Steve McQueen, Harry Houdini, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Fatty Arbuckle, and me.

Question: What do the above people have in common (besides being carbon-based life forms)?

I'm not watching the Oscars. Nope. I used to watch it, but I went cold turkey several years ago. Last year I fell of the wagon and ended up suffering (yes, suffering) through the longest telecast in Oscar history. And I hadn't even seen any of the nominated movies. I hate big celebrity awards ceremonies, the only reasons to watch them is to see if anyone wears a transparent dress or have a tape in the VCR on the off chance someone's boobs pop out while they're accepting an award. And if anyone (i.e. Salma Hayek) has anything pop out, I can see the screen captures on Usenet.

Bob's back., woo-hoo!

Too much trouble coming up with a cool name for your latest military adventure? Try the American Military Operation Name Generating Device. [Link via Metafilter.]

My favorite was "Operation Delirious Marsupial".

What did I do in the days before I got satellite TV and internet access? [Scratches head and thinks for a long while.] Oh, yeah...I remember. I used to read books and write stuff on paper. I must've been out of my mind.

Are there any clothing-optional dentist offices?

Why have I been skipping showers on Friday nights? Just because I usually don't have to go anywhere on Saturdays doesn't automatically mean I should be grubby and smelly. In fact, I hate being grubby and smelly. And having a two days growth of beard sucks too. (I think I'm channeling another blogger; if I ever find out specifically who I'll let you know.)

Ignore the entry below about Bryan Ferry, the article headline was corrected hours ago. But I still think Ferry should sue them for mistakenly putting a headline about some rapist above an article about Ferry's dull divorce.

I need a hobby. Or maybe just deep sedation.

I think Bryan Ferry should sue for this foul up

Rarely a day goes by where I don't get hits from freakos searching for Icelandic porn or some varient of North Korean porn. Why? Who are these people? Are they the same people, or are there that many people all over the world looking for these sorts of things. If only I could cash in on this strange need.

For all its vaunted "interconnectivity", the web's practically stone-age when compared to television. When I want breaking news I turn on the TV; reading news online is better only when your other option is reading today's newspaper.

I've spent hours vegetating on the couch in front of the TV watching the opening rounds of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", or as I like to call it, "Bush's Stupid-Ass Bid For Re-election That's Going To End Up Causing A Lot Of Innocent Americans To Get Blown Up By Religious Fanantics". Admittedly the name the Pentagon's PR firm came up with is catchier than mine, but I'm just one man with somewhat limited resources.

I found this earlier today in my logs. It has nothing at all to do with what's going on it the news today, but I found it interesting nonetheless.

Why not get of the couch and see how the other half lives?

I hate it when my cover's blown. I have the odd talent (luck?) of being able to go out in a small city and not see a single person I know. When I walk down the street or go into a store I don't want anyone to recognize me. Of course, going into the same stores constantly, the regular employees will know me as "that guy who comes in buys the exact same thing every single time." I expect and accept this type of recognition. What I find so jarring is when I run into people I went to high school with or people who know me in some other way. Once about five years ago, a guy in a uniform called out to me; it turned out he was an old school friend that I'd literally known since I was about seven years old, but I hadn't seen him since graduation years earlier. He was now a fire inspector and was out doing his rounds. I, on the other hand, had been working as low-paid temp and week earlier had worn most of the skin off the palms of my hands unloading trucks filled with extremely heavy boxes of thread. So I got to show him my gross, painful hands and see his reaction at my seeming failure at life. Fun. Well, today, my cover was blown in a vaguely unsettling way. I went up to the counter in a store and the woman ringing up my purchases asked me my mother's name. I look nothing like my mother. How did she know who my mother was? Where did she know me from? After exchanging a few words I found out that I'd gone to school with her daughter and son. I'd even spent the night at their house once over twenty years ago. Now I don't want to go back to that store again. I don't want to go from being just "that guy" to actually having someone able to attach a name to me.

Oh, I hate Tuesdays. Is there any day of the week that just doesn't absolutely fill me with dread? Thursdays through Saturdays, maybe. Maybe.

Yesterday I found a bunch of Rhodesian web pages. What's so special about that? Well, Rhodesia stopped being a country in 1980. (After white minority rule ended it became Zimbabwe.) I don't know why I never considered that displaced Rhodesians would be so organized and nostalgic. Fascinating stuff. (I say that a lot, don't I? One day it'll be true, I promise.) This material is great to dig through if you're like me (and I hope for your sake you're not at all like me) and have a long-standing interest in post colonial Africa and obscure wars of the past fifty years or so. This site is the most comprehensive when it comes to the military stuff, but beware the occasional white supremacist rhetoric. This site's an online library of various books about Rhodesia, but unfortunately their selection isn't that great. If you want Rhodesian merchandise (come on, there must be at least five or six non-Rhodesians that do) try here. These sites have links to many other similar sites; it's an entire hidden world that few know about. (This isn't interesting to you at all, is it?)

