Blotto Grotto

Greatest equine snack product ever

2007-07-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

This is blowing my mind. There is a snack product for horses called Uncle Jimmy's Hangin' Balls. "Your horse will spend hours trying to lick and grab these balls."

Link.

In case you haven't noticed, this blog has been pretty quiet lately. If this poses a problem, might I kindly refer you to one of the seven bajillion other tacky blogs that litter the Internet.

I guess there's a chance that I might pick this stanky football (by which I mean blog) up again and run with it this fall, but if I were a betting man I'd head to Vegas and blow it all on a sweet game of craps. That's not to say I won't resume regular screeding at some point; mainly I guess I just wanted to work the words "stanky" and "craps" into this paragraph. Probably I could have executed my "stanky/craps" combo more smoothly, but fuck it, like Rhyming Ghost Shakespeare said, "to thine own self be true, foo'." Doing so means amusing myself with the least effort possible, craps craps craps,

stankily,
Mike

Entrepreneur-turned-pundit confronts fact that pundits are a dime a dozen, writes book about it

2007-06-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ho ho! What's up readers? I know it's been a while since I've come at you with any fresh musings, but fuck it, life goes on, huh? The overwhelming irrelevance of my protracted silence on this here “blog” (a word that I still hate, by the way) suggests that -- holy shit, Batman -- hack punditry and cheap dick jokes are easy to come by, which makes them something of a low-cost, bulk commodity. There's plenty to go around, which is why no one gets worked up when one of the many trillions of bright shining stars in the “blogosphere” ceases to twinkle. Basic economics dictates that talk is cheap, because there's so much of it -- we are talking junior high level supply and demand theory here -- and today's post is about a dude who wrote a book that misses this very point.

The dude in question is Andrew Keen, an entrepreneur who bit it during the dotcom bubble of the late nineties, and eventually went on to develop a deep skepticism of “Web 2.0” (a phrase that I hate even more than the word “blog”). Full of profound things to say on the subject, he recently wrote a book. Here's a snippet from a New York Times review of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture:

Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”

Mr. Keen's arguments would be perfectly cromulent if not for the fact that virtually every single one of his criticisms applies to the mainstream media as well. Superficial observations -- like softball human interest stories masquerading as news? Shrill opinion -- what, like Nancy Grace asking a guest why we don't all move to Nazi Germany because he suggested that there may very well be reasonable doubt in the Duke rape case? Content as mere dressing for advertising -- seriously, is this guy oblivious to commercial breaks, ubiquitous product placement, and tech stories that read like paid ads?

I'm not saying that a bunch of stupid twits like me waving their dicks around on the Internet is a perfect system -- quite the contrary. It's deeply flawed, but it's following a road of defects blazed by the mainstream media. The reason the mainstream media is suffering isn't because a grossly inferior product is presenting a cheap and easy alternative -- it's because the Internet has greatly lowered the cost of creating and distributing a shitty product in the first place, thereby lowering the cost of entry to the “shitty news and hack punditry” marketplace.

(And if you think that the last sentence reflects a lower level of discourse than professional media, I remind you it's apparently okay for the "real" media to suggest that torture should be a televised sport. The Internet may be a bit crass more crass than some of our paid and syndicated pundits, but not by much.)

This lowered cost of entry is the same reason we're getting more and more of our entertainment from “amateur” content. It's a one percent kind of thing. Let's say one percent of Americans are musicians. And let's say that of those musicians, one percent are actually worth listening to at all. That's only one one-hundredth of a percent of all Americans that create music worth listening to. But .01% of 300 million Americans equates to 30,000 people that make decent music. Most of these amateurs will never make a top 40 list, but that doesn't mean they're not worth a listen. Hell, right now I'm listening to a garage band that I've never heard of before yesterday, and they sound absolutely awesome. Better than most of the tripe on commercial radio. The problem for artists like this isn't “Web 2.0,” it's obscurity.

Here's Keen's take on the economic implications of all these bangin' new technologies that lower the cost of entry for content creators: “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred.”

Oh, good God, no! Was Mr. Keen raising a stink like this when robots cost Detroit auto workers their jobs? I've got some sour news -- that's capitalism for you, dude. Adapt or die. Just because an entity has historically made money off a particular product or service does not automatically entitle that entity to continue making money in the face of a more competitive alternative. After so many years of trying to cater to their customers' desires for soft news and insipid entertainment, media conglomerates are finding out that their customers are actually pretty good at coming up with stupid, insipid shit themselves.

And that's what it all comes down to. Punditry, opinion, half-assed reporting, and base entertainment are easy to come by. No scarcity equals low intrinsic value. All the Internet is doing is destroying an artificial economy that used to exist because of the previously high barriers for distributing shitty content. If old media companies want to adapt, they should man up and create a superior product.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. If you're particularly interested in the book, you can read a section of it Mr. Keen's website. Finding his website is left as an exercise for the reader, because I'm a lazy, unpaid, hack pundit and also I hated the Flash interface necessary to read the excerpt of his book. I suppose you might use that upstart “new winner” Google to find his website and buy his book, thereby generating income for Mr. Keen and helping to fill the shoes of the industries that Google is undermining. Huh.

Sincerely,

Mike

ps: Could this dude have come up with a less “Web 2.0” example than Craigslist? Seriously, it got its start in about 1995, with it's present incarnation dating back to the late nineties.

pps: Here's some sweet user-created content, a picture of a baby bird that I took. I'm posting it here to undermine Getty images, who I otherwise would have paid to use a stock photo. Take that, old economy!

Goddamn motherfucking Chicago Tribune

2007-06-17T08:25:00.000-07:00

Usually when I use the phrase "goddamn motherfucking" as an adjective for a newspaper, I'm describing The New York Times. However, today I uttered this phrase in reference to the Chicago Tribune for the first time ever.

I happened to peep last Thursday's Tribune, which had a cover story on the recently discovered gigantoraptor. Like all good newspapers, it used a pun in the headline: "Big bird joins cast of dinosaur fossils." (Get it? Get it? Like Big Bird, like, from the cast of Sesame Street? Get it?) It also used a puntastic subhead: "Giant flies in face of evolution theory." Great pun, but less overwhelmingly fantastic.

It's unclear whether or not the subhead is meant to refer to our theory of how birds evolved in the first place, or the theory of evolution in general. It's the kind of sloppy writing that gives fodder to creationist dudes. And at any rate this fossil really doesn't fly in the face of anything. I mean, maybe if it dated to the Cambrian period and was fossilized alongside a jetpack, sure, then it would be totally flying in the face of evolutionary theory, but right now it's merely just in your face, no flight involved.

A much better subhead would have read, "Gigantic dino-bird thought to have been totally fearsome; is now in your face."

Additional rumination on legitimacy

2007-05-22T10:03:00.000-07:00

You know you're legit when you've got an entire folder on your hard drive devoted exclusively to storing pictures of double guitars. ("You know those guitars that are, like, double guitars?")

Further updates as events warrant.

-Mike

Rembrandt and the Vikings

2007-05-03T06:56:00.000-07:00

Idea for movie:

Rembrandt, walking alone down a road one night, encounters a rip in the space time continuum. This phenomenon was caused by lightning striking a painting of a wormhole that he had done. As he stares in awe, a bunch of sweet Vikings come through the wormhole.

Initially, it looks like the movie will be a wacky "fish out of water" concept as the Vikings constantly blaze up in Amsterdam's red light district while Rembrandt paints a new wormhole to get them home. However, when the Vikings attempt to return home through the new wormhole, one of them forgets his baby and so Rembrandt has to jump through the wormhole with the baby just before it (the wormhole) closes.

After passing through the wormhole, Rembrandt discovers that they're not in Vikingland at all, the year is 1861 and they're in the middle of the Civil War! Rembrandt and the Vikings are forced to choose sides amidst the heat of battle.

Fortunately, even though Stonewall Jackson is wailing on the Union, and General Grant's soldiers are succumbing to gout and amputation at a terrifying rate, Rembrandt and the Vikings choose wisely and team up with the Union to turn the tide of the battle.

From here on out the movie takes a decidedly more serious tone. Lincoln calls Rembrandt and the Vikings to the White House, and they devise a sweet new battle plan that utilizes all of the Vikings' skills. Also, one of the Vikings is a totally accomplished blacksmith, and he comes up with some sweet Civil War-era Viking gear to help them fight.

Years pass as the Vikings spend their time constructing the Merrimack, which is modified to look like an ironside Viking longship, and which has been tricked out with sweet graphics of Valhalla that Rembrandt airbrushed on the side. After the lead Viking applies a "Don't Tread on Me" decal to the ship, it is finally finished, and the Vikings can begin their epic campaign to end the Civil War.

Working in concert with General Sherman and his forces, they begin "Operation Norse Pinch." As Sherman marches down to the ATL, the Vikings steam upriver to meet him there. Along the way, both parties do some epic pillaging. But in Atlanta the Confederacy has constructed a massive barricade around the city and holed up inside.

General Lee's forces don't know when to quit, and they have concocted a desperate plan to foil the Union. Once Sherman and the Vikings have the city surrounded, the Confederates enact "Operation Reverse Trojan Horse."

Pretending to surrender, they let all the Vikings and Union army into Atlanta at once. The ATL is quiet -- too quiet. Johnny Reb is nowhere to be seen! The confederates have all fled through secret tunnels, trapping the Yankee/Viking forces in the city, which they are now burning down!

Oh shit! Is this the end of the Union Army and the Vikings?!

NO WAY MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!

Out of nowhere, Rembrandt cruises into the city at top speed (5 knots) on a customized jalopy airship! He parachutes into town with his easel and other art supplies, and begins painting at a furious rate.

As the city burns, storm clouds gather. Faster and faster Rembrandt paints. His masterpiece takes shape. It is Atlanta, as seen from the outside, burning. There are also a ton of gigantic Viking horses and M-16s in the foreground.

When Rembrandt applies the final stroke to his painting, it is instantly hit by lightning, opening up a wormhole. The Union Army and all the Vikings dive through, and suddenly they're outside the town again, and they pick up their sweet machine guns and horses and sneak up on the Confederate Army from behind!!!

At this point, the Confederate Army is completely wasted on moonshine, and the Vikings give them the choice to surrender or die. Some dudes choose to surrender, but there is still a sweet battle with the holdouts, who all die.

Victorious, Rembrandt and the Vikings return to Washington, DC. Lincoln shakes their hand and invites them to see a show at the Ford Theater. That night, John Wilkes Booth attempts to murder Lincoln, but Rembrandt, who is sitting behind him, takes the bullet instead. Rembrandt dies and the nation mourns.

Without Rembrandt's wormholes, the Vikings are trapped in 1865 America. Unable to return home, they pick up some hot Swedish immigrant chicks in the upper Midwest, and set out to become hardscrabble gold miners in the Sierra Nevada.

The end ... or is it?

(ps: The name of this movie is Rembrandt and the Vikings)

+

=

AWESOME

The meme stops here.

2007-04-23T08:31:00.000-07:00

Word up, dudes! Comin' at you -- I know it's been an extended absence, but my hands are totally full right now.

I know what you're thinking. "Mike, you're a 26-year-old that lives with his mom. The high point of your year is Shark Week, and the most you exerted yourself yesterday was when you wasted ten minutes griping about how much you hate hard candies. How could your hands possibly be full?"

Valid question. Well, here's an outline:

(0) What I've been up to: Introduction
(1) What I've been up to: Methodology
(2) An aside: Some memetic shit
(3) What I've been up to: Results and Discussion

===============================
(0) Shit, in brief
===============================

So here's the scoop. As you may or may not recall, Lady Shihady and I moved from Seattle to Iowa. We're now living with my folks and are in the process of buying a house. This is really difficult and I think I peed myself at least three times looking at how much a mortgage costs. But things seem to be in order -- we close on April 30th and move in next week. (Ye gods!)

Lately the business travel's been kicked up a bit as well. I went to Chicago and New York, but failed to find really exceptional hot dogs or pizza in either city. I guess that speaks volumes about my general ability to function as a human being.

===============================
(1) Breakin' it down now:
===============================

Here's a picture of me in Chicago with a cop on a Segueway. Why do cops always end their conversations by admonishing me to "Stay out of trouble, son?"

The trip to NYC was cold and wet. I lived in the Pacific Northwest for a good eight or nine years without every purchasing an umbrella. But when I went to New York, it was positively pissing out, and I wisely purchased the first umbrella I could find, which, as luck would have it, was a brilliant shade of hot pink. I was soaked by that point anyway, but the hot pink umbrella was better than the busted-ass umbrella that I'd fished out of a garbage pile earlier in the day.

New York seems to have drainage issues. This is rainwater gushing out of a chink in the wall at the Times Square subway station:

Another great thing that I did was head on down to a cabin in Southern Missouri one weekend. Here's some pictures of that memorable shindig.

Here's a dude named Luke earning everybody's respect.

We invented a fun game where Vic would wear a hockey mask, and then we'd smash a beer into his face as he swung from a tree.

A nice behind-the-scenes shot of the beer-toss crew.

Extreme air guitar session.

===============================
(2) The meme stops here
===============================

So this "blog" got "tagged" with a "meme" in which I am somehow required by the Gods of the Olde and Vengeful Internet to post five random, distinct facts that you did not know. I am going to subvert this meme by (a) not "tagging" anybody else with this, and (b) posting five random lies.

Fact #1:
Shark cloacas are full of candy.

Fact #2:
In certain translations of the Old Testament, Moses is explicitly described as having a "sweet ZZ-top style beard." But because sunglasses weren't yet invented he had to wear those kick-ass Eskimo glacier shades that are just a piece of bark with a slit cut in them. Ancient murals depict radiant beings that match this description descending on unicycles from tricked-out UFOs.

Fact #3:
The hoverboards from Back to the Future 2 were actually manufactured in California for like five days, but then some kid fell and broke his neck and he was paralyzed, and his mom sued, so they had to stop making them, but you can still sometimes find them on eBay, but they cost like a shitload of money, like almost $400, and even then they have those pink Barbie logos on them.

Fact #4:
President Hoover once appeared in a rare Little Rascals-Three Stooges crossover episode. In this episode, Hoover appointed both the Rascals and the Stooges to his Joint Presidential Council on High Jinks and Epic Capers. The Joint Presidential Council was to appear at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Hoover Dam, where they were charged with serving shaved-ice treats to attendees. However, infighting among the Stooges caused them to become distracted and forget about monitoring the ice machine, which soon covered the entire Hoover Dam in four feet of snow. The Little Rascals were to ride a toboggan down the dam and somehow learn a valuable lesson in transit to the bottom.

However, the episode took an unscripted turn for the worse when the Rascals' mascot dog began to frantically hump the leg of President Hoover, causing the president to stumble into a big pot of hobo stew. Because the editing technology needed to remove the embarassing footage did not yet exist, the entire storyline needed to be re-shot from the beginning. Unfortunately, President Hoover's schedule was very tight, and this was ultimately impossible.

The sole copy of the dog-humping-hobo-stew-spill footage was locked up in a vault, and then sold on the black market, where it changed hands several times. It currently resides in the private collection of Quentin Tarantino, who is in negotions with George Lucas to include it as special feature for the DVD release of a widescreen original-edition Empire Strikes Back that has an alternate ending where Luke joins the dark side and is killed when Yoda ramps a really loud motocross dirtbike into his face. Yoda then slams a Mountain Dew. In this alternate ending, dirt and blood totally fly everywhere.

Fact #5:
Roger Waters and David Gilmour have put aside their differences, and are planning to perform again as Pink Floyd in a seriously mind-blowing tour. This is scheduled to take place in the year 2000 and will coincide with the legalization of all drugs.

===============================
(3) Conclusion
===============================

So, anyway, like I say, we close on the house on April 30th ... seems like a good time to do some spring cleaning on this "blog" thing here. I'm thinking of calling Blotto Grotto quits and setting up a more generalized web site type thing (e.g., something non-Blogger, maybe a Wordpress or Drupal setup). We'll see what comes of this. I'm sure all 1.5 of my readers will have strong opinions on this.

-Mike

Word up

2007-04-03T12:42:00.000-07:00

Unh, funkytown

2007-03-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

Hola, compadres. I know it's been a couple of weeks since I updated here with a full post, but bear with me -- Lady Shihady and I have moved to Iowa (fuck yeah!) and are currently trying to buy a house. If you've never bought a house before, try to imagine them most fun you could possibly have hang-gliding, racing dinosaurs, or kicking it at a water park. Got it? Good. Now imagine the exact opposite. Buying a house is somewhere between these two extremes. Determining which extreme is closest to the home-purchasing reality is an exercise left for the reader.

The drive out to Iowa was a bitch. I was up 'till 4 a.m. on a Thursday night/Friday morning packing, woke up at 6 a.m. Friday, and after loading up a moving truck we were on the road at 3:30 that afternoon. We slept for four or five hours in eastern Oregon that night, got about seven hours of Z's at a rest stop halfway across Wyoming on Saturday night, and made it into Iowa around 10 p.m. that Sunday. I lost the faceplate to my stereo somewhere in Boise, which made it impossible to stay alert by blasting loud music. By Sunday night I was so road-weary that I started calling up people in my cell phone's address book at random to stay awake.

In western Nebraska I filled up with a leaky pump that soaked my hands in gasoline. Then I ate a big bag of finger-lickin' good artificially flavored cheesecorn, thereby ingesting fossil-fuel residues and sickening myself. Helpful tip: stop sucking popcorn flavoring off your fingers if it tastes like octane.

Anyway, after doing a little bit of house-hunting it looks like we may have found a suitably legitimate place, so Lady Shihady and I are meeting with a realtor today. We'll see how this goes.

Expect erratic, disjointed commentary to continue throughout the near future, with normal posting to resume at pseudo-regular intervals after I purchase and settle down at the Shihady Fortified Compound for Applied Eschatological Studies and End Times Center for Second Amendment Rights.

-Mike

Chalkmonster

2007-03-12T22:32:00.000-07:00

-Mike

The importance of follow-thr

2007-02-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

Wow. A month and a half or so ago I made a big list of pressing shit that needed to be done before the move. Here's how my hot "to do" items panned out:

Sell Volvo on eBay.
Tried and failed to unload my '62 P1800 on eBay. The bidding never made reserve, although it did nearly reach half of what I originally paid for the car. The vehicle is currently being shipped to Iowa, where I plan to sink even more money into the it.

Design wedding announcement
Shoulda but didna.

Get addresses of wedding invitees
Ain't much use without an invite.

Send announcement to invitees
See above.

Send memo to boss about moving to Iowa
This I actually did.

Figure out move date and plan
50/50 on this one.

Decide what can be sold/given away/kept in Seattle
To the casual observer, it may look like I followed through on this one, but in reality the process of dealing with my massive repository of earthly goods was largely random.

Sell used books
This almost worked. I got 36 bucks but was left with only slightly fewer unwanted books than before. But who doesn't like 36 bucks? It's practically enough to offset the first 36 miles worth of gas driving my ridiculous truck to Iowa. Speaking of which ...

Sell truck (?)
As you might have guessed based upon the above commentary and the inclusion of the parenthetical question mark in my original list, this was destined never to happen.

yours in just sort of floundering through life,
awesomely,
and totally in your face,
with a sweet jpeg,

Mike

Moving: it's a bitch (redux)

2007-02-22T14:24:00.000-08:00

Hola, dudes. So this is the second time in the history of this blog that I've experienced the pleasure of moving. Last year I moved about 170 miles from Portland to Seattle, and this time I'm moving about ten times that distance from Seattle to Iowa. With any luck I won't find myself moving yet another order of magnitude farther next year, because that would put me 17,000 miles away from Iowa, smack dab around the planet and plopped in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Fuck that noise, I mean the ocean is great, but I prefer your more standard fare variety of ground-based living.

Anyway, a big truck comes tomorrow and we're loading all of our shit in it to haul 'er off to Iowa.

(Did I mention ... fuck yeah! Iowa!)

So. As part of the moving process I have been using Craigslist to sell/give away/trade for beer anything that I can afford to part with. Thus far I traded a shitty Ikea futon for a 12-pack of Fat Tire (I definitely came out on top there), and a gigantic metal sign with my company's name on it for some sketchy dude's gnarly homebrew. If I had known it was homebrew I'd have just put the damn sign out on the curb, but fortunately I'm good at dealing with adversity and I figure maybe I can trade the homebrew for some real beer. Preferably the type that comes with the angry grizzly bear with glowing red (presumably laser-shooting) eyeballs on the label.

Unfortunately, a lot of uptight dickwads keep flagging my sweet posts because they can't cope with the awesomeness of trading junk for beer.

I'm constantly amazed by the level of jack-assed dumbfuckery one encounters on Craiglist. For example, one of the things I'm giving away is a gigantic fern that belongs to Lady Shihady. Here is the Craigslist post that I set up:

Big fern. Will be given to whoever can pick it up today and/or prove that they won't kill it right away.

And here is a response I got:

Hello,

Are you talking about a plant if so, Please contact me back interested. Thank you.

Am I talking about a plant. Am I talking about a plant?!?! What clued you in, numbnuts, the gigantic photo of a gigantic fucking plant?!? Fuckin' A, I must be dealing with some kind of genius fucking alternate dimension rocket scientist here. If you'll excuse me, I have to go find my long-lost TI-81 graphing calculator, because clearly I'll need it to help compose an adequate response to Einstein McBotanist here.

Thanks,
Mike

ps: Maybe this dude thought that "fern" was code for "sweet combustible hobbit-weed"? If so, perhaps he shouldn't have contacted me using a va.gov email address. Christ.

Lists

2007-02-09T09:17:00.001-08:00

Hey dudes. Last week I had a chance to get re-acquainted with one of my all-time favorite pointless endeavors: donning a pair of headphones and zoning out while spending an hour in a Fred Meyer store trying to find a tube of caulk and a few other sundries. Man, it was fun, and there sure is a lot of zany crap for sale in that store.

One of my best exploits in consumerism was back in college, when I went to Safeway and purchased a lighter, a forty, some condoms, and a few little army dude toys. I think I may have also picked up a 4x4 magazine or something ... I'm not sure. Regardless, that was one shopping list that shouted "word to your mother" loudly and proudly.

Fred Meyer, however, has even more zany crap than Safeway, and as I wandered the aisles I mentally constructed the following awesome shopping list of Fred Meyer purchasables:

- Beer
- Hacksaw
- Band-aids
- Condoms
- Diapers
- Crowbar
- Duct tape
- Cap'n Crunch
- Butter
- Extreme teriyaki meat snacks
- A garden hose
- A douche
- A copy of "The Purpose Driven Life"
- 600 blank CDs
- Fresh underpants
- Some kind of suppository
- Denture adhesive
- A hammer
- Bubble bath
- Gigantic sack of refined sugar
- One dozen packets of morning glory seeds
- Athletic socks
- Garden trowel
- One pound of nutmeg
- Fifteen boxes cough syrup

There is some overlap with my great Safeway trip from years back, but that's to be expected. The fact that you could actually walk into a Fred Meyer and purchase all these things in one trip to one store causes my heart to swell with pride. America is fucking awesome.

If I had more spare time on my hands it would be interesting to see what sort of look I'd get while purchasing/returning all of these items. Unfortunately, though, I'm a very busy man, and in a hilarious twist the many hours that I spend on any given day mentally constructing and refining lists such as this actually preclude my going out and purchasing items from said lists.

Anyway. That's all for today.

-Mike

The lack of a couch on the porch has really crimped my style.

2007-02-05T00:14:00.000-08:00

I have to get right to the point here: I think the lack of a couch on my front porch -- well actually it's kind of a deck -- regardless, I'm sans outdoor couch activity --

Fuck.

Look, the lack of a couch on my front porch has really crimped my style.

I'm not saying I need a couch on the front porch to kick it eXtreme, but it sure helps. I was standing on the porch tonight drinking beer and listening to Nirvana, and I was like, man, it sure would kick ass if I had a couch out here. I found a chair on the curb that I dragged up to the porch last summer, but it's not the same.

I need a couch on the porch.

My first house in college had a couch on the porch. I got ripped off on that fucking couch. Twenty bucks for a spider-infested piece of shit with half the cushions missing. But hot damn if it didn't get the job done, so I guess I can't complain. And who knows, the spiders may even have come with the porch and not the couch. Not to mention the fact that the dude I bought it from, a recently released ex-con selling furniture on his lawn at one in the morning, helped me move the couch home for the paltry sum of one burrito and a Big Gulp.

This couch served me well during the summer that I sublet my room, which was the same summer that I stuck around my house because my big plans "fell through" (i.e., I fucked up).

The next fall, though, things took a turn for the worse, couch-wise. The fascist assholes who rented out our house conducted "periodic property drive-bys" (and not the cool ack-ack-ack type of drive-by) determined that our sweet couch placement constituted lease-violating furniture modality. Well fuck 'em if they haven't ever needed a cushy place to swill a cold one.

When the notice came in the mail, I put the couch in the garage for a couple of months, long enough for them to drive by and observe that the issue was resolved, and then I dragged that awesome fucking couch right back to my porch. Certainly the rental agency personnel must have driven by once more after that, but we never heard from them.

"Clearly," they must have thought upon seeing the couch mysteriously reappear "these tenants are much too crafty for our wack form letters. Best to leave sleeping couches lie, yo."

Once I graduated from college I got a job, a different house, and a new (slightly used) couch. We decked this house out in a nautical theme, but it never had a good porch couch. We had some patio furniture on the porch, which was OK, but not mind-blowing. We did have a sweet couch in the garage, and that worked out swimmingly. In fact, I would venture to say that with practice, a garage couch could supplant a porch couch.

Eventually the nautical theme wore out and it was time to get a new house. I moved into a new place with a great big porch, and the garage couch was plopped on the porch for maximum relaxational continuity.

I chilled long and hard on that porch.

So from 2000 to 2005 I had basically adequate couch technology. In 2006, I met Lady Shihady and moved on up to Seattle. While it has been cool to live in Grunge Rock City, USA, I didn't bother to move my porch couch up here.

What can I say? Should have brought that couch with me. I haven't kicked it nearly enough on the porch. This has resulted in the following ill effects:

(1) I have watched an insufficient amount of traffic cruise by
(2) I have kicked my feet up on the porch banister an insufficient number of times
(3) I haven't thrown enough crap off the porch onto the lawn.

Now some folks would take a look at this situation and take the chickenshit way out. Well, in spite of my prediliction for drastic measures, suicide isn't for me. Instead, I'm moving to Iowa, a state with ample natural porch resources, and plenty of awesome crap to throw off those porches.

Speaking of awesome crap in Iowa, some of the great shit they have there includes discarded Xmas trees, which you can seriously burn the shit out of after the holiday season. Those things go up like a gasoline-soaked Viking funeral pyre. Anyway. Word.

I'm movin' out cornside, and the Shihadys are gonna be setting up shop in the heartland. I look forward to establishing residence in an are with sufficient porch/garage space to house a truly sweet custom couch. I am talking about a sweet fucking couch.

We're moving to Iowa at the end of February. It's looming large and fast, but I'm pumped up and completely psyched.

And you know what? That new couch is just the tip of the iceberg. Goddamn I love fucking Iowa.

-Mike

ps: It would appear that I'm down to a once-a-month update schedule on this blog. Son of a gun. Not sure how that happened, but it did. Let's face it: Blotto Grotto had its day in the sun as my pet project for most of last year. In 2007, you can look forward to updates on an approximately whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it basis, which will oscillate wildly between weekly, monthly, rarely, and never. Peace out and keep it real.

Are you there blog? It's me, Mike.

2007-01-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

Hola, dudes. First off -- apologies for the protracted silence on my end. Seeing as how this blog has approximately as many return readers as your average Viagra-shlepping spam blog, though, I doubt this is much of an issue.

So where was I? For much of November and December, I was preoccupied with freezing my ass off in a power outage, traveling, and kicking it hardcore. Also, I lost a lot of time daydreaming about the Harlem Globetrotters.

Anyway, here's an outline:

(0) Power outage
(1) Experiencing Seattle
(2) Shihady, where was you?
(3) 2007

This post contains a lot of pictures, so any readers still rocking a 300 baud connection should consider themselves duly warned.

===============================
(0) Big-ass windstorm
===============================

About a month ago Seattle got pwn3d by a leet h4x0r windstorm that DDOS-ed power to about a million fuxx0red n00bs. My neighborhood was no exception -- around 1:30 in the morning, a gigantic tree fell down onto some power lines, taking out a couple of utility poles and an unlucky Ford Focus. The power went out the night of Thursday, December 14th, and wasn't back on at our house until the evening of Sunday, December 17th.

This was a good opportunity for Lady Shihady and I to practice our skills at being miserable in the cold. Here's some pictures of the damage and the clean-up:

I was initially excited when I heard that the NOAA was accepting public submissions to name the windstorm, but declined to suggest anything when I heard that my proposal need be family friendly. Fucking fascists.

===============================
(1) Out and aboot
===============================

About 15 minutes into our first day without power or Internet, Lady Shihady and I quickly came to the conclusion that we should get out and about. (Actually, my first idea when I discovered that the Internet was broken was just to kill myself and hope to be revived in a future world with a non-broken Internet, but Lady Shihady's idea of going someplace seemed much more prudent and reasonable. And as many of you know, prudence and reason are two of my favorite things. That, and also flying off the handle.)

So we went out and experienced Seattle. I feel that the best way to experience any city is in a competitive eating environment. Fortunately, Seattle did not let me down. Here I am eating a jar of hot sauce to win more hot sauce for my dad:

They gave me a two-minute limit to eat the entire jar, but I finished it in 15 seconds. Nothing happened when I finished it though, so I just kept scraping the sides of the jar with the plastic spoon and licking it for another thirty seconds. Then I asked if we could call it done, and the answer was "yes."

Lady Shihady and I also went downtown to do some shopping, where I took a few pictures of the city:

We also watched the new James Bond movie, which was purported to be "gritty," but featured too much card-playing and not enough ass-kicking. Booooring.

===============================
(2) On the road (again)
===============================

So in addition to Missouri and Iowa in November, I also went to Colorado in December. Lady Shihady and I drove to Snowmass, Colorado for New Year's. We went by way of Salt Lake City, where my compadre Dorf lives. Here he is during our trip to a crab shack for dinner:

Here's the dog in the car.

Here's me, excited to be in Colorado:

And here's a cup of coffee at a breakfast place in Boise, Idaho called Goldy's:

I really cannot stress enough the importance of eating breakfast there if you ever drive through Boise.

OK, that's all for now, I guess. Thanks to anybody who actually reads this.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Not a real doctor

Iowa, search engines, etc.

2006-12-04T09:56:00.000-08:00

Word up, homies! After a painful, protracted absence from this blog, I'm back! (Yet again!) The good news is that I have some fun and exciting photographs to share with you. That bad news is that I'm balls deep in work right now, and I may not resume regular posting until sometime next week. Here's an outline!

Item number zero: Iowa
Item number one: Computers

===============================
(0) Cows, etc.
===============================

So I went to Iowa over Thanksgiving, to kick it with the fam. Vic was in Iowa as well, so we staged the photograph below:

Vic is looking comfortable in some kind of blue jacket thing, while I'm sporting a shirt with a picture of a tractor on it. Amazingly enough, while flipping through photo albums later that weekend, I encountered a similar picture (non-staged) from several years ago of Vic and I looking at a coffee table book -- and shockingly enough, I was wearing the exact same T-shirt.

Another thing I did in Iowa was befriend some cows.

Boy, that sure was a lot of fun.

===============================
(1) More lame computer shit
===============================

So here's something to keep you busy until I post again. Head over to Google, and search for "Google." When I try this, Google finds 763 million pages that match my query. Now, search for "Microsoft." Google finds 39.5 million results there.

Next, hurry your ass on over to search.live.com, Microsoft's new search engine that I'll link to with the phrase bukkake catastrophe. Search for "Microsoft," and Microsoft Live Search finds about 80 million pages that match your query.

