awwww! Llamas for sale!

Here’s the funniest thing I’ve read all week, a beautiful, savage skewering of a journalist whose laziness and presumption are a wonder to behold.

Watching Adult Swim and thinking of my sweetie…l’m in a very placid state… nearly floaty. Nag Champa burns while Newt purrs in my lap. I think my mind is about 5 feet to the left of my body. I have the urge to drink something with rum in it, and maybe a paper umbrella.

The trees hide the mountain,
The mountain hides the temple.
Vines’ shade is deep;
Cloud shadows, ragged.
Afar the bell sends off the falling sun.
Weary birds wing homeward
Cold light is sodden
With a smear of mist
I ask the rude monk
Where he wanders ‘neath
The moon morning and evening,
Early and late.
“I come with my lute here
strolling in search of a poem.”

– Hsien-Yu Pi-Jen

Ugh, my spine. Going to the doc tomorrow again to get this ironed out. The weather is shifted a day late… I could use some rain today, not tomorrow, to rest to.

*though of while doing obe meditation, mild rewrite*

On a scrap of typewritten paper –

until the host accepts them completely. Once established they grant the host heightened sensations, but at the cost of inhuman urges. These urges are often more strange than dangerous, but one wonders whether an untrained mind can distinguist between its own thoughts and those slipped through the back door of consciousness. Perhaps they are entirely benign, as the hosts claim, or perhaps the belief that they are benign is merely implanted by the parasites. It is not inconceiveable that they actually learn the mental patterns of their hosts and then devour their minds (and brains), mimicking the now-dead hosts and aquiring complete control of the bodies. A thorough autopsy of a host is obviously necessary, as are neurophysiological experiments on living hosts, but they are extremely secretive about their nature and protective of their dead. Cremation is universal among them.

So far, they have shown no coherent political activity, though perhaps their activities are simply too subtle for us to follow. The only thing that can be called a “policy” is that of paranoid secretiveness, which is understandable even if the beings are benign. Indeed, without projecting astrally, I would never have realized the existance of the Betellians, let alone determining details as to their habits and those of their human hosts.

This paranoid need to protect their identity is what makes me fear for my life.

Argh… going to lay down in a few…while I’m doing the Oso back-rest, you might want to check out this….

Enron actually built a fake trading room on the sixth floor of their Houston HQ. A slick Hollywood production with 36 inch flat panel monitors and faked video conferenced rooms.

According to former Enron employees, on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown headquarters was a set, designed to trick analysts into believing business was booming.

There is a lesson to be learned here for writing conspiracy fiction. The things that are possible with money are more numerous and versatile than you would imagine. Just think, the 7th richest company in the US actually built a Big Store room in their corporate HQ, staffed with legit employees and routinely bamboozled authorities, analysts, reporters and investors with a virtual dog and simulated pony show.

Caught up in the dream, employees voluntarily, even enthusiastically participated in the deception. It was just good business. Sort of like a live-action commercial.

When I wrote about a month ago (I’ll redirect a link later) that no one knew what the heck Enron actually did, this is what I was talking about. Yes, they traded in commodities and futures. Duh. What no one could figure out was how Enron could make so much profit from doing it when everyone else quickly discovered that brokering a trade of vapor for BS results in a percentage of nothing. Gee, maybe we just weren’t doing it right. I guess that’s where the spiffy Enron philosophy and corporate culture and leading edge thinking outside of the box paradigm shifting came in.

I was beginning to suspect that I was getting a bit grandiose with my musings about the Kilroy Org. Now I realize I was thinking small.

freaky,man.
eggs are cool. I like the friendly curry ellie.

mega-tsunamis? I know I’ll be avoiding california and australia for a while. but scotland? 🙁

Stickfas are cool. I’m gonna get some. I fear for their lives, though, given what newt does to army men.

[update – 3/2/03] http://www.printroom.com/ViewAlbumPhoto.asp?userid=scottobear&album_id=57101&image_id=6 (printroom direct links now dead)

more piccies here

I’m glad Newtie’s doing well… I’m having a mildly tough day. I think I’ll spoil myself, get some good delivery food, and slack some, work on writing some fiction, and tweaking that code… take things at my own pace. Minor walkies earlier. My Yahoo and ICQ have been funkier than george clinton’s socks after a 25 mile hike, lately. people appear off and on, including myself. weird.

Gnite!