I have seen the future and it's kind of creepy. Or maybe just stupid. Do we really need all of our appliances online? Maybe it's a really, really bad idea. An idea so bad it would give Aldous Huxely, George Orwell, and William S. Burroughs the creeping terrors.

Someone should make glow-in-the-dark toilets. They would be a lot easier to find in the dark. I hate having to turn the lights on in the middle of the night.

I'm so bored.

I hate Mondays.

I propose that Bush and Saddam wrestle nude on live TV; it's the only logical solution to a very stupid problem. The loser gets spanked. There's not nearly enough spanking on TV these days. Not that I'm into that or anything.

I hate Sundays.

Today I spent literally hours reading this site which debunks the whole Vietnam POW/MIA thing. Highly fascinating stuff (at least to me). [Link via Metafilter.]

I found this appalling web site at Metafilter. My deepest apologies to all who hit the link.

And almost as bad, is this, which I found at Shellen.

Stupid Haloscan deleted comments from one of yesterday's posts.

Maybe I'm not coming down with a cold. Exciting, no?

I think I'm coming down with a cold, or, as I'll probably put it tomorrow, I tink I'b cubbing dowd wiffa code. My right ear's been stopped up most of the morning and I'm feeling progressively worse, although not dramatically so. Colds usually leave me one of two ways, walking misery or semi-conscious delirium.

And Haloscan's down again. Can the day get any better?

I love Amazon. Tuesday I ordered Francois Caradec's biography of Raymond Roussel and today it's in my hands (which makes it difficult to type).

Here's the latest chapter on Bob vs. the Japanese doppleganger.

I wrote the nonsense below last Saturday night. When I was about halfway through it I realized I was basically writing an unintentional parody of Diamond Geezer's Retail Therapy Project, where he got his loyal readers to vote on something he should buy himself for his birthday. Oops. Well, I do have a birthday coming up. Maybe you can vote on which of the items below that I should under no circumstances ever be allowed anywhere near. Or vote on which federal prison I should serve hard time in if I ever get my grubby hands on any of the items below.

A list of ten things I want, but really, really don't need.

1. A sitar--I've more than proven with both acoustic and electric guitars that I have no discernable musical talent, but yet I've wanted a sitar since the mid 80's. (Blame the Beatles.) What would I do with it? I'd probably just noodle around with it for a day or two and then just prop it up in a corner.

2. A Thompson submachine gun--I left that right-wing gun nut stuff when I grew out of being a thirteen year old Soldier of Fortune magazine reading dumbass, but a still I want a Thompson submachine gun. These weapons are true works of art and under no circumstances should raving lunatics like me be allowed to own one. Like the sitar, it'd end up propped in a corner.

3. A steam-roller--This needs no explanation, but mashing stuff is fun.

4. A fully functioning robot servant--OK, modern science hasn't caught up with this particular need yet, but one day it will, and, naturally, everyone will have one but me. It'll be 1995 all over again!

5. An alligator--Like the steamroller, this needs no further explanation, but like the submachine gun, people like me have no business owning them.

6. A really big laser of some sort--I have no idea what I'd do with it. Maybe cut stuff up with it. But that'd get old kinda quick.

7. A set of bagpipes--Since I was a wee lad I've wanted to own the most obnoxious musical instrument known to man or beast.

8. A kilt--See above.

9. A tuba--At heart I'll always be a frustrated musician. I want a brass tuba, not one of those white ones because they look like toilets.

10. An ostrich--Think of the mayhem I could cause with an enormous, angry bird.

Of course, this is just a short list; there's so many other stupid things I want like an x-ray machine, a flame-thrower, a jet engine, an array of dental equipment, a hovercraft, etc.

Whenever I hear the Clash's "48 Hours", I laugh at the line, "Every time I miss it 'cos I ain't got a ticket" because it sounds like Joe Strummer's saying, "Every time I miss it 'cos I ain't got a chicken".

Someone searched Yahoo for photos of squirrels getting hit by cars and ended up here. I'm tenth at Yahoo for this inexplicable search string. Notice they wanted photos of squirrels "getting hit" and not squirrels that have already been hit. I imagine such photos are quite rare.

Yesterday morning it was in the thirties and I had to scrape ice off my car windows before I went to school. Today it's seventy-five degrees. Tomorrow it'll probably be snowing or a tornado will suck up the house and fling it into the next county.

