Someone out there in desperate-land has written a bot to spam blogs with comments having links to online poker sites. I just deleted 497 of them. I’ve added “poker” and “casino” to my nuke list, so don’t put those words in any comments you want to see posted here. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to get the football from my aid and push the big red button marked “boom.”
The bad news is that I’ve been sitting in the same position for so long, my ass aches.
I was pretty frickin’ productive today. My butt was super-glued to my chair for six-and-a-half hours while I was a code rock star.
Thank god I’m done with that.
Uuuugh. It’s 9 p.m. and the house is still in the mid-80s. Of course, that beats the solid 106 – in the shade – we pulled yesterday.
Man, I’ll tell you what: I’ll take forty below and howling over this sticky, windless broiling any day.
Well, it’s happened. Youtube has officially proven that four of five school-aged girls in the U.S. are brain dead zombies.
Or not. You be the judge.
Sometimes I just get fed up. Sometimes, I have to send an e-mail. Most of the time, I fire my missive into cyberia, then forget it, but every once in a while, I wait by the side of my inbox, refreshing my bloglines account every fifteen seconds to see if I have been heard; if I have made a difference.
Here’s one of the later I fired off today to Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle:
Subject: Writing is a bitch…
…and I’m rather sure you knew that when you started, and probably know it even more now. The good news is that you’re a rather talented, very entertaining writer. The bad news is that you’ve fallen prey to one of my pet peeves. The worse news is that it’s break time at work, I’ve finished all the brownies I made (from scratch, according to grandma’s recipe) last night while drunk, and I feel like I have to make my literary world a little better.
Here’s an example of your transgression: “…fighting valiantly against the vagaries of time and gravity to keep you going until, well, until it can’t anymore.” The main problem is the “well.” This is, in my humble-yet-correct opinion, an example of a tired and sloppy mechanism that writers use to seem cute when they’ve run out of cute.
Here’s how to fix the problem: stop it. Write what you mean. Don’t be cute if you’re not cute because a) we don’t really give a fuck if you’re cute because you’re usually right; 2) cute takes away from the message like a shi-tzu defending a junkyard (see what I mean?); finally: every half-assed blogger on the planet is doing the “blah blah, well, blah blah” dance, and they don’t even get paid. Take advantage of your talent, instinct, good fortune and liquor cabinet and find the right words to say what you mean.
Don’t fall back on cliche. Fall back on the couch after you’ve exhausted yourself kicking ass.
Yours,
-aj
Unfortunately, this guy and I share the same kind of boat luck. But it’s hilarious to read about.
Our house was invaded this weekend. Twice.
First, a family of fat, dumb mice decided to come out of hiding and thumb their noses at our fatter, dumber cats. At one point, Meg and I watched incredulously as what surely must have been the world’s fattest mouse literally dragged it’s sagging belly in a complete circle around Sassafras, and then in a final kiss-my-ass salute, it actually crawled across her paws while she did nothing but sit there, motionless, watching.
Finally, our gay transvestite cat, Zeta, came to the rescue. After living at the Flying W ranch for four years, he finally hiked up his skirt and showed the other cats how it was done and wiped out two mice in one evening.
The next evening, Meg and I were firmly planted in front of the TV, getting our dose of head crack (that’d be season two of “24″) when the cats (who are at least good for this one thing) alerted us to our second invasion. Because we live in a crappy old, falling-down, piece of crap house, things occasionally go wrong. Say, like the roof leaking, saturating 70-year-old plaster that then succumbs to gravity leaving a gapping hole into the ‘tween-floors crawl space that’s attached to the gapping hole in the rotted soffits by a lot of dark, musty air. The sort of dark musty air that grackles just love.
We stood up to investigate, only to have a grackle smack into the upstairs door’s window. I immediately started planning how I was going to beat the bird into a pulp with the kitchen broom, then stuff its tenderized remains back in the attic and forget the whole thing.
Meg, thinking a little more rationally, went around to the front of the house and opened the door, let the bird out, then cleaned the bird shit off the stairs.
So the kid and I are having Saturday morning in my office, playing with computers. He’s sitting in his chair banging on a keyboard and mouse and moving all sorts of crap around in Linux. I’m sitting in my chair, banging just on my keyboard, and moving all sorts of crap around in Linux, too. That works out pretty well for both of us.