I can’t bring myself to actually post this on a support group, because this is “so obvious”, apparently.

I just went to go make some lemonade, picked up my 1 lb. bag of generic sucralose, and found it covered in, seriously, like a two-millimeter-thick sludge of greyish bodily fluid.  Three guesses.

So: Splenda transferred to new bag, hidden from cat, and mental note added: check on weird licking sounds.

Anyway, my feedback rating crossed 500.  Hoorah!  I had hoped for that to happen in March, but I fell behind.  I am now be-purple-starred.  And as the Sibs decided some years ago, Purple is the Atheist color.  So I’m sitting pretty.

Oh, wait.  Did I say Jewish?  I meant Atheist.  Brad Sherman is atheist, an activist, and an American.

If Sherman had been Jewish, the airwaves would not have stopped shrieking the story for the last six days.  Monique Davis, a black, female legislator, went all 1841-Mississippi on Sherman’s ass, and there was barely a murmur in the media.

Some of you who get your news entirely online will contend “Oh, everyone covered that, Josh!”  What I want the rest of you to do is, if this is the first, or the first detailed, report you have encountered of what happened, to post, “I didn’t know about that.”  You with me?  The usual suspects can go ahead and tell me I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m just asking the rest of you to be honest about this.  Did this get the coverage it would have if, for instance, an Atheist legislator (Ha!  Must be a fucking incredible duck hunter!) had told a 71 black woman that she had no business in a legislative session?

(You can see it buried deeply in the Chicago Tribune.  I know the Web has a way of flattening sites, but just note what column it appeared under, when, and where.)

Linux users in X have it great.  Type mplayer http://media1.vcoe.org/eaglecam1 in a shell window, set the window that pops up as “always on top”, and just hang it somewhere on your screen(s).

Thanks, Amal!

There is too much to think about.  Too much happening, too much not.  Too little comforting breathing beside you, that you have spent a decade learning to expect.

There is no motivation to read.  No desire to let television wash over me.  Just an urge to take a mallet to the mocking green LEDs of the clock-radio.

I am thinking of redoing my bedroom.  Vinyl floor with a fabric runner between a proper futon at one end of the room and the ensuite bathroom at the other.  Prolific shelving on two walls.  Hanging linen “dressers” for folded clothes, the rest of the clothes on hangers, in the recessed part of the third wall called, by the architect, the closet.  Maybe linen, again, to define its wall, currently demarcated by decrepit sliding-panel doors, their track long since damaged to the point where it is a battle of wits, will, and vertebrae to move them.  Serious blackout shades for the windows (pull-down shades sandwiching lead foil would just about fit the bill.)  The walls: satin black.  And all LEDs?  That is what duct tape is for.

Sleep, death, opiates.  They have the same draw, and they all have the same feel: velvet, and quiet, and soft, and undemanding.  Butcher’s “Perfect, endless darkness”.  And all with a riptide.

Maynard James Keenan named one album “Opiate”.  He named another “Undertow”.  I don’t think this is an accident.  They could be the same name.

When it’s two o’clock, three o’clock, and you’ve taken all the assistive chemicals you can safely consume, and you bob on the water — bounce, bounce, bounce — and wait for the riptide to catch you, wait to be pulled under, pulled in.  Wait to take a breathful of darkness.  And wait.

Consciousness?  Overrated.  Stimulants?  Keep them.  I don’t get the urge.  I just want to sleep, to die, to glide, to be free of the soundtrack and perseveration and scheming my mind — me, I guess — explores, constructs, deconstructs.  I come up with great ideas, yes.  I come up with ideas for companies, for novels, for throwaway lines of novels.  I come up with solutions to technical problems I didn’t even know I was working on.  I find optimizations and melodies and connections.  I find everything a hypomanic 148 I.Q. should.  But I don’t find sleep.

Someone once said that computer programmers “don’t like drugs that make them stupid.”  But that’s not quite right.  Not stupid.  Just still.  Or silent.  Or gone.

2:43.  2:43.  2:43.  2:44.

I once went to a nice restaurant by myself, before going to the theater by myself.  There was another lone diner, a man, sitting next to me.  The waiter approached him, and he held up the menu and asked if they had anything with potatoes.

Potatoes?  What?  I mean, as the main course?  Or, nothing else matters but the potatoes?

It was a nice restaurant, and the waiter kept his composure.  I’m sure he’s been asked stranger things before.  He points out the menu items that come, by default, with potatoes, but helpfully notes that potatoes can be added on the side of any item on the menu.

We’re both sitting alone.  I want to go sit across from him and ask him, “Why potatoes?”  He’s in a suit.  I’m in a suit.  I’m having lobster ravioli, and he’s jonesing for potatoes.

Potatoes.  Potatoes.  Why potatoes, of all things?  2:47.  2:47.  2:48.

Reread.  2:50.  Have to push “Publish” at some point.  My readers are patient, but reading the transcription of every minute on the clock for the next fortnight — the fortnight to come before I can sleep — is pushing it.

