First entry--
Notice that unlike most online journals, these entries are chronological. First comes first, and you'll have to scroll down to get the latest info. That's how it goes.

Peace out.

I figured out, in part, what it is I want to say in this journal. At home, my significant other dislikes me talking trash. I'll talk trash about just about anyone on television. The way I see it, if they can't hear me badmouth them, who the hell cares? But to promote domestic harmony, I'm going to have to stop being so negative at home.

What does this all mean for you readers? You get all my vitriol, all my bile and negativity. You can't keep all that shit inside forever.

Let's talk politics.

Last night was the sole debate of the vice-presidential candidates: John Edwards, from my home state of North Carolina, and Dick Cheney, from Halliburton Inc. In the interest of full disclosure, let me start by giving credit where it's due. Dick Cheney is a smart guy. But he's a jerkoff and a hawk. He kept saying that John Kerry had "voted on the wrong side" for the whole time he's been involved in politics. How fucking arrogant--as if the "right side" were whatever side Cheney happened to support. What really got me was that he had the gall to mention El Salvador as a place where the US had helped to bring democracy. That might be said of Iraq, too, but if you install a dictator and then take him down, that's a zero-sum game. Not a victory.

On the bright side, Edwards was a great speaker. Not too surprising, coming from an experienced trial lawyer. I was especially happy to see him attack Cheney's fallacies without letting them slip away unnoticed. I really would have liked to see him ask about what the "wrong side" meant.

Enough about politics. Nobody I like ever makes it past the primaries.

What else can I pass judgment on? This is my forum. This is the place where I can say what the fuck I want.
Ah . . . I thought of something.
Topic: Women's Fashion
Discuss among yourselves. Items to consider: capri pants, flares, ponchos.

By the way, I'm now trying out the style code from Wallace's blog

Okay, I don't know what the fuck is going on, but the "deadrabbit.net" domain just up and disappeared. Where the hell did it go? How do domains work here at metawire.org? How is "Go Daddy" allowed to take a domain that is currently in use? I'm asking all of these questions to myself, since no one can access my goddamn web site.

On an unrelated note--
I saw "21 Grams" last night. Pretty good, albeit dark. I like this Naomi Watts girl. She's becoming the newest indie queen: "Mulholland Drive" (first one I saw her in), "The Ring," (not exactly indie, but cool nonetheless), "21 Grams," and now "I [Heart] Huckabees" which hasn't even hit theatres here yet. Naomi Watts is too good-looking to be in just independent films. It kinda throws me off.

And in still other entertainment news, last night I saw "South Park" featuring the journey of Lemmiwinks the gerbil, through a gay man's intestinal tract. I never thought I'd see that on television.

RIP Christopher Reeve. From the nytimes:

Notably absent from the article was mention of his appearance in "South Park," in which he overcomes his paralysis by cracking open fetuses and sucking out their juices. The other day I mentioned to my girlfriend that I'd never expected to see a gerbil inserted into a man's ass on Comedy Central, and she responded, "don't you remember the episode with Christopher Reeve? That was more disgusting."
Ah, indeed it was. But it didn't involve gay sex, so wasn't as controversial.

I may as well mention that I am no longer on Arbornet, Metawire, or any other free hosting service. I shelled out the dough to have my own domain, my own hosting service, and it feels good. Yet no one even knows this page exists. In time, in time.

Pretty soon I'm going to have some links to past and current interests. Right now, I'm interested in wavelets.
Here's a link to A Really Friendy Guide To Wavelets. Any bets on how long before the link breaks? Ah, the ephemeral nature of the world wide web.
Why, you might ask, do I give a shit about wavelets? Well, primarily because you can do some really cool signal analysis and denoising with wavelets. I'll post some pictures soon. I'm all about multimedia.

I feel like I was a slow bloomer in many respects. At this particular moment, I'm thinking about academics. I've always been a curious person, and generally did well in school, but I think some of my education was a little mixed up. You know how teachers are supposed to start with simple concepts and then build on those concepts towards greater complexity? Well, I think I was missing several important pieces when I first learned physics and math.

I didn't really feel math was useful or relevant to me until I took a course in Differential Equations. That was the first time I got to do math problems that were real-life, rather than contrived examples. Remember the gravitational acceleration on earth? 9.8 m/s/s. Ever done a physics problem where you assume no air resistance? It's all bullshit. A person falling from a plane reaches a certain terminal velocity, rather than continuing to accelerate until they smash into something or open a parachute.

