Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Plymptoons
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Player
• Exodus - Impact is Imminent
• Rammstein -  Mutter
• Guns N' Roses - Use Your Illusion II
• Pitchshifter - www.pitchshifter.com
• Marilyn Manson - Lunchbox

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

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Unopened letters

When I Grow Up:
• I will try harder.

Curse of the Day:
• May your toes itch unbearably.

Daily Update
At some point I'll learn to do these updates some time other than 3 hours past my bedtime when I'm too tired to think, or 15 minutes after waking up, when I'm not yet awake to think.  Although at least this way I have an excuse for being less than uber-witty.  Currently it's the former, if you were wondering.  Past bedtime, I mean.

News stuff, what too much surfing Friday afternoon brought.  It's really not much in the way of "news", it's more like "interesting stuff I saw here and there, but don't have all that much to say about, therefore it's here, rather than down below where I'm obligated to jabber on about it in longer form".  And with that room-clearing introduction...

• I joke about "my future wife" from time to time here (and in real life) but I've never really given it any serious thought, which you have probably already figured out due to the words "Nicole Kidman" usually appearing in the same or an immediately adjacent sentence.  I've even joked about meeting my future wife through this blog/live journal/thing, and had a dream about that once.  Well, I don't think the dream actually progressed to white dresses and a chapel, but it was on that track.  I bring this up since a blogger actually did meet a woman through his blog, and they actually are going to get married.  You can read about it here; it's a nice little story. 

• Okay, so this is a complicated one. Two guys found out that one of their neighbors had been molesting and sodomizing his 7 and 10 year old nephews.  They broke into his house, beat him up, stripped him naked, and then heated a metal spatula and repeatedly branded his ass and genitals with it.

Gibson suffered first, second and third degree burns and was hospitalised for three weeks. In June 2001, he was convicted of sexually assaulting the two boys, and is serving an eight to 40-year prison sentence.

You may well think that they should have finished the job with a rusty pair of scissors. Their defense was that they were provoked by the horrible news, they had to get at the guy, and he deserved it.  That might go over better if they weren't both already serving long sentences for other crimes!

Evans is already serving a two to 40-year sentence after being arrested and convicted for drug delivery several months following his assault on Gibson. Grant's sentence will be added to that. His co-defendant Dewon Williams, 21, is also in prison, serving a life sentence for an unrelated murder he committed several months after his attack on Gibson.

So did their vigilante justice scar their psyches and set them onto the criminal path, or what?  They both got 19 months tacked onto their current sentences.

• It's wrong to laugh at this. Wrong, I tell you.  Even if it is from Canada.

Grieving relatives placing a memorial at an intersection where six people were killed earlier this week were sent diving for cover Wednesday as two cars crashed at the same place.

An Alberta Motor Association student-driver car was making a left-hand turn off Secondary Provincial Highway 512, just east of Lethbridge, at around 9 a.m., when it was T-boned by an sports utility vehicle, say RCMP.

• Another article about the hideous things Japanese soldiers did during WW2.  What was it with the Axis powers?  I mean there have been countries united in war for all of history, but it seems that the Japanese and Nazis were just out of their minds with the whole atrocity kick.  I don't even want to quote from the article, go read it if you must know.  Vivisection, forced frost bite where they'd break off a frozen arm from a living person, injection of toxic chemicals, etc.  Hideous stuff.

Would things have been different if Allied soldiers were involved? There have always been suspicions and allegations that this happened at Camp Mukden in China, where Allied prisoners - including Australians - were held. Yet Sheldon, in his extensive research that contains many examples of the unit's activities, such as the frostbite experiments, was unable to find "substantive evidence" of this.

The immunity granted to those in Unit 731 saw the doctors involved return to mainstream Japanese society. In 1989, the now-defunct Japanese magazine Days Japan revealed how those who had escaped prosecution had gone on to take some of the most prestigious positions in the Japanese medical community.