But, get this -- when I search for "Google" using Microsoft Live Search, I find a whopping 648 pages. Huh. It's almost as if this service is either accidentally (!) or intentionally (!!) broken. Credit goes to some dude on Slashdot for making me aware of this strange condition.

An interesting thing to note here -- I come up with 648 Live Search results for Google when I search from the main page, but it's possible for me to come up with 751 results after I've clicked through about five pages of results and then try searching again.

Also interesting -- searching for "Googel" (intentionally misspelled) yields 45,602 Live Search results.

On a side note: on the off-chance that anybody from Microsoft is reading this, my mom can't get over how much she loves the Linux machine that I set up for the family over the Thanksgiving holiday.

10-4
Doc Shihady

Head

2006-12-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

Hi kids! I’m hoping that someone out there on the interweb can help me find something. What am I looking for you ask? Pancho Villa’s head.
Some years after my old friend Pancho was assassinated (what a great word! ass twice!) it seems someone dug up his grave and removed his head. An American was arrested, Emil L. Holmdahl, but he quickly released and returned to the good ol’ US of A. It’s reported that he then sold the head to Frank Brophy, a close friend of Prescott Bush. Yeah, gramps… anyway… there’s this club, sorta like the girlscouts, but not quite as manly… and word on the information superhighway is that they collect skulls… Geronimo’s, Pancho’s, Hitler’s, Mr. Rodgers… I think (as does the government on Mexico) that these punks should return the head to the body. Or give it to me. That would be cool. I could drink cheap ass Pancho Villa tequila from it. Funny thing about Pancho, he generally didn’t drink…

Who gives a shit about the fucking marmot?

2006-11-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

"Also, let's not forget -- let's NOT forget, Dude -- that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city -- that ain't legal either."

Clearly I haven't yet posted the details of my trip to Missouri. I feel really bad about this, like I've wronged the Internet in some terrible way. For some strange reason, I want this travelogue to be a cut above the usual off-the-cuff tripe I post here. So I'm actually, you know, writing and editing (!) the thing. It's anybody's guess whether or not you'll get it before Thanksgiving, as I am currently madd preoccupied with other shit. So, in loo (sp) of a travelogue, please accept the above picture of an amphibious rodent.

-Doc Shihady.

I'm a pro at the Internet

2006-11-17T16:26:00.000-08:00

You know you've been on the Internet too long when you read the headline "Dutch government proposes public ban on burkas" as "Dutch government proposes public ban on bukkake."

I'll try to post photos and a write-up of my trip to Missouri later this weekend.

Later,
Mike

Going to STL

2006-11-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Yo ho ho

Today I leave for Missouri to fuckin' cold kick it with Vic. I have madd shit to do before I leave, so in loo of a real post, take a peep on these pictures. (And yes, I know that you don't spell "loo" like that, but I'm too lazy to spell check).

Number one, my old Monte Carlo. God rest its soul, sold to a gentleman in Wisconsin.

Number two -- WHO'S UP FOR SOME POLO MOTHERFUCKERS?!??!?!

peace out

-Doc Shihady

Wiki-wiki-unghhhh (Maple syrup and Xenu)

2006-11-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

Yo ho ho, dudes and dudettes! Today I want to hit you with a couple of sweet topics:

(0) Honey vs. Maple syrup
(1) Xenu

Time to kick out the jams!

===============================
(0) Honey v Syrup
===============================

My buddy Reido recently exploded my inbox with a great email in which he conducted a rigorous critical analysis of honey and maple syrup. This could not have been more timely, as the dinner that Lady Shihady and I whipped up last night utilized both maple syrup and honey. Reid has thoughtfully taken it line-by-line for us, and he did such a great job that I'll reproduce his comments here (also it saves me the trouble of writing an original post today):

Origin
Honey: Bee barf
Maple Syrup: Tree blood
Edge: Honey

Danger in Production
H: Stung to death
MS: None (though maybe tree falling on you, explosion in the sugar shack, etc.)
Edge: Honey

Humans involved in production
H: Dorky guys in silly hats with smudge pots
MS: Olde-Timey revolutionaries (but also Quebecois)
Edge: Maple Syrup

Container
H: Plastic teddy bear
MS: Jug that, if you drew XXX on it, could pass for a whisky container
Edge: Maple Syrup

Distillation
H: Mead
MS: I don't know, but it might make you blind
Edge: Maple Syrup

Methods of Consumption
H: In tea, on scones and crumpets
MS: On flapjacks, johnny cakes, waffles
Edge: Objectively maple syrup, but for me, honey, since I don't like any of the food MS goes on

There you have it. There are a couple other things to consider. One: honey means bees, and bees mean creepy dudes who dress up in long johns and cover their faces in sugar so that they can construct deadly "bee beards." If you master the secret bee dance, it is eventually possible to get the bee beard to transmogrify into a fearsome stinging "extendo-hand" that can retrieve objects at a distance, pollinate trees, and repel attackers.

(Hey, does anybody remember Killer Bees: The Soon to be True Story? It was a made for TV movie that came out in about 1993 or so and showed how a flock [or "swarm"] of bees could outrun a high-speed convertible and kill your ass. One little known fact is that a cloud of bees racing down the highway will cause a turbulent vortex so violent that it can result in camera tilt of up to 40 degrees from level.)

Anyway, on the flip side you have maple syrup, which is a refined tree product. Trees, as it is commonly known, are capable of growing out of the remains of pirates and vikings. So are the flowers that bumblebees harvest for honey, but it's way easier to grow one tree out of one dead viking than it is to grow a thousand flowers out of a thousand dead pirates. So with maple syrup, there is a better chance that you are drinking the remains of a dead pirate or viking. This is what modern philosophers call "the circle of life."

Also, it appears that Wikipedia does not have an article on bee beards! Could somebody with actual knowledge of bee beards please write that article?

===============================
(1) Speaking of Wikipedia...
===============================

... the Wikipedia article on Xenu is amazing. Xenu, for those of you who are out of the loop, is like the king poobah of evil happenings in Scientology. He is a dude so gnarly that he purportedly sent a shit ton of frozen aliens to earth and exploded them in a volcano with a hydrogen bomb. As far as religious beliefs go, I would rate this as more plausible than "aliens hiding behind Hale-Bopp are waiting to party down" and less plausible than "we must pickle the pharaoh's organs, mummify his pets, and trick out his coffin with gold rims to ensure safe passage through the afterlife."

An interesting aspect of this story is that Xenu supposedly transported the frozen aliens to earth in spaceships that look like DC-8 airplanes. Wikipedia thoughtfully provides the following artist's conception of just such a spacecraft:

Now is it just me, or does this aspect of Scientology remind anybody else of Homeboys in Outer Space?

As for putting the "science" in "Scientology," the Wikipedia article has a nice section describing one dude's calculation that it would take between 19.3 and 54.1 billion spacefaring DC-8s to transport all those frozen aliens (some 13.5 trillion total) to Earth.

10-4
Mike

ps: Doesn't transporting 13.5 trillion aliens to Earth and then exploding them with hydrogen bombs seem like a monumental waste of effort? Couldn't you save yourself a few billion trips by just dumping the aliens into the vacuum of space?

Shit that pisses me off

2006-11-06T07:50:00.000-08:00

(0) When the sun gets up at like 10:00 and sets at noon.

Earth's axial tilt is getting to be in nigh full effect shortly, and this fills me with -- well, not rage exactly, but more like an extremely distant and sedated cousin thereof. I think that I'm afflicted with what doctors call "Seasonal Effectiveness Disorder," a terrible malady that only allows me to be effective at anything for about five days or so around the vernal equinox. The rest of the year I lope around chugging bon-bons, guzzling beer, and jeering at shit that I read on the Internet. So with the onset of winter weather it's not that I'm not any less effective than I was last summer, it's just that I'm uneffective in a sluggish new way.

(1) The Mizzicrosoft-N0ve11 deal

So N0ve11 just signed a deal with Mizzicrosoft. As far as I can tell, this deal says that they will (a) develop technology to help Wizzindows and Linux to play well together in mixed-computing environments, and (b) not sue each other's customers over patent issues. Basically, this makes N0vell like Lando Calrissian before he was hanging out with Han Solo and doing commercials for Colt 45 -- his least acceptable phase, when he was in league with the Empire. Anyway, I'd been messing around with N0ve11's Linux distro, but until Lando gets with the program and starts fucking up storm troopers and binge drinking with Chewy (ably played by a young Richard Stallman) I think I may try my luck with Fedora Core 6.

(2) The fact that Homeboys in Outer Space is unavailable on DVD.

Way back in 1996, UPN got their shit together and green-lighted a program called Homeboys in Outer Space. Do you doubt the awesomeness of this show? Then peep here a bit of the premise, as encapsulated by UPN's very own promotional literature:

"Rocketing along in their Space Hoopty (a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a wrecked Impala), Ty and Morris try to accomplish their miscellaneous missions ... Guiding the Hoopty is an automated, sassy on-board computer, Loquatia. This tart-tongued maven of the mainframe resents that she's confined to the console, and spends her time in perpetual overdrive, tormenting Ty with her caustic remarks and teasing Morris with her cybernetic feminine wiles."

I have searched high and low to find a Homeboys compilation for purchase, but the series was never released on DVD! In fact, it was cancelled after just one season. Its ratings sucked, but it was also getting shit from certain advocacy groups, who accused Homeboys in Outer Space of promoting racial stereotypes. Give me a break -- this show was totally awesome, which by definition means that there's no way it could have been bad.

For the sake of comparison, I'd like to draw attention to another program called Family Matters. This situational comedy frequently garnered cheap laughs by exploiting Steve Urkel's love of science. I mean, come on. Urkel did more to promote damaging geek stereotypes than Homeboys in Outer Space did to promote racial stereotypes. Let's all take a step back for a moment, and agree that Urkel making electricity with cheese is just as funny as a sassy Impala flying through space. That's all I'm saying.

Anyway, anybody knows how to get their hands on a copy of Homeboys in Outer Space, give me a call.

-Mike

Does anybody want to hear about maple syrup? Because I plan on talking about it.

2006-11-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about Lady Shihady's proud Vermontian heritage is that she knows a thing or two about maple syrup. Vermont's love of maple syrup is obvious if you steal a peep at their official state quarter. If you look at it one way, it appears to be two young children harvesting maple syrup. But if you look at the quarter upside down, you can see an old man drinking syrup.

Anyway, since shackin' it up with Lady Shihady my maple syrup intake has increased by approximately four thousand percent. Maple syrup has a few simple rules:

(1) ALWAYS talk about maple syrup.
(2) NEVER DON'T talk about maple syrup.
(3) If this is your first encounter with maple syrup, you MUST drink it.
(4) ALWAYS apply maple syrup to ALL your foods.
(5) Anybody caught drinking or using imitation corn-syrup-based maple-flavored topping WILL be summarily dismissed.

You may find my embrace of the fifth rule somewhat surprising, given my Iowan upbringing and down-home Midwest values, but take my word for it: corn syrup is freaking nasty, and should only be used to cook up fake blood for use in monster movies. (Seriously: corn syrup plus red food coloring equals awesome fake blood.)

Don't get me wrong. Fresh summer sweet corn on the cob is a delicious treat (and it can be consumed with maple syrup). However, it is light-years removed from its distant cousin, corn syrup.

But back to maple syrup. Have you ever wondered, "Dude, maple syrup is a sweet and healthy staple food, but who first thought of boiling tree sap until it tasted delicious?"

Well, that's a very good question. Maple syrup as we know it today was first used some time in the 1600s, when white people teamed up with indigenous North Americans to invent cornmeal flapjacks and also tasty johnnycakes. While undeniably legitimate in their unadorned, naked form, these amazing breakfast foods were nevertheless in need of some kind of syrup.

However, the early Puritan inhabitants of Old America were not scientifically minded, and thus lacked the expertise needed to engineer maple syrup from the ground up. Fortunately, divine Providence took care of that for them. Here's how the shit went down:

One day, Elias St. Sweetmineral Bogsetter, a carpenter and reknowned Massachusetts sled-builder, was wandering around in the woods mourning the death of his kin and looking for something to do. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, he sees this amazing buck. I'm not kidding; the rack on this bitch is seriously outta sight, it's like 32 points and it looks like it has a bunch of upside-down rocking chairs and menorahs growing out of its head. In between the two antlers, he sees something completely unexpected -- a glowing, levitating apparition of a bottle o' pure maple syrup.

Of course, having never seen or tasted maple syrup before, Elias had no idea what it was. But he was able to infer that it tasted delicious, and it had something to do with the big maple tree that was drawn on the jar. So he went to the biggest maple tree in the woods, which happened to have sprouted tall and mighty in Massachusett's most intense region of geothermal activity.

This is not surprising: it is a commonly known fact that the natural minerals which boil to Earth's surface by way of mudpots, geysers, and fumaroles are the best tree fertilizer in the entire world.

The tree that Elias found was magnificent and strong. But during a cold snap the night before, a sap vein had burst! This was the first "gusher" in all of recorded history. Of course, the mighty maple gushers have now all been tapped, and it is extremely unlikely that humanity will ever again see another sap flume like old Elias St. Bogsetter saw on that bright winter morning.

More amazing still, though, was the fact that this sap flume was shooting clear across a geothermal swamp and into a natural stone bowl heated to hundreds of degrees farenheit by the primal geologic forces of ancient Massachusetts. The sap had been boiling all night and all day, and was turning into syrup before Elias's very eyes.

Elias quickly fashioned a crude jug out of a gigantic pine tree that he cut down, and filled it to its brim with syrup. But before he could take it back to town, he drank all the syrup. So he filled it up again. And yet he wanted still more, so he cut down a second pine tree and made a second jug, filled that, and returned home to the Puritan settlement of Fraggle Rock.

Back home, he whipped up some flapjacks and johnnycakes, drowned them in butter and syrup, ate them, and repeated this process until he died of hyperglycemia. But fortunately the town doctor was able to deduce the cause of death and recommend that colonists consume no more than five gallons of syrup per day. Of course, since those ancient days humankind has evolved so that we can handle far, far more maple syrup than the paltry volume of just a few gallons per day.

And that is the story of maple syrup.

-Mike

A weekend in three parts

2006-10-30T08:25:00.000-08:00

Hola, dudes! Top of the morning to y'all. Check it: here's the weekend as a fugue in three parts.

(0) Kicking out the home entertainment jams
(1) Kicking out the vehicular commerce jams
(2) Kicking out the long walk on I-90 jams

HOO-WAHHH!!!! Peep it out! I am trying something new -- boldface section headers!

===============================
(0) Books 'n' DVDs!
===============================

Lady Shihady and I enjoy a modern lifestyle steeped in sophisticated culturational offerings, such as books and DVDs. (Trivia! The term "DVD" ambiguously refers to either "Digital Video Disc" or "Digital Versatile Disc" -- the chief DVD standards consortium has used both phrases, but never issued a concrete ultimatum on which is correct! This is reminscent of earlier times in human history, when DVD could stand for either "Dangerous Viking Disease," or "Deadly Viking Disorder." In some corners of the world (specifically, Nova Scotia, where Leif Erickson conducted deadly warfare with Native Americans), it stood for "Digeneous Viking Danger." Digenous is the opposite of indigenous.)

Anyway, DVD-wise Lady Shihady and I peeped a couple of films this weekend. The first was Dead Man a Jim Jarmusch film set in the rootin' tootin' rowdy times of the Old West. Johnny Depp plays an accountant named William Blake, and he is wanted for murder and the theft of a horse. Take note, kids -- murder and horse-theft is a "can't lose" premise.

Eventually, William Blake meets up with an Indian fellar named Nobody, who mistakes him for the famous poet of the same name. For a Jim Jarmusch movie, this plot is surprisingly coherent and believable, and as an added bonus the soundtrack is just Neil Young casually laying down gnarly shit on his instrument of choice, the guitar.

In addition to horse theft, murder, and Neil Young, this movie gets further props for illustrating what Johnny Depp would look like if you were high on peyote (like he normally looks, except with a skull instead of a face.) For the most part I liked this movie, with the exception of the fact that Jim Jarmusch took the liberty of having William Blake and Nobody traverse discontiguous biomes on horseback over impossibly short lenths of time.

The other DVD we peeped out was a documentary called American Movie, which is about a dude in Wisconsin who makes a horror movie. It's kind of funny and depressing, but mostly just depressing. It does earn major points for featuring the line, "It's a new beverage from C0ca-C0la called Surge."

(Why the leet hax0r typography, you ask? To defeat trademark-enforcement lawyerbots and brand-awareness crawlbots that scour the web looking for people to sue and tracking consumer trends, respectively. Fuck those assholes -- if I won't give them the time of day, why would I want to give them data points?)

Finally, books -- I'm about halfway through a book about some dude who spends a winter in a cabin on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, but I forget the name of the book and the author. Still, though, it's pretty good, and I would recommend picking it up if you get a chance.

===============================
(1) Selling my ride
===============================

So I'm selling my Volvo, a nicely done-up P1800 with a Ford 302 in place of the usual Swedish 4-banger. This car attracts lots of attention from gearheads when I drive it around, but unfortunately the Craigslist ad I posted is also attracting attention from evil douchebags who want to use this vehicle's mighty power to pick up drunken skanks at nightclubs.

I showed the car to a dude who must be about 36 years old and harbor eight different strains of herpes and five different variants of chlamydia. The sad thing is that he's some kind of engineer with actual skills beyond just applying hair gel and body spray. Years of schooling and he still acts like an undersexed fourteen-year-old from Long Island. Goddamn -- could somebody please fill me in on what the hell meatheads are trying to accomplish when they holler out the window at chicks? Are they hoping to pick them up? Driving with me, in my car, which seats two, in which the meathead would be the first person to get kicked out to accomodate another passenger?

Christ, what a fucker. May he never breed.

===============================
(2) Hoofin' it
===============================

So Lady Shihady and I went for a hike yesterday, and we got all turned around when attempting to take a shortcut back to the trailhead. This resulted in our walking smack into Issaquah, a couple miles down the interstate from the trailhead where we'd parked. Rather than get ass-lost in the hills again, we chose to hoof it back along a two-mile stretch of I-90. Fortunately the rain and the traffic were both light, and none of the drivers were the kind of belligerent drunken assholes who get a hoot out of whipping empty glass beer bottles at your head from a moving truck.

(One dude in a really shitty, poorly pimped out Mazda honked at us. To him I can only say, "Thank-you for alerting us to the fact that it's a stupid fucking idea to walk down I-90. The next time I see you in traffic, I'll return the favor by honking at you to alert you to the fact that it's a stupid fucking idea to drive around in a shitty, poorly pimped out Mazda.")

If you've never walked down an Interestate, I would -- well, fuck it, I wouldn't recommend it, but I'd recommend at least thinking about what it might be like, or maybe just driving along the side of the interstate really slowly and looking out the window. There is a lot of totally interesting garbage scattered along I-90.

The various overlapping debris fields make some of this shit look like it got tossed out of an airplane -- I saw remnants of the same shredded pool toy scattered across a distance of roughly ten thousand linear feet. More impressive, though, was a debris field about a mile long that looked like briefcase, photo album, and a wad of monopoly money violently exploded at about two hundred miles per hour.

Upon plucking through this impressive assortment of trash, I was immediately surprised and delighted. One of the more remarkable photographs I picked up was a Polaroid that had become wrinkled and crinkly as a result of the elements, and was in the process of shriveling inward toward the center of the picture. I scanned the photo below last night. As of this morning, the strange wrinkling effect has consumed the portrait.

Damn, that's creepy.

More later,
Mike

More creamy crap

2006-10-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

The composition is a little bit busy, but what the fuck, here you go anyway.

-Mike

Random link for the day: Russian video games for OS/2 users

2006-10-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes -- here's your random link for the day:

A collection of games for your OS/2 computer, published by a Russian software company.

Who could forget such classic titles as Sunny Pills (arrange pharmaceuticals to earn points!) and Death Morozes and Tree of Apocalipse? Let's not overlook Operation Warp II -- Revenge, which lets you "make sabotage" (!) and "earn bukazoids" (?) using your "'pepaletz' type aircraft.'" Perhaps most astonishing is the game MARS!, which "may be used by small children or real alien-hunters."

-Mike

More cartoony wacom crap

2006-10-25T12:56:00.000-07:00

Ho ho!

-Mike

HOWTO: Register to vote

2006-10-24T17:53:00.000-07:00

Hola, dudes. I have to confess -- and here I confess of my own volition, not owing to waterboarding or anything awesome like that (here I must indicate that my understanding of waterboarding is such that it is a lot like snowboarding, except that you are doing it on a liquid mountain made of pure artesian spring water) -- that I'm feeling a little bit dapper today. You see, I'm fucking psyched about participatory democracy, and yesterday I got all registered up to vote on the very last day possible here in Kizzing County.

(A tangential side note: longtime blog-readers are well aware of my hatred of kings, and indeed monarchists in general. In fact, I once flew into a fit of rage upon seeing the logo of a crown adorning a King County bus. However, I have been assured that it is okay to use the words "King County" because it is being changed into a reference to my main man Martin Luther King, Junior (whose name, if you looked it up in the phone book, would be listed as "Junior King Martin L.," which would also be a good name for a positive-vibe-eminating feel-good non-gangsta hip-hop group).)

In light of my sweet slacker ethos, I would have preferred to put off voter registration until the very last minute. However, I knew that I totally couldn't do this: registering on election day at most polling places is totally verboten. Now on one hand, I disagree with this on the basis that I am constitutionally entitled to put everything off until the last minute. This right is guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment (the protection of rights not specifically enumerated elsewhere in the Constitutamajigger).

However, I realize that allowing pollside voter registratation would facilitate voteatorial activities by "moderates," which is latin for spineless pussies who are incapable of perceiving things in shades of black and white only. These people have no place in the political process, because not trying to perceive things in black and white is like saying that you don't care as much about issues as those of us who are capable of perceiving things in black and white. And if you don't care as much, how could your vote matter as much?

Shit, man, the way I see it, the amateurs can have their feel-good non-binding UN resolutions just as long as they keep real democratic American voting to the pros -- us extremists. (Which is, incedentally, ancient Greek for letting the waffle-brained n00bs vote is tantamount to appeasing Xerxes.) Can you see both sides on the issue of abortion? Then stay away from the polls! Either you believe that every sperm is sacred, or you believe that the gestation of all fetuses must immediately cease forever.

So that is why I must reluctantly accept the fact that election-day voter registration can never come to be. The thought of moderates just casually voting -- it sickens me.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. This feisty screed is supposed to be a HOWTO on voter registration. So, here you go:

==============================
HOW TO REGISTER TO VOTE
==============================

(1.) First, figure out the very last day to register. Don't do anything until then, except for drinking and really halfhearted attempts at maintaining a blog. Whatever you do, avoid spell-checking and calling your family. Read Slashdot a lot. Blaze it up if that's your thing.

(2.) Forget about voting entirely. Then, go out for breakfast on a Saturday morning in October, and leave the radio on to keep the dog company. When you return home from breakfast, be outraged to discover that the dog has consumed the remote control to the DVD player, rendering the usage of which impossible, but be pleasantly surprised that the radio is telling you that even though you missed the register-by-mail deadline, you can still register in person Saturday afternoon and also on Monday.

(3.) Promise yourself to register on Saturday, but secretly realize that you probably will fail to do so.

(4.) Fail to do so.

(5.) Work on Matt's new Land Cruiser on Sunday. Don't take any pictures of the Cruiser because you busted your camera back in April while getting drunk in the Torrey Pines H1Lt0N with two dudes. Pull the Volvo out of the garage and actually drive it for a change (figure 1). Flip off a bunch of brie-eating, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, gay-marrying liberals in Volvo 240 wagons just to be ironic. Don't eat all day, then drink beer and eat until you feel sick.

Figure 1

(6.) Wake up Monday and hate your job. Realize that registering to vote is a valid excuse to blow off work. Resolve to do so, but first chug an entire pot of coffee.

(7.) Once you have read all comments on Slashdot (even those modded -1 Flamebait), decide to actually get on the bus and leave home. This should happen at about eleven o'clock.

(8.) It's important to get on the right bus. Figure out which part of town has the most depressing-looking buildings that make liberal use of poured concrete and uninspired architectural cues, then get on the bus that goes there.

(9.) Get off the bus when you see a large administrative building made of concrete that appears to have been built between 1968 and 1982. Enter this building. (Hint: if you enter a building that has granite pillars or marble floors, you have probably become disoriented and walked into the olden-tyme courthouse across the street, constructed circa-1935 by a bunch of busted-out WPA Okies.)

(10.) Look around you. Does the building look a lot like a hospital on the inside, but smells more like copy toner than old people? If so, you are in the right place. If not, you are probably standing in line for a social security check. Ditch these old Marxist hoots and check the building directory for the election-y offices. Go there.

(11.) Stand in line for a while. Be secretly psyched up by the decor, which looks like it was somewhat amateurishly implemented by a pro-participatory-democracy high-school pep squad at moderate expense. Eventually, receive a paper form.

(12.) Make token effort at completing the requisite paperwork. Flail around helplessly until an underpaid civil servant walks you through the process of writing down your name and address. Show your ID. Congratulations: you are now registered to pit your electoral sensibilities against those of the millions of mouth-breathing, semi-literate simps who have kept America's Next Top Model on the air.

That is all for today.

Sincerely,
Mike

Dogs on the wing

2006-10-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

This is Onca:

This is the approximate distance that Onca leapt down a hill yesterday:

And this is the impact crater left by a hundred-plus pounds of high-velocity dog:

=======================

In unrelated news, this is a really fucked up package:

I mean, seriously, what is going through this dude's head?

10-4
Mike

Honing my skizzills: digitally colored demons and alligators

2006-10-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes. Yesterday I wrote about how I spluged on some art supplies and a Wacom tablet. Well, here are the results of a quick pen-and-ink sketch imported into Photoshop for some not-so-quick digital coloring. The whole process took a few hours, although most of the time was probably just getting familiar with the tablet -- by the time I finished up, it was light-years faster than it would have taken to perform the same operations using a mouse.

(And yes, I know that "light-years" are not a speed or a measurement of speed. But the way I see it, if Star Wars can refer to "parsecs" as a unit of time, then I can sure as shit use light-years to measure speed.)

Anyway, here it is:

And a detail ...

A lot of the textures that you're seeing are actually a light ink wash that I laid down on the original drawing using a paper towel and some diluted ink. In retrospect, I probably laid the ink on a little thick here -- when I remove the original ink layer in P-shop, I'm left with what looks like a fucked up drawing from a French children's book: Balzac's Angry Gator in the Land of the Wailing and Gnashing, or something like that ...

(By the way, I have no idea who Balzac is, other than the fact that he's a French dude whose name sounds a lot like "Ball Sack." How freakin' cool, huh?)

So there you have it. I've been using the two Linux boxes is my house nowadays for just about everything, but unfortunately I had to kick out the jams on my Powerbook for this one. I would have used the GIMP to do this, except (1) the GIMP is still parsecs away from Photoshop (and here I am using a measure of distance inappropriately to refer to a measure of technical whiz-bangery), and (2) if I write too much about the GIMP, Google is going to start referring ever more bizarre Internet perverts to this site.

(What's even worse is when you try searching for how-to guides on the GIMP -- if you want to learn how to use layer masks in the GIMP, definitely do not google "GIMP mask.")

However, there's this software called "Wine" (stands for "Wine is Not an Emulator") that's a reverse-engineered implementation of the Windows API. Photoshop 7.0 runs perfectly on Linux under Wine, thanks in fact to development efforts by Disney, of all people. Thanks, dudes! Now if only I could find a copy of Photoshop 7 on Craigslist. Fuxx0r!

-Mike

Internet utilization

2006-10-19T09:14:00.000-07:00

So lately I've been utilizing the power of the Internet -- a lot. You name it, and I'm all over it. I've got my RSS feeds getting piped into Liferea, I'm downloading ISOs of different Linux distributions left and right, I'm leaving legitimate comments on friends' blogs, and a while back I picked up 32 megabytes (!) of RAM for a ten-year old ThinkPad on eBay. But thus far I have seen maximum computronic intertube potential realization while using Craigslist. Craigslist is a website that's not only not "Web 2.0," it's practically "alpha-release Web 1.0."

(I almost went so far as to proclaim Craigslist as "pre-alpha Web 1.0" (oh yes, I almost went there), but really, Craigslist is too legit to be lumped in with all the other half-baked Internet shit that people cooked up in the '90s. And while I'm glad that the catchphrase "the new economy" is a rotting, maggot-infested corpse of flash-in-the-pan jargon, a part of me misses the dot-com bubble.)

Anyway, Craigslist. Earlier this month I tried to use Craigslist to sell "a big box of shit," but for some reason the ad got flagged and deleted. Later, I sold an old DSL modem for ten bucks and a six-pack of expired beer. Earlier this week I splurged on a new-in-box Wacom tablet.

See, I used to draw comics and other geeky shit like all the time. But life after college took me by the balls, and I fell out of practice. My skillz got rusty. Now I'm trying to rekindle that spark, so I plunked down on a bunch of new pen-and-ink stuff, and the Wacom tablet for "digital coloring." At least, that's the rationale for buying it. Probably though readers of this blog will just be subjected to a lot of crap like this:

Please accept my apologies in advance, and know that this "finding a creative outlet" phase will probably last about two weeks, at which point I will get bored and put my art supplies away for another five years or so.

10-4
Mike

Big news for all you TV-watchers

2006-10-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

Holy shit, this is pretty amazing. The girl who played the female lead in Duncan 2.0 Beta is appearing in an upcoming episode of CSI: New York. Peep it out: link to preview in super-inconvenient flash video format. Check out that snappy, in-your-face interrogation scene dialogue! ("Do you beat up guys often?" "Only when they've hooked up with my girlfriend." Oh, snap!)

Man, I was totally casting her before it was cool. The episode airs tomorrow, consult local listings for further info.

-Mike

Five nickels worth of correspondance gravy matrix.

2006-10-14T23:42:00.000-07:00

The postcard above cost me exactly twenty-five cents (plus tax). Note the wacky font, which is suitable for broadway performance announcements or expatriate flapper binge drinking challenges held in Parisian opium/jazz houses.

Believe it or not, I did not actually travel back in time to obtain this postcard. Rather, I obtained it at a supermarket in November of 2003. And now here it is, on the Interent. That tales this card would tell, if only it could tell tales -- have already been told, by me. (Big fucking flushing sound.)

That is all for now.

Dr. Michael Shihady.
What a beer drinker thinks when he's not drinking beer.

700 hobo names (read aloud)

2006-10-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Last night Lady Shihady and I rolled on down to Elliott Bay Books and peeped a listen on John Hodgman, professional literary writer and author of The Areas of My Expertise. This book is a compendium of made-up facts, presented as an almanac of complete world knowledge. The back cover features the following awesome blurb:

"In the olden days, all-important knowledge was stored in the Library of Alexandria. In the modern era, all important knowledge was stored in the Internet. The Areas of My Expertise is an upgrade to the Library of Alexandria and the Internet, offering significant improvements in security, accuracy, and awesomeness.

I would go so far as to award this book my highest level of praise, calling it "awesomely outrageous." Plus, in addition to complete world knowledge, the book also contains a list of some 700 hobo names. Here is a link to 700 hobo names read aloud:

700 hobo names read aloud.

The book talk itself was pretty legit. The author exhibited an aura of courteous deferentiality, yet was not above mildly razzing an audience member who asked an annoying question with a too-long preamble. God I love mild razzings. Anyway, that is all for now.

10-4
Mike

ps: For any nit-picky aspiring grammarians reading this site, please note that I have preserved the above blurb's correct hyphenation, which is presented as it appears on the back of the book. The inconsistent hyphenation of "all-important" and "all important" is not in error. What the blurb is saying is that while the Library of Alexandria contained a subset of "all-important" knowledge, the Internet contains the whole set ("all") of any important knowledge, which includes knowledge of regular importance as well as all-important knowledge.

