August 31, 2003

The Racial Slur Database

The Racial Slur Database is crazy...really. It's amazing how many different words and references people come up with to put each other down, when everyone knows we're all pretty much pieces of shit inside no matter what color we are on the outside. Damn.

Designing My Own Hell

Ants
Circle I Limbo

Republicans, Democrats
Circle II Whirling in a Dark & Stormy Wind

Actors
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow

Communists
Circle IV Rolling Weights

Scientologists
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled

River Styx

Greens
Circle VI Buried for Eternity

River Phlegyas

Militant Vegans
Circle VII Burning Sands

Catholics
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement

Creationists
Circle IX Frozen in Ice

Design your own hell

August 26, 2003

Still nothing really new

I started back to school today. I flubbed up my perfect non-tardy self by running into my first day of class late thanks to missing the fact that I was supposed to be at a whole different campus for the class. I spent 10 minutes at the other campus scratching my head and wondering where room 415 could be when the math building ran in series of 100s, but eventually I came to my senses and realized that I'd have to show off all those marvelous offensive driving skills I never use if I wasn't going to walk into class 30 minutes late. I'm not particularly excited about the classes I'm taking right now I think, but I suppose that once this year is finished I should be virtually graduated and be able to prepare to song and dance my way into counting all those extra credits I took.

I suppose I've been in one of those weird transitional moods lately between manic and depressed. I haven't been oversleeping, just the opposite - but I haven't been bouncing off the walls. Just the average sort of thing that happens when something breaks my cycles I guess. Hopefully I can get back on track with my class schedule, I suppose some people would hate to deal with the way my moods run in circles all the time but I've guess I've sort of come to depend upon them. As long as I'm going to be a little crazy I should be able to use that to my advantage, right?

August 13, 2003

No Updates

Well I recently had a death in the family so I haven't been updating this like I should. It's hard to justify looking for funny things to talk about, ranting about copyright, or much of anything when people you care about are deeply troubled. My grandmother, the sweetest woman in the world, lost her older sister this weekend. I don't have an older brother or sister, and I of course don't have enough years to have known anyone the amount of time my grandmother has. I know I was shocked and hurt when my good friend Asa shot himself before he had even turned 30 years old, when my uncle Orville passed and I had watched him starve himself to death in snapshots of hospital visits, the several times I came to school on Monday morning in high school and someone I'd known or had passed in the hall would never come back again, and sitting in the intensive care unit with my atheist bullshit self praying like a saint for my grandfather to pull through his sudden heart surgery. There's nothing to be done of course, people die and they get hurt and sometimes they just decide to leave. I don't know what I'm trying to say really. Treasure every moment you have with the people you love, let each day have at least a bit of joy in it no matter how dismal it seems. We really don't get a lot of time to do things here on Earth and even the loudest among us is very small and precious when compared to the enormous tide of humanity.

August 07, 2003

The reality of globalization

“They tell you it’s the Oil but I know it is not the Oil, I just can’t figure out what the hell it is we are here for.” said an American soldier to blogger journalist Salam in his August 5th entry. I just wish everyone else was asking that question too. I've been really active lately in a discussion about environmentalism over at SKR's site about the US' decision not to sign off on the Kyoto articles a while back and taking a break from bitching about the war, but it's not hard to understand how some people don't have that luxury.

I think the problem is that there are a lot of things wrong with the world and people with the means to do something about it usually don't want to because solving some of these things isn't conducive to staying in power.
I don't know if it's possible to fix that, because it simply may just be a fact of biology that we've an urge to kill each other just as strong as the one that makes us pants lusters. We're a bit broken possibly, sort of doomed by evolution to be madmen saints.

August 05, 2003

Alumni Sites

Normally I would provide a link at this point, but in truth I'm not really interested in sending everyone to the personal hell of my high school alumni website that I've just been on. Dutifully I added my email address, if for no other reason than maybe someone that I actually know might wander in there curious like I was and see me and drop me a line. I learned and implied a few things about my fellow high school classmates by my visit though, and I thought I would share my observations.

1. The more information there is available about a person in your alumni directory, the more self-righteous they will probably be. This includes people with more than one child, who've lost weight or turned from 'nottie to hottie', who are still with the same person you last saw them with, are tremendously successful, and spouses of military folks.

2. People with little information on the alumni website probably still live in the area, and weren't very interesting in the first place. I decided to place myself amongst these people when I added myself because I didn't really care to give everyone a free pass to my blog that I dreamed of blowing up in an enormous fireball of self-expressive hate while in high school.

3. People who were truly and genuinely interesting in high school will be AWOL, since they either have better things to do than lurk around people they probably couldn't stand any more than me or they are probably dead. It's always strange that corollary, I don't know why but most of all interesting people are dead. It stands to reason that it holds true for people I went to high school with too, but I can't remember most of them so how would I know?

I can barely remember some of the people I went out on dates with in high school, and yet there I was dutifully looking through the listing like I would see something incredibly compelling. My father claimed that I should have gone to my ten year reunion a few years ago, but I still can't see why. Maybe it's because when I look through those pages of people talking about their lives I don't feel any sort of association with those same notions. Yes I feel older occassionally when I start to look at how big Phoenix is getting, but I certainly don't feel like a 'grown up' particularly. I'm not sure if I ever want to either, they seem so...deadened. "I married Tom, we're in BFE Arkansas and can't be happier with our three kids and two dogs." Maybe I'm just not cut out for that shit.

Maybe it repels me because I secretly desire something like that? Well, not married to a Tom - but you know what I mean. Domesticity seems like an easy life for me, the perpetual diplomat. Do what my wife suggests and bring home a steady paycheck, watch a little football before I go to bed at night. Ugh. It almost sounds like giving up. I think I would crack under that kind of day to day tide of familial responses, or worse I wouldn't crack and the light would go out in my soul and I'd be left with whatever passes for domestic bliss before you fall asleep watching the evening news each night.

Normally I'd close this sort of entry with something witty and clever, but I don't know what to say anymore. I feel exposed right now, like someone disapproving might be watching. My conscience? Perhaps. Who knows, and let's hope I never have to find out.

Playing with some new ideas for presentation





August 04, 2003

Wasabi

The funny thing is, I can't remember having wasabi. I know I must have had it before because I've pretty much tasted every single bit of hot food known to man.

Debunking the Dvorak Myth

A lot of people have told me that the Dvorak keyboard is inherently superior to the standard QWERTY keyboard. I'll admit, I've been skeptical mostly on the grounds that superior things are usually adopted quickly by people who pinch pennies for large corporations and if if saved a hundredth of a penny by changing over to Dvorak it seems that at least large corporations and the government would force everyone to change over to the cheaper system

"The trap constituted by an obsolete standard may be quite fragile. Because real-world situations present opportunities for agents to profit from changing to a superior standard, we cannot simply rely on an abstract model to conclude that an inferior standard has persisted. Such a claim demands empirical examination. "

I think this article provides ample, and interesting examination kids. Check it out.

I've Gone Down To Southpark

Your Blogger as Southpark Character

This morning I played around with some neato Flash toys at Comedy Central and came up with this striking rendering of your's truly as a Southpark character. Come on, don't I look like the coolest kid in 3rd grade?

August 02, 2003

Man may have been alive when stuffed in container

"Timothy Schuster may have been alive when corrosive chemicals were poured over him in the moments before he was sealed into a blue plastic barrel used to store chemical waste."

Wow. I think that that solves the question quite neatly of whether it's safer to dissolve your victims or to feed them carefully to wildlife.