I had the resolution messed up, so these aren't really all that good, but they show some nastiness, still:
Like I said... so-so... but you get the idea... uh... don't you?
Friday, February 28, 2003
Some So-so Pics
I had the resolution messed up, so these aren't really all that good, but they show some nastiness, still:
a view from the top of my hill at my birch tree in the front yard... it's MUCH taller than the pine tree in the background - NOTE: That is NOT snow... that's ICE... pure, solid as shit ice
the same (poor) tree from down the hill looking up... note: there's a car in there, somewhere.
It's really hard to make out, but there's a HUGE limb piercing the carport as well as a piece of the roof, there...
a HUGE tree that fell in my neighbor's yard
post-chainsaw... that's a HUGE BITCH of a tree, eh? (it's still like that... NO CLUE how they're going to get rid of it, either - I'm thinking either, like, a helicopter, or dynamite)
my next-door neighbor's (used to be a) Dogwood tree
my birch tree, post-thaw... NOTE: those branches you see buckled are bigger around than your legs, and they were snapped like little twigs
Another HUGE BITCH of a tree... in my back yard... about 85 feet tall... that I was thoroughly convinced was going to come crashing through my bedroom at any given moment... you should have seen the size of some of the limbs that came off of it... that could easily kill a human... even a great big strong one... jinkees...
a completely shredded tree across the street from my house
a view from my next door neighbor's of a totally slaughtered tree in my backyard
my backyard... trust me... there is a backyard in there somewhere amongst the treelimbs...
Like I said... so-so... but you get the idea... uh... don't you?
I had the resolution messed up, so these aren't really all that good, but they show some nastiness, still:
Like I said... so-so... but you get the idea... uh... don't you?
Thursday, February 27, 2003
I'm watching this special, Psychic Detectives, on CourtTV... Some of it, highly cheesy... Other parts, kind of interesting, I have to admit... but the biggest thing I'm going to walk away from it with is that (host of Crossing Over) John Edward still deserves the Biggest Douche in the Universe award.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
8march2003.com - a HA! (okay, not really, but still)
I have a friend who is Russian... Moldovan to be more precise... They were telling me that March 8th in their country is something called "Women's Day" where men pamper women and all that good stuff like that (hmmm... Valentine's Day, part II?), and apparently daughters all buy presents for their mothers and such...
So, 8march2003.com is actually gonna turn out to be a big marketing campaign to make "Women's Day" a bigger holiday (probably by the Hallmark people).... eh? eh? C'mon, feel me, people... well, okay... so it's not about that... but it was a nice try, anyway, wouldn't you agree?
I have a friend who is Russian... Moldovan to be more precise... They were telling me that March 8th in their country is something called "Women's Day" where men pamper women and all that good stuff like that (hmmm... Valentine's Day, part II?), and apparently daughters all buy presents for their mothers and such...
So, 8march2003.com is actually gonna turn out to be a big marketing campaign to make "Women's Day" a bigger holiday (probably by the Hallmark people).... eh? eh? C'mon, feel me, people... well, okay... so it's not about that... but it was a nice try, anyway, wouldn't you agree?
You carry on despite your fear
Inside a box you keep your sanity
And it will never be clear...
It shows the angels laughing
But where is the love that we're supposed to find?
Lost in a maze of games so very
dark and overwhelming
Lost in these thoughts that seem to rule my mind..."
Haloscan is starting to aggravate me... They need to do something about whatever the heck's been going on with them, recently... It's not like people are beating down the door of this blog waiting to post comments... but still, if even one of you were wanting to comment, you couldn't because they crash three times a week, lately... Anyhow, my apologies...
Monday, February 24, 2003
WHOA! This is TOO cool!
I was baffled... It took me about a half an hour to figure out what was going on... but until then, I was stumped... sometimes, I need to not think so hard... think hard make brain go, "Ow."
CHECK IT OUT
I was baffled... It took me about a half an hour to figure out what was going on... but until then, I was stumped... sometimes, I need to not think so hard... think hard make brain go, "Ow."
CHECK IT OUT
Something Else
PREFACE: The word �suck� is one of those words that can take on a couple different meanings. One meaning can be of a very positive light, with several delightful subdivisions unto itself... and then there's also a meaning that connotes something very bad is going on, as well... Sadly, this is one of those stories in which the word "suck" reaches whole new levels of �bad.�
So... Big ice storm... not a little minor thing... insanely major... 30,000 houses without power kind of major, see? Pants-poopingly major... I, personally in my nearly thirty-four years of existence, have never seen anything remotely like it. HERE are some images from the city website... I personally think they vastly understate the damage that I personally saw (and am still seeing) within just a few blocks of my house (as best as I can tell, they look like images from a couple different places out in the more rural areas). When I can find the software to get the pics I took from the digital camera, I'll post them, as well... I think they're much more telling of the carnage (at least in a personal manner, anyway). I will now attempt to recount my ordeal as best I can for you here (yeah, it's pretty long, but it was a pretty long and intesne ordeal - so, why don't you do yourself a favor and bookmark the post and take a few days to read it all if you have to):
Friday, February 14, 2003
St. Valentine's Day... After a week of snow, cold, snow, thaw, a little more snow, and a nearly compete thaw, Friday brings us 40� temperatures and rain starting at about noon... It's nasty out, I want no part of it, at all, and end up falling asleep for the night at about 9:30pm. Pathetic, I know, but that's how it goes, sometimes.
Saturday, February 15, 2003
I wake up about 6:30am (thanks to falling asleep so early the night before). Still raining, still grey as can be and basically nasty. I check the Weather Channel in between some Boomerang and I see where they are calling for the rain to start to freeze up after the sun goes down... hooray... I grab a guitar and proceed to fidget around on it for the next couple hours, recording a few bizarre odd-meter, open-tuning ditties (inspired by the seriously silly movie, �Overdrawn at the Memory Bank� (a really early Raoul Julia flick produced by New York Public Television) that is on Mystery Science Theater 3000) into a little digital flash memory recorder I have.
