was thirsty. I put the sandwich down and went back into the kitchen to get myself something to drink. A few minutes later I was back on the couch watching TV. I sat there for a few minutes and began to feel hungry. Then I remembered I'd had a sandwich. Or did I? I had no actual memory of eating the sandwich. I looked around, but I didn't see it anywhere. What happened to it? Suddenly I jumped up from the couch and looked down at a completely flattened peanut butter sandwich. I must've sat on it for at least five minutes.

I've found that a lot of the enjoyment I get out of reading other people's blogs is dependant on being able to quickly access them through nicely organized links of my favorites. If I have to type in a bunch of URL's, suddenly much of the fun is drained out.

Drivers, drivers, drivers, drivers... In Windows it's all about the drivers. OK, so I got my drivers installed and now I have a display that doesn't look like something from 1992. I now have all the colors of a rainbow and all the patience of a psychopath. Do any of you know just how bad a web site looks with only 16 colors?

I miss Linux.

I'm now officially a member of the world; I have Windows installed installed on my PC. I hate it and it's complete shit, but I have it installed. My monitor, for reasons, I can't fathom, won't display anything other than 16 colors at 480x640 (or whatever), so my display looks like I'm using a 486. I suppose that's one way to get me to not to look at nudie photos online. It's an old monitor, but it displayed things beautifully with Linux.

I couldn't even manually configure my internet connection. It's easy to connect using Linux. Windows 2000's Wizard was counterintuitive. Thanks Microsoft. I ended up having to use the stupid disk from my crummy ISP. Might as well be on AOL.

So, in conclusion, it was a partial success and a partial failure.

I'm absolutely exhausted.

I finally got the new harddrive. I haven't attempted to install it yet. Tell you the truth, I dread putting it in despite the fact that I've installed several harddrives before. Those were either school computers or just an old computer I had. This is new stuff that actually cost me some money, so I'm a bit apprehensive. Hopefully in a couple of hours I'll be back online telling just how darn easy it was to put in a new harddrive and install Windows 2000. Or I'll be back online raving like a lunatic about it all went wrong and how much it sucks being the only person on earth who uses Linux as their primary OS.

What have I been doing over the past three weeks since school ended? I had so much planned, but I pissed it all away sitting in front of my PC looking at blogs and other junk. And now the summer semester's started and I'm back in school again. At least I only have one class, so I'll have time to design and build the robot army I'll use to enslave humanity.

This morning I risked life and limb to go and buy a new harddrive. Every other vehicle on the street is piloted by a lunatic. But I digress. When I got to the store I found out they were sold out of the harddrive I wanted. I probably could've gotten a different model or went to a different store, but I figured I'd leave well enough alone and just go home.

Why do these simple little things have to be so excruciating?

I got the mouse. The trap woke me up a little before two in the morning. I'd all but conceded defeat in this battle of wits.

The sluggishness of Blogger pages is getting really annoying.

That stupid mouse ignored all my traps. I guess it doesn't like peanut butter. I've got a connoisseur on my hands.

I'm going to end my days a raving madman.

I have some advice for people who've just started jobs where they have to use a cash register. When you hit the button that causes the cash drawer to pop out, stand back from the register. This morning I saw this girl press a few buttons on the register and the drawer popped out and hit her hard in the stomach. It actually knocked her back a few inches. But I suppose if that happens enough times she'll learn.

Last night I thought of my previous entry on the moronic articles written about Playmates, and dug out an issue of Playboy to actually read the Playmate article. (For scientific purposes, you understand.) I didn't read the article because I found myself distracted by the photos. Oddly, I began to wonder what this extraordinarily beautiful (and extraordinarily naked) woman looked like with her clothes on. Is this a sign of maturity? Or am just not getting enough oxygen to my addled brain?

I thought of something wonderfully pointless this morning. Every month in Playboy they have a Playmate photo layout and centerfold of some girl no one's ever heard of sans clothes, and these layouts always have an accompanying article about said girl. I don't think these incredibly stupid pieces are actually supposed to be read by anyone, but I, naturally, end up reading them. (You put words in front of me and I'm going to read them.) What makes these articles so stupid is that these women haven't actually done anything to warrant being written about in a respected international magazine with a readership in the millions, other than simply being young, beautiful, and naked. People who are young, beautiful, and naked are a dime a dozen. OK, so here's my pointless idea: publish an anthology of the best of these stupid articles. But only print the articles, no pictures. It'd be a monument to pointlessness and vapidity.

