Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Empty
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Carousel
• Megadeth - Rust in Peace
• The Black Crowes -  Shake Your Money Maker
• Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion I
• Exodus - Impact is Imminent
• Tool - Undertow

Books Lying Open
• Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grim

Soul-Devouring Worry
• The drums in the night.

When I Grow Up:
• Preservatives will work properly in opened jars of Alfredo sauce.

Curse of the Day:
• May the needle seek out the vein.

Daily Update
Not late, for a change.  Well, no later than usual, anyway.

Work sucks. Crowds have been crap lately, probably somewhat due to the upcoming baseball strike, but also just since it's late in the season and the Padres have been in last place for months.  Again.  Also sucks since they're sending out way too many guys selling the same junk I'm selling, and there are only so many people who want to buy it.  Thirty boards divided by 4 is a lot more than 30 divided by 10.  I always sell more than my even share would be, but there's only so much I can do when there are 2 or 3x as many vendors as there "should" be.

I realize that "should" is an entirely-relative concept; management could care if there are five fewer peanut vendors, resulting in the ones selling it making 50% more, due to there being 5 more cotton candy vendors than usual, which causes the ones who normally sell it to make 50% less.  The peanut vendors are certainly all for it.  However when due to the wildly-fluctuating staffing levels I make less Friday + Saturday than I did in an average Friday or Saturday the prior four months, I'm not a big fan of the changes.

On the unpleasant topic of work, my future girlfriend appears to have flown the coop just ahead of my grasping fingers.  She wasn't there Saturday night either, and the same evil imposter female who was there Friday was there again.  This makes me suspect the change is a permanent thing, and this new woman will be manning that post for the rest of the year.  If there had been two different people the last two nights, I'd think that my potential paramour was just out sick or had the painters in or something, but with just one, it looks like a replacement.

Now wouldn't it be ironic if I began talking to her and we ended up dating, etc?

That's not entirely out of the question; she's not hideous or anything, just sort of average.  Short dark red/black hair, slim, vaguely-pretty face.  Of course being as I'm so totally perfect in every way, I have the right to expect a potential GF to be something like Nicole Kidman's younger, hotter sister.  Right?

Walked by her twice Saturday night, and both times took a look as I approached.  Mostly out of curiosity, as I was obviously hoping she'd be someone else (they look nothing alike, so it's not as if anyone could confuse the two women).  Both times she was looking back at me as I walked up and then past, and the second time I gave her a nod and what passes for a smile on my lips, and she grinned back.

And at that moment, I was smitten, and knew we belonged together, forever!  Well not really, I've never felt that way about anyone, but perhaps some day I will.

Does it really matter if a woman I've never spoken to in my life, who might turn out to be a lot of fun and shag like a minx, is a 5 or a 7, on a very quick physical appearance scale?  Apparently so, since I was getting myself convinced to try and chat up the 7, but the 5 who actually shows more interest at this very initial stage doesn't seem to be registering on my radar.  No wonder the only females ever in my bedroom are hand-held and furry.

So some news:

• I've heard of this penis puppetry show in the past, but thought of it again with this article on Yahoo about it. I can't really visualize what happens, and none of the articles I've read are specific about things that go on during the show. Who is the target audience?  It's not sexual, so I guess it's just a curiosity?  Do any non-gay men go?  Do any gay men go?  I've heard of similar female shows, where they let you have a look through an inserted speculum, and that doesn't really interest me either so perhaps I'm just lacking in the necessary curiosity.

• Funny article about prominent politicians who ducked out of Vietnam in one way or another.  Mostly Republicans, mostly ones who are quite pro-war now.  The so called "Chickenhawks".  It's been pointed out in other articles that the leadership who have actually served in war are the least-enthusiastic about the Iraq Attack, with people like Colin Powell and Normal Schwarzkopf applying their actual battlefield experience to their decision-making.  Meanwhile you have hawks like Dubya who spent Vietnam in the National Guard, protecting Texas from invasion, Cheney who got deferment after deferment, and others:

Kenneth Starr, Clinton's legal nemesis, had psoriasis; Jack Kemp, Dole's running mate in 1996, was unfit because of a knee injury, though he heroically continued as a National Football League quarterback for another eight years; Pat Buchanan had arthritis in his knees, though he soon became an avid jogger.

The best story concerns Rush Limbaugh, the ferociously bellicose radio personality, who allegedly had either "anal cysts" or an "ingrown hair follicle on his bottom".

