I took a break manually updating entries from two years ago to go to the park and toss the ‘bee for a bit. What started out as a sodden day turned out better than expected. I enjoyed the weather, my time off from work and some thoughtfulness.
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My hosting company, logjamming.com, was hacked last Thursday. If you missed it and would like to see what the hack ended up looking like, look at this. I’m keen to think that they were nice hackers.
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…if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. -Economy

I don’t think I’ve ever written about food. I’m on an eat what I’m hungry for diet. This is not diet used in ‘what I eat to lose weight’ instead it is used in the ‘what I eat cause I’m hungry’ sense.

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I read two books in two days. Yes, I’ve already finished the books I picked up Sunday at the library. Besides both having the word ‘heaven’ in the title and both using the word ‘milquetoast’ in the exposition, they are very different.
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Dear,

Everything is going to be alright. I finally understand. Yesterday I had an epiphany and reached enlightenment of a sort. I know you are madly in love with me; and that is okay. I’m writing this to tell you that being totally consumed by the fires of your ardor is a good thing. You don’t have to fight against it. Go ahead, surrender yourself to your passions and lose yourself in your love for me. There is nothing to fear of love.

I certainly didn’t expect this to be the case. Until yesterday I hadn’t realized what an amazingly fantastic person I am, how devastatingly handsome, how I am exactly what every woman on this earth wants. Every woman knows me, for I am her greatest desire. I had not imagined I was so inherently gifted. I must admit, it is quite the responsibility. That is, holding in my hands, as it were, the very beings of each of you. Having in my power, if I so chose to do so, the ability to make fists of my hands and destroy your very souls.

I must certainly appear quite godlike to you ladies. I can succor or smite thee, raise you up or cast you down into ruin. The power of this realization has gone to my head a bit. But still, there is no reason to fear love. There is no reason to pretend that you don’t know me, pretend that you don’t want me with every last gluon of your being. There is no longer any need for you to hide from your true feeling by saying that you love another. There is forevermore no real purpose to any resistance on your part to the engulfing force of your desire. Do not run away from love, instead run into it.

I can feel your heart race when you catch even the briefest glimpse of me. I am aware of the machinations and lengths to which you are willing to submit yourselves to in order to gain proximity to me. I am amazed at the strength of your character and in your abilities to successfully conceal your zeal all of these years. But I tell you now, that is no longer needed. I know. I know and I have accepted my responsibility. I have enough love for you all. Come unto me and find peace and fulfillment. Do not fear your love for me. I am here and no one of you need be afraid of your love again.

Yours, Truly,

Adam

I ran into near rush-hour traffic this morning on the way to work and then discovered that many people must have decided that Monday was get to work ass-early just like Adam day. Yesterday, I ran to the library and picked up a couple of books, [The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin and The Silence in Heaven by Peter Lord-Wolff] and my limit of three DVDs, all foreign. I nabbed Chushingura - Hana no maki yuki no maki [a shorter version of the same story in The 47 Ronin, and this one has Toshiro in it]; The 400 Blows [Criterion Collection DVD, w00t!]; and Ren? Clair’s ? nous la libert?. While running prior to that, I ran into some dog shit and it ran with me for the rest of my run. Or, at least it ran with me until I ran into a big sucking mud puddle and almost lost a hoof. Before that, I ran nowhere because I was still recovering from running into a wall on Saturday afternoon when the falafel I’d had Saturday morning decided to run around in my intestinal tract. I had done some running on Saturday whilst simultaneously throwing a frisbee as well.

Why am I always running everywhere? I should take the time to stop and smell the trees/bushes that grow along 77 and 90 and are there [in my theory] to cut the smell of the foundry/steel mill/chemical processing facility just past them. They smell familiar but I’m not sure what they are, exactly. When I actually go running my workout consists of running and then walking and then running and then walking and then running and then walking again. Not very disciplined. I figure, however, that if I just extend the amount of time my workout takes, then I will eventually be able to cut out most of the walking. I will end this entry abruptly.