You know what would be cool, though? If there was no air resistance, you could become a human missile. Japanese kamikazes could just jump out of planes from high altitude, and then guide themselves to hit a battleship. With that kind of velocity, you'd go right through steel.

Getting back to reality--if there were no air resistance, we wouldn't be able to fly planes at all. Maybe a blimp would still work . . . but certainly not a parachute.

Another thing I should mention--
Some people are purists, and think that online journal entries (aka blog posts) should never be edited once they are online. I do not feel that way. I will edit with impunity, both for factual errors as well as plain whimsy.

A couple of examples: I originally spelled Christopher Reeve's surname incorrectly, with an "s" at the end. That has been fixed. And I originally said I'd first seen Naomi Watts in "Lost Highway" when it was in fact "Mulholland Drive." Whatever. They're both David Lynch movies.

All right. After lots of work and a crash course in Cascading Style Sheets, I finally have a presentable site. Other features coming soon. Possibly comments. I may put up some sort of email address, but it will probably be an image of the address to thwart all those email-harvesting spam-bots.

Oh, and by the way--Clarian is Gator is Spyware is Malware.
They could prolly sue me for saying that, but I believe there was just a law passed making spyware illegal. So suck on that, Gator!

Two things I thought of last night:
Kid Bop (or something of the sort) where a chorus of children sing the latest pop songs right out of "NOW that's what I call music volumes 1-78". It was disturbing enough when they sang the Baha Men torch song "Who Let the Dogs Out?", but I had to expell horrible thoughts from my head when I heard the Kid Bop chorus singing Britney Spears's "Toxic." Small children dressed up like sexy stewardesses . . . Makes me a bit ill.
The other thing was a word I couldn't think of. I was watching a VH1 or E! special on reality shows, and some of the contestants were complaining about how the producers would lie to them to get them on the show. Later, we were watching "Crossballs," created by Matt Besser of the Upright Citizens' Brigade. It's a debate formatted show with a moderator, but for any given issue there are pundits from either side who don't realize the whole show is a farce. In pondering whether these unsuspecting people were able to sue the show once they discovered its true nature, I tried to think of a word that would describe those people. I want a synonym for "Unsuspecting Victim of a Humiliating Joke," but nothing came to mind. Later my girlfriend suggested "butt" as in "butt of a joke," and I speculated that if the people were being conned they were "marks", but neither of those were really what I was looking for. In the English language, we have all sorts of special words for people who are victims of some kind (such as "mark" and "butt"). There's also "patsy," "scapegoat," "whipping boy" and many other wonderful words for special kinds of victims. We even have two words for the victim of sodomy: catamite (usually the small child kept by a pedophile) and punk (though nowadays no one uses the word that way) as well as gay culture's "bottom," although I doubt that bottoms consider themselves victims, per se.
Anyone know what to call someone who is humiliated?

Had to go to traffic court this morning.

Apparently there is no defensive driving option in Oregon to reduce the insurance cost. Goddamn insurance. Just today in the NY Times there was an article describing the fradulent practices of insurers in New York, who engaged in price-fixing schemes with other companies. How is it possible for insurance companies to discriminate against people based on their gender, age, etc.? Aren't we protected from that sort of discrimination? If I were an employer, and I told an applicant,

"Sorry, but we can't accept you here because you're a woman, and our actuarial staff tells us you have a higher probability of leaving the work force to raise a family. It's just too much of a risk. We'll hire you for half-salary or else you can look for employment at some other business."

Methinks someone would get sued for saying that. It would be completely different if insurance were an option, but it isn't optional to have many types of insurance. I believe Workman's Compensation is required. Auto insurance is required if you want to legally drive. Health care is too expensive to afford without insurance, so you can either pay the extortion cost or risk catastrophe.

From an old commercial for State Farm (I think):
In a class for insurance training, the instructor is barking out questions in a call-and-response.

INSTRUCTOR: What do we say?
CLASS: We say NO!
INSTRUCTOR: What do we do?
CLASS: Deny the claim!

State Farm was using the commercial to contrast themselves with the "other" insurance companies, but the day I see an honest insurance company is the day I see an honest politician.

Fuck 'em all.

Can you tell I'm in a rotten mood? Going to court will do that to you.

