Diskage:
DVD • LotR
CD-ROM • Empty
CD Player
• Soundgarden - Bad Motor Finger
• Mad Season -  Above
• System of a Down - Toxicity
• God Lives Underwater - Life in the So Called Space Age
• Metallica - ...and Justice For All

Books Lying Open
• The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were, Michael Page & Robert Ingpen

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Petty carping.

When I Grow Up:
• My trophy room will be substantially larger.

Curse of the Day:
• May you trip over your own goddamned feet.

Daily Update
I want to get back to work on a big site project, as well as make some more potato stir fry (I'm addicted to it now) so here's news and then other semi-news below.

• Short news item about a candidate for the Montana senate who has eerie silver/bluish skin.  In what should serve as a major indictment of the media, there are about 50 news stories on him today, but not one of them has a goddamned picture.  Hoping to see a picture is the only reason anyone is clicking on the link in the first place, you swollen liver-spotted media toads! The condition is apparently semi-common, and comes from excessive silver deposits in the body. And it's permanent.

There are a ton of articles about the condition, mostly on medical sites. The vast majority read like this.

In recent years, silver-containing products have been marketed with claims that -- when taken by mouth -- they are effective against hundreds of diseases and conditions. These claims are false, and since these products offer risk without benefit, their sale should be stopped.

These silver products are typically colloidal silver, a suspension of submicroscopic metallic silver particles in a colloidal base.

Long-term use of silver preparations can lead to argyria, a condition in which silver salts deposit in the skin, eyes, and internal organs, and the skin turns ashen-gray.

Many cases of argyria occurred during the pre-antibiotic era when silver was a common ingredient in nosedrops. When the cause became apparent, reputable doctors stopped recommending their use, and reputable manufacturers stopped producing them. The official United States drug guidebooks have not listed colloidal silver products since 1975.

You can find many other sites with info about how colloidal silver products have amazing health benefits, but oddly enough, every single one of those sites seems to be selling said products. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.  Of course none of these sites, pro or con, has any damn pictures.

I finally widened my search and found this poor woman's webpage, which has pictures of her.  She has argyria, and it's quite impressive.  It actually looks a lot like that one silver chick on Farscape, which I know of entirely through magazine and website photos.  But that's true of most things on earth.

• I posted about a couple of articles (one, two) a week ago that discussed the danger that New Orleans could completely vanish beneath the Gulf of Mexico if a really big hurricane hit, since the storm surge would swamp all the levees and dykes that keep the sub-sea level city dry.  It's damn near happening right now, with N.O. surviving the storm since it's not category 5, and is hitting land a couple of hundred miles away.

Forecasters warned that some areas could be inundated with 6 to 10 inches of rain and a life-threatening storm surge on the coast of up to 25 feet. A storm surge of 20 to 25 feet was likely to leave up to 15 feet of water in Erath, Delcambre and Cypremort Point, which are near the coast. There could be 2 to 8 feet of water in Abbeville, 20 miles inland, the weather service said.

A couple of cool pics of it are archived here.

• The Sports Guy writes a regular column for ESPN's Page Two, and he's usually very funny.  The current one is no exception, chronicling his voyage to gamble and see an Ultimate Fighting show.  The description of the crowd is classic.

Yikes. You could practically smell the testosterone. Every guy in the building looked like he was waiting for somebody to make eye contact with him, just so he could stalk over and scream, "You lookin' at me? You got a problem?" Sleeveless shirts, gold necklaces, slicked-back hair, swaggering walks ... it was like we had suddenly entered Badda Bing.

One buxom blonde companion commanded everyone's attention, mainly because of her skintight black cocktail dress, topped by an "I know everyone's looking at me" smile and a cowgirl hat decorated with cubic zirconium crystals and sapphires (all she was missing was a long metal pole). The guys next to me were staring at her intensely, frozen, like how my dad's dog Maggie looks whenever somebody eats popcorn. Meanwhile, the girl sitting in front of J-Bug was wearing a strapless dress, looking like she just arrived off the set of "Men In Black, Part 69," prompting the Bug to wonder longingly, "Imagine if she was into slightly overweight guys with no money?"

ere's how I filled the precious hours of my day.

