Category: blogging

Where write about writing, and my website sounds familiar.

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choke on this silver spoon


Monday night, just got off the phone with Pat, telling him I was about to go outside and pull weeds. Sharaun then walked out the door headed to the gym and, rather than haul the baby monitor outside with me into the 100°+ degree twilight, I decided to save it for another day. Another day on pins and needles at work, where the current climate is all headmen and falling axes. Without going into the whole story about my ongoing flirtation with the breadlines, suffice it to say that things have been a bit stressful and the atmosphere isn’t the most work-conducive. In fact, I don’t think I’ve done a “real” bit of work in three days now – ever since my employer raised the threat level to orange. It seems however, that I have, for now, weathered the storm – once again proving my indispensability. Chance has once again enabled me to grow more undeservedly self-assured and pompous. One day I’ll choke on this silver spoon, it’s a sure thing.

You may notice the “double posting” for today. You’ll see the entry below this one is dedicated to one of this year’s Halloween projects. I intend to document my projects a little better from now on, and will have a static, living post for each where updates will go. Not that you care about this, but it’s just easier for me to document the projects in a living post rather than setup an entirely new dedicated page. Besides, how can I one day hope to get some projects listed on the Monsterlist if I don’t document them properly and publish on the internet?

Today, while cleaning out my My Documents folder at work, I came across a curious Word document called “South Side of the Island.doc.” Not recognizing the file by name, I opened it to investigate. Inside was written only the following:

South Side of the Island

Counting myself (a librarian by former trade), the population of our little island stood at a proud six bodies:

  • Ms. O, who, it was said, was once a fearless sea-captain, and whose house had a mast sprouting from its center, complete with crow’s nest atop.
  • Mr. & Mrs. U, both schoolteachers by former trade. Their grey hair always a little wild, and both of them given to being easily surprised or even skittish.
  • Mr. T, a brilliant scientist and inventor.
  • Mr. H, who was once a police officer. Made a body feel right secure to have a former man of the law nearby.

I read this over and over again, trying to place it. Did I write this? Had I downloaded it or copied/pasted it from somewhere? I quick Google search turned up nothing. I read and reread it, and ever so slowly started remembering… I think I did write this. The date on the file says August of last year; you wouldn’t think my memory would fade that fast – but it seems it has. Maybe I was going to write a story about my #1 topic: an island. I think I was most surprised to realize I’d written it because it actually sounded interesting, and when I thought it was something I’d stumbled on rather than my own craft I actually wished I could read more.

I don’t know what it is about my “work smarter, not harder” post that attracts the whackjob comments, but it sure seems to be accruing them slowly. Check out this doozy and the one below it for an example of what I’m talking about. The other day I thought I might be imagining that the number of “random” comments I get here on sounds familiar was increasing, but with some great out-of-nowhere ones cropping up this week, I think it’s out of the realm of imagination and into the realm of fact. Maybe I’ve penetrated Google deep enough that I’m now getting a “second wave” of search-driven visitors. I say bring ’em on, I gotta believe I’m writing for someone…

I much prefer sitting here listening to music than sitting here watching TV. Let’s face it, I’m rarely sitting here without this laptop in front of me anyway, and listening to something multitasks a lot better with writing than watching something does. Even if Sharaun is home (she’s not now) and the TV is mandatory, I’m usually only listening anyway. The only watching I’m doing right now is the watching of Keaton’s video baby monitor, showing me some flickering, washed out, ghostly-grey bird’s-eye shot of her resting peacefully in her crib. Looking more like a wobbly kinescopic view into some past era than a representation of real-time events, I can barely make out her tiny form in contrast to the other shapeless grainy wiggles. This thing cost $200? It almost works like something I’d consider paying $40 for when you wrap tin foil around the antenna. Wow, that little nothing-sentence turned into a whole paragraph… now if that ain’t God’s bounty then I challenge you to show me what is.

I got more in me, but I’ll call this one done and put it in tomorrow’s so I have to write less then. Brilliant, nay? Goodnight my lovers and haters.

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the opposite of downhill


Entry today is heavy with the stuff that drives away readership, but so it goes. Rode my bike to work today for the first time in a long while. The ride in was great: iPod on, weather still morning-cool, and mostly downhill; the ride home was awful: hot as hell, no water, and the opposite of downhill.