About noon, I call my friend Mike and tell him about the strange movie I just watched and suggest that we go get some lunch... so about an hour later he comes and gets me and we go through Wendy's... they actually get BOTH of our orders right the first time (they have an uncanny knack for fucking up orders every time you go there in some fashion or another). �Hey maybe the gods are with us, today,� I think to myself, revelling at the fact that I didn't have to go back through and get my side order of cheese or the fries that they forgot to put in the bag... (note: famous last words)
SO we go back to Mike's and chow. Afterwards, we spend the next couple hours checking out the newest expansion of Ultima Online. I used to play the game, but I got kinda put off by the tedium... Anyhow, I still like to watch stuff going on in the game when I have a chance, and Mike was taking me around to all the new gigungous houses he and two other friends had just built in the new land expansion. Seriously impressive stuff, especially Steve's (the �veteran� of the group), complete with a battle arena on the rooftop for people to gather and compete in a �Friday Night Fights� thing and stuff like that...
So after we run around in UO world, I suggest we go to Sam Goody. After all, there's always a CD waiting to be added to the collection. So we head out. There's a fine sheen of ice starting to show on the trees in the area, but the roads are fine to and from Sam Goody. We go back to his house and gather up the crap I had left there and we head to my house. It's about 9:15pm. To get to my house from Mike's, there's two ways you can go. You can either go around �the boulevard� to the east or you can cut over the hill that houses the city's reservoir. The roads were okay when we got home from Sam Goody so we really don't think anything of going over the reservoir... umm... oops... When you get to the top of the hill, the road curves left. When we reached the top of the hill and attempted to make the left, the truck just basically went straight, instead... and made a beeline for a big guard rail. At the last possible second, the truck regains traction, swings hard to the left and we avert smacking the snot out of the gurad rail by mere inches... my comment to him was, �I could have stuck my tongue out the window and licked it, we came that close to it...� Collective breath-catching and a bit of a nervous chuckle later, I arrive home.
My neighborhood consists of three streets on a hillside surrounded on three sides by one of a few legit �forests� inside the city limits. You can have a better look HERE, if you like. In the winter, when all the trees have shed for the season, there's an incredible view of the city from my house, clear across the Ohio River to the Kentucky hillside. I thought I should fill you in on that for the rest of the story...
It continues to sleet and freezing rain and all that great stuff. I get online and reply to a couple emails waiting in my mailbox. I can hear the sleety stuff hitting my windows now at an accelerated pace. Things are clearly not improving outside, at all... I continue to surf around the net, thinking, �Well, it has to end sometime... doesn't it?�
About 10:30pm, the phone rings. It's someone who we'll call Extremely-important Person, or EP for short. EP is many, many miles away, safe at school. I inform her of the current situation and the near accident on the way home. As we continue talking, I can hear the freezy shit getting heavier... We continue our conversation, with me doing my best not to notice the weather... Then, at about 11:45pm, it happens... �PLOINK!� Out go the lights. Fortunately, they immediately come back on. Being on a cordless phone at the time, I lost communication with EP for a moment. When everything is cool again, I tell her that the lights have just flickered off and on and apologize for the brief loss of the phone. About five minutes later, �PLOINK!� again, and a very distant �KAPOW!� of a transformer popping, and the lights go out and immediately return for a second time. Seeing as it's the second time it's happened (and subsequently, the second time the computer I was sitting by had to go through the whole ScanDisk crapola), I decide it's probably for the best to shut the computer down for the night. About three or four minutes later, �PLOINK!� (�KAPOW!�) again... This time, the lights do not come back on... they tried to, about three or four times, but no luck... in the meantime, I have lost commuinication completely with EP, this time... I know that she will call back when she realizes I didn't come back, and make my way down the pitch-ass black stairs through the pitch-ass black living room to the corded phone in the kitchen. I inform EP of the situation, kick back in the La-Z-Boy, and we resume our conversation... no big deal... I've had the power go out on me before. It'll be cool.
Sure enough, about 1:30am, the light in the kitchen informs me that power has, indeed, been restored to the neighborhood... that wasn't so bad, at all. I can still hear it raining and such, but hey - we've got power back. EP and I finish our conversation for the evening and I make it upstairs in time to watch South Park at 2am, relieved that the power is back on and rather tired from being up so long. After South Park, I switch it over to SciFi, where a cheesy horror-esque movie is just starting... Well, I'm in one of those �the cheesier, the better� kind of moods. Sitting up on my bed, I finally start to give in to the fact that I'm really tired, and I begin to nod off... catching myself as I do so the first few times, continuing to ingest the cheese on my tv screen... I quickly nod off again - this time waking up to darkness... I have no idea how much time has passed, what time it is or anything - my watch is across the room and I don't feel like knocking over a huge stack of CDs in my floor to see what time it is, 'cause I couldn't really care less. �Shit,� I think. �Fucking power's out again...� About the time I get up to take of my clothes and actually get into bed, the power clicks back on. �Good deal,� I think and crawl under the covers for the night...
Sunday, February 16, 2003
10:00am - I pull the covers off my head and greet the morning with a yawn and a squint... one of the first things I realize as I come out of my haze is that it's still sleety-freezy-shitting outside. This is starting to suck... An oatmeal bar and a glass of orange-pineapple-banana juice later, I'm playing my guitar. Quickly realizing that nothing productive is happening, I put the guitar back in the case and flip around the channels... Nothing good there, either.
