Doom. Despair. Ruin.

They're talking to me all the time now. They only used to bother me when I was alone. This is going to be a problem, I just know it.

10:22 PM

The world needs more songwriters who use words like "infinitesimal."
The world needs more singers who enunciate the "g" at the end of words.

12:42 AM

I think I should make a movie.
No, even better! I should have a TV show! My ideas are so disjointed they would never work as a movie. (When I was typing this, "would never" came out as "oudl levem". Am I dyslexic? No. Bad typist? No. Drunk or on drugs? Not today. Just got a little schizophrenia action goin' on.)


Did you know that there's a C-Span 3???

11:34 PM

OK, the new commercials for Siemens cellular phones are officially cool.
Too bad the only services in the U.S. that can use them all suck.



The Canyonero post was the first in a series. Occasionally I'm going to post the lyrics to one of my favorite songs. Like right now!

Artist: Denis Leary
Album: No Cure for Cancer
Year: 1993
Track: "Voices in my Head"

Spoken (barely intelligible mumbling): There's a secret Satanic message in this song! Play it backwards! Play it backwards! Play it backwards!

I
Want you to get a gun
And head on down to Washington

And I
Want you to climb up high
High up in the sky
And shoot them all

Th-Th-They
D-d-don't deserve to live
What did they ever give to you?
Nah-nah nah-nah nah-nah

Spoken: (Rant): You know what I want you to do? I want you to go upstairs to that apartment where that guy keeps playing that Barry Manilow record "Copacabana" over and over and over again. I want you to ring the doorbell, and when he answers the door, I want you to stab him in the neck with a number 2 pencil over and over and over again because he... must... pay! Chop him up and put him in the freezer and as you leave the apartment, light the place on fire!

Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my
Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my

You should dress up like a clown
Arf! Arf! Hoooowwwwll!

Spoken (as a mother): Hi, you never called me back. I got the pictures back from Thanksgiving. I don't know why you wear that earring. If your father was alive I don't know what he'd say. I was talking to Mrs. Corelli yesterday. You know Bobby Corelli who was in your grade? He got promoted again in his law firm. He's making $175,000 a year now. (inhale loudly) Are you on drugs? (inhale loudly) Why don't you ever call me back? (inhale loudly) When are you gonna get married son? Isn't it about time you settled down and got yourself a wife and got yourself a house and got a kid, and got a car, and got a dog, and got a lawnmower, and got a nice picket fence . . .

Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my
Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my head
The voices in my head

Why?
Why is it every time
I gotta wait on fuckin' line?

Spoken (rant): Why is it every time I turn on my television set I gotta see Sally Struthers and those starving kids? Why can't somebody just send her a check and shut her and those God damn kids up? Where's Rob Reiner when you need him?

Why, why don't they drop the bomb
Right on top of everyone
Nah-nah nah-nah nah-nah

(Chorus overlaps self repeatedly along with other disjointed audio clips)
Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my
Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my

Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my
Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my

Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my
Voices in my head
These are
The voices in my

Screamed: Stop, stop, stop with the singing!

Whew.

10:05 PM

It's taking forever to compose Part Three.

You know it's a sad, sad world when I have to be the arbiter of Truth in Advertising.

And why is CNN Headline News playing the "Halloween" theme? It's creepy.

11:07 AM

There's this one episode of The Outer Limits where a soldier wakes up from cryogenic freeze after 50 years and finds a world populated entirely by women. They cooperate with each other in a fully-democratic society administered by a unified global government. The virus that ended the war doesn't kill adult males but does kill male infants. So there can be no men other than ones that come from before the plague. The one man is regarded as a curiosity by the world full of lesbians, until they realize that a man is useful in many respects. So the matriarchy has him put down.

This is of course not the moral of the story as intended by the damn liberal Hollywood types. But it's the truth.

The failure on MANkind's part here was that the cryogenically frozen man was alone. I think that for the good of huMANity, we need to build a secret mountain fortress, known only to a few male members of the military and maintained by brainwashed nationalist eunuchs, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands of the best examples of man are stored. When the inevitable end of this cycle of human society comes, the maintainers will simply wait to die, having set up and tested the system to the best of their ability. The system will then thaw out one man every 5 years, releasing him into a hermetically sealed monitoring chamber from which he can observe the outside world. He will then choose whether to scout the land or return to sleep. If he decides to scout, he will thaw another soldier to stay behind and monitor him, then he will go determine the situation, and decide whether to thaw more reinforcements. If the gender which should be dominant is no longer in power, the Army of Man will burst forth and set things right.

