Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

ute kitty photos today, and then some reader mail leads me to discuss how long these blogs take me to write, and what insecure men would do if they really could get their penises enlarged. Would that change anything?

I got through all of my photo backlog yesterday, but haven't put any on pages with captions yet. In the meantime, here are a few kitty shots, and some of the ridiculous Claim Jumper food we brought home, hopelessly unable to finish it all in the restaurant.

If you want to play this game with your own kitties, it's best to do it in the darkness, and if you're using the laser scope on an actual firearm, be sure you unload it first. Our laser pointer is a little metal pen-like thing that Malaya got somewhere.  It's hard to keep going as long as the cats would like us to keep going, since the point your finger must depress is slippery and hard and uncomfortable, presumably to keep you from using the device for too long and draining the batteries dry.

This is what the view down looks like most of the time I'm in the kitchen, making food.  Regardless of what I'm making, in comes the Jinxers, prowffing and gurgling and just generally making a nuisance of herself.  Once she gets a bite of something, gets moved, or gets to sniff an onion or something else she doesn't like she'll back off or leave entirely.  Fortunately, we have her trained to never ever get on the counters *cough* so on the floor she stays, begging or waiting for food and being cute.

One of the great strengths of housepets, cats in particular, is their ability to look inordinately pleased when that expression will perplex the humans who live to serve them. Here we see Jinx manifesting that ability, to a minor extent, while posing in this amusingly nonchalant position on the arm of the sofa.

You've seen this sofa (it's really more of a loveseat in width) in past photos, when it was blue, or white.  Malaya usually keeps a throw over it, for reasons that should be obvious at a glance. Hey, when you're young and living in a small condo and your furniture is largely comprised of stuff you took from the spare rooms in your parent's house, you make due with what you've got.

Jinxie perches on this high table on the back patio all the time, and enjoys looking out at the trees, which are infested with both squirrels and birds.  Oddly enough, she's never perched on the actual wooden railing, and she never seems to look down from up here, and never considers leaping down to the fence on the first floor.  Good thing, or we couldn't let her out so much.

Click this one to see it larger.  We do have a lovely view from our back patio.

I've blogged a few times recently about Claim Jumper, and the obscene portion size. Here are a couple of examples of the leftovers.

This is what we brought home, after eating there the first time, on Valentine's Day, when we had to wait 3 hours for a table. These trays are the size of dinner plates, mine is the large sandwich with the fries, that's their BBQ chicken sandwich.  Half of it.  Malaya had one biscuit left over, along with her mashed potatoes.  The biscuit is a two-hander.  But of course your eyes are probably on the pie.  That's a slice of the six-layer motherlode cake, and yes, they have special long rectangular boxes to carry it home in. It took us several days to eat, not because we couldn't eat it all at once, but because it was so good that we wanted to save it and enjoy it for longer.  That and we couldn't forget that it was about 120 calories per bite, and was single-handedly destroying our diet efforts.

Their brownies are basically the size of an extra large, square sandwich.  Larger than sandwich bread.  We wondered how they got it out of the pan, and into the to-go box, since there weren't any smears of chocolate on the sides, and the brownie wasn't smushed on any side or corner either. Do they have some sort of magical crane claw spatula that scoops it up from above and lowers it into the to-go box without losing a crumb? Or just waiters with very practiced and talented hands?

We have no idea about the calories in the brownie, and honestly, we don't want to know.  We've been eating about a fifth of it each day since we got it, and it's still sitting in the fridge now, down to about the last 10%, taunting us.  "Eat me.  Eat me!" it says, and no woman (and few men) can resist the lure for long.

Perhaps we'll just have a couple of bites...

¤ Donnie, frequent emailer and author of his own new blog/site/thing, mailed to ask:

I have been doing a little update on my site on a mostly daily basis (the last week or so not really counting due to a neck injury, but I still tried to) and I really thank you for the help that you gave me in getting the whole thing set up. The one thing I am really curious about is how long does it actually take you to do one of your blogs? I am finding that even the short little things I do can take in excess of an hour, and a lot longer if I try to [search out and] link to the things I am talking about.

I was just curious to know how long you actually spend on your garden variety blog.

44 minutes.  Exactly.  Any longer, and I stop mid-sentence.

No, not really.

I can't answer this one easily, since I don't have a "typical" or "garden variety" blog.  Mine vary so much from day to day, in terms of length, style, format and content.  I usually do most of them right before I post it, which is generally in the evening/early morning between midnight and 4am.  Not that I spend 4 hours on it, but it's about that time that I usually think about doing them.  However at that time I sometimes spend 5 minutes just pasting in stuff I wrote earlier, picking a QotD, and writing the 3 sidebar CotD things, and that's that.

Other times I've done nothing on the blog earlier in the day, don't have any good topics to talk about, and I have to go surf to try and find something or else make something up, or post some photos. Other times I haven't done anything earlier in the day [or the day(s) before] but I'm full of energy and have content ideas, and when I start typing it just takes off from there and next thing I know there's an 8000 word essay that I didn't see coming and didn't plan in advance.

This doesn't address the time I spend earlier in the day working on the blog though, and that time is also hard to track down.  I surf some almost every day, and usually I see a couple/few news items that I can't help but comment on.  I never force myself to write about something that I post here; they're all things I see and basically can't help but want to write about.  In fact one of the main reasons I started doing news stuff in the blog, over two years ago, was that I found myself seeing outrageous news items left and right, wanting to comment on them, and tying up my friend's ICQs with message after message including the link, trying to quote something from it, and trying to include my comments on it as well.