12:00 noon - I switch it over to FOX to see if the Daytona 500 is going to get rained out or what (the Weather Channel clued me in to some inclement weather down that way, too). About five minutes into the broadcast... yes, you guessed it... �PLOINK!� (�KAPOW!�)... �Shit!� I wait... I wait a little longer... nothing... Looking outside, the snowplows that went up and down the hill did their job pretty well - my street is very clean, considering the foul weather that hasn't stopped since Friday. In the silence, I can hear more �KAPOWs� from tranformers all over town popping... Something else I'm hearing more and more, too. The cracking of tree limbs as they snap off of trees from the ever-growing weight of the ice that is building up on them... Some of them make such a sound, you would swear someone is cranking off shots from a 30-06 rifle. �Okay, this is definitely not getting any better...�
I go out, clear the inch of "pre-Slushee" (without the syrup) off of my porch porch and have a look around. It generally pretty nasty out, but more specifically, it's really nasty out. Trees are starting to droop a bit more significantly, now. Starting to get hungry, so I go in to order some Chinese. I'm standing in the sunroom at the back of the house, looking down the hill and just as I hang up the phone I see a tree come teetering over out of the woods about four houses down... Not a branch from a tree, and entire tree about 18" in diameter... It rips through the power line on the poles out back, literally unearthing one pole, which comes to rest against a garage... If it hadn't been for the fact that the cable company put in new cable about 18 months ago on brand new, super-heavy-duty strand, the tree would have totally blasted the back of the neighbor's house... as it was, there was damage, but not what it could have been... I came shooting out of the house and down the hill to see if everything is okay (it's obviously not). After looking over the damage to the power lines, poles, etc., I slowly start to realize that we're not going to have power back on the hill anytime soon... not a very comforting thought...
The power company says they'll have everything under control in 24 to 36 hours (should I start holding my breath?). This, of course, is of little comfort to me, whose worst experience with power loss was probably when it was about 105� outside one summer and we lost power for about three hours in the afternoon. Meanwhile back in the real world, it's still extremely shitty out and only getting shittier...
The sounds of the �rifle fire� are getting much more frequent, now (it seems like there was a decent-sized �CRACK!� about once a minute), and it's honestly starting to unnerve me, a bit. So I figure the best thing for me to do is to grab some CDs and some batteries for the Walkman and do what I can to not worry about it for the moment. After all, I can't do anyting about any of it while there's still ice continuing to form on the trees and they're breaking in-two everywhere... So I grab my Walkman, grab a few CDs (including the ones I bought at Sam Goody last night that I haven't had a chance to listen to, yet)... open the drawer of my desk to grab the spare AA batteries... searching... searching... searching... "a ha... there they a- AAAs??? Huh??? SHIT!!!� So much for that �the gods smiling on us� nonsense I was thinking yesterday. Well, I absolutely cannot sit there and listen to nothing but the trees breaking apart outside. I'll break apart, myself... Considering that my car is broken (and even if it weren't, it's handily blocked in by my wilting birch tree), there's only one thing to do...
I strap on my boots and head for the carry out about ten blocks away... When I get there, I can see the big "CLOSED" sign in the window... "Yippee..." The only other choice is to walk to the Super Quik about three miles away by Mike's house... Ack... but I've got no choice... it's either that or back home to the silence... I grab my cellphone and call Mike and tell him that I'm heading his direction and will probably stop by and thaw for a few on my way to the Super Quik. On the way, I am passed by a formerly very, very close friend... not once, but twice on the way to Mike's in about a fifteen minute time span... It's not that we had some kind of falling out or anything, he just convinced my girlfriend to leave me and marry him about six or seven years ago. So I wasn't really expecting him to stop or anything, but still, if I had seen him trudging through the shit, I have no doubt I would have stopped and picked him up in a heartbeat... I guess I should maybe rethink my kindness to assholes in the future. About a 1/4 mile from Mike's I see a guy come walking up the boulevard. As he gets a little closer, I can see he's toting a 12-pack of Busch Light... �Mmmm... yummy swill.� I almost stopped in my tracks when I saw what I saw next... the guy is totally hitting a hooter... and not, even, like, hiding it, or trying to hit it like a cigarette, but, y'know, toking on it, walking down the street in broad daylight. I guess I need to stop being surprised at how ignorant people are, anymore.
Anyhow, I get to Mike's and get warm. While I'm there, I hear the weathrfolks say it should be in the mid 40s tomorrow and the mid 50s on Tuesday... "Well, at least it will thaw out..." (note: more famous last words)
So I leave there and go to SuperQuik... There's about 50 people in line at the kerosene pump... I think to myself that I'd almost rather be cold than sit and huff burning kerosene fumes - it tends to make me (and others) quite ill-feeling.
6:15pm - Back home (finally). Stuff is really nasty out, now... I go down to Mrs. Bays' house to check on her. She's lived alone for a while, now, and after seeing a tree limb bigger around than my leg pirced through her carport and sever others of comparable girth laying in her front yard and strewn about, I figure she's probably freaking out in her basement or something (and probably rightfully so). After seeing that she's okay, I come inside and basically collapse... but not before I slap my batteries that I trudged though the shit for in to my Walkman and fall asleep listening to King Crimson... at last, a minor bit of relaxation...
Sleep kinda comes and goes throughout the night... one thing kinda sticks out... Every time a song ends, in that little silence in between songs, without fail - �CRACK!�... damn...
Another late-night call with EP proves a bit settling. There are tree limbs falling all over the place at this point, but the sound of her voice is rather soothing among the chaos... as soon as we hang up, though, it's back to the realization that there are some mighty big, OLD trees that just so happen to have a bead right on my bedroom should they decide to give way... In particular, Where my bed is in my room and where I lay on my bed, I open my eyes and behold a GREAT BIG tree that just is aching to fall over and has been for the better part of about ten years. So... I just need to keep my eyes closed and concentrate on the music and being any kind of warmer...