This is awesome because it constitutes a mild razzing at the expense of the ancients who curated the Library of Alexandria. As you can see, I stand by my previous statement from moments ago regarding my love of mild razzings.

North Korean nucleonic crisitunity / Creedence / Pavement

2006-10-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

Hola, dudes. Today's post hits on three things:

... (0) North Korea
... (1) Creedence Clearwater Revival
... (2) Pavement

===============================
(0) Goddamn motherfucking North Korea
===============================

So North Korea has finally flipped its shit and stuck its dick in the mashed potatoes. Nice job, assholes.

Now I've written about North Korea before, but I hope you'll forgive me if I jaw on about this subject again. I've been interested in North Korea ever since I read a British dude's travelogue about his trip to North Korea, and I learned about a great big concrete husk of a 105-story abandoned pyramidal hotel sitting in downtown Pyongyang. This big hotel was supposed to help usher in a new era of sucker chumps blowing their foreign capital, but (surprise) North Korea either ran out of money to build the hotel, or it was structurally unsound, or both.

In his travelogue, British Dude recollected how his tour guides insisted that they just couldn't see this nasty abandoned fuck-up that adorned their skyline, even though it was visible in plain sight. That's some 1984 shit right there, dudes. Just to be clear, here's a good look at the hotel. It is kind of hard to miss:

Observe how this (now possibly zombie-infested) hotel was supposed to have not one, not two, but five rotating restaurants on top of it. Pretty audacious food-planning for a country where two million died of starvation in the mid-1990s. Hell, I'm a well-to-do first worlder that lives in Seattle, and I've never even been to the rotating restaurant on top of the Space Needle. Leave it to a monument-obsessed Stalinist regime to pull such a gross overestimation of culinary venue requirements out of its ass.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this all except to say that North Korea seems (a) batshit crazy, and (b) like a shitty fucking place to live, and not just because they've banned the internet.

Here's a link to a graphic novel about a French dude's trip to Pyongyang that my buddy Reido sent me for my birthday: Link.

Oh, right, and here is the obligatory wiki-link to legitimate info on that hotel.

===============================
(1) Creedence
===============================

As long as we're revisiting subjects that I blather on about at great length: Creedence Clearwater Revival. Even after twenty-six long years of living on this planet (Earth), I remain amazed at Creedence's consistently high level of legitimacy. You can peep a listen on their legitimacy by following this link to a bootleg of a 1970 jam session with Booker T.

===============================
(2) Pavement
===============================

This here is just a quick mention to Will that I picked up Slanted and Enchanted as per the recommendation you left on a previous post. Good call, dude: I am enjoying this album very much. I mean, I'm not enjoying it right now, because I am listening to Creedence, but at the times that I was listening to that album it generally elicited a positive effect on my head and ear regions.

For those readers who aren't Will (all three of you), I apologize for your having to read the above paragraph, which is more or less completely irrelevant to you.

10-4
Dr. Michael Shihady

More from the archives

2006-10-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

Greetings, dudes. I am back in Seattle, and would that I could write a bunch of dick jokes and quasi-coherent rants for you all right now, but unfortunately I have to buckle down and do some actual work. So please enjoy the following black and white pictures, which I took approximately four years ago or so. The night before I took these pictures, I puked far more than I had ever puked before in my life -- and I mean cumulatively, my entire life's work of puking paled in comparison to the amount that I bizzarfed that evening.

I was an automated puke sprinkler going off every five minutes, even after there was nothing left to yakk up. Eventually I started drinking water just to give me something else to puke, because I had started to barf green stuff that seemed to have originated from below my stomach. (I'm not sure, but I may have been puking shit. It certainly tasted like it.) I guess the take-home lesson here is not to consume legal psychoactive root extracts that you read about on the Internet. Seriously: I would describe that little chemical adventure as the primary reason why I can no longer reliably perform calculus.

Anyway, here are those pictures I was talking about.

That's all for now.

10-4
Mike

Addendum: Special note for the my one reader who originally hails from Aberdeen. This blog is now the number one Google hit for Aberdeen Shithole (no quotes).

One from the archives

2006-10-09T06:49:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes. No time for a big ol' honkin' huge post this morning, as I have to get on the road for Portland Fucking Oregon. In the meantime, please accept the above JPEG of a truck. It is a picture that I took when I was twelve.

10-4
Mike

Captain's "log"

2006-10-05T10:21:00.000-07:00

The best part about Wikipedia is that sometimes it does my blogging for me:

The problem with the dude not snacking all the time is that the movie might have an insufficient amount of snacktivity

2006-10-04T11:19:00.000-07:00

Hola, dudes. How's it hanging? If you answered, "Free 'n' breezy, balls in the wind like either the good Lord or Satan intended, depending on your worldview," then congratulations on earning yourself a nomination for the presitigious Shihady Award for Excellence in Pantsless Internet Reading and Sophomoric Theological Postulation. This award is given out, well, not necessarily every year, but only when a suitable recipient can be identified.

Anyway, let's cut to the chase:

Last weekend I watched the third movie in the Fast and the Furious franchise, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. But I like to call it 3 Fast 3 Furious, since the second movie in the franchise was called 2 Fast 2 Furious. However, I like to refer to the second movie as Faster and Furiouser. I know this is complicated but please try to bear with me here.

Now the original movie, simply titled The Fast and the Furious, was basically completely awesome. Many people remember that Vin Diesel had a great big car and lots of things went really fast and crashed. However, what really made the movie mind-blowing was the car stuff in combination with Vin Diesel's character. Specifially, his speech about how he lives his life a quarter mile at a time: this was freakin' amazing. As an added bonus, the plot -- which is basically just like Point Break but better -- involved threats of truckers "about to go vigilante" and there is a super-secret bonus scene after the credits which shows how Vin Diesel has fled to Mexico.

The second movie was not nearly as good. Vin Diesel's character was gone, but the other dude came back for more. Other Dude, aka "Spillner," dicks around and does some shit and there are a couple of cool cars but the movie is generally nowhere near as good.

3 Fast 3 Furious brings some level of respectability back to the franchise, but it's still not as good as the original. First off: this movie is set mainly in Japan, but there's not enough absolutely ridiculous Japanese cars, like the hot pink minivan that Vic and I saw in Hiroshima, which was emblazoned with the words "Fantastic Nutz" and had a five-foot long spoiler. Some of the cars in the movie were slightly ridiculous, but none of them looked anything like this.

But my main problem with the movie has to do with a character named Han. In the first half of the movie he is snacking in practically every single scene. This is so awesome. Each time the filmmakers need a reaction shot, they just cut to the dude snacking. This blew my mind. It got me so pumped up -- he's eating like Japanese chex mix or something, one piece at a time and with great authority.

I don't know and I don't want to know what exactly it is that he's actually snacking on, because when I was in Japan at the top of a mountain after a deer ate 30,000 yen that fell out of my pocket, I bought a snack packet full of rice crackers and tiny dead fish. It was pretty nasty and it tasted like Long Beach smells, but I still ate it anyway because I was hungry and depressed and I didn't have enough money left to buy anything else. So I'm just going to assume that the dude was eating chex mix. He was pretty awesome.

BUT THEN HE STOPS SNACKING HALFWAY THROUGH THE MOVIE. This abrupt change is *completely* unexplained. He just stops snacking. What the fuck?! Why? It made me so angry. And then to add insult to injury, (spoiler alert), the dude dies in a car accident, so you know he'll never snack again. The filmmakers try to redeem themselves at the end with a (spoiler alert) Vin Diesel cameo, but -- while awesome -- this feels like too little too late. Why wasn't Vin Diesel in the entire movie? Think about it! It could have been 90 minutes of cutting back and forth between Vin and Han snacking on shit and staring at Japan, punctuated by awesome car shit and that "quarter mile at a time" monologue. This would have been sweet.

Anyway, I'm pumped up for 4 Fast 4 Furious. Hopefully it gets made and hopefully it is exactly like the hypothetical scenario I have described above.

10-4
Sir Forksplit McBrickshitter

Andy Rooney sounds off on Creative Commons licenses

2006-10-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Mike is currently recovering from bone injuries incurred when his sled flipped during an underground tournament of Wisconsin truck luge. Today's guest post is written by Andy Rooney.

Lately I've been on the Internet. Have you ever wondered why they call it the Internet? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the prefix "inter" means "between." You would think that because interstates are used for traveling between states, the Internet could take you to other nets. But I've only ever seen the one Internet.

But sometimes I use the interstate highway near my house just to go to the mall on the other side of town. Maybe the Internet is like that, I just haven't gone far enough to get off on another net. Or maybe it's like Hawaii, which has interstate highways even though the island is unconnected to the contiguous United States. Yes, the Internet sounds more like Hawaii than the road to the mall.

Maybe getting on the Internet is like being in Central Texas, and you just have to drive on it a really long time before you reach another net, because the first one is so big. I suppose I could stay logged on overnight and see if I woke up on another net, but I only have one phone line and I can't tie it up. So I guess I'll never know. Sometimes it's just easier to give up.

People are always saying how schools need the Internet, but I can't see why or how. I guess the Internet is a little bit like niacin. Here's a big bowl of niacin. Doctors say my body needs niacin, but it doesn't look like anything my body would need, and I sure wouldn't eat the Internet. The Internet is like a big bowl of niacin on a Hawaiian island that's somehow located in the middle of a large inland sea contained entirely within Central Texas.

Another thing that's in Texas is Austin. People tell me there is a lot of music in Austin, which kind of makes music like niacin and Austin like Hawaii, which makes the Austin, Texas music scene a lot like the Internet. It's funny that even though the Internet only takes me to one net, I could use it to take me to the Austin music scene, which is in another state. In this regard, the Internet is a lot more like a computer interstate than a tool for going to other nets.

Perhaps a more apt name for the Internet would be "the computer interstate." Al Gore called it the "entertainment superhighway," but I've never found the Internet to be very entertaining. It's more like a "niacin superhighway."

And because the Austin, Texas music scene is a lot like the Internet, I don't find it to be very entertaining either. And just like how the Internet is a misnomer, the Austin music scene has a big misnomer too. It's called the "Creative Commons" license. Distributing work under a "Creative Commons" license allows other people to re-use the work for free. Apparently these young troubadours are some kind of info-communists who think nothing of the good Americans that died face down in Vietnamese rice paddies and frozen Korean fields in the name of stopping collectivist B.S. like this.

I don't think I've ever heard of a more oxymoronic licensing scheme than "Creative Commons." Creativity isn't common at all! And if it's common, how could it be creative? They might as well call it the "Eat my niacin" license, because if it's free it probably doesn't taste very good and it doesn't sound like my body needs it.

What's wrong with good, old-fashioned crooners that released their music under a traditional American copyright, like Frank Sinatra? Old blue-eyes could take any of these ragamuffin Austin punks. In his day, the Internet could take you to space, where he battled the Soviets on board Apollo 13 in the The Manchurian Candidate.

Christ, I miss Frank. I was one of three people that could call him that. Everybody else had to call him "Mr. Sinatra." The only other people that could call him "Frank" were President Eisenhower and the Emperor Constantine, who lived in the center of the secret casino constructed at the apex of an invisible masonic pyramid deep beneath Las Vegas.

I remember blasting down the highway in his El Dorado, top down with a bottle of whiskey in hand. Hot desert air, a hundred miles out of Palm Springs and we'd burned through two packs of Camels. James Dean came out of nowhere. Flat out. Flat fucking out in his Porsche, like a jet-powered upside-down silver bathtub hopped up on bennies. Down the road. "Look at that punk go," Sinatra said. Then, when Dean was about a mile away, we got passed by a great purple ship flying down the road, blazing fire and erupting in a dreadful symphony of hideous alien noise. We never knew what it was and we never told anybody. Just a great and hideous purple ship, tear-assing down the highway in hot pursuit of James Dean.

Frankie saw in the windows. He said there was a terrible beast at the helm. It had big yellow eyes and was built like a lizard. I never saw it though. The lizard was chugging niacin. Quarts and quarts of this niacin. This evil fucking reptile beast just could not get enough. That is why I have never trusted niacin or the doctors who recommend it. The next week James Dean smashed his car up into little bits. They said it was an accident. Frank and I both knew there were other forces at work. More fantabulous. But it has always been a secret among us. Frank took it to the grave. But my heart is too heavy to contain this leaden secret forever.

Jesus, the things I know.

Signing off,
Andy Rooney

Let's all STFU and remember the '90s for just a second

2006-09-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

Hola, dudes! It's Friday morning: time to sit back and get wistful. Who here remembers the 1990s? Hopefully all of us, right? Well, in honor of [actually I have no idea what this is in honor of], today we'll be taking a stroll down memory lane. Check out the awesome outline for this post, chock-full of 1990's-related content!

... (0) Animated GIFs!
... (1) Nirvana!
... (2) Other music that wasn't Nirvana!
... (3) The Infotronic Supercorridor!

===============================
(0) Animated GIFs
===============================

Probably if there's one thing that people think about when they remember the 1990s, it's animated GIFs. If there's two things, it's probably animated GIFs and OS/2. This leads historians to ask themselves: "Were there ever any animated GIFs having to do with OS/2, and if so, can I somehow affix them to the leather patches on my tweed jacket? Puff puff puff, I love smoking my Sherlock Holmes pipe and eating expensive cheese and having grad students do my research for me [utterance of colloquialism 'LOL,' indicative of 'laughing out loud']."

Well, good news! There were definitely animated OS/2 GIFs, but to my knowledge there is no way to put these anywhere on a tweed jacket. Also, Professor Feejay McBriechugger should be made aware of the fact that smoking is bad for you, exploiting grad students is not cool, and nobody outside of academia or the Volvo-driving Whole-Earth-catalog-reading community really likes college professors.

I mean, seriously: look at grad students and the intellectual property they produce. They bust their balls to produce publishable results, and the papers are then submitted to journals. The journals publish papers and make bank, but the authors (neither students or crusty old professors) ever sees a dime of compensation -- and you thought that musicians were getting a shitty deal with record labels. Meanwhile, college libraries have comical little moths flying out of their wallets because they spent all their bling acquiring journals that publish papers written by professors about research done by students. This strikes me as slightly fucked up. (And try ordering a single research paper from a journal. They're like twenty bucks a piece. That's the same as an expensive CD, or anywhere between one and five pizzas depending on how picky you are.)

Anyway, I'm getting distracted from the core issue: animated OS/2 GIFs. Well hold on to your britches, 1990s enthusiasts! Here ... it ... comes!!!!

Wasn't that just fantastic and amazing?

Actually, the story of the GIF image format really is fantastic and amazing. The compression algorithm used in GIF images was patented by a company called Unisys, and in the mid-90s they started sueing people who implemented software capable of reading or writing GIF images. The patent expired in the U.S. a few years ago, and as of October, the GIF format will be definitively in the public domain worldwide. But it was seriously not cool when they were bustin' balls over their patent. Meanwhile, I am eagerly awaiting the MP3 patents to lapse into the public domain -- everybody needs a reason to look forward to the year 2010, and that's mine.

Upon re-reading that above paragraph, I am surprised that I don't live alone in a sea of dirty dishes, old computers, and a colony of feral cats breeding in my attic. I've done pretty well in life.

===============================
(1) Nirvana!
===============================

Nirvana is another popular thing to think about when you remember the 1990s. As you can see from the above photo, Nirvana was a "gimmick-rock" band, and their "gimmick" was the fact that they were made entirely out of Legos. Although Lego-based bands are common today, at the time this was considered a very novel thing. However, it's worth noting that when Nirvana first bust on the scene there were several bands made entirely out of Duplo blocks (Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Indigo Girls) that were growing in popularity. These Duplo-based bands have been criticized for not being as fun as Nirvana and having fewer interactive playsets available for purchase. Eddie Vedder countered this criticism in a 1996 interview with Rolling Stone, noting that the larger size of the Duplo blocks that comprised his body made him a good choice for young rockers without the advanced motor skills necessary to manipulate the smaller Lego bricks.

(I just read the above paragraph and I'm not sure what it means or where it came from.)

Anyway, you can remember the 1990s by clicking here to peep out Nirvana blowing up Del Mar, California with their cromulent sounds, circa 28 December 1991 anno domini.

===============================
(2) Bands that weren't Nirvana!
===============================

As awesome as Nirvana was and as cool as it is to think about them all the time, there were in fact several other 1990s bands that were not Nirvana. Probably one of them was a group called Pavement. I don't know a lot about them, but after listening to them play in a country called Germany, I'm curious to learn more. Did they wear those sweet green overalls with short legs? Did they have those pointy helmets where you can use the spike on top to assemble and hold together a really big sandwich? These are the things I want to know. Also, I want to know what Pavement album I should buy first. Please if somebody knows anything about them leave a comment.

OK, you can click here to peep a listen on Pavement playing in Germany on the 26th of June, 1996.

===============================
(3) Something about the Internet!
===============================

I couldn't find a photo of Al Gore inventing the Internet, so here is the next best thing. One cool thing about the Internet in the 1990s was the fact that a lot of web pages were pretty shitty. In fact, I remember reading a statistic stating that 4% of Interweb traffic was at one point Geocities pages. Raise your hand: who here had a Geoshitties account? Be honest.

Man, lookit that Ewok go.

OK, that's all for today.

10-4
Dr. Shihady

The Internet is fucking weird

2006-09-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

Holy shit. This is a breaking Internet news alert: Dustin Diamond, the dude who played Screech on Saved by the Bell, is alleged to be shopping a sex tape around to distributors. Here are some links to the story as reported by purportedly legitimate news sources.

On one hand, it sounds totally fucked up -- the video is titled Saved by the Smell and supposedly involves Diamond dirty sanchezing on tape -- but mostly it just reeks of a formulated and pathetic P.R. stunt perpetrated by cheap-suited leeches on behalf of a washed-up loser whose house is on the verge of forclosure. How depressing.

Still though, I wanted to learn more. So I consulted the Internet, and was surprised to discover that: (a) The North Korea Times was reporting on the story, and (b) there is such a thing as the North Korea Times website in the first place. Pretty fucked up when you consider that North Korea has banned the Internet.

Using the power of curiousity, I then decided to consult Wikipedia for more information. According to the Wikipedia article (which is only a stub, natch), it looks like some chumps in Australia are shilling for those douchebags in Pyongyang.

Two observations here. One. The "fake newspaper" schtick strikes me as a P.R. ploy even lamer than the Dustin Diamond sex tape. Two. The fact that somebody, somewhere in the world is reprinting information about Screech's sex life on behalf of the North Korean regime is at once both deeply hilarious and troubling.

That is all for now.

10-4
Dr. Michael Shihady

ps: Isn't it awesome how many links I included in this post? Isn't it fun how tedious it is clicking on them to find out where they go?

I think I need a new camera

2006-09-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

So as you may or may not have noticed, September has been a little bit light with the updates around here. Well folks, that's because it's shaped up to be another busy month. It started off house-sitting for some friends, then I drove on down to San Fran-fucking-cisco for a conference (nothing against the city, I just like the ring of "San Fran-fucking-cisco"), somewhere along the line I finished Duncan 2.0 Beta: The Movie, and then I went to Vermont last weekend. Also, I drove from Seattle to Portland and back to Seattle for work yesterday. Fucking modernity.

Vermont was pretty great, though. The awesomest part was when I learned how to play polo. Before I met Lady Shihady, I had some pretty ill-conceived notions about polo, notions about a sport characterized by friendly banter and courteous deferentiality. Well, Lady Shihady is a champion equestrian, and she got me thinking correctly about what polo really is: a bloody, bone-crunching, brutal sport characterized by swarthy Argentinians giving each other painful spinal injuries. Horses will plow into each other, and riders are allowed to "hook" each other's mallets to pull competing players right out of their saddles.

Of course, I didn't do any of this. I just sat on a horse and whacked a ball with a stick. But that was still totally fun, and I seem to have a natural knack for riding: I had my horse spinning some pretty good donuts in no time flat. Horses are pretty cool animals. They're basically like gigantic dogs, except you can ride them and they can accidentally kill you.

Lady Shihady's mom snapped what I can only assume are some great pictures of the Great American Polo Adventure, but she used a conventional filmic camera, and consequently I have not yet seen the snapshots. I think it's time for me to get a new digital camera: my old one was destroyed in a night of drunken mayhem in last April, when my friends Reido and Moitch joined me in La Jolla to celebrate the occasion of helping me drink all the alcohol I would buy at Ralph's that night.

Lately I've been using Lady Shihady's digital camera, which is OK, and the camera on my cell phone, which is a worthless piece of shit, the usage of which makes me feel like a crispy-haired night-clubbing douchebag with a hard-on for whatever pointless consumer electronic device is blitzing prime-time advertising slots that month.

But I have a few pictures taken over the last month or two, so what the fuck, let's take a peek why not?

**************************************************

This is our awesome dog. What a freakin' cutie-pie.

**************************************************

When I visited British Columbia last summer, I drank a can of "Beaver Buzz" energy drink. I still don't know whether or not this represents a double entendre to Canadians.

**************************************************

This is the building my conference was in. Initially I thought it was kind of a cool building, but upon reflection I'm starting to think that posting this picture is just populating the Interent with more pointless blog-vomit.

**************************************************

Sometimes, when I get tired of my job, I fantasize about driving a really sweet truck. In the middle of just such a fantasy, I walked by this awesome semi. The picture doesn't do it justice, and it really makes me hate my camera phone. Canadian trucks seem to be totally sweet for some reason, so I am going to link to some other Canadian truck photos.

**************************************************

While house-sitting for some friends earlier this month, I took a walk down nearby Aurora Avenue. (Oregon readers: this area is kind of like 82nd Avenue in Portland -- big an' shitty.) I was walking by a tombstone shop, where you can buy gravestones and monuments. The statue above stood out -- a pigeon had dropped a fat white turd right into the angel's mouth, giving the appearance that the statue had opened wide for "the money shot." That's basically Aurora Avenue in a nutshell, and it made me wish that I was carrying a decent camera.

**************************************************

This is our neighbor Roy's truck. It smokes a lot when he starts it up. This picture was actually taken after most of the smoke had drifted away. It's pretty amazing how inefficiently a truck can combust hydrocarbons and still run. Note the tricycle, ladder, and mass amounts of mysterious shit lashed to his rig. None of it ever goes anywhere. Seriously, what the fuck?

**************************************************

And finally, here we have some tasty treats that my buddy Reido sent me for my birthday. Hilarious and awesome.

**************************************************

So that's that. Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that half the time this month when I've gone to write a post, Blogspot has been on a pissy fritz that interferes with my ability to post sweet rants. I don't know why, but it pisses me off. Big time. I'm thinking of converting my old desktop machine from college into a web server and building my own site. So, given the usual glacial pace of my personal projects, you should be looking forward to this change in approximately 18 to 36 months.

Thanks,
Mike

Duncan 2.0 Beta: The Movie

2006-09-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

Hey folks. Duncan 2.0 Beta: The Movie is now online. I'll post the link a couple paragraphs down, because first I need to hype up the movie for you. I would call this film "an overclocked, bleeding-edge thrill ride" that's "in your face with legit cromulence." It has guns, puke, cars, swear words, and a brief artistic portrayal of the female form, so if you have any kids they should leave the room while you watch it.

I would have posted the link earlier, but I had to fly to Boston and then drive on up to Vermont. When I was a kid flying was awesome. In part, this was because I knew deep down, in my heart of hearts (that's like a meta heart that supplies blood to your heart muscle, doctors refer to this meta-heart as your "coronary arteries," the blockage of which will cause heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-acks) that I would be an astronaut. So getting on an airplane was just like step one in my personal astronaut training program: you have to crawl before you can walk, and you have to fly on a regular airplane before you can take the space shuttle out for drinks.

But now, I am a fully developed, emotionally mature human adult (almost), and it has become sadly apparent that unless NASA needs somebody to help test the effects of binge drinking and bazooka-barfing in space, I am never going to "kiss the sky" without the aid of powerful psychoactive agents. Conseqeuntly, commercial air travel is a lot less exciting, and a lot more miserable.

Anyway, enough with the chit-chat: let's make with the link here. In order to download Duncan 2.0 Beta, click here.

You should be able to play this file with the latest version of Quicktime. Fair warning, the file is about 160 megs and hosted on a friend's server running off a DSL line, so you might want to plan on doing something else while you wait for it to download.

Okay, I'm out of here. Lady Shihady and I have to scout venues for our wedding. I am thinking an abandoned sawmill, with the bride and groom (her and me, respectively) riding up to the ceremony on ATVs. God that would be sweet. So far this idea has not been fully rejected by the family, so I feel optimistic. Alright, later homies.

10-4
Dr. Michael Shihady
Not a real doctor

A brief note on JAVA support

2006-09-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

Here's a little gem from the Windows 98 EULA that I'd like to share with y'all:

Note on JAVA support. The SOFTWARE PROUDCT may contain support for programs written in JAVA. JAVA technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of JAVA technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.

Three things. One: Boldface is taken from the original document. Two: I like how they explicitly call out Java here, as if there's not a chance in hell that Windows 98 will BSOD at the most inopportune moment possible. Three: I am not a lawyer, but I think the subtext here is that if you ever need to write some code to regulate a reactor's core tempurature, you shouldn't do this using a Java applet. Probably TurboPascal or BASIC is a better choice.

I know, I know: posting segments of a depricated operating system's end-user license agreement does not exactly lend itself toward making the kind of sophisticated, witty dick jokes that you have come to expect from me. That is why I am urging you all to stay tuned for an important announcement regarding the immediately forthcoming release of Duncan 2.0 Beta: The Movie. Oh yes. It's done.

10-4
Mike

Flywheels, adrenaline, Linux.

2006-09-21T10:59:00.000-07:00

Morning, dudes. Let's start with an outline:

(0) Fuckin' A.
(1) Adrenaline is the only cure.
(2) Not as leet as I thought I was.

OK. Let's begin.

===============================
(0) Damn.
===============================

I'd be layin' a lie on your hides if I told you all that the last couple of weeks have been rainbow bliss and moon pie dessert buffets. Probably the shittiest event of the month so far has been the death of Steve Irwin. I had planned on writing about this earlier, but I wasn't sure how to go about it. Honestly, though, his death really got to me. I will spare you the details because in hindsight I think there's no way to write about that week without coming off like a sissified girly-man.

So suffice it to say that his death sucked, and was the kick-off for a couple of long, sucky weeks that found me engaged in thrilling events such as driving to Tacoma wearing socks stained with coffee and soy sauce so that I could pick up a $900 flywheel. This cruise featured a total Lebowski moment where I was listening to the Rolling Stones version of that "send me dead flowers" song and spacing out, when all of a sudden I ran over a gigantic chunk of construction scrap littering the interstate. This caused me to pound the roof of my truck and swear.

===============================
(1) The movie Crank.
===============================

Lady Shihady and I saw this film last night. It looked really promising: a dude is injected with poison, and the only cure is adrenaline. The movie was made about 100 times more awesome by the fact that my special lady smuggled in an icy-cold can of Surge for me to slam. This blatant violation of movie-theater-law was done without my knowledge and or any suggestion on my part. She sure is good to me. I purposely left the can on the armrest of a seat so that some dude would find it, and hopefully wonder what the hell he's doing looking at the container for a beverage that hasn't been commercially available in the Seattle area for about five years.

If only the movie had lived up to my expectations, though. Not to say that it wasn't good, but it wasn't as mind-blowingly awesome as it could have been. I mean, in an entire movie about a guy who needs adrenaline to live, there was no (a) skateboarding, (b) BMX bicycling, (c) deadly animal encounters, or (d) nearly enough awesome cars. Also, the edgy, in-your-face MTV-generation editing style detracted from the movie. I felt that that this was bullshit. In a movie about a dude who needs adrenaline to live, you have to rely on the story and the action to carry the movie. That kind of edgy post-production should only be used for things like romantic comedies or boring documentaries, where there's not enough substance to justify the movie without choppy, seizure-inducing edits. I mean, seriously: it's awesome enough that the dude is driving a Buick Riviera through a shopping mall. We don't need to see it from 45 different angles that make use of 80 different color palettes.

Another thing in the movie that bothered me was the token "nerdy guy secondary character." In the movie XXX, starring Vin Diesel, they nailed totally this character. Agent Toby Shavers was a hilarious jibber-jabbering geek, and Xander Cage's delivery of "Do you ever get punched in the face for talking too much" is perfect. However, in Crank, they seemed to think that it would be funnier if this character was interested in being flamboyantly gay instead of being interested in science or engineering. This might have been acceptable if he was a flamingly homosexual weapons engineer, but just having be a trendy clubber adds nothing to the story.

One of the things in the movie that pissed me off was the objectification of women, and the gratuitous "sex in public to get the adrenaline going" scene. First off, it's condescending and unnecessary. But more importantly, these scenes distract from violence and action, which should be "nonstop." By definition, stopping the violence and action to portray sexual acts disallows for the possiblity of nonstop action and violence.

Overall I would give this movie a B.

===============================
(2) Not as leet as I thought I was
===============================

So I'm dicking around trying to get a smallish Linux distro running on my ancient ThinkPad, and -- get this -- the machine is incapable of booting from the CD drive. I guess ten years ago the thought that the installation disk for an operating system would be a CD must have been some nutty bullcrap. I believe this counts as un-fucking-believable.

So I pulled out an old 3.5" floppy and made a boot disk (wow, been a while since I've done that) to install a program called "smart boot manager," which looks like an extra layer ontop of the bios that allows you to boot from the CD drive.

However, when I try to install the "Damn Small Linux" distro, I get a bunch of errors when uncompressing shit, the monitor auto-detect doesn't quite work, and then I get a kernal panic. Fuck! I guess I'm helpless if I don't have a candy-colored Ubuntu installation configurator doo-dad to hold my hand.

Looks like there might be some extra options I can set when I boot up, and then I have to borrow some config files to get the monitor working properly. But the sound card simply doesn't play with Linux, owing to the fact that (to my knowledge) IBM never publicly released the specs necessary to write a functional driver.

What's cool is that new ThinkPads are actually a great machine to run Linux on (in fact, Lenovo, which bought the ThinkPad line from IBM, recently announced that they'll be selling ThinkPads with a Linux distro called OpenSuse pre-loaded on them). I think there's some kind of lesson or moral or insight that can be learned from this, but I'm not sure what it is and I'm too lazy to figure it out.

OK
Mike

I'm back, dudes.

2006-09-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes -- sorry for the protracted silence on my end of the blog here. Partially this was due to weirdness on the part of this here crazy blogging software. Fuck knows how this site wound up with like five identical motorcycle posts on the front page. Also it was inaccessable for a few days. Then I went to California.

But listen up. Here's the real reason I haven't written in this blog lately: Every single ounce of my spare time has been spent working on a thrilling motion picture chock-full of guns, robots, and puke. And now, this film is nearing completion.

The name of the movie is Duncan 2.0 Beta: The Movie, and its game is slamming your eyeballs with a nonstop, edge-of-your-seat rollercoaster thrill ride jam-packed with action, romance, and intrigue. And it even has a side-splitting reference to that venerable programming language known as Pascal.

Anyway, I just cut the second draft of the movie, which clocks in at around 15 minutes or so. It's not feature length, but it's not some bullshit tweenage YouTube crap, either. I should have the final version done later this week, at which point readers of this blog will have first crack at downloading this amazing piece of filmographic motion history.

OK, I have to work now.

Sincerely,
Mike

We must rename the planets

2006-08-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

Good morning, dudes!

I have an important issue that I'd like to discuss today: Why the fuck are planets named after Roman gods? I mean, come on, I realize some of them were somewhat awesome -- and here Pluto and Mars come to mind -- but for the most part they are staggeringly irrelevant fictional assholes in need of a serious attitude adjustment. If there were any justice in this world, every comment on Slashdot about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer going ape shit, throwing chairs around, and threatening to "fucking bury" Google would be one-upped by a "+5 Insightful" slam about Saturn wigging out and devouring his children (figure 1). I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of monopolies, but neither am I a fan of cannibalistic gods of agriculture flipping the fuck out and eating their young.