The power of suggestion is massive, we all know that. For me though, the power of suggestion from those I respect is even moreso. For instance, while in Florida, my longtime buddy Kyle and I discussed new music, as we’ve been musical partners going waaaay back. He ended up mentioning the new Destroyer album, which had been sitting, relatively unplayed since my first impression, on my iPod for weeks. He hadn’t actually heard the album himself, but a mutual friend had compared it to Bowie (quite a germane comparison, by the way) and just hearing Kyle’s interests piqued got my itching to spin the album again and reevaluate it. I put it on as I went to sleep that night, despite Sharaun’s permanently lodged complaint about headphones in bed (I’m supposed to be “paying attention” to her as we fall asleep). Anyway, I’ve got to admit – either I’ve been lemming’d into a fondness for the album, or I misjudged it to begin with. This album is good, and getting better the more I hear it.

Folks, it was just a month and a half ago that I blogged about the incredible increase in comment spam this site was seeing. That’s six weeks ago, for the months-to-weeks conversion challenged. Six weeks, and my comment spam count is now sitting above 70,000. Doing a little arithmetic, that means I got 40,000+ pieces of spam comments in that time – amortize that as if they were coming in at a regular rate and you end up with a figure of ~6,000 spams per week, or ~1,000 per day (rough math). That’s insane… right? I guess when your blog has been around for nearly three years (w00t!) and you’ve got a butt-ton of entries you’re just a spam-comment honeypot and it’s to be expected. Thank God for Akismet.

Speaking of Akismet – I’ve long dreamed of adapting the Akismet API for use with my spam-ravaged Coppermine photo gallery. And, after an hour or so of tinkering – I actually did modify Coppermine to work with Akismet, using Bret Kuhns’ PHP4 library. Right now, the hack is incredibly rough – but basically doesn’t allow comments which are suspected as spam by the Akismet screening. The “disallowance” is a horridly ungraceful Coppermine “die” error, but it works for now. The only guidance I give the Akismet server at this point is the comment author and text, which is just scratching the surface of spam-evaluating criterion which may be passed. Also, I did not bother to modify the Coppermine database to enable tagging comments as spam, nor did I implement a way to submit false positives back to Akismet for training. Since both of these things are essential functionality for “conscientious” Akismet usage, I feel like I should work more to make this thing better. Eventually, I’d like to make it into a full-fledged Coppermine plugin – but for now it’s a complete hack (I even waxed about my grand intentions on the Coppermine boards).

The proof is in the pudding though, and I’ll have to monitor things for a week to see if the hack actually stops spam (although I don’t see how it won’t). The things I do for fun…

Oh, and a message to all the hecklers – yesterday’s post-accompanying picture of Keaton was chosen specifically for its… beauty. I’ll have you all know she is still, and will always, = cute.

Goodnight.

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verdant billboards


Welcome one, welcome all – to the sounds familiar blog. Now with recent-fad relevancy! Sounds familiar is your one-stop-shop for online predator sting operations, drifting, black-haired Britney, and the World Cup.

I don’t feel like I’ve been doing any “good” writing of late. That “Lion” bit the other day was some attempt to make myself feel good about my writing again – to move this blog out of the “went here, did that, had fun” doldrums and bring it back to something a little more interesting. To renew the storytelling aspect, maybe focus a little more on the writing and less on the material (if that even makes sense). I really do enjoy flattering myself by trying to “write good.” I get happy if my words flow well, if the sentences bring across ideas with unique words or interesting structure. I do abuse punctuation, and love a good run-on, but it’s the way my mind likes to see its thoughts put on paper. I can’t promise much, as my writing tends to reflect my mood, and is always a struggle between how badly I want to get the thought down vs. how pretty I want it to sound.

Slightly related, I had another friend ask me the other day how much time “blogging” takes me, “How much time per day,” he asked. I’ve been asked before, and I never have a really solid answer – I suppose because I just don’t think about it too much. This time, the curious friend asked if it was something I had to consciously work at or if it was now a firmly entrenched habit. I guess that one is easier to answer than the “how much time” one, as I’m fairly certain this blogging thing is definitely now a habit – nay, a compulsion, obsession. Even on the days I don’t write, it’s not because I don’t want to write – I always want to write. I don’t write because there’s just nothing I can bring myself to write about, and what’s more I actually feel bad about it. I’ve come to take pride in posting regularly, and more than fearing a disappointed audience, I don’t like breaking my “streak.” Anyway… back to the question of time-spent.