Bob asked the folks at Blogger about the "Japanese bizarro blog universe" that several of us spent too much time roaming around in Sunday. The Blogger folks weren't exactely helpful.

Meanwhile, my thirst for world domination hasn't been quenched.

Life is so dreary. If I had a robot army at my disposal things would be far more interesting. At least for me. Everyone else would be cowering from the wrath of my robot army. But hiding in a sewer while robots burned your city is interesting, right? At least it'd be something you could tell your grandchildren one day.

I hate Tuesdays. Every week I have to suffer through that godawful, tedious PC upgrade and repair class. It's just screaming agony every step of the way. We couldn't even do our assignment today because one of the other classes had hosed all the PC's we work on. These computers are dusty, old Pentium and Pentium II things, but in the past they've always worked (surprising when you consider how many times they've been taken apart by empty-headed students). I can't even imagine what the other class did to them. Out of fifteen or more PC's, only two worked halfway. Lovely way to spend three hours.

Did Google buy Keenspace? The free Keenspace pages now have the exact same Googlesyndication text ads as the free Blogger pages.

Do you ever go to the meat section of your local supermarket, look at all the cuts of beef, and fantasize about reassembling the cow? No, me neither.

Like I don't I have enough to worry about.

This is the best explanation I've read so far of the weird Japanese "mirror" site situation. (And if you're reading this and don't have the faintest idea of what I'm referring to, read yesterday's entries.)

Ah, finally, I have all my archives back. Now those weirdos in Japan can make a copy of each and every page.

Ah, lovely, Haloscan's down again. I thought they had finally got in a new shipment of hamsters to replace the exhausted ones, but I guess I was mistaken. They wear out so fast running in those little wheels that connect to the generators that power Haloscan's servers. It's tragic, really.

[If you haven't been here today, read the previous two entries first.] Bob found a thread on the Japanese mirrors at Metafilter.

This whole thing doesn't bother me, so I'm not going to try and get them to stop archiving my blog. It's not hurting anything (is it?), but I would like to know how it works.

[If you haven't been here today, read the previous entry first.] Well, thanks to the unauthorized Japanese mirror of Dooce's archives, I found a link to the unauthorized Japanese mirror of Volume 22. And thanks to the unauthorized Japanese mirror of By A Woman, I found a second unauthorized Japanese mirror of Volume 22. This story gets weirder and weirder as I go along. There must be some logical reason for all of these mirrored pages. Are these pages actually entended for public consumpton, or are they just some kind of oddball automatic archive?

I've visited what just may be an illegal copy of the entire web. Or if not that, then something almost as bizarre and incomprehensible. I was doing my usual morning blog-reading rounds, when I saw this link at Bob's. It's an unauthorized Japanese mirror of her blog. But it gets worse. I tried some of the links on the mirror site and instead of just being Bob's links, they were Japanese mirrors of her links. And the links on most of those pages were Japanese mirrors, and so on into infinity. And it's not just blogs that are mirrored; I found mirrors of Blogger, MTV, and the Guardian UK also. (Sorry, I didn't copy the URL's to those pages.) I followed links for over an hour, but it just kept going. I thought at first that this was merely the work of an overenthusiastic fan, but it's so huge that it could have only been done by a script of some sort. No amount of speedfreaks could have put this together. I was hoping, of course, to find my own page in there, but I just got worn out. It's strange, people, go have a look.

I just noticed something, a lot of the ad-supported Blogger blogs now have both the new text ads and a banner ad. This sucks. Are we just going to get more and more ads at the top until we upgrade?

Why do all the spammers think I'm in debt and have a small penis?

I didn't post a thing yesterday, the first time I've skipped a day since Christmas. I was busy most of the day and couldn't think of anything worth posting. Not that today's any different.

This morning I bought another lava lamp at the same crummy discount store. I dug out the last traditionally shaped one from inside a stack under a table. I'm now trying to decide which one I like better. Exciting, huh? I live on the edge.

One thing I haven't subjected my readers to is my love of the Oulipo, a French avant-guarde literary group whose members produce works according to strict, often mathematical, constraints, such as writing a novel containing no words with the letter "e". I've had a strong interest in this group for ten years, and was pleased to recently come across a couple of blogs (for lack of a better word) that deal with both the Oulipo and other weirdo language/literary stuff. I used to wallow in this sort of thing before I let the damn computer take over my life.

