• #DarioArgento can be … excessive. Extremely. Yuck. #horror #
• I just said, "Look, I'm not going to argue with you" to my *cat*. I guess I'm "that creepy cat guy" now. #
• No idea he was such a hateful nut RT @Monicks Actor Stephen Baldwin Takes Christian Indoctrination to the Xtreme http://ow.ly/1nPOB #
• Email: "March savings at the #AmnestyInternational Store! Protect human rights in a bold and stylish way!" Um — #FAIL. #
• My #caffeine tolerance is now officially 0 mg. Sucks hard for a #coffee and #tea fanboy. #
• I hope #DoubleFalsehood ISN'T #Shakespeare. That Julio speech is doggerel. "… and ran amok", yeah? http://bit.ly/cpRpVN (Anyone get that?) #
• Probably 20 mg of caffeine, and I've been diaphoretic for three hours. #Fuck. Med interactions. #
• Accidentally apropos! RT @thebardbot @clanmackay and that, I hope, is an unmeasurable distance (The Merry Wives of Windsor: ACT II, SCENE 1) #
• Yeah, wow, that mis-fire (?) of @thebardbot ended up as eloquence. Immeasurably amok indeed. Um — anyone GET the "amok" reference? #
• One more: "and", "that", "I", and "hope" all show up in my tweet. Important hint to the bot's hashing algorithm. @thebardbot: message me? #
• Not clear on the referent, but flattered anyway! RT @jcarmello @clanmackay Hahahahahaha!! Thats gonna get repeated for sure!! Really funny!! #
• Do you know #EddieIzzard and #GrahamNorton EACH dose with both coffee and white wine before shows? Hmm. There's a hint here. #
• (Yes, you guessed right, I'm hypomanic right now.) #
• I'd like to buy Morty Abzug a sandwich. A nice one. He put much coolness into #watch. #linux #unix #MortyAbzug #
• Apparently, it takes 10^10^10 hours to master and burn a #DVD in #Linux.  And 20 gigs of real estate. #
• I haven't figured out where the parentheses in 10^10^10 go yet, though.  I'll know by … some time well after I die, I suppose. #
• Second time asking, but is there an app to see the overlapping followers of two (or n) twitter accounts? If not, I gotta write one. #

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Excerpt from “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History” by Mark Morford:

Hey, kids!  Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Black people?  Back in 1800 or whenever?  They liked being slaves.  True!  Many savvy, industrious Negroes actually volunteered for that fine, desirable position.  It was a completely balanced, fair, hugely successful system, until those damn liberals came along and ruined everything.  I know, right?  What a shame.

Do you know what else?  America was wholly victorious in Vietnam.  It’s a fact!  Kicked some serious enemy butt!  Mission accomplished!  Sure it was a little bumpy for awhile, but President Nixon, that great and wronged American hero, put us on the righteous path in the end, wrapped that sucker up beautifully and made America the noble Superman to the world.  Hey, it’s the truth!  You can look it up in your history textbook!

Of course the venom is justified.  But the best use of sympathetic venom is not to curl up and let it take hold but to stand up and find the antidote.

This is not the first time the issue has crossed the mcgees.org desk.  It did 8 years ago as Texas Textbook Bonfire.  But don’t just get pissed.  Get moving.  Write letters.  Better yet, donate to almost anyone in the “Sleeve” section of the mcgees.org sidebar.

Get moving, people.  Work now, snark later.

I’m trying to get this published:

A hellish blight destroys the land.  A dude from Maine recovering from drug addiction, his much younger psychic paramour, a retarded guy, and a preternaturally wise (but overly-sexualized) 11-year-old boy — all of whom smoke like chimneys — go on a road trip to combat it.

Along the way they discover a roving band of cannibals, identifiable because they have filed teeth.  The cannibals attack them with vicious homophobic slurs that are OK because obviously Stephen King does not agree with them.  The wise boy knows it’s no good, but the retarded guy battles valiantly, killing all but the biggest cannibal, dying in the process.

The ghost of some woman the dude from Maine read a lot about appears.  So does the ghost of his ex-wife.  They begin to battle.  In the process they wound the big cannibal.

The cannibal’s guts rupture, and out pour a bucketful of lobsters.  The lobsters fall upon the dude from Maine, severing some body parts.  His paramour screams.  Then the lobsters all burst open and broods of spiders pour out.

But the wise 11-year-old has been pondering, and his cherished book, which contains Edgar Allen Poe in-jokes, holds the secret to defeat the evil ghost.  The trick is for the good ghost and the boy to drown her.  She drowns graphically.