Monday, February 17, 2003
After a pretty restless night (I actually fell asleep for good at about 6:00am), I wake up around 10:00am... The little battery-powered radio tells me that not only are most of the radio stations in town off the air, but the one station that is still on is reporting 30,000 homes in the area are without power... yikes... "This sucks." Since the water pumps are electric-powered, there's no water pressure here, either... hooray... more joy... Well, at least it's supposed to thaw out, today... After I become a little more awake, I realize something... It's not sleety-freezy shitting outside, anymore... "Still sucks, but thank god..."
I shouldn't have thanked anyone, because not only did it not get above freezing all day, but it began snowing right before noon and proceeded to dump about three inches of snow on top of the thousands of tons of ice...
At about noon, I decide it's time to go out and make another survey of that crapola... I walk out to the middle of the street and turn to take a look down the hill... "Holy shit..." At the same guy's house where the tree fell over in his back yard nearly through his house, the super-old, SUPER-huge tree (at least three feet in diameter) in his front yard did not only fall over, it came right out of the ground, partial root-system and all... not broken tree... good-and-uprooted tree... It missed going through the master bedroom of his house by a matter of about two feet... the house next to his (luckily empty at the time), however, is now wearing the tree firmly through the balcony and front porch... It is truly an ugly, ugly mess...
About 6:30pm, I call Mike to get a report on what he's seen out in the field (he's a cable guy)... As I'm talking to him in the sunroom, I'm looking out in the back yard at the some twenty or thirty limbs laying there... All of the sudden, a tree abuot 18 inches across comes STRAIGHT for the sunroom.... and catches on the cable strand (again)... thank the powers that be for strong anchors... I was backing out of the room the whole time, waiting for it to crash through the roof of the sunroom... and it didn't... it just hung there... *SHOOO!* That was tripped out...
[note: as of the writing of this, the tree is still laying on the cables out back... doesn't appear to be going anywhere, anytime soon]
Other than the continuing tree carnage, the lack of thaw, and the snow, the day is rather boring... still pretty unnerving - in fact, I'm starting to become convinced that this will never end - but pretty uneventful... I checked on a couple neighbors (Mrs. Bays' son finally came and got her and took her to his apartment that has had all utilities the entire storm) saw a couple neighbors I haven't spoken to in a while and walked around with them and surveyed more shittiness... heard from my saving grace (Extremelyimportant Person) and went to bed... Tonight, however, the great big, old tree took on a whole new characteristic - where the snow had fallen and clung to the ice glaze, it had formed a face that looked remarkably like the mascot of the band Iron Maiden, "Edward T Head." The face was staring right at me, smiling its wicked smile... Man... I really need the power to come back on...
Sometimes I'd catch these flashes of light through my closed eyelids... I'd open them... "Lightning?" I would think... "Nah... No way... not feeling any thunder or anything..." It happens a couple more times in the next few minutes and I'm totally confused... I shut off my CD player, sit up in bed... and wait... sure enough... �FLASH!�... �KAPOW� (faintly) "A haaa... The transformers..." When they go out, they actually put off an insane amount of light, even from really far away... I put my headphones back on and try to get to sleep...
At a couple points through the night I would hear branches breaking, wake up, look out the window, and SWEAR that the tree was falling... It SO looked like it was coming right for the window... not good for my now thoroughly sketchy heart... I would do just about anything to not be where I was at that point. I'm going mental...
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Well, the power company said the power, that should have been back on (according to their earlier report) last night will now be on by Thursday... well... okay... so they only missed it by three days. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, though... They weren't expecting quite what they got...
And again... the weather people drop the ball... The supposed-to-be 50� temperatures don't get above freezing... still ice everywhere... still extremely shitty... trees still snapping, but not nearly at the pace they were... mostly because most of the stuff that was going to fall is already laying all over the fucking place...
I'm feeling severely mental at this point... I mean yeah, I've got music... I've got EP doing her best at keeping me calm (she has a wonderful voice among other things, I think). I'm not sure she truly realizes the actual severity of the situation, but nonetheless, she's keeping me sane... I appreciate it way more than I would ever make it apparent to her...
Wednesday is much like the rest... cold... shitty... ice everywhere... there's not a lot to report... Chainsaws a plenty... EP keeps me as relatively calm as she can... Being smelly and cold and worn out takes a real toll on the psyche... It's one thing if you prepare for it, like climbing K2 or something... you're prepared to be smelly and cold and worn out... but when you don't expect it, and don't want it, and it never seems like it's going to come to an end, it kind of freaks you out...
Thursday, February 20, 2003
5:01am
�CLICK�
???
I was totally asleep... but I swear I just heard my converter on my TV come on...
Wait a minute... What did I just think to myself, there? I swear I just heard... my...
I throw the covers off from over my head and lo and behold!
"...let there be light..."
Oh my god! Oh my god! Incredible...
�WHIRRRRR!�
Could it possibly be??? The furnace!!! is ON!!!
Oh, joy of all joys!
The afternoon brings temperatures in the mid 40s and even though it's very sunny out, it sounds like it's raining out... Ice is coming down all over the place... the thaw is on...
...
The house warms up... The water is warm (well, the water is back, first and foremost)...
Soon I am clean and warm... incredible... am I dreaming? *pinch* "Ow! Fuck!" Nope... not dreaming.
No cable (and no net), yet, but I am warm and clean... incredible...
Friday afternoon brings the return of the cable and the internet and I finally can let out a big sigh of some form of relief... That was five days of complete shittines... boy, did it suck... But the suckdom has ceased to be quite so sucky... It's still a total mess... a complete disaster... but I think it's going to be a little better... Things feel almost kind of normal, again... but for five days... it was something else.
