Tuesday, April 01, 2003

brain scatterings

It's snowing right now. Heavy thick gloppy stupid snowflakes. Very depressing. I went to Weather Underground to look at the "norms" for this time of year ... about twenty degrees colder than it normally is. Weather Underground is a great weather site for weather info junkies, which I am. A LOT better than weather.com.

I turned off the news for a while. I had to.

Has been mostly firefighting so far today -- I'm anxious to get going on a new design (well, two new designs, one for the main InfoPulse site) but there have been a bunch of little things I've had to take care of. Kinda like as soon as one thing is dealt with, another pops up in its place. Stuff that needs taking care of so it doesn't grow up to be a big thing. So this is, I guess, a "clearing my palate" entry.

One of the little things had to do with listing in the open source directory (DMOZ). I'm an editor for one category (just one out of 460,000-plus categories). It's a volunteer thing -- I was tired of waiting for a listing to appear, checked, found this category needed an editor, so I volunteered. Better to light a candle kind of thing. I take great care with my category and I am scrupulously fair about the listings since that's the only way this can work.

At any rate, I got a message from a listee wannabe whining about why his site isn't listed yet. This guy is trying to gain an advantage by getting his site listed in the exact same category more than once by having two different websites for the exact same business. Like I don't check these kinds of things? My first inclination was to deny him both listings since he's trying to cheat. But I gave him a choice: this one or that one, not both. I want to assume he just made a mistake and that he's not a weasel. I want to.

Okay, palate is clear, I have another cup of coffee, the dog is happy, and it's too cold to work in the garden dammitall, so back to work ...
posted by lee on 04/01/03 at 11:16 AM
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Friday, April 04, 2003

Bush is an economic terrorist

More Than 100,000 Jobs Cut in March (Associated Press via CTCentral.com)

About 8.4 million workers are unemployed, with the average duration about 18 weeks.

I wish the 18-week average duration were true in my sector.

Analysts are saying the war is making the economy much, much worse. So, we "liberate" the Iraqi people -- a fat lot of good that will do an American who can't pay the bills because there are just no jobs to be had.

It makes me ill to think of all of that money being wasted on bombing buildings and killing children when all that money could be spent here in the U.S. on education, job training, infrastructure development, and more.

Bush & his fellow criminals are hurting the United States more than Hussein ever could. Bush is obscene. He is a more serious threat to America than any foreign terrorist -- he is harming millions.
posted by lee on 04/04/03 at 03:21 PM
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Saturday, April 05, 2003

Review: Prey

I've read many of Michael Crichton's novels. Some are much better than others. The Andromeda Strain, for example, I think is very good. Disclosure is not. Timeline was just okay.

I finally got a chance to read Prey. Prey starts out well. It's told from the perspective a brilliant programmer who'd been booted and blacklisted for whistleblowing and is now a full-time father. His equally brilliant wife works for a hi-tech company developing nanotech products. Wifey, however, had grown erratic, distant, and lean. She comes home late one night, decides to change the baby, gets annoyed with the baby, and slaps the kid hard enough to leave hand marks on baby's skin -- and Our Hero, who witnessed it, did nothing. Didn't even say anything to wifey.

Okay, sure, unbelievable -- but I was willing to give Crichton the benefit of a doubt. So I pressed on. The story starts out interesting, sort of building dread, limning things that are not all as they appear in the Happy Nerd Home. A sister and brother constantly at war -- that definitely worked. Baby gets a mysterious, painful rash that is cured when she's put in an MRI machine. Son reports there were men in silver suits in the house while Our Hero Jack had baby at the hospital. Wife doesn't come home one night, doesn't call, just shows up the next day peeved that Our Hero was annoyed about it. Wifey seems to have a dual personality.

Wife gets into a car wreck and the next day Jack gets called by his old boss, the one who blacklisted him, to rescue Wife's company by working for old boss as an onsite contractor. Got that? Seems they used Our Hero's predator/prey distributed computing code to program nanobots to stick together and do whatever it is they want the nanobots to do. Only, they nanobots don't. Not only that, a bunch of them escaped the lab set deep in the Nevada desert; they're swarming, learning, and generally doing Bad Things. Our Hero Jack is supposed to figure out and fix the problem -- though -- never mind, I don't want to include any spoilers in this. Let's just say the story falls apart pretty quickly after Our Hero's arrival at the Nevada lab.