By the way, I am still working on the site layout. There will be a fixed bar on the left, but everything else will scroll. Let me know if you like it, if you know my email address.

It's been a hectic few days. You might even say frenetic. But the week is more than halfway over . . . I'm hoping to see "Team America: World Police" this weekend.

Last night I saw "Eating Raoul," recently released on DVD. Ever since my poor VCR crapped out, I can only watch DVDs, and I'd actually been waiting awhile to see this film. It's always in the "cult" section with "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" and other strange films. From the cover graphic, I had no idea what to expect, but the movie was over-the-top. The opening narration talked about the corruption of Hollywood, and how sexual appetites and hunger for food are becoming blurred . . . sexy commercials advertising ice cream or hot dogs and such. In the movie, a couple (Paul and Mary Bland) want to start a country restaurant. Paul is a wine connessieur (is that how it's spelled? Damned French) who is forced to work in a liquor store, and he is fired for refusing to sell a customer a bottle of Mountain Brook wine ($1.50 a bottle), a cheapo wine that he claims made him sick. Mary is a nurse. Paul and Mary are squares in a hedonistic, early-80s Los Angeles, and Mary is constantly attacked by "swingers" who try to rape her. (Mary and Paul sleep in separate beds, by the way, and seemingly never have sex.) After Paul accidentally kills a swinger who is molesting Mary, the couple decide that killing these no-good swingers is a way they can finance their dream of a country restaurant.

Anyway, the movie was outrageous and entertaining, and would have surely been more entertaining if I had been older than a toddler in 1982. The whole thing is a satire of a culture I've only read about.

Oh, so in the absence of writing entries, I've been busy fixing up the site. The Archives page is now functional, and things work better in general. Anyone out there reading this? If so, do you know my email address? I need a "Contact Me" page with a sneakemail address.

Also on the cathode ray tube last night . . .
On A&E's "City Confidential" they covered the murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair in Austin in 1995 or so (made nostalgic for my Austin days). What a character. This country owes her a debt of gratitude. Without her, we'd still have to pray and read the Bible in school. I'm all for optional prayer, but forcing God on people is uncool.

Choice quotes from America's Most Hated Woman, from a Playboy interview:

From the New Scientist this morning:

So these biometrics actually have significance other than letting the government identify you by iris / fingerprints / whatever? Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Does this mean there's some validity to that old myth about foot / penis ratio?

I don't often read Indymedia, because a lot of it is stuff so radical it doesn't even interest me. But the other day I downloaded a program to subscribe to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so I can see what the latest news stories are without ever visiting the web site. That makes it a lot quicker to find something interesting. And even Fark has RSS feeds, so I don't have to look at all the animated gifs of girls wearing advertisements directly on their breasts. Although I admit that that low tactic is remarkably effective at getting me to look at the ad in the first place.

But to get back to my story . . .
I actually did read Indymedia today, and as usual it gave me a scare. The quote comes from this story (a repost) from the arkansas branch.

Oh, did I mention that I'm a member of the American Friends Service Committee? I guess that means I provide material support to terrorists, huh? Which brings me to the other thing I wanted to mention.

You may have heard that Indymedia had their servers stolen from both the US and UK, from recent reports. This next story is a followup, in which Indymedia asks: "Who took our servers?"

They later speculate whether the "third country" was perhaps Switzerland or Italy, but the bottom line is that this was a covert operation of some sort. I know it's not 100% protection from seizure, but this was my reasoning for choosing a hosting company located in Vancouver, BC. They assured me they would not turn over any files without a Canadian court order. Seeing as I'm now probably on a watch list because of my contributions to a pacifist organization, it does make me feel more secure knowing my data is on Canadian soil. How sad is that? I have more faith in a foreign government to protect me than the government that I vote for. I'm not saying that I voted for the ones that won the elections, just that the US is the country in which I vote.

If I haven't been writing, it's not because there is nothing to write about but because I'm too damn busy to write.

Something to ponder:
Why is it that with all the contractions in the english language, including a ton that contract the word "not," we have no grammatically correct contraction for "am not". You can say "I'm not" (correct), or "I ain't" (incorrect), but at least in the US no one says "amn't". Why not? And why isn't "ain't" correct? My only guess is because "ain't" can also mean "aren't" and "isn't" as well. But when I watched "The Crying Game" again recently, I saw one of the characters say "amn't" (pronounced "am-int").