PREFACE: The word �suck� is one of those words that can take on a couple different meanings. One meaning can be of a very positive light, with several delightful subdivisions unto itself... and then there's also a meaning that connotes something very bad is going on, as well... Sadly, this is one of those stories in which the word "suck" reaches whole new levels of �bad.�
So... Big ice storm... not a little minor thing... insanely major... 30,000 houses without power kind of major, see? Pants-poopingly major... I, personally in my nearly thirty-four years of existence, have never seen anything remotely like it. HERE are some images from the city website... I personally think they vastly understate the damage that I personally saw (and am still seeing) within just a few blocks of my house (as best as I can tell, they look like images from a couple different places out in the more rural areas). When I can find the software to get the pics I took from the digital camera, I'll post them, as well... I think they're much more telling of the carnage (at least in a personal manner, anyway). I will now attempt to recount my ordeal as best I can for you here (yeah, it's pretty long, but it was a pretty long and intesne ordeal - so, why don't you do yourself a favor and bookmark the post and take a few days to read it all if you have to):
Friday, February 14, 2003
St. Valentine's Day... After a week of snow, cold, snow, thaw, a little more snow, and a nearly compete thaw, Friday brings us 40� temperatures and rain starting at about noon... It's nasty out, I want no part of it, at all, and end up falling asleep for the night at about 9:30pm. Pathetic, I know, but that's how it goes, sometimes.
Saturday, February 15, 2003
I wake up about 6:30am (thanks to falling asleep so early the night before). Still raining, still grey as can be and basically nasty. I check the Weather Channel in between some Boomerang and I see where they are calling for the rain to start to freeze up after the sun goes down... hooray... I grab a guitar and proceed to fidget around on it for the next couple hours, recording a few bizarre odd-meter, open-tuning ditties (inspired by the seriously silly movie, �Overdrawn at the Memory Bank� (a really early Raoul Julia flick produced by New York Public Television) that is on Mystery Science Theater 3000) into a little digital flash memory recorder I have.
About noon, I call my friend Mike and tell him about the strange movie I just watched and suggest that we go get some lunch... so about an hour later he comes and gets me and we go through Wendy's... they actually get BOTH of our orders right the first time (they have an uncanny knack for fucking up orders every time you go there in some fashion or another). �Hey maybe the gods are with us, today,� I think to myself, revelling at the fact that I didn't have to go back through and get my side order of cheese or the fries that they forgot to put in the bag... (note: famous last words)
SO we go back to Mike's and chow. Afterwards, we spend the next couple hours checking out the newest expansion of Ultima Online. I used to play the game, but I got kinda put off by the tedium... Anyhow, I still like to watch stuff going on in the game when I have a chance, and Mike was taking me around to all the new gigungous houses he and two other friends had just built in the new land expansion. Seriously impressive stuff, especially Steve's (the �veteran� of the group), complete with a battle arena on the rooftop for people to gather and compete in a �Friday Night Fights� thing and stuff like that...
So after we run around in UO world, I suggest we go to Sam Goody. After all, there's always a CD waiting to be added to the collection. So we head out. There's a fine sheen of ice starting to show on the trees in the area, but the roads are fine to and from Sam Goody. We go back to his house and gather up the crap I had left there and we head to my house. It's about 9:15pm. To get to my house from Mike's, there's two ways you can go. You can either go around �the boulevard� to the east or you can cut over the hill that houses the city's reservoir. The roads were okay when we got home from Sam Goody so we really don't think anything of going over the reservoir... umm... oops... When you get to the top of the hill, the road curves left. When we reached the top of the hill and attempted to make the left, the truck just basically went straight, instead... and made a beeline for a big guard rail. At the last possible second, the truck regains traction, swings hard to the left and we avert smacking the snot out of the gurad rail by mere inches... my comment to him was, �I could have stuck my tongue out the window and licked it, we came that close to it...� Collective breath-catching and a bit of a nervous chuckle later, I arrive home.
My neighborhood consists of three streets on a hillside surrounded on three sides by one of a few legit �forests� inside the city limits. You can have a better look HERE, if you like. In the winter, when all the trees have shed for the season, there's an incredible view of the city from my house, clear across the Ohio River to the Kentucky hillside. I thought I should fill you in on that for the rest of the story...
It continues to sleet and freezing rain and all that great stuff. I get online and reply to a couple emails waiting in my mailbox. I can hear the sleety stuff hitting my windows now at an accelerated pace. Things are clearly not improving outside, at all... I continue to surf around the net, thinking, �Well, it has to end sometime... doesn't it?�
About 10:30pm, the phone rings. It's someone who we'll call Extremely-important Person, or EP for short. EP is many, many miles away, safe at school. I inform her of the current situation and the near accident on the way home. As we continue talking, I can hear the freezy shit getting heavier... We continue our conversation, with me doing my best not to notice the weather... Then, at about 11:45pm, it happens... �PLOINK!� Out go the lights. Fortunately, they immediately come back on. Being on a cordless phone at the time, I lost communication with EP for a moment. When everything is cool again, I tell her that the lights have just flickered off and on and apologize for the brief loss of the phone. About five minutes later, �PLOINK!� again, and a very distant �KAPOW!� of a transformer popping, and the lights go out and immediately return for a second time. Seeing as it's the second time it's happened (and subsequently, the second time the computer I was sitting by had to go through the whole ScanDisk crapola), I decide it's probably for the best to shut the computer down for the night. About three or four minutes later, �PLOINK!� (�KAPOW!�) again... This time, the lights do not come back on... they tried to, about three or four times, but no luck... in the meantime, I have lost commuinication completely with EP, this time... I know that she will call back when she realizes I didn't come back, and make my way down the pitch-ass black stairs through the pitch-ass black living room to the corded phone in the kitchen. I inform EP of the situation, kick back in the La-Z-Boy, and we resume our conversation... no big deal... I've had the power go out on me before. It'll be cool.