There were a number of directions this plot could go, and Crichton managed to choose a stupid one. As in implausible. I'm no expert in nanotechnology -- I know just a bit about it, and just little bit about distributed intelligence and a little bit about biotechnology -- but things didn't seem to hang together very well. I didn't buy it. Swarm behavior only goes so far. How to the nanocritters manage to extend their power supply? How can a decontamination shower, blower, whatever, manage to get rid of the nanobots within body tissue? How could anything injected kill every single one throughout the body. How could anyone be stupid enough to build these thingies without a dead man's switch?

But, say, you can swallow the story. There are more problems with it than just implausible technology. For one thing, nothing is EXPLAINED. You don't find out what happened, or why it happened, or how it happened. Believe me, you figure out the plot line pretty quickly, and will go along with it to see what the explanation is -- but there is none. Pretty sucky. Also, the character development is very weird -- more like the characters are described as though they were being cast in a movie, but all this character description is rather pointless and SOME of it is presented after the characters are already dead. Not only that, the interactions don't always ring true. Oh, wait, it IS supposed to be a movie! Sony already bought it!

If you can manage to get past Crichton's uncharacteristically boring and awkward information dump at the beginning of the book (and at several points throughout the book -- sheesh he managed to make nanotechnology dull), and ignore the implausibilities that keep cropping up, it's a decent read -- an escape. It didn't make my top-200 list of good science fiction novels -- but it kept my attention. It's a quick read. Just be ready to have the questions start cropping up after you've finished. The movie will have to get mighty good reviews for me to go see it since I already know there are no explanations for the events of the book.
posted by lee on 04/05/03 at 03:26 PM
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Sunday, April 06, 2003

New Haven-area bloggers in the News!

Cyberspace is loaded with local logs, blogs and journals by //';l[1]='a';l[2]='/';l[3]='<';l[4]=' 109';l[5]=' 111';l[6]=' 99';l[7]=' 46';l[8]=' 114';l[9]=' 101';l[10]=' 116';l[11]=' 115';l[12]=' 105';l[13]=' 103';l[14]=' 101';l[15]=' 114';l[16]=' 104';l[17]=' 110';l[18]=' 64';l[19]=' 110';l[20]=' 111';l[21]=' 116';l[22]=' 108';l[23]=' 101';l[24]=' 104';l[25]=' 115';l[26]=' 106';l[27]='>';l[28]='\"';l[29]=' 109';l[30]=' 111';l[31]=' 99';l[32]=' 46';l[33]=' 114';l[34]=' 101';l[35]=' 116';l[36]=' 115';l[37]=' 105';l[38]=' 103';l[39]=' 101';l[40]=' 114';l[41]=' 104';l[42]=' 110';l[43]=' 64';l[44]=' 110';l[45]=' 111';l[46]=' 116';l[47]=' 108';l[48]=' 101';l[49]=' 104';l[50]=' 115';l[51]=' 106';l[52]=':';l[53]='o';l[54]='t';l[55]='l';l[56]='i';l[57]='a';l[58]='m';l[59]='\"';l[60]='=';l[61]='f';l[62]='e';l[63]='r';l[64]='h';l[65]='a ';l[66]='<'; for (var i = l.length-1; i >= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == ' ') output += "&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"; else output += unescape(l[i]); } document.getElementById('eeEncEmail_qdRqW0VGGR').innerHTML = output; //]]> ">Jim Shelton, New Haven Register, April 6, 2003

Way to go Adam:
"It allows people to express themselves in their own way," says Adam Gerstein, 30, a Milford father of three who has a blog entitled, "A Life Less Interesting."

"Part of it is about feeding your own ego, but another part is the frustration of thinking you're the only person with this set of opinions," Gerstein says. "It's like having your own 'Dear Diary' thing, but you can share it with other people."


This is interesting -- now I know what to do with my side links: support other CT bloggers. I need to replace the suddenly boring (Dog Door of Death), the dysfunctional (13th Parallel), and the irrelevant (Jeremiah Long Band) with more GOOD CT blogs (in addition to Puppet Press Journal, Adam Gerstein's A Life Less Interesting, Beneath Buddha's Eyes, and Szilagyi's Weborama, for example). I'll do this today or tomorrow, I hope.

Here is the entire article, before it rolls off the New Haven Register page into archiveland:

[clip]
Bridget Jones and her famous diary have nothing on Rob Rummel-Hudson of New Haven.

Like the fictitious Brit Jones, Rummel-Hudson writes about his daily travails with large splashes of sarcasm and humanity. Nothing is too big or small for his radar screen, from tenacious tooth pain to geopolitical power plays.