I’m going to get a new window in my apartment. I should be terribly excited I suppose, except that my apartment also needs new closet doors, new cabinets, new carpet and a good scrubbing by a HazMat team. Also, the communication of the landlord to the tenants is of the highest technology. Someone slid a barely legible handwritten note underneath my door stating that on Tuesday May 27th my apartment would be getting a new window. It also stated that the tenant must be present during the entire time of the installation which is scheduled from 8am till ??. So it basically blows an entire day of work and an entire day of possible fun so I can sit around and watch some guy with plumber butt bust out the old window, take a break, fit the sill for a new window, take a break, smoke a cigarette, take a break, take a break, smell up my apartment, make it dirty, take a break, put in the new window, take a break, caulk and seal it [if i'm lucky], take a break and take a break. I guess I’m supposed to make sure he won’t steal anything either. Oh yeah, Tuesday the 27th is actually Thursday the 27th. So I don’t really know when the hell this guy is going to show up.

Of course, perhaps the window installer will be a Swedish bikini model wearing nothing but the tool belt and she’ll need my help installing some fixtures. It is more likely that she will be a Latvian with bad teeth that smells of onions and rancid sweat. It is even more likely that she will be a he with bad teeth, the kind of smell that takes the enamel off of teeth [hence his bad teeth] and tools that grease everything they touch. That might sound bad, but that is what the guy who was installing a window on the 3rd floor looked like yesterday.

I woke up today to this on my weather page:

But I’m not going to let that get me down. This weekend is the Cleveland Music Festival, and while GWAR is no longer headlining, I’ll still get the chance to see The Misfits and avoid Mushroomhead. Tonight I’m going to see one of my ex-coworkers from VDS [Venereal Disease Servicing] rap at the Wish Nightclub. Tomorrow evening I think I’m going to be at Peabody’s/Pirate’s Cove [yarr] for the whole evening. Saturday I’m going to see the Misfits, and if I have any energy left I’ll see what is shaking on Sunday.

I also had a dream last evening that I was involved in a play that was being performed at my old junior high school. I found out opening night that my part was a speaking part. I also had no costume and was running around in boxers trying to find a pair of pants to wear. To help me out, the set folks painted one of my lines on a hot dog shaped pillow. The line was: ‘Do you have money for lunch? Her head is acook.’ I have dreams involving stages from my childhood often. Many times they have nothing to do with performances but stages have so many interesting places to move [trapdoors, catwalks, guy wires, curtains, small lunar rovers, et cetera] that my subconscious seems to like to use them in order to convey many meanings quickly and simultaneously. Random but cool.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy, far, far away, there lived a small and determined band of heroes who fought evil for reasons concerning Truth, Justice and the American Way. Since Truth and Justice are, at best, subjective terms whose definitions change depending on who has power and since no one who they fought for [or against] had any idea what the American Way was [since this happened elsewhere a good goddamn long time ago] their tights and capes were promptly confiscated and they were put away. Instead of telling you their story, I am, instead, going to tell you this one.

There was once a snut who lived in the forest. This was a good place for a snut to live because the favorite food of a snut is the root-tip of the fabulous fugwup tree. The snut looked like a very small tapir; if you can imagine a tapir around the size of a shih tzu, and had soft and subtly variegated fur and was lonely. Snuts are typically solitary creatures, but they must come together to breed and they typically stay together until their young is raised. It had been so long since this snut had seen a fellow snut that it was beginning to despair ever finding one again.

In fact, the forest wasn’t as fun as it used to be. The fugwup trees were getting harder to find and when the snut did come across one, it was often sickly and its roots tasted bitter. The snut had even tried eating the berries of the graz bush when fugwups were particularly scarce, but they gave the snut a bellyache and made it dizzy. Even the other forest animals seemed more subdued, the snut heard fewer birds and the few animals it came across looked at him oddly. There were often violent and alien sounds to be heard in the distant parts of the forest. One day the snut even accidently ran in to its most fearsome predator, the kata. The kata didn’t eat the snut, however. Instead, she gave it a pitied look, took a deep breath, turned and disappeared into the nearest graz bush.