Sure enough, about 1:30am, the light in the kitchen informs me that power has, indeed, been restored to the neighborhood... that wasn't so bad, at all. I can still hear it raining and such, but hey - we've got power back. EP and I finish our conversation for the evening and I make it upstairs in time to watch South Park at 2am, relieved that the power is back on and rather tired from being up so long. After South Park, I switch it over to SciFi, where a cheesy horror-esque movie is just starting... Well, I'm in one of those �the cheesier, the better� kind of moods. Sitting up on my bed, I finally start to give in to the fact that I'm really tired, and I begin to nod off... catching myself as I do so the first few times, continuing to ingest the cheese on my tv screen... I quickly nod off again - this time waking up to darkness... I have no idea how much time has passed, what time it is or anything - my watch is across the room and I don't feel like knocking over a huge stack of CDs in my floor to see what time it is, 'cause I couldn't really care less. �Shit,� I think. �Fucking power's out again...� About the time I get up to take of my clothes and actually get into bed, the power clicks back on. �Good deal,� I think and crawl under the covers for the night...
Sunday, February 16, 2003
10:00am - I pull the covers off my head and greet the morning with a yawn and a squint... one of the first things I realize as I come out of my haze is that it's still sleety-freezy-shitting outside. This is starting to suck... An oatmeal bar and a glass of orange-pineapple-banana juice later, I'm playing my guitar. Quickly realizing that nothing productive is happening, I put the guitar back in the case and flip around the channels... Nothing good there, either.
12:00 noon - I switch it over to FOX to see if the Daytona 500 is going to get rained out or what (the Weather Channel clued me in to some inclement weather down that way, too). About five minutes into the broadcast... yes, you guessed it... �PLOINK!� (�KAPOW!�)... �Shit!� I wait... I wait a little longer... nothing... Looking outside, the snowplows that went up and down the hill did their job pretty well - my street is very clean, considering the foul weather that hasn't stopped since Friday. In the silence, I can hear more �KAPOWs� from tranformers all over town popping... Something else I'm hearing more and more, too. The cracking of tree limbs as they snap off of trees from the ever-growing weight of the ice that is building up on them... Some of them make such a sound, you would swear someone is cranking off shots from a 30-06 rifle. �Okay, this is definitely not getting any better...�
I go out, clear the inch of "pre-Slushee" (without the syrup) off of my porch porch and have a look around. It generally pretty nasty out, but more specifically, it's really nasty out. Trees are starting to droop a bit more significantly, now. Starting to get hungry, so I go in to order some Chinese. I'm standing in the sunroom at the back of the house, looking down the hill and just as I hang up the phone I see a tree come teetering over out of the woods about four houses down... Not a branch from a tree, and entire tree about 18" in diameter... It rips through the power line on the poles out back, literally unearthing one pole, which comes to rest against a garage... If it hadn't been for the fact that the cable company put in new cable about 18 months ago on brand new, super-heavy-duty strand, the tree would have totally blasted the back of the neighbor's house... as it was, there was damage, but not what it could have been... I came shooting out of the house and down the hill to see if everything is okay (it's obviously not). After looking over the damage to the power lines, poles, etc., I slowly start to realize that we're not going to have power back on the hill anytime soon... not a very comforting thought...
The power company says they'll have everything under control in 24 to 36 hours (should I start holding my breath?). This, of course, is of little comfort to me, whose worst experience with power loss was probably when it was about 105� outside one summer and we lost power for about three hours in the afternoon. Meanwhile back in the real world, it's still extremely shitty out and only getting shittier...
The sounds of the �rifle fire� are getting much more frequent, now (it seems like there was a decent-sized �CRACK!� about once a minute), and it's honestly starting to unnerve me, a bit. So I figure the best thing for me to do is to grab some CDs and some batteries for the Walkman and do what I can to not worry about it for the moment. After all, I can't do anyting about any of it while there's still ice continuing to form on the trees and they're breaking in-two everywhere... So I grab my Walkman, grab a few CDs (including the ones I bought at Sam Goody last night that I haven't had a chance to listen to, yet)... open the drawer of my desk to grab the spare AA batteries... searching... searching... searching... "a ha... there they a- AAAs??? Huh??? SHIT!!!� So much for that �the gods smiling on us� nonsense I was thinking yesterday. Well, I absolutely cannot sit there and listen to nothing but the trees breaking apart outside. I'll break apart, myself... Considering that my car is broken (and even if it weren't, it's handily blocked in by my wilting birch tree), there's only one thing to do...
I strap on my boots and head for the carry out about ten blocks away... When I get there, I can see the big "CLOSED" sign in the window... "Yippee..." The only other choice is to walk to the Super Quik about three miles away by Mike's house... Ack... but I've got no choice... it's either that or back home to the silence... I grab my cellphone and call Mike and tell him that I'm heading his direction and will probably stop by and thaw for a few on my way to the Super Quik. On the way, I am passed by a formerly very, very close friend... not once, but twice on the way to Mike's in about a fifteen minute time span... It's not that we had some kind of falling out or anything, he just convinced my girlfriend to leave me and marry him about six or seven years ago. So I wasn't really expecting him to stop or anything, but still, if I had seen him trudging through the shit, I have no doubt I would have stopped and picked him up in a heartbeat... I guess I should maybe rethink my kindness to assholes in the future. About a 1/4 mile from Mike's I see a guy come walking up the boulevard. As he gets a little closer, I can see he's toting a 12-pack of Busch Light... �Mmmm... yummy swill.� I almost stopped in my tracks when I saw what I saw next... the guy is totally hitting a hooter... and not, even, like, hiding it, or trying to hit it like a cigarette, but, y'know, toking on it, walking down the street in broad daylight. I guess I need to stop being surprised at how ignorant people are, anymore.
Anyhow, I get to Mike's and get warm. While I'm there, I hear the weathrfolks say it should be in the mid 40s tomorrow and the mid 50s on Tuesday... "Well, at least it will thaw out..." (note: more famous last words)
So I leave there and go to SuperQuik... There's about 50 people in line at the kerosene pump... I think to myself that I'd almost rather be cold than sit and huff burning kerosene fumes - it tends to make me (and others) quite ill-feeling.