Earlier I got the bright idea to do a search on Google for blogs that mentioned my hometown. I was hoping to find a local blog because I was curious to see what the hell they'd find to write about in this city. I didn't exactly find one, but what I did find kind of made me wish I'd never ever mentioned the name of my hometown in this blog. There was a site promoting get-togethers of blogging folk from various areas and I found info about an up-coming meeting here in Hicktown. But the scary part was one of the proposed meeting places was a restaurant/nightclub that's literally a half mile down the road from my hovel. That's too close for comfort. Next thing they'll be knocking on the door. ("Come outta there, you blogging bastard!") I can't have that. It'll only take one these local bloggers to spoil everything. And I have a confession to make, I've never knowingly met another blogger. I'm not exactly dying to meet another blogger either because I'm basically a hermit and a misanthrope. I'm probably safe from meeting any local bloggers unless they find me through Google or catch me in the act at school. But, despite all of this, I have doubts this local blog summit will amount to anything because only one person was signed up for it.

Some spring break this is, I spend hours at school in the computer lab doing work, and then at home I get swept up in a full-throttle Jekyll and Hyde freak-out over my accounting homework. It's not right, I tell you. It's spring break, I should be at a beach someplace running down the street naked, smoking crack, turning over cars, battling policemen, making amateur porn, or at least vegetating on the couch in front the TV for nine straight days. Something in my life went very, very wrong someplace.

Since my mind is preoccupied with school misery, I'll give you a link that shows you how to freak out your college roommate. (I never had a college roommate. Sad, huh? It's the kind of thing that just makes you want to chase me with a flame-thrower.)

Blogger finally got rid of the default text ads and gave me one that reflects the content of my blog: "Is Boredom Contagious?" They know me too well. And, yes, boredom is contagious; so contagious that I should probably put a warning label at the top of my blog.

I'm so bummed out I can barely function. It's spring break, so I should be goofing off, but yet I have to do homework the whole time. I've spent a lot of time today with my head stuck in my damn accounting textbook trying to memorize this inane dreck for a test that's over two weeks away.

I've been either bored or just plain bummed out all day long and I'm not even sure why. To give an example of just how bored I am, this afternoon I sat on the couch mindlessly flipping through dozens of channels and ended up watching a three hour televised interview with Susan Sontag, who I'm not even that crazy about as a writer. All I wanted to do today was vegetate and eat junk food, preferably chocolate. In fact, I'm so bored/bummed out that I can't think of a way to end this paragraph in any coherent manner.

Why wasn't this reported by the US media?

The things I find in my referrer logs make me wonder sometimes if the insane outnumber the sane. Early this morning someone hit my blog by searching for casino north korea pig thermometer. Yes, you read it right. I have no idea what the hell they were looking for, and I seriously doubt the searcher knew either. And it's creepily similar to a search request I found a few weeks ago: north korea casino wish thermometer. It's wigged out, man. (I was number one at Google for both these searches, by the way.) It has to be be the same person. Has to be. I forgot to write down what ISP the first searcher had, but the second was using AOL, which, for some reason, strikes me as quite logical for a search of such staggering absurdity.

I've also had two people search for bastard volume 22. One searched German Google, the other used some Portuguese search engine. What does that mean? Why would anyone search it? I should change the name of my blog to this search.

Earlier in the week I went to Babelfish and translated Volume 22 into Korean and then translated it back into English. I wasn't quite prepared for the results: Sheep 22. Huh? Sheep? How did they go from "volume" to "sheep"?

While looking through my change this morning, I found a weird coin with a squid on one side and bull's head on the other. It's copper and slightly smaller than a penny. The words "TÍA AURAR ISLAND 1981" are stamped on the side with the bull's head and there's a number 10 on the squid side. I'd never heard of this Tía Aurar Island before and couldn't imagine where it was, so I looked it up at Google and was directed to a site dealing with coins. The answer shocked me: it's Icelandic. The "Tía Aurar" refers to the denomination of the coin, not the name of the island. Strange. How does an Icelandic coin end up circulating in a hick town like Danville, Virginia? And even stranger is that it would end up in the hands of someone with an odd obsession with Iceland.

I'm sure by now everyone with a Blogger account has noticed the new text ads that have recently replaced the banner ads that previously appeared at the top of our blogs (or rather appeared at the top of the blogs of us too cheap to upgrade). The content of these ads is determined by the content of the blog it appears on. Presumably this system works by way of an algorithm like the one that powers the text ads that appear down the right side of the page at Google. Here's where things get odd. The ads that appear at Google are determined by the specific search request. So my question is, if someone hits my blog by searching Google for erotic grannies or "Communist Porn" (which has happened recently), because my blog contains words like "erotic", "grannies", "communist", "porn", etc., is my blog going to end up with the same kind of porno text ads that you'd see at Google if you searched for erotic grannies or "Communist Porn"?