The snut was shocked at this behavior, but still greatly relieved. It even absentmindedly ate some grazberries in its bemusement. The snut had run in to this behavior before, almost as if the other animals knew something about its kind which the snut wasn’t aware. As it moved off into the evening, the snut crossed a stream, went down a hill, rolled in some particularly nice leaf mold and crossed something new to its experience. A hard black river that hurt its feet. All of these strange and exciting events had briefly made the snut forget how lonely it was, but after crossing the black river the immense solitude came rushing back.

The snut wanted a mate; it wasn’t as young as it used to be and it felt an urgent need to make its mark before it became completely unattractive to other snuts. This was the right time of year to come across other snuts, the breeding season, but in all of last year it had only come across three other snuts. A family to be exact, a snoot a snout and a snit. They had come up to the snut and snuffled it before moving off into the forest.

While recalling all of this, the snut had become quite physically ill from the grazberries it had eaten earlier and quite mentally ill from the trauma of loneliness. The snut’s eyes were watering heavily and it coughed up a bit a graz juice and stumbled against a tree. It hadn’t seen a healthy fugwup tree in just about as long as it hadn’t seen another snut. Once the majority of the dizziness had worn off it tottered forward toward a clearing. Life wasn’t all bad. The weather was the same and the snut reveled in the rainwater that washed its fur, and the dirt smelled the same and the snut loved to feel it between its feet. It still found joy in its life.

There was a sudden, sharp pain in the snut’s hind leg, the world spun and the last snut felt itself lifted into the sky. There is dangled. There it writhed. There it died. Three days later a man came into the clearing, cut down the stiffened corpse, skinned the snut and tossed the carcass into a stream. It was a stroke of luck to have caught a snut, they were so rare now. Its skin would fetch him a nice price at the logging camp down the road.

Disclaimer: I am in no way, shape, form or manner planning, thinking about planning, planning of thinking about planning or attempting suicide. Quite a bit of time in my anthropological learning process was devoted to the study of suicide, this stems from that. Some bits and pieces also come as a result of my delvings into existentialist philosophy. Thank You.

Emile Durkheim talked about both suicide and anomie; anomie being a state that can culminate in suicide. Snitching from the linked site, we get two definitions:

Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus makes a philosophical case against suicide, something which Camus was mightily concerned. His assertion that suicide is a statement that life is not worth living seems to apply more to Durkheim’s egoistic suicide than the altruistic version, this makes sense to me because Camus is concerned with a person as an individual entity instead of someone who can dampen their will to sacrifice for others. A meaningless life is the ultimate absurdity and this is fine. What seems to have troubled Camus so is that suicide is a rejection of life because the life does not fit the mold of the person living it. Suicide is therefore the dumbest philosophical thing someone could do.

Those bloody Romans had all kinds of ideas about suicide too. But all too often it seems that suicide was more of a political act than done for Durkheim’s take on altruistic or egoistic reasons. Cato for instance, did not kill himself because of the degree to which he was or was not integrated into society. He killed himself because he would not live under Caesar. This seems to threaten Camus’s take as well, because I don’t see how Camus can denigrate Cato’s use of Cato’s life for a suicide that is done in this manner.

In one of my recent National Geographics, a statement [which coupled with a sort of A Modest Proposal spin gave me the idea for this] along the lines of ‘Only a ninety percent reduction in human population can result in the preservation of endangered and threatened species in natural habitat.’ This was in order to keep some species from being wiped out and others from being mere curios [only kept alive by constant human breeding and intervention]. This brings me to my case for suicide. Instead of folks killing themselves because ‘no one cares’ or because ‘the world is a terrible place’ why not axe yourself in the name of conservation? It is altruistic and you’ll be in good company with the likes of Cato, because you are also doing it because you will not live in a world where animals are mistreated. I’d do it myself but I’ve got to go spread the message. You understand I’m sure.