The world, in the meantime, has largely recovered, most of the evildoers having died.  The dude from Maine and his younger love get married and go to start a family.  The boy, who has formed a weird father relationship with the Maine dude, stays anyway to think about his fate, evoking one last goodbye from the good ghost, who fades with a whisper.

(So, what did I forget?  The rule is that every trope has to have occurred at least twice in the canon.)

Until recently, my maternal grandfather raised chickens.  Niall loved collecting the eggs when we visited.  He would go from nest to nest to gather them, and put them in a basket.

Walking back to the house, he stumbled and barely recovered.  My mouth was open to say “maybe we shouldn’t put all the eggs in one basket”, and then thought Oh.  Huh.  That’s where that comes from.

[title reference]

• #Earthquake in #LA. #
• #USGS showing that the #SoCal/#LA #earthquake was magnitude 4.4 at 4:04 in #PicoRivera, about 15 km from where I live http://tr.im/S4xX #
• Surgeon described #DavidBeckham's #AchillesTendon as "totally torn". I can't not hear that in a #Valley accent. http://tr.im/S5cU #football #
• #BetterThanEzra's "This Time of Year" just came on shuffle. Yay for happy #music! #

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Awake since ten minutes before the earthquake.  Suggestive, yes?  Likely random.

Listening to iPod shuffle.  The Doors, The Mountain Goats, Candlebox, They Might Be Giants, Flowing Tears, and Ace of Base have shown up.  And rocking the (legal) hallucinogens.  Good times.  Maybe back to sleep.  After I net the faeries for future pressing.

Let’s see how well my HTML renders sleep-deprived and spacey.

Niall story.  Nonna (my mom) asked Niall to read her the cornbread recipe aloud:

“One pee kay gee Jiffy corn muffin mix.  One egg.  One slash three cup milk.  Preheat oven to four hundred little circle high up.”

Niall story:

Niall:  What nut did you tell me you were allergic to, Daddy?

Joshua:  I’m not allergic to nuts.

Niall:  Which one did you tell me?

Joshua:  I’m not allergic to any nuts, Niall.  Why would I tell you I was allergic to nuts if I’m not?

Niall:  It was walnuts, right?

Joshua:  No.  You’re thinking of someone else.

Niall:  Oh, that’s right!  Cashews!

Joshua:  Niall, it’s wasn’t me.

Niall:  I’m pretty sure it was.  You told me you were allergic to walnuts.

Joshua:  People can be sure and wrong, Niall.

Niall:  [thinks]

Joshua:  Did you know that?  That someone can be sure and wrong?

Niall:  Yes.  [pause]  I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.  We’re going to have a nut-eating contest.  It’s like a pie-eating contest.  I’ll take all the kind of nuts, and you can eat them and see if you’re allergic to them.  So if you’re allergic, you should say so before the nut-eating contest.

Joshua:  I’m not allergic, Niall.

Niall:  OK, we’ll see if you’re allergic to any of them.  If you are allergic to any of them, I’ll give you a glass of water.  There will be lots of water.

• Friends say it's darkest before the sun rises. Pretty sure they're all wrong. #MountainGoats #

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Missed a week.  Maybe back on track.

You have no clue how hard it was to pick a song like this today.

Down

Down
Fell by the wayside
No getting out

Down
Cry me a river
Dried up and damned

The names can be changed
But the place is still the same

I am loaded, told that all’s for naught
Holds me down

Rise
Life is in motion
I’m stuck in line

Rise
You can’t be neutral
On a moving train

One day the symptoms fade
Think I’ll throw these fucking pills away

And if hope could grow from dirt like me
It can be done

Won’t let the light escape from me!
Won’t let the darkness swallow me!

Fuck Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Fuck him, fuck everything he stands for, and fuck the Hummer he rode in.  But I won’t let the darkness swallow me.  I’ll make it through this year if it kills me.

It may be good for my mental health to listen to something other than The Mountain Goats for a while.

“I hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us.  I hope we come up with a failsafe plot to piss of the dumb few that forgave us … I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow; I hope it bleeds all day long.  Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises.  We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong … I am drowning.  There is no sign of land.”

Checking my email just now, I have new messages from Amnesty International, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, three different NPR mailing lists, the Center for Inquiry, Think Atheist, Pearl Jam, and the eBacchus wine site.  I am such a fucking cliché.

