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.