It is probably pretty obvious, but I am filled with feelings of inadequacy. Like most things, it has its positive effects and negative effects, but I think, for the most part, that this/these feeling[s] hinder more than they help. [sometimes when i write, i have far too many weird things going on in my sentences, such as the brackets, slash, and comma plethora in the last one]

I don’t feel like I am better at anything than anyone else. I know someone who is vastly more knowledgeable or talented or successful or driven, for every possible thing that interests me. I’m mildly envious, but moreso I just feel bummed that I’m not the best at anything. I know two amazing poets and a few great writers, several talented musicians, some great artists, razor-witted thinkers and problem solvers, determined activists, elegant web designers, world class athletes, deft filmmakers, computer tech gurus, you name it.

I can imagine a person telling me that needing to be better than someone is a selfish and egotistical thing. It is important for self-esteem to feel good about something that you can do. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be better or the best at something. For me though, since I am so demanding of myself, and feel so inadequate, being the best is at once both what I am aiming for and what keeps me feeling down. Because I can’t be the best, I can only be me.

These quotes trouble me. The first one is very powerful but since I have no idea what my genius is [or, even if I possess one] then I cannot follow it. The second one troubles me because I don’t know if I’ve got the gumption to find out what my genius is. I don’t know if I’ve got the focus or determination to do the necessary 90% perspiration.

Basically, I’m in a conundrum of my own making. I guess I’m expecting these answers to just appear in front of me. I’ve been searching for direction for so long that I must have some strange sort of sense of entitlement to an answer, or at least a compass to lead me there. I’m lost in a desert and I don’t know if I have enough energy to get out.

Of course, I have things much better than many other people. I have a job, I have the best family in the world, I have friends who don’t mind me. I get enough to eat, and I am surrounded by people who challenge and enrich me. I’m healthy, I’m young, and I live in a world that has more interesting things in it than time to do them all. Maybe its not such a big deal that I’m not great at anything. If I took the time to try to be great at something, then I would miss out on something equally cool and vastly different. Does this mean I am content with being inadequate? ack!

I saw a video of the beheading. I’m not sure if it was uncut or not, as it was a bit jumpy. It definitely stuck in my craw to watch it, but I don’t feel the outrage that so many others seem to feel. I’ve cut the heads off of living creatures before [mostly just fish] and that sticks in my craw too. Still, cutting the head off of a human boils down to nothing more than killing another critter. Seeing something living die isn’t disturbing to me. That isn’t to say that I find the idea of the execution appealing. I don’t think any type of killing is appealing - it all sticks in my craw, but I think plenty of people are finding it difficult to distinguish between the act of killing and the no good reasoning behind it. What makes the beheading so abhorrent is that it was done in cold blood for no good reasons related to personal survival. Instead it was a political killing and the video is a terrorist act. That is what is most disgusting to me, the no good reasonableness¹ of it.

In the same vein I equally excoriate the torture of any creature. Torture serves no good purpose- it doesn’t matter if it is a human or a less adaptable critter. Honor and shame are very powerful tools that are always wielded with danger and it seems that torture is one of the more foolish ways that honor and shame are expressed for humans. Beyond that, however, is the purely visceral pain of torture. There ain’t no good reason for that shit period

A quick timeline of my feelings on the this whole clusterfuck in Iraq [I've not said much on it the entire time its been going on]:

1. We shouldn’t have gone in there in the first place, there was no good reason for it. And I am still waiting to hear one.
2. Well, we went in and fucked things up, so now we’d better stay there and fix it, and;
3. currently I think the quickest way to fix it might be to get the fuck out since we are so unwanted.

It is a shame that this war seems to be causing more problems than it solved, but that kind of stuff happens when decisions are made for no good reason.

1: I think the word ‘reasonable’ is used incorrectly. Animal behavior seems much more reasonable than human behavior. They mostly kill each other for food. They mostly don’t kill their same species. They mostly don’t torture their same species. I’m sure there are exceptions but for the most part, that seems quite reasonable to me. Yet, if animal behavior is ‘unreasonable,’ then I’m going to start learning from them. Unreason might be the way to go.²

2: My assumptions regarding the definition of reason are shallow, but I am trying to use the word as I think it is most commonly used. That is, I’m not using the academically examined, philosophically challenged, and treatise-heavy dissection of what the word ‘reason’ means. I’m using it like those people who toss out sound bites saying ‘There is no reason for this kind of behavior!’ Well of course there is a reason, it might just happen to be a no good reason and much of it was probably reasoned through before acting upon it. That version of reason sucks.