I’d guess I spend, on average, and hour and a half each day blogging. Sometimes less, sometimes more. I write mostly in the evening, while Sharaun and I sit and watch TV. Sometimes, I’ve snuck online during the workday and scribbled down thoughts in outline form, or set a fragmented sentence “to-blog” reminder to pop up on my cellphone and jog my memory. If the mood is right, it doesn’t take long at all. I can knock out several well-formed paragraphs in under a half hour. In fact, sometimes I get to writing so much that a good portion of the stuff ends up in the pre-written “bin” to post later when I’m not so inspired. I usually get an entry done and then spend an amount of time equal to actually writing it in reviewing and touching it up. Fixing sentence structure, flow, spelling, etc. Lastly, I surf the ‘net looking for an appropriate picture to accompany it, upload, format, and hit “publish.”

I like to think about it like this: Were I just taking those couple hours and watching some TV, it’d be two hours out of each day I’d never be able to get back. Spending those two hours writing, I feel like I can get some of that back – by way of reading what those two hours produced at some later date. I can at least revisit the thoughts I took time to put down. I’m going to stop writing this now.

When I was a kid, we had sycamore trees around our hometown. Those familiar with California sycamore trees will likely know what I mean when I say they had the coolest “puzzle-piece” bark. Instead of a solid sheath of bark like standard trees have, these trees had a protective outer shell made up of little cobblestones of hard bark. Being boys, we loved to pick at these scabby things, pulling off the amoeba-shaped flakes of bark to expose the bright yellow-green skin underneath. I can remember staring at trunk and limbs of the tree, looking for potential patterns; purposely trying to pull off the little puzzle pieces to leave behind a green secret message. The tree’s soft layer of protected skin used as a verdant billboard, perhaps advertising the vandal’s name or favorite four-letter word. Sure, the letters were often bubbly and imperfect, but if you took a long hard look at the sycamores in my neighborhood – you’d likely find one or two with a large green D-A-V-E picked off vertically down its trunk.

So… somehow I ended up at an old Stereogum post the other day, one centered on a Hilary Duff photoshopping contest. And, reading through the comments I found this gem tucked away at the very bottom:

HILARY THIS IS KATE. I AM A HUGE FAN I DO NOT WANT YOU TO BECOME ANOREXIA YOU ARE MY ROLE MODEL, YOUR PRETTY YOU ALSO HAVE A WOUNDERFUL VOCIE AND I DO NOT WANT YOU DIE. PLEASE DONT BE ANOREXIA BECAUSE I KNOW THERE ARE MANY MORE FANS THEN JUST ME WHO LIKE YOU AND FEEL THE SAME WAY. SO PLEASE DONT CONTENUE TO BE ANOREXIA
GET BETTER SOON
YOUR FAN KATE R WRITE BACK

Excellent. You hear that, Hil? Don’t be anorexia, OK? Reminds me of some of the fan “mail” I’ve gotten on my ? and the Mysterians page.

Goodnight.

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as july approaches


Friday Friday Friday! Dave love the Friday. Burned the better part of the post-work daylight today working in the front yard: mowing, fertilizing, trimming hedges, checking sprinklers and weeding. Yard looks much better for it and I feel like I did something constructive.

While I don’t usually do celebrity gossip stuff, I am willing to link a funny story if it’s related to something I care about. So, continuing the Scientology bashing theme from yesterday, here’s the comical tale about some famous folks’ heated run-in with a dude wearing a “Scientology is gay” t-shirt. Good story, and, where can I get that shirt? Come to think of it, it’s eerily similar to a shirt I still want to make, but don’t have the artistic prowess to illustrate. Anyone who has some basic drawing skills and wants to help me realize my multi-religion-bashing concept tee, hit me up and we’ll do lunch.

As July approaches, and August after, my mind begins to drift to this year’s Halloween prop. Last year, Kristi made a great suggestion to do a backlit scene on the lawn with a large glowing moon and animated wolves in silhouette, complete with scary baying sound effects. I simply adored the idea, and the concept seemed relatively easy to realize: 2D wooden wolf coutouts with hinged parts for movement, some kind of illuminated orb shaped from pipe/wood, and a simple motor to animate the thing (I have an ice-cream churn we never use which I can adapt). Now, don’t get me wrong, I think this is an excellent project – but it sounded relatively “low touch” in terms of effort (of course, I’m probably wrong about that) and that prompted me to start daydreaming about a second, more involved, prop. Two props in one year, can it be done?! As my mind drifted on the 2nd prop idea, I centered most of my concepts around air-power, which I switched first experimented with (quite successfully, I might add) on last year’s “pneumatic coffin-popper” project. Air power is so clean and easy, no electricity to deal with, no AC-to-DC rectifying, no relays or geared motors to wear out – just a compressor hidden away in the garage, a hose, and some cylinders.