I've got one of those ceilings that's panels held in a metal frame. Above the panels is space about foot and half high with ductwork, light fixtures, wires, and other stuff. On those occasions when a mouse gets up there and runs around, its footsteps are amplified to the point where it sounds as if there's a small dog running back and fourth. As you would expect, it's very difficult to sleep when there's a mouse in the house. I have a long, storied history of mouse murder. I love animals, but things that keep me awake at night must die, so I put the traps on the panels right above my bed. And if I catch a mouse in a trap, and the trap doesn't kill them, I actually take them outside and release them. I know that makes me a total wuss, but so be it. I could never actually kill the thing myself, I just set the trap and hope that the mouse either leaves the house or dies a quick death in the trap. And if they're stupid enough to come back in, the traps will be reset and waiting.

I have another mouse. Since mice typically avoid lit areas, I left the light on all night and slept with a sock draped over my eyes. I only heard it once. Maybe it left.

I just watched a classic Star Trek episode, something I haven't done for years. It was entertaining, but I have one question: why did Capt. Kirk wear eye shadow?

Years ago when my sister had a pet snake, she would go to her local pet store and buy frozen rats in plastic bags. Once she mailed me one of the empty rat bags. (She's a lovely girl; I can't imagine why no lucky man hasn't married her.) The weirdest thing about this is that there's a factory out there someplace where people put frozen rats in bags for a living. It had a brand name, but I don't remember what it was. (I mailed the bag back to my sister.) You never hear about these kinds of factories. This area is economically on the decline because of the drawn out demise the Southern textile industry. On the local news there's regular reports about companies closing their doors and letting all their employees go. So when a company decides to come into this area it's always big news. Imagine hearing the following on the local news: "Good news for the Danville's unemployed, a company that bags and sells frozen rats will be moving into the area creating 150 new jobs." Nope. You're not going to hear anything like that. How would you like to shove frozen rats into plastic bags eight hours a day, five or six days a week? I've done similar things with pasta and pizza crusts and even that gets disgusting after a short period. I can't even imagine what it'd be like having frozen rats rolling down a conveyor belt at me all day every day.

Wow, the weather's actually good; I can see blue sky.

Last night not only did it pour down rain so hard I considered building an ark, but there was a thunderstorm too. So I shut the PC down and unplugged everything. I probably shouldn't even bother unplugging the PC because I have one of those expensive surge protectors that has the insurance policy. I should let the PC get blown up, collect the insurance money, and buy a new one. There's some great computer deals out there. But with my luck my claim wouldn't be allowed because of some trivial technicality.

Yay, it's raining again. I just can't get enough rain. It's my life long goal to live in a swamp. Everything's gotta be soaking wet, it's the only way I can be comfortable. Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!! All it ever does is rain and I'm sick to death of it. For several years we lived under drought conditions, and now it rains so much I think the entire area may legally be eligible for protection as a rain forrest. Is this Laos or something? Pretty soon I'll be burning off leeches when I get back from the mailbox.

The Indy 500 was a bore.

It's Memorial Day weekend and that means hours and hours of auto racing. The Indy 500 is set to start in a little bit and several hours later the 600 from Charlotte will get underway. Only a short time ago this used to be one of my favorite days of the year, but now I'm only just barely interested. Tony George's jerk-water IRL and CART's self-destructive mismanagement have completely ruined American open-wheel racing. And NASCAR's self-righteous jingoism and endless, mind-numbing races make it virtually impossible for me to get any enjoyment out of it anymore. It's just a bunch of guys driving around in circles to me these days. Utterly pointless. Of course I'll watch some of it, but I'll hate myself for giving in.

You could never have a reality show like this on American TV because the "contestant" (or maybe "victim" is a better word) would sue the hell out of everyone involved. [Link via Metafilter.]

