Diskage:
DVD • Plymptoons
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Player
• Audioslave - Audioslave
• Metallica -  S&M
• Tool - Salival
• Faster Pussycat - Whipped
• Tool - Undertow

Books Lying Open
• A Path of Daggers, Robert Jordan

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Clever 14 y/o boys pretending to be hot chicks.

When I Grow Up:
• Man will control the weather with an iron fist.

Curse of the Day:
• May your readers prove surprisingly co-ed.

Weird weather for January.  It's howling wind outside right now.  I mean 30MPH plus, I had to close the living room windows since the blinds were being sucked into the screen so hard I thought it might tear, and papers were blowing off my desk.  Really.  It's 4 in the morning, and the outside temperature is something like 74, with about 22% humidity.  This be a Santa Ana, when there is an offshore flow, high pressure, and the air from the deserts to the east gets sucked out to sea.  It's cloudless and very windy all day, and dry hot.  It feels about 85 in the sun, and your car is an oven with the windows up, but if you stand in the shade of a building you are almost cold without a jacket.  Plus about every other person you see is sniffling, since allergies seem to go insane with this sort of wind/weather.  Mine were not, luckily.

I like the night wind, but this is so strong that there are loud and annoying whistling noises as it sucks through cracks people have left their windows open, and I can hear banging shutters from the house across the parking lot.  It's damn noisy to be frank.  Especially without the sounds of cars and people to cover the desolate howling of the gale. 

The mystery of search strings.  I've had the Mystery of Joanne Whalley page up for months, and the original blog version of it for longer. Never seen a search string about her.  Yesterday I posted the December mailbag with a couple of emails about her, and my reply, and suddenly today there are 5 referrals from the following search string: "joanne whalley butt"

How can there be five people out there searching for information about the woman's ass?  I suspect it was just one person, and the script bugged and counted them five times. As buggy as the search string script is, that wouldn't surprise me.  At any rate, their search was unsuccessful, since none of the discussion of her or images feature her derriere.  Sadly enough.

News here, hot chick and car crash below.

• Here's what we (California) get for not voting Bush.

For the first time since it was given the authority four decades ago, the United States Department of the Interior has said no to California's dipping into the Colorado River for more than its allotted share.

Nudged on by six other states that draw from the river, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton described the enforcement last month as "a turning point in the history of the Colorado River."

• Dumb ass of the day.

BURBANK, Calif. - A Metrolink train carrying morning commuters smashed into a truck at a railroad crossing Monday, upending two passenger rail cars, killing a person and injuring 20. The victim was in the truck, which burst into flames.

The truck drove onto the tracks at a crossing where the gates were down and the signal lights were flashing, witness Greg Peale told KABC-TV. Investigators had no immediate comment. In addition to the one fatality, 20 people were injured, said police Sgt. Craig Ratliff, who described the injured as "walking wounded."

The train derailed and two of the cars tipped over sideways, so you know virtually everyone on the train must have at least severe bumps and bruises, and it's lucky no one in the two cars that fell over sideways broke their neck.  Picture your house suddenly going 50 MPH and then falling over sideways?  That's about what it's like to be in a train that derails.

It must run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, they have to get tow trucks to turn the cars back over, make repairs to the track, reschedule trains all day, etc.  All because of one idiot.  Lucky he died, or they'd have killed him.

• Article that could only come from Australia. Or perhaps Arkansas.

MEAN-FACED purple dogs, bathed in gentian violet antiseptic paint to soothe their recent battle scars; a copy of the half-yearly Bacon Busters magazine, its Babes & Boars section well-thumbed; the pervasive stink of dead, flyblown pig. The scene is the annual Pork & Pussy Hunt at Pine Creek, 200km south of Darwin. It sounds bad. It smells worse.

It's basically a bunch of outback rednecks who go out and kill all the feral cats and wild boars they can catch.  It's somewhat environmental, as both species are overpopulating and decimating the indigenous plants and animals, though their extremely blood thirsty and savage methods are not quite what the animal protection society is likely to approve of.