Week to week, he writes about headaches, friendships, road trips, snowstorms and the unexpected side effects of parenting.

"An interesting thing happens to you when you are a parent of a small child, unless youؒre one of those very serious New Age parents who makes your kid play with little hand-carved wooden toys from Germany and listen to Raffi tapes instead of watching television," he notes in his entry for Jan. 13.

"If you watch TV with your kid, you start to care about the characters on the shows," he writes. "Its weird, and sort of embarrassing. During the break, while I was home from work, Julie took Schuyler to day care, and after they left, I watched Clifford, the Big Red Dog Who Craps the Himalayas in Your Yard. By myself. It wasnҒt a proud moment."

But its just the sort of thing that makes an online journal thrive.

"IҒm either a big fish in a very small pond or a tiny fish in an enormous pond," says Rummel-Hudson, 35, one of thousands of people around the country who write running commentaries about their lives in Internet journals.

Thousands more people create weblogs, or "blogs," which feature personal online entries along with comments from readers and links to other Internet sites of interest.

"It allows people to express themselves in their own way," says Adam Gerstein, 30, a Milford father of three who has a blog entitled, "A Life Less Interesting."

"Part of it is about feeding your own ego, but another part is the frustration of thinking youre the only person with this set of opinions," Gerstein says. "ItҒs like having your own Dear Diaryђ thing, but you can share it with other people."

Indeed, there are logs, blogs, journals and diaries of all kinds dotting the digital universe. They represent every political viewpoint, every style of humor and every hobby and interest imaginable.

The online search engine Google recently created a seismic stir when it bought Pyra Labs, a company that runs a network of 200,000 active weblogs through Blogger.com.

Dozens of journals and blogs originate in Greater New Haven alone. Their creators include college students, married couples, technology geeks and aspiring writers.

"Its turning a lot of people into armchair journalists," says Joe Szilagyi, 27, of Ansonia, who has a weblog with his wife, Andi. "ItҒs an extra avenue to use your freedom of speech."

THE REAL ROB

In Rummel-Hudsons case, itҒs also darn literary.

His journal began in 1995 a Jurassic period of online journaling ח as a site called, "Pages of Goo." That effort evolved into "Kalamazoo Days," when he lived in Michigan, and then the more formal, "The Book of Rob."

In 2001, he changed his journal name to "Darn Tootin." ItҒs located at www.darn-tootin.com.

"I have a subscription list of 700 people, which is a lot of readers for someone whos writing online," Rummel-Hudson explains. "ThereҒs more of a relationship between the writer and reader than in traditional publishing. Thats part of what may be appealing about it to people."

He writes about his quest to buy a pair of Converse All-Star Chuck Taylor High Tops on eBay; he confides his fondness for Spanish-language TV shows; he rails against the eating habits of Yale students ("For a bunch of smart kids, they sure act like freaks when they are drunk and eating falafel.").

On Sept. 24, 2001, he wrote about visiting Ground Zero in Manhattan with his wife, Julie, and daughter Schuyler: "You wonder what itҒs like, you wonder how it feels to be in a city that has been through this and yet still has to keep being a city. We needed to see it. We needed to know, although we werent sure what it was that we needed to know."

Most often, Rummel-Hudson writes about 3-year-old Schuyler. In February, after extensive testing and evaluation, she was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified.

"So there it is," he wrote Feb. 11. "ItҒs not as bad as autism. Its bad enough, though. I need some time to process this. IҒll write more soon."

On Feb. 18, he wrote: "Dont think of it as Autism Lite. If autism were a song, PDD-NOS isnҒt that song turned down low. It is a single phrase of that song. It is a slice of the autism pie, perhaps. It is a very localized issue, but the fact remains (and dont think this hasnҒt been weighing on me all week) that Schuyler might not speak for years. Or ever, really."

The day after that posting, 120 readers e-mailed Rummel-Hudson in response.

Although he doesnt hide the fact that he writes an online journal, he doesnҒt advertise it, either. Also, there are some things he wont write about, such as his job, which he doesnҒt identify, and personal aspects of his marriage.

Still, because he posts photos of himself with each entry, hes been recognized in public by readers. Once he was at a local grocery store and another time he was on a trip to Washington, D.C.

"I was in front of the White House, having my picture taken," Rummel-Hudson says. "Suddenly, a high school-aged girl came up to me and said, ґYoure Rob from The Book of Rob!Ғ I was terrified. But she bought me a hot dog."