Think about it. English needs an "amn't."

So this will likely be the last entry in October. Then I plan to move all October entries to an archive page. Details still need to be worked out.

Oh, and by the way, Internet Explorer sucks. This is nothing new, but I thought I'd point it out because IE totally garbles this web page, even though it works fine on Mozilla, Safari, Firefox . . . haven't tried OmniWeb, Opera, or any of the smaller browsers, but I'll bet on OmniWeb it works fine. If you, for whatever inexplicable reason, use IE to browse this site, I highly recommend visiting the image-free version, which is slightly less awful looking. But I don't always sync the main page with the image-free one, so beware of the lag.

Now that the administrative bullshit is over, let me comment on something more interesting. Today is the company Halloween party, and I am dressed as Gomez Addams. I've grown a moustache for the past 3 weeks or so, and am eager to finally shave it off after the party. But I'll take plenty of pictures, first. I had to get a cigar, a black tie, and some spray-on black hair coloring. I had thought that Target carried about everything, but they not only didn't have a black tie, they also didn't have any sort of Halloween makeup. I had to go to Fred Meyer's. Hear that, Target? You lost my business because of poor selection. So sad.

I am such a slacker when it comes to Halloween. It's uncomfortable to be in a costume, usually. I don't even have my jacket on, but I'm sweating just sitting here at my desk. How the hell do the businessmen do it everyday? If I were ever a CEO, the fashionistas would either say I was a trend-setter or else a fashion disaster, because I have no patience for fancy dressup. If the suit makes it hard for me to bike, then there's something wrong with it. Why do we (society in general) allow ourselves to have our dress dictated by women and gay men? And the occassional straight man that slips past the gay mafia to gain employment in the fashion industry?

Tina Fey's awesomely funny movie Mean Girls got it right about high school Halloween in the US. The girls take the opportunity to dress like sluts, not like scary monsters. At least the preppy girls.

At my high school (the first one), there were few divisions of people. We had honors-track preppy kids, who wore braided belts and polo shirts and khaki pants made by "Duck Head," and there were the semi-delinquent "hoods," and plenty of rednecks thrown in the mix to make it interesting. I guess I hung out with everyone, superficially, and had about three or four really close friends. But they did a pretty good job segregating students based on their academic abilities, so I had few classes with the non-honors kids.

There were two exceptions: PE and ELPSA. Everyone ought to know PE is Physical Education, but ELPSA was an acronym unique to our school, I believe. It stood for "Economic, Legal, and Political Systems in Action" and should have been called "Civics" except they threw in some economics. In that environment, surrounded by a bunch of kids who regularly got Cs or below in class, I acted up quite a bit. It didn't help that my friend Ian (pronounced EYE-in) was one of my classmates. He was a smart kid that unfortunately lived in a trailer, and whose mom was chronically ill with some "blood disease," probably lupus, in retrospect. Ian was my neighbor, and we were both picked up by the schoolbus at the end of my (long) driveway.

Anyway, Ian was always talking about "purple weasels" and "orange gophers" and much other nonsense. He and another kid in the ELPSA class (named Shannon) would give people titty-twisters and call it a "tricky fun." There were many types of "fun," including a "special fun" and a "fun fun." One of them involved poking people with a sharp leaf from a holly bush. No one was ever injured from a "fun." Shannon and Ian would compete with each other to get the lowest grades on a multiple choice test. For the short answer section, they would write-in phrases like "Fruit Loops" or "Trix" in response to questions like "What was the name of Adam Smith's theory about economic forces?"

I left that school in the middle of 10th grade. At the end of my senior year of high school, I heard that Ian had contracted testicular cancer. I saw him once more after that. He'd had one testicle removed, and joked that he planned to get a T-shirt that said "One-Ball Wonder." Unfortunately, they caught the cancer too late and it spread to his brain and killed him by Christmas.

I wish that were the end of the depressing story, but in fact there is more. Besides his mother and father, Ian left behind two younger brothers, Adam and Ben, who were still prepubescent when Ian died. About a year later, Ian's parents both died in a murder-suicide. I know no details about it, but as I said before, his mom was slowly dying. That left Adam and Ben with no parents and no brother, and it all happened in a space of less than two years.

I think that's the most tragic story I know. Fitting for the Halloween season.