• The news videos of Al Qaeda killing those dogs with supposed nerve gas have been declared fakes by many, but real by others.  Even if they are real, dog-lovers have been reacting with outrage (that angle never really occurred to me, I just looked at them for the potential evidence of gas attack) for the poor dead puppies.  Well, according to PETA (admittedly not the most unbiased of sources) most every military on earth kills plenty of animals in testing, and the US most of all.

Each year, at least 320,000 primates, dogs, pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, cats, and other animals are hurt and killed by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in experiments that rank among the most painful conducted in this country. Because these figures don’t include experiments that were contracted out to non-governmental laboratories or the many sheep, goats, and pigs often shot in wound experiments, the total number of animal victims is actually much higher. The cost to taxpayers for these military experiments is estimated to be in excess of $100 million annually.

• A court setback for Ashcroft and his new world order, or whatever you want to call it.

A May 17 opinion by the court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) alleges that Justice Department and FBI officials supplied erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.

Authorities also improperly shared intelligence information with criminal agents and prosecutors in New York on at least four occasions, the judges said.

Given such problems, the court found that new procedures proposed by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft in March would have given prosecutors too much control over counterintelligence investigations and would have effectively allowed the government to misuse intelligence information for criminal cases, according to the ruling.

• Article about Bush's financial history, and tax filings.

In 1972, Gov. Kerner was convicted of income tax fraud for influencing public policy that benefited his holdings in a race track corporation.  On the advice of his accountants, Gov. Kerner treated the proceeds ($180,000) of his race track stock as long term capital gain subject to the reduced tax. 

So?  Well, as the article discusses in legal terms, Bush did virtually the same thing, but more so.  The parallels between the cases are quite strong, though in every case Bush is guilty of more misconduct than Gov. Kerner was, as far as I can see. I think that in 1972 people still had some hope that politicians wouldn't use their elected position to enrich themselves, and that by now everyone just sort of expects it.  So whether a jury would convict Bush is very open to debate, but it's interesting to see the sort of trickery politicians use to get rich while in office, without actually taking bribes or other less-sophisticated old fashioned techniques.

It's pretty much an academic question at this point.  Note that Kerner was brought down by the DA, who was of the other political party, and wanted to make a name for himself by taking on the famous Governor.  It worked, he was later elected to higher office.  So there would have had to be a really gutsy Democrat or Independent District Attorney in Texas, one not afraid to go after Dubya.  There were no shortage of such Republicans during the last administration, willing to drag up very old real estate dealings by the Clintons, investigate that for years and years, and ultimately find nothing of any importance.  Democrats just lack the fervor and hatred to muck-rake and launch personal crusades against their political opponents.

t last, the Daily Archives Page up to date.  It had been neglected since late May, so I had to add blog summaries for the last week of May, every day of June and July, and three plus weeks of August.  This was a surprisingly-time consuming project, requiring five or ten minutes per entry, especially on the older ones, since I'd forgotten most everything on them, and had to reread most of the updates just to type the short summaries on the Daily Updates Page.  Plus I just enjoy smelling my own poo.

If not for the fact that it was only that far behind since I kept not spending 30 seconds a day to update it when I wrote the blog, I'd be angry at someone.  Hopefully I can manage to update it every day from now on, when the whole update is fresh in my memory and quicker to write.

I'll start on that... tomorrow.  Or possibly the day after.

In the process of updating those I read a lot of the updates from then, and saw much I'd change if I were to redo them.  I'm not going to, other than a few links that I fixed, since I try to regard them as "gone to press", like a newspaper or magazine that's been printed and can't be poked at afterwards.  It's tempting to rewrite history on a website, simply because you can.

Another thing I noticed from the old ones was how many links were already dead.  Even in news updates from just two or three weeks ago, virtually all of the images going to Yahoo, and even most of the articles, were gone.  That seems rather quick, but I guess they post so much news and so quickly replace initial versions of articles with later ones.  Also Yahoo is entirely script-generated, with every URL subject to later change by the program that stores and links to them, so they might have the same stuff still there, just in different locations.  Which is fine for them, but it sort of ruins linking.  I started doing the news images here yesterday, and will continue with that, but that doesn't much help the broken story links.  Bah.

I wasn't real happy with the last couple of stories I'd written for here either.  Not that they sucked, at least not that badly, but it's funny how reading something weeks after you (I) write it makes such a difference in the perception of it. At the time I was reasonably-satisfied with them, thinking all flowed pretty well, the tone was consistent, etc.  Reading them yesterday, especially that last Sliver of Sky one, I wanted to jump in and start editing.

I'm having lots of ideas for short stories lately.  Not like in the old days (early 90's) when I was writing (fiction) six or more hours almost every day, and had so many more short story ideas than I could type out.

Here begins the ironic comparison.