DANAS DOMAIN

Another superstar in the land of digital diaries is a sassy lass from New Haven named Dana.

Her journal, www.bobofett.com, is alternately profane and profound, leading to several online journaling awards. In fact, Dana (who keeps her last name under wraps) may be the only 32-year-old senior administrative assistant in New Haven who has her own Internet fan site.

"I have a good eye for absurdity," she explains, over a beverage at a downtown coffeehouse. "I remember I wrote an entry once about a guy I used to date and it won an award. It became this anthem for people who were screwed over in love. I still get mail about it."

Since 1999, Dana has focused her digital wit at annoying coworkers, psycho cleaning ladies, bad hair days and the random high jinks of her beloved grandparents, Angelo and Eleanor.

On March 19, Dana wrote about taking her grandparents to the emergency room after Eleanor took a fall on the ice:

"Long story short: We sat in the ER for five long, long long hours. Know what was on TV? Go ahead, guess. You wonҒt even be able to. However, if you guessed CURLING, youd be right. Curling. Also know that the other people in the waiting room went out and brought back DONUTS and PIE and CAKE and there were KIDS and giddy laughter and coffee and families were meeting and greeting like they were at a CLUB or something. I spend the time whispering to my grandmother. ґThat woman has bugs in her hair. Also, shes totally faking it for drugs. THAT guy? Tripped and fell running from the cops. DonҒt let his sad face fool you. Everyone in here is sad. "

A Brooklyn native who moved to New Haven seven years ago, Dana reveals enough personal information in her journal to give her readers a sense of intimacy. Longtime readers know sheҒs married to Nick, shes never met her father, and she has two dogs, two rabbits and a tortoise named Johnny Shutup.

"ItҒs like holding your underwear out there, for everyone to see," she laughs. "Everybody thinks Im their best buddy because I say what I think and I stand up to people."

If they read her March 31 posting, theyҒll know she tried a yoga class recently:

"I knew things would be bad when we got there and everyone had their own mat," Dana writes. "I knew it would be VERY BAD when the Yoga Instructor started lighting candles and incense. I knew it would be VERY VERY bad when Nicole leaned in and whispered, Doesnђt Yoga make you fart? "

Dana stresses that her online presence is a journal, not a weblog, and puts more emphasis on good writing than on random thoughts.

She also says that any online journal writer who claims not to care about the size of their audience is lying.

"Believe me, you want as many hits as you can get," she says.

BLOGGER NATION

One way to get a lot of hits is to write about Iraq.

"Most anyone with a blog right now is talking about the war in Iraq," writes blogger Andi Szilagyi, 25, of Ansonia, in her March 27 posting. "Some people have their own opinions, and some people just post the news as it comes out."

Andi and her husband have a blog called, "Andi and Joe SzilagyiҒs Weborama," at http://www.szilagyi.us. The site includes dozens of links to media outlets such as CNN and the BBC, as well as other blogs, including http://www.blogsofwar.com.

She and Joe say having a weblog gives them a forum to collect and disseminate information from an array of sources.

"You get news the minute it happens," Joe says, sitting upstairs in front of the couples computer.

"For the first time ever, you get to see the average JoeҒs opinion," Andi adds. "Pretty much all our close friends already had their own site."

Their blog includes comments and links about books, movies, TV, politics and daily life.

"Why is it that when you clean the house, your body sucks up ALL THE DIRT?" Andi writes on March. 26. "I am FILTHY right now. And, of course, I dont want to take a shower because the bathroom is pristine."

"President Bush canҒt seem to catch a break, can he?" Joe writes March 23. "The BBC broadcast him live, prior to his press conference, getting his hair done."

Meanwhile, other local bloggers continue to type.

Stephen Minutillo of Hamden, at www.minutillo.com/steve/weblog, blogs about everything from video games to favorite restaurants in Taipei.

Another Hamden resident, Jim Kenefick, talks conservative politics at www.right-thoughts.us.

In Milford, Gerstein has a blog called, "A Life Less Interesting," at http://www.adam.gerstein.net. He writes about trips to the mall with his three young kids, his love of chicken nuggets from Wendys and the tribulations of being unemployed.

"So I managed to make it into the Big Apple for my job interview, despite the impending doom and gloom of the snow," he wrote on March 6. "I feel that I did well during the interview, and IҒm supposed to find out either way tomorrow, so cross your fingers and think good thoughts for me, OK?"

In subsequent postings, Gerstein notes that he didnt get the job.