Fig. 1: Francisco de Goya's interpretation of Saturn, a serious major-league asshole, devouring his children. Circa 1815.

Another problem I have with the naming of the planets is that they're named after Roman gods -- or, as I like to call them, the Rip-Off Cabal. Seriously: the Roman gods weren't even original, they just copied the Greeks and gave them new names. Jupiter = Zeus. Neptune = Poseidon. Venus = Eros. And so on and so forth, until all several thousand gods have been exhausted. I mean, come on Rome, you showed good creativity in your early years with that yarn about Romulus and Remus suckling on a wolf titty. Couldn't you have at least tried to come up with one original god of something?

On one hand, the Roman Empire's blatant rip-off of Greek mythology angers me, but on the other hand, the fact that astronomers perpetuated this derivative naming of the planets tears me up inside even more.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot, I have one more gripe, but it's not about the naming of the planets, it's about the actual word "planet" itself -- it means "wandering star," because early astronomer dudes noticed that planets moved across they sky differently than stars. Goddammit! They're not fucking stars! If we don't call stars "wandering planets," why should we call planets "wandering stars"? However, I am willing to let the misnomer "planet" slide for now, but only because I can't think of a cooler word to replace it.

But this actual naming of the planets -- fuck it! Why would you want to honor somebody who didn't even exist by naming an entire planet after them? We need to get with the program here, pronto. Science may not be a democracy, but language and nomenclature certainly fall under the umbrella of mob rule. If enough people start using words, it becomes official! Don't believe me? Peep out the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, where you'll find recently coined turns of phrase such as "hacktivist," "cybrarian," "skatepunk," and "nanobot."

(Incidentally, the word nanobot offends me deeply, because I have never, ever heard about a nano-scale robot cabable of doing legitimate robot activities like welding, beeping, or fighting. Talk about vaporware.)

Anyway, my point here is that if enough people start referring to planets by their new handles, we can effectively rename them!!! My first suggestion is incredibly important, and it concerns the planet closest to the sun. Currently, it is named after Mercury, a Roman rip-off of Hermes, the fleet-footed messenger dude who had embarassing little wings on his sandals. What a sad excuse for a planet name. Shit, if you're gonna name it Mercury, why not just name it "Delivery Boy, Junior"? Because that's essentially all Mercury was. Fucking Mercury.

No, we must change its name to "Munro," in honor of motorcycle speed champion Burt Munro.

Burt Munro has the rare distincition of being a real American hero even though he was from New Zealand. You can learn more about him in the movie The World's Fastest Indian in which Anthony Hopkins portrays old Burt during his trip to America in which he exceeded 200 miles per hour on his insanely modified 1920 Indian motorcycle. Burt Munro forged his own pistons, practically whittled down truck axles to build engine rods, and was, generally speaking, a salty old motherfucker with balls of steel.

Fuck. The story of Burt Munro is the best story I've heard in a long time. When Burt bought the motorcycle as a young man, it had a top speed of 56 miles per hour. But after years of living in New Zealand and modding the fuck out of his bike, he took it across the ocean to America, and set a land speed record for 1000 cc motorcycles in 1967. Almost 40 years later, the record still stands. I mean, the dude set a land speed record on leaf springs.

Fuck. The man embodied the scientific method, too, so astronomers should be all about this. Hermes/Mercury/Messenger Boy Junior never dropped any science. He was like a meat version of one of theose pneumatic message delivery tube systems in old skyscrapers, except way less cool because he couldn't suck up capsules filled with candy and swear words written on old scraps of paper. He never dropped any science, ever. In contrast, Burt Munro was a methodical experimentalist, constantly formulating hypotheses and testing them on his motorcycle. If a new part he built made his bike go faster, it was a success. If it didn't work, then his hypothesis was wrong, and he'd try something else. Let's see a Roman god with the humility to admit on any kind of regular basis that he could be wrong.

Fuck --- just, fuck. You can't tell me that some made-up extraworldy fuck-o deserves that planet more than Burt Munro. And that is why I ask you, dear readers, to always and forever after refer to the planet closest to the sun as "Munro."

Of course, the issue will no doubt come up in causal conversation with your friends. You'll need to be prepared. "Wait -- what the fuck is Munro?" they'll ask. Here's how to respond.

"Munro is the planet closest to the sun, named after motorcycle racing champion, tireless innovator, and awesome old dude Burt Munro. Munro is heavily cratered, with a physical appearance not unlike that of our moon. Appropriately enough, given the propensity of its namesake to forge his own parts, Munro has an iron core of unusually large proportions relative the planet as a whole. Speaking of which, Munro's composition is the subject of upcoming space missions MESSENGER and BepiColumbo, and it is hoped that these missions will yield further insights into Munro's origins. Like its namesake, Munro is fast as fuck, orbiting the sun once every 88 days. It's average orbital velocity is 47.36 kilometers per second, but when Munro really kicks into high gear this 70% metallic speed beast tops out at 58.98 kilometers per second."

At first, your friend will likely stare at you dumbstruck. But then, he or she will nod slowly, and say, "Yes, I agree, Munro is a suitable name for such an awesome planet." Then they will ask what Burt's motorcycle looked like, and you can show them this picture:

I recommend printing and saving this picture. Possibly also you should laminate it. You may have to explain that half of the bike's aerodynamic shell has been removed to show off the mechanical components. God I love components.

I am going to close out with a recommendation that you watch The World's Fastest Indian. The DVD has the best special feature I've seen in a long time, a 1971 documentary on Munro called Offerings to the God of Speed. It has some awesome interview material, badass footage, and it showcases some of 1971's most popular filmmaking techiniques, such as long crossfades to rolling waves lapping at an ocean beach. Pretty good shit. Burt Munro is an inspiration, and I am 100% serious when I say that we should name a planet after him.

Sincerely,
Mike

Pluto's not a planet, it's a trap.

2006-08-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Damn. Longtime readers of this blog will know how much I dig the Western World. Consider: our esteemed canon of boring but important classical literature; our travel to the moon using gigantic rockets that carried elite square-jawed astronauts and their cars with wheels made of piano wire; our infinite capacity for tolerance as demonstrated by the fact that somebody is still allowing Jim Davis to churn out countless Garfield strips devoid of substance or humor; our fierce and mighty power, as demonstrated by the 1969 Dodge Charger R/T, 1970 AMX, and the fifteen-plus iterations of Grave Digger that have competed in monster truck rallies nationwide. In fact, I like the Western World so much that I will be borrowing a couple of cues from classical Greek philosophers for this post: reason and balance.

Reason is what the classical Greek philosophers used to "rationalize" their penchant for cornholing little boys. This is fucking straight-up nasty, and if I could travel back in time the first thing I'd do is throw a serious beat-down on a large number of ancient Greeks. Rest assured that I will be using "reason" in a different way for this feisty screed.

Balance was a typical aspect of life in classical Greek times. Half the time would be spent chugging olive oil and blowing chunks into priceless urns, and half their time would be spent waging war against the Persians. Most scholars agree that this practice has persisted into modern times in some form or another. In its purest form, "balance" consists of two equally weighted things. In more advanced forms, "balance" consists of two objects of unequal mass placed on lever arms with the fulcrum positioned so that neither object hits the ground. I will be using this more advanced form of balance in kind of a metaphorical way, by talking about two things. With that said, here is an outline:

(0) What the fuck is a planet supposed to be anyway
(1) Puking rainbows.

Let's begin!

===============================
(0) Astronomers, you're out of your
fucking element!
===============================

Recently, astronomers decided that Pluto is no longer a planet. It got demoted, joining the ranks of a sub-planetary class that includes the asteroid Ceres and some god-forsaken space rock so nerdy that it's been nicknamed Xena. May the Space God have mercy on our solar system when we start shitting on planets named after a grim and bloodthirsty lord of the underworld by lumping them alongside space rocks named after hokey virgin-fare TV shows. It's a sad day for humanity.

I think that we can all agree on one thing right off the bat: the job of astronomers is to do astronomy -- not to diddle in semantics. That is the job of foremost Internet luminaries such as myself.

Oh, I know all the complaints. "Pluto is too small. It's orbit is too elliptical. Pluto is too awesome for me to fathom -- what if frigid ice-muppets are chattering away on its surface right now, huddled around volcanic vents and sleeping in slaughtered tauntauns to keep warm? Best to leave it out of sight and out of mind by reducing it to some asterisked footnote on the edge of our solar system." This is a crock of shit.

Well, I will not stand idly by whilst the slacks-wearing tweed-jacketed pipe-smokers (not a euphemism) of the world hijack my deeply-held and highly revered classification of the natural world. Hey, scientists! Haven't you ever heard of democracy? America is by the people, of the people, and for the people, which means that you have to cater to every whim of the huddling masses here on earth! These brie-eating Godless taxachussetts liberal fucktwit scientists -- don't they know that democracy means majority rules, all the time? That means that if the majority want us pledging our kids to God and State every morning in public shools, we have to! That means that if more than half the people think that Earth is 6,000 years old and was made in six days, we have to teach it in science class! That means that if half the people think black is white, it's true! Jesus Fucking Christ, scientists, get with the program already!

At any rate, it is evident that we need a new way of deciding what is and is not a planet, and it is evident that this classification scheme will have to preserve what we believed before new evidence was brought to light. I think that a good way to rationalize our beliefs about planets is to introduce a classification scheme based on whether or not an olden-tyme dude was involved in the discovery. Here is a chart to help you:

(0) Is the object in the solar system?
---> If yes, proceed to the next step.
---> If not, forget about it.

(1) Is the object undergoing nuclear fusion?
---> If yes, it is the sun or a bomb.
---> If not, proceed to step 2.

(2) Is the object an asteroid?
---> If yes, we should extract minerals from it.
---> If not, proceed to step 3.

(3) Does the object have a cult associated with it?
---> If yes, it is the Hale-Bopp comet.
---> If not, proceed to step 4.

(4) Does the object have a phonograph, prime number, and line drawings of naked dudes?
---> If yes, it is the Voyager probe.
---> If not, proceed to step 5.

(5) Is the object a gas giant with a hilarious name?
---> If yes, it is "Uranus," a planet.
---> If not, proceed to step 6.

(6) Did cavemen or ancient Greeks know about it?
---> If yes, it was a planet.
---> If not, proceed to step 7.

(7) Was anybody with badass chops, poofy olden-tyme pants, bugged-out Christopher Lloyd expressions, or kick-ass facial hair involved in the discovery?
---> If yes, it was a planet.
---> If not, it is something else.

Now, you might think right away that Pluto would not be a planet, because discoverer Clyde Tombaugh did not have a mustache and was decidely a man of modernity. HOWEVER! He "discovered" the planet using photographic plates belonging to Percival Lowell, who was clearly an olden-tyme dude on the basis of the following considerations:

"Percival" is an olden-tyme name

He was involved in the undisputedly olden-tyme pursuit of searching for "Planet X"

Probably also he flew in a zeppelin once

He is buried in an awesome olden-tyme mausoleum

He had a kick-ass mustache

Fig 1: Percival's 'stache.

Percival Lowell's research was a necessary prerequisite to Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto, and thus Pluto meets the requirement of having an olden-tyme dude involved in the discovery. Clearly, Pluto is a planet, and we can end all this silly talk of demotion.

You can read more about Lowell here.

===============================
(1) Taste the rainbow.
===============================

Best website I've seen in a long time: Puking Rainbows.

That's all for today.

Sincerely yours,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Man of science.

Public urination is basically the perfect crime.

2006-08-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

Hola, fuckers! I'm back from my weeklong hiatus -- and I still don't have shit to talk about. I reckon that I could play off recent current events in the tech world and make a stink about how fucked up patent law in this country is, but that would be too damn nerdy. Or I could jibber-jabber at y'all about that country music star who got busted shooting a caged bear because he wanted to look like he fuckin' totally bagged a vicious ursine monster, but that guy is a blubber-gutted sad sack of shit not even worth the sentence you're reading right now. Hey! Here's some news! Croatia just announced that they're going all open-source for government software needs, and ... no, fuck it, I mean Vin Diesel proved in XXX that Eastern Europe is awesome to the max, but, but ...

FUCK IT! I'M WRITING ABOUT CROATIA!!!! YEEE-HAAAAAAA, BUCKEROOS!!!!

Now here's the thing about Croatia. Number one, they do seem pretty awesome. Number two, in the interest of accuracy, XXX was actually set in the Czech Republic, not Croatia, but Croatia is still pretty cool. Number three, the primary export of Croatia is Nikola Tesla and ass-kickings. Don't ever fuck with Croatia, or they'll administer a serious beat-down. Shit, fuck with 'em heartless enough, and Nikola Tesla well come back as an electromagnetic spectre of death and beat your chump ass silly.

"Fuck!" you'll find yourself exclaiming. "What the fuck!"

"Mess with the best, die like the rest!" Tesla will explain, then he'll fuckin' do the awesome thing where he picks you up by your collar and your belt like he was an olden-tyme constabulary, and then he'll totally bum-rush your chump ass into a dingy bus stop like you were a sorry drunk getting the boot from a raucous English pub. Then, in the bus stop, you'll be surprised and terrified when you discover that jackals and hyenas who escaped from the Croatian National Zoo are patiently waiting to chew your face off, just like that chick in France who chugged too many sleeping pills and woke up to discover that her black lab had wigged out and ate her lips and nose and skin.

Man. People thinking they can fuck with Croatia ... screw 'em. (And seriously, it is pretty cool that Croatia's public servants are going all open source. Look for more of Croatia in the news in the next ten to fifteen years. They seem to be on the right track. I hear that film jobs are getting outsourced to Croatia because they have the know-how to do motion picture stuff for cheap. Unlike myself, Croats seem like hard-working down-to-earth cool dudes, so I give them props.)

Anyway. This week I hooked up with a friend of mine from college who lives in Seattle now. Let's call him "Dave," because that's his name. He's doing grad school -- for math -- at the university that came up with that huskie logo that's on my folding chair. Man, I don't often agree with that talking Barbie doll that got pulled from the market for being a worthless piece of sexist shit, but she hit the nail on the fucking head when she said "Math is hard!" (I also agree with Teen Talk Barbie when she says "Want to have a pizza party?")

(Damn, that reminds me, I have pizza in the fridge to eat. Awww, yeah. Thanks for the heads-up, Barbie.)

It was cool to see Dave again after all these years and to have him confirm my deeply held beliefs about math being difficult and pizza being delicious. After drinking with him and two of his friends at the bar, I walked home and took a leak in some bushes I saw along the way. Public uriniation is basically the perfect crime -- totally gratifying, and if a cop catches you doing it you have a legitimate excuse for peeing on him if you pretend to be surprised and spin around really fast.

In my opinion, that's problem with white-collar criminals -- you know that no matter how many identities they steal or how many phony checks they pass, they're never gonna pee on a cop. Unless they're high on PCP and committing really violent white collar crime by banging on a keyboard until their fingers bleed. I guess I could see them peeing on a cop if they got busted just then.

I would have to say that probably my favorite episodes of Cops are the PCP episodes. I especially like the one where the dude is standing on a garage roof with bloody feet and hollering about something. There is another good episode from Des Moines where a naked dude breaks a fence with his head. I wish the midwest had more of a PCP problem and less of a meth problem.

Okay. That's all for today. More later.

Very sincerely yours,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Man on Internet

You've got to be shitting me.

2006-08-17T08:28:00.000-07:00

Shit, homies: I just cannot believe it. On more than one occassion I've groused about the fact that this blog has a grand total of something like three regular readers including myself. On a good day I'm lucky to get 30 hits, 15 of which are likely to be me crawling through the archives to see if I've already used the phrase "fuck-nutted he-bitch." (I haven't.) The remainder of non-Shihady, non-regular readers will be perverted sickos in middle eastern countries with nationwide Internet filters whose Yahoo searches for verboten man-on-beast action led them here. Fuck. From time to time I also get hits from hard-up Mongolia-bound Google users searching for "Ulaanbaatar brothels."

The sad fact is that as awesome as I like to think I am, my fiesty, semi-coherent ramblings on Johnny Tremain, international politics, and how much I drank last night are just not that popular.

And yet, here's the amazing thing: this blog is in the top one percent of all blogs on this planet (Earth).

You've got to be shitting me. And no, before you ask, I didn't just make up that statistic based on scientific guesstimation. I consulted Technorati for the latest stats on Internet bullshit and discovered that based on the number of incoming links (mainly from jdodson.org and a handful of courteous spam-blogs) my blog is ranked number 281,016.

Sounds pretty bad, right? Yeah -- until you realize that there are 52 million blogs on the Internet. That puts this blog in the top one percent of all blogs. With as little traffic as it gets, this site outranks over fifty-one million other blogs in the "blogosphere." This blog is elite. This blog has attained a much sought-after rank that lesser blogs can only dream of attaining. This blog towers above a mess of spelling errors and sloppy HTML assembled by an a flock of semi-literate dipshits that outnumbers any standing army on the planet by over an order of magnitude.

And yet virtually nobody reads it.

I mean, shit, if this doesn't underscore how totally overhyped this whole "blogosphere explosion" is, than I don't know what does. The oft-cited staggering figure du jour is some 75,000 new blogs per day. What you aren't hearing about is the fact that 74,999 of those blogs will be utterly unreadable tripe, while the 75,000th blog will be a highly specialized forum for about a dozen guys discussing arcane nuances of adhesive applicator tips for superior gasket sealing in late-model small-block engines.

In other words, 75,000 irrelevant new websites spring up every day, polluting the Internet and making it that much more difficult to find awesome shit like anecdotes about cool dudes who light their farts and drop objects off bridges. It's enough to commence a man to ponderin': What the fuck is the point of even doing this? I like spinnin' yarns, telling dick jokes, and bitching about how much I hate the queen, but I don't really see how the Internet as a venue is at all superior to, for example, a street corner.

I need to think about this for a while. I'm gonna take a few days off from writing -- should be back sometime mid- to late-next week.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Not a real Doctor

ps: The actual genesis of this post was the fact that I wrote a useful script that creates an ordered playlist for all the mp3 files in a folder based on the time the files were written/ripped from disc (the idea being that they were ripped sequentially based on the track order). It's a useful little utility, because Sound Juicer, the default mp3 ripper in Ubuntu, doesn't auto-create playlists. I thought about posting it here and releasing it under the GPL, but then I realized that approximately zero people would care. If I'm mistaken and you would actually find it useful, let me know. Thanks.

New England has expired

2006-08-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

Fellow citizens, I would like to talk to you about a very severe nomenclature problem that this country currently has.

Specifically, I have a bone to pick with the naming of "New England." New? England? Like elder statesman Ben Franklin once said: "Two wrongs don't make a right, people, they just make a double-wrong and a big stinking pile of baloney. P.S., join or die, and a penny saved is a penny earned."

Let's get with the program, America -- the name "New England" is so far past its freshness date that it's stopped smelling rancid to the noses of all but the most olfactoryly sensitive patriots. (And while I'm on the subject of "freshness dates," there's another bullshit marketing phrase that I'd like to call out. Since when did the day that something becomes no longer fit for human consumption garner the distinction of being a "freshness date?" Fuck that noise.)

Some of you might think I'm joking. You are wrong.

"New England" is certainly not new, nor is it the property of England. It's not even "new to you" in the second-hand sense -- if you've ever slammed a pint of Ben & Jerry's, hated on Phish, or assembled a 500-piece fall foliage jigsaw puzzle, "New England" is a played-out olde-school prig.

Worse though than New England's false and misleading adjectival forename is its corrupt and treasonous surname. England? England?!?! Our best and bravest fought and died in a war of independence to remain tied in title to those vestement-wearing, overly-taxating, underly-representating, bloodsucking monarchical dickweeds?

This is a fucking travesity. There is nothing peculiarly English at all about "New England." Shit, you could more justly call Maine "French Canadian America" than you could call it "New England."

God I hates me some redcoats.

So I'm calling for a revolution on the tongues of all good Americans. It's time to take a lesson from history: For years, the city that is currently popularly referred to as "New York City" was known as "New Amsterdam." Then, when the British usurped the Dutch and we traded one tyrannical colonial overlord for another, "New Amsterdam" became known as "New York."

The British sure as shit didn't want a bunch of tulip-eating, weed-smoking, Hamlet-having hippie windmill lovers leaving their mark on maps, road signs, and their national conciousness. Should good Americans afford those snaggle-toothed crumpet-loving tea fiends across the pond that privilege? The answer, my friends, is no.

That is why I insist that we should no longer refer to that blustery collective of northeasternmost states as "New England." Instead, I propose that we refer to this region as "Old America." If you prefer, "Olde America" or "Reverse Florida" are also acceptible spellings.

We must also purge our country of place-names relating to irrelevant English prefectures. New York City is the most obvious example, but here we must afford special consideration, or else residents of all five burroughs -- Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Riker's Island -- will simply condense their name to MaBrooBroQueRi, as they are wont to do. (My suggestion is that we call the city "America Island," but in the spirit of democracy we must put it to a vote.)

Citizens, I urge you to join me in this important battle for America's heritage and its future. Only by changing our very language itself can we affect the kind of change in our national conciousness necessary to finally, completely, and decisively cut the fucking umbillical from those queen-loving twits and their soggy fucking isle of despair.

I thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Not a real doctor

ps: Anybody out there already referring to "french fries" as "freedom fries" damn well better be getting on this bandwagon.

No post today.

2006-08-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

-Mike

Suck it, Beardo.

2006-08-14T07:53:00.000-07:00

Man, dudes, I feel like I woke up and crawled into Garfield's skin. Mondays suck. Here's an outline:

...(0) Bran' new hoopty
...(1) Weekend camptivity
...(2) Fear / Loathing / Castro

Let's kick it.

===============================
(0) Pimp my ride
===============================

Well, last week Lady Shihady and I bought a brand new car together ... and when I say "brand-new," I mean "pre-owned," which is secret marketing code for "used." The phrase "pre-owned" has to be one of the most transparent pieces of money-grubbing, briefcase-clutching, suit-wearing bullshit that I've ever heard. To investigate the origins of the phrase "pre-owned," let's put on our thinking caps and take a trip back through time!

RRRRRRRR SSSHHHH-KRAK!!! (That is the sound of revving up to 88 miles per hour so that you can travel through time.)

(Also, why did the DeLorean have to reach 88 miles per hour to travel through time? Isn't this a trifle fast to be going if you plan on driving into another century that doesn't have, you know, roads? Couldn't Doc have made it a more conservative 18 miles per hour, or maybe just made it something where you push a button? Granted, this would have been way less dangerous, and therefore way less cool, but still.)

(Furthermore, do any of you remember the Back to the Future Saturday morning cartoon? There is one joke where Marty McFly parallel parks the DeLorean by flying it laterally into a parking spot. As a child, I found this gag to be hilarious, and as an adult, I can look back on this gag as a formative influence on my developing mind. But look here! In Futurama Season 2, Episode 7, Put Your Head on My Shoulders, a similar version of this joke appears, in which Amy laterally flies her new "Beta Romeo" (which actually appears to be modeled after the Volvo P1800, and not an Alfa Romeo) into a parking spot. Whether or not the use of this joke was coincidental, a respectful homage, or spiteful ripoff, I may never know. However, I dervive great joy from stinking up the Internet by writing nerdy-ass shit like this.)

(Damn, it really does not get much nerdier than this on a Monday morning.)

Anyway, back to our imaginary time-travel investigation. Here we are, back in the year 1985 AD, and ... eh, fuck it. I don't feel like writing a bunch of boo-yah about the doofus that came up with the phrase "pre-owned." Let's just all agree that he was a sinister beady-eyed ragnar with a penchant for tawdry thrills and stinking turns of phrase. As if somebody did you a favor by "pre-owning" the car for you -- fuck that noise. The words "pre-owned" make about as much sense as a "pre-slackened condom" or "pre-confiscated by the Redcoats muskets."

Man, I'm not really doing a good job here of talking about the car. So, to get to the point: it's a 2000 Audi A4 quattro (that means it comes with an optional fourth wheel). Also it has a turbo and a manual transmission, which means that I really shouldn't be driving it.

Prior to owning this car, I really haven't been all that good with a manual transmission -- this is marketing code for saying that I would "pre-own the holy fuck out of your clutch" if you let me anywhere near a stick shift. But the transmission on this car is downright generous, and I got the hang of it in almost no time.

The downside of this car is that it practically reeks of legitimacy. It has no major body damage, it makes no terrible noises, and the mere act of driving it is not considered probable cause in most states. It has a nice sound system, but with every Creedence track I pump through the stereo, I still feel as if I have months left to go before I will complete my ritualistic cleansing of all the Dave Matthews Band albums that must have been repeatedly blasted through those speakers. (Side note: that "crash right into me" song would be awesome in a car commercial. [By the way, I know somebody from Audi is bound to read this ... you media-savvy fuckos crawl the "blogosphere" for market research -- and I want a big fat check, a cold beer, and a beejer when you use that song in your next crash safety ad campaign.])

(Lady Shihady: I am just kidding about the beejer part.)

Anyhowski, there is no real point to this other than to say that I just took another great stride toward sophisticated adult legitimacy.

===============================
(1) Woods and nature and shit
===============================

So last weekend Lady Shihady and the dog and I took the new hoopty up to the mountains and went camping. We stayed at the Dalles campground, north of Mount Rainier and next to the White River. And man, some of the "camping" that goes on up there is just ridiculous. I understand that car camping is not exactly roughing it in the first place, but there comes a point when it stops being camping at all, and merely becomes "scenic parking." Seriously, is it really necessary to be running a generator to power all the electrical geegaws in your 45-foot RV?

Don't get me wrong, there's something legit about living out of a moderately sized RV, but these big ones are nuttier than a squirrel turd. It's like driving a house to the woods -- and fuck, a lot of the new ones cost more than a house to begin with. And they all have ridiculous names like "The Intruder," "The Marauder," and "The High Tundra Mercenary of Death with Optional Airbrushed Tigers and Swans." While "The Intruder" is certainly accurate enough, I think the other gigantic RVs ought to sport names like "Traffic Blocker 4000 XE" and "Fearer of the Unknown."

At any rate, though, camping was nice, as we got one of the "overflow" spots reserved for people who arrived after the main campground had filled. It was a walk-in spot far away from any odiferous pit toilets, noisy highway, or chugging generators, and the nearby burbling river drowned out any stereos or yipping football-sized dogs that might decide to raise a late-night ruckus. The idea that this was one of the less desirable "overflow" spots because you couldn't reach out of your tent and grab a cold beer from your car seemed bizarre, but fuck it, who am I to complain?

Anyway.

===============================
(2) Fidel Castro and shit
===============================

So yesterday after we got back, Lady Shihady and I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ... I was psyched to discover that there was an audio commentary track by Hunter S. Thompson. It's pretty amazing, but there's one point in which Thompson mentions that one of his heroes is Fidel Castro. And man, normally Thompson is pretty right on, but Castro seems like a pretty major asshole to me.

I mean, the dude runs a country where you can get your ass thrown in the slammer for treasonous "counterrevolutionary" activities. What counts as treason? How about getting together with three of your friends (who presumably drive awesome 1950s American cars) to bitch about how much Cuba sucks? What a fucking dickweed this guy is!

Sitting around and bitching is basically all I do, and there's no doubt that if I lived in Cuba, my ass would be in the clink alongside anybody who ever vocally advocated, you know, a multiparty system. Thanks for nothing, Castro. And nice beard, by the way.

Seriously, why does everybody have such a hard-on for Castro's beard? God it pisses me off. Seriously, it's not even a very good beard. It's just that he's had it for so long that eventually people forgot that it looks like he was licking a bunch of envelopes before diving face first into a pile of eight-inch long frizzy gray pubic hairs. And yet people fawn over this furry bristle-mop face muff like it's a ZZ-Top-caliber beard. Come on, world, get with the program.

Those of you who follow current events may know that Castro is currently "recovering" from intestinal something-or-other. As proof of Catro's aliveness, Cuban state media released the following photo of Castro holding Sunday's newspaper:

If nothing else, this should settle the long-unanswered question at the State Department's Cuba desk over whether or not Havana posesses the p2p filesharing technology to download a cracked copy of Photoshop. I mean, seriously, have you ever seen a daily periodical in a state-controlled economy whose paper is as bright and white as the fabric in an Adidas jacket originating from a free-market economy? Fuck no! Our durable goods will beat their disposable propaganda every single time!!! (Unless our durable goods were made in China, but that doesn't count.)

Furthermore, in real life, the Granma newspaper used red ink for the headline that Castro's showing off. Oops -- nice one, Cuba. Meanwhile, an AP wire report says that there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of these photos. Fuck, these are our choices? A state-run newspaper that unashamedly lies to you, or an independent newswire apparently staffed by a bunch of overly gullible "gee-whillikers, what a scoop!" Jimmy Olson-types. Fuck. I weep for humanity. Weep.

Under the direction of Castro, Cuba has executed thousands upon thousands of its citizens for "counterrevolutionary" activities. What a fucking crock of shit that is. Man up and stop being such a fucking asshole all the time, eh buddy?

At first, I was optimistic when I heard that Castro was out of commission owing to his stomach bug. But then I was disheartened when I heard that in spite of our trade embargo, the Cuban government had managed to either develop or import successor-naming technology, and Castro's brother Raul has stepped up to run things for now. Fuck. Same old meat grinder, just another hand on the crank.

And while I'm on the subject of Cuba and ranting, I'd like to talk about all these detainees in Guantanamo that the Bush administration has insisted they can hold without trial. This is fucking buuuuullshiiiiit, homies.

The current administration insists that this country was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and that that they are the inspiration for our particular codification of innate rights. Like my main man Thomas "Jammaster" Jefferson lays down in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights." In other words, sayeth certain framers and the current administration, we have rights not because the government guarantees them but because God endows us with them.

As a dude whose belief in a god is nonexistant to shakey at best, I'm not 100% down with this logic, but that's a fiesty screed for another time. All I'm saying is that if you swallow the party line that we have our rights because God gives them to us, it's an affront against your creator to deprive "detainees" of their rights on the legal technicality that you're holding them in another country. This is hypocrisy at it's fucking finest, folks -- to say that God endows all humans with equal rights, and then to refuse to grant those rights. Fuckin' A, there's a gaggle of ragnars at the helm of every ship if you ask me.

Shit. I'm hungry and need more coffee. I'm out.

Later,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Not a real doctor.

Unvarnished purity and elegance at it's fucking finest

2006-08-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

Hey folks. I know that I've come rappin' at you with a string of low dick-joke-quotient posts lately, and I plan to write one more serious screed here before the week is out. Hopefully you can forgive me, but yesterday was a Big News Day, and I'd like to talk about some shit that pertains to the Big News that went down: our friends across the pond put the kibbosh on a heinous terror plot, and we owe them in a big way.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I have a penchant for making fun of how much British food sucks, and you sure as hell can't hold me back when it comes to trashing on the queen (and British people, please don't try to rationalize her presence by saying that she's a figurehead -- fuck figureheads, I demand reason and accountability). But for the most part, you have to give jolly old England credit for their "parliamentary, representative democratic monarchy," which is 75% legitimate by name. What I'm trying to say here is that even though it's bullshit that they have a figurehead queen, I give madd props to the British for pigeonholing their monarchy into a figurehead role in the first place. Shackling monarchs is no easy task, and it probably took so much time that they forgot how to cook food without boiling it, which would explain why all their cuisine is so nasty.

Anyway. Now that the Brits are no longer our gun-grabbing, press-shuttering, Cornwallace-loving colonial overlords, they've become pretty cool dudes. And yesterday they proved it by busting a plot to explode ten U.S.-bound commercial airliners. It's no exaggeration to say the Brits prevented the first serious terror threat to rival September 11th in scale. Thanks, England -- we owe you all about sixty million pints of Guinness and then some.