The ideas I have now are small ones. Scenes: a couple talking, or a guy remembering some event from his childhood, or a short sketch of what should probably be a longer story.  What makes this ironic is that when I was 19 and writing a ton, I used to heap derision, or at least indifference, on stories of that type.  My main short story problem then was trying to do way too much.  Introduce characters, work in a plot, have some action, building suspense, a climax, etc.  That's really hard to do in a short story of manageable size.  It rapidly becomes a long short-story, or more like a summary of a novella.  The one horror short story I've yet added to this site is a pretty good example of trying to put too many elements into one story.  It's not a bad one, but there are a lot of events for a proper shortie.

The short stories I think of now are much more sparse, and the irony is that most of the students in my creative writing classes in college were around my current age or older, and that's what they wrote for short stories. At the time I found them boring and too short, and unimaginative.  I felt like they were purposely leaving out all of the plot events and action to just have some dialogue and a character engage in deeply introspective ponderings.  Possibly they were, but more likely to my current thought is that they just couldn't think of anything else.  It's far easier to have nothing happen than it is to think of something cool that can happen and be resolved in 10 or 15 pages.

I had a decent idea for a short story that I was going to write tonight.  Instead I washed the stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, and made a huge thing of stir fry (mushrooms, black olives, purple onion, green bell pepper) and poured half a jar of Alfredo sauce over it, and had that over pasta spirals.  It occurred to me that it was relatively foolish to spend time writing up these random short stories that will never go anywhere or do anything for me, when I've got dozens of outline points and cool ideas for my big fantasy novel thing, and never any time/motivation to work on it.  And I've been saying for the better part of 2 years that I simply must begin writing more fiction; that I must spend at least an hour a day on that, and more, if possible.

The last thing I noticed doing the archives was how goddamn annoying Charlene was.  If anyone hadn't figured it out at the time (there were strong tip offs in the "soul-devouring worry" items on the side bar each time), she wasn't real.  I'd had the idea to do a sort of he said/she said thing, or possibly a mysterious editor, who would add in comments on the finished blog.  I would do these myself when editing it after writing, and before posting.

The problem is that I virtually never have/take the time/interest to edit these at all after I type them up.  The day Charlene appeared I had written this out, and was going to post it.  Instead of that I figured I'd just try doing what it said, and see how it went.

I've had the idea for a while of doing this site as a two part project, with an imaginary co-writer, a caustic female who would Devil's Advocate everything, pick apart my generalizations. She'd not write anything originally, but would go over what I had written and put in comments here and there, probably in a red font, and wouldn't just do it on the main page; she'd pop up on most every content page, just making comments and insults here and there.  She might even have arguments with me about her comments, or what I said in reply to her, etc.

I would of course just start doing this, perhaps introducing her as a friend who wanted to get involved in the site but often disagreed with me on things.  I would also have an email for her, have a staff page with her info on it, etc.  It would all be pretty much tongue in cheek, and clever readers would realize that she was just a psychological exercise of mine, but I thought it would be funny to see if anyone fell for it, if she or I got more agreement on things, who got emails, etc.

Obviously I didn't carry it as far as initially conceived.  I did add that Site Key page, but didn't bother with an email or trying to make her actually sound like another person.

I sort of lost interest in doing her comments after a few days of it, but had been thinking I might return to the idea at some point.  That changed when I read them while catching up on the Archives, since she was just so damn annoying.  At the time she seemed sort of cynical and harsh, but basically tolerant and good-natured in her poking fun.  Re-reading them yesterday, she seemed like a shrewish bitch, or a really bad sign for my mental well-being.  Or both.

So I decided she would not be returning, which is why I'm posting this now.

You might wonder if I would do what I said I was doing?  I mean if I had a female friend who wanted to add her comments on this page, would I let her?  I don't think so, no more than I would a male friend. It's my blog, my place to write about this or that.  I'm fine posting comments or emails from others, either in the mail bag or excerpted on this page, but I don't think I'd want another person posting here.  It's not like this is a real blog or news site, where there are numerous discrete news items and the poster's name on them.  This is much more of a live journal type thing, with one frequently-monolithic update a day, and it's mine mine mine.  I mean it should have a single voice/tone.

So Charlene was not inspired by anyone (the name was inspired by a rather brassy and intelligent girl I knew and didn't much care for in high school, and have never seen since) or written by anyone other than me, and if I'd had a female friend/gf at the time who wanted to make comments on the page, I probably never would have done it at all.

I'll probably leave the site key page as it is for now, and explain things somewhere else.  Perhaps when I get those old blogs/articles up, one can be about Charlene, with her comments and then this explanation.  Hold your breath.

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