All sorts of stuff floating around the 'net today, while I wait for Ry to return from picking Jim up from work, I thought I'd share a few shorts with you:

Manny has imparted me with this bit of wisdom.

kd has a beautiful new look, MoveableType 2.0 looks pretty nice.

A beautiful economic discussion about the value of a skyscraper, a person, and a person's penis is afoot over at Faith's place by Dave and I.

Davezilla continues the sacrilege over on his site.

Finally, we may have someone to take Michael's place over the summer... Candice (fellow blountie) needs a place to live and it looks like it would be a good fit. Yay for us!

Every friday I'm going to answer the five questions posted by Heather at The Friday Five and post the answers here. Feel free to answer for yourself in my comments box or on your own site...

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Danger, Will Robinson! Morons at twelve-o'clock! (link courtesy of Jenn at Always the Freak, courtesy of Bad in a Good Way).

The above article, entitled "College Girls: Unpaid Whores" (yes, now go back and click the link...) is written by a Cornell University Ph.D. candidate, and self-obsessed zealot, Joseph Sabia. It would take the better part of a novel to cover ALL of the reasons why this particular individual is full of excrement, so I'll just hit the thoughts that come to mind.

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It's kinda sad, really. My previous post talked about the hoop-la (pardon the pun) caused by a certain project put together by a certain Hoopty. I've been reading (on a fairly regular basis) participants in the electronic shouting match. I'm not going to post names or links to individuals to fuel the fire, but it's sad to have respect for people, their writing, and their ideas, only to have those same people almost impolde when criticized. A fair number of people (though not even close to all of them) have shown such tremendous immaturity when dealing with "the other side of the coin" and criticism, that I wonder if their wonderful writing, their popularity, their apparent maturity, isn't just how they are on the "happy days" when people agree with them. We all know people like that... online or off... that are great to have around, as long as you don't disagree with them. But the point isn't that people shouldn't disagree... from conflict comes growth, but when it's over... it's over. Is it REALLY worth a huge "fuck you" and "let's forget we were ever friends"? Maybe. My feeling now, though, is that the people saying "You're either for me, or against me" didn't change... it just took a situation like this that started out on such petty terms, to bring to light the true content of their character.

I've decided that my left pinky is, indeed, broken. How did I come to this conclusion? My finger is turning purple, though rather slowly. I'm down to probably 25% range-of-motion, and pressure on the finger doesn't hurt in the top two thirds of the finger or any of the joints. So what does that mean? It's not dislocated. Dislocation would hurt mainly at the joint... and my finger joints don't hurt in the least. However, squeezing the bit of finger between my hand and my first knucke produces a pretty substantial, and rather sharp, pain. Oh well, at least it's cool looking. If it starts getting much worse I'll probably go get someone with a Ph.D. to look at it. I wonder if Dr. Summers knows anything about medicine. Speaking of my favorite Professor, here are some quotes from class this week that I thought y'all might enjoy:

"We would never have a formal wedding without the throwing of, uhhhh, stuff."

"I'm just glad that there's a biological clock in the women. When that clock goes off, men, nothing will save you. She'll have her two kids."

"What kind of cigarettes do women advertise? <prissy voice> Virginia Slims </prissy voice> you konw, the dainty ones. Not Marlboros. <gruff voice> No, you have to be on a horse to smoke a Marlboro. </gruff voice>"

I had the pleasure of running my first Circle K meeting tonight. It went well, I suppose. I only started 3 minutes late. Prior to Circle K, Abby and I cooked dinner. She brought the vegetable and went and got sweet tea for us. That was pretty cool. After Circle K, my pal Kristi was kind enough to fix me a wonderful Pina Colada... yum! Thanks Kristi and Abby. Y'all rock.

Well... that's all for tonight... but, damnit, sign the friggin' guestbook if you've not done that yet. :)

Lots and lots of randomness going through my head today, try to keep up. :)

A bit ago, after being casual online acquaintances, one Katie Sherman and I had a disagreement which was caused by a misunderstanding, followed by an inability for her to stick to one topic at a time. It seems that she was just infatuated with taking one point and twisting it in such a way that she could have a valid reply (thereby making it invalid), but I digress. She asked that I never speak to her again. Hehe... I wish my world were that simple... someone disagree with you? *poof* they don't exist any more. ANYWAY... her new site is up. The journal is password protected so that evil people like me can't read it. She's redone one of her site skins, the "primary colors" skin has changed from having annoyingly bright, pure primary colors on it, to having altered colors. In fact, they've been altered to look almost indentical to mine. Observe:

Have you ever wondered if a group of Americans exists that believes in their own petty cause so blindly that they'd be willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of innocent Americans to protect it? Of course there is. This group is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). While I appreciate the ACLU's contributions to our civil rights when it comes to cyberspace, most of the time I think their stances on issues are just silly. Welcome to another fine example of the ACLU not being able to see the forest for the trees.

This CNN article talks about a new Airport screening tool that is essentially a strip-search. The computer uses low-level x-rays to see through clothing and get a pretty graphic image of a person's body. Now, you can bet that some damn liberal is going to be up in arms over an invasion of privacy, etc. and they are.

Barry Steinhardt, one of the head zealots at the ACLU, is quoted in the article as saying "We don't need to use this technology. In fact, we don't even need to test it. We know it works, it works too well. " It works too well. Too well? Can anything possibly "work too well" when it comes to detecting weapons on passengers boarding a plane? Frankly, I don't think anything can work well enough. Let's get to the real meat of the complaint. Later in the article, Steinhardt says "This will become mandatory. People will be embarrassed."

I. Don't. Care. Be embarassed. Be HUMILIATED. Or don't fly. Go back in time and find ANYONE who's lost his or her life on a plane due to some short-coming in airport security. Ask them "Would you rather be embarassed, and still alive; or dead." Wanna guess what their answer would be? How quickly we forget 9/11. I'm all for civil rights, but in cases like this, you've got to realize that the right of 5,000 people not to die greatly outweighs your "right" not to be embarassed.

Of course, what do you expect... the ACLU is the group that would go to war to keep the US from implementing a security system like Israel's that employs racial profiling to identify high-risk passengers. Yeah, that'd be terrible, wouldn't it? That's not the only difference between Israel's Airport Security and ours, though... Israel's track record is PERFECT. Only one Israeli flight has ever beeh hijacked, and the culprit wasn't even allowed on the Plane by Israeli Air officials... he got on the flight at a connection.

My point is simply this: how can you claim to be protecting the rights of American citizens, when your plans would endanger the most basic and fundamental right, the right to life?

Eight games played today, six correct picks. The two that I got wrong were the two I figured I would. Maybe I should second guess my picks round by round BEFORE I turn them in. At any rate, my pick percentage fell only slightly to 77.5% (31/40) and my two miss-picks weren't bad ones to miss.

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Petey faired pretty well in the Tourney today. 16 games played, 14 correct picks. Nice. That brings my first round percentage to 78.1% (25/32) not too shabby for a guy who doesn't watch much college basketball unless Bama is on TV. For those of you keeping up with the tournament through these posts, read on... if you don't care about basketball, come back some other time.

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