"Mule", from Darwin, is a committed enemy of the pig. He has 20 hunting dogs and a very long blade for finishing off the furious, crash-tackled swine by hand. Mule's method is to drive along dirt tracks at 60-70kmh with three or four of his best dogs -- he prefers "anything with a bit of pit bull or bull mastiff in it" -- on the back. He says the dogs can smell pig up to a kilometre away; when they begin to whimper he stops and lets them off.

Wearing heavy neck and chest collars, with glow sticks attached if hunting at night, the dogs will drag the pig down by any part of it they can grab -- usually the ears or tail. Then Mule moves in for a deep heart plunge with his knife.

Sounds sorta fun.  They have game wardens who do much the same thing going after wild boars in Hawaii, where they destroy the ecosystem.  Boars aren't exactly easy to catch.  They can weigh 200+ pounds, they move fast and through extremely dense brush, and they are savage fighters with sharp hooves and huge teeth.  You did see Hannibal, right?  Like that, but smaller and faster.  A human has little chance of catching one, since the boars are low to the ground and will go through thickets and swamps and such far faster than you can.  Hence the dogs to harry and slow it down, so the human can catch up for the kill.  Real men use huge knives.

• Darwin Awards candidate here. Maybe.

A longtime maintenance worker at the Sierra Condominium Apartments was killed New Year's Eve after he somehow ended up on the hood of a sports car that subsequently crashed into a tractor trailer.

"We have information that Mr. Conran was on the hood of the car or on the outside," police Sgt. Kim Major said. "The truck, there was nothing he could do. They smashed into him." She said the purple Z28 Camaro exited the complex at the same time the tractor trailer, on its way to Fort Pierce after making a delivery at The Stuart News, was traveling west on Monterey Road, and the two vehicles collided.

The article is amusing for the oft-expressed incredulity over how the accident could have happened. My instant thought is that they had a good head start on their New Year's drinking, were all hammered, and decided to try a little car surfing, meeting a predictable end.

On second though, he was 33 and the two other guys were 15 and 18, so maybe he jumped on their car, or they were stealing a car? So we won't award his Darwin trophy just yet...

 

I'm sure I'm biased, but that is so how girls should look.  Tight in the right places, nicely-action-posed, sexy belt, nice color of jeans, and even a big glass of beer in the foreground, cause as we all learn in college, drunk chicks are ready to go.

"Hubba Hubba!  Fresh fish!"  Wouldn't kick her out of the hot tub, now wouldja?

So spit out those peanut M&Ms and sit up straight, because tomorrow I'll tell about her initial mail, my inept reply, and how we came to be trading pictures and long emails.  You'll also be able to see the rest of this picture, which she has graciously permitted me to share with my vast and frequently sweaty-palmed audience.

As they always say, the best way to meet women is to run your own frequently-obscene website.  I've been doing this since February 2002, and this is not the fourth, not the sixth, not even the eleventeenth...

She is the first woman to write in who I can, in some pathetic, desperate, quasi-virginal way, pretend gives a shit about me as a maybe potential boyfriend type unit, aside from the fact that she lives thousands of miles away and is probably readying her affidavit for the restraining order even as I type.

Take that, you singles' bar crawling, herpes-infected, gotten-laid-in-recent-memory Iguanodons!

One thing I'm wondering, if anyone has more experience with it than I do.  How many emails are you supposed to trade before dropping all pretense and just babbling on about hot monkey sex?  I don't think two is enough, so maybe like five or six, if they're relatively long mails, and the phrase, "fuck off and die, you creep." doesn't crop up all that often?  Thanks in advance for the advice.

Car crash.

Unrelated to the above image/information, comes this tale of woe.

I live right next to a rather busy street.  Two lanes going each way, about 3/10ths of a mile from a busy freeway interchange.  I have no figures, but I'd say that many thousands of cars travel up and down the street next to my bedroom window every day.

Fortunately I'm on the second/top floor of the apt complex, and there is a steep hill up from the street, so I'm probably 35 feet above street level.  High enough that the noise isn't that bad, though they stupidly made the outside of the building arched above the narrow bathroom windows.  So there's this 4 or 5 foot overhang, which serves as a perfect sound funnel, pulling the street noise in very well.

There is a cross street with a perpetually-red traffic light to the right, out my bedroom window, about 30 yards.  I can't quite see it through my bathroom or bedroom window, since there is a big tree to the right.