I've linked to this before, but I'll link to it again because gratuitous nudity has always cheered me up.

Why do people dress up cats? Cats don't like to be dressed up in anything. No hats. No sweaters. No socks. No shoes. If, after you've subjected your cat to such humilation, it doesn't fight you, it's only because it's given up. But, despite all I've said, after hitting the link, I had a strong urge to get a "chicken transformation kit" for a cat. Thankfully I own no cat, so none will be tranformed into chickens. [Link via Metafilter.]

From the Department of Incredibly Boring Things comes this report: Our current stock Blogger templates are HTML, but the templates for the New Blogger are XHTML. So that means once all our Blogger sites get switched over to the new system we're going to have be more careful of sloppy code when we modify out templates. Unless, of course, they don't change our templates to XHTML. (God, that was so boring I could barely type it.)

Sweet Mother of Zeus! The sun's finally come out!

Why didn't I buy some chocolate when I was out shopping this morning? I stood there in line with my purchases, looked over at the Hershey bars, and decided not to get any chocolate because I didn't need it. Well, I need it now. Badly. My batteries are completely run down and I can barely think straight.

I remember a time long, long ago when the sky was blue and there was this hot, bright thing in the sky called, I believe, the sun. For crying out loud, it's May 23rd, not January 23rd. And I live in Virginia, not Ireland. It should be at least ninety degrees outside and the sun should have baked the ground almost as hard as concrete. Instead it's coolish and very, very wet.

I'm really bored with how my blog looks. Tell you the truth, I don't think I've ever liked the way it looked. The template's going to get changed sometime in the future. But rather than just blindly rip up my old template and experiment with other stuff that might screw up everything in sight, I signed up for a new free Blogger site to flail the piss out of until I stumble onto something I like.

Or at least that was the general idea when I signed up for the new blog. After I got into the sign up procedure I found out that all the new blogs will be using the spanking new Blogger interface. So I got a preview of the New Blogger, and from what I've seen, it's nice. It actually works with Mozilla. Zut alors! I can actually post something longer than a short paragraph before things get out of hand. You Internet Explorer folks just have no idea of the kind of nonsense I've had to put up with posting stuff over the last six months using Mozilla, Galeon, and Opera. And naturally, by the time the Blogger powers that be get all the old blogs up and running on the new system that works with what I'm using, I will have switched from Linux to Windows.

And speaking of new blog designs, there's a new thingamajig called Strange Banana that randomly generates new blog designs that you can freely use. I haven't dug deeply into it yet, but it looks intriguing. (And if you try this out and screw your blog up, don't blame me. Back up your old template, dammit!) [Link via C:\pirillo.exe.]

For once in my life I have an idea for something that would actually be useful instead of just annoying: a hum search engine. Let me explain. I'm sure most of you reading this have heard about Apple's new music download service that's been raking in ridiculous amounts of cash over the past few weeks. Well, my idea would be a complement to Apple's service and other services like it. Let me explain further. How many times have you wanted to hear or buy a particular song, but you didn't know the name of it or the name of the artist? You may not know the lyrics, but you can hum a bit of it. Here's where my idea comes in. Lots of people have microphones hooked into their computers, so why not take advantage of them? With my hum search engine you could just turn the on microphone and go "NA-NA-NAAAA! NA-NA-NANA! NA-NA-NAAAA-NA-NA!" After an extensive search of our insanely huge database, the results would be, "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple. Ingenious, no? Now all I need is about twenty to twenty-five million in start-up costs.

I was over at Submit Response (for the first time) and found a link to Ubu Web, which I'd seen before and completely forgotten about. Ubu Web has lots of information on things like concrete poetry, conceptual writing, etc. But forget all of that; go there because they have .mp3's of Kurt Schwitters and Marcel Duchamp.

1. What would you do if you picked a booger out of your nose that looked like Abraham Lincoln?
Well, I guess I'd keep it for posterity and maybe even put it on display. If its popularity rose I'd send it on tour, but these days there's little interest in such things. I blame rap music.

2. If you were stranded naked on a desert on an island ruled by a race of giant superintelligent woodchucks, would you agree to mate with any of them?
Well, duh, of course I would.