2:51.  How do you stop an out-of-control mind?  Where is the sandy incline for when your mental brakes fail?  Where’s the fucking button to turn this machine off?  148 kilos of pure suction.  We don’t want to be stupid.  Ha.  Why not?  Can’t stupid people sleep?

PIC line.  4mg Dilaudid.  Saline push.  Stat.  I said, STAT!  Shit.  No nurses.  No wife.  No son.  No Dilaudid.  Just me, and this award-winning, much-lauded freight train of a mind.  This problem-solving machine that can command six figures and ruin my life.

2:58.  Good night.

In the example above, the anyoldclaptrap@mailinator.com, some robots are going to come breezing through mcgees.org and pick up that email address, and add it to spam lists.  Bookmark this post and check back in a week or so to see if I’m right.  As I write this, the mailbox is empty.  To check it, go to Mailinator, enter in your mailbox name (anyoldclaptrap), and see your/my/our mail.  Voila!

Problem is, everyone else can see your mail, too.  So if you want a throwaway address to use for a while, on multiple sites, pick something longish and complicated (anyoldclaptrap-4032470234 or whatever), and now, Mailinator will generate an alternate “To” address for the mailbox (in this case, M8R-gk4u4f@mailinator.com.)  Now you can give that out, and there is no way to recover your actual address from it.  Have your mail sent to M8R-gk4u4f@mailinator.com, check it at anyoldclaptrap-4032470234, and when you’re done or tired or swamped, just drop your drugs and walk away, fairly confident that no one else has read “your” emails (They could, of course, if they successfully guessed anyoldclaptrap-4032470234.  But not likely.  It’s just security through obfuscation, which is much better than no security at all.)

In other news, days are now one hour long:

One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive.  I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit.  It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go.  Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning.  When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options.  Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”.  If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.

The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up.  The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive.  See the flags on the hard drive by typing:

sdparm -a /dev/sdX

where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)

To clear the flag, type:

sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX

The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.

Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.

Touch-ups are expected in pictorials these days.  Covering freckles and imperfections, lengthening limbs (true!), that sort of thing.  Oh, yeah, and breaking the laws of physics.

As discussed previously, I don’t usually go for blondes that much.  But Jessica Trainham of the Atlanta Falcons cheerleaders is a cutie.  She’s there on the right:

For, um, academic interest, study that image for a moment.  Here’s a close-up:

What the heck?  What’s going on with the arm and the pom-pom?  Cerna’s arm appears to be entering Trainham’s abdomen, but then — what — making a 90° turn at her pelvis to hold a frilly pom-pom in front of Trainham’s naughty bits?  Frustrated art student, maybe, with a hankering for this?

Thanks, everyone.  I should be back to posting now.

I was in love with Victorinox Swiss Army Knives from the mid 1980s.  One of the (many) reasons I was looking forward to going to Switzerland with my family was my ability to purchase, in Switzerland, one of my beloved knives.

Today, I get an email from slickdeals.net advertising — what else — a top-of-the-line, $80+ Swiss Army Knife for under $35.  The sale is one of their “Gold Box Lightning Sales”, which means it has a duration of minutes to hours.  So I go to GMail and send out a quick email to, oh, just about everyone, telling them about the sale.

Then the proverbial X hits the Y.

It’s kind of funny to me, now, in a rather embarrassed way, the first time I’ve been reasonably accused of spamming.  But yes, that’s what happened — everything from pure jest to someone seriously threatening to block my emails.

I can’t really claim any extenuating circumstances, so let this be a warning to you: if you see an awesome deal, even if you think everyone you know might be interested in it, spammers have ruined it for the rest of us, and sending out a mass email to all your friends might not be the best route to go.

Anyway, I ordered my knife, and I hope some other people were able to order knives of their own — if you’re not already Leatherman devotees or something.

And if you got the email and hated it, I’m really sorry.

Watch your checkbook, though: the merchant is completely honest, to be sure, but the current exchange rate (plus “international fees” on your credit card) leaves much to be desired (when importing — it has been a boon while selling on eBay!)

No kickback, just thought the cover collectors would like to know.

Can anyone help?

Is mcgees.org going to participate?  OH YES, if they’ll have me.  I see dollar signs.  Maybe I’ll have to get rid of my Auction Sniper link to be admitted…

A friend of mine, a PowerSeller, saw my feedback when it was right around 400 and said, mockingly, “Oh, how cute!”  I worked bloody hard for those 400, damn it!  Can you imagine reaching 13,000 or something?

Actually, I can.  It’s sort of the route I’ve planned for myself, at least in the near future.

Aside for one very recent, very undeserved Neutral, all of my feedback has been positive.  Knock on wood…

I can’t sleep, as you can probably tell, so I’ve been fiddling (they call it a “one tweak loop” in computerese) with the sidebar.  Let me know what you think — if you can tell the difference.

Firefox did not complain about the word “computerese”.  Wow.