Since I've lived here, about 4.5 years, I've heard at least 15 car crashes out my bedroom window.  Three or four times it's been to the left where the driveway from my apartment exits, and points directly towards the exit driveway of a Denny's across the street.  Cars coming down or doing up the street are often screaming along at 50 or 60 MPH, despite the speed limit being 35, and the traffic light at the bottom of the hill so frequently being red.  There is also a lot of traffic, usually backed up the hill well past my apartment driveway from about 4-6pm every night, as people wait to get onto the two freeways that join just down the road.  The road is not very wide either, with just enough space in the middle for a left turn lane going into Denny's and one the other way into my apartment driveway.  But there's not enough space to pull out into the middle of the street and wait for it to be clear to get to the other lane

As a consequence, people trying to turn left from my apartment or from Denny's across the street must look both ways, and then frequently floor it to scoot across and into the other lane before another clump of 20 cars comes down/up the hill.

As I said, I've heard at least 15 crashes.  And I mean heard, as in screeching of tires and loud impact sounds.  I'm sure there have been dozens and dozens more that were of the fender bender type, inaudible to my ear, as well as many more when I wasn't home or was asleep.

I don't usually go out and look, unless there are excessive sirens and the street seems to be entirely blocked off. Which happens once in a while.  I've seen several cars upside down on the hillside in front of my apartment, and once a pick up truck upside down and actually leaning against the front wall of Denny's, right across the street.

The best accident to date happened Saturday.

I was in bed, preparing to go to sleep, at around 9am.  I had the blinds closed and the light on, since I was reading, trying to get tired enough to sleep.  I've been having issues not staying up 20 hours or more every day of late.

Anyway, I heard a familiar screech, and then a thump-a-duh thump-a-duh thump-a-duh like a big plastic box falling down a flight of stairs. It seemed to be nearly below my bedroom window, and a few seconds later there was a huge crunching noise and then blackness descended.

I realized at once that someone had crashed into some sort power box, and cut the power to the apartment complex, and it struck me as hysterically funny, for some reason.  Sitting there in bed, in the dark, with a book in my hands.

I was wide awake at that point, so I got up and looked out the bedroom window, but aside from some sprayed safety glass and several cars pulled over to the side of the street, I couldn't see anything.  I threw on some pants and went outside, and a crappy blue compact car was sideways in the street, way down by the intersection, and there were pieces of torn shrubbery and bushes all down the side of the road, all over the sidewalk.  Picking my way through the dog shit next to the apartment building (everyone with a dog seems to use the same place to "walk" it) I hopped down the footpath on the embankment, and yep, one of those big green metal boxes was substantially dented, not far from where the car had come to a halt.

There was already a police car there, and as I watched another one came roaring up the hill and parked across the street, blocking it off entirely.  Cars had to just turn around there, or cut through Denny's.

I could not see any other cars with any damage, just ones that had stopped behind the wrecked one, so as far as I could tell they had somehow lost control spun, flipped, rolled over at least two or three times, bounced off the green power box, and then spun back into the street, and landed on their wheels.  Nice driving there, Mr. Andretti.

Having seen my fill, I went back inside and sat in the bright living room to read for an hour.  I was finally feeling tired them, and went into the bedroom to lie down.  As I got there it suddenly occurred to me that I could have just opened the bedroom window and gotten plenty of light to read while in bed.  I just hadn't thought of it at the time, since I had closed up the window and made it dark, and that meant it was time for sleepy-bye, and not wakie-poo.  The window would not see light again before I awoke that afternoon.  At least that was the plan.

I got into bed and settled down, relaxing, breathing deeply, trying to put myself to sleep.  I wasn't that tired, but it was working, and just as I was drifting off... the light came on and the radio started blaring.

That woke me up completely, with another laugh, and I lay there and read another 200 pages, finishing off the stupid novel and wrecking my sleeping cycle yet again.

Life near a busy street is always fun.  Or possibly always sucks.  I'm not sure which.  I need one of those "spill beer off of it" balconies like the slum quarter houses have in New Orleans.  I'd have a nice view of the wrecking zone below, and hot chicks would come over to flash people below, and throw plastic beads around.

Ahh, the improvements one could make in life with money.

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