So, air-power on the brain, I began to revisit an idea I’d had a while ago which was based on a “twitching, hanging-from-the-gallows” prop I’d seen somewhere on the net (and has since disappeared, I think). The hanging man always intrigued me, I think mostly because I imagined the hinged limbs moving in a slow-but-frantic, almost electrocution-like, way. Powered the way I imagine it, the whole thing would be quite random, the movements not based on repetitive motorized actions – instead only being “motivated” some force, the actual movements themselves being completely spontaneous and organic. I love the concept, but was kind of turned off by how macabre I imagined the final result. While I love Halloween, I’d like my display to at least remain kid-friendly scary… and besides, in these politically-correct times I’m actually a bit leery to actually place a “lynched” dummy on my lawn.

So, keep the concept but scrap the noose and gallows… what could I do? Then it hit me, a scarecrow. Scarecrows are very Halloween to me, and the scarecrow in my concept is a lot gruffer than your goofy Wizard of Oz variety, I imagine him with a twisted sneer or something. A scarecrow writhing to get off his pole, kicking and flailing… yeah, I love it! Here’s a brief concept description and sketch I made today with all my enthusiasm:

“Flailing Scarycrow”

  • PVC frame with dual-action push/pull air cylinder mounted vertically mid-torso
  • PVC body “jointed” (springs or otherwise) at hips, shoulders, knees and elbows for organic motion
  • Wire attached to each cylinder plunger, and attached to PVC arms/legs near elbow/knee joints
  • Push/pull action of cylinder alternately tugs wires attached to knees/elbows, resulting in a jerky, flailing motion in limbs
  • Cylinder should fire randomly, or perhaps be motion-activated, and be at a lower pressure to sell the effect

Here’s a sketch I did, it was in color, but I don’t have a scanner and the only one I have access to only does black and white. You can probably figure it out anyway.

One thing I do want to do is begin documenting my projects better. I’ve even considered a page devoted to them, with details and through processes like in this entry. Ambitious, I know, but a guy can dream. Anyway… I’m not saying it’s ready to design, maybe a few more weeks o’ thinkin’, but it’s got potential!

Changing subjects… did you see the strange comment yesterday on the “satanic flier” entry? (Remember, the “satanic flier” post is consistently my most read post, averaging 30+ reads per day.) I originally pegged it for a random-letter spam filter test, but was intrigued when a Google search for “zwaml” turned up a ton of hits. Though none of them in English, most of the results were in French, some German, and some still appeared to be a phonetic version of Arabic or some other script. Intrigued, I looked up the IP address of the poster, which turned out to via a system based in Mauritius (it’s OK, I had to look it up too). AfriNIC, the Internet Numbers Registry for Africa, is based in Mauritius – leading me to believe the commenter was commenting from somewhere in Africa. Some more digging, and a few other searches seem to indicate a link between the word “zwaml” and the Kabyle region of Algeria, where they speak their own language: Kabyle, which is a Berber language.

Look, people, I researched this for hours last night. My conclusion? “Zwaml” is a slang word in some Berber-based language, it refers to a type or class of people and is derogatory. I also think it is a semi-localized term, being used primarily in the Berber-speaking regions of North Africa, and can be alternately spelled in English as “zwamel,” don’t ask me why.

Bottom line? I think I’m being called a name.

In other other news, I recently found out that the blog that started it all for me is now back online – and has been active again since sometime late last year. Glad to see it back, it really was my inspiration (oh, and please forgive the linked entry… it was only my 23rd of blogdom – cut me some slack).

Goodnight.

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my bid


Hey Maygsters, I think it was you who once told me you sometimes check this page multiple times a day to see if I wrote late? That one statement was enough to motivate this late entry; thanks. Sorry it sucks anyway.

Going on 10pm Thursday night and I was fully planning on not writing an entry for tomorrow. Yeah, I had some canned stuff I could slap together – but none of it seemed exciting enough to make an entry out of. Work had me frustrated today, to the point where I called it quits around 11am and headed home to sit on the couch and do e-mail and conference calls. Let me tell you, nice weather wafting through the windows and the iPod on shuffle make for a much more enjoyable working environment than 3 and 3/4 shoulder-high grey fabric walls and a grey desk. In counterpoint to my normal “working from home” days, I actually got a good bit done.