Mr. Rogers has died. When I was little I loved Mr.Rogers' Neighborhood, but my parents absolutely hated the show because they thought Mr. Rogers was "too prissy".

For one brief shining moment my comments actually worked. And now they're down again. [Sounds of uncontrolled sobbing.]

We've been getting lots of freezing rain. I hope the power doesn't get knocked off. I remember the power being off for several days during a few winter storms when I was little. My mother would actually cook on our wood stove. Yeah, I know it sounds quaint, but it sucked not being able to flush the toilet or take a shower.

We're snowed in again. It started pouring down sleet a little after two and night classes were canceled. No accounting class! And next week's spring break.

Hmmm....my comments are gone again; I could have sworn I saw them a couple of hours ago. Haloscan should lay off the trained chimps they have running their servers and hire some actual people. Or maybe lay off the actual people and hire some trained chimps. Either way, changes need to be made.

Here's a repost of the stuff I accidently deleted during Monday's extended disaster:

OK, I admit it, I can't think of a damn thing to write about. I've been putting this off all day. No, actually I've been putting it off since yesterday because I couldn't think of anything to write about then either. All I had to offer were a couple of depraved links. Unfortunately for this entry I'm falling back on links again, but these aren't quite so depraved. I found them by desperately typing in random words at Google. Sad, I know, but oddly enjoyable.

This is what my blog should've been.

This is the one and only (Or at least I hope) Poop Thesaurus.

This is Japanese. I think it's a videogame. Or something. I don't know.

This and this are sites done some kinda artist. I'm going to dig deeper into these myself when I have time. Or maybe I won't. Sue me.

I was going to drop Haloscan for YACCS, but I found out YACCS isn't accepting any new people. Bastards! One comment hosting outfit that looks promising is Squawkbox. And there's that other one, Eneration, Enetatation, Enterology... Or something like that.

It's official: Haloscan must be destroyed, or at least consigned to the landfill of forgotten online services. I know I shouldn't complain about free services, but these humans are bringing unreliability to untold new heights.

This morning, to cheer myself up, I bought a lava lamp for $10 at a discount store. It's a little slow warming up, but when it finally gets to optimal temperature it's hypnotic. And gloriously pointless. So I encourage each and every person reading this (which these days, according to Sitemeter, is about two people) to go out and buy a lava lamp. Do it for your mental health. Do it because it's enjoyable watching globs of unidentifyable crap undulate in a glass container.

OK, repairing my screw-ups was easy enough using Internet Explorer, but I still need a better reason to stick with Blogger.

Can someone give me a good reason why I should stick with Blogger? I can't think of a reason. I've been playing around with Diaryland and Blog Studio blogs over the past week or two and I'm really considering moving. Blogger's interface is so dependant on Internet Explorer that it's virtually unusable if you aren't running that particular browser.

And can someone remind me why blogging was supposed to be enjoyable? I seem to recall enjoying once before...

This really sucks. I have half a goddamn post on my blog and now I can't get rid of it. Safe mode doesn't work. Nothing works. And then I accidently deleted yesterday's post trying to get rid of this stupid, messed up post. All this because I accidently left out closing quotation marks in a link. The rest of the larger paragraph is gone and none of the following paragraph showed up. It's all combined in one nonfunctioning link. Fuck!

I really messed up things. I posted something with some slightly messed up html and now I have this post I can't edit or delete.

Woo-hoo! I've got my site's daily traffic down to the low single digits! If I keep this up it'll be in negative numbers, if that's even possible.

Has anyone ever had their blog made into a movie? I hope not.

Are there any blogs in weird, obscure, almost extinct languages like [insert the name of a weird, obscure, almost extinct language only known to linguists whose job it is to know about such things]?

Ever notice how people who use one blogging service tend to mostly read and link to other blogs who use that same service? Look at my links; out of 22, half of them are Blogger sites, there's one Diaryland site, and I think the rest are independents who don't use services. And if you go over to a blog hosted by one of the other blogging/journaling/whatever sites like Live Journal, Diaryland, Interactive X, Blog Studio, etc., etc., etc. you'll find that most of the links on them are other blogs hosted by that service. It's like it's a rule: If you have a Blog Donkey blog, you may only link to other Blog Donkey blogs because you're now part of the Blog Donkey blogging community and we want to keep out the riff-raff. But there are no rules as far as I know, besides the kind of stuff Live Journal has with friends lists (which isn't really the same thing--I don't think).