Man, when I have to confess that right now I'm getting a little teary-eyed about how awesome America and Britain can be. I mean, we totally fought a bloody war for indepence from them, but eventually we worked shit out, defeated the Nazis, won the cold war, and in between came up with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Young -- the list goes on. (Okay, Neil was Canada's and John Lennon was kind of a dick, but still.) And while I'm not proud of everything we've done together in recent years, both our nations are still pretty awesome.

I met a few British people in hostels during my trip to Japan, and it saddened me that they didn't understand America all that well. "Why are you all about the flag?" they would ask, and then they would get angry when I would try to explain that we're not all about the flag, we're about the fact that America is the greatest country on the face of the planet. I wish I could do like an Ebenezer Scrooge Christmas Carol dream sequence with them, except instead of showing them terrifying visions of things to come, I would be the ghost of America's present, and I would show them how here in America we have dudes that strap gas-powered fans beneath parachutes and fly around, how we have demolition derbies with heavy-duty agricultural equipment, and how we have the most awesome mountains and plains haunted by severely excellent spirits of crazy, bearded, alcoholic hillbillies.

God, America is awesome. I know that I promised to write about the news, but I got sidetracked on all the awesome things that come to mind when I think about my country. So I want to thank the Brits one more time for protecting our backsides before I move on to the serious shit.

What I want to do is compare important statements on this busted plot -- a statement from the UK, and a statement from the President of the U.S.A. Remember in grade school, when you'd have to "compare and contrast" two essays or shit like that? Put on your thinking hats, class, because it's time to drop logical analysis on newsworthy verbiage. Peep it.

Here is what Paul Stephonson, Deputy Commisioner of Scotland Yard, had to say in his statement on the busted plot:

We are confident that we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction and to commit, quite frankly, mass murder.

I would want to join the commissioner who is fully briefed and has been here at New Scotland Yard since very early this morning in paying tribute to the Met's counter terrorist branch and the security services for the work that they have undertaken in disrupting these activities.

We believe that the terrorists' aim was to smuggle explosives onto aeroplanes in hand luggage and to detonate these in flight.

We also believe that the intended targets were flights from the United Kingdom to the United States of America.

I can confirm that a significant number of people are currently in custody and the operation is ongoing.

The majority of those arrests have been here in London, but we have also made arrests in Thames Valley and in Birmingham, and of course I am very grateful for the support our colleagues have shown in backing up this operation, and showing their leadership in those forces.

We are currently searching a number of addresses and Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of the anti-terrorist branch ... will give a further details about the investigation later this morning.

As the operation got under way we spoke to a good number of community leaders to make them aware that a major anti-terrorist operation was under way but without giving specific details about locations. This extensive dialogue will continue.

We would like to reassure the public that this operation was carried out with public safety uppermost in our minds. This is a major operation, which will inevitably be lengthy and complex.

The United Kingdom is now at the highest possible level of alert. We will consider the threat in its wider sense and take whatever action is necessary to protect people here in London and right the way throughout the United Kingdom.

Measures have already been put in place to restrict hand luggage taken onto aircraft. This will inevitably cause very significant delays and I know it is doing that as we speak here. We ask for people's continued help and patience at these very difficult times.

We are genuinely looking to the public to remain calm, patient and vigilant, but we cannot stress too highly the severity that this plot represented.

Put simply this was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.

Link to source material (Guardian UK).

This is one king fucker of a "just the facts, ma'am," statement. This is the type of statement that you'd see from a dude who drinks his coffee black, drives exactly the speed limit, and calls his mom every weekend. No politics, no bullshit, just straight-up facts. In short, this is the type of a statement that I want to hear when heavy shit goes down.

Now, let's compare and contrast that to the statement that George Bush, Jr. delivered after stepping off Air Force One yesterday:

The recent arrests that our fellow citizens are now learning about are a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to -- to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation.

I want to thank the government of Tony Blair and officials in the United Kingdom for their good work in busting this plot. I thank the officials in Washington, D.C., and around our country who gather intelligence and who work to protect the American people. The cooperation on this -- on this venture was excellent. Cooperation between U.K. and U.S. authorities and officials was solid, and the cooperation amongst agencies within our government was excellent.

The -- this country is safer than it was prior to 9/11. We've taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we're still not completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in. It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America.

And that is why we have given our officials the tools they need to protect our people.

It -- travelers are going to be inconvenienced as a result of the steps we've taken. I urge their patience and ask them to be vigilant. The inconveniences occurs because we will take the steps necessary to protect the American people.

Again, I appreciate the close cooperation between our government and the government of the United Kingdom. The American people need to know we live in a dangerous world, but our government will do everything we can to protect our people from those dangers.

Thank you.

This transcript comes from the New York Times, who I am still pissed at, and who I will not give the courtesy of a link.

Anyway: Give me the facts, dude, not a bunch of political spin. Specifically, the line "And that is why we have given our officials the tools they need to protect our people." Did these tools have anything to do with the bust? If not, shut the fuck up, and don't exploit what could have been a mass-tragedy to shove your agenda down our throats.

Tell me what the fuck went down, and what we did in co-operation with the British to prevent this plot from coming to fruition. If you can't tell us right now because the investigation is ongoing, explain that to us, and promise that further details will come later.

Don't use this as an opportunity to explain to me that the world is a dangerous place. I am capable of perceiving glaringly obvious aspects of reality. I understand that living on Earth carries with it the risk of death through terrorist activities, war, car accident, disease, lightning strikes, shark attacks, and falling meteorites. And if it's dangerous only because there are still "people who want to harm us for what we believe in," then shut the fuck up, because with six billion people on the planet, there's always going to be somebody that wants to fuck you up on account of your beliefs. Thank you for announcing that something that has always been the case will continue to be the case for the rest of human history.

Terrorism will never succeed in influencing America by hitting us with attacks so severe that we can no longer withstand them. This is simply not possible. The only way terrorism will succeed is by forcing Americans to captilate to their agenda because we live in fear. Laying this "holy fuck the world is scary" bullshit down on us does nothing to stop terrorists from achieving their aims.

Fuck this. We saw the same sort of exploitation when the Patriot Act was up for renewal earlier this year -- around that time, the Bush Administration released details on a plot to fly an airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast. This plot was busted years ealier, back in 2002, and it was never clear that the Patriot Act was essential to carry out the bust. But that didn't stop the administration from alluding to that anyway, and selectively releasing information timed to achieve their own political ends.

And that's endemic of the way this War on Terror has been conducted. A while back, "the Portland Six" were busted on the same day that Richard Reid entered a guilty plea for attempting to blow up a commerical jetliner with a shoe bomb. "The Portland Six" were a handful of dumb shit fucko's who decided to fight alongside the Taliban against US forces, but were too incompetent to cross from China into Afghanistan. John Ashcroft announced it as a "defining day in America's war against terrorism."

Forgive my skepticism, but I can't help but think that the Portland Six bust was timed to coincide with Richard Reid's guilty plea. And in my mind this is not the way to conduct an investigation -- you fucking bust these theocratic chumps when you're good and fucking ready, when the evidence is there and you can build a solid case, and when you're confident that further investigation won't lead you to uncover any new plots -- or as we saw yesterday, when there is an imminent threat. We shouldn't be choosing to make arrests so the attorney general can have a ready-made quote for the news crews. That's what I call bullshit.

Fuck.

I think one of the most revealing quotes yesterday came from White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. "You can't go overboard when you're trying to protect lives."

Now if this doesn't sound like a bunch of pink-bellied Volvo-driving liberal bullcrap, what does? By that logic, it wouldn't be going overboard to impose ludicrously strict safety standards on automakers, ban tobacco products, confiscate all guns, and suspend the second amendment. Fuck these lying hypocrite ragnars. There is such a thing as going overboard, and the fact that they don't seem to understand that is what's truly scary.

Sincerely,
Mike

ps: Thanks again British dudes.
pps: (Your food still sucks though.)
ppps: America rules.

James Van Allen, R.I.P.

2006-08-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

Damn. James Van Allen is dead at 91. In celebration of Dr. Van Allen's life and times, here is a collection of photographs depicting James Van Allen in awesome scientific situations.

Let's hear it for severe-looking men in white shirts and ties bustin' Soviet chops with the power of science. Communists are either good-intentioned but delusioned soft-skull morons or power-hungry totalitarian dickweeds -- and I give madd props to James Van Allen for dropping science on their pink, revisionist heinies just when the world needed it done the most.

The world has just died a little bit more today.

Sincerely,
Mike

You versus all the assholes in the world

2006-08-09T08:14:00.000-07:00

So, peep it out, there is currently a video up on YouTube that's a rancid piece of shit -- but it's a different piece of tripe than the usual webcam-girl bullshit that pollutes YouTube. The ripeness of this video-turd stems from something that I've incoherently ranted about before on this blog: my belief that when somebody says something, the awesomeness of that statement is at least partially dependant upon who is saying it.

Specifically, Jenny and I argued about this way back in January when it was revealed that author James Frey was not a stone-cold fuck-up alcoholic, but rather a pretty-boy fucktwit capable of being reduced to a quivering lump of goo by Oprah Winfrey. This made the awesomeness factor of his "memoirs" suspect, and in my mind it made them a lot more shitty.

But more to the point: right now there's this video on YouTube. It's supposed to look like a homemade video that makes fun of Al Gore's in-your-face global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth ... looks like just a regular homemade video, made by some regular dude who thinks it's fucking bunk that increasing the amount of heat-trapping gasses in Earth's atmosphere will warm up the planet. I will link to this video using the phrase Linux bukkake skateboard.

However, this video wasn't made by some 29-year-old dude living in Beverly Hills ... it was purportedly shat out onto the Internet by a group called DCI, a PR/lobbying firm whose clients include (wait for it) the Exxon Mobil Corporation.

Go fucking figure.

Now see here, I think the legitimacy of this video takes a major hit when you discover that it was produced by hired guns based in our nation's capitol. I mean, fuckin' A -- the rug-pissers of the world were tryin' to pull a fast one on us.

It's not 100% analogous to the James Frey scenario, because in this case there was no awesomeness to be sandblasted away when we discovered the true nature of the content creator. However, any semblance of legitimacy the video had -- the notion that somewhere in Beverly Hills, some average Joe was taking a stand against Al Gore's shadowy penguin army (what the fuck) -- is gone.

Anyhow, there's not a whole lot I can say about how fucking slimy and underhanded this is that hasn't been said before. However, I do want to touch upon something that I haven't seen addressed in the mainstream media: the choice of penguin.

The penguins in this movie are "Tux." Tux is the Linux penguin, and he does cool-ass penguin things like sit around and stare at you and appear in countless graphics accompanying news stories on open source software. Here's a great picture of Tux wearing a sombrero and shmokin' a blunt:

Perhaps it's just coincidence -- a non-sombrero'ed Tux is on the first page of hits returned by a Google image search for "penguin." But dig a little deeper, and you discover that -- hot fucking crackers --

Microsoft is a former DCI client
DCI publishes a website called TechCentralStation
TechCentralStation has published a number of articles that portray open source software in an unfavorable light.

TechCentral articles have great titles like "No to Info-Communism" and "Is the Penguin Contaminated?" They also have great section headers like "Partly legitimate, partly vaporware." (Gee, kind of like half the Vista features that were ever announced?) If you want to read up on it yourself, here's a link to a Google search that will take you to Linux-related articles on their site.

The people who push this shit out on the world aren't idiots, and they have an agenda -- but when they won't comment on the work they do, you have to make some educated guesses as to what that agenda is. My guess? Lump 'em all together -- all the left-wingers, environmentalists, open source advocates, anti-war activisits, and anybody who grouses about how we are (in the words of Bill Hicks) getting "fucked in the ass every single day" -- and make 'em look like a bunch of batty fringe-lunatic dipshits.

Fuck it. It really is you, the hapless idiot consumer fuck-up, against an elite cabal of asshole pricks who want to shove expensive oil, factory-crippled DRM-"protected" media, and bullshit agendas down your throat.

It's you, the hapless idiot consumer fuck-up, who has to pass off a gigantic debt to your kids because the oil revenues that were promised by that same elitist cabal never fucking materialized to pay for reconstruction in Iraq.

It's you, the hapless idiot consumer fuck-up, who's gonna be paying for five dollar gas ten years down the road when hydrogen fuel cells never materialize. And if they do materialize, it's you, the hapless idiot consumer fuck-up who's going to be paying just as much to drive, because -- guess what -- hydrogen is refined from oil.

And when killer hurricanes fueled by warm water in the Gulf of Mexico blow through your hometown and fuck the holy living shit out of just about everything and everyone, it's you, the hapless idiot consumer fuck-up, who will have your second amendment rights suspended while rich people who can afford to hire "security firms" maintain their right to armed protection. Don't believe me? It happened last year.

Fuck. End rant.

Sincerely
Mike

ps: Holy fucktards, Batman! The TechCentralStation website uses -- gasp -- Linux servers!!! Peep it out here. They use a mix of Linux and Windows servers. As of this writing, all the articles on www.techcentral.com are available and being served from a Linux mahine. Everything on www2.techcentralstation.com -- which is hosted on a Windows server -- is down. Laugh-out-fucking-loud, numbnuts.

I think I have an addictive personality

2006-08-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

Dudes, I'm coming at you with a heartfelt confession. I have a problem. And it's literally tearing me up inside.

I am fucking addicted to pepperoncinis.

I am currently plowing through these spicy little pickled bitches at the rate of slightly less than a gallon a week. This is not a joke. As my pepper consumption has geometrically increased, so to has the frequency and liquidity of my bowel movements. It's like somebody lit a anti-personnel device packed with explosive capsaicin and angry feral cats in my asshole. And yet I can't stop.

It's bad, dudes, way bad. (Also, ignore the fact that the Wikipedia article insists that pepperoncinis are not spicy: they are. Trust me, whoever wrote that article did not guzzle literally dozens of bulk peppers per day for days on end. And I guarantee you that if the peppers aren't spicy in your face region, they're definitely spicy in your ass region.)

Fortunately, I live in America, which -- as has been established many times before in this blog, usually with the aid of many feisty swear words -- is the greatest and best country of all time.

When it comes to food, a lot of your lesser countries are wack-ass poser bitches. What's that jolly old England? You've never had a pepper problem? Well maybe that's because you boil the living fuck out of everything that ever touches your plate. Ever wonder why you're the only country with a dish called "spotted dick?" Leading food historians believe that it's because one time in the 16th century, a royal chef failed to boil a horse schlong beyond recognition. While eating breakfast, the queen "spotted the dick" when she went in for a close-up with those olde-tyme opera binoculars-on-a-stick. Outraged that her food had not been properly rendered unidentifiable, she roared "Off with his head!" and the poor sucker had his noggin ripped off by an angry knave.

But in America, we do things a little different. We like to keep our food identifiable, and --

Fuck. I have to admit something: I started writing this post last night, but quit halfway through to watch four episodes of A.L.F. before falling asleep. Upon waking up, I discovered that I had no recollection of how I intended to segue from conflict to resolution in this screed, nor do I know where I was going with the whole "British food sucks" thing. Apparently, the portion of my brain responsible for crafting well thought-out essays had died overnight.

Anyhow, to wrap it all up, all I'm saying here is that I'm addicted to pepperoncinis. But I have a great plan: since I have turned twenty-six years old, every day my brain dies a little bit more, and every day my cognititve capacity shrinks just a little bit further. That means that I no longer have the brainpower to cope with any new addictions. So all that I need to do is start up a new addicting habit, thereby displacing one of my previously held addictions -- hopefully pepperoncini consumption.

I guess I could always just tape the jar shut or something, but let's be reasonable here: there's no way in hell that's going to work. Instead, I'll just become a compulsive Internet gambler or something awesome like that. Pretty soon, I'll be spending so much time flushing my savings away on online poker that I won't have any time left at all to remember how much I love stuffing my face with that spicy, stomach-churning goodness.

Sincerely,
Mike

ps: After I die and some Hollywood bigwig decides to make a biopic of my life, this whole "Mike is addicted to chili peppers" thing needs to be covered in an awesome montage scene. First I am chugging pepperoncinis in the kitchen, and then we hear Buffalo Springfield sing all like "Stop childern, look around, everybody see what's going down." I fall on the floor, but I attempt to get up but it takes me a couple tries. The song keeps playing as I walk out the front door and fall down the stairs, still clutching a barrel of pepperoncinis.

I walk through the park throwing up and bleeding out of my mouth. To my left are a bunch of hippies dressed up in their ridiculous hippie outfits and holding anti-war signs. On my other sign is a row of riot police decked out in full body armor and holding rifles. Again the song urges the children to all see what's going down, and I eat a dozen more peppers and throw them up on the hippies. The riot cops all love me for that, but still I hate authority figures and deep down I know that the hippies are probably right about how much war and cops suck.

Again I fall in my own puke. The barrel of pepperoncinis spill everywhere and it looks like I'm crying. I pick up a bunch of pepperoncinis from the ground and shakily stand up. Then I start walking down the line of riot cops and placing a pepperoncini in the barrel of each of their guns.

Awesomely enough, as I do so, each riot cop who receives a pepper is instantly transmogrified into a twelve-foot tall saguaro cactus wearing a sombrero and a pancho. Instead of guns they hold maracas and bongos, and instead of regular faces they have two big kielbasa sausages for lips, synchronized double-projectile tuna heads that retract in and out instead of normal eyeballs, and instead of a nose and a mustache, they just have a broken "Precious Moments" figurine connected to the bristles of a pushbroom.

The talking police cacti get all wound up and psyched, and they start to play the bongos and maracas in time with the soundtrack. One of them has a big wooden guitar that he plays by blowing on the strings. As soon as I've transmogrified all the cops into cacti, I kick down the barricades and the hippies come swarming up to give the cacti big hugs. But then the hippies all start screaming because they have needles stuck up and down their body from the cacti. One of them holds a bleeding girl like in that picture from Kent State, and everybody learns a valuable lesson. The music abruptly stops and we cut to the next scene, where I'm dominating a celebrity poker championship in the basement of a Reno truckstop, suckin' on a big cigar with an empty beer and half-finished chili dog next to my chips.

Un-fucking-believable

2006-08-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

Hola, dudes. I know I should be rapping at you with a long-ass post chock full of my usual fare of high-concept dick jokes and endless tirades about how much I hate monarchists, but today we're going to be dropping the dick schtick and talking serious for a moment. Yesterday, AOL released a collection of "~20M web queries collected from ~650k users over there months." This data was "anonymized" by assigning each user a random number.

This is a pretty fucking weak method of anonymization, if you ask me. To AOL's credit, once they realized what a massive fuck-up they'd committed, they pulled the file, but the cat is now out of the bag, hosted on various sites unaffiliated with AOL and also available via bit torrent.

Many of the search terms are for embarassing, illegal, or questionable shit. And because these "anonymous" user searches are marked with a timestamp, it seems to me that you only need to have followed an outgoing link to one healthily inquisitive dude's website in order to have your privacy compromised.

For instance, suppose you performed a search for "legit government website" that took you to a government website where you entered your name and social security number for identification purposes. If your search query, along with its date, time, and "anonymous" User ID were released by AOL, the government would need only check its server logs for the same incoming search at the same time, and then see if that user went on to give them any personally identifiable information. Then, they know that "Joe Blow, social security number XXX-XX-XXXX not only searched for "legit government website," but also "How do I masturbate my underage illegal immigrant houseboy."

This is kind of a black-helicopters-and-tin-foil-hat scenario, but I'd be surprised if nobody used this information to associate some of these search terms with a real individual. After just a cursory search of some of this data, I was able to find queries from an anonymous user who searched for a particular church in my hometown, then went on to search for questionable porn, cracked software, a specific class at the local community college, and information on aftermarket parts for a specific model car that he (or she) presumably drives.

Fuck, it could be possible to identify this person by sitting in the church parking lot on Sunday, writing down license plates, and seeing which of those cars show up in the community college parking lot on Monday morning.

Absolutely un-fucking-believable.

As of now, the story is being completely ignored by the mainstream news media. A Google News query for "AOL Search" (no quotes in the actual query itself) suggests that the only news outlet to have picked up on this story is "OhMyNews" in South Korea. South Korea! How the dickens did they beat the New York Times to this story?!

Anyway, just thought y'all should know.

Later,
Mike

I'm a crotchety old dickweed now

2006-08-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

Hola, compadres. As some of you may know, I am twenty-six years old today. In caveman times, I would be nearly dead at this age, and I probably would have had at least two limbs gummed off by elderly mastodons. I would have about ten kids, half of whom would also be nearly dead, and the other half of which would already be dead, consumed by various species of prehistorical megafauna, including but not limited to wooly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giganto-bisons, flat-nosed bears, and carnivorous llamas. But thanks to technological advances in medicine, contraception, and species extinction rates, I am now just a crotchety old dickweed with no kids and all his limbs.

So in honor of my birthday, I am going to spend some time talking about the following subjects:

(1) How much a loaf of bread used to cost
(2) Kids these days
(3) Why won't somebody do something about all these problems

*****************

Now see here, when I was just a little chitlin in the golden days, you were liable to have yo' mammy calls you in during a game of stickball. "Hon, gow'n down to the gen'ral store, an' buy us all a loaf of bread, y'hear?" Of course you heard, 'cause you was lookin' at a sure-fire whuppin' if you din't hare no bread-call, but mammy always ask on account of she love you so.

So what she done do, is she press this great big nickel inna your hand like it ware some kinda precious gem. But it waren't no thing, she just wanna you to feel special, and ooo doggies, it was so special, 'cause a nickels in those days, they were so big and shiny, not like the nickels today, what is small and grubby and taste like cans. Those nickels was the size of a cat head and just as good I reckon. Ev'ry body would love to look at the nickels so much to see they's reflection in ol' General Stonewall's head ('cause he was on the nickel in those days), they would all drop the stickball game and come a-runnin' over to peep the mighty nickel.

In fact, you couldna even bring no nickels to school, in those days, not never, or Old Man Sneznar -- a might big an' angry Swede who smelled somethin' powerful of lingonberries -- he was the headmaster of the gymnasium and prone to whup you somethin' fierce if he caught you with a nickel. The reason for this was because the nickels was so big an' reflectin' if you put them on the floor you could catch a gander up a girl's bloomers in just the right light.

So we would all run over to the general store with this nickel, like I was sayin', and we would buy a loaf of bread and some sundries and about ten or twenty penny candies, because in those days a penny were good for just a tenth of a cent and maybe a li'l bit o corn pone.

And the bread!!!! Wooooieee!!! Back in those days we didn't have no spongey white-loaf bullcrap like the kids today eat, given them all they's hyperactive chillun disorder. No siree, we had magical talking bread loaves, because they was made o' snakes. See, t'was common knowledge you put in a snake in an oven, it heat him up so much he get all slithery an' talky, pretty soon he be pleadin' "LET ME OUTTA HERE DAGNABBIT!"

Course you don't listen no snake, 'cause they's just nuisance animals. But you heat them up sufficient, and pretty soon it changes they medulla oblongata somehow an' they become peaceable creatures in all that dough. So the bread, by the time it's rose up good, it'll be talkin' mighty kind an' friendly at you, jibber-jabberin' all day long, like that bread got off something good on jawin' at you about how sweet an' tastey he was, wantin' to blither-blather especially on about baseball an' flappers, as they was all the talk of the town in those days.

Oh, how I remember those days of cheap bread and tawdry flappers. It all ended I guess when Howard Hughes got big an' famous, 'cause he didn't like no creepy-crawlies in no food or on no surfaces. So what he did was buy up all the general stores an' bread recipes, an' he says "NO MORE SNAKES!" and instead o' snakes he used that expensive hippie-dippy whole grain wheat, bunch o' bull pies if you ask me, an' he uses this top-shelf expensive Listerine in his bread, and as a matter of course all of a sudden it cost you a pretty penny more than a nickel, and it don't talk at you or taste nowhere near as good.

Of course, we all celebrated way into the night and the morning and the next night when we heard how Howard Hughes died, but by that time, nobody remembered how to make the delicious snake bread, so we had to go right on eating the no-goodnik Hughes bread that we hated so. You don't mention that man's name around me in no sentence o' reconcilliation ever, not around me, you hear?

*****************

Okay, that's all I have time for today. I'll write about kids these days and all these problems that somebody should do something about at a later time.

Sincerely yours,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Extremely old gentleman

Eh, fuck it.

2006-08-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes. I turn 26 years old tomorrow and I'm getting sick of my job. This morning I tried to, you know, write an actual post, but fuck it, the damn thing came of like a pussed-out bitchfest. And seeing as how the purpose of the Internet is to be in your face all the time with awesomeness (or mit nein scheißdreck, as the Germans say), I couldn't bring myself to lame up the Internet with my personal work-related issues.

I mean, fuck, sometimes I feel so bad for the Internet. When did it become this massive repository for wack-ass hooey? Well, I for one, am not going to contribute to the ongoing decline of the Internet by posting a load of mopey drivel. No way, sir.

Instead, I am going to jazz up the Internet with my trademark feel-good 'tude. Toward that end, here is a triumvirate of blurry pictures (circa July '05) of yours truly, mustachioed, drunk, and dancing:

I think we can all agree that this is a step in the right direction for the Internet.

Fuck
Mike

The "inexplicably successful slacker/fuck-up" demographic demystified at last

2006-08-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

Morning, dudes.

Today I am going to be rapping to you about the following topics. I'll try to keep the outline for today informal and breezy. This means that you'll be getting a content outline, but none of the typical section headers.

Outline:

(0) Background
(1) Boozeological purchase algorithm
(2) AGD
(3) Bumper sticker validity
(4) Wieden+Kennedy

Yo ho ho, here we go!!!

***************************

Last night an old friend of mine from college sent me a survey. She graduated with a degree in physics but found her way into the wine industry, which gives me hope that I can escape the world of comp chem. Unfortunately, none of my alternative fields of choice -- desperado, drifter, madcap inventor of steam-powered brain readers -- are quite as burgeoning or lucrative as the wine biz.

So she sent me a survey asking me what factors I took into account when purchasing wine: varietal, region, price point, label, recommendation from wine store worker, anything else?

Well, you may not know this, but ol' Dr. Shihady has expanded his horizons this year -- since settling into my newer, more adult contemporary lifetyle, I have purchased several bottles of wine from legitimate retailers (read: not convenience stores). And in an all-consuming flash of goodwill, I penned the following response to the survey.

***************************

If all of the factors in my wine-buying decision were assigned points, they would add up to about one thousand. Here is how many points each factor gets in my purchase algorithm:

=================
Label: 400 points
=================
This is the most important part of a wine. If it has too nice a label -- and here we are talking like raised print and metallic inks and chic minimalism -- it says "Make way! Snoberella and Prince Dickweed coming through!" But if it is just like one color and says "FORTIFIED WINE," then it says something like "Look at me! I will be drinking this alone while weeping!"

You want a nice middle ground in the label, something that starts out punchy and ends on a sweet note. For example, a label that has a bottle of wine with wheels and tailpipes ramping over angry kegs with monster teeth. This label lets you know that this wine will slam your tastebuds with extreme prejudice, but the fact that there is a picture of a bottle of wine on the label lets you know that it's a wine in the first place.

=================
Price: 250 points
=================
Look, I'm not made out of money here. Ten bucks or less; preferably something in the five to seven dollar range.

=================
Varietal: 250 points
=================
Until you used the word "varietal" in your email, I hadn't known what that word meant, but now I know that what you call "varietal," I call "flavor." I actually like cabernet sauvignon because it tastes a lot like candy. I guess some reislings also taste a little bit like candy, too.

Basically in this category I am looking for something that tastes like a Jolly Rancher. In fact, if you could put "Now with enhanced Jolly Rancher flavor" on your label without getting sued, that would really help me out.

Important question: are the flavor names supposed to be capitalized? Are they places or grape types?

=================
Region: 100 points
=================

Here I am looking for something that comes out of Australia or someplace with a lot of sharks or megafauna or something. I almost bought some Canadian wine when I was in BC last week, because they have moose and grizzly bears, but instead I got some Alberta Genuine Draft. It was pretty good, I guess, and unlike wine they sell beer in fifteen-packs up there.

=================
Recommendation from
wine store person: 0 points
=================

What is this person going to tell me? This wine costs five bucks? This wine comes from a place with sharks and tigers? I know my geography. The only thing they could tell me is whether a wine tastes more like tropical Skittles or regular Skittles, but they never use words or phrases that I can understand (e.g., "like an Xtreme citrus blast with subtle notes of strawberry Starburst and also the stuff they put in the middle of Junior Mints.")

=================
Anything else: 0 points
=================

That is everything.

***************************

Man, the song "Lodi" by Credence is pretty good. If you've never been through Lodi, I would recommend that you not break your streak -- Lodi is pretty fucking shitty.

Anyway, in the above response to the survey, it seems like I'm just intersted in drinking something that tastes like candy, which begs the question "why not just drink wine coolers and Smirnoff Ice?"

That's a legitimate question, and I'll try to answer it as best I can: those drinks are fuckin' nasty shit. Just like there is good candy and bad candy, there are good candy-flavored alcoholic beverages and nasty candy-flavored alcoholic beverages. Skittles are tasty, but Peeps are like totally nasty to the max -- they taste like puffed sugar and chicken shit. In that regard, they are not totally unlike the flavor profile of Smirnoff Ice.

Just thought I should clarify. Also, I liked Alberta Genuine Draft so much that I took a picture of it. Here it is:

***************************

Yesterday I talked a little bit about our strange neighbor, Roy, and his junk-laden truck. Aside from the fact that his truck is basically unusable because you can't pick stuff up in a "pickup" truck if there's no fucking room, it also has a bumper sticker on the back. It says, "I used to have a life, but my job ate it."

Goddamn it. As Lady Shihady so accurately pointed out, there's no validity to this bumper sticker, as he is on disability and does not actually have a job.

If you're getting paid not to work, the law should require that a social worker look over your vehicle to identify and remove any irrelevant or inaccurate bumper stickers. For example, if you had a bumper sticker that says "I hate Mondays!!!" the social worker would replace it with one that says "I used to hate Mondays, but now the week just kind of blends together in a depressing haze of Swanson Hungry Man meals and daytime TV!!!"

In the case of out-and-out unprovable bumper stickers, a highly trained theologist may need to be called in. And here I am thinking specifically of those bumper stickers that read, in an intimidatingly jagged font, "WARNING! IN THE EVENT OF THE RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED!"

I want a bumper sticker that says "Warning! In the event of the rapture, I'll be looting your beach house!"

***************************

So yesterday this blog got a hit from the Wieden+Kennedy advertising agency. In case these dudes are still reading this blog, I would like to mention that I am available should you need a dude to whore out his ideas for money. In fact, here a few ideas for "sexing up" the ad campaigns for some of your clients:

Coca-Cola ad concept:
==================
In this ad, the new Coca-Cola executive is attending his birthday party. It looks like he's having a lot of fun, and then he turns to the camera and winks. "I'd like to buy the world a Coke," he says, and a black circle folds in on him while Porky Pig stutters "Ibbih-duh, ibbi-duh, ibbi-duh, that's all, folks!"

But then I jump through the circle and expand it out to fill the screen. "Hey, cheese nuts!" I shout. "You know what I'd like to buy?! A motherfucking can of Surge!"

"What?" he'll ask, because his brain and heart is an arteriosclerotic mess of rancid calcified porridge (we show this with a 3D CGI fly-through of his body, in which the camera goes into his mouth and out his ear).

"Dude," I'll say. "I want to give Coca-Cola money in exchange for Surge, a product you used to sell, but you won't let me do that. See, instead of buying a Coke for the world, you should let the world buy products from you. Something in the free market is fundamentally broken if I can't give a gigantic corporation money for a product that I want. In conclusion get bent."

Then I would slam a Surge from my stockpile (I still have twenty cases left because I sensed the impending Surge shortage in the year 2001; this is not a joke or a lie), and a robot would puke on this lame n00b.