If the male gender has been gone for a while, the females won't know what hit them until it's too late.

In case of the total decimation of humanity, we will also build a few facilities full of properly submissive frozen women. They will simply lie in waiting for the men from the other facility to thaw them.

I have decided that this may be the best way to ensure survival of human society as it was meant to be after the fall of the world as we know it.

1:37 AM

Blog problems mostly over. I'll pick up at the end of 8th grade sometime soon.

A few additions to the list of people I hate: People who wear turtlenecks regularly. People who get annoyed with me for eating at work. People who are rich and still cheap. Anyone with a vacation home. People who help the police build better stealth vehicles. Possibly the entire population of the following Virginia towns: Sutherland, Bracie, Church Road. People who drive brand new Mustangs and get passed on the interstate by me, in my oil-leaking, muffler-less 1991 Acclaim.

Pokey the Penguin is a hearing aid that hovers! It will not work outside of the UK.

I have embarked on a quest to make sure all my MP3s have accurate tags. This is not an easy task. I bet most of you out there don't take the time to verify your MP3 tags. Then you share the files, with missing or inaccurate tags. I hate you.

1:41 AM

"Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name. But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game."

Where was I?

"Some people have a way with words, and some people, well, not have way." - Steve Martin

Oh yes, I had just been moved to Colonial Whites.
That must have been roughly 1986-1987. I should have been in kindergarten. I wasn't. I was having some psychological problems that fall under the general heading of "separation anxiety." I was afraid to be away from my parents, so I had to have therapy before I could go to school. Yeah. Weird, huh? Now The Kip and The Mom don't get along very well.

When they finally made me go to school, they had to decide whether to put me in Kindergarten, since I had never been in school at all before, or put me in 1st grade with the other kids my age. They ended up putting me in 1st grade, with the recommendation that I apply for the gifted program. I could read about as well as the guidance counselor that was testing me.


I talk a lot about my reading skills. It may seem like I'm exaggerating. Bragging, maybe, but not exaggerating. I can read upside down twice as fast as the average American can read right-side-up. I can pronounce most foreign languages that use roman characters and get it right most of the time. When I was at the Governor's School, my second Latin III teacher (We'll get to the details in a bit) was amazed at how well I could read aloud in a language I struggled so hard to translate. Right now I'm trying to learn how to read barcodes. Don't ask why, because even I don't know. Anyway, back to the story.


Entering school at Tussing Elementary was really the beginning of the Story of Kip.

In 1st grade I met most of the people I would consider friends, some closer than others, through high school. Learned a little, did terribly in math, lost my first spelling bee, and moved on.

1988: This is when my sister was born. This seemed like a good thing at first, but actually it sucked. Because as it turned out, my mother wanted a girl all along. This should have been obvious if I were a little more perceptive, since she made me wear my hair long when I was a toddler.

In 2nd grade I discovered a new way to express my creativity called Odyssey of the Mind. I was sitting in lunch next to a kid named Nicholas Merola. His mother visited him and witnessed the two of us having a conversation with my lunchbox. She was coach of the Division I team from our elementary school (back when the City of Colonial Heights actually cared about its gifted programs) and she decided that I would be an asset. That had a lasting impression. I learned that I love to act. We made it to the world finals in Colorado. Took 6th out of about 60 teams. Not bad for a bunch of 8-year-olds from nowhereville.
3rd and 4th grade weren't particularly noteworthy. Except I did once bite somebody who cut into the lunch line ahead of me. They put me on In-School Suspension. I liked In-School Suspension. Whenever they tried to use it to punish me, they failed. I did my work faster than it could be assigned and got to spend the rest of the time pretending to work by reading or drawing. Also on my 10th birthday we went to war with Iraq.
5th grade was cool. I joined the Cub Scouts (Webelos). Had my first male teacher, Mr. Byington. He was a great guy. Won the city spelling bee. The city spelling bee was pretty stupid. Three elementary schools and a middle school sent people, so it was usually 3 5th graders and an 8th grader. My victory was a bit of a surprise. Made an enemy. Had the last laugh when I airbrushed him out of the Challenge 23 team picture 7 years later. After the spelling bee Mr. B. would sometimes let me skip spelling tests and even sometimes let me CONDUCT the tests. That was too fun.