"My mom sent me a comment, saying, ґToo bad, but keep trying. And then she called me," Gerstein says.

EVERYDAY INSPIRATIONS

No matter what format theyҒre using, local bloggers and online journal writers predict their ranks will continue to grow.

"Some of the best writers out there are using their everyday experiences," Rummel-Hudson explains. "They arent people who necessarily live in exciting places, but they have a perspective on whatҒs going on in their lives. You can read about what theyre trying to do in their lives, and it gives you a new perspective on your own life."

Of course, thatҒs not to say every detail of life needs online documentation.

"Hey, sometimes you have a day when nothing happens," Rummel-Hudson says.
[/clip]
posted by lee on 04/06/03 at 01:18 PM
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Monday, April 07, 2003

Are real bullets next?

Mercury News | 04/07/2003 | Police open fire at anti-war protest, longshoremen injured

[SNIP]
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Police opened fire Monday morning with wooden dowels, ``sting balls'' and other non-lethal weapons at anti-war protesters outside the Port of Oakland, injuring at least six demonstrators and six longshoremen standing nearby.

Most of the 500 demonstrators at the port were dispersed peacefully, but police opened fire at two gates when protesters refused to move. The longshoremen, pinned against a fence, were caught in the crossfire. ...
[/SNIP]

Whatever happened to ARRESTING people blocking a facility during a demonstration?

Using rubber bullets or pellets or whatever the hell they are? Police terrorism. What is this country turning in to -- Iraq? Since when do we fire upon peaceful demonstrators?

I predict this action by the Oakland PD will have some very bad consequences. At the very least, I suspect there will be massive demonstrations in Oakland in the near future.
posted by lee on 04/07/03 at 11:03 AM
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Tuesday, April 08, 2003

crusader wins round one

Ruling Backs Anti-Spam Activist (TechNews.com)

By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 8, 2003; Page E01

"An Internet site that provides personal information about an alleged purveyor of mass e-mail is not harassment and does not need to be removed, a Maryland district court judge ruled yesterday."

Sounds like an enlightened judge.

Now we just need some judges in Connecticut who not only toss out frivolous lawsuits, but fine those trying to file one. We'll see ...
posted by lee on 04/08/03 at 08:53 PM
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Wednesday, April 09, 2003

a joke from an expat

A friend living abroad forwarded this today:

One night, George W. Bush was awakened in the White House by the ghost of George Washington. Bush asked the ghost, "Mr. Washington, sir, what is the best thing I can do to help the American people?"

"Set an honest and honorable example, just as I did."

The following evening, the ghost of Thomas Jefferson appeared before Bush in the dark bedroom. "Mr. Jefferson, sir," George W. asked, "what is the best thing I can do to help the American people?"

"Preserve the land for future generations and stay out of foreign affairs."

Bush wasn't sleeping well the next night, and saw yet another figure moving in the shadows. It was the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. "Mr. Lincoln, sir, what is the best thing I can do to help the American people?" George W. asked.

Lincoln thought for a moment. "Go see a play."

---
I hope the war is truly winding down. I fear that it isn't. I still want to know where the rest of the Iraqi troops are: how can a couple of hundred thousand soldiers just vanish? And with the looting and mayhem going on in Baghdad today, it's clear that nobody, not even US troops, is in control. It's telling that the Red Cross (or Red Crescent as it's called there) will not enter until SOMEONE is in control.
posted by lee on 04/09/03 at 08:37 PM
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Thursday, April 10, 2003

yup—flashy stuff

whitehouse animation inc. presents "KUNSTBAR" a "film" by THE PETRIE LOUNGE--- 2002.

From Mark Hurst of Good Experience.

Look at some of their other stuff -- it's just as weird. Interesting animation though.
posted by lee on 04/10/03 at 10:00 AM
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Saturday, April 12, 2003

what happens dicks [try to]
run the world by themselves

Knock. Knock. Who's There? Same Ol' Editor-Guys by Caryl Rivers, Women's Enews, April 9, 2003

[snip]
From opinion pages to brainy magazines to journals of opinion, women's voices are more muted than they have been in years. As columnist Alicia Mundy writes in Editor and Publisher, at The Washington Post, "Op-ed pages are bulging with deep 'insider' pieces on foreign affairs to the near exclusion of more immediate issues. Second, these pages are almost entirely devoid of women." She notes that if you did a cursory search of the last two year's opinion pages, "you would be alarmed at the lack of diversity among writers and among subjects beyond foreign affairs."