6:15pm - Back home (finally). Stuff is really nasty out, now... I go down to Mrs. Bays' house to check on her. She's lived alone for a while, now, and after seeing a tree limb bigger around than my leg pirced through her carport and sever others of comparable girth laying in her front yard and strewn about, I figure she's probably freaking out in her basement or something (and probably rightfully so). After seeing that she's okay, I come inside and basically collapse... but not before I slap my batteries that I trudged though the shit for in to my Walkman and fall asleep listening to King Crimson... at last, a minor bit of relaxation...
Sleep kinda comes and goes throughout the night... one thing kinda sticks out... Every time a song ends, in that little silence in between songs, without fail - �CRACK!�... damn...
Another late-night call with EP proves a bit settling. There are tree limbs falling all over the place at this point, but the sound of her voice is rather soothing among the chaos... as soon as we hang up, though, it's back to the realization that there are some mighty big, OLD trees that just so happen to have a bead right on my bedroom should they decide to give way... In particular, Where my bed is in my room and where I lay on my bed, I open my eyes and behold a GREAT BIG tree that just is aching to fall over and has been for the better part of about ten years. So... I just need to keep my eyes closed and concentrate on the music and being any kind of warmer...
Monday, February 17, 2003
After a pretty restless night (I actually fell asleep for good at about 6:00am), I wake up around 10:00am... The little battery-powered radio tells me that not only are most of the radio stations in town off the air, but the one station that is still on is reporting 30,000 homes in the area are without power... yikes... "This sucks." Since the water pumps are electric-powered, there's no water pressure here, either... hooray... more joy... Well, at least it's supposed to thaw out, today... After I become a little more awake, I realize something... It's not sleety-freezy shitting outside, anymore... "Still sucks, but thank god..."
I shouldn't have thanked anyone, because not only did it not get above freezing all day, but it began snowing right before noon and proceeded to dump about three inches of snow on top of the thousands of tons of ice...
At about noon, I decide it's time to go out and make another survey of that crapola... I walk out to the middle of the street and turn to take a look down the hill... "Holy shit..." At the same guy's house where the tree fell over in his back yard nearly through his house, the super-old, SUPER-huge tree (at least three feet in diameter) in his front yard did not only fall over, it came right out of the ground, partial root-system and all... not broken tree... good-and-uprooted tree... It missed going through the master bedroom of his house by a matter of about two feet... the house next to his (luckily empty at the time), however, is now wearing the tree firmly through the balcony and front porch... It is truly an ugly, ugly mess...
About 6:30pm, I call Mike to get a report on what he's seen out in the field (he's a cable guy)... As I'm talking to him in the sunroom, I'm looking out in the back yard at the some twenty or thirty limbs laying there... All of the sudden, a tree abuot 18 inches across comes STRAIGHT for the sunroom.... and catches on the cable strand (again)... thank the powers that be for strong anchors... I was backing out of the room the whole time, waiting for it to crash through the roof of the sunroom... and it didn't... it just hung there... *SHOOO!* That was tripped out...
[note: as of the writing of this, the tree is still laying on the cables out back... doesn't appear to be going anywhere, anytime soon]
Other than the continuing tree carnage, the lack of thaw, and the snow, the day is rather boring... still pretty unnerving - in fact, I'm starting to become convinced that this will never end - but pretty uneventful... I checked on a couple neighbors (Mrs. Bays' son finally came and got her and took her to his apartment that has had all utilities the entire storm) saw a couple neighbors I haven't spoken to in a while and walked around with them and surveyed more shittiness... heard from my saving grace (Extremelyimportant Person) and went to bed... Tonight, however, the great big, old tree took on a whole new characteristic - where the snow had fallen and clung to the ice glaze, it had formed a face that looked remarkably like the mascot of the band Iron Maiden, "Edward T Head." The face was staring right at me, smiling its wicked smile... Man... I really need the power to come back on...
Sometimes I'd catch these flashes of light through my closed eyelids... I'd open them... "Lightning?" I would think... "Nah... No way... not feeling any thunder or anything..." It happens a couple more times in the next few minutes and I'm totally confused... I shut off my CD player, sit up in bed... and wait... sure enough... �FLASH!�... �KAPOW� (faintly) "A haaa... The transformers..." When they go out, they actually put off an insane amount of light, even from really far away... I put my headphones back on and try to get to sleep...
At a couple points through the night I would hear branches breaking, wake up, look out the window, and SWEAR that the tree was falling... It SO looked like it was coming right for the window... not good for my now thoroughly sketchy heart... I would do just about anything to not be where I was at that point. I'm going mental...
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Well, the power company said the power, that should have been back on (according to their earlier report) last night will now be on by Thursday... well... okay... so they only missed it by three days. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, though... They weren't expecting quite what they got...
And again... the weather people drop the ball... The supposed-to-be 50� temperatures don't get above freezing... still ice everywhere... still extremely shitty... trees still snapping, but not nearly at the pace they were... mostly because most of the stuff that was going to fall is already laying all over the fucking place...
I'm feeling severely mental at this point... I mean yeah, I've got music... I've got EP doing her best at keeping me calm (she has a wonderful voice among other things, I think). I'm not sure she truly realizes the actual severity of the situation, but nonetheless, she's keeping me sane... I appreciate it way more than I would ever make it apparent to her...
Wednesday is much like the rest... cold... shitty... ice everywhere... there's not a lot to report... Chainsaws a plenty... EP keeps me as relatively calm as she can... Being smelly and cold and worn out takes a real toll on the psyche... It's one thing if you prepare for it, like climbing K2 or something... you're prepared to be smelly and cold and worn out... but when you don't expect it, and don't want it, and it never seems like it's going to come to an end, it kind of freaks you out...
Thursday, February 20, 2003
5:01am
�CLICK�
???
I was totally asleep... but I swear I just heard my converter on my TV come on...