Yeah?  No kidding.  Add me to that list.

Anyone care to support, debunk, or otherwise comment on this “miracle” product?

Seriously, hazard a guess.

Since I don’t want the email and (maybe) feed readers to just show the number, please click here for the answer.

That’s my number.  Care to share yours?  Average across 30 days if you can.

Now, establishing an auction value makes sense for these: that establishes what items like it, in comparable condition, fetch to when sold to someone else with an interest in art.  But the valuers will go on to give a higher value for insurance purposes, which is supposed to be a “replacement value”.

Replacement?  What could that possibly mean?  Surely you aren’t going to go out and find another portrait of your ancestor, right?  Another sampler that a distant forebear created?  No, it probably means a contemporary of what you have — a portrait of someone else, or a sampler by someone else.

This baffles me.  Why bother?  If it’s Revere Silver, and there are other, more-or-less identical items on the market, “replacement value” make sense.  But the literally irreplaceable, the one-of-a-kind items?  When they’re gone, they’re gone.

My former boss (Jeff, if you’re reading, it was your father) once talked to me about an insurance agent approaching him about insuring his children.  He was likewise dumbfounded.  As he saw it, the argument seemed to be that, if his child died, it would take a lot of money to make up for it.  This is nonsense.  There is not a figure (in dollars) I would accept in exchange for Niall — there may not even be a figure in lives I would exchange for his.  That’s not big-U Utilitarian, but it is how I think.  Heirlooms like the cassette tapes that my family recorded for my Nana, which I now have safely in my possession and will be encoding to digital form, don’t make sense to insure.  There is no accounting for ancestry.  de la Rocha lyrics come to mind: “Sell your history for a VCR.”  No thanks.  You keep your VCR, I’ll keep my heirlooms, please.

Anyone want to join me in a stirring round of “And I’m Proud To Be An American”?

The sins are:

Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

To the best of my knowledge, the Catholic Church does not conduct in vitro human or genetic experiments, so five out of seven ain’t too bad!  That only gets the Church damned five out of seven possible times.  Bravo!

I went to time.gov (bookmark that one) and found out it was 5:30 — the following morning.  So I slept for about 15.5 hours.

Kind of scary — weird things happen when you are sick — but a good way to accumulate shows on your DVR.  I started watching a Law & Order: CI episode I had previously given up on.  It’s a Logan episode, starring David Cross and, they said, Kristy Swanson.

I like David Cross.  I like his writing, I like his stand-up, I like his insight.  But I think it’s fair to say that he has no dramatic chops.  If we find out he’s the killer and has been lying about everything during the episode, it may be better, because the fact that I don’t believe a single one of his motivations could be viewed as a choice.  The episode is dreadful.  And Kristy Swanson?  Kept looking for her.  Beautiful, beautiful Kristy Swanson from when I was in high school.  Here is how I remember her:

Here are three more-or-less NSFW images.  SFFD fans, remember to check back when you are home.

Finally found her: she’s playing a bottle-blond floozy.  A latter-day Marilyn Monroe, a comparison they keep making more and more explicit.  And she’s — how to put this gently? — obese.  Not Monroe-by-today’s-standards-big, but obese.  Maybe some of it is a fat suit, and she certainly looks worse because of the Playboy-style caked-on makeup and garish lipstick, but her upper arms looks like they weigh as much as she used to in total.  IMDB reports she’s almost 40, now.

Really unfortunate.  I’m speaking as someone who has put on 120 pounds (British: 8 1⁄2 stone; Bushman: very much; elsewhere: 54 kg) in the last ten years, so I know this can happen, and I know what I’m talking about.  But this is really, really unfortunate.

Episode is half over.  I’m going to go drag myself back and try to finish it this time.

A representative from POWERMATIC was showing off their top-of-the-line woodworking lathe: an 800 lb. cast iron Goliath with lots of bells and whistles.  One neat thing was a hollow tailstock, apparently airtight, with a door that opened into a compartment.

“Oh, neat,” I thought.  “You can keep finishes or sandpaper in there without it getting dusty!”

The POWERMATIC representative smirked, “We say this compartment is to hold your favorite beverage.  What that beverage is, we won’t say.”

Whoa, wait!  What are we talking about?  Why the circumlocution?  It’s not infant’s blood, right?  It’s not cat urine.  It’s clearly an intoxicating beverage that he’s suggesting you hide.  While working on a full-size lathe.  Is he insane?

They really need to send woodworkers to tool conventions, not just salesmen.  This has totally turned me off of POWERMATIC.  Drinking alcohol while turning is a good way to lose a limb.  Talk to a turner, and he will give you a list of what you want while turning: a full face shield, ideally one with positive air pressure; long sleeves that button or tape tightly at the wrist; a full apron; something to cover the opening of your socks; no loose jewelry or hair; super-sharp tools; a safety kill switch; etc.  One thing he will not suggest is that you need to drink a fucking beer.

Man.  I’m thinking about writing a letter of complaint.