6th grade rolls around, and life gets a little interesting. The Dad is now working in Norfolk and a gulf is growing between The Parents. The Kip gets his first real computer for christmas. It was a piece of crap. A Packard Bell from Wal-Mart. But my parents knew nothing at all about computers, so it was basically mine, and I spent way, way too much time on it.
The school system in Colonial Heights is a unique piece of work. The three elementary schools breed three completely different types of students. These people stick together for 6 years, form cliques, become virtually Balkanized. Then they all get blended into one Middle School. Fucking brilliant idea.
Other than that, it wasn't bad. Took the elective sample course, wherein I learned that I don't do music, I hate woodworking, my own self-taught typing style is impossible to break out of, and I will always suck at foreign languages.
Began to learn just how much I could hate people. Learned to forge my mother's signature. Began to reject the idea of homework.

7th grade was... about 36 weeks long. The Kip is running out of adjectives. Took Latin I. That was fun. Won another city spelling bee. Met Mrs. Knowles. She is, without a doubt, the weirdest teacher I ever met. She once sent Junehee to the school library to get a bible. In a biology class. Yah.
Nearly failed Pre-Algebra. Math and The Kip do not interact well. Once got a test grade that was below 10 points. On a test I actually was present for and participated in.
Went to an extracurricular program called the Center for Talented Youth. To get in, I had to take a sort of pre-pre-SAT, the SSAT. Got a perfect verbal score. One of about 5 out of several thousand participants.
I'm pretty sure this is the year when I ate the the watch battery. I did a lot of crazy things in my elective classes. Here's the story of the watch battery.
Shawn found a watch somebody dropped on the floor. I took it apart, and swallowed the battery. That was pretty much it. We both got sent to Assistant Principal Hitler. He asked me, flat out, "Are you ON something, son?"

8th grade was a sort of turning point. I had become so engrossed in computing as a hobby that there was no going back. I discovered how much fun it was to play with fire. I rebelled against the Physical Education system. Refused to change into gym clothes or shower with a group. Didn't really need to, since I didn't participate in the activities. This did not sit well with the PE teachers, or with Assistant Principal Hitler. They put me in In-School Suspension again. Didn't work. Teachers had to invent work for me to do. My Drama teacher got tired of trying to keep up with me and ordered me to write a biographical paper about Shakespeare. Wrote one twice as long as she wanted in about a half-hour. After that she just stopped sending work.
This is the year when my reading habit really took off. I read Moby Dick, The Three Musketeers, and Ben Hur. For fun.
And this is the year of the biggest mistake I ever made. I applied for The Governor's School for Government and International Studies. Now known as the Maggie L. Walker Governor's School for Government and International Studies, now that they have their own building. I came in second for the one spot our city was allotted. But Jonathan decided to drop out of the running, and I got the privilege of going. Jonathan is a cool guy, but if I still had a List, he'd be on it for that one thing. It's not his fault it sucked, but when I think of how close I came to NOT going...


The Governor's School. What a horrible place that was. And the terrible thing is, I was excited to go. I'll write more about it later.

1:16 AM

Random Tangent Time!
I think that the government needs to commission a few giant statues. Like 10 stories tall. With giant stages and coliseums beneath them. And their faces should have giant gas-powered fireballs instead of eyes. There would be one of Jesus. He'd be facing Mecca and holding up both middle fingers. There would be one that's just a big cookie. Or maybe an ice cream cone. There would be one of Buddha. He'd be in a typical buddha-like position, facing no particular direction. There would be one of a random naked woman with a gigantic set of breasts, for no particular reason. There would be one of Ronald Reagan. He'd be carrying a torch in one hand and a gun in the other. And if there's one of me, I'd have to be pointed toward Canada, doing something rude.


The Simpsons - 5F10 "The Last Temptation of Krust" - Canyonero!

Can you name the truck with four wheel drive,
smells like a steak and seats thirty-five..

Canyonero! Canyonero!

Well, it goes real slow with the hammer down,
It's the country-fried truck endorsed by a clown!

Canyonero-o! (Yah!) Canyonero!
[Krusty:] Hey Hey

[Soft]The Federal Highway Commission has ruled the Canyonero unsafe for highway or city driving.

Canyonero!

...

12 yards long, 2 lanes wide,
65 tons of American Pride!

Canyonero! Canyonero!