So why do we cluster with our own kind? My guess is that it's mostly laziness and maybe an unwillingness to seek out something new in unfamiliar areas. (It also may have something to do with the fact that some of these blogging services host sites that seem to be ignored by Google. And if the site's invisible to Google it might as well not even exist.) Since I use Blogger, I have to go to Blogger's home page whenever I want to post stuff in my blog. At Blogger's home page they have a list of recently updated blogs, so if I look at new blog, just out of convinience, more than likely it'll be hosted by Blogger. (If this isn't making any sense you can blame it on the fact that I'm all cranked up and bouncing off the walls on caffeine. God help anyone who wants to talk to me on the phone anytime soon.) And when I go to these new Blogger blogs, more than likely they'll be linking to mostly other Blogger blogs also. It's self perpetuating. We build our own ghettos and don't even notice.

Last month, I think, I jokingly made a comment about starting a porn blog. Well, this morning, I found a real one. The first link I hit was this abomination (and this link isn't safe for work--or anywhere else). I hope it's a joke. Really, I do. And be sure to check out the FAQ for the helpful illustrations.

In the eighth grade I knew this guy who'd just moved down here to Virginia from someplace like Wisconsin. In class one day he told a story about a grocery store in his home state that suddenly became very popular because they started selling beef a lot cheaper than their competitors. Everyone was buying this cheap meat. After an investigation, it turned out that the stuff wasn't beef at all (surprise!), but was instead illegally imported kangaroo meat. I have no idea if the story's true or not.

Earlier this morning I stopped at a railroad crossing, the barrier things were coming down because a train was on the way. A guy strolled across the tracks and said to me, "Come on. Go. The train's way down there." He pointed down the tracks to an area I couldn't see because of the trees. I waived him off. I probably could've slipped through with no problem, but I don't usually take risks like that when I'm not enraged. But then again, considering how I feel, I should've just parked my car on the tracks and let the train knock me into the next county.

I botched my accounting test last night. At one point I seriously thought I was going to have to leave the room and throw up. There's a possibility that I might squeak by with a D. I've already dropped this class once before, which means that I can't take it again if I screw it up this time. And if I can't take it again I might as well find another major because two semesters of accounting are required for my useless degree.

I have an accounting test tonight I need to be cramming for instead of wasting prescious time doing my usual slack-jawed cyber-wank. My PC at this point is basically just a substitute TV. I just sit in front of it and look at web pages. Sure, I could say I'm doing research, but I'm not. Nope. I'm just goofing off.

A little while ago I blundered across the fairly amusing BigBlueBlog, and while reading it, I found this link. It's mildly naughty, but I suppose it's safe for work. Maybe. I don't know anything about your workplace. OK, don't look at it. I don't want hear about you getting fired; I don't need that on my conscience.

No school today. We just can't handle snow and ice down here. Up in New York it's not unusual to have twelve feet of snow on the ground. They just dig a network of tunnels through it and go about their business like the inhabitants of a giant ant farm until the spring thaw. But down here if we see a few flakes we mob the grocery stores for provisions and have huge pile-ups on the ever so slightly damp highways.

Blogger's really starting to piss me off. I've had a heck of a time today getting my own and other Blogger pages to load, then I found out that I'm missing a month's worth of archives. I think they're still there, they just aren't linked to. I'm going to suggest they rename this webloging service Clogger.

Things are really frozen outside. The temperature's not going up at all, so I wouldn't be surprised if school's canceled again tomorrow. Wouldn't that be just tragic? I'm devistated at the very idea. Oh please, please let there be a sudden anomalous heat wave to melt all this ice so I can go to school! (Note sarcasm.)

I don't usually leave personal messages to people here, but I need to right now. Hilary, I tried twice to leave comments at your blog but they disappeared leaving only my name, email address, etc., so I emailed the answer to your question. If you didn't get the email then you should probably tell me via email because, as you've probably seen, my comments haven't been working either. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

We had freezing rain last night and fine sleet all day long. School's closed yet again. I'm really broken up about this because I so wanted to be forced out of my nice warm bed at an unnatural hour by an alarm-clock so I can go to a class I hate.

I just read over at Diamond Geezer that Google has bought Blogger. In a longer article I found some info I find even more interesting than the buyout: there's an estimated 1.1 million registered Blogger users, but only an estimated 200,000 active Blogger sites. 200,000 is a far more manageable number than 1.1 million. Sometimes the sheer number of weblogs almost gives me a nosebleed.

In my opinion the best thing to come of this buyout is that the all the Blogger sites (like this one!) will be moved over to Google's servers. Google's servers are exceptionally robust, Blogger's servers run Microsoft garbage and are periodically down. This move will be a big plus. Now if Google would just buy Haloscan and Sitemeter maybe we would actually have a combination that worked.

Man, the Haloscan comments have been down since yesterday. I wonder what the problem is, not that it matters.