A loyal reader writes^†:

Well, loyal reader, I aim to please^€.

Also, thank you for sending me those interestingly arranged self portraits and the silk underdrawers. I am sure that you are not the only one who wonders about my sexual prowess, fortitude and frequency. I know this because when I check the search strings that result in hits on my site, lots of them are sexual. By far the most popular is the search for ’sick pictures’ followed closely by ‘redheads’ and ‘hot monkey love.’ In the next lower echelon of searching people seem to be interested in whether I have a ‘clamped girlfriend’ or ‘fudge covered oreos.’

It is also of interest to me how often other people talk about their own sex lives or the sex lives of other people. All of this interest in sex, or ‘porking’ as I like to say, leads me to conclude that many people must enjoy the act. I would also like to take this time to point out that I have large hands that flabbergast women into cattywampusness. Sex. Sex. Sex. Porking. Sex. Sex.

I hope you have enjoyed hearing about my sex life^‰.

I hope it wasn’t too graphic for your taste. But you should always try to [and I learned this from a T-shirt, so it is wisdom indeed]: Remember that it only seems kinky the first time. The safest form of sex is abstinence. The next safest form of sex is with me.

^†This is fictitious.
^€Still fictitious.
^‰Most fictitious of all.

I had many dreams last night but the one I am going to tell you about involves me going off to war. I was living on a planet that might as well have been Earth but wasn’t. I say that it might as well have been Earth because if you had been born into that world it would have been Earth to you. I say it wasn’t Earth because I had to go to war in some inhospitable [I had to wear a breathing apparatus] region of the planet and fight imposing insectobeasts. I never actually saw any of this, but I knew it from television in the dream. I never actually watched television in the dream but I still had this information from television as a sort of dream backstory. I find this interesting; a dream past, dream memories, strange. The war had been going on for a very long time.

I was in front of my mother’s old workplace with a group of other recruits and we were all saying goodbye. The only person there with me was my grandfather. We were talking about fishing, not fighting. When the call came for us to get on our transport [accompanied by a deafening roar as it started up] I suddenly felt panicked about what I was getting into and I hadn’t said goodbye. I turned and looked at my grandfather but didn’t say anything. Neither did he. We wouldn’t have been able to hear each other in any case. He just looked at me, a scared young punk kid, and that was enough to calm me and give me a sense of resolve.

The look that my grandfather gave me is what I find most interesting in this dream. That, and why it affected me so much. It was one of the most powerful dream moments I’ve ever had. I’m sure much of the power comes from my close kinship and friendship with my grandpa. Whenever we went fishing together was a great time. I’m sure part of it has to do with my engagement in the civics of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which helped me finally understand what most likely motivated my grandfather to fight in World War II. Which is probably why the look was so powerful. My grandfather understood what it meant to go to a far off place and fight to not die. Even though he was old when he saw me off, he probably saw his face overlaid on his young punk grandson. There probably wasn’t anything to say in that situation. Conveying complete understanding through that one look was probably the best thing my dream could have done.

I saw Ratatat and Clinic at the Grog Shop last evening. Ratatat was surprisingly good. Just two guys and their guitars, some groovy bells and whistles [and a cool projected psychedelic accompaniment] and lots of jamming. They didn’t have any lyrics but since each song seemed like a blend of experiment, improvisation and virtuosity, words probably wouldn’t have helped them much. The guitarist in charge was hammered and was knowingly making lame comments to the crowd. He also invited people to come up on stage and dance around. Only one crazy [and I do mean crazy] guy took them up on it and he stayed up there the rest of their set and did weirdo robot movements. The drunk guitar guy sincerely thanked him afterward.

Ratatat is the kind of band that I would like to do the soundtrack for one of the movies I’ve not yet made. Last night I couldn’t really think of something off of the top of my head for the type of film it needed to be but after some thought I think that perhaps ‘Convenience Charge’ could be adapted to work with something like it.