I’m such a procrastinator. It’s an trait I think I developed as a natural second-order effect of my desire to be lazy. I don’t consider my laziness a laziness of thinking, or creating, or reasoning – just a laziness of convenience. When things aren’t what I want to do, I drag my heels. Even when I want something done, but don’t want to put the effort forth to get it done – my laziness steps in and takes over. It’s a bad trait, one that has me constantly putting off things that are simple tasks – but it’s the way I’ve learned to work. In the end it all boils down to being extremely self-centered (I do feel I maintain a line between my self-centeredness and my caring for others before, but I won’t try and make the point here). Anyway, this paragraph doesn’t fit… it’s now over.

Last night our company (remember, my first girlfriend and Sharaun’s college roommate?), Robin, inquired about the whole “blog” thing. And, being that she represented a major milestone in my adolescence, she is fairly well represented here – and I think she was surprised to find that out. Anyway, I ran a search for her name and handed her the laptop. She read through the entry about her birthday, the reminiscing over one of her notes, and the time I cheated on her with her best friend. At some point, she turned to me and asked, “Did you ever think we’d be here, on a couch in California, reading about this?” Hell no I didn’t, not in my wildest dreams. But… I’m glad it worked out that way, kinda cool.

Anyway, in the end she said the entries helped her remember what a dick I was. So, if nothing else, at least the blog serves the purpose of reminding people of my past-dickness. Which is good if I ever want to be inducted into the “Dick Hall of Fame” after my demise. I’ve heard written record of dickdom goes a long way as testimony in the judges eyes, so I figure I’m a lock.

Goodnight folks, love ya all.

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don’t blog for no suits


Another Monday done gone, workin’ for the man.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know that I talk a lot about my work without really talking about where I work or what exactly I do. That’s not gonna change, but I did want to talk about a fairly recent development at “my work” that has caused me to think. At “my work,” the corporate intranet this year added a dedicated space for employee blogging. Much like wordpress.com offers subsites that come preinstalled with the WordPress blogging backend – our corporate blogging area has it’s own custom backend and offers a working blog to any employee who wants to write. Everyone at “my work” can read these company-sanctioned blogs, and from what I can tell – there are no boundaries on content other than the standard stuff like no porn, etc. Meaning, these company-resource-supported blogs don’t force employee bloggers to write about company stuff. In fact, upon browsing many of the employee blogs I’ve noticed the posts are often just as banal and random as my own.

This is where I get to thinking. These blogs are hardly anonymous. Not only do they contain the employee blogger’s name, but the time and date of the posting. Every comment is also timestamped and tagged with the commenter’s name. I browsed these blogs a bit today and found ruminations on clogged gym shower drains, commentary on articles seen on Fark and BoingBoing, and all other sorts of non-workish type content. Not only that, there were employee comments on the stories, and comments and stories alike contained links to non-corporate-intranet URLs. This corporate blogging thing is definitely not for me. Not just because a lot of my content is “gauche” at best, but moreso because I’d worry these employee blogs could be used as accurate records of company time wasted. Why tell everyone you work with that, at 3:23pm on Monday, you were typing about the nice sunny weather rather than whatever the hell you’re actually being paid to do at 3:23pm on Mondays.

I’ll stick to my external blog, thank you. With full knowledge that it’s out there on the internets for anyone to read – but also a guarded tongue at work as far as publicizing it goes. I don’t need the man breathin’ down my neck trying force some “rules” on my blogging. I don’t blog for no suits…

Folks, I have to say I was worried. About what? Why, about this new Thom Yorke album. Yes, I was worried. When I downloaded it, and had run through it once on the iPod, I was worried that I’d be underwhelmed with it. My first impression what that it started and ended strong, but got all blurry and drug-out through the middle bits. Alas, a couple more casual listens didn’t do much to change that initial impression. Then, I got some focused one-on-one headphone time with the album, and things began to get clearer. Swirly keyboards and understated beats, Thom’s sing-song phrasing full of unexpected changes in timing and key… yeah this thing is good. I still think it’s strongest while opening and closing, but now the middle seems more supportive than weighing. It is worth mentioning though, that, in my opinion, this isn’t as good as what these tunes could’ve been would they have been collaborated on by Jonny, Phil, Ed, and Colin.

Anyway – I’m glad it leaked, and boy did it – nearly two months in advance. Following in the tradition of the last Radiohead albums, all of which have leaked considerably prior to street. XL, the label the album will be officially released on, had some interesting things to say about the leak at a recent Eraser listening party:

Given the nature of Radiohead’s audience, and the history of their albums leaking, it has generally happened a lot earlier. Any label at this point expects that an album is going to get leaked. It definitely happened earlier than we had anticipated. I think it [the listening party] would have had a lot more punch if it was truly the first time that anyone had listened to it, but my assumption is most people in the room last night had already heard the record.