Top of the line in utility sports,
Unexplained fires are a matter for the courts!

Canyonero! Canyonero! (Yah!)

She blinds everybody with her super high beams,
She's a squirrel-squashing deer-smacking driving machine!

Canyonero-woah! Canyonero! (Yah!)

Drive Canyonero! (Yah!)

Woah Canyonero!

Woah!

12:17 AM

I feel like writing this in a mixture of first- and third- person. Many grammar nazis will be appalled by this, and they can bite me.

This is part one - everything prior to entering state-mandated schooling.

January 16, 1981. A day which may one day live in infamy.

For unto you is born this day in the city of Hopewell a Sonofabitch, which is The Kip.
At the time, of course, not yet The Kip. But soon. You see, the bizarre eating habits of the mother of The Kip caused comment from her family. For she consumed many Kipper Snacks, a conveniently packaged form of Herring. (You must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest wiiiith... a herring!)
And lo, it was said unto her, "your baby's just going to be a big Kipper Snack!" And hence, the young one was known as Kipper Snack, then for many years Kipper, and then upon entering school, simply Kip.


As an aside, The Kip wishes to make it known that He has a truly bizarre memory. Certain things are recalled in absolute, crystal clarity. Other things are so muddled as to be nearly useless. Still other things are fabricated by my various mental facilities and impairments and I have difficulty knowing which is which.
And the organization of these memories is seemingly random. I can't decide what to make into a cerebral DVD and what gets virtually ignored. It just happens.
Sometimes I remember silly things, like times when I have made small factual errors or times when I did something embarrassing. Most people would not remember these at all, or would, upon recalling them, consider them humorous, or learn from them. My mind does not work the same way. I recall such memories at seemingly random, sometimes inappropriate times. And they virtually paralyze The Kip. This is why The Kip must always, always find ways to occupy Kipself. And there must always be background noise.


ANYway...
The Kip's earliest years are not entirely clear.
The Kip was born at John Randolph Hospital in Hopewell, Virginia. Hopewell is a unique place. By "unique" I mean "terrible." Full of chemical plants, a coal-fired power plant, a few junkyards, and at least one now-defunct factory that became an EPA Superfund site. From 1966-1975 a toxic insecticide called Kepone was dumped into the James River.
It is believed by some that this is part of the basis of The Kip's uniqueness.
Perhaps so is the fall down the steps. Or the respiratory infections so severe as to require oxygen therapy. Or the choking on a penny. Or the car accident The Kip's mother was in before The Kip's birth. See where this is leading? Perhaps I brained my damage.

Another source of The Kip's unique personality is the manner of his upbringing. Soon after birth I was placed in a completely yellow room. Just a touch darker than your average school bus. Spent quite a lot of time there. The Kip's mother also believed strongly in the use of educational toys. The Kip's first friend was a Speak and Spell. The Kip could read Dr. Seuss and suchlike by the time he was three. The Kip could read his mother's college sociology and biology textbooks fluently shortly thereafter, though not necessarily understanding them. That took a few more years.

The Kip lived in Hopewell for a time, which I cannot accurately measure because I was a child, and as we all know, according to The Kip's Theories on Human Development (a work in progress), kids are stupid. Even smart kids are still stupid. During this time, The Kip was exposed to his parents' musical preferences. And unlike most children, who hate the kind of music their parents like, I totally absorbed the music to which I was exposed. Because The Kip's parents were terribly young.
The Kip was born when his parents were both eighteen years old. Of course, teen parents are a dime a dozen now, but The Kip's parents -- they were trend-setters!

The Kip's father was in the army. I have no frickin' idea what my mother did. To this day she refuses to tell The Kip anything. But I remember her disappearing a few times, and she has said some weird, cryptic things about what she was doing.
The Kip's father worked for a while at The Pentagon. He was a maintenance technician, and claims to have had a security clearance higher than the President. This makes sense, since even the secret sub-basements need the wiring checked and the air filters changed. (Officially they have two below-ground levels. There's at least one more that doesn't get mentioned on CNN.)
The Pentagon is a big place. Biiiig. As much floor space as the Empire State Building. 17 miles of corridors. The technicians get electric carts. They're much more efficient when you... customize them. I don't think The Dad of The Kip was the only person who turbocharged his Official Pentagon Go-Kart, but his is the only one I ever got to ride on.