Clinic was much as I expected them to be. 4 Brits in surgical scrubs and masks, jamming away. I was a bit surprised at just how much of The Beach Boys/surfer rock vibe that their guitars had. That never really came through to me on any of their albums. Incidentally, I didn’t realize they released their newest album a few months ago. From what I heard live, it sounds promising.

We bailed a bit early because we had to get up early for work, and so I am a bit groggy still. In an hour I get a back massage though. Ver’ nice. I also think that the overuse of the word ‘like’ in description and conversation is nothing more than an aborted attempt at metaphor. Perhaps if folks were a bit quicker on their feet and could come up with an appropriate metaphor, ‘like’ wouldn’t be so, like, annoying. The schools must change! or something.

Friday’s adventures in the land of Habitat for Humanity were alright. Since the weather forecast was a bit random we started out working in the HfH headquarters and I cleaned old drywall sealer and primer out of buckets with the kid of the guy who is getting a house built. There were a bunch of high school seniors there doing work for a senior project and the girls started out sorting nails and then one of them came over to clean buckets with me. She totally wanted me. It figures, because high school girls didn’t want me in high school they would obviously want me now. So I talked to her [read hit on her] and found out she plays lacrosse and is going to Miami of Ohio for college. In the afternoon we went to a site and spread topsoil in the yard in preparation for the folks who were scheduled to move in the next day. I did much shoveling and raking and wheelbarrowing. That evening I was quite exhausted so I just made fudge and went to sleep.

Saturday was my fun day. I didn’t do much apart from playing Starcraft and watching Secretary. It was another solid film distributed by Lion’s Gate that dealt quite interestingly with sadomasochism. Instead of making it into something deviant, it is both empowering and addictive to both parties in this film. I also watched all of the films in my new Animation Show DVD. It is an awesome DVD and is going to be a good start in my collection of animated DVDs.

Saturday evening was a party over at Lauren’s place. I took my fudge, a bottle of Vampire Cabernet Sauvignon and The Animation Show DVD to show a short or two. I met a few of Lauren’s friends and finally met Patrick’s Genevieve. I quickly became the drunk person at the party, which was good because it gave me plenty of time to sober up for the long ass drive home. Lauren neglected to mention that she lived on the moon. We played a fun game that I never learned the name of but it was vaguely like Balderdash except cooler. Everyone wrote down an answer to a question [Things You Shouldn't Say to your Grandma] and then people had to guess at who said what. I overanalyzed a bit because I was aware that some strategies might include attempting to write answers like someone else, making fun of yourself as a false trail, guessing your own as someone else’s as a way of laying a false trail, etc etc. I left for home around 4 in the morning and didn’t find out until I actually started driving that I was still a wee bit drunk. So I drove slowly and super carefully the rest of the way home. My fudge was a big hit

Sunday I cleaned the hell out of my apartment. Something in it smelled like rotten food and I never ended up finding it so I believe that something died in the wall. Perhaps my neighbor killed someone and hid them in the wall? It still smells vaguely of bad cabbage. I also took some pictures and did that clich? of lich?s - practicing my guitar outside in the nice weather. I also started watching The Guns of Navarone [I like my old movies].

Here are some cool phrases I invented in the same vein as the line from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “I’m so hip, I can’t see over my pelvis.”

• I’m so bright, my mom calls me son.
• I’m so slick, I’m often mistaken for an oil spill.
• I’m so smooth, _______.
• I’m so cool, I’m a national penguin reserve.
• I’m so hot, _______.
• I’m so sweet, _______.

Okay, so I didn’t think of all that many. If you have any ideas to fill in the others let me know.