Miller High Life
ad concept:
==================
Two construction workers are unwinding in a park after work and drinking beer as they lean up against their dump truck. All of a sudden, the White Stripes sneak up behind them and start playing. Then there is some dialogue:

WHITE STRIPES: [music]

CONSTRUCTION GUY 1: This suxx0rs!!!11~

CONSTRUCTION GUY 2: Let's teach these dicks lesson!!!

Then they reach into the cab and they dump a bunch of garbage on the White Stripes and push them into the river. We cut to a wide shot in which the construction dudes high five in the foreground while the White Stripes go over the Niagara Falls with a bunch of garbage. The commercial ends with a close-up on the beer and the voice-over "You wouldn't tolerate a sloppy drummer and an annoying prick. Why tolerate anything less in your beer? Choose Miller."

Nike ad concept:
==================
So there's this kid in the 1960s, and he has a button-down shirt with a lot of starch. He's watching a civil defense educational film, when all of a sudden these bullies jump out from under his desk and start pummeling him!!! The kid is bleeding from the face and ears, and these roughians are like "meet us by the flagpole." When the teacher calls them out the bullies cheese it and then the commercial cross-fades to an American flag with an Apollo moon rocket launching in the background. The kid is really scared and it looks like he might have peed himself, but then Michael Jordan slides down the flagpole and looks the kid in the eye.

"Little boy, have you had your break today?" M.J. asks. The kid shakes his head silently. "Well," M.J. says, "zip up your ass, because this is going to rock." Michael Jordan then accordians the kid like he's a made of paper, injects him into a basketball, and then dunks the ball on top of the flagpole, immolating the just-arrived bullies in a blaze of fire. Inside the basketball, the young child finds Michael Jordan again. They are both made of talking, excitable, three-dimensional scraps of paper that wiggle about in glee.

This makes everything they say sound very warbley. All of a sudden the kid looks down at his feet and his two legs and two arms morph into fifty-five Ganeesha arms and legs made of wiggling paper scraps, and each of his arms holds two basketballs, a football, and a baseball bat and raquetball. Each of the child's legs is wearing five Nike shoes wich in turn wear one Nike shoe on each tread protuberance, and this goes on and on like a fractal of shoes with more shoes on each of their tread. The camera flies around really fast to show this.

"Come with me little boy," MJ says, and then they dunk again, this time on a mile-high hoop in a craggy mountain, and at the top of the mountain they levitate up to Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs is holding Bill Gates in one of those two-dimensional glass prisons from that one Superman movie.

Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs put their heads really close together and they morph into a talking stallion with giantic talking eels coming out of its torso. The eels slither and hiss as eagles and griffins soar through the sky behind them. The clouds are made of churning blood and cotton candy. "HAVE YOU HAD YOUR BREAK TODAY?" the Einstein/Jobs combo asks in a thundering voice.

The little boy's wiggling paper scraps suddenly turn into connected hot dogs and pipe cleaners. "Why does everybody keep asking me that?" the kid whines. It looks like he is starting to cry. His tear ducts are made of fifteen chrome spigots each, and they begin to dribble Gatorade. Just as soon as it's clear the kid is about to burst into tears, he shouts, "I WANT MY MOM" and we flash the Nike logo. Except instead of just one swoosh, it's a hundred of them, and they're all flying at you really fast and the sound effect is the THX one from the beginning of Star Wars.

***************************

That is all.

-Mike

I've had a rough night and I hate the fucking Eagles

2006-08-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Dudes, I'm still feeling the thrill of being back in the United States of America. God, our Union is so awesome. I think Ben Franklin summed it up best when he drew the cartoon of that crazy snake that said "Join or Die." As far as death-related American catchphrases/mandates go, I also like "Live free or die."

Another good snake-related piece of American art is the coiled rattlesnake flag that says "Don't tread on me." One one hand it's awesome that Metallica used the snake. On the other hand, it sucks when people see the Gadsen flag on my clothing and think that I want to talk to them about Metallica.

"Enter Sandman," is a pretty good song, though.

***************

One thing that I'm not so thrilled about now that I'm back in the USA is my bizarre neighbor. There's this dude down the alley from us named Roy. He's one of those dudes that's totally friendly to everyone, but if you start talking to him you'll find yourself unable to politely extract yourself from conversation. He's on disability, just shaved his head, and has a smoke-spewing F-150 loaded up with so much fucking crap that it's nearly unbelievable. I don't know what most of it is, because it's covered with a tarp and a net, but the pile is taller than the cab of his truck and it's topped off with a ladder and a tricycle -- and it's been like that since we moved in. He also has a shitty early-80's compact Oldsmobile sedan that's similarly laden with shit. Let it go, man. You can probably put most of it out on the curb.

Also he wears those gigantic plastic glasses that you see on every token nerdy GI in every Vietnam movie ever made. In the army, these spectacles are referred to as BCGs, or "birth control glasses," because they're so unstylish. The overall effect is kind of creepy, sort of like a friendly, gigantic, semi-retired moonshiner/butcher/venison enthusiast from backwoods Georgia.

On one hand it sucks because this guy will just invite himself into our yard to pet our dog, but on the other hand it's cool, because having a wacky neighbor makes my life a lot more like a sitcom.

***************

The switch over to Linux has gone pretty smoothly. One small hitch was the fact that all of my mp3 playlist files from the Windows machine used Windows-world path styles -- a Windows path uses the backslash character (\) instead of the forward slash (/) used by every other operating system in the world. I was able to fix this using a program called "sed," but I still had a problem -- none of the mp3 players included in the Ubuntu distro are capable of correctly recognizing relative paths in playlist files.

So after a little more dickeying around with sed and I had replaced all the relative paths with absolute paths. Boo-yah! I'm now listening to some killer mixes. One problem is that many of the ID3 tags are fuxx0red, so the music database that these mp3 players build is basically pointless. I suppose that I could write some program that calls an ID3 editor to correct all the ID3 tags automatically, but I'd rather just downgrade to an mp3 player that doesn't attempt to create a music library in the first place. Call me old school, but I like my flat filesystem.

I'm kind of surprised that there's no relative path support or playlist conversion utility included with Ubunutu ... seems like a pretty commmon problem that people would encounter when migrating from Windows. Not to bitch or anything -- I'm just saying is all.

***************

A belated reply to the suggestions from last week regarding where to eat in Aberdeen: I really liked the Olympic coast, so sadly, I will probably be rolling through Aberdeen again in the future. I remember peeping the "Humdinger" while driving through Aberdeen, but I was skeptical at the time because it looked pretty dead. However, upon further reflection, the whole town looked pretty dead, so it's probably nothing to be skeptical about. I'll try it out the next time I pass through.

I guess the exception to deadness would have been the Staples parking lot. That place looked bumpin'.

There's something depressing about a town when you walk into a gas station for rancid, burned gas station coffee and you hear a radio ad for USDA rural development grants. Fuuuuuuck.

***************

Anyway, sorry if this post is a little weak. By way of apology, please accept the following link to a version of The Big Lebowski edited down to a minute of F-bombs.

Sincerely,
Mike

I'm back in America, bitches

2006-07-31T11:50:00.000-07:00

Goddamn is it good to be back in the United States of Sweet Rockin’ America.

Fuckin’ A, compadres. Fuckin’ A. There is no substitute for cold beer, free speech, and the right to bear arms. Canada does all three of those in varying degrees of piddling to passable. America -- where I am right now -- does all three totally to the max.

Did you know that in Canada, it is illegal to own a high-power assault rifle? Did you know that in Canada, it is illegal to post hate speech on the Internet? Did you know that it Canada, beer is sold in warm 15-packs that cost twenty dollars? No fooling.

Anyway, it’s good to be back here. The conference was a total bust owing to our shipper’s inability to actually deliver packages containing conference materials on time. Actually, I wouldn’t say the conference was a total bust, because it was at least uphill from a nude beach.

But if nothing else, the trip did reconfirm my most dearly held stereotype about Canada:

The purpose of Canadians is to be courteously deferential all the time.

During my stay in Canada, I saw a dollar store called Loonie King, an advertisement for a contest in which you could win “a great day with Wayne Gretzky,” and a really cool semi. Maybe I’m just romanticizing things, but I think it would awesome to be a trans-Canadian trucker. I once drove from Manitoba to Alberta by way of Saskatchewan, and that still ranks up there as one of my most thrilling driving experiences of all time.

Sharing the road with polite and courteous Canadian truckers on a two-lane interstate highway while the sun set at 11:00 pm is something I’ll never forget. If I ever die a hilarious death and somebody options my story rights to Hollywood, please insist that my biopic include a long montage of my awesome truck hurtling across the Canadian plains, steeped in the midsummer grandeur of a brilliant sunset and set to either Credence, some acoustic Led Zeppelin song, or Jimi Hendrix. In fact, since this scene should be at least 20 minutes long, you could probably use songs from all three.

I also met a Canadian guy who talked about skunk problems and other hilarious issues of great importance to Canada, and I had an ass-kickingly delicious burger called The Vic -- “double patties, double onions, double cheese, double bypass.” I can say without hesitation that this was the greatest hamburger I have ever eaten in my entire life. Canadians really know how to grill a mean burger. Eat at Vera’s if you ever go to Vancouver.

(Also, since I know that whoever produces my biopic will have to take certain creative liberties in the interest of keeping the story moving along, I think that it is okay to combine the hamburger-eating scene with the 20-minute long Canadian-driving montage. Purists will decry the fact that half a decade separated the two incidents, but in my mind and my heart I know that they belong together.)

But in spite of all the coolness that Canada boasts, they have a dark side.

Yes, I know that this is shocking, but you need to keep reading. Did you know that Canada still has pictures of the queen on their money? Well, they do, and goddamn does it piss me off. I hate monarchs so much, and I’m not joking around here. I mean, basically all the queen had to do to be put on their money was be born in another country and not die before reaching adulthood.

Canada, this is such bullshit. Here in America, you don’t get to be plastered on our coinage just because you were born. Hell no, dudes. In America, you have to do something of incredible merit, like defeat the British and have wooden teeth (George Washington), preserve the Union and emancipate the slaves (Abraham Lincoln), or defy the Supreme Court and send countless Indians to their death on the Trail of Tears (Andrew Jackson -- what a dick that guy was).

So in conclusion, my recommendation for Canada is that it’s time to get off the titty -- take the queen off your money, make your currency double-sided with loons or grizzly bears, and sever any remaining ties with England. Their food sucks, their royal family is a bunch of batty twits, and their cars all have bizarre electrical problems that are impossible to fix.

That is all.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Shihady

Aberdeen is a major shithole / fontological brouhaha

2006-07-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

Hola dudes. I am back from a weekend on the beach with Lady Shihady. We rolled on up to Olympic National Park, where we kicked it on the beach. And shit goddamn, it takes a long-ass fucking time to get there -- owing to the presence of Puget Sound and the Olympic range, it's a four-hour drive to the beach. Fuuuuck. On the other hand, though, it keeps the beach from getting slammed with day-tripping fucktards, so I guess the long drive isn't all that bad.

On the way there, we beat our way through Aberdeen, hometown of Kurt Cobain. Shit, man. Previously the dude had been something of a mystery to me, but after seeing Aberdeen in person I can understand how his suicide threshold was so low. That town is a grade-A shithole. Parts of it seemed almost cool in that shithole West Coast down-and-out coastal 'burg way, but not enough to draw my lazy ass out of the truck.

I recall that one of the occasional commenters on this blog knows a thing or two about Aberdeen -- where do you eat in Aberedeen? I thought that it would have had at least something like a bad-ass artery-clogging, heart-stopping, bowel-clogging greasy spoon. Or at least a taco truck.

And speaking of bowel-clogging cuisine, I would have to recommend against eating an entire bag of Doritos Black Pepper Jack in one marathon binge. Based off my limited experience, I would have to say that there's something about either Black Pepper Jack Doritos or my colonic physiology that causes Doritos not to solidify into regular poo logs. Instead of being processed into a satisfying dump after my body had extracted the vital Doritos nutrients, they just got shot out my ass like soggy cornmeal being blown through an industrial pesticide sprayer. Nasty.

But the beach was fun and totally unspoiled, except by the acres upon acres upon countless acres of clearcut forest that characterize the Olympic penninsula.

Also, what the fuck is up with the Quinault Indian Reservation? Is it dry? Because in spite of my best efforts, I could totally not buy beer there.

*********************************

And meanwhile, check out this leet piece of shit:

It's the default Desktop that appears when you first power up your brand new Pentium II Hewlett-Packard Pavillion 8570C. Hot damn, motherfucker! Sure it may look like shitty wad of clipart pasted together by a first-grader, but that desktop is interactive! You can click on it and go places!

(And seriously, what a piece of shit that default desktop is.)

Last week I did a fresh reinstall of Windows prior to installing Linux, and I took a screenshot of the default W98/Pavillion desktop just for kicks. Because, damn, that gnarly turd is a real piece of work. It looks like it's not even the original clipart -- it looks like they scanned grayscale clipart from a PTA newsletter, and then pasted it together in about thirty seconds. But upon passing it on up the corporate ladder for approval, I can only imagine some porcine managerial-type having a flash of inspiration: "Guys, that's great. Top notch work. But could we jazz it up a little? I notice that we have "Wacky Fontz ProXtreme 2.1 just begging to be used -- could we put some text in one of the Wacky Fontz over the picture of the earth? And beneath the earth clipart, let's put that photo of the earth from the recycling PSA. You know, the one where they wad up the picture and the guy who does the CNN intro says 'If you're not recycling, you're throwing it all away.'"

And some low-level functionary/intern dude was all like, "You got it, boss," and dropped in the earth photo and one of the Wacky Fontz to read "http://www..."

Man, that font is a piece of shit. It's just a hallmark of craphood. I've seen this font elsewhere in the world, most notably adorning the sign for "Uncle Butchy's Low-Carb Creations." If the diet-fad-of-the-year business model didn't clue you in to this business's odds of success, the font sure would have. And, in fact, Uncle Butchy's is no more.

Fuck that font, and fuck the world of corporate computing. Fuck it all. I got shit kick right now, so I'm signin' off.

-Mike

(ps: Perhaps light blogging this week, or perhaps not. I have to go to Portland and then to Vancouver, BC for a conference. Depending on how bored/lonely I get at the conference, you might see a ridculously verbose and unreadable string of muddled, self-abusive tirades posted here.)

Earth is puking out loud

2006-07-21T21:46:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes. I'm rappin' at you again, from behind the keyboard of a fully fucking functional Linux system.

I was trying to follow up that intro with a paragraph on how Linux is "ready for the desktop," but fuck it, I'm not gonna say anything that hasn't been said a hundred times before. Instead, I am going to hit on a couple of unrelated topics:

******************************

Google displays properly using IE 3.0. I discovered this when I booted my W95 laptop to retrieve some old files. Yahoo, however, looks like a rabid mountaincat shit and puked all over the page before eviscerating it. Mad props to Google for their simple, effective, and backwards-compatible design.

******************************

No props to the US government for fucking up NASA's mission statement. Previously, it was: "To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers ... as only NASA can."

Now, it's "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research." The change was supposedly made to put the organization more in line with Bush's pipe dream vision of going to the moon and Mars.

Please note that Bush thinks that it will be cheaper to stage Mars missions on the moon, because the gravity there is lower. How in the world it is cheaper to launch a rocket from Earth and then launch it again from the moon -- as opposed to just launching it once from Earth -- is beyond me. I guess Bush must know something that every physicist on the planet doesn't know. Maybe there's like Yosemite Sam gold nuggets on the moon that we can use to pay for both launches. Yeah, that must be it.

Awesome job on the new mission statement, guys, awesome job. Just when the credibility or usefulness of an organization is in doubt, I have always found it to be helpful to delete references to that organization's home planet.

Link to NY Times story on this bullshit.

******************************

In other news, the US embassy is charging American citizens for evacuation from Lebanon. For those of you who have been living in a cave or in blissful ignorance, Israel is currently busy blowing the fuck out of Lebanon. And if you're an American that wants out, you've got to pony up to the tune of three hundred big boys. (Coincidentally, that fee will exactly cancel out the tax break you got for voting our current President into office! Ha ha! The government wins again, fuckers!)

Yet at the same time, the US government is also delivering more laser-guided precision bombs to Israel, bombs that will be dropped on Lebanon by American-made jets.

Fiscal conservatives should be blowing their scrotums out their ass over this egregious case of shady business dealing. First the government sells weapons to Party A, then it sells tickets to Party B to get their sorry asses out of those very same weapons' drop zones. People, this is fucking bullshit.

Instead of charging Americans to get them out of the way of bombs that were engineered using their tax dollars, we should impose an extra evacuation surcharge on all the shit that we sell to Israel. For instance, if we know exactly how many bombs they wish to drop on Lebanon, we simply divide the total number of Americans in Lebanon by the number of bombs, and add that much to the cost of each bomb.

Boo-yah! Problem solved! I feel that this is a modest propsaol. But then again, it's also a bleeding-heart liberal Taxachussetts spendocrat proposal, so if anybody has a solution that doesn't impede commerce quite so much, please let me know right away.

Sincerely
Dr. Shihady
Fringe lunatic and global crisitunity pundit

Leet Ubuntu sound card config post

2006-07-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes. Sorry for the lack of posting these past couple of days. I have been busier than a chicken sexer in a cloaca mall. (Chicken sexers peep out the cloaca to see if it's a hen [girl chicken] or rooster [boy chicken]. Cloacas are the holes that they use to piss, shit, fuck, and shoot your breakfast out of. It's tough to tell the difference between a dude chicken and girl chicken sometimes, and you don't want no roosters hanging with the hens on account of the fact that you also don't want no chicken embryos in your omelette [unless you buy the fertilized eggs at the Chinese grocery store, which come with an embryonic chicken already inside them -- and that shit is just plain nasty].)

Anyway, one of the reasons I've been so quiet these past couple days is that I've been in the proceess of installing Ubuntu/Xubuntu on my old Windows 98 machine. A couple of notes:

-> Back up that old data, fuckers! I used the "-p" option when scp'ing my files to an external HD connected to my Powerbook. The -p flag will preserve the timestamp and the permissions when copying files. Downside? FAT32 permissions are fucked up/nonexistant, and read-only files won't copy. (I think that this can lead to problems with rsync as well.) I could give two shits and a fuck about Windows' ass-over-cerebellum notion of file permissions, but preserving timestamp info is important to me: there is something deeply gratifying about looking at the file modification date and saying "Holy shit, I totally remember that one time I used MS Paint to create a sweet bitmap in 1997."

To get read-only data to scp with the -p option, I found that it was easiest to just change the permissions in Windows. W98 does not readily support batch permission changes, so I just did a "Find" to recover all files I wanted to backup, then I right-clicked, selected properties, and unchecked the gray-colored "Read-only" box. This converted the read-only files -- of which there were only a handful out of several thousand files total -- to full read/write.

-> Point two: Sound cards are historically noted for being a total bitch to get working with Linux. And, of course, when I install Ubuntu, I get no sound at all. I had kept a small Windows partition around, and using W98 gave me the annoying-ass Windows startup/shutdown noises, replete with giggling children and soaring MIDI-fantasticism. So the speakers were obviously plugged in. But when I booted back to Linux, all my tests indicated that the sound card was recognized, running, and configured properly. (Side note: Windows XP startup noises were purpotedly created using pirated software! Laugh-out-fucking-loud, bitches.) Anyhow, if it's plugged in and the card is properly configured, what gives?

I'll tell you what gives: the speakers were plugged into the wrong damn hole. Back in 2004, i installed RedHat 9 on the computer, and had a problem with this piece of shit "software modem/sound card" combo unit that came with my machine. This machine was built back when the Internet tubes were still pretty unpopulated, so you could use a slow-ass modem and share some of its tube capacity with your speakers. This type of product no longer exists, because it is tantamount to treating the Internet like a giant truck that you can just dump things on, and it would cause a huge performance hit with contemporary applications.

There were no drivers for the original sound card/modem because of its bizarre and fucked up design, so I just bought a new sound card for $20. I added it to the machine, but never took out the old card -- which still worked with Windows. The problem? When I was putting my office together, I plugged the speakers into the wrong damn sound card. Fuck. An hour down the toilet when all I had to do was look at the hardware.

But things are moving along swimmingly, and before too long here I shoud be puttering along smoothly in Linux Land.

God my posts have smelled like nerd lately. Here is a link to a collection of Dan Rather quotes to make up for it. In the words of that esteemed anchordude, "Turn the lights down, the party just got wilder."

-Mike

They pissed on your fucking rug, Dude.

2006-07-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

Looks like I shoulda taken the dog out one more time last night -- she pissed all over the rug. (And that rug really tied the room together.) Laundry time, motherfuckers. Here's a loose 'n' sloppy outline:

(1) Computer shit
(2) Computer shit
(3) Horse drugs

Today, I am going to "sex up" my post by using <b> tags! Grab your balls and cough, dudes, because the doctor is in!!!

*************************************
Part One: Computer Shit
*************************************

I guess I also could have called this section "What a difference 1600% more memory makes." My old Windows 95 laptop: 16 megs. My old Windows 98 desktop: 256 megs. Now, you may be thinking: "Dude, what incredibly cromulent benchmark tests were you running?" Well, I'll tell you.

Back in the dark ages of computing (circa 1996 to 1999), I used a couple different word processors: an ancient version of Microsoft Works, and Lotus Word Pro 96. Most of my writing was done using Word Pro, which saves files in a format called LWP. Of course, this is an undocumented proprietary format that is completely unreadable by any word processor software that I use on my G4 laptop -- namely Microsoft Word.

It's not easy to convert LWP files to Microsoft Word's .doc format, but even doing that doesn't solve my problem -- it just stuffs my work into another opaque file format, and odds are I'll have the same problem again in the future. Although Microsoft is making moves to open up its proprietary file formats and make things more transparent, I'd rather use a file format that's totally open and already supported by most word processors. Rich text format (RTF) seemed like a good bet, so I went about looking for a way to batch convert .lwp files to .rtf.

Folks, I will save you the trouble right now and let you know that there is no readily available tool for batch converting LWP files to RTF files. I read that you can batch script in Lotus Smart Suite, but apparently the Lotus scripting language is -- get this -- Pascal. And I don't plan on ever learning Pascal, not ever my friends. I might as well learn Cobol and stuff antiquated PS/2 trackballs up my ass if I plan on learning Pascal.

(If anybody can confirm that Pascal is the Lotus scripting language, please let me know. Maybe it's just Olden Internet Hearsay -- I can't even find the original source any more, but if true it would be nothing short of flabbergasting. God I love to flabbergast.)

Anyway, the solution, as it turns out, is to simply open all the files in Word Pro, and save them out one at a time as .rtf files. I only had a couple hundred files to convert, so this was a bitch of an endeavor, but not a mega-bitch. An in my extensive benchmark tests, I can tell you that this works a lot faster with 256 megs of RAM vs. 16.

No. Fucking. Shit.

Anyway, kudos to anybody that actually read this.

*************************************
Part Two: More Computer Shit
*************************************

So where I'm actually going with all this is just to say that I'm getting a little bit sick of getting screwed by software vendors. It's a bitch when I don't have a way to use the files on my hard drive because the information is saved as a secret code that nobody can read. It's a bitch when PowerPoint corrupts my files, and it's a bitch when I can't view a slideshow on any random computer. It's a bitch when you can't read or write to a Windows NTFS partition because Microsoft never fully documented how the fuck NTFS actually works. And it's a bitch when you can't view a video clip in your favorite media player, because the format is closely-guarded secret and the only player that works on your preferred platform is a finicky piece of shit that's no longer under development.

It's a bastard bitch that's full of fucking bullshit, is what it is.

I'm a little bit hyper-sensitive to all of this right now, because owing to a strange set of circumstances, I am temporarily selling software at work. And the thing is, we try our damndest not to sell "permanent licenses" -- instead, we prefer a model where you have to regularly re-up, and pay on an annual basis. This is like going to a car dealer, and finding out that you can only lease cars but not buy them.

And for an example of what happens when you can't own a car, look at the first mass-produced electric car since the advent of the modern interstate highway: GM's EV-1. They were all leased, with no option to buy, and -- save for a couple destined for museums -- they were taken off the roads and crushed by GM.

This whole "leasing software" thing is a model that lots of big vendors would like to transition toward. And it fucking sucks. Imagine paying for your OS, not all at once, but month after month after month, justified by the necessity of security updates and other random code patches. Worse yet, imagine that a software company implodes, stops selling licenses, and you have no way at all of using your data.

What I'm saying is that I should be able to read my data and own my software, and use computers without bullshit lock-in policies getting in the way.

So, I am going to try an experiment. I have an old desktop running Windows 98. Microsoft has recently end-of-lifed Windows 98, which means no more security updates, no more patches, no more code maintenance -- nothing. The recommended course of action? Upgrade to a newer flavor of Windows that will make my old machine even slower.

Well fuck that. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I'm being painted into a corner. And so this week I'll be trying out a Linux distro called Xubuntu on my old PC, and I'll be seeing how this works out for me.

Don't misinterpret this as an open-source versus closed-source argument. This is a "repeatedly getting fucked" versus "not getting fucked" situation.

All things being equal (inasmuch as this is possible) I think that open-source operating systems can be inherently more secure than their closed-source counterparts. But I'd rather use a closed-source application using open file formats than an open-source app using undocumented, obfuscated file formats. (This is something of the case with the GIMP, a Photoshop alternative whose preferred XCF file format is unstandardized and not recommended for data interchange. The GIMP source code itself serves as the primary form of documentation for the XCF file format.)

So wish me luck as I try out Xubuntu this week. I have to head down to Portland tomorrow morning, which means that I'll probably install on Thursday and write-up my initial experiences on Friday.

*************************************
Part Three: Horse drugs
*************************************

This is completely unrelated to the computer stuff, but lately we've been getting catalogs for both dog and horse supplies. And man, let me tell you, gram-for-gram, glucosamine is a lot cheaper when you buy it for equines. So I guess that this section should have read "horse dietary supplements" instead of "horse drugs." I apologize for misleading you.

Sincerely,
Mike

Possibile eulogies, Scandanavian films, computer shit

2006-07-17T00:53:00.000-07:00

Dudes! It's late o'clock Sunday and I'm burnin' the midnight oil here. Between system upgrades and inaugural dog hikes, it has been a real dirt-and-silicon kind of weekend here in Seattle. Commencing the wrap-up:

***********************

On Friday, Lady Shihady and and I took the dog out for a little walk. We escorted the new pooch up to a small city park with a kick-ass view of Seattle proper, and then we picked up a heapin' helpin' of groceries -- including Trader Joe's all natural turkey dogs.

Let me just say this right now: Mm-mmm, motherfuckers! These plump weiners are delicious when steamed. There's a game I like to play now, called "You be the hot dog guy." In this game, I pretend that I am the proprieter of an up-and-coming hot dog cart, but I am trying to eat my business into oblivion by consuming as many hot dogs as I can. Damn these things are tasty. And the nice thing about turkey dogs is that they don't have any snouts or anuses in them, not like normal hot dogs -- at worst, turkey dogs can only have beaks and cloacas.

So that sure was an unqualified product endorsement.

Following turkey dog procurement, we continued walking home, whereupon the dog dropped an impressive choco-log. What made this even more amazing is the fact that she had already deuced once before, and we were out of designated crap-bags to be used for dump-cleanup. Fortunately, though, I had my thinking cap on, and was able to derive a plan: I grabbed some English muffins from the grocery sack, and salvaged the breadbag to clean up the dog's dookum -- man, was it nasty. It was totally squishy, and not at all pleasant.

Having collected the crap I continued walking down the street, where for the first time ever I saw a Ford GT in real life. Damn. I was totally peeping this car out, and after scoping it for a while I was amazed to discover that I had wandered into an intersection. What's more, another, lamer car had only recently puttered through moments before I stumbled into the street.

Good timing on my part -- a couple seconds earlier, and I would have been pancaked. This would have sucked, but I feel that the eulogy would have been awesome:

"We are gathered here to remember Mike. Creamed by a subcompact car while carrying an English muffin bag full of dog crap, it is safe to say that Mike died as he lived -- scatterbrained and full of shit."

***********************

Other dog news -- our furry new addition to the fam is doing swell. As predicted, I have completely forgotten about all gripes pertaining to the name "Keida," and thusly we have christened our canine compadre. In fact, I so little care about all of the KDE K["program purpose"] naming scheme that I even inadvertently nicknamed the pup K-Dog. So boo-yah.

We went for a short hike today in Discovery Park. The sun was shining, a cool breeze was blowing, and the towering Olympic range was resplendent in its majestic glory as it towered over Puget Sound -- also, K-Dog unleashed another ferocious shit. I mean, this dump was GIGANTIC. Practically as big as her head. This dog can kick some serious fudge vittles out her ass, yo.

I think that K-Dog got a megadose of narcotic painkillers when she was fixed, which would explain (a) why she seemed so out of it the first couple of days, and (b) why she didn't take a dump during that time. But as the drugs wore off, so too did the opiate-instigated constipation, and this dog is making up for lost time with extreme gusto.

***********************

Scandanavian films: how could I have remained so unaware of Nordic talkies for so long? Last week I watched a Norweigan movie called Elling, and yesterday I saw an Ingmar Bergman flicker called The Seventh Seal.

Normally I'm not much for foreign films, but Elling wasn't bad at all. It's about a dude -- Elling --

Ah, fuck it, I don't have the heart or the energy to put any real effort into a review here. Long story short, this is a serious movie without a lot of dick jokes (but there are some); in spite of this it is pretty good. The theme of the movie, in a nutshell, is that it's a titty of a bitch to grow as a person when you're afraid of losing the identity that you already have. I recommend it.

Now, The Seventh Seal -- here is a movie I can get behind. Lots of medieval Swedish carousing, and a square-jawed 1950's dude playing chess with Death: This is Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey meets Hamlet Except in Sweden Instead of The Smaller Country it Was Originally Set In.

The cool thing about this movie is that they don't fuck around when it comes to death scenes. You know how in some movies they'll show a dude with a beard in a hospital bed or on a warehouse floor, saying some malarkey bullshit like, "My son, my son ... I fear I am dying. What is to become of me?" Then they die slowly and shut their eyes quietly.

That drivel is pure ass spew. In Sweden, they feel the same way as me. Ingmar Bergman has this one dude die of the Black Death, and he doesn't die with a whimper and a poot. Oh nelly, no. The dude dies like this:

"AAAUGHGHHGHGH!!!!! AUUGGHHGHGHGH!!!!!!! AAAAAAAUUGHGH!!"*

*(Translation from Swedish: "Fuck! Fuck! I am dying!")

And this dude does it real loud, too, and then he just fucking hurls his body on the ground like he wants to break all his bones.

Man, I am so sick of American movie death scenes. This wussy death crap in American movies has got to go. Hollywood: Watch a Swede, learn, and put your fucking back into it. This is the movies, not real life, and even if you get killed with a movie bullet you don't have to shut up like you would in real life. Instead, you can scream "FUUUCKKKKK!! DAMN BITCH I SHOT!!!! AUGHGHHGGG!!!" and then convulse violently for a while. Even if your head is gone, you can scream out your neck.

I hasten to remind those readers who demand cinematic realism that the scenario suggested above is at least twenty times more accurate than the computer interfaces that are portrayed in Hollywood movies.

Anyway, instead of reviewing or recommending The Seventh Seal, I am going to link to its Wikipedia article with the phrase chess with Death.

***********************

Finally, computer shit: man, I was up madd late tonight putting my office back together. I finally got all my hardware organized, upgraded the memory on my old Pentium 2, connected my ancient Windows 95 laptop to my Windows 98 PC over the LAN (god I'm leet), and rescued a bunch of old files -- some dating back nearly ten years. Fuck! Of course, they're completely unreadable on the machine that I use for day-to-day computing, so here's a hearty "fuck you" to proprietary, undocumented file formats.

For tech-nerd-type readers who desire a much more eloquent discussion on the subject, peep out the following post by a long-time Apple user who's switching over to Ubuntu.