First off, I fed the two snakes, since they were starving.  As always This small pic to the right is the ball python, mid-meal. Click the image to see the full shot.  It's cropped here so you don't have to see what he's working to swallow, if the sight of dead furry things bums you out.  The big Red-tailed Boa, pictured below, got a full grown rat.  He made it go away like a Cubs fan descending upon a bratwurst in the middle of a July double header.

 

I feed them by holding the dead rodent by the tail, dangling it like a furry piñata.  The snakes immediate wake up and slither over, necks cocked to give them striking ability.  They usually sniff it a bit, then bang, a lightning quick strike, and frantic constriction (even though the meal is always long dead).

The big one did this, and I came over to the desk to eat some of my shrimp pasta while he was squeezing.  I ate for a minute, got the digicam and walked back over to get some pics... and the rat was gone.  Just the snake, getting a drink of water.  He eyed me speculatively, looking up and wondering if another nun num would be appearing.  He could eat rats like popcorn, if I let him, but he's fat already.

He'd probably prefer something larger, like a rabbit, or cat, or yapping rat-dog. That's him in the photo here, crushing my fragile ribs like so many twigs in a mud slide.

 

I also somehow found the time to play a couple of games of Bookworm. I'm trying to stop playing it though, since I don't especially enjoy it, and it takes too long. I had much better luck finding multi-letter words during the later games, making lots of 6 and a few 7 letter words, probably since I was more awake and alert.  It's actually best to play while doing something else, since there's no time limit and you're better off doing long words, since they generate more bonus tiles.  I watched the second half of LotR (again) while playing, and scored a lot of big words by taking my time and looking all around.

The key seems to be to scan wider areas visually.  Don't lock in on one letter and try to find a word from it, just let your eyes wander around and look for common letter combinations.

That being said, most of the time you'll be in damage control, trying to deal with the burning tiles, which must be made into words ASAP.  If not you get a big pile of them, like I have here, where excessive uncommon consonants doomed me.  I got 220k my 3rd game, and died with an absurd amount of burning tiles on the screen, due to me getting a burning X and J at the same time, flipping tiles, and having no better luck with new letters.  You just can't ever flip them after about 120k, or you get like 7 new burning ones, on top of however many you had already to deal with, and unless you get amazingly-good letters, you are doomed.  The fun in the game is fighting off a near-death; I had several times with 3 or 4 burning ones a space from the bottom, and it's quite gratifying to make "myth" and take out a burning M, T, and Y all at once, all near the bottom row.

Even up to mid-level 9 there aren't that many burning ones coming that you can't survive it if you clear out one or two every turn.  The problems always come when you get a bunch of C, H, V, B, G, P type letters in a bunch, and no useful vowels.

My best score word to date was something stupid, like "drape" but had 2 green and a yellow tile in it, for the big bonus score of around 6100.  My favorite was making a burning V, N, and K into "viking", but it wasn't worth that many points since burning letters just count as normal tiles.

Words appear in the scorebox to the left as you click letters, and if you click up a valid one, it will show the score. This helps a lot when you're trying to get rid of burning tiles, since there are hundreds of 3 letter words you've never heard of and never will again. Just click the burning one and one next to it, and then try various other letters in range, and if one is valid it'll show the score its worth on the left.  I got countless "aeu" (worth 150 points!) type words this way.

You can play the entire game just clicking tiles; click the last letter in a selected, valid word to submit it, and if you want to clear your clicks just click a letter across the board, or the first selected letter in your word. Easier than moving the pointer over to the submit key or the space above/below it to clear a selection.

My other tips are to kill the burning tiles instantly, and let the green/yellow tiles stack up in the same area to try to use several at once.  It's probably not worth more points over all, but it's fun to try and get your best score per word.

 

After all this excitement, I went to bed early.

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