I dreamed I was traveling through Italy. My unconscious mind even provided a girl for me to travel with. And then I woke up. Boy was I pissed.

I've complained about how cold my "office" is before, but the problem can mostly be solved by wrapping a blanket around myself when I'm at the computer. It doesn't keep my mouse hand warm though. So this morning, in a flash of inspiration, I came up with the idea of a heated mouse pad. Brilliant! Then I checked Google. Of course someone else came up with the idea first.

The entry below was inspired by an entry at By a Woman. I should've mentioned this last night, but, swept up by the muse, it slipped my addled mind. I'm such a dumbass.

All this talk about hoarding duct tape, plastic sheets, and provisions for three weeks or more in case of terrorist chemical gas attack reminds me of something I saw when I worked as a temp at the school for snooty rich girls. I was one two or three other guys they had doing odd jobs, moving furnature, etc. Anyway, we had to go down to a storage room to get something and this storage room was in fact a cold war era bomb shelter. I'm just over six feet tall and I couldn't stand up straight in there because the ceiling was too low. Imagine being trapped in there during a nuclear strike and having to walk around with bent knees the whole time. Of course being trapped in a fallout shelter during WWIII with a load of teenage girls, I imagine standing up would be the least of my worries, but I digress... Now, onward to the point of this interminable story. The shelter had a couple of big hand-cranked air blowers to bring in air from the outside. Remarkably, they still worked. I asked one of the other guys (the smart one who'd actually dropped out of a four year college instead of community college like me), "If everything outside of the shelter was radioactive then wouldn't the air they pumped in also be radioactive?" He just said, "Uh...yeah."

After a dreary day away from my PC, I thought it'd be a good idea to mess around online for awhile. It probably would've been about as good an idea as stripping naked, smearing myself with meat, and jumping into a pit filled with starving wolverines. When a web page simply won't load I get frustrated: when virtually no web pages load I get homicidal. So much for a relaxing session in front of my PC. Sorry, I gotta go and start my axe-murder spree.

Ever since I did all that research on celery-flavored soft drinks on Monday I've had the almost overwhelming desire to drink a carbonated soft drink from a glass bottle. When's the last time I did that? These days everything's in plastic bottles, but there has to be something carbonated in glass bottles that's available in my area. (And please don't tell me to dig an old glass Coke bottle out of a trash pile from behind someone's house, clean it out, and fill it with Coke from a plastic bottle. I've already considered and rejected that option.)

When I was little back in the 70's virtually all the vending machines in my area sold soft drinks in bottles. And how many times did one of my parents tell my sister and I to hurry up and finish our drinks so they wouldn't have to pay the 5¢ deposit for the bottle? That part wasn't any fun. So we'd stand there outside of the gas station forcing down Pepsi or that vile orange Ne-Hi (or however it's spelled). (Mindless nostalgia is a sign of old age.)

I have to buckle down on the accounting, but as I try to read this week's material I can feel my brain actually trying to self-destruct. How can anyone ever study this garbage enough to actually become an accountant? And why am I required to take two semesters of this whale dreck when I have about as much interest in becoming an accountant as I do in becomming a rent boy?

Read the paragraphs below before reading this or hitting the links, otherwise you'll spoil the effect. (And if there's one thing I can't stand it's an effect-spoiling bastard!) Here's a link that explains everything in fascinating detail. This link hits a little too close to home, but it's relevant if you read the bit about the Pepsi Building.

One thing I've never done here is subject you folks to one of my stupid dreams, but there's a first time for everyting. I dreamt I had a 2 liter bottle of thyme-flavored Sprite. It was something made for the holidays; the label had a candy cane on it. The stuff was dark like Coke except it was green. Fortunately, or unfornately, I woke up before I got to taste the vile looking stuff.

The thyme-flavored Sprite reminds me of a bizarre soft drink that actually existed back in the 20's-40's called Celery Cola. Yeah, it had celery in it. I can't even imagine what it tasted like. Occasionally we dig the bottles up around here; they have a pseudo-Coke swirling script down the side. I don't know if was a nationally known soft drink or just a strange Virginia/North Carolina thing.

Yesterday while poking around here, I ran across a link to a fascinating article about web traffic and "power law distributions". Fascinating stuff.

I've been getting spam in my Hotmail account and the return address is my Yahoo account. So, in effect I'm spamming myself--except I'm not; my Yahoo address has been hijacked. And as far as I know there's no way to stop this. At least I haven't had my inbox at Yahoo crammed with requests to stop spamming people.