3. Does it bother you that much of the mail you get has been licked by people you've never even met?
I try not to dwell on it.

4. Feathers or antlers?
I'd have to say antlers.

5. Imagine you're six years old. You've just woken up from a nap and you realize the house is empty. You search the house, but can't find anyone. You begin to get frightened and scream out, "Mommy! Mommy!" Then your middle-aged next-door neighbor, Mr. McClenachan, bursts through the front door completely naked screaming, "I'm your mommy now!"
That wasn't even a question.

Have a look at this MSN page on Charles Manson. And be sure to scroll down to read the lists of artists who're like Manson.

While driving to the library, I noticed a blimp flying over the city. Dirigibles aren't that common around here, it's been years since I last saw one. It kept circling around, so I imagine it was advertising something. The problem was, no matter how good a look I got, I couldn't read what was painted on the side of the thing. So what good is it for your fast-food chain, TV network, insurance company, murderous death cult, etc. if no one can read the name on the side of the blimp you spent good money to hire?

Went to the public library and checked to see how well the Blogger sites I'm having trouble with loaded. Diamond Geezer loaded in a decent amount of time, but Roaming Redhead took more than a minute to load and not everything loaded. The library has a broadband connection and I'm trapped in the boondocks on a dial-up connection, so I don't know how useful my little experiment was.

I've suddenly started having problems loading certain Blogger sites. Over the past few days I've had trouble loading Diamond Geezer and Roaming Redhead, but it's gotten worse. Some sites load fine while others either take forever to load or don't fully load at all. I don't know what the problem is because I have the same difficulty no matter what browser I use. (And I've got about six browsers on my system.) I've even had trouble getting some of these pages to load in text only browsers like Lynx. Is it on my end or Blogger's? Maybe it's because I use Linux. Have any of you Windows and Mac folk had any problems like this recently?

I found the following in a draft of a letter to my sister from several years ago:

Commercial on the radio for the Swanee Restaurant, but it sounded like the announcer said the Sweaty Restaurant. Awful images filled my mind.

Another commercial on the radio: "Shave today at Western Auto!" I thought, That can't be right. Then I realized he said "save today". Imagine my embarrasment had I shown up with shaving cream and a razor.

I dug everything out of my unwanted mini zoo. My haul? A big toad, an adult frog, a baby frog, and a salamander. So I fully expect to have at least a few frog-free days until it rains again and more hapless amphibians blunder into this poor excuse for a window. This type of basement window is lousy for virtually everything except catching frogs and toads.

The sunken basement window just above my desk is a near zoo. Yesterday I went outside and fished a mouse out of it. Later there was a three and a half inch salamander stuck to the window. (Not a common sight.) About an hour after the salamander lost its grip, a frog was climbing up the screen. And a few minutes ago a large toad was making a futile escape attempt up the side. Maybe if it's not raining tomorrow I'll dig all these noisy things out of there so I can mope in peace.

Need some Father Ted audio files? No? Well, I suppose you better stay away from Funny as Feck then.

The internet is so boring. Amaze me, internet! Make me rich and powerful! Or at least stop boring me to tears.

Today's fairly cruddy. It's raining and coolish enough to turn the heat on. Dull.

I've discovered another vaguely useful tool, GoogleBrowse, which searches Google recursively, whatever that means.

While poking through my logs, I found a link to a site I'd never heard of called Blo.gs. It lists recently updated blogs of all sorts and has some other features. Worth a look.

My report card came in the mail today. I actually got an A in accounting. How on earth did that happen? In fact, I got an A in everything except MS-Word. How did I end up with a B in that? How many times did the teacher ask me how to do stuff because she couldn't figure it out? Grrrr!!

I have an odd assortment of foreign language books I know I'll never read. So why do I have them? I find them in thrift stores, they look interesting, they're dirt cheap, and so I buy them. Some of the more interesting ones are Jurassic Park in Japanese, a biography of Gogol in Russian, a book in Afrikaans (a grammar?) called Afrikaans Speel-Speel Leer, and a slipcased Japanese/Italian dictionary. I've got a pile of others. My personal favorite is a peculiar learn-to-read-English book in Korean. The bulk of the volume is in Korean, but it's littered with English vocabulary words and sentences. When flipping through it one day I found the following jaw-dropping sentence, "The girl farted, and everybody laughed." This sentence would be easier to ignore if the whole book were filled with similar examples, but it's not. The sentences are for the most part the usual bland stuff like, "He grew old" and "Half-boiled egg digests well." Maybe if we'd learned more useful words and sentences in high school French I would've paid more attention.