(Ubuntu is a contemporaneously popular Linux distro, and later this week I plan to install Xubuntu, a similar version on my old Pentium 2 box. More on this amazingly important story as the situation develops.)

(Also, for badass gnarly death scene computer shit, you can read this obituray having to do with booze, strippers, and file compression.)

sincerely
Dr. Michael Shihady
not a real doctor of anything at all

Yarn-spinnin', album-reviewin', Wiki-linkin' Friday morning post

2006-07-14T08:15:00.000-07:00

Word up, dudes. It's a low-key kind of Friday morning here at home with the dog. Being a dog owner is pretty awesome, but if I'm not careful I'm gonna relate nothing but pointless dog anecdotes in this here "blog."

Sidenote: I still don't like the word blog. I mean, think about it: "blog" is short for "weblog," a log of events that you put on the web. Logs contain factual information about actual things that have actually happened. Logs can therefore be used to construct a timeline of events. Over time they can be used to chart trends, infer causality, and drop a fat chunk of Google on your ass with poppin'-leet data-mining experiments. This website (latin for "place on a computer") can be used to do none of these things -- well, except for the data-mining thing, seeing as how I occasionally get hits from non-Google data-mining entities that contract out to major hotel franchises and also the U.S. government. Ha ha! The future is now, motherfuckers!

But back to the subject at hand: my precious li'l furry buddy, named either Seida, Keida, Sadie, or -- if Lady Shihady relents under the pressure of my constant nagging -- Boobs. Somehow I doubt that this is on the horizon, though, as she threatened to buy me a goldfish whose name I could change every day. "Even Fuck My Balls?" I asked. Yes, I could even name the goldfish Fuck My Balls.

Personally I think that Boobs is a cute name, but anything deemed "blog fodder" is out. Honestly, I'm not even sure that I care all that much, although the name Keida doesn't seem 100% right to me. That's just because when I do all my leet hax0ring on a Linux system I prefer to use the Gnome desktop environment instead of KDE. This isn't because Gnome is superior or anything or has more useful tools or because KDE won't let me do some important thing or something -- it's just because every single program associated with KDE begins with a "K." Their spreadsheet? Kspread. Their clock program? Klock. Their media player? KMplayer. And if they ever had a program for "eida," whatever that might be, it would be called "Keida."

(Man it took a lot of words for me to bring that concept all the way home.)

Also, I think that the name "Keida" means "Little Dragon," and the KDE mascot dude is a little dragon. Naming the dog Kedia would just be KDE overload for me. In fact, you can't even spell Keida without the letters KDE.

By the way, Lady Shihady, if you are reading this -- this is mostly just train-of-thought computer bullshit, and if you want to go ahead and name the dog Keida, that is totally cool. Like most things I write about, I can guarantee that I will forget about this KDE junk within a probably a day or two.

***************************

So. The title of this post mentions "yarn-spinnin'" but I have yet to spin a yarn. Yarns are kind of like tall tales (you know, American folklore like how Paul Bunyan axe-murdered Johnny Appleseed), and I don't have a good one offhand. So instead I'll just relate a story about the dog.

Yesterday I put an ice cube in her bowl of water. The dog had never seen an ice cube in a bowl of water before, and holy shit, she totally started barking and growling at it! Brownian motion was causing the ice cube to move about in the bowl, and I think she thought the ice cube was alive! How precious is that!

If I'm not carefully this dog is going to turn me into a gigantic quivering pussy. Or just a bigger quivering pussy than I already am.

***************************

Astute readers will also note that I allude to an album review in the title of this post. Word -- I can totally do this. Lately I have been enjoying a couple of albums that I picked up: Nia by Blackalicious, and Living With War by Neil Young.

Nia is a damn good album, and that's all I have to say about that, because there's no doubt a honkey like me would come off like a blathering nitwit if I tried discussing the nuances of an album by a group called Blackalicious.

Living With War is a solid album, featuring fun family sing-alongs like "Let's Impeach the President." This is a good album for listening to at maximum volume while driving a motor vehicle. Fully recommended.

So I guess this isn't so much as a pair of album review as it is a pair of recommendations. Sorry if you feel misled.

***************************

Finally, just to keep y'all entertained and informed, here is a link to a random Wikipedia article. It's about a Soviet mannequin cosmonaut named Ivan Ivanovich.

***************************

Thank you
Mike

Fucking dillweed.

2006-07-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

What I want to know is how the fuck Italy could have produced something as mind-blowingly awesome as pizza, and something as full of rancid fucking douche-fluid as my landlord. I just don't get it.

(And don't take this as a catch-all diss against Italy or Italians -- in fact, a lot of Italian chicks are smokin' hot.)

This ragnar poser just showed up at my house, showing the place to prospective buyers who want to build a duplex -- excuse me, townhouse -- in the backyard.

What. A. Dickweed.

I would like to know how, "I may build a duplex in the backyard, but that will be down the road and won't affect you," got turned into "I'll be showing the house to some prospective buyers who may start construction in October."

Fuck you, asshole, and fuck your receding hairline, unnecessarily copious amounts of hair gel, bullshit talk, and crisply pressed shirt that is apparantly incapable of buttoning all the way up so as to conceal your chest -- a gnarly and revolting torso that apparantly has the matted pelts of many dead ferrets pasted to it.

Also, I don't know which one of them all showed up in the crew-cab pickup with a leather interior and a four-foot long truck bed, but typically I have observed that people who actually do actual construction and actually, you know, haul shit like tools (and not just fat fucking checkbooks) around town, typically these people prefer a vehicle that can actually carry a piece of, I don't know, plywood.

Fucking ragnars.

Goddamn I am so pissed off right now.

I love the Internet's miraculous ability to let me swear in print anytime I feel like it.

Thank you and have a nice day.
(Unless you are in the business of fucking up property by building on it.)

I'm on farm time, bitches.

2006-07-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

That's right, motherfuckers -- I'm on farm time! Well, maybe not quite, seeing as how there are no chickens to get up with, but I am waking up with our brand new dog! Having a dog is pretty awesome. She is a dog that was rescued from a home full of cheesedick looneys that couldn't care for her properly, and her foster family just delivered her yesterday. Lady Shihady and I are pleased as punch with this brand new addition to the family.

Overall, this has been a pretty cool experience. Within a couple minutes of us taking ownership of the dog she puked on the floor, and within a couple of hours we determined that she may have also barfed in my hair. But further intensive research has suggested that what we initially thought was puke may not be vomit at all -- rather, it could be gelatinous phlegm resulting from a respiratory infection that she has. I will look into this further and let you all know.

We're still trying to come up with a name. All of my favorite names thus far (Internet, SCSI, EULA, and now also "Boobs") have been rejected as possible handles. She answers to "Sable" right now, but I have a hard time calling her by the name of such an underwhelming Mercury sedan. Plus, the last two guys I knew that drove a Mercury were unwanted new-age houseguests who believed that they were capable of practicing magick (yes, magick with a "k" on the end, which is even worse than the bullshit David Copperfield TV-magic variety). In my opinion, anybody that is actually capable of practicing magic would be able to conjure up a better ride than a rusted out piece-of-shit Mercury Lynx.

Damn, magicians piss me off. Lately I have heard some of them refer to themselves as "Illusionists," but I think that "Liars" would be a better term. Don't believe me? Think about it for a second: some ragnar in a cape gets up on stage, announces that he's going to saw a chick in half, and then pulls some slight of hand and insists that, yes, he really did cut her in two. Furthermore, he will later go on to insist that he has actually glued this very same chick back together using even more magic. He just lied! Twice in a row! What a fucker!

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. We've got a sweet honey pie of a new pit bull buddy, and I'd like to share some pictures.

Did you notice that last one, folks? Check it out again -- and look closely. We're not just living with a dog, we're sitting on a cow -- a cash cow, that is! Lady Shihady thinks that the white spot looks "a lot like a heart," but I have to say that it's more like "a spitting image of the Virgin Mary."

The Virgin Mary appears in lots of places, like pretzels, grilled cheese sandwiches, water stains on improperly sealed freeway overpasses, over the skies of Mexico and Portugal basically all the time according to that A&E special, and on the backs of minivans (right next to the sticker of Calvin pissing on the Ford logo). Except for the last instance, which is a decal, the rest of these appearances are divine apparitions that can make you a lot of money.

In case you are still unsure, peep it out again, as I have taken the liberty of computer-enhancing the photo to make it a bit more obvious:

That right there, I think, is incontrovertible evidence of a higher power at work. Fuck yeah, dudes -- fuck yeah. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to sit on my ass and wait for the offers to roll in.

Sincerely yours,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Shihady Institute of End Times Virgin Mother Research Labs

A series of tubes

2006-07-11T06:50:00.000-07:00

Gooooood morning, fellow North Americans! And a hearty good morning as well to several random guys from Turkey who will inevitably find this blog in a Google search for gay-fucking-related terms. I don't know why this happens, but it seems to happen way too often.

Anyway, I've got a new li'l pit bull joining the family today, not to mention a whole heapin' helpin' of work to catch up on -- consequently, today's post will be a shimmering triumvirate of random electronical detritus that I can simply copy and paste.

***********************

This diagram was on the packaging of a phone cord that I bought. A phone cord.

Package design fuckers, listen up: if the consumer doesn't already know how to connect a phone to the wall, then (a) the two squiggly lines bisecting the phone cord are going to baffle this helpless ingrate, and (b) he or she is probably too stupid to know what the fuck the phone cord does anyway. In fact, the phone cord was probably purchased under the assumption that it was something else all together, like spaghetti or a noose.

Instead of a phone-wall connection diagram, it would instead be more helpful to have a pictogram of a dude gobbling the phone cord and simultaneously hanging himself with it. (Also, the pictogram should have a big red circle-slash thingy through it, like a no-smoking sign, to say "don't do this.")

Between this and Senator Ted Stevens' (R-Alaska) recent speech proclaiming that the Internet is a series of tubes, I am beginning to harbor the faintest smidgen of doubt in this country's technological literacy.

***********************

File this one under "lovable and hilarious:"

Man, I love how so many gigantic dogs look like Winston Churchill.

***********************

And finally, a series of important emails relating to outer space. These were sent yesterday between my buddy Reido and I as we found new and clever ways to avoid doing work:

--------------------------------

From: Mike
To: Reid
Subject: anybody who says outer space isn't awesome can suck my dick

SRB sep from latest shuttle flight

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/video/shuttle/sts-121/mpg/srb_fd01h_ra.mpg

Seriously it reminds me of the opening scene in Episode IV but even cooler. Fuck that sounds so nerdy

-Mizzike

--------------------------------

From: Reid
To: Mike
Subject: anybody who says outer space isn't awesome can suck my dick

You won't get any argument from me about the awesometude of space. I did, after all, write my fifth grade 15 page paper on outer space, so I am pretty well versed on all of its components. Like "Planets" and "Stars." I think that the only way you could have made your statement dorkier, IMHO, would have been to refer to Episode IV as ANH. Did you see the World Cup finals? It is pretty cool that a headbutt is the appropriate method of attack. Zidane reminded me of Mean Machine.

--------------------------------

From: Mike
To: Reid
Subject: anybody who says outer space isn't awesome can suck my dick

No I sure as hell did not see the World Cup finals. Who won, Portugal or Uraguay?

--------------------------------

This email thread went on for a while before it ended with me describing to Reid how one could simultaneously shoot a gun, drive a car, chug whisky, eat pizza, and get a beejer -- all at the same time.

-Mike

Dang.

2006-07-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Monday fucking morning

2006-07-10T07:56:00.000-07:00

Damn:

(0) Goddamn motherfucking weekend
(1) Goddamn motherfucking New York Times
(2) Goddamn Cheech and Motherfucking Chong

Okay, like the song goes, "let's get it started here, but then eventually go over there and drink warm cans of Old Style in the parking lot behind a row of mopeds." Goddamn motherfucking Black Eyed Peas ought to be banished to shitty stereo systems at junior high dances forever and 'till the end of time.

===============================
(0) Weekend
===============================

So by the time Friday afternoon rolled around, I was righteously psyched to be rolling down to the Waterwheel with Matt. I showed up around 6:00 or so, ate a cheeseburger, drank a bunch of Rainier, and eventually we met up with a bunch of folks and went bowling. I started off strong with two spares in the first four frames, but then proceeded to suck ass as I continued to drink with gusto and impunity.

The more I drank, the more I sucked. Also, the more I drank the more I became cognizant of what a douchebag the guy bowling in the next lane seemed to be. According to the electronical scoring screen, the dude's name was "Danny" and his girlfriend's name was "Allison." However, I am taking this nom de bowling with a big fat grain of salt, because according to the scoring computer for my lane, my name was either "Dicktits" or "Nippleswitch."

Danny may have been a douchebag, but man, that dude could roll: strike after strike after strike, this motherfucker was shitting out at least a 200 game like it was a half-digested can of creamed corn. (Which is to say, he was shitting it out with smoothness and nonchalance.) His lady friend, though, was trying her damnedest just to keep her balls out of the gutter. (Swish!) And after about four games of this schtick, Allison seemed to be getting pretty tired of Danny.

The more strikes that got tallied up on Danny's scoreboard, the more I drank. If I had to make an analogy, it would be like that old-time movie where a rowdy bunch of French aviation enthusiasts takes a rocket to the moon. You know the movie, right? The one where they pilot their rocket right into the moon's eyeball, as if they were some ballistic wicker fleck set loose during roughhouse play?

(If you want, you can watch Le Voyage dans la Lune here. It's in the public domain, which is code for "nobody cares enough about the movie to pay somebody to change the laws and keep it under copyright.")

Anyway, there are several points in my evening that correspond directly to scenes in that movie. And I know it seems like I might be going out on a limb by saying that, seeing as how I have never actually watched that movie, but what the fuck.

Scene 1 -- Blast-off and travel to the moon:
This is akin to the point where I lovingly set a beer on the ground, only to have somebody else kick it over. I had to rescue my beer from the ground somehow, so I stripped off my Hawaiian shirt, mopped up all the beer, and then put my shirt back on. Around that time, I got tired of looking at Danny's fitted hat, which was cocked up way at the top of his head at a funny angle. I wished to expound upon all the problems with his headgear, but all I could manage was a drawled-out "Danny's hat is wrong."

Scene 2 -- Crashing my rocket into the moon's eyeball:
In some circles, this is known as the "money shot." At the thundering apex of my drunken arc through the evening, I was angry and sick of bowling. I just straight up did not give a fuck. And it was then -- wrapped in a clingy beer-soaked shirt while cheesed off and generally not giving a fuck -- that I ended my last game by rolling three strikes in a row.

Damn. I don't know where that came from, but I wish I could bowl like that all the time.

Scene 3 -- Exploring the moon:
After bowling, I walked my ass home, took a wrong turn in a neighborhood that I knew, and didn't realize I was on the wrong street for a good ten blocks. Then I turned left down a diagonal street to get my ass back on track, only to stop at a bar solely because it had a picture of a horse on the side. I drank one beer and split, finally making it home 90 minutes after leaving the bowling alley.

The next day, I did a lot of sleeping.

===============================
(1) Goddamn motherfucking New
York Times
===============================

Longtime readers of this blog may be familiar with my ongoing love-hate relationship with the New York Times. On one hand, they're better than a lot of the tripe that passes for news media these days. On the other hand, a lot of their articles appear to be written by out-of-touch dickweeds. For example, I read the following opening paragraph in the Times' article on the new Dodge Charger police car:

The Dodge Charger, a favored getaway car for bad guys in memorable roles from "Bullitt" to "The Dukes of Hazzard," has turned state's evidence. The shapely muscle cars that won stoplight showdowns and Nascar championships four decades ago have gone straight and joined the police force.

Two major gripes here. First off: the new Dodge Chargers have nothing to do with the storied Chargers of yore. If you're going to compare the new Chargers to the vaunted Charger R/Ts from the late 60s, then you might as well compare them to the shitty econo-box Charger coupes of the 80s.

Newsflash, ragnar: the olden-tyme Chargers of esteemed awesomeness were two-door coupes designed for cool-ass dudes with badass sideburns and questionable vests. Typically, these drivers did not give a fuck about anything, and had constant access to either really good weed, scads of ketamine, or kegerators chock-full of skunky beer. The bogus contemporaneous Chargers of nowen-time are four-door sedans designed for lame-ass dillweeds who totally give a fuck about all kinds of things, including but not limited to short-term interest rates, property values, and their lawn.

So could we drop the act and quit pretending that the new Chargers have anything to do with the old ones? Thank you.

Second major gripe: read the New York Times' opening sentence closely. Notice the phrases "getaway car," "bad guys," and "Dukes of Hazzard." Which one of these is not like the other? Has this douchepie ever actually watched an episode of the Dukes of Hazzard?

Newsflash #2, ragnar: THE DUKE BROTHERS WERE THE GOOD GUYS. Quoth my main man Waylon:

"They're just some good old boys, never meanin' no harm, beats all you never saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they were born."

You fucking dickweed reporter. Do you even understand the premise of the Dukes? They mean no harm. Yeah, they're in trouble with the law, but it's the law that's the bad guys. I mean, come on, how hard is this to understand?

The Dukes of Hazzard is not a complicated show. I shouldn't have to be explaining it to you. I mean, I've seen offensive shit in the New York Times before, and I've seen bad reporting, but this is just downright pathetic. As long as you have two functioning neurons to rub up against one another, you should be able to comprehend the fundamental premise of this TV show: Dukes good, law bad.

So in conclusion: somebody (preferably me) needs to tell this asshole to fuck off and get a job writing ad copy.

===============================
(2) Cheech/Chong
===============================

So for some reason, I added Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke to our Netflix queue, and it's been sitting in our house for about a month now. I just hadn't been motivated enough to watch the movie until last night.

I'm not 100% sure why I got this movie, but I think it's because I kept quoting the line "Dunh-dunh, dunh-dunh DUNH -- MY SCROTUM!!!" (Sung to the tune of "My Sharona.") Unfortunately, after watching Up in Smoke I think that this line is actually from Cheech and Chong's Next Movie, which means that I didn't even rent the right goddamn DVD.

But man, I have seen plots in porno movies that weren't as flimsy as Up in Smoke. Don't get me wrong, watching Tommy Chong operate a blender at maximum volume is hilarious, but this kind of comedy just does not lend itself to a plot. Cheech and Chong movies really don't need a plot, they just need to feature Cheech and Chong dicking around for 90 minutes or so while getting high. Which I guess is really all the movies are in the first place, but still, it's the attempt at the plot that gets in the way.

Anyway, that's all I've got for today.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Shihady

A handful of ass and a mouthful of titty

2006-07-07T06:39:00.000-07:00

Since I have nothing right now that is both (a) worth bitching about and (b) meritorious of Internet posting, here's a scan from one of my old sketchbooks. Enjoy:

Sincerely,
Mike

(ps: Pay no attention to the title of this post. It's just a mindless experiment to see if it draws any search engine traffic.)

What a fucking load.

2006-07-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

What a shitty fucking Thursday this is turning out to be: I overslept, peeped my email, and was totally flabbergasted at what an egregious chump my landlord is. This dude is showing our house to some potential buyers who want to build a couple of townhouses in the backyard. "Townhouse," by the way, is Asshole Code for "overpriced duplex with vinyl siding and good but not great sink fixtures." What a fucker -- I'd previously been pissed off to discover the "notice of potential land use action" sign go up in my yard, but was assuaged when Lady Shihady said that this guy said he wouldn't be doing any construction during the term of our lease.

What. A. Fucker. Does the world really need another shitty fucking duplex so badly?

***********

Now. Yesterday I needed to get some electronical loot, so I went out to Fry's Electronics. Located in scenic Renton, Washington, Fry's is conveniently situated in the festering pus of a gnarly suburban shithole. There was a Fry's in Portland as well, but just like the Seattle Fry's, the Portland Fry's isn't located in Portland proper: it's located in close proximity to a "family fun center" adjacent to the Interstate, where I once got forcibly ejected from the Go-Kart track at a company-sponsored outing. I think it's a general rule of thumb that Fry's Electronics is always going to be located in the shittiest, most depressing part of town.

One of the great parts of the Fry's experience is that the shelves appear to be stocked by developmentally challenged thumbless post-nuclear mutants whose label guns are always almost out of ink. This is super if you want to imagine atomic monster zombies twitching around in a break room, but not so good if you need to (a) locate a specific product, or (b) buy something.

Another great thing about Fry's is that after you pay, some dude makes you show him your receipt, and then goes through your bag to make sure you didn't steal anything. Newsflash, fucker: if I just spent enough money to get my dick sucked at someplace that doesn't smell like cardboard, sweat, and ozone, maybe you could treat me with more respect than your common slack-jawed preteen shoplifter.

Fucking Fry's. The sad thing is that they're still leaps and bounds better than Best Buy. Now those guys really piss me off.

***********

And speaking of post-nuclear mutants, here's a selection from the ol' sketchbook:

***********

And finally, my thoughts on cruising. A lot of people have found a leader in the form of Sammy Hagar, a frizzy-haired cocksucker of a rockstar who is incapable of driving 55 miles per hour. (In case we've got any Canadians reading today, a mile per hour is just like a kilometer per hour, except faster and less convenient to do math with.) Now I don't know what this guy's problem is, but 55 is just about right for getting your cruise on.

Hell, sometimes when I cruise, I like to keep it at a stately 50 miles per hour. The whole point of driving is to fucking cruise with extreme prejudice. (Canadians: this doesn't mean I'm prejudiced against America's minorities, it means I'm prejudiced against not cruising extremely.) You have to be cranking delicious tunes and have one arm out the window. If you're going a hundred miles per hour in Sammy Hagar's car, I don't care how soundproofed the cabin is: if the window is down at that speed, the radio is going to sound like shit. And how can you cruise properly without tunes?

Anyway, all I'm trying to say here is that I love cruising, and 55 is perfectly fast enough.

Very sincerely yours,
Mike

Maimed by the sea!

2006-07-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes, how's it hanging? (Hilarious aside: the correct answer to this question is always "one lower than the other.")

Anyway, here it is, the fifth of July, and I'm back in the home office droppin' science and keeping it real. Or at least as real as a dude can keep it while he's listening to an Italian guy sing about chips. I don't know if they're potato chips or British-style chips (we call 'em fries in America), or if he's talking about poker chips or cow chips or what. All I know is that this piano-blasting crooner is wishing his baby well, and then he starts singing "chips, chips ..."

It's a "what the fuck" kind of morning out here in Seattle.

Anyway, the holiday weekend was awesome. Lady Shihady and I went to Cape Meares, Oregon with occasional co-blogger Matt and his girlfriend. Cape Meares is located next to Tillamook, a small town whose twin claims to fame are a thriving cheese industry and a gigantic World War II blimp hangar that now houses a kick-ass collection of vintage aircraft.

Now don't get me wrong, blimps are awesome. But there are a couple of things more awesome than blimps: (1) zeppelins, and (2) destruction. Zeppelins are not blimps: they are dirigibles. You see, zeppelins are buoyant flying machines with a rigid airframe. In contrast, blimps rely on gas pressure to maintain their shape. Destruction is what happens to zeppelins (the Hindenberg and a couple of American dirigibles that were destroyed in weather-related accidents), blimp hangars (there used to be not one, but two blimp hangars in Tillamook), and poorly planned coastal towns.

Oh yes, my friends. Right down the --

Hold on, I need to lay a couple of ZAFs (Zeppelin Awareness Facts) on you.

Zeppelin Awareness Fact #1: The spire on the Empire State Building was originally built for zeppelins to dock to. Holy shit, how cool is that? Major subfact, the Graf Zeppelin once enhanced that badass tower by mooring its stately form there.

Zeppelin Awareness Fact #2: The Hindenberg accident was not caused by the hydrogen gas keeping the zeppelin aloft, but rather by the composition of the zeppelin's skin. You see, in order to keep the gas from heating up and expanding too much, the skin of the zeppelin was doped with heat-reflecting chemicals ... unfortunately, these chemicals were explosive, and when a spark jumped between the skin of the zepplin and the airframe, the whole damn brisket got broiled. Of course the hydrogen inside the zeppelin blew up, but what caused the accident was the fact that the zeppelin skin was explosive. What a bummer -- it killed the golden age of zeppelineering.

Anyway, back to what I was saying:

-- right down the beach from Cape Meares is a spit that separates the Pacific Ocean from Tillamook Bay. It was on this spit that an olden-tyme dude decided to build a new town, to be the Atlantic City of the West. He called it Bayocean, and it had a hotel and a post office and a "natatorium" (I think this was like a greenhouse for infants). But unfortunately, this town was maimed by the sea!

I know this to be a true fact because I read a book with that very same title. The mighty ocean totally eroded the beach, all the houses got fucked up and destroyed, and today the town is no more. I think you can still see a few foundations, but I didn't find them. It's a pretty kick-ass beach.

Anyway, I'll post a few photos later this week, but right now Uncle Mike has to get back to work. Pretty soon the Shihady family is going to have another mouth to feed: that's right people, we're getting a pit bull. I wanted to name it Internet, but that was vetoed, so instead I suggested that we name it SCSI (pronounced "Scuzzy"). But that was vetoed as well. I mean, look, I'm trying to be a team player here, right?

Anyway, having another mouth to feed shouldn't be too much of a problem, because we've determined that the dog and I both like a lot of the same foods (this is not a joke). The dog is staying with a foster family right now, and we'll pick her up next week after she gets either spayed or neutered. I forget which, but I know one of them has to do with balls, which I'm pretty sure that she was born without.

10-4
Mizzike

Dogs, gay cowboys, America, oh my.

2006-06-30T08:29:00.000-07:00

Hola comapdres. Sorry for the brevity of yesterday's post. I was at the bar on Wednesday night, and even though I didn't get blackout-shitfaced-drunk, I had been swimming in coffee basically all day long and woke up on Thursday dehydrated and angry. Anyway, I want to talk abut a few things today:

... (0) Dogs (WARNING! Turner and Hooch spoiler alert)
... (1) Brokeback Mountain
... (2) America

So let's kick it into high gear now, shall we?

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(0) Canis domesticus extremus
===============================

Alright, so here's how it goes: Lady Shihady and I are looking for a dog. We're looking mostly at pit bulls, but last night we checked out a cane corso. It was sort of a friendly mastiff-kinda dog. I have no idea what that means except for the fact that the dog was chilled-out, pleasant to be around, and sort of like the dog from Turner and Hooch.

For those of you who live in a sad vacuum devoid of the movies that Tom Hanks made before his face got really puffy, let me tell you about Turner and Hooch. This movie is in the "detective-buddy" genre. Let me describe this concept using a plain-text Venn diagram:

( Detective movies ( Detective-buddy movies) Buddy movies )

That's kind of hard to decipher if you don't really love Venn diagrams, but it goes like this: There are detective movies, and there are buddy movies. Some detective movies are also buddy movies, but some buddy movies are also detective movies. Movies that are both buddy and detective are said to exist within the union of the detective and buddy genres, and they are called (by myself and nobody else that I am aware of) detective-buddy movies.

Holy shit, I just devoted so many words to such an asinine concept.

Anyway, Turner and Hooch is about a detective ("Turner," played by Tom Hanks) and a his buddy ("Hooch," played by a gigantic dog). Here is everything you need to know about Turner and Hooch:

Tom Hanks is a detective.
His new partner is a dog.
Tom Hanks totally cracks wise like all the time because of this.
Hooch slobbers all the time all over everything (hilarious stakeout scene).
Hooch is a randy fucker and totally sires a litter at the end of the movie.

Also, Hooch is gigantic. But this Hooch-dog that Lady Shihady and I checked out last night (you see how I brought that right back around? fuck yeah...) -- this dog was totally not gigantic. I mean, it was big, but it was (a) the runt of the litter, and (b) it never slobbered.

What the fuck?! Why would you get a Hooch dog if it wasn't ridiculously gigantic and never slobbered? Here's how I look at it:

I could invest my time and money in Hooch dog.
I have already invested my time and money in watching Turner and Hooch.
I should therefore synergistically maximize my canine R.O.I. by getting the dog and stealing all of Tom Hanks' dog-slobber jokes.

But if the dog doesn't drool everywhere, I can't do this. I can't say hilarious shit like "Hey dog! Did you swallow a shoe? Looks like you've got a pair of laces hanging out your mouth!" I swear, that shit was like crack-me-up hilarious when I watched Turner and Hooch fifteen years ago.

The downside, I guess, is that Turner and Hooch has a really sad ending. I don't want to give it away or anything, but I'm pretty sure that the dog died to save Tom Hanks' life. When my youngest brother watched Turner and Hooch, he totally cried at the end of the movie. My other brothers and I razzed him mercilessly about this.

Anyway, I guess where I'm going with all this is to say that we're going to check out some pit bulls next. They are friendly little dogs with a totally undeserved rep. Kind of like me. Also, I just like to say Turner and Hooch. Hooch hooch hooch.

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(1) Brokeback Mountain
===============================

I finally saw this movie this week, and holy shit, could they have made it any more depressing? Seriously, holy shit, what a fucking depressing talkie. Although it's seriously a stretch to call it a talkie -- a mumblie would be more like it. Dollars to dicktits that the working title of this film was Two Homosexual Cowboys Mumble at Each Other For Twenty Years and One of Them Grows a Mustache. Maybe the enunciation modulator on my TV set is busted.

But shit, man, I mean, fuck, this was a serious downer. Except there was this one part where the dude from Donnie Darko started up his pickup truck and they dubbed in the sound of the wrong engine. It sounded like a motorcycle or a weed whacker or a Honda Civic or something -- I don't know what -- but it definitely wasn't an old-school Chevrolet pickup truck. Let me tell you, the gayest shit about this movie wasn't two cowboys cornholing each other. It was the goddamned sound design.

(Astute readers will recognize that I'm masking sadness with anger here.)

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(2) AMERICA!!!
------------------------------
Administrivia and General Rant
===============================

Word up, homies! I'm going down to the Oregon coast for the weekend and don't get back to Seattle until Tuesday night: it's a long-n-awesome 4th of July weekend. I plan on taking a total load off (yeah), but unless Matt wants to go war driving in his biodiesel land cruiser there probably won't be any blog posts until Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. (War driving is when you drive around looking for unsecured wireless internet connections. Sure, I could have just said that I wouldn't post unless I could steal somebody's internet connection, but that would sound way less violent and way less leet.)

Anyway, I'm gonna kick back on the beach in honor of America. Now let me just say a few things about America:

America is a mammal.
America fights ALL the time.
The purpose of America is to flip out and kill people.

(Apologies to the Official Ninja Homepage.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that America is rad a lot of the time. But sometimes it's wack. Like this week: an amendent to the Consti-motherfucking-tution to ban flag burning failed to make it through the Senate by one vote. What the fuck? This many cheesedicked scrotum-chugglers really wanted to make it illegal to express yourself? Holy fucking shit, that makes me angry. I mean, FUCK. I have some ill news for your fascist assholes:

AMERICA WAS FOUNDED ON THE IDEA THAT WE CAN EXPRESS OURSELVES WHEN WE HAVE A GODDAMNED PROBLEM WITH THE MOTHERFUCKING GOVERNMENT, WHICH, BY THE WAY, WE DON'T REALLY TRUST ALL THAT FUCKING MUCH IN THE FIRST PLACE, AND THEREFORE SHOULD BE WARY OF GRANTING THEM MORE POWER, I MEAN, RIGHT?

You can tell I'm correct when I go into caps lock like that. But what the fuck? Who the fuck wants to give the Congress the power to make it illegal to "desecrate" the flag? I got news for you fake patriot fuck-os: have you taken a look at the way that amendment was written? Suppose those gay-cowboy-wedding rainbow-flavored war-hating nancy boy liberals in New England controlled Congress: they could say that it "desecrates" the flag to put it on a dead dude's coffin. They could say it's desecration to wave it at your favorite monster truck (in my case, Grave Digger: totally awesome). They could say it's desecration to fly it on your SUV at 60 miles per hour down the highway, exposed to constant flag-destroying pollution. Goddammit, motherfuckers, wake up and take a look at what the fuck you're trying to do: you're trying to give bullshit powers to the biggest, most inept asshole in town -- the government. Fuck that.