The Kip was relocated a few times, including spending a brief period in Colonial Heights in a little duplex on Battery Place, which is close enough to Petersburg as to make the legal boundaries irrelevant. Eventually The Kip's family moved to Woodbridge. Woodbridge was very different from Hopewell. It didn't smell like a mixture of industrial solvents and human waste, for one. For another, there were finally substantial numbers of other kids for The Kip to interact with. This never went very well. Kids are stupid, remember.

Going off on a slightly askew path here... THIS is when The Kip fell in love with Sci-Fi. The Dad was a little bit of a Trekkie. Not a big one, just a little one. But a big enough one to make an impression on a very sharp, agile, yet terribly impressionable mind. And one Christmas I got Return of the Jedi toys. The Ewok tree fortress and the exploding speeder bikes. That was before the world went lawsuit crazy.

Anyway, from there, it was off to Germany. And The Kip's first airplane ride. There was no fear. I knew definitively and beyond any doubt that space flight was a breeze. How tough could it be to fly in the air?
Germany was a fun place. Snow everywhere. Source of some of the worlds greatest toys. A national railway system that doesn't suck. The only real downsides were the occasional danger of frostbite and the omnipresent smell of diesel exhaust.
At first The Kip and family lived in an apartment in a town called Vegesack. On the twelfth floor. Waaaay up high. Took a wee bit of getting used to. But not much. The fear factor was mitigated by the fun factor. Fun to drop things off the balcony. Beer bottles, haphazard blobs of Lego blocks, an overcooked pan of Jiffy Pop, various other things.
Once, the too youthful parents of The Kip and their American military friends stole a shopping cart from a nearby grocery store and hurled it off one of the balconies other than their own. They always either claim not to remember this, or deny it. That is because they were rather impressively intoxicated. I didn't realize that at the time, but in retrospect it seems obvious.
After a while The Kip's mother tired of the place, and she and The Kip moved back to the United States. The Grandparents of The Kip had moved to a quaint little house in Chester.

It should be becoming obvious at this point that The Kip has spent much of his life in a relatively small territory.

From there, BACK to Germany. When we got back, The Dad of The Kip had grown a mustache, and I didn't recognize him. In fact, I seem to recall refusing to believe that he was in fact The Dad. Fortunately The Kip's mother hated it, and it went away.
There was a lot of walking during this particular period in The Kip's life. The town we lived in was such a neat place. Imagine Colonial Heights as it is today. Now shrink it to about half size but keep all the stores and restaurants. Now put in more crosswalks. Cobblestone roads. Make all the buildings out of brick. That was the town we lived in.

Then The Dad decided not to re-enlist, and we all went home. We moved back in with The Grandparents, after briefly staying with The Other Grandparents. You know how it is sometimes, one set of grandparents, usually the maternal grandparents, are extremely close, and the other set you just communicate with by phone and mail and visit on occasional holidays. We stayed with those grandparents for a little while. Then we moved back in with The Grandparents. They had moved to a little town called Warfield, but guess what state it was still in? You probably guessed right. I still remember the ZIP code, God only knows why.
It was 23889. It's one of those things I do. Remembering completely insignificant details. Like the fact that a floppy disk holds 1457664 megabytes. Just wait until we get to the part about working for the Shack...

And from there, we moved to Colonial Whites Heights.


Here truly begins the story of The Kip.
...which I will post tomorrow. Maybe. I'm tired.

7:19 PM

W.Bloggar: A nifty tool for a nifty service. There are many different blogging tools, but this is the one that works for me.


I finally broke down and bought my own Dremel today. Not actually a Dremel brand tool, but a Black&Decker Wizard. Smaller, cheaper, uses Dremel attachments. Why did I buy this tool? ZIPZAP MODS! I just put the finishing touches on my interchangeable dual-cell battery pack. Before I was using a nightmare of bad soldering to hold them together and hardwire them to the car, now I can swap them with a single cell with no sweat.


"It's the fine print that matters. If the fine print says the offer is only for two-headed centaurs with dyslexia, then you don't get that deal if you're not a dyslexic two-headed centaur. It's the rules, and it's legal." -- Kipism of the day.


I think I just might start composing the abridged story of my life. If I get bored enough I just might pull it off.

9:41 PM

There's no Michael's nearby, but here's how close the latest suspected sniping is to the nearest RadioShack. About 450 yards. "Start"=RadioShack 01-1775 (which is in my district!), "End"=Ponderosa Steakhouse (where the guy was shot).