Years ago I used to listen to a lot of shortwave broadcasts from different countries. Many of these stations featured programs on how to learn to speak their native languages. I would listen to these things, but mainly I'd daydream. On occasion an odd sentence would stand out and make me wonder when they thought that sentence would come in handy. The best example was from the Voice of Free China from Taiwan. The scenario was that two women were watching a man in a restaurant who was eating everything in sight. One of the women said, "Look at the way he's staring at that sweet and sour pork." In the years since (and this was in the mid 80's probably) I daydreamed of learning that sentence, flying to Taipei, and just walking around saying it to random people.

Yesterday, in a fit of boredom, I went to Goodwill to dig through the used books. The pickings were slim, but I did score an English/Portuguese dictionary printed in Brazil. It's a welcome addition to all my other foreign language dictionaries. I've got English/French, English/Spanish. English/German, English/Italian, English/Latin, English/Greek, English/Danish, and now English/Portuguese. It's a pity I can't actually read any of these languages. Actually I can read a little Spanish and a little more French because I did study them in school, but I don't know them well enough to actually converse or read a book.

My usual way to test how comprehensive a dictionary might be is to look up curse words. Most of my foreign language dictionaries don't include curse words, thus rendering them somewhat useless in certain situations. I breathed a slight sigh of relief when I found out the English/Portuguese dictionary I got yesterday has fuck in it (relações, in case you were wondering). This dictionary isn't quite as comprehensive and useful as I'd want, though. There's plenty of useful, important words not in here. Where's fellatio? The king of the useful foreign language dictionaries is, in my opinion, the huge unabridged one put out by Harper Collins. (I'm sure there's others, but this is the one I happen to own.) No matter how depraved your trip to [insert the name of any Spanish-speaking country here] is you can find the words you need for your "unique" situation. It's all here: sex, drugs, violence, etc. So, if you find yourself in Montevideo needing to buy some heroin, find a transvestite prostitute, and hire a hitman, this is the book that you should use for reference.

Last year I signed up for a class in spoken Chinese. On the first day of school I went to class and waited for someone, anyone to show up. No one ever came. I went to the main office and found out I was the only one who had signed up for the class.

I'm in the public library right now editing my sidebar links. Exciting, no?

Clouds. Rain. Blah. I didn't even bother to go outside and look up. When's the next lunar eclipse, 2014?

We've had beautiful weather all week, but naturally on the day we're supposed to have the lunar eclipse it gets cloudy. (Or at least I think we're supposed to have a lunar eclipse. The last eclipse (partial solar) I went out to see, I found later I'd missed it by a year.)

We had a total lunar eclipse back in 2000, I think. That was back when I worked second shift on a fairly crappy job. I remember taking a break toward the end of the shift and going outside with no coat on and my sleeves rolled up (it was well below freezing) and looking up at this weird orange moon. That was the first time I'd ever seen a lunar eclipse. About twenty minutes later I was at home in my driveway with my early 70's Yashica SLR on a tripod taking a few exposures and half freezing myself to death. (I had a coat on this time.) It ended badly though, the pictures were overexposed and a few days later I effectively transformed the camera into a paperweight after I jammed it trying to do a double exposure.

A lunar eclipse is definitely worth looking at if you can see one. Typically a full moon at night looks like a bright, flat disk, but during a lunar eclipse the moon is suddenly transformed into a three-dimensional object. It looks like a reddish-orange ball hanging in the sky surrounded by stars. Vaguely unsettling, but beautiful.

Earlier, I answered the phone and a woman on the other end asked, "I'd like to speak to the lumber department." I said, "This is a house." End of conversation.

I've been reading some of my old notebooks for inspiration because I can't think of anything to write today. The best thing I've come across was the line, "I feel like an animal in an old, cheap zoo."

