Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Pulp Fiction
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Carousel
• Guns 'n Roses - Appetite for Destruction
• Metallica - S&M
• Jane's Addiction - Ritual de lo Habitual
• Metallica - Justice for All

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

Soul-Devouring Worry
• It's all controlled by malevolent computers with the AI of a War2 grunt.

When I Grow Up:
• Scholastic achievement won't be measured in "cheerleaders nailed" any longer.

Daily Blog
It's 6am Sunday morning and I need to get up for work in 5 hours, and I'm pretty damn sleepy, so this won't be all that long.  I had thoughts of writing some fiction, was sitting on my bed around 3am thinking of some short story ideas, and how I should just sit down and let my fingers do what they would.  I should have, but I didn't, and now it's dawn and I'm too tired.  It wouldn't have been that good anyway, I didn't really have any inspiration or brilliant idea.  And yes, it's the ability to readily make excuses like those that explain my amazingly successful writing career to date.

Work last night wasn't bad.  Crowd was pretty large, as usual on a Saturday Night when they always give away something.  A shirt was the gimme last night. School is finally out for everyone, which means a much higher per-capita of children, which means more sales of pretty much everything, being as kids want all the sweet junk we sell, and parents tend to buy it for them.  Plus like 10 sections were sold all to Girl Scouts.  Not literally, there weren't 5000 girls in those outfits, but the tickets were all to their families.  So there were tons of families with 8 or 10 or 12 y/o girls, and lots of their brothers along as well, and they just bought everything in sight.  I sold cotton candy as fast as I can ever remember selling it.

As usual on a very good sales night, the game went like lightning.  There were no hits until the 4th inning, and no runs until the 7th, and even then it was just a solo home run, which is quick.  Scoreless games can be slow, if the pitchers are slow or every inning has 2 guys on base, but that wasn't the case last night.  First time I noticed the hour it was around 8:30, and was nearly the 7th inning.  Game was on pace to be over in two hours, which is really fast. 

Baseball is always trying to cut the game time, but in my experience no one wants that.  Really long games with a bunch of pitching changes are boring, true, but people like a game to be around 3 hours, or longer if there is a lot of offense. A two hour game you take 15 or 20 minutes to get in line for some food and go to the bathroom, and you might miss two innings.  Plus games that short are always like 2-1, with hardly any hitting or offense.  Constant 1-2-3 innings are boring, unless the pitcher is a big crowd favorite, and that's true of like 4 pitchers in all of baseball.  Where as everyone likes any hitter when he puts some good wood on the rock, whether he's the back up shortstop or Barry Bonds.

Anyway, the cotton candy ran out in the 7th inning, and I was checked out and in my car by the bottom of the 8th, and it was 9:05pm, after the 7:05 start time. Most nights that's about the bottom of the 6th, and I'm looking at making another $40 or so.  It's subjective/selective memory, but it certainly seems that every time there is a huge crowd and really fast sales, the game is 1-0, and when they're playing Philly on a Wednesday night in early September it's 9-7 in the top of the 4th and every single person in the stadium who might be going to buy something already has.

Anyway, have some news. 

• A woman in New Zealand is planning to film her birth as part of a porno film.  NZ lawmakers are having cows.

"While it is unclear exactly what is planned, child pornography is a crime and we want to do all we can to protect children from such exploitation," Ms Pakura said. "Even using footage of the birth alone in such a movie is an affront to the child's dignity and future interests."

Okay, first off, babies have no dignity.  Secondly, isn't it rather a stretch to say that maybe in 10 or 15 years someone will bring up the fact that the kid's birth was shown in a porno?  A crappy movie that will be forgotten in about 3 months?

I have trouble imagining anyone who would find a birth video sexy, frankly.  If you did, there are plenty of tapes on the whole "miracle of life" thing, that show the baby coming out in far better detail than I ever want to see it.  In any event, I wouldn't try to stop the woman.  Assuming she has competent medical care, a midwife, etc, what's the problem?  Lots of people film their births on home video, and lots of people have births at home, rather than a stressful and infection-filled hospital.  The woman was just stupid to let it be known in advance that she was filming it for reasons other than personal use.

• You might want to avoid having surgery in Japan.

• I posted a couple of days ago about the new types of super jets, and the Japanese model that was going to be test flown in Australia soon.  Well, it didn't go too well.  With cool fireball photos.  The Yahoo slideshow is amusing, with numerous pictures of glum Japanese scientists.

• This story of the senior forgetting which pedal makes the car stop (not to mention which slot on the gear shift makes the car go backwards) is amusing mostly since it occurred about 10 miles from where I live.  I like that the headlights are still on underwater.  Pretty good save by a bystander, I might add:

It happened around 10:45 p.m. at the Travelodge in Hotel Circle. Police say an 81-year-old man was trying to back out of a parking space when he hit the gas pedal and smashed through a fence, plunging to the bottom of the swimming pool.

When officers arrived, they found a car submerged at the bottom of the pool. A witness jumped into the pool and rescued the driver by breaking the back window of the car. No one was injured in the accident.

I'm surprised it was possible to break the back window out, I mean underwater, kick it that hard?  Or did he grab a pool chair or something?  Perhaps the car wasn't underwater yet, back end sticking up so he didn't have to hit it through the water?  I think it would be impossible to break if it were all the way under, barring a heavy metal pointy thing.

I'm also surprised the guy was drunk; generally just being old is excuse enough to lose control, especially with the whole gas vs. break foot thing.  I'm never comfortable being behind or in front of an old person driving, especially in a parking lot.  They just tend to forget what they are doing too often, and back up or go forward more or less at random.

And my last surprise is the shot showing the car's license plate; that it's not a rental, or a Zonie.  "Zonies" are Arizona heatbirds that come to vacation here in the summer, fleeing the oven-like temperatures in the desert.  They are about 98% white seniors, usually driving their big Cadillacs or Buicks (like the one in the pool) or else SUVs.  They drive slowly, in the wrong lanes, don't know where they are going, and are a general freeway nuisance.

I've got a whole "Flux's guide to driving on a real freeway" guide planned out, would be a funny page, with the basic car/driver type analysis, rules, tips, etc.  I just have to get around to actually doing it at some point.  Zonies will be featured, though not prominently, since they are rather a regional problem.

The guy had prostate cancer and several other ailments, but he was still mentally sharp, so life was really a hell for him.  Old, sick, no hope of getting better, outlived all of your friends, no children to assist you.  Sad story.

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