Diskage:
DVD • Brotherhood of the Wolf
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Player
• Audioslave - Audioslave
• Slayer - South of Heaven
• NIN - The Fragile
• NIN - Broken
• Tool - Undertow

Books Lying Open
• Children of the Mind, Orson Scott Card

Soul-Devouring Worry
• The devil's tools.

When I Grow Up:
• There will be both rhyme and reason -- but in a pinch rhyme will do.

Curse of the Day:
• May your pets plot against you.

• This is the ugliest kitten I have ever seen. In fact there's a whole litter of them.  I'm not sure what makes them so ugly; something to do with the skull, and the way it bulges up at the forehead like some sort of monster fetus, born at high altitude to a woman with very narrow hips. I sent it to a cat lover and she couldn't admit that it was ugly, but you know how girls are. (Insane.)

• Predictably enough, with her SuperBowl halftime appearance motivating me, I've added another Shania Twain sexy fashion disaster photo to her sexy but not really sexy fashion disaster page.

Sexy!  Well, not really.

• It used to be such fun to be a gay man.  You could just run around and have sex with anyone you saw, and more than likely he'd be game to have sex with you.  No worries about pregnancy, and other guys are just as shallow and vapid and mindlessly horny as you are, so no cuddling or pillow talk needed.  Just gun and run, and act out the lyrics to YMCA as though you haven't a care in the world.

Then came HIV/AIDS, and the party came to an abrupt end. But for the last few years various drugs have been able to hold off HIV, so the fun was beginning again, especially for HIV positive guys who were staying alive with the drugs, and had nothing to fear from the virus, so could bareback away, like the infamous herpes dating clubs for hetero people.

Then comes this.

A virulent antibiotic-resistant form of the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, better known as staph, is rapidly spreading among Los Angeles gay men, baffling local physicians.

Since the fall of 2002, the number of gay men in Los Angeles County suffering from boils, inflammation and abscesses on their hands, legs and genitals has exploded, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Sucks.  I mean the whole point in being gay (as I see it, not being gay myself) is that you don't have to play all the silly dating games that women require to get into the mood, and you don't have to worry about anyone getting knocked up.  And here it's been 15 or 20 years of just one disease after another, and now you think you've finally got AIDS beat, and then pow, inflamed boils on your nuts.  That's got to put off even the horniest sneaky butcher.

• Weird article about psychological torture jail cells the Spanish were building 60 years ago, during WW2.

Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial.

The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving.

A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner sliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua said. Some cells were painted with tar so that they would warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.

Today was one of those days where some catchy tune takes up residence in my brain, and once entrenched is harder to get rid of than your unemployed brother in law on your living room sofa.  The tune is No One Knows, by Queens of the Stone Age.  It's not really much of a song, but it's got this impossibly jangly guitar, and I've always had a softer spot than a newborn's skull for that sort of sound.

It reminds me of the one good song every by The Toadies, which wasn't at all similar to this one, so I'm not sure why it reminds me of anything.  Well, Possum Kingdom does have somewhat similar guitar.  Very clear and crisp sounding with the jangly style, like you can hear every string individually. It also reminds me of some live versions of The Becoming, track #8 on The Downward Spiral. When they get to the instrumental part before the "Hiding, backwards inside of me, I feel so unafraid..." there are some amazingly jangly guitars, and they make me happy. I was going to put up an mp3 of that song, but I don't have many mp3's on this machine, and I can't be arsed to turn on the other one and get it online just to upload this one song, assuming I even had it on the other machine what with all the HD deaths I've had over the years.  So suffer in silence.

Fortunately for your ears, the full Queens of the Stoneage song is available in good sound quality in streaming .asx or .ram from their official site.  If the file links don't work, just go to their site and click the Discography link, then select the song.  You can't miss it, being as it's the only one on the page with audio/video linkage.  I wouldn't bother with the video; the sound sucks, but it's still better than the image quality, which is reminiscent of Polish farm porn viewed through a screen door.  From what I could make out, pigs are not gentle lovers.  I mean from what I could see of the video, it's 90% the unphotogenic guys in the band standing around playing guitar, intercut with shots of a stuffed dear.  Seriously. They must have had a budget of oh, twenty or thirty bucks.

Nevertheless, I like the song.  For the immediate future, anyway.

Baby rats!

Case in point.

I never know with my camera, if it'll focus on the target, or something in the foreground.  It worked nicely here, focusing on the rats, and not my my chest or legs on the way down. You even get a nice true color representation of them; I mean this is what they look like.  Often they are overexposed and all bright white, or the flash shines off their fur too much and they look brighter than they actually are.

The left middle one is the oldest, and daughter of the two hooded ones to the right, and mother of the litter of six that was born in early December, and are all gone to the Ratscwitch that is my freezer.  The second oldest is not to be seen here (I believe she was nuzzling one of my heels), but she looks a lot like her orangish daughter to the lower left.  Her other daughter is the silvery/beige one to the top right.

The peaches one on my foot, daughter of the fat white/brown, is the mother of the middle batch of 14, 13 of which were just sold to Pet Kingdom.  Her one remaining daughter is seen in a picture further down this page.

She's quite the brave and confident creature, more so than usual for her age, and leaps into my hands the minute I stick one into the cage.  The 11 from the younger batch all sniff fingers frantically, and will climb into my hand if I leave it in range for a bit, but they are still sort of shy. This one is bold.  She had 5 siblings who looked just like her, but with pink eyes.  Black/dark-eyed white rats are a fancy breed, and relatively rare. This one isn't pure since she's got very light brown spots on her head, just behind the ears, but is pure white everywhere else, and I think she's a cutie.  And if you don't, then you can just go to hell.  Plenty of rats there, I hear.

If you want one last rat picture, one that's a bit suspect, you can click here.  And yes, it's a rat in my lap, but I'm still glad to see you.

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