Leaks are just a given now, I suppose. I’m not sure there’s a way anymore to not have an album leak prior to street. You can restrict access to the studio during mastering, but things will still have a tendency to fall into the janitors pocket; you can watch the mastering plant where you cut the discs, even the assembly line where you package them; you can even embed digital “fingerprints” into advance listening copies sent to journalists and media outlets – but nothing is gonna stop that thing from making it onto the ‘net before you can buy it in stores. I’d wager that, if there’s any amount of pre-sale interest in an album, that there’s close to a 100% chance a release group will beat the street.

In the midst of an abysmal “funk” at work, I begrudgingly do my work each day, suspended in some perpetual state of limbo while my project gasps and sputters the longest death rattle in recorded history. But, work is work. Lumbering, wounded project or healthy, shiny-new project… it’s what I do for a paycheck. I keep telling myself to just shut up and get done what needs to get done. That kind of tough-love motivation does work, but it doesn’t come close to replacing genuine enthusiasm.

Goodnight my friends.

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or write poetry


Thursday night mofos! Tomorrow I’m attempting to head out of work a bit early to head for the hills and begin our two-day camping trip. Keaton’s 1st multiple-day outdoor experience, I’m pumped. Sitting here watching the TiVo’d finale of the National Spelling Bee, which I’ve been hooked on ever since the year I caught the possessed Rebecca Sealfon on take the crown on ESPN. Now it’s moved to prime-time on ABC and it’s all glitz and glamour, and I love it to death.

Things are work right now are so “maybe, maybe not” that I find my strictly logical mind floundering amidst all the ambiguity. I’m OK at making contingency plans, any good engineer knows that’s key – but making a multi-headed hydra of contingencies and outcomes, each relying on each other to form some twisted, writhing, tangled knot of possibilities is something I don’t enjoy doing. When each action relies on three other actions which all may or may not happen, each with their own “likelihood probability”, my brain immediately tells me, “This is stupid! Something bigger is wrong here if you have to ‘plan’ like this! Stop now and go back to stone-one, figure out where the grand eff-up was and fix it.” Thing is, I think my brain is right. If your “plans” start to sound like the horoscopes in a women’s magazine, where you can interpret them however you want and they say nothing of substance, you’ve got more fundamental problems than just too many variables. In that case the basis of your plans, or your planners, or maybe even your motivations and goals are faulty.

The 411 on your project today…
Embrace the program you’re working on, honesty sparks even more happiness. You’ll have to guard against saying too much today, especially if you get into a conflict with a friend, your guy, or someone you have to work with one-on-one. Avoid the urge to be like Donald Trump. Swallow any tendencies toward pomposity or ambition. Instead, sit around eating ice cream and talking to your friends, invent a new project – or write poetry. This program is full of turbo-charged energy and sweetness, so just ignore any trash-talk you may hear in homeroom. Relax! Remain open to the possibility that a combination of self-sufficiency and outside assistance could work for you.

It’s been far too long since I reviewed some of the better search engine phrases that’ve led folks to this blog. Let’s check some out and try to respond to them where appropriate, shall we?

  • how to keep a mantis prawn as pet
    Easy: Don’t.

  • rebel flag bathing suits
    … look great at Klan rallies?

  • nobody like stevie ray vaughn
    I disagree.

  • origin of the phrase “dry hump”
    Actually, I invented it. It, and all kinds of humping.

  • home remedies for singed hair
    “Remedies?”

  • I think my girlfriend is scamming me
    And the internet is definitely the right place to confirm it.

  • i deserve a beer
    Yes; yes I do.

  • i hate itunes
    Yes; yes I do.

  • forgot moms birthday
    Shamefully, so have I.

Before I go, chew on this: I took the 4,000 spams screenshot on yesterday’s blog at 8:30am on May 31st (according to the file creation time). At that time Akismet had trapped 35,471 comment spams during the time it’d been installed on my blog. Tonight, at 9:12pm on June 1st, a mere ~36hrs later, Akismet has blocked a total of 42,373 comment spams. That means that over span of not even two days, my site was hit with 7,000 spams. At this pace, it’s looking like the 5,000 spams a day record might be less of a “high water mark” and more of the new normal. Praise to Akismet for blocking all but one or two pieces which I’ve had to manually filter.

Goodnight and good-weekend to you, biatches.