In accounting you have a debit side and a credit side and the numbers in each column must balance or the whole thing's wrong. Going through each account, painstakingly entering each figure, making sure every adjustment is correct, double checking your sums, and then finally adding each column to reveal a perfect trial balance is truly grand. Or so I imagine. Every time I do it I end up with something like an unexplained $35,000 discrepancy. So I nitpick, I agonize, I rant, I rave, I threaten, I weep, I rip out what little hair I have left on top of my head, I beg, I plead, I curse the gods until I finally find whatever mind numbingly stupid mistake I made that screwed up everything in the first place. I fucking hate accounting! I'd rather be sodomized by a tree sloth than spend one more second adding up columns of figures.

I'm old. Really, really old. Ancient even. This numbing fact was hammered home last night while listening to some records. (You know, vinyl.) I still haven't bought a new CD player to replace the one that died before Christmas, so I've been listening to creaky old vinyl and cassettes I bought back in the 80's. I've been playing Hüsker Dü's New Day Rising way too much lately, so I dug out the first Clash album and the first and third Velvet Underground albums. It was that damn first Velvet Underground album that got me. I looked at the worn, moldy sleeve (and for you younger readers, the sleeve is that square cardboard thing the big flat round thing goes into) and realized that this reissue that I bought in 1985 was as old now as the original 1967 album would've been in 1985. Ugh. And I'm not even going to mull over the Devo album I bought back in 1979.

I took a break from my accounting homework and checked my site stats. (What else am I going to do?) I found that apparently someone from Australia had hit my site from a link on somekinda Libertarian online magazine. I went and had a look. I looked some more. I kept on looking, but I'll be goddamned if I can find any link to my site. Anyone got any ideas? And why would any political site link to my inanity?

Here's a link to some strange movie reviews that focus on how accurate the typefaces in recent historical films are. Really.

Everything's covered in ice, so school's been cancelled yet again. Yippee. Now I have the whole day free to do my accounting homework. Ugh. I welcome death.

Last night in accounting class I slipped my mechanical pencil into my shirt pocket and promptly stabbed myself in the left nipple. I tried not to yelp.

And since this is the second time this week I've mentioned my nipples, I'm going to try and refrain from mentioning them again until at least next Monday.

It's supposed to snow yet again tomorrow. Isn't it odd that every single week it snows on Thursday and/or Friday? Naturally I welcome the snow and yet another four day week. I don't have any pressing work that requires me to go to the computer lab, so bring on the torrent. All I want to do is screw around online and eat M&M's.

Existence is so overrated.

I should be doing my accounting homework right now, but I'd rather make out with a chimp than do accounting. I should also be practicing my keyboarding since I can't type without looking at the keys (despite the fact that I've been typing since the mid 80's), but I'd rather have the chimp rip my arms off and beat me to death with them than spend anymore time at a keyboard.

I need to find some kind of way to relieve stress that doesn't involve smashing everything in sight to rubble. I don't know where my destructive urges come from, but I've had them my whole life. Maybe the doctor dropped me on my head at birth because I was so damn slippery. All I know is that for the past week or two the urge to smash things has me more than a little preoccupied. In the computer lab I want to hurl the monitor across the room after I make a typo. On the street I want the other drivers to go hurtling over cliffs that aren't even a feature of this area's topography. What can I say? My caveman urges are taking over. AAARRRGGGHHHH!!!!!!

Today a teacher at school, who's been touchie-feelie with me, touched my right nipple. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe I'm just irresistable. Hell, once he practically had me backed into a corner of his office. My question is this: why does this sort of thing always happen to me? And if it has to happen to me, why can't the teacher be, you know, female? The really funny part is that he's not even one of my teachers.

I really, really, really didn't want to spent the better (and I use that word lightly) part of a Sunday afternoon reinstalling Linux. And I really, really, really, really didn't want to have to end up re-reinstalling Linux because I'd fucked up something.

I hate my life.

Auto racing is evil. Evil! This morning it occurred to me that the Rolex 24 from Daytona was probably on, so I flipped over to the Speed Channel (how convenient). Now I'm hooked. I just wanted a taste. I thought I could handle it. It's just a bunch of guys driving around and around and around, but yet I have to watch it. Why? It's stupid. It's probably good that I was watching the news all day yesterday because if I'd known a 24 hour enduro was on I would've watched it all day and most of the night. Evil!

I went to the thrift store this morning like I do most Saturday mornings. They had a TV on and I saw the news report of the space shuttle burning up on re-entry. Naturally I left to go home and watch the news, but it struck me as odd that I'd find out this way since I'd both been watching TV and been online prior to leaving the house and saw no mention of it. I found out about JFK Jr.'s plane crash in the same store in the same way. And I found out about the Sept. 11 attacks by seeing CNN coverage on dozens of TV's in the electronics section of a department store.