• I made a smart-ass joke yesterday about "They're both still alive?!" about The Two Coreys. Corey Haim died today, and I feel like a jerk. #

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• #Ubuntu just provided an "Important security update" to *sudo*. Not cool. Not something you want vulnerable. Buffer overflow? I hate #c.   #

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• Damn it. Stuart Holden broke his leg. Poor guy, poor US team. http://tr.im/QDFC #StuartHolden #football #soccer #
• One.org just said that "55 senators are on Twitter, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats." Um – no 0.5 senators left; Strom's dead #
• My #LG #phone plays a long sound file to confirm when I silence it. What bright engineer's idea was that? #
• has a screaming bitch of an #MSG headache. That's one more restaurant I can't go to any longer. #
• I don't think I've yet opined about the awesome "F♯ A♯ ∞" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Gods I love that album. #GodspeedYouBlackEmperor #
• Actually, I'll trade anyone a listen of their album of choice for a listen to that #GodspeedYouBlackEmperor album. Impossibly awesome. #

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In France, youth binge drinking (15 – 25 year olds) is experiencing a major rise.  A proposed solution?  Give university students wine tastings in lunch cafeterias to teach them how to respect and enjoy wine.  “Why is there sexual education and not viticultural education? You can learn wine too.”  This is being supported by a well-known gastronome and a former director of the Sorbonne.

Actually, that’s a very very French solution, yes?

This weekend I’ll be finding out if I can boot a Powerbook off a USB flash drive with a bootable FAT32 primary partition that’s an Ubuntu live CD running VirtualBox with a Windows XP disk image.  The end result of that would be running Windows on a Mac, but I have no idea if that will work.  I don’t even know what the hard/impossible step(s) might be.  Something something x86 instruction set something something hardware abstraction layer something something I have no idea what I’m talking about something something laser beams.

• Anyone else feel that a hard-boiled #egg is more filling than a scrambled egg?  Why would that be? Just water content? #
• Sob story: 120GB #iPod, only 8GB left, and that's only studio albums; no #concert recordings. 120GB is apparently only 314 days of music.   #
• In related #iPod woes, what do I now do with >100kg of #CDs? Can't ethically sell them, can't logistically store them, & hate trashing them. #
• With #Amazon's new "Media Library", their exhaustive record of my purchases goes back to *1999*. Not sure I like that. #
• is so fucking mad right now that he feels like throwing up and can't even be distracted by junk food TV on Hulu. I hate people. All of them. #
• .@tallyhall Los Angeles please. #TallyHall #
• RT @AtheistHitSquad Waterproof? http://ow.ly/1e0ll (This argument NEVER OCCURRED TO ME, and I feel really dumb now.) #
• #Tangerinegate http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/comedy/2010/03/tangerinegate-by-robert-popper.shtml #
• has now chilled out, having immersed himself in dumb Twitter memes, attempts at cleverness, and mockery of theists for half an hour. #

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• If any of my #Facebook friends receive money solicitations, they are from a hacker, not me. (mcgees.org on FB) #
• Given that the Web really is [mb]illions of monkeys on equivalent keyboards, how long until we get our own Hamlet? (Probably not new joke?) #

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My Facebook account was attacked in a method detailed in this online story.  Except, in my case, my password and email address were not changed — although they should have been.

If you hear of a Facebook friend in London without a penny, take a moment to check their story — it’s most likely a scam that’s seeped into the social network … Facebook user accounts have been hacked, opening them up to scammers who then use it to send live chat messages to their friends asking for help…

The messages claimed the person was “on a trip to London, but had been mugged, and was now marooned without passport or cash somewhere in North London”.

I was able to change my password, log off, log in again, and post a message to my peeps that the hacker was not me.

Now FB has disabled my account, presumably to make sure everything is fixed, as the story linked to above mentions.  This means that, most likely, that Facebook is either monitoring IPs or IMs.

Have I mentioned how much I fucking hate Facebook?

• People who use "#herbal" and "#homeopathic" interchangeably frustrate me. That's like confusing "Prozac" and "distilled water". #
• Watching Polish subtitles again. Line: "… Nobel prize for jerk-offs." HAD to learn this. Translation: draństwo. Round-trip: meanness.   #

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Twenty-five.  Wow.  And another saved-from-extinction week by writing last week’s Vedder Tuesday on a Monday.  So maybe another one tomorrow.  But probably not.

Here’s a rather dark one from their debut record:

Deep

On the edge, a windowsill
Ponders his maker, ponders His will
To the street below, he just ain’t nothing
But he’s got a great view, and he sinks the needle deep, yeah…
Can’t touch the bottom
In too deep, yeah.
Can’t touch the bottom

Oh, on the edge of a know-nothing town
Feeling quite superior, the aged come
To the sky above he just ain’t nothing
But he’s got a great view, and he sinks a burning knife deep, yeah…
Can’t touch the bottom
In too deep
Can’t touch the bottom
In too deep

On the edge of a Christmas-clean love
Young virgin down from Heaven — visiting Hell
To the man above her, she just ain’t nothing
And she doesn’t like the view
She doesn’t like the view
She doesn’t like the view

But he sinks himself deep
Oh, can’t touch the bottom
In too deep, yeah
Can’t touch the bottom
Can’t touch the bottom

Heroin abuse, murder, and child rape, all in one song?  Wow.  Three cheers for the subject matter of the music I listen to.