Freedom rocks, and I'll be shit-goddamned the day we revoke freedoms that are still enjoyed by racist skazwags in downtown Tehran. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go clean my gun.

Love,
Mike

Hung over

2006-06-29T09:34:00.000-07:00

Fuck.

-Mike

Japan Photos -- Part 2 -- Everywhere else and Tokyo again

2006-06-28T07:34:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes -- here's the remainder of the pictures from my awesome trip to Japan with Vic. I'm going to kick it off again, real hard and old school, with another amazing photograph:

Damn, this dude is so Xtreme, I had to perform an Xtreme crop in Photoshop to show you how awesome he is. Later on in this amazing post I will show you the whole picture, and it will still be Xtreme. Damn, the time that we took this picture was so awesome. I wish all the time could be like this.

Here are two crows in Hiroshima. In Tokyo we saw the nastiest, hugest, most gnarly crow ever choking down a ball of rice the size of a cow brain. But he was as fast as he was nasty, and before we could take a picture he was gone. In Hiroshima, we took a bunch of pictures of crows down by the river to remind us of that nasty crow in Tokyo, and in the process of doing so some limey asshole rode by on his bike and scoffed at us under his breath. Then he turned around and was all friendly-like and tried to sell us a map. Only Vic heard him scoff, but if I had heard him dissing on our "crow-tography," that fucker's bike would have been upside-down in the river. Go rub one off over a picture of your queen, asshole.

The first night in Hiroshima we got totally lost and couldn't find the hostel and it was raining like a tanked monsoon god pissing blood and passing kidney stones. It was a torrential wet hell, and I was soaked and cold, but eventually our friend Campney rescued us and we stayed in the Hiroshima Carps' dorm with a bunch of baseball players. But the next day I decided that I was only going to wear fast-drying synthetic fibers, which is how I ended up visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum looking like a hobo clown. (I felt kind of bad about this.) You can't see my feet in this picture, but if you could you would see how the brown duct tape holding my shoe together color-coordinates with my brown dress socks.

Hiroshima, with the A-bomb dome visible in the background.

This is Vic at a Hiroshima Carps game holding a "Lucky Change Card." The blue creature is Slyly, the Carps mascot. (Campney moved to Japan to be the guy in the Slyly suit.) The dude on the right on the card is some kind of admiral. I think I decided that either Vic or I was supposed to be the admiral dude. We're both pretty regal when it comes to the high seas.

Left to right: Vic, me, and a Japanese girl who serves beer from a keg on her back.

Slyly!!!

The day after the baseball game, we went to Miyajima, a little island nearby Hiroshima. There are tiny friendly deer that basically run the island. Here is a truck waiting patiently for the deer to move.

I don't know, some kind of temple or radio tower?

We took a lot of pictures on Miyajima. Here I am enhancing a shrine.

Here is Vic, looking dapper as usual in the natural splendor.

Holy shit. This picture is seriously questionable. Sorry.

Toward the end of the trip, I think we were taking lots of shrine and temple pictures just to prove that we did obligatory touristy shit.

Here I am feeding a map to a deer! Ha ha! This paper-eating deer certainly could not be a harbinger of things to come!

... and here I am with Vic, shortly after a deer ate about two or three hundred bucks worth of paper money that fell out of my pocket.

This is the view from the top of Miyajima. Pretty hazy.

Vic and I on the hike back down, which took forever. We talked a lot about whether or not it would be cool to be a temple monk and basically spend all your time sweeping, chilling out, and maintaining the trail that we were hiking on.

This is a famous shrine thing in the water near Miyajima. More importantly, though, it is near the "Monster on a Stick" cart where I got a delicious octopus tentacle that totally lifted my spirits.

This is in Kyoto, one of many cities where Japanese people enjoy small cars.

This is the world's largest wooden structure, the Something-or-something Gate in Kyoto. You can see me enhancing it in the lower right-hand corner.

Me, Vic, Japanese kids.

At this point I was getting pretty fucking sick of temples.

After the temple, Vic wanted to go to a castle, so we did. But the castle was kind of just like a temple with a wall and a moat around it. Still, though, I tried to keep a good attitude, as you can see above.

Later on we tried going to a town called Ise, but we couldn't figure out the trains. So we went back to Tokyo to fucking rock it. Shit seriously turned around for the better once we slammed some Mountain Dew that first night back in Tokyo. Here we are slamming more Dew the next day.

Sweet holy fuck, this is easily one of the top ten beverage experiences in my life. As you can see, Japan still uses the old-style Dew cans.

The last picture we took in Japan was of the toilet controls in the hostel. Fortunately they have an ordinary lever in case you're too fucking illiterate to figure out how this shit works.

Here is a beer-serving robot from a box of Asahi Super-Dry that we drank.

And here are the schematics if you want to build your own.

And finally, here is a scan of the greatest and most hilarious page in our "point-n-speak" Japanese phrasebook.

Thanks again for reading,
Mike

Japan Photos -- Part I -- Tokyo

2006-06-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes. Since I finally got my hands on the pics from Vic's and my amazing trip to Japan, I'm sharing some of them with you today. Specifically, I'm sharing those from our initial stay in Tokyo, and I'll share the rest later. Now let me kick it off with one of the most incredible pictures ever taken:

Vic and I made this on the train from Tokyo to Hiroshima -- it's a little gnarly dude from Dig-Dug, modified for improved awesomeness.

On the flight to Tokyo we passed over this erupting volcano. It's Mount Augustine, and it was totally all up in our faces, but we didn't hardly care at all -- in fact, we thought it was awesome.

Here we are in some fucked-up fish market in Tokyo. In third picture, you can see me looking dazed after I got hit by one of those mini-trucks from the second picture.

This is Vic contemplating the Japanese poster for Transporter 2. We watched this movie on the flight over, and were psyched to see the poster for it in the subway. This movie is a lot like a monster puking eel on a rollercoaster -- it's pretty damn cool, but it makes no sense at all.

The logo of a cat carrying another cat has something to do with dry cleaning. Obviously.

Here I am astounded at a Peugot "sports car" that had a "216 cc" emblem. I thought that it had 216 cubic centimeters of displacement, which puts it into the "extreme low end lawn tractor" tier, but later some British dude explained that this was just the model number. What the fuck? Wouldn't this just confuse British people even more? They're like all about the metric system.

Apparently, Vic and I regard the Japanese imperial palace with extreme suspicion. I like how I look kind of like Mikey from American Chopper in that photo.

Vic and I trying to feed feral cats.

A mouse carrying a machine gun, I guess.

Greatest TV show ever: nasty beetles fight to the death.

A huge crowd of people watching some dude play a video game where you play the drums.

Japanese ads: even farther removed from reality than their American counterparts.

Anyway, that's a shitload of pics from Tokyo. Hopefully that wasn't too tedious; sorry if it was.

-Mike

Camping / Wistful memories of Japan

2006-06-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

Hey dudes. So I went camping last weekend with three dogs, two dudes, and one extremely awesome truck. Matt brought his camera along, and I took a few pictures that I thought I'd share:

We started drinking basically as soon as we were in the mountains.

This is what me and the truck think of snow.

Lucky Dog.

Matt behind the wheel of his recently completed biodiesel Land Cruiser.

Sometimes, when I see lame-ass new cars, it makes me want to puke my pants. This truck makes me want to puke too, but only because it's so awesome.

Onca by the campfire.

This is Jason's dog, Jake, but we call him "Lumpy Gravy" on account of all the tumoric protuberances that he has growing on his body. As you can tell from all the empty beer cans behind him, Lumpy sure can knock 'em back.

This is what Jason and I look like after a long day of getting fucked up in the North Cascades.

Fuck yeah.

Anyway, that was Saturday. On Sunday, the Cruiser wouldn't start, so we tried rolling it downhill to pop-start it. This worked only well enough to idle; there wasn't any throttle response at all. So after rolling a couple thousand vertical feet down the side of a mountain we pulled over and discovered that the "engine" fuse was blown ... and initial efforts to replace it ended with the fuse immediately blowing again.

After some hunting around, we were able to identify a short circuit in the vicinity of the alternator. We unplugged the shorted out wire, and were able to drive all the way back to Seattle no problem. Old cars are awesome; they are easy to work on and they look cool. New cars will basically fuck you over if anything ever goes wrong.

In other news, I finally got those pictures of my Japan vacation from Vic. I'll post them later this week, but in the meantime, here is just a taste of what you're in for:

You'll get the full story later, but in the meantime please know that the above picture resulted in the following email to Vic this morning:

YOU CAN FIGHT THOSE FUCKING GNARLY WEIRD DUDES FROM THAT JAPANESE SUBWAY BILLBOARD SIGN WE SAW THEY ARE FIBER DETOX CREATURES BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW TO WORK THE CONTROLS SO THE CHICK KEEPS LOSING AGAINST THE COLON URCHIN

MIKE

I'm fairly certain that the brown dude with the eyeball arms is supposed to be made out of shit. Anyway, thank you for reading today.

North Korean Taepodong-2 ICBM: Holy Fuck!

2006-06-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

Jesus Christ, folks. Here’s one to file under the “horrible news” department. North Korea, a fucking totally admitted nucleonic power, possesses sinister missile technology and intends to conduct a test launch. You heard me right, people: the Taepodong-2 ICBM is capable of reaching major American population centers including Chicago, Canada, and (fuck me sideways) Seattle. That’s practically where I live, homies.

Naturally, this pisses America off, because we don’t like to be fucked with. Benjamin Franklin suggested that our national motto should be “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” but I think a more appropriate slogan would be “Don’t fucking touch me, ever.” So one possible solution that has been bandied about in the press is to use our nascent “missile defense shield” technologies to shoot this bitch missile out of the sky.

Unfortunately, some namby-pamby granola-smoking hippie moonbats and “engineers” think that this may not be such a great idea, because our anti-missile systems have thus far proven to be flaky at best. Therefore, it stands to “reason” that if we try to shoot down this bullshit projectile, we stand a good chance of failure and thereby bolster North Korean confidence in their ability to attack us. Excuse me? Hold the fucking phone and take a gander at this bitch!

North Korea: +2 magic missile.

Newsflash! The Tapeodong-2 is the size of the the entire planet! There is no possible way that we could miss a target this big unless we had Stevie Wonder trying to gun this thing down with teeny-weeny organic pellets from the inside of a pair of earth-tone maracas!

Some other pundits say that this gigantic missile, which is apparently stationed in Asia next to a smaller missile that’s about the size of the moon, poses no threat to us. The “logic” here is that North Korea does not have the technology to affix an actual nuclear warhead to the Taepodong-2.

This is beside the point. While it may be true that North Korea does not presently possess a wooden ladder capable of reaching the top of this enormous rocket -- a necessary prerequisite for mounting the actual warhead -- experts believe that the North is at most six years away from obtaining such a ladder. We know that North Korea has long sought ladder-grade wood and has recently made great strides in the development of sawing and drilling technologies needed to enrich low-grade tree products harvested from now-defunct Siberian logging colonies.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that this missile would require a warhead -- or even rocket fuel -- to deliver a catastrophic blow to America. Proving that the mother of invention is indeed necessity (or in this case, abject and desperate nationwide poverty), this missile does not rely on high-priced traditional rocket technologies such as having an engine.

Instead, it is simply built so tall that it extends into space to begin with, and reaches its target by being toppled into the appropriate hemisphere. Naturally, its directional targeting capabilities are therefore somewhat crude. However, the impact force of its gigantic, heavy superstructure (thought to consist of re-appropriated nonfunctional Cold War-era tractors) would exceed that of several dozen Hiroshima-type bombs. Have you ever seen the movie Deep Impact? It’s kind of like that.

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that this missile is literally a gigantic threat, and in accord with our doctrine of pre-emptive self-defense we ought to take it out with extreme prejudice. At this point, we know that Kim Jong-Il has weapons of mass destruction. We know where they are: They’re in the area around Asia, east, west, north, and south somewhat. We know this because they are the size of a planet and kind of hard to miss. So can we just fucking school this punk and get it over with already?

Thanks for listening,
Mike

ps: I know that lately I’ve been ranting a lot about how much I hate kings. But as much as I hate monarchists, I hate Stalinists even worse. North Korea is an evil fucking police state that blows goats and sucks ass.

Japanese Cinema Explosion

2006-06-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

How’s it going dudes? Today I’m going to talk about a movie that I watched with Lady Shihady. It was called Milo and Otis, and it was about a dog and a cat. Overall the story was strong: the dog and the cat go on a big adventure, and in doing so they have to befriend some new animals and fucking regulate on a few other wild creatures.

Also, this movie was made in Japan. Right away this should have raised alarm bells, but for some reason it didn’t. I mean, here we are talking about a country that makes children’s cartoons about magical raccoons with humongous bizalls. Uppity geeks call it “anime,” but let’s face it: this is just a fancy way of saying that you like to watch horrible animation about jumping, shrieking dudes with gigantic eyeballs, ridiculous hair, and stilted dialogue. And I’m not even going to talk about “manga.”

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that all Japanese animation is bad. In fact, some of it is really good. But most everything that I’ve seen is either really bizarre or really shitty, although it is seldom both bizarre and shitty at the same time.

And don’t interpret this as a knock against Japan, either. Most American animation is pretty bad, too. Sure, you’ve got a few standout examples like The Simpsons or Futurama, but I’d rather shit out my mouth than watch another Snagglepuss cartoon. Although we really don’t have the giant raccoon nuts level of “what the fuck is this supposed to be” over here.

Anyway: Milo and Otis. Just to be clear, though, I want to state that this was a live action movie, and not animation. I was just using Japanese animation as a barometer of that country’s overall weirdness quotient. This movie was made in 1989, long before computer technology allowed the consumer public’s bullshit tastes to shoehorn talking animals and babies into every other prime time commercial.

Therefore, instead of having voice actors CGI lip-synching, there was just one raspy British dude who would say what the animals were supposed to say: “Otis knew that he had to fucking shut down this totally gnarly bear cub before it wailed on Milo. ‘Hey, you roly-poly fat-assed ursine piece of shit!’ Otis said. ‘I’m gonna kick your ass!’” Except they didn’t swear nearly as much (or at all, really) in the movie.

The point is, it was a cool movie, because it was just a dog and a cat running around in the countryside, getting into jams and kickin’ back and maxin’ out relaxin’ in extreme natural splendor. But because it was Japanese, parts of it were totally weird – at one point, I found myself exclaiming, “How many fucking cats did they go through to make this movie?”

And seriously, how many cats did they go through? Because they were putting actual cats in wooden boxes and sending them over waterfalls, dropping them in the ocean, and having them take swipes at bears while they were hanging onto a branch for dear life. This was nonstop edge-of-your-seat excitement, but holy fuck: I just hope the cat that played Milo is okay. Actually, it’s probably a moot point, because the movie was made 17 years ago and that cat is almost certainly dead by now, but I still hope that he made it through the filming process okay.

So, at any rate, I guess that was just a long-winded way of me saying that I can’t imagine a live cat being put in constant mortal peril in an American movie. Maybe a computer-animated cat, like in the Garfield movie, but that looks like a steaming pile of cinematic horse crap.

Sincerely,
Mike

******************************************************
BLING BLING OOP YMMV IMHO!!!
SPECIAL WEDNESDAY “HUMP DAY”
DOUBLE-POST DOUBLE-DOSE UPDATE!!!
******************************************************
So I’m traveling on the train down to Portland right now. Some times Amtrak is OK, and sometimes it sucks. But I’ll tell you one thing that never sucks: the West Coast, baby. When we stopped in Olympia, a friendly old grandma gave out strawberries to everybody in this car. She was super happy because today is the first day of summer – and it was also her birthday! Holy fuck, how awesome is that?! When she told us, the whole train in unison was like “Happy birthday!

This kind of awesomeness happens way less frequently on other coasts such as, for example, the East Coast. (Again, though, I remind you that the accuracy of this assertion decreases with the square of the distance north of Boston.)

Goddamn motherfucking Boston

2006-06-20T07:05:00.000-07:00

OH MY FUCKING GOD! IT'S A GODDAMN OUTLINE WITH INDENTED BULLETS!!!

(0) Where have I been!?!?
(1) How to speak Bostonian!!!!
(2) Air fucking travel --
.... (a) Fellow assholes!!!
.... (b) Television!!!
.... (c) Unattended baggage!!!
(3) America: Fuck yeah!!!

===============================
(0) AWOL, motherfuckers!!!!
===============================

Observant readers of this blog (all one of them (myself)) will note that I mentioned an impending trip to Boston and Maine. If you're wondering why I didn't post, well, there you have it. I meant to, but it didn't work out. Anyway, I was in Boston for yet another conference, and then I went up to Maine with Lady Shihady and their family for the weekend. If I had to make a rough estimate, I'd say that Maine is approximately forty billion times cooler than Boston (the city, not the band). Here's what went down:

In Maine: I ate delicious fish and chips, kicked it on the beach, dismantled sparklers and exploded them with a 12-year-old, looked at dead sand sharks in the ocean, watched a campfire, and hung out with great people all weekend long.
In Boston: Some asshole tried to rip me off and everybody was rude.

And seriously, boy were they fucking rude. I don't mean they had a rude, crude, 'tude, dude, I mean that they were just out-and-out dickweeds. The dude that tried to rip me off was some Abercrombied-out short guy wearing khaki jams (what the fuck?) who claimed that he needed either bus or train money to get himself, his wife, and has two infant sons to some other city on Massachusetts coast. His story was obviously bullshit, the wife and kids were nowhere to be seen, and he was nowhere near a bus or train station, yet this prick dogged Lady Shihady and I for a good five or ten minutes trying to get money out of us, first by pleading, and then by calling us heartless assholes.

Now I wouldn't like this guy telling me how to do my job, so I assume that he doesn't want me telling him how to do his job (being an annoying grifter who has to fake like he's crying so he can afford to get fucked up on Bacardi Ice with his meathead friends). But if he's going to be grifting people with tales of woe regarding his 13- and 17-month-old sons, he shouldn't be asking for forty bucks worth of bus fare. He should be asking for money to help grow his second son in a sophisticated incubating tube, because it is physically fucking impossible to give birth to two kids four months apart.

This is what gets me. If the dude had pulled a knife or a gun on me, I would have been like, "Here's some cash! Have a great night and try to ignore the fact that I'm about to weep like a sissy bitch!" But instead, this guy approaches me claiming that he's on the verge of tears, and then he goes on trying to use logical and emotional appeals in an attempt to extract cash monies from me: BOSTON, THIS MAKES NO SENSE!!! Except for the select group of elite students and professors at your city's prestigious learning institutions (and also one janitor there in the case of Good Will Hunting), logical appeals are not your strong suit. I would advise you to instead look toward New Orleans for inspiration, where six or seven people were murdered last weekend. Now there's a city that knows how to play toward its strengths.

===============================
(1) How to speak Bostonian
===============================

The Boston tongue is strange and exotic, and for first time visitors it can be a little hard to get around the city. So I've taken the liberty of making a handy Bostonian-to-English translation guide. Boston phrases are in bold, and English phrases are in regular font. Clip 'n' save, motherfuckers!!!

"Come on, move."
"Excuse me."
"What the fuck is your problem?"
"Can I help you?"
"Fuhgheddabboutid."
"I'm sorry, but you will not be getting your change back."
"What the fuck are you looking at?"
"Can I help you find something?"
"This goddamn fucking traffic is insane!"
"We sure did underestimate the difficulty of burrowing enough tunnels all over our fucking city!"
"Hey buddy!"
"Either I am going to murder you for cutting me off, or I am about to have a stress-related ulcer explode into my lungs and kill me."
"Fuck you!"
"Go Red Sox!"

===============================
(2) Goddamn motherfucking air travel
===============================

--------------------------------------
(2a) Fellow assholes
--------------------------------------

Goddamn if last night's flight back from Boston wasn't a titty of a bitch -- we sat on the runway on a full flight for two fucking hours waiting for weather to clear, and we arrived in Seattle three hours late. Goddamn sonofafuckingbitch. It's not like a fucking 300-mile long line of thunderstorms developed while the flight attendants were giving their saftey talk, so why the fuck did you herd us all into the plane? Was this just so that we could push back from the gate to claim an on-time departure? What a fucking load.

And I know it's not the airline's fault, but if you have never spent eight hours on a plane next to a dude with Tourette's syndrome, then you have not truly lived. This guy was making noises that sounded like he was simultaneously burping, coughing, and farting out of his mouth all at once. At first I thought it was hilarious, and then I thought that it was some kind of horrible respiratory disease that I would catch and be forced to live with, but then I after about five hours of nonstop burping/retching/mouth farting I realized that it was probably either extreme drunkeness or Tourette's or both.

--------------------------------------
(2b) Television!
--------------------------------------

One of the nice things about being stuck on the plane for countless horrible hours was the time I had to catch up on TV. The best was probably the all-outtake episode of American Chopper -- you know the scene where the announcer is like "With the veteran's convention three days away and the bike dangerously behind schedule, the situation is about to explode. But first, the boys need some light relief" -- and then they like crash shit into other shit or break something or visit somewhere fun? This episode was all light relief. God, it was awesome. Just to let you how I feel about the show, here's an email I wrote last September:

I knew today would rock when I went to 7-Eleven. It used to be that they had an "American Chopper" thing on top of their fountain beverage unit. But then they replaced it with an ad urging me to "Unleash the Frawg!" Fuck that shit, bitch, Surge for life, no way I'm drinking some green apple Pepsi-Cola discharge shit getting pimped by a disco frog. Goddamn it. Today, though, things were looking up, because the Frawg ad was gone, and the American Chopper thing was back up.

Fuck yes, my friends.

I always liked the American Chopper fountain beverage thing because it has the three main dudes from the show on it. Each time I went in 7-Eleven, I could look at the fountain beverage unit and identify a one-to-one correspondence between the American Chopper cast and the creative triumvirate behind Zombies and Watersheds. If you think about it, Vic is basically like the angry old dude with the kickass mustache and non-ironic biceps. He drops awesome swears all the time and tells his kid to fuck off and everybody else to eat shit. Dorf is like that guy's kid who builds the bikes, and sometimes he's like, man, fuck you, and he shows up to work late and also it looks like maybe he started drinking too young when he was a kid. And I'm like that blonde guy with long hair who once wore a Ween t-shirt on the show, you know the guy, he shows up once or twice an episode for no apparent raisin [sic] and is all like "Ho ho! Let's party!!!11~" and then he gets the pickup truck stuck in the mud bog and Vic has to pull it out and swear a lot and then everybody is behind schedule.

Shit goddamn I love being that guy.

Anyway, in the all outtake episode, you get to see that dude that I'm like -- Mikey -- crash the truck into the mud bog again. But then you get to see what happens next -- and they fuckin' annihilate the truck. And Mikey hosts the episode. He even runs 16-second quarter miles in a 1977 AMC Matador. Fuck yeah. So what I'm saying I guess is that the tangible upshot of being three hours late to Seattle and sitting next to a dude with Tourette's syndrome is that I saw one of the greatest episodes of American Chopper ever.

--------------------------------------
(2c) Goddamn fucking observational humor
--------------------------------------

Yo, have you ever noticed in airports how they say shit about how unattended baggage will be judiciously confiscated with extreme prejudice? Why don't they ever do that for those unclaimed bags that chug around on the baggage carousel for hours on end? What's up with that?

===============================
(3) USA MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!!
===============================

Okay, I know I talked a lot of shit about Boston here, but one awesome thing about Boston was all the Revolutionary War stuff hanging around. I mean, I saw actual cannons that we stole from the British. God I hate monarchists -- and I'm serious, that's not a joke -- I fucking hate kings and queens. Anyway, it was awesome to think of how Boston must have been one badass fucking Johnny Tremain town a while ago. And it's so awesome how America told England to fuck off. It's such a shame that this former town of silversmiths and brewers and horseshoers and musket-havers is now home to so many assholes. But damn it was awesome to think of the Boston Tea Party and how we fucking pwn3d the Redcoats. Fuck the king.

Sincerely,
Mike

Anderson COO(L)per + SQL

2006-06-17T21:30:00.000-07:00

Everything's coming up Anderson Cooper for me. First, like Mike, my employer pays me to fly places and yammer. This upcoming week I am going to New Orleans. Yeehah. I found out only this week that I was going, so I looked on the schedule. This conference is usually about 30000 people, so the guests are pretty good. Last year was Obama and David Sedaris. This year?

Madeline Albright
Caroline Kennedy
and
ANDERSON COOPER!

Woo hoo. While everyone and their mother will probably be going to see Anderson and hit on him, I will attempt to do so most embarassingly. Hopefully I can also hand him a sandwich.

Also in Andersonwatch 2006, I was browsing an awesome website which makes pins, and found these Anderson themed items:

AWESOME

Unrelatedly, Vic is the only BlottoGrotto writer to NOT have made a SQL joke yet. What the hell, Vic?

Tubcat Goes to Seattle

2006-06-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

Hola, dudes. Here's a comic I wrote. It's about Tubcat going to Seattle:

Tubcat in Seattle: Page 1
Tubcat in Seattle: Page 2
Tubcat in Seattle: Page 3
Tubcat in Seattle: Page 4
Tubcat in Seattle: Page 5

Sincerely,
Mike

Taco Monday at the Water Wheel

2006-06-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

Outline!

(0) Taco Monday!
(1) Bahston!
(2) God I miss C.C. Lemon!
(3) The Jerk!
(4) New Les Claypool album!

===============================
(0) Beer and tacos and shit
===============================

So yesterday I walked on down to the Water Wheel, which lies across the canal from me on 15th. It was an about an hourlong walk through drizzling rain. In eight years of living in the Pacific Northwest I haven't owned an umbrella, and don't plan on getting one anytime soon. It's a point of pride for me. It was that muggy summer kind of rain, but it was also pleasantly cool out at the same time. And in the process of my slight dampening, I looked out across the city and got to thiknking.

I live in Seattle, I get to fuck around with cool computer shit for my job, my bloodstream is 20 percent coffee, and I listen to Nirvana a lot. Except for the fact that I don't wear flannel very much anymore, I'm basically exactly where I thought I would wind up back when I was a chipper young tot in junior high school.

The stunning accuracy of my predicted future shocks me, because back in college I had predicted that I'd wind up living out my truck for an extended period of time. The fact that I currently live in a house without wheels or a transmission surprises me, and the fact that I haven't ever done so saddens me somewhat. However, given that I've met the lovely lady I want to spend my life with, I don't want my prediction to come true (even if the house had sweet mag wheels) because I don't think Lady Shihady would put up with me if we lived an a forty sqaure foot metal cube with a bathroom consisting of a funnel connected to a hose that drains through the floor. Sort of it would be like living like an astronaut I guess, but I don't think this rationalization would fly.

Anyway, that's what I thought of on the way to The Waterwheel, where I drank beer and ate discount tacos. I'm trying to give up meat lately, but unfortunately there are so many delicious meat-flavored products (like tacos) that it's proving to be a real bitch.

===============================
(1) Boston!
===============================

Flying there later this week! Goin' to Maine for the weekend! I never been to Maine! I'm gonna catch me a Lobster!

===============================
(2) God I miss C.C. Lemon
===============================

So when we were in Japan, Vic and I discovered this amazing beverage called C.C. Lemon. It's delicioius, and has "50 lemons' [sic] worth off Vitamin C in every can." Drinking it is like having the queen lemon of a citrus hive die on your tongue, but right before she passes from this world her swollen, tart abdomen violently bursts, unleashing forth the slithering goodness of a million tiny sightless baby lemons squirmin' all over your taste buds. I guess I could have described it in a more appetizing manner, but holy fuck, how else could I get my point across? This drink is all lemons all the time. Anyway, I brought a can of it back with me and drank it yesterday: god, I miss it so much already.

===============================
(3) I'm picking out a Thermos for you!
===============================

I just watched The Jerk. Sweet holy fuck, it's hilarious. I can't believe I went so long without ever seeing it. Highly recommended.

===============================
(4) Of Whales and Woe
===============================

I recently procured Les Claypool's new album, and it's pretty good. It's got a track called "Iowan Gal," and Les Claypool does indeed have himself an Iowan Gal: he married a chick from my hometown in Iowa. My friends Justin and Vic were at a barbeque where Les Claypool's spouse was present, as well as Claypool himself (apparently Justin's family is friends with the Iowan Gal's family). They bothered Les Claypool, but he nicely suggested that they leave him the fuck alone.

One year we went over to Claypool's Iowan Gal's family's house for an Xmas party, where I met Les Claypool's kid but not Les Claypool himself. I was a little let down, kind of like how I felt when I found out that Justin's mom went on a date with Roger Ebert once but never coupled or conceived with him, thus depriving me of the chance to have Justin contain 50% Roger Ebert DNA. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that if you like weird bass noises that sound like a rowboat duct taped to a timpani and being passed from a whale's ass to its blowhole, you should buy this album. It's pretty good, but not as good as C.C. Lemon. I'd rate it about 45,600 stars out of a possible 53,000.

Sincerely,
Mike

Knoppix v. Gnoppix

2006-06-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Hola el duderinos. This morning I think I'm gonna hold off on the usual fare of dick and titty jokes, and instead talk about my experience with Knoppix and Gnoppix this weekend. These are different flavors of Linux "Live CDs," which means that you can pop 'em in your computer, boot up, and experience all the sweaty geek-love magic of running Linux on your machine on a temporary basis without messing with your current OS or filesystem. Although if you like, it's possible to mount your existing filesystems and fuck with the files using [G|K]noppix. This can be handy if you've fuxx0red an existing Linux installation and need to fix something or if you've forgotten the root password to your machine and need to reset it. But a lot of the time, well, fuck, you just want to have Linux with you wherever you go.

And let's face it: a guy like me? Shit, bitch, when I'm not modding my propeller beanie for 40% more efficiency or raising the waistline on my polyester slacks, I basically spend all my time worrying about whether or not I can have Linux with me wherever I go. (Ha ha -- just kidding! Kind of!) When you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense, especially if you're on the move a lot. Rather than use a virus-ridden Windows installation on a strange computer, you can insert a compact disc, reboot, and cease to worry about keystroke loggers. This would have been super-handy when I was visiting Japan, where I couldn't check my email on a hostel computer without getting spammed by about a bazillion pop-up windows for bullshit products.

Anyway, so those are just a few of the reasons that Gnoppix and Knoppix are useful. What's the difference between them? The most readily apparent difference is that Gnoppix uses one desktop environment (called Gnome), and Knoppix uses another (called KDE). Most Windows users should find either these desktop environments to be intuitive enough to get around without a problem.

Generally I prefer the Gnome desktop, so I tried Gnoppix first. Unfortunately, Gnoppix wasn't auto-detecting my hard drive, so I downloaded Knoppix and tried that instead -- boo-yah, it detected the hard drive. (In spite of their practical similarities, I believe that Gnoppix and Knoppix development is carried out separately. As a result, the hardware auto-detect seems to be somewhat different between the two. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, or clarify if appropriate.) Knoppix worked fine, except that for whatever reason, it would hang on shutdown. Fuck! That was annoying ... it prompted me to remove the CD from the tray, close it, and press return. Doing so, however, did nothing. It also included the cryptical qualifier "(auto 2 minutes)," a period of time during which nothing happened. Oh well.

Anyway, so that was my Gnoppix/Knoppix experience this weekend. I would call it "awesomely outrageous," and also a lot of fun. There are other Linux Live CDs out there that let you demo other distros (I know Ubuntu has one), and I'd like to try some of those as well. Ultimately it would be cool to take an existing Live CD type of distribution (probaby Knoppix, maybe Ubuntu) and modify it to create the ShihadyOS LiveCD, a Linux distro whose sole purpose is to boot up and swear at you really really loudly.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Shihady
Not a real doctor

ps: I'll try to resume dick jokes tomorrow