Me and a Bavarian Elephant toy were drawn today.(I’m the one with the goatee) the rest are older.

Taking the Newtsicle to the vet tomorrow morn… I hope he gets a clean bill of health…I imagine he will. 🙂 Aside from that, my only real duty is laundry.

Online Company-Flamers: Beware

First a woman got fired because of something she said on her web site. Now people are getting sued for posting negative opinions of companies on message boards. What ever happened to free speech?

I’ve had issues with the current “money = justice” legal system since long before the O.J. thing. The whole concept of bogging people down under huge legal fees until they concede makes me think of schoolyard bullies wrestling smaller opponents to the ground and making them eat dirt until they say “uncle”. I also have serious, serious problems with cases where the defendant was not notified they were being sued, so they never showed up in court, and the plaintiff wins by default. It’s all rather Orwellian.

If there’s an issue in the 21st century that’s going to provoke people to start throwing tea into the harbor, this is it. Taxation without representation is nothing compared to litigation without representation.

Heaven help you if you make a comment critical of the media. Considering that a mere six companies (AOL/Time/Warner, Viacom, Newscorp, General Electric, Gannett and Tribune/Times Mirror ) control every major media outlet in the free world, and all of them would suffer major damage to their power base if a serious threat such as trust-busting a la Microsoft (for all the effect that had), they’re all going to band together to insure their power base, even while competing for your incredible shrinking attention span.

What I really want to know is, when did I start becoming a paranoid crackpot? when did this stuff start to really, really scare me and make me want to start lining my ballcap with tin foil? Some of this freaky weird fringe stuff is actually starting to make sense to me. I’m starting to be able to see the Fnords.

ugh… the program I’m working on is evil.

Ugly, craven, mutant code that shuns the light of day, spooks dogs and horses, and makes small children cry out in the dead of a moonless night. Villagers fork the evil eye at the code when they walk down the street, and some day the townsfolk will rally with torches and pitchforks and confront the code in its desolate lair, and drive it from the land of God-fearing folk forever.

But I’ll defeat it. pesky differences between .NET and VBA. bah, humbug.

Baby Llama! – Awwww…

Animal planet rocks… I love watching the tube with my sweetie in the morning.

Newtcam is on
wanna see?

Waiting for my hair to dry. As soon as it does, I’m in the sack.

3D HTML!?Nifty… Using HTML and javascript, these people re-created the math behind a 3D program. And, like all good mathmaticians, they show their work.

Images from Dexter Thursday are here. (also a little pic of my project.)

ahh…white chocolate chip cookies with macadamia nuts. a great ending to the day.

greetings, space brothers, and goodnight

submitting some stories here next… I have a mailing to send out this weekend for my sweetie, too. Tardy Scotto. Get back on schedule.

Newt is clucking very strangely. muh-muh-muh-merrrrr. Nothing outside that I can see. When I went to investigate, wrestling match time… swabs and teef vs giant monster papa hugs.

ZorkBot is an AIM interface for an old text adventure game called Dungeon. This game was the predecessor to the Infocom game Zork which was very popular in the late 1980s. [so yes, maybe it should be called DungeonBot, but Zork has much higher name recognition]

I can only imagine the havoc that a water-cooled laptop computer is capable of wreaking.

A New Zealand phone company sent a bill saying it was charging a man extra for “being an arrogant bastard”.

WCAG in haiku

Fired for having a journal?
This is upsetting because she has never named names, never stated who she worked for. And no, she doesn’t work for the same company I do, and I have never met her. Don’t know her from Eve, but the issue concerns me.

Her first amendment rights have been violated. Period. End of discussion. I hope she sues them into oblivion. They have termitated her for the way she conducts herself in her personal life. They have terminated her because they do not like the opinions she has expressed, outside the workplace… May as well fire her because she runs a pro-Democrat site and the management are all Republicans, or a Baptist site and everyone else are Buddhists. Or because someone went to see her in a play and didn’t like her performance, or went to an art gallery and didn’t like a painting she did. Yes, it’s just that stupid.

Granted, she may be in a “right to work” state. Which, in a seeming contradiction, doesn’t mean you have a right to work. It means employment is a priviledge (“at will”) and the employer can fire you without notice for no reason whatsoever. But according to her, they clearly stated the reason, and it’s just wrong. It’s unethical, even if it were deemed to be legal.