• Just thought: "Once again, my email volume plummets on Friday nights! Why in the WORLD would that be?!" (#YouMightBeANerdIf?) #
• Did you hear about the #Polish production of #Dracula? They called him "Blad the Impaler" — but that was just an "error"  http://tr.im/PZcq #
• (Yes, that was me trying to go meta on a Polish joke.  Subtitles rawk.  Translations, too.  We'll see from the flames how well I did.) #
• is so tired he can't sleep. And is completely without pennyroyal tea. #

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• "Ram"?! Ram the motherfucker in like it's the fucking golden spike. Take names. This ends now. http://tr.im/PQua #hc09 #hc10 #p2 #
• "No other cast member to receive more favorable dressing facilities"? Is #UmaThurman in the fourth grade? http://tr.im/PQDA #

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Error message:

If I don’t do one today (Monday) I’ll have missed a week.  So sorry.

Ed once said that their first album dealt a lot with teen and youth angst, but that he figured older people felt it too, and wanted to make a song about that.  Here it is, the song with the longest title in the Pearl Jam catalog.

Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town

I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar — yet I can’t seem to place it
Cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
Lifetimes are catching up with me
All these changes taking place
I wish I’d seen the place
But no one’s ever taken me
Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away
Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away

I swear I recognize your breath
Memories, like fingerprints, are slowly raising
Me, you wouldn’t recall, for I’m not my former
It’s hard when you’re stuck upon the shelf
I changed by not changing at all
Small town predicts my fate
Perhaps that’s what no one wants to see
I just want to scream “Hello!”
My God its been so long!
Never dreamed you’d return!
But now here you are, and here I am
Hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away

The next one … tomorrow?

All Vedder Tuesday

• Car is blocking roadway in movie. Line: "That must be the guy whose car I talked to on the phone." #
• Sorry to my #UK friends, but I just ordered from overseas, and I LOVE how week the #pound is! #

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From eBay:

MC011 Your eBay selling account has been limited – [my username]

Dear [my username] ([my email address]),

Your account has fallen below eBay’s minimum seller performance standards.  You are still able to list and sell items; however, your volume will be limited until your performance improves above these standards.

This limit takes effect on 2/20/2010.  Each week you can sell up to 50.00 % of what you historically listed with this account.

You may have up to 0 open listings, up to $18.00 open sales and up to $10.00 closed sales during each week.

Note*: If you exceed any one of the above thresholds (open listings, open sales or closed sales), you will be unable to list for 7 days, when the limit will reset.

My response:

I was just told my account has fallen below seller performance standards.  WHAT are you talking about?  I’ve received no negative feedback recently, am not involved in any disputes that I know of, send everything with tracking numbers, have been providing great service and great products — and now this message that I can now list 0 items for reasons that were NOT STATED?

Seriously — I need assistance here.  What is going on?

Their response:

Dear Joshua,

Thank you for writing eBay in regard to the recent message you received from us. I have looked into your account and I can see that your Detailed Seller Ratings are fine.  I believe that you received those emails because of a technical problem that we are experiencing right now.  I would like to apologize for this.  Please be reassured that we are working to resolve this, and that it is our top priority at this time.  If you are experiencing any limitations due to this, please know that we are aware of this problem, and we will have it resolved within 2 hours.  If you are still experiencing any problems after that time please
respond to this message and let us know.

I understand your frustration regarding this matter and apologize for the inconvenience it caused you.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
[representative name]

eBay Customer Support

I just arrived back home.  I knew I was in for a scolding from my cat.  I always get a scolding from my cat when I walk in.  Except, I realized, he was standing by his food dish.  He always does, but I have always assumed that is because it is by the door.  But this was clearly his “feed me” yell.  I thought about it.  It always is.

“You have food!” I told him.

“FEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDMEFEEDME!”

So I took his food bowl, held it through the front door for ten seconds, out of his sight, then brought it back in and set it in front of him.

He stopped screaming.  He was happy.  He had been fed.  He ate.

It’s been a while (2.83 years) since I gave an update of the number of countries or territories I’ve “collected” as visitors to mcgees.org.  According to Google Analytics, the source I now trust, it’s now at 164, including some gems such as Libya, Kyrgyzstan, Réunion, and now (woo-hoo!) Kiribati.

23 of these territories visited only once.

Here’s the data.  If you find anything interesting, or want to find out what any given location was looking for or at, let me know.  I find all this fascinating.  I think it’s some of the stamp collecting itch.