OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everybody panic! There are amoebas in the water!

http://www.kpho.com/news/14214579/detail.html#

There have already been 6 cases this year! That's a .0000000009 percent chance that you will be attacked by an amoeba! We're doomed!


Who wants to go swimming?

So who wants to stand in a midnight line with me?

I'm doing it. I'm going to stand in line at midnight for Halo 3. I figure I've fought the hype for virtually every other instance of hype so I may as well give it the old Russian bread-line try and line myself up at the ghetto GameCrazy and watch out for Bloods presence.

If it looks like I wont get my ass kicked by a flurry a ghetto grade schoolers I'll take a picture or so of the would-be mayhem.

Whaaaa?? The gun buy-back program didnt work?

Truly, I am shocked beyond belief.

In a not entirely unrelated side note, though I have completed my NRA training thingy I cant legally teach the class until the NRA does my paperwork and I get notified that I have been added as a certified trainer. I guess they have problems with impostor trainers?

I sent in my exams and stuff on Tuesday so given the approximate size of the bureaucracy involved I estimate it will be legal for me to teach by the year 2014. Unfortunately that is two years after the end of the world as we know it so my certification might not be recognized in the post-apocalyptic North American continent.

We'll have to play it by ear.

Dave, put Ben on your handlebars and take him to get his game. He's sad without it.

Kin

Some of the British aren't so bad:

"I hate offended people. They come in two flavours - huffy and whiny - and it's hard to know which is worst. The huffy ones are self-important, narcissistic authoritarians in love with the sound of their own booming disapproval, while the whiny, sparrowlike ones are so annoying and sickly and ill-equipped for life on Earth you just want to smack them round the head until they stop crying and grow up. Combined, they're the very worst people on the planet - 20 times worse than child molesters, and I say that not because it's true (it isn't), but because it'll upset them unnecessarily, and these readers deserve to be upset unnecessarily, morning, noon and night, every sodding day, for the rest of their wheedling lives."

by Charlie Brooker from the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2170735,00.html

Ben grabs the Indie life preserver when he shouldve just drowned.

What's this? Ben wishes to attend the "I AM Festival?"

Has the whole world gone insane? Has the 7th seal been torn open?

Will Ben purchase from the self proclaimed indie craft fair? Will he provide a booth of his own and sell the indie crafts he has no doubt been locked away in his room perfecting all these years?

I don't know what upsets me more. Losing Ben to the indie kids he should be too old to lose himself too or that he approached me with an offer to purchase my soul. I feel so unclean. I have been offered crack, heroin, fat-girl sex and homo sex and neither has made my skin crawl with as many bugs as Ben's thoroughly indecent proposal has.

The dirt just won't come off.

Over the weekend I got dragged off to a gallery opening and was told while in attendence to "open up." Against my better judgement I held my tongue and for that I will never forgive myself. There are forces at work to push me over the edge I tell you. Dark, limp-wristed forces wearing girls pants.

lazy sunday

Nerds

Why it was okay for me to buy an iPod

I had to do some serious soul searching for this one. I was thinking about getting a new mp3 player. The Archos Jukebox Recorder has served me well for around 5 years, now, but it's starting to show its age. The AC adapter broke, so I can only charge the batteries by taking them out and putting them in a separate charger. The hard drive has been acting weird, sometimes audio will drop out for a few seconds or it'll just stop playing randomly. And I was starting to think that 20 gigabytes was not enough. The final nail in the coffin was that it let me down on my recent 5-hour journey to Ithaca. So, I started idly looking around to see what else was out there.

I only have a couple of demands: it has to be UMS compliant, so I can drag-and-drop and organize things the way I want them, it has to play illegally pirated drm-free stuff and it has to be cheap. I was initially drawn to the Cowon line. Their benefit is that they offer really good audio quality. Unfortunately, though, they're really expensive. Also, most the mp3s I'd be playing through it aren't high enough quality to really benefit. I looked at some of the other, newer Archos models, but none of them in my price range really did it for me. Then, I was looking at the site where I got the alternative firmware I use in my Archos and saw that they make firmware for the iPod. That intrigued me. I learned that I can get an iPod to do everything I want it to do. Next stop, Ebay. I looked around and discovered that if I was smart about it, I could get a 60 gig iPod w/video for just over $150. That was exactly my price range. So, I decided to go for it.

The only lingering advantage of my old Archos is that the thing is built like a tank. It has those huge rubber stoppers that you could run over with a truck and it'd probably still work. It occurs to me, though, that I never have run it over with a truck and I'd likely never run an iPod over with a truck either, so that shouldn't really be a major concern.

Now, I just have to live with the shame of carrying around an iPod. At least I'll have the secret thrill of knowing I'm getting all the benefits without any of the drawbacks. I'm not locked into iTunes. I can do what I want with my media. I didn't give Apple any of my money. And, hopefully, it'll be compatible with all the peripherals. So, I can finally get that musical toilet paper dispenser I've always wanted.

Is that a pistol in your pocket?

Why yes, yes it is.


Hooray for new guns!!!

I'll be a certified NRA instructor next week guys. Who wants a permit? Permits for everyone!

We Need Ben

Ben needs to be an active part of this little site. God knows the boy spends enough time on the internet, we need to let him know that Al Gore didn't go through all that trouble for him waste away all his online time searching for 15 year old japanese girls with eels leaping out of their recti.

Forgetting my friends

Man, I totally forgot this whole thing was here until I saw it scrolling through my entered URL's.

I guess that means you guys mean a lot to me, huh?

X's and O's. Well, maybe no X's. Well, X's for Ben but nobody else.