Right now I don't feel like an animal in an old, cheap zoo; I feel like my brain has been secretly replaced with sawdust.

This is an old favorite web page of mine that details various experimental writing methods. I haven't looked at it in a long time, although I probably should give it a good going over and see if I can find a way to snap myself out of my sloth-like mood.

One day I'm going to travel to Japan and visit this rather curious museum. (Not quite safe for work.) [Link via dumb luck.]

I have further evidence I should wear my glasses when I read. A little while ago I was looking at an advice column in today's paper and read the following: "I am a nurse and work in a pediatric unit. Every day we get at least one delivery of beautiful balloons[...]" The problem was that I read the word balloons as baboons.

Sleep can be infuriating. Last night I went to sleep and slept for what seemed a long time. Later I woke up, fully expecting it to be morning, but when I looked at the clock I saw I'd only been asleep for forty minutes. If I dreaded getting up the next the day (like I tend to do), forty minutes would've been great because that would mean that I still had hours to sleep. But I since I didn't dread waking up the next day, and because I haven't been sleeping well recently, the idea of the morning being hours away seemed almost unendurable.

The flipside to the endless night is the rapid night. I've spent years dreading the next day for various reasons, usually a really crappy first shift job. The typical scenario I'd have to endure was this: I go to sleep, wake up five minutes later (or so I thought), and look at my clock to see that it's three minutes before the alarm is set to go off. What am I supposed to do in three minutes? I can't just roll over and go back to sleep the way I'd do if I found out it was four in the morning.

On these long, dreary pre-summer days I find myself thinking a great deal, pondering various concepts for hours on end. Like, did they have bathrooms on Star Trek? If they had a transporter that would dematerialize people and reassemble them in a completely different location, then couldn't they also do the same with human waste products? Just beam it right out of their colon and/or bladder. They have the technology, so why not?

Oh, this is just wrong. Why would anyone want one of these? (Don't answer that.) Why would anyone manufacture and sell these things? (Not safe for work unless you put a blanket over your computer and get under it like it was a tent.) [Link via Jodi in a roundabout sort of way.]

I'm suffering from terminal brain lock. It's tragic, I know, but these things happen; it's not like I was kidnapped by groundhogs and made their love slave or anything. But I digress. Here's a few oddball links to amuse yourself with while I languish in the punishing humidity with my locked up brain.

Here's a site with random text generators that produce marginally interesting gibberish.

Halfbakery has more stuff than I care to mention; some of it's actually amusing.

Here's a site with nothing but dumb warning labels. [Link swiped from someone at Halfbakery.]

This site just confused me.

Volume 22 had its six month anniversary yesterday and I didn't realize it. When I started this blog back in November I doubted I'd be able to write interesting stuff everyday. I was right, of course, but that didn't stop me. Anyway, thanks to everyone who reads my nonsense on a regular basis, thanks to everyone who links to me, and a huge thanks to Trudie for inexplicably linking to me when Volume 22 was literally a week old. Trudie, you really directed a lot of traffic my way, and I wish I could return the favor, but no one ever seems to use my link list.

Evhead's returned to the readable world. Clean. Functional. Lovely.

I found a Welsh blog without difficulty. Of course now I don't care, because I don't read or write Welsh. But through its links, this blog led me to several interesting ones I can read.

Glosses is written by a grad student in linguistics.

a blog with a name that keeps changing. Watch out for the zombie and mummy.

Enigmatic Mermaid is partly in English and partly in Portuguese. Loads of interesting links.

Giornale Nuovo has a current entry about Codex Seraphinianus, possibly the strangest book ever published.

Linguablogs links to blogs by language nerds.

I wish I was a language nerd. I have to settle for just being a nerd.

When will I learn to stop mentioning and/or linking to foreign language blogs? I found this in my site stats this morning. Scroll down to May 7.

First it's hip-hop Icelandic people, now it's Iranian neo-nazis. Next I'll irritate the Welsh.

We may have had a tornado or two touch down about 35 miles here yesterday afternoon. Some trees got knocked over and some houses were damaged, but nothing compared to the warzone-like devastation places like Oklahoma have gotten in the past few days.