1:30 AM

They may not actually be monkeys, they may be very hairy naked leprechauns.

11:24 PM

"Could you do it? If you do it... then...... I won't have to do it." - Adrian Monk
(One of the best excuses I've ever heard. I'll have to use it soon.)



"I advise you in the future to replace the words 'crunchy frog' with the legend 'crunchy raw unboned real dead frog' if you want to avoid prosecution!"

10:37 PM

I wonder if Vulcans have green nipples. I mean, they have green blood, and with the coming of "Enterprise" the makeup department is finally giving them proper greenish complexions, and T'pol's lips aren't nearly as red as previous Vulcan females. So if we ever got to see Vulcan nipples in a future Star Trek show or movie, would they be green?

8:46 PM

This is the coolest thing that has ever happened in the entire history of the world.

7:13 PM

Just so's ya know, The Kip is not The Sniper...
...my aim isn't nearly that that good.


Here's an interesting theory that just occurred to me.
You've seen The Terminator, right? The original, I mean, not part 2. What was Arnie initially doing? Killing everyone in the White Pages with the name Sarah Connor.

You may or may not have seen 12 Monkeys. Here's the gist: cataclysmic virus destroys all but a few hundred thousand humans. The ones that got to the hermetic shelters include some of the best and the brightest, who develop (or refine) time travel. They send back people to find a pure, unmutated strain of the virus from which to base their vaccine research. Their "aim" across time isn't too good.

So combine the two ideas here... Sometime in the not TOO distant future, some kind of colossal tragedy befalls mankind. The survivors either create the technology or discover that our governments already had the technology to send a man back in time. They can pinpoint time-jumps in 3 dimensions, but not the fourth, so they decide to send a man to Washington D.C, SOME time in their relative past. They give him all the resources they can give him on who is related to the tragedy and how.
For example, say the tragedy is a virus. So one person will have a grandson who develops a revolutionary method of DNA splicing, another person will program a piece of lab software, another person's son will kill someone in a car accident which will motivate yet another person to invent some medical technique that will save the life of a key researcher... and so on. It's all basic chaos theory-you know, the butterfly's wings flapping here is the last bit of push needed to start the tornado there, and such. But who knows how detailed these future peoples' research can be? And how much deviation will be needed in the timeline before the tragedy is averted?

This sniper could be saving our future.


Just a thought.

4:55 PM

Guess what I just did. Go ahead, guess.

No, I did NOT "finally snap and start shooting people"! And what do you mean by "finally"? Are you EXPECTING me to snap and start shooting people???
Why I ought to shoot you, dammit!
Wait...


Anyway, here's what I just did: I cleaned the RadioShack employee bathroom.

No, I'm not joking. I stayed an extra hour after I was scheduled to be off, I went to Target and bought $39 worth of cleaning supplies (rather, RadioShack bought them and I just did the leg work), and... cleaned... the damn... bathroom.

Know why?
Because a woman wanted it. So it was done.

It has been almost 2 years since a woman worked at my store. And it was before I worked there. I was traded from Southpark for Paul's only female employee, and he never had a female work for him since then. Probably because the reason we switched stores was that she filed a false sexual harassment claim, and Paul didn't want to deal with that ever, ever again.
So for 16 months, the bathrooms were cleaned by the Male Cleaning Philosophy.

The Male Cleaning Philosophy is summarized as follows: Windex.
Yes, all cleaning problems can be solved with the liberal application of Windex and paper towels (or, if one is feeling especially adventurous, a sponge).

But now we have two female employees. One is quiet and never complains about anything. The other... well... she has, somewhere in her body, a cocaine gland. So speaking her mind is not a problem. And today she spoke out about the bathroom.

So I fixed it. She didn't even ASK me to fix it, she just said it was "gross," and I felt compelled to remedy the problem.
2 cans of "Crisp Linen" scent Lysol disinfectant, 2 "Scrubbing Bubbles Foaming Toilet Bowl Tabs", a bottle of Lysol one-step floor cleaner, a "2000 Flushes" tablet, and, yes, a half-liter or so of Windex later... the bathroom is fit for human use.

One day, females will learn to work together, and we males will be doomed.

6:01 PM

This is the best commercial ever. It always will be.