Here is the recipe for the fudge I made.
Ingredients:

• 4.5 cups of sugar
• 2 tablespoons of butter
• 12 ounces of evaporated milk
• a pinch of salt
• 12 ounces of semi-sweet morsels
• 12 ounces of another type of chocolate, hell maybe use peanut butter morsels or butterscotch ones. I used Special Dark morsels.
• 2 cups of marshmallow cream

Steps:

1. Boil the milk, sugar and butter for 6 minutes or thereabouts. You’ll need to stir it up first, and once or twice while boiling. Thats a lot of sugar.
2. Put the morsels and marshmallow cream in a big bowl.
3. Spray some wax paper with cooking spray and use it to line a 9 x 13 dish.
4. Realize you’ve forgotten about the boiling sugar thing and panic needlessly cause its fine.
5. Pour boiling mixture over morsels and cream
6. Stir for about five minutes or until it starts to thicken. If you want, at the start of this step you could put some cinnamon or orange extract [I don't know how much because this is my own addition] into it to make slightly cinnamon-y fudge or slightly orange-y fudge.
7. Pour into 9 x 13 dish, cover and let sit overnight

Don’t refrigerate unless you want the fudge to get dry and hard or if it isn’t firm enough for your taste.

This week is a bust as blogging goes, since tomorrow I’m working on a Habitat for Humanity house with some coworkers. I’ve obviously changed the stylesheets around a bit and hopefully they are a bit more readable. Thanks to A List Apart for giving me the necessaries. I still can’t figure out why there isn’t more space between the paragraph breaks. I know it is a CSS issue, but it is beyond my meager skills when I think about how to apply an attribute outside of a paragraph tag. Still, the output is inside another tag. If the answer lies there I don’t know what it looks like. So instead I will code the breaks manually for the time being.

Do you think all those buttons over on the side are tacky? I’m starting to. I think I just stuck ‘em on there because other sites use them. I believe the prevailing rules is to not use an image unless you have to. Another bell and whistle that I am ready to add is a CSS coded drop shadow. I’m having no problems with the code here, but rather, problems making a drop shadow in an empty selection. Once I figure that out I must then figure out just how damn big the shadow needs to be to fit around my main content window. the size recommended by A List Apart is far too small. And, since I am dopey, I don’t really know what they mean when they say:

I’ve been on another music downloading spree lately. But I’m at the point where I need some help. I need dance tunes and really good ones. Yet it has been so long since I have listened to good dance music I can’t remember the names of any of the songs. I don’t mean any of the innumerable techno songs, I need songs from when I/you was/were in junior high and high school and even college. Gangsta rap anthems, junk like that. So, if you please, leave a comment and list some songs you feel that I should absolutely have if I was going to throw a dance party.

I’m not. So don’t get excited.

I’m also somewhat unconfident of the subtitle for the site on my green style. ‘.44 Caliber Soul Revolt’ was what I settled on, I thought ‘Revolution as Propaganda’ was too pretentious and ‘Guerrilla Audacity’ was too stupid. It needs to fit with the theme of the style. I really want something that will both make fun of the faux-army clothes of American Eagle/Abercrappie collective and still be apt for my own idiom. If you have any ideas please tell me.

Rapid catch up. Friday I ate a mushroom forest, played pool with pool sharks and other deviants [including a goatherder and coxswain] and won at poker. Saturday and Sunday nothing happened. Yesterday my redesign went live and now has groovy style sheet switching on the right side. Whichever style you choose should remain that way if you accept cookies. The accessibility and usability need improved but I’m just glad my entries didn’t wig out like before. I don’t know if any of those xml feeds work because I’ve never used anything like that before. They are there at least. This site at least fakes compliance. I can work on prettifying it a bit more. Which style do you like best?

This sentence starts a new paragraph. I went to a class on Winning Oratory yesterday that was actually rather interesting. It didn’t teach me much that I didn’t already know, but since I cared more about it this time, I assimilated it a bit better. I had a long and hilarious conversation over AIM last night regarding the miniseries 10.5. Since I don’t have a TV that gets reception of any kind, I hear all of my idiot box tidbits through friends. 10.5 sounds like it is so bad that it brings the TV miniseries to a new low. I was tempted to do an analysis of it, much like I did for The Da Vinci code, yet this time examining it from an academic position, but I’m too lazy to do that today.

Which is why you get a random assortment of sentences that have no real coherence. You can also check out some movie reviews over at Lauren’s place.

Paragraph breaks are hard to see.

Here are the winners, the placers, the showers and the rest of the magnificent few who were privileged to enter the 2004 Organic Mechanic haiku contest. All entries are the copyright of the authors, they just happen to be here.