To be fair, balanced, and unbiased, I do wonder if they’re more to the story that Heather’s not telling us — I’d like to talk to her employer to get their side of things, but I’d likely only get a “no comment”… and I’d have to banish them all to the land of wind and ghosts.

happy birthday !!

The mark made a break for it…I took off after him like a seagull in a hurricane. I turned the corner and spotted my man jumping into a cab so I did the same. He led me across town to a little dive on 13th street and got out of his cab. My boy parked up the block and we watched while Walker looked around for a tail. When he was satisfied he’d given me the shake, he went in. I paid off my cabbie and followed. It was another bar, and Walker wasn’t anywhere in the room. I sat down, ordered a beer and waited. After about ten minutes I saw a couple of guys wander out of a door in the back. A couple of minutes later, a couple of more came wandering out, so I wandered in.

It was a small time gambling setup… the kind you can throw into the back of your car if the cops come. I started getting that lousy feeling again. You don’t just walk into a place like that unless someone wants you to…and if they do, it’s usually because they’ve got a fix so you’ll stay around… maybe permanently. It was about that time I became aware of a lumbering hulk behind me… before I could react, a sharp rap on the back of my skull told me that it was naptime.

The Pentagon has decided to close The Office of Strategic Influence. Do you think they’re just spreading disinformation in saying they are closing it? How do we know if an office whose purpose was to tell lies is being honest when they say they are closing?

I’m having a frozen banana for breakfast…I wish I had some chocolate syrup to dip it into, but it’s still a tasty treat on its own. I’m not sure what it is about ‘nanners, but I can eat just one and be really full. I don’t think I could eat more than two in a sitting, even though I could eat twice that amount in most other foods.

Is “tardbucket” a good insult word? I sort of want to call someone a tardbucket.

Speaking of my last entry and being 10 years old… Here’s some selections from the 1980 JC Penny catalog. I actually had a pair of nikes with the wrong-way swoosh (#2, the blue with the gold)

too many meetings at work today! bleh bleh bleh!

tomorrow will be more of the same. I do like having a fresh project to work on though… now it’s just a question of finding out *exactly* what people want and expect of the program.

As this will be internal, a “do what I want, not what I say” client won’t be as much of a problem. (gadzooks…I hope, anyhow)

The back is better today, a minor twinge still, but not enough to be any kind of distraction from my work, fortunately. I forsee walkies being reactivated by thursday or so.

brain is in gearhead mode… producing more code than story-stuff. lovely forms, queries, and variables are coming together in a very pleasing way. Also, Tulpa is blooming as a seed in the back of my head, though. I think I have a better idea of the island where the people live, and the mediterranian culture. I have been hearing and reading a bit about the Romany culture, and I suspect a little of that will find its way into there. is a muse, I admit. is also helping out quite a lot. Thanks!

Rowanda beat out South Florida for the lightning strike capital of earth. We’re number 2!

Scientists cross pigs with spinach?

I’m curious…how many of you guys remember 1979? Like Jimmy Carter, The Energy Crisis, All the gas stations with no fuel?

I was 10 years old then…I didn’t live in Florida yet, but we visited friends there in the keys. I remember carrying a 1978 world almanac with me *all the time* places. It was my source for nifty numbers and information, all kinds of trivia. Within a month that summer… July… I knew the whole book front to back, back to front. I still have a lot of that information locked inside my head, taking up space that phone numbers or some other memory use other folks might have. I sort of wish I had a stronger interest in music or language at that age… science and history was much more appealing to me at the time. I was one of those weirdo kids that actually knew all the presidents and vice presidents from Geroge Washington on, and could tell little goofy factoids about at least the more interesting ones, like Grover Cleveland (who was extra cool to me, because he was named for a muppet and a city in Ohio) being president two different terms, with Benjamin Harrison in between. I remember wanting John Anderson to win the 1980 election, because I didn’t like Reagan or Carter…it was the first year that I paid attention to elections and ad campaigns, though I didn’t understand very much of it. I thought the debates were interesting, and remember asking my Dad about Ayatollah Khomeni, and why the hostages were taken in Iran.

Weird, what flashes back, spinning off of the back of my skull… I remember news reports telling what day it was with the hostages… day 59, day 134, day 332. it lasted longer than a year.

Well, I’m going to bed… maybe to dream of my sweetheart and I as kids, running around, and goofing. Sweet dreams, dear journal, and wish me the same.