The man who succeeded Ishii Shiro as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others took up posts heading university medical schools, and also worked in the Japanese health ministry.

• Great picture from the archives of Boners.com.  As with all shots there that I occasionally link to, you want to be careful not to click the next or back buttons, since you'll probably see something hideous.  This one is no exception.

miss having something to write about here.

For some reason I've not seen any news items or weird stories lately, or at least none that have motivated me to write about them at length.  I think I need to surf some more odd sites, rather than just news, where you get seven flavors of disaster and mayhem, and little else (other than celebrity pictures).

I've found more motivation in what to talk about from science articles and sociology stuff in the past.

I have none of that today though, just a lot of yawning and eye-rubbing, while I vamp for time.

Work has been really crap the last month or so, mostly due to hardly any people going to the games. Friday night was about the worst selling crowd I can ever remember.  Not horribly small, but tons of no shows and hardly any kids there.  No one was making any money on anything.

Every year around this time the vendors nose-dive on profits, since the baseball team is usually way way out of contention, the company hires a ton of new vendors for football season, and school starts up.  This results in smaller crowds, more vendors, and fewer kids.  Kids drive an amazing amount of product sales.  They want everything, they eat everything, and their parents often buy it for them.  Even parents who are tight fists and don't buy their kids much still buy them more than they (the parents) would have on their own, and often if they are getting the kid something they'll get themselves something at the same time.

If the stadium was smart they'd just have a permanent half price for kids policy, with one dollar kid days from time to time on top of that.  Just get the little buggers in; they'll bring their parents and more than pay for themselves food and souvenir purchases.

So anyway, I made like $55 Friday night, compared to $120 or so I was making every Friday from May-early August.  It was really hot and humid so I was soaking in sweat all night, my would-be girlfriend is still gone from her formerly station and nowhere to be found, and I had a headache all night.  On the way home I realized that a few Rubio's fish tacos would make things better.  So I drove by the store semi-near my apartment, and of course the 99 cent offer has expired.  I didn't want any enough to pay the normal $1.80 or so, especially with work sucking so hard on money of late.

So no money, and no fish tacos.

I got home and meant to get to work on some site stuff, but did a bit of surfing first.  By chance I saw a link to an online games site.  The link was for one of their Pac Man clones, which I immediately rejected as being crap.  However they have upwards of 50 other games, and though most of them are junk (like kids games, you get sick of them in 15 seconds), a few are pretty fun.  All of the games are in flash, so they aren't real detailed on the graphics, but are colorful and play lag free once you've DL'ed them.

Acno's Energizer is pretty fun; I got up to lvl 17 before I got sick of it for now; I'll do the rest of the levels some other time.  My suggestion; write down the level codes it gives you, so when you die you can pick up where you left off.  The game enters your last earned level code in the little "select level" box if you do another game, but if you hit the back button or close your browser, that goes away.  The level codes are really annoying; way too long in a crappy font; o and 0 are identical.  Why not just make them be 1-30 or whatever.  So what if someone types in the last level right at the start, it's a little shareware thing, let people do the last level first if they so desire.

Hexxagon is the one I enjoyed the most, since it's a version of Attaxx, a strategy game that I used to play in the arcade a decade ago, and have always really liked.  Playing a few games of that motivated me enough to try and hunt up a better version of the game, but I didn't have any luck.  There are emulator versions of it, but the two sites I saw didn't have it.  The game is from 1990 and there's no PC version of it being sold, but there are various freeware and shareware versions online, none of them very satisfying.

There are a few good action games on the Miniclip site, an asteroids clone and a few others, but I wasn't motivated enough to play them enough to get the hang of them.

So with this and that and those, the night has pretty well vanished without a trace.  And it's now nearly dawn, I'm starving, my headache is back, and I've accomplished nothing, other than this lame edition of my blog.  Cheers.

<-- Yesterday  --  Tomorrow -->
Archives Page

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.