At last, It occurred to me that I could just post that sort of thing on a blog and those friends could read it there, if they were interested.  So I did, and they weren't.  Fortunately I didn't let that slow me down, and I've come a long way, baby.  Now I post news that none of my friends or anyone else much cares to read.

As for the time spent; some days I'm not in the mood to surf or I am in the mood to do other things, and I won't surf at all.  Other days I'm bored and idle and find myself reading random stuff all over the Internet for hours.  I did a lot more of that in the old days, before I was living with Malaya.  She helps keep me more on track, plus my "sit in front of the computer dicking off" time is much less unlimited now, so I try to do things I really want to do (write), while still allowing some time to play Dynomite and Diablo II and blog and surf.  Just not as much as I used to.  This is a good change.

When I do see a news item I want to blog about, 98% of the time it's a very quick process.  Five or ten minutes tops, depending on how long my digression in comments is.  I quote it, I paste in the link, and I babble some about it, as quickly as I can type, which is pretty fast.  Very, very seldom do I go back and edit my comments or grammar later, or add in additional linkage.  If I do news images that's usually pretty fast also.  I just save and rename it, perhaps crop or reduce in size in Photoshop, optimize the file size with USSPro, and stick it on the page in my HTML editor (FrontPage 2000).

Exciting summary, huh?

When I do my own photos, they don't take long to insert and write a caption about.  However I should probably include the time I spent taking them in the first place, the time I spent sorting through 200 photos to save the best 40, crop them down for visual impact, resize them for the browser (I never post anything larger than 500 pixels wide so I won't stretch the browsing window of 1024x768 readers.), save a larger version and link to it from the smaller one, etc. I can do a photos page with 15 or 20 images and captions in less than an hour, once I've got all of the shots already cropped and ready to insert.  But it might have taken me 3 hours in the first place to sort through 200 shots and resize and crop and rename and save them all.  And I might use those shots to make up parts of 3 or 4 different updates.  So do I divide up that time by all of the updates, factored by the % of shots I used in each?

This is going on and on, but my point is what you could have guessed in advance; the time I spend on a blog varies a lot depending on the blog.  I never run a stop watch on it, but I'd say it's at least an hour per blog, usually more than that.  The longer writing pieces I do are actually pretty quick, since I do them 99% as you see them.  I very seldom go back and edit anything, and I'm generally typing them about as quickly as I can type, since the words and ideas and such spring immediately to mind. I should perhaps claim that I spend hours and hours working out the powerful, persuasive, and intelligent arguments I use here but hey... who am I kidding?

I definitely have a gift or a knack or something for writing, especially when it's bullshit about my day or society in general, and this stuff takes me far less time than it would take most anyone else.  Whether or not that's a good thing, or something I should derive pride from, is entirely open to debate.

Basically, I don't think about the time very often, since while I mentally tally every minute I spend watching TV or exercising, and remember it when I finish the blog and want to write fiction and realize that it's already 5am and that I'm too tired to do any decent work... the time I spend on the blog never seems as long as it is, and never seems like too much of a waste. The only time thing I ever really think about for the blog is how long it must have taken me, or should have taken me, when I get to the FTP program and see that it's another 47k file, and I wonder what the hell I said to get to such length, and when I wrote all of that.  I'd like to keep them more like 25k each, maybe 30k tops, but then there's a day with 3 good news items, and I go long talking about writing, or a movie review, and suddenly I'm damn near double that ideal length. Again.

¤ I checked my comcast.net email today, one I hadn't looked at in months, and found 80 messages, all of them spam or notes from the ISP.  Most of them spam that I'd be insulted by, if I thought they were sent to me personally.

Speaking of penis size, it's an issue I was talking about with Malaya the other day.  I was wondering if there really were a pill or a patch or something so easy that could make the penis larger, say instantly three inches longer, and say it's got a Viagra-like effect that made the man instantly hard any time he wanted to be... would men still be so obsessed with their penises, and would their worries about that inadequacy still be so publicly displayed?

What I mean, is would insecure men still try to fill the void inside themselves by cheating at every opportunity, staring at every woman that walked by, buying red convertibles on their 55th birthday, and driving around in overpriced and underutilized H2s and jacked up 4x4s in their 20s and 30s? Would they still get toupees and hair plugs, have facial surgery, try to date 22 y/o bleach blondes, drink too much and get fashion tips from Maxim? Would they still get into bar fights and go crazy at sporting events, or act like total pricks in the business world?

In short, would men continue to be so obsessed with empty foolishness, and driven to overcompensate because of their penis size issues, if they no longer had (or had to worry about having) a penis that was too small?

For a brief moment, I entertained the thought that a longer penis drug that actually worked (or an easy and quick surgery that did the same thing) might be the salvation of humanity.  And then I realized, and Malaya pointed out, that it wouldn't really make any difference. Men who are driven by penis worries would still have them, since they'd just assume that every other man had taken the same drug and was still larger than they were.  It's like that newly popular drug ibogaine, the one that supposedly cures physical addiction to drugs.  A junkie can take it and no longer need crack or heroin or whatever. But if the junkie's mind is still weak and needy and their life is still a mess and drugs are the only thing that they know to use to get by, they'll go back to them again, no matter how much they hate themselves for doing it.

So all of the male issues and need to show off and overcome insecurities that are driven, at least in part, by worries about penis size and performance ability; are internal, in the brain, and a magical ibogaine-like fix wouldn't really change things on the society-wide scale. Though I hope that it would at least help some individual men, much like breast implants don't cure suicidal women, but can give average women a big confidence boost, at least in the short term. (Of course the ones who aren't idiots eventually get more depressed as they come to realize that they're still the same dumb boring person, and that men only pay attention to them now to stare at their tits, and that only lasts so long.)

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