Earlier I saw a tornado warning on TV. We don't get lots of tornados like those flat states out west with no trees, but they happen every once in awhile. And since over 40 people have been killed this week in the midwest and the south by countless tornados I began to worry a little. I carefully shut down my PC because Unix-type operating systems tend not to like it when you just shut them off in the middle of everything. But after I shut it down I wondered why I'd bothered. What difference does it make if the PC's been shut down safely if parts of it are scattered across two counties after the house has been sucked up and pulverized by a tornado? Anyway, nothing happened.

Anyway, Nothing Happened will be the title of my memoirs.

Something I've wanted to do for years is kite aerial photography. I'll probably never get around to doing it, but here's a page on how to do it. [Link via some damn blog I came across and forgot the name or URL of.]

I'm a man of action, so this morning I got a haircut.

My life has suddenly gotten so mind-numbingly tedious I can't bear to dwell on it. Day to day existence is boring as hell.

In a desperate bid to find something interesting to spur me into action, I went to Google and typed in random words to see what new and strange places I was pointed to. I found one interesting blog and nothing else. Nothing. Apparently even Google's too bored to spit out something interesting, and/or bizarre, enough to amuse me. Then I remembered I'd bookmarked that link that takes you to random Blogger sites. I hit one and it had animated gifs that took forever to load. I hit a second and it too had animated gifs that took forever to load. I propose that people be fined $300 per animated gif. It's the only way these pinheads are going to learn.

Now that I'm free of the sinister yoke of accounting (at least for a little while) I don't know what to do with myself. I've been waiting for this day for months; now what?

Last night at school, when I walked toward the foot-bridge, the brown duck exploded out of the gully and came right at me. It passed over me by only a couple of yards. I could've been impaled on its bill!

Is the new design of Evhead a joke? Maybe it's a parody of the Viewable With Any Browser campaign that discourages browser specific web design. Instead of a site that looks great in all modern browsers, it's a site that looks unbelievably awful in all browsers. But that doesn't make any sense. I hate Ev's new design with strangely intense passion. The old layout from last year was so clean, functional, and minimal.

Well, I think I passed the accounting test, but only that. I was hoping for an A or B, but I'll probably have to settle for a C or D. It really pisses me off; I studied my ass off for this stupid test and I sat there with a mind blanker than a zen master.

My last evil accounting test is tonight. Afterwards I can let out a sigh of relief and relax in an evil-free world--or at least evil-free for a couple of weeks until the summer semester starts up.

Excuse me while I do some desperate cramming for my test.

Ah, imagine it, a world without accounting...

The entry on Monday where I mentioned my old diaries/journals has me poking through the last one I ever completed (coving the years 2000-2002). A lot of the later entries deal with going to the dentist. (I had some serious dental issues in late 2001 that had reduced me to an agony-ridden wreck.) Much of the earlier entries dealt with my old job and how much I hated it. Really great reading. (Note sarcasm.) The remaining entries are about books, photography, astronomy, and porno. It's embarrassing just how much I wrote about porno back then. I miss having a private journal. Hell, I miss writing about porno.

Ugh, Tuesdays. I'm tired, bored, and nauseated. Later I have to go to that miserable, boring three hour PC upgrade and repair class I hate so much. Thankfully today's the last regular day and the exam's supposedly going to be optional (if you need extra credit to bump your grade up).

Here's a nice project I should try myself; I can fill up all that time that usually gets wasted in some typically asinine persuit (see below--anywhere). I can't imagine the amount of work it would take to transcribe all of one's old diaries, journals, etc. to a web page. I have 4,000 to 5,000 pages of crap, much of it illegible (especially the material from the past five and half years after I thought it'd be a good idea to start writing with a fountain pen; think Jackson Pollock).

Jackson Pollock's my favorite painter. Once in the early 90's I lost my mind for a month and decided that I was put on this earth to be a painter, and my main model was Pollock. Unlike Pollock, I had no talent, no place to paint, and practically no supplies to work with. So instead of rolling out an enormous piece of unmounted canvas on the floor of an unheated shack, I used pieces of typing paper taped to a piece of wood I'd pounded into the ground. And I didn't use brushes, I used firecrackers. I'd tape an M-80 (which is basically just a small stick of dynamite) to a board in front of the paper, glob some of my sister's old paint on it, light the fuse, and run like hell with my fingers in my ears. The results were interesting, but mainly all I succeeded in doing was frightening the cat.