At The New York Times, the same situation generally prevails. In the month between November 4 and December 4 of 2002, for example, an online search revealed that of the non-regular columns on the opinion page, 60 were by men and 14 by women. (Three bylines featured names that were androgynous, so hard to quantify.) Two of these pieces by women could be called very light, one about the perfect Christmas gifts, another by Miss Manners on etiquette. When all opinion page bylines were counted, of 92 writers, only 19 were women. And as the nation lurched into war, the situation has not improved.
[/clip]

Maybe that's why there's been so little coverage, in the U.S. media at any rate, of the civilian casualties during this "liberation." Maybe that's why there is so little coverage of events of real and immediate concern to Americans -- such as not being able to find a job, running out of unemployment benefits while still having several mouths to feed, not being able to pay for health insurance, schools running out of money, pensions headed for the toilet, the true cost of this phony war ...

The administration has done an effective job of diverting established media away from the real problems -- and what passes for mainstream media in this country has fallen for the propaganda hook, line, and sinker.

This cartoon, by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes, pretty much sums up what's been going on in not just the U.S. media, but the administration as well:

AnnTelnaesdotcom.gif
posted by lee on 04/12/03 at 11:18 AM
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Sunday, April 13, 2003

sunshine and betula and Miller needs a retread bad

Pollen.com reports that maple, birch, and cedar / juniper is high today. Just barely high, and boyo is it socking me. Some years hay fever bothers me a lot, some years barely at all. I fear this is a year of bothers me a lot. The only things that really work for me are Benadryl and Comtrex -- but both leave me feeling stupid and out of it. Cure worse than the disease kind of thing. So I tend to avoid allergy pills unless it's so bad I can't keep my eyes open (and thus can't work even less than I can't work on Benadryl).

What's bad is my dog has hay fever too. This afternoon, while we were working in the garden (well, she was digging me a nice hole I didn't need), we were BOTH sneezing.

But it felt good to be outside, finally. I got one bed cleared out, planted verbena and rubeckia and threw in lots of wildflower seeds. Last year things in the garden were horrible -- just not enough rain. Maybe we'll have a normal summer this year.

The dogwood should be in bloom within the week!

We went to Home Depot on Friday and got some very nice looking dwarf Alberta spruce, some juniper ... my goal is to get this stuff in the ground over the next couple of days. It was actually a pretty good time to go to HD, which Stanley refuses to go to on weekends unless it's very late (not a crowd lover, he, not at all). But he took me on Friday, late afternoon. It was raining, you see, and I figured it was a good time to go to a garden shop because there would be very few idiots shopping in the rain. I was right!

I also want to get the climbing rose bush trailing around the trellis we put up last year, but I'll need help with that since the trellis is a lot higher than I can reach without a ladder. And I don't do ladders ... oh Stanley ...

A sort of peaceful weekend. I got my personal taxes done -- just have to finish the business tax form and get that off plus the new "entity tax" the State of Connecticut is demanding -- I don't know if we have to pay it or not, need to check that out -- but I assume we will. Another bit of our money to send off to Rowland so he can mismanage it. But, no tax ranting today. No. I had a PEACEFUL weekend, I did ...

Speaking of rants, check out what Stanley wrote in Puppet Press Journal about Dennis Miller's show on HBO Saturday night. Here's a clue for Miller: the well has run dry. It's drought time in jokeland for you. I've been a Miller fan for years, but this last show, and his appearance on Bill Maher last month -- geez. Maybe he should take a longer hiatus or whatever he was doing. I don't care if he's turned into this nasty reactionary as long as he's amusing about it. But there was nothing amusing about this HBO special -- it actually offended me, especially the racism. I'm glad I didn't pay money to see it. His delivery was way off -- during the first twenty minutes or so it was almost as if he was slurring his words or, if he talked any faster, he WOULD'VE slurred. I started doing the crossword puzzle during about minute 21 or so, kind of listening for a change of pace or at least a heckler, but no luck. Just killing time until the news came on. What a shame. The studio audience was pretty tepid too -- he had to have noticed. Some of the jokes, such as the ones about priests, have been done to death already -- old news. It's like he's so busy trying to find all those esoteric references he forgets to look for the humor in things. If he doesn't find anything funny right now, he should just find some more shitty acting roles he can screw up. Or do Bordello of Blood II. I guess it bothers me a lot more than I thought because I was looking forward to the special. Hey Miller: your audience has moved on -- catch up, buddy. Or find a new day job.
posted by lee on 04/13/03 at 09:00 PM
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