Disks in Rotation:
DVD • The Usual Suspects
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Carousel
• Sevendust - Home
• Fat Boy Slim - From the Gutter to the Stars
• System of a Down
• Disturbed - The Sickness
• The Prodigy - Fat of the Land

Books Lying Open
• Annotated Lovecraft, S. T. Joshi
• Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grim
• Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
• Dreams of Terror and Death, H. P. Lovecraft
• Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre H. P. Lovecraft

What's For Lunch?
• White rice, with black pepper. C

Soul-Devouring Worry
• It will only get hotter.

When I Grow Up:
• I'll live in a big sprawling mansion like Ozzy does.  But with fewer rat dogs and nutty relatives.

Daily Blog
Watched episodes 3-6 of the Osbournes, and it's definitely grown on me.  I wouldn't give it quite the amount of attention it's been getting in entertainment articles, but it's worth watching, I suppose.  I also saw the 3rd South Park episode of the year, and my god has it jumped the shark.  I'd say any single episode from the first 3 seasons is 10x better than the best episode of the 6th season thus far.  Even the voices are worse.  They can't help the female voices, since the nutty woman who did almost all of them killed herself a couple of years ago, but they quite high-pitching Stan, Kyle, and Cartman's voices, so they sound like mediocre impersonations of themselves now.  Like the idiots doing them on every other radio show about 5 years ago.  More than that, the writing is just crappy.  No amusing subplots at all, which were often the funniest things in early episodes, and not really any oddball events.  Nothing with school, no Chef at all, Butters is far less interesting than Kenny, etc.  Maybe it's sucked for the 4th and 5th seasons as well, but I don't know, haven't seen any of those.

Depressing though, I'd planned on buying the 4th and 5th seasons on DVD at some point, but can't see any reason to do so at this point.

I was talking to a friend on ICQ yesterday, and the following exchange struck me as amusing.  It's sort of tacky to paste in IRC or ICQ conversations into a weblog, but what the hell.

Her: Welp, I have ICQ 2002a, and... I don't see any improvement, but maybe it all turns sparkly after a few hours.

Me: That's what you said about Viagra too.

A few news items of note.  Amusing ones, mostly, though nothing can (ever) hope to top that gold statue fellatio shot from yesterday.

• Ahh of course, it's a binturong!  Silly of them to have not known immediately.

• New scientific evidence seems to show that virtually anything fried has Acrylamide, a chemical that is a known carcinogen.  So enjoying some FFs isn't quite on the level of chomping down on fresh asbestos, but it's not a real good thing.

"Frying at high temperatures or for a long time should be avoided," the Swedish administration's statement said.

Oh, well that's good.  I mean it's so useful to fry things for short times on low temperatures, after all.  This is also known as soaking in warm cooking oil, a sure technique for cold, inedible goop.

• In more health news, I'll be buying some Vitamin E capsules, I think.

• Article from USA Today that has basic computer questions of the sort your parents probably need to have beaten into their skulls.  Question one makes me tear out my hair though.

Q: I like to forward jokes to friends. How can I forward a joke and delete all of the previous e-mail addresses?

A: Finally, someone who understands this basic rule of e-mail etiquette. When you forward e-mail, a new message is created that usually contains the original addresses in the body of the e-mail. This is bad because it divulges the addresses when so many of us like to keep our address private to prevent spam. Most e-mail programs let you highlight addresses in the forwarded message and delete them before you click send. But, a better way is to select only the part you want to forward and paste it into a new e-mail. To really be a good netizen, use your e-mail program's blind carbon copy (BCC) feature, which hides the addresses of all of the recipients.

The correct answer is, of course, that everyone hates forwarded jokes, and to be a good "netizen" (a term no one who actually is one has ever used in their life) you should delete it before it can spread further, and hope the AOLer who keeps sending them to you will get a clue at some point.

• News item about how "angry young men" are more likely to drop dead of a heart attack than non-angry men.  This is of course news to no one, but apparently there was a need to study it. It's at least something to cheer you up the next time some asshole in a BMW starts tailgating and steering with his knees so he'll have one hand for the cell phone and the other for the horn.  It's unknown if the study included the premature death rates of various shouting assholes who get punched out or shot to death, but probably not.  Other causes of death to assholes are just a bonus, on top of the heart attacks, I guess.

• And in some depressing and potentially very very bad news, it appears that the shit may be heading for the fan at even higher velocity in the Middle East.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia has sent eight brigades to its border with Jordan after receiving intelligence reports that Israel was massing troops along the Jordanian border, Saudi officials said Tuesday.

In Israel, an army spokesman said Israel had not increased its troops along the border with Jordan.

A near-majority of the Arab world believes that Jews were warned away from the World Trade Center on 11 September; an actual majority believes that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered because of her involvement with a Muslim man; more than half of all black Americans believe that the CIA makes drugs easily available in their communities to keep them quiescent, and one-fifth believe that it deliberately introduced the Aids epidemic; 80 per cent of all Americans believe that the US government is conspiring to withhold information about Gulf war syndrome; and a bestseller in France claims that Osama Bin Laden was a US agent who was used by President Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the twin towers.

Between November 27 1963, and March 16 1964, the FBI had three of its top marksmen carry out an exercise to establish if those shots could have been fired in that time frame. The three experts, using the same rifle Oswald was supposed to have used, fired 3 shots each at a stationary target only 15 yards away, trying to match Oswald’s speed and accuracy. Every shot was high and to the right. None of these top marksmen could get off three shots in the time of 5.6 seconds and hit a target at a distance less than one quarter of the distance than the President’s limo had been. The shots were fired at a flat trajectory and not from a height of at least sixty feet that would have been the minimum elevation from which the sniper was firing.

In a final series of tests, one of the FBI marksmen fired a series of shots at a target set one hundred yards away. Again, he could not get the three shots off in the time frame; his best time being 5.9 seconds, but all of his shots were at least five inches above and to the right of the target. Robert Frazier, the agent, claimed that was the best he could achieve due to an uncorrectable mechanical deficiency in the telescopic sight.

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