Since I saw that duck last week, every time I walk over the foot bridge at school, I look down to see if it's back. Well, today it came back. And it brought a friend. The first duck was the typical green-headed mallard and the other one (presumably a female) was a sort of speckled brown. This area is not a good place for eggs and ducklings. There's the usual stray dogs and cats roaming around, but there's also hawks.

Thanks to some input from Terry and Trudie, I may be on the way to finding out just what the heck brown sauce is. It may be related to A1 in some way, but it's probably a closer relative to ketchup/catsup. Of course, now that I've spent (i.e. wasted) so much time on such a pointless question, I can't remember why I thought it was so important to begin with.

Here's the official vegemite web page. Don't get me started on vegemite; I've wondered what it tasted like for more years than I care to mention.

I found two interesting Blogger links this morning: this one lists all the Blogger sites updated in the past 10 minutes, and this one lists all the Blogger sites updated in the past 3 hours (a very long list).

OK, I lied; they're not that interesting.

What's brown sauce? They mention it quite a bit on EastEnders. Yesterday I was watching it and a guy squirted the stuff all over his breakfast. Is it like A1 steak sauce? Does anyone outhside North America know what A1 steak sauce is? I prefer Worcestershire sauce myself, but only on steak.

Next I'll ask about vegemite.

I couldn't sit in the house all day with my head in an accounting textbook while planes from the airshow buzzed the house. So, I studied for about an hour. Maybe. Then I went out and stood in the yard squinting through binoculars for several hours waiting for various planes to fly by. The top of my head ended up slightly sunburned, but I got to see a stealth fighter fly low overhead.

I also saw an A-10, a T-33, a P-51, and a B-25. (Humor me.)

It's a pity the test I have to take on Wednesday is on accounting for receivables, current liabilities, and payroll accounting, and not on identifying military aircraft through binoculars while standing in your backyard in your pajamas.

There's going to be an airshow at the local airport today and tomorrow. Planes fly right over this house when making their landing approach. But I'm going to be stuck in front of an accounting textbook while vintage and exotic aircraft buzz the house. There's no justice in this world.

Yesterday while perusing a few blogs I don't usually peruse (excessive perusing is too taxing to my fragile psyche), I came upon a veiled reference to my favorite bizarre 1970's toy: Hugo.

Oh, how to describe the freakishness of Hugo to people too young, too old, or too British to know just what the hell I'm ranting about? Well, to put it simply, Hugo was basically a hand puppet for disturbed children. Training for future mad scientists. It was a bald man with no eyebrows (he looked kind of like Mini Me from the Austin Powers movies), and you were supposed to glue things to his head like warts, sores, stitched-up cuts, bad eyes, facial hair, wig, etc. The glue came in sticks and was the color of ear wax.

I got my Hugo for Christmas one year. How many hours did I spend happily gluing warts and sores to this thing? It was enjoyable until the glue got too thick on the warts and other bits. You were supposed to clean the glue off everything, but what seven year old has the time and patience for such nonsense? Over time the warts and things got lint and hair stuck to them.

Eventually I just destroyed Hugo like most of my other toys. But for a few years afterwards, on occasion, I'd find one of the warts in a box or under my bed.

Peeing will never be dull again. [Link via Barefoot.]

Yes, I know I shouldn't be here (or in anyone's blog comments) when I have accounting evil to study, but I just found out part of my archives are missing. Again! #$%&#!!! I'll see you in Hell, Blogger!

Google News included this as the top news story about the SARS epidemic. Apparently the Googlebots occasionally collect clearly marked satire as real news.

The time has come. My last accounting test is Wednesday and I'm going to have to pry myself away from this PC and actually study. There's two chapters of garbage I have to consume, memorize, and understand. I've been dreading this day. So if I don't update as often as I have, it's because I have my head stuck in my accounting textbook.