Man: Well, dimple monkey, twice the pudding, octopi for tango man.
Trenchcoat Guy: I sense a little... confusion.
Man: Yeah. Very blender shoe, cellular, scooter my daisyheads.
Trenchcoat Guy: You said... "cellular."
Man: Diddley day.
Trenchcoat Guy: Those cellular plans, they can really confuse you.
(Trenchcoat Guy hands Man a Sprint PCS® phone)
Trenchcoat Guy: Here, the new Sprint PCS Free & Clear plan lets you choose one free option: long distance, nights and weekends, or wireless web.
Man: And all the calls are clear.
Trenchcoat Guy: Well said.

12:15 AM

I want to make a movie. And I want it to star the following people: Myself, Steve Buscemi, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Stanley Tucci, Malcolm McDowell, Christopher Walken, Joe Pesci, Gary Oldman, John Cusack, Dan Hedaya, Peter Weller, Jack Nicholson, John Malkovich, Mark Hamill, Tommy Lee Jones, Tony Shalhoub, and the late Raul Julia.
That last one will be a bit tough.

It will also feature computer-generated characters, and characters present only in voice. Those characters will be voiced by the following people: Myself, Maurice LaMarche (The Brain), James Earl Jones, Ian McDiarmid, Frank Oz, Harry Goz (Captain Murphy), George Lowe (Space Ghost).

And in bit roles: Erik Estrada, Gary Coleman, Mr. T, Dirk Benedict.

And being executed as part of one of the many climactic fight scenes: Carrot Top, Alec Baldwin

And playing the female lead and supporting roles: Nobody smaller than a C-cup.


I believe that this movie will be successful even without a damn plot. And if the plot is worked out right, we can use this movie as the first step in conquering the universe.

8:48 PM

Damn them! Damn them all to hell!

I HATE BASEBALL!!!

How DARE they pre-empt The Simpsons for stupid baseball playoffs?

Everyone at FOX and everyone in Major League Baseball needs to have an old and extremely splintery wooden bat SHOVED UP THEIR ASSES!

8:23 PM

"Except for the murders, and your trying to kill me, you really were the best doctor I ever had." -- Adrian Monk

11:57 AM

I kind of wish I wasn't so completely wired right now. I'd like to eat something. And maybe go to sleep soon.
But I can't. Because I had a monumental headache... and so I took some Excedrin, and then had some Mountain Dew, and then some more Excedrin, and then some excessively sugary food, and then some more Mountain Dew...
At least I don't have a headache. And the dizziness is almost gone. And I can get a lot of ZipZap modding and porn hunting done with the energy I have.

12:27 AM

I love a good defrag. One you can really feel. Those people on their NTFS and EXT2 systems are really missing out. Sure, their systems are faster almost all the time, but they don't get the satisfaction of a good healthy defrag.


USA Network is running a marathon from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Sunday of the greatest non-sci-fi, non-cartoon show ever made.
For those who don't know which show I'm talking about, the show is called Monk. It stars the great Tony Shalhoub as a former police officer who went completely off the deep end after the death of his wife. His already prevalent obsessive-compulsive tendencies went haywire, so he had to be stripped of his badge and gun.
He also happens to be a genius.
So now he works as a private consultant for the San Francisco Police Department, and in between alphabetizing other peoples' record collections and boiling his toothbrushes, he solves murder cases by noticing tiny details like which hand a blind woman shook with, or how a gunshot echoes in a public square.

It is, and I say this without the slightest reservation and in total honesty and non-sarcasm, the greatest television show I've ever seen outside of the media of cartoons and sci-fi.

11:34 PM

They're reporting that the ozone hole is at its smallest size in 15 years.

I think I'm going to celebrate by getting the box of 10- to 15-year-old aerosol spray paint cans out of my shed and blasting them with a shotgun! What a joyous occasion!

10:14 PM

More ZipZaps action:
Official Press Release
"Driving Today"
Somebody else's blog.
Slashdot discussion #1 Slashdot discussion #2
ExtremeTech.com (a wholly owned subsidiary of Ziff-Davis Publishing Holdings, Inc.)
AusMicro.com (those darn crazy Aussies...)

And, can you believe it, somebody actually putting effort into what I just did.

8:19 PM

Did you ever stop to think about how silly the phrase "knock on wood" really is?

And what if it were slightly changed? Like "knock on Nerf" - Nerf is relatively rare and doesn't knock very effectively. Or "knock on oatmeal" - that would just be a mess.


More syllabic rearrangement... we know what a "bump on the head" is, and it's bad. But what about "hemp on the bud" or "hump on the bed"? Those aren't bad.

11:20 AM

Strange forces must be at work somewhere.

If you ask me to name my favorite class and teacher from my entire educational career, it would be my 7th to 8th grade Latin class, and the teacher, Patricia Smith. She... tolerated my eccentricities, and she was overall a nice person. Plus it was easy to mess with her.
I once discovered that I could force my whole face to turn red by flexing certain muscles that I don't fully understand, and it freaked her out.
In Latin I, I would deliberately transliterate phrases into inappropriate English. Like "convenio in locum commodum" (or somesuch, I don't remember the endings), which was supposed to mean something like "they came together in a nearby place" instead became "a convenient local commode." I did that kind of thing all the time. And of course there were the classic names Dido and Aeneas, supposed to be die-do and a-nee-us, instead became ditto and anus. That didn't last long.
It could have been worse, but I didn't know what a dildo was back in 7th grade.
But, like I said, she tolerated my weirdness in a way that few teachers have.


And now her daughter works at my store.

Strange forces at work.

8:03 PM

Target is going to kill me.

It was bad enough when they added Milano cookies to their snack bar lineup. Now they have Krispy Kreme donuts and caramel-walnut brownies.

I'm going to die at RadioShack, from Target snack bar food.

I suppose there are worse ways to go.

3:33 PM

I'm trying out a new Blog management program. ignore this.

Ignore this.




IGNORE THIS!

1:23 AM

A line has been crossed. I just went to Target and paid $12.99 for a Hot Wheels KIT Racer, a licensed clone of the Tomy Bit-Racer (which is just a Bit Char-g that doesn't steer), just for the 26000 RPM motor. The ones we sell at the Shack only go up to 23500 RPM.

I have problems steering with the 21500. I almost never use the 23500. But now I have a 26000, just because I can!

Yes, it's a sickness.

6:37 PM

I can no longer be silent on the subject of ZipZaps. I must tell the world about the coolness factor of these toys. No, not toys. They are beyond the definition of "toy."
Take the following concepts and combine them: R/C Car; Pokemon; slot car; heroin.

That's a ZipZap. They're cool. They're a clone of a toy produced by Tomica (Tomy) in Japan called a Bit Char-G. But ours are cooler because they're a tiny bit bigger. Theirs are 1/72 scale, ours are 1/64. 1/72 is non-standard. 1/64 is HO, as in HO trains and HO slot cars.

You start with a starter kit. They're available in two frequencies, 27mhz and 49mhz. You may want to get the 49, if the color is agreeable and you don't plan to play in an area with anyone who already has a 49. (I have two of the 49s, and Geoff has two 27s. Both of mine have better range than both of his, with no modifications. Place whatever value you will on that bit of anecdotal evidence.)
On top of that, you can get parts to enhance your ZipZap. Each starter comes with one bodykit, one gear ratio, one motor, one type of rims, and one type of tires. There are 3 types of tires, 4 motors, 3 gear ratios, and innumerable rims and bodykits available. All of them are licensed by major automakers. My PT Cruiser has a little decal inside the bodykit that says "©DCC" (as in DaimlerChrysler Corporation).
And soon there will be more bodykits. Believe it or don't, but there's going to be a SpongeBob Squarepants bodykit. I will own this kit.

And it doesn't end there. The back tires and motors are interchangeable with the Japanese originals. Also with the ones from the Hot Wheels K.I.T. Racers, a rebranded Tomy product. And with the ones from the HobbiCo MicroSizers, also a rebranded Tomy product.

And the bodies, being 1/64 scale, are compatible with Matchbox and Hot Wheels, and with HO Slot Cars. It's already being done.

And then, there's the more intensive mods. I shall not detail them here. Suffice to say, this is no mere toy. It is an obsession.

Required reading:
TinyRC
Micro RC Cars Resource Center

8:49 PM

People are always telling me to be more positive. They say things like "Cheer up" or "Look on the bright side" or "quit being so goddamn gloomy you son of a bitch." (these people are rare gems of honesty, God love 'em)
Or, in my boss's case, they say "Yeah, you're probably right." (Have I mentioned how cool he is?)

Well fine, here's me being positive.

The current weakness and eventual failure of the economy has a major upside: No shortage of good parking spots.

12:36 PM