Wait a minute... What did I just think to myself, there? I swear I just heard... my...
I throw the covers off from over my head and lo and behold!
"...let there be light..."
Oh my god! Oh my god! Incredible...
�WHIRRRRR!�
Could it possibly be??? The furnace!!! is ON!!!
Oh, joy of all joys!
The afternoon brings temperatures in the mid 40s and even though it's very sunny out, it sounds like it's raining out... Ice is coming down all over the place... the thaw is on...
...
The house warms up... The water is warm (well, the water is back, first and foremost)...
Soon I am clean and warm... incredible... am I dreaming? *pinch* "Ow! Fuck!" Nope... not dreaming.
No cable (and no net), yet, but I am warm and clean... incredible...
Friday afternoon brings the return of the cable and the internet and I finally can let out a big sigh of some form of relief... That was five days of complete shittines... boy, did it suck... But the suckdom has ceased to be quite so sucky... It's still a total mess... a complete disaster... but I think it's going to be a little better... Things feel almost kind of normal, again... but for five days... it was something else.
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Saturday, February 22, 2003
*sigh*
I'm growing ever more tired of my friends interrupting me when I'm in the middle of talking about something I want to talk about sometimes for the sake of basically just not letting me talk about one thing I want to talk about, ever... and if I do chime in with what I think about whatever, more times than not I'm told, "No, [it's like this]..." as if my opinion is somehow incorrect... Maybe I'm mistaken, or maybe people don't realize they step on my toes way too much when we all talk... I always let them dictate the paths of conversations, and they (never fail) always end up sitting around talking about the same things - either politics (one of the two friends is right-of-center, the other is left-of-center, which makes for some legit entertainment, at times) or Ultima Online... after a conversation about the bugs in the recent addition to the UO world (I try to stay interested in it all, but I played the game for a few months (and would probably still be playing it out of loyalty to my friends if it wasn't for the fact that the computer I currently use can't handle the load) and basically found it WAY too time intensive for WAY too little of a return - I need more plot in my adventures other than mining my ass off for hours at a time to smelt it into ingots to smith shitty items to melt down to go mine some more to smelt some more to make more shitty items to melt down some more etc. for countless days (and that's just one skill of your characters 7 possible "grand mastered" skills), so I kind of tire of hearing about it incessantly after a while), it had to get around to politics (because it always does)...
[note: I'm not using "blah blah blah" to be a dick, but because I can't really remember what was actually being said - I was trying to enjoy my steak]
Pa: "...[blah blah blah, Bush's and Cheney's families both got rich on oil (yeah, okay, not really earth-shattering news)]..."
Fi: "...[blah blah blah, five year plan... blah blah blah, hydrogen cars...blah blah blah, something about] JFK..."
(a ha! an opening!)
Me: "Oh, my god. That reminds me. Have either of you seen 'Clone High,' yet?"
Fi: "No."
Pa: "No."
Me: "It's the first thing I've seen on Mtv in years that I can actually stand to watch."
Fi: "What is it?"
Me: "Well, it's a high school that has clones of, like, Joan d'Arc, Ghandi, Abe Lincoln, JFK, Cleopatra, and all these historical figures... it is absolutely hilarious... all kinds of famous people doing voices, too... Nicole Sullivan, Andy Dick-"
Fi: "What, it's a cartoon?"
Me: "Yeah."
Pa: [some form of sigh-type thing]
Fi: "I'll never watch it..."
Me: "Well, you're missing it... It's fucking hilarious... There was this one on the other day - JFK was in the media room getting it on with Catherine the Gr-"
Pa: "After we clean up Iraq, we need to continue right on into Iran, then Turkey, then [blah blah blah, let's make sure the entire world hates us before we annihilate it]..."
[I hereby give up on ever being able to get a word in edgewise when the two of them are in the same room together]
I think my friends are too commited to trying to be intellectual all the time and trying to solve other people's (like, say, G-Dub's) messes (which no one on the planet will ever do) to lower themselves to laugh at a silly cartoon. It's okay to laugh at Dave Attell (who is really funny) talk about getting a handjob from one of the Dixie Chicks, but a cartoon? Don't be so absurd.*sigh*
I'm growing ever more tired of my friends interrupting me when I'm in the middle of talking about something I want to talk about sometimes for the sake of basically just not letting me talk about one thing I want to talk about, ever... and if I do chime in with what I think about whatever, more times than not I'm told, "No, [it's like this]..." as if my opinion is somehow incorrect... Maybe I'm mistaken, or maybe people don't realize they step on my toes way too much when we all talk... I always let them dictate the paths of conversations, and they (never fail) always end up sitting around talking about the same things - either politics (one of the two friends is right-of-center, the other is left-of-center, which makes for some legit entertainment, at times) or Ultima Online... after a conversation about the bugs in the recent addition to the UO world (I try to stay interested in it all, but I played the game for a few months (and would probably still be playing it out of loyalty to my friends if it wasn't for the fact that the computer I currently use can't handle the load) and basically found it WAY too time intensive for WAY too little of a return - I need more plot in my adventures other than mining my ass off for hours at a time to smelt it into ingots to smith shitty items to melt down to go mine some more to smelt some more to make more shitty items to melt down some more etc. for countless days (and that's just one skill of your characters 7 possible "grand mastered" skills), so I kind of tire of hearing about it incessantly after a while), it had to get around to politics (because it always does)...
[note: I'm not using "blah blah blah" to be a dick, but because I can't really remember what was actually being said - I was trying to enjoy my steak]
Pa: "...[blah blah blah, Bush's and Cheney's families both got rich on oil (yeah, okay, not really earth-shattering news)]..."
Fi: "...[blah blah blah, five year plan... blah blah blah, hydrogen cars...blah blah blah, something about] JFK..."
(a ha! an opening!)
Me: "Oh, my god. That reminds me. Have either of you seen 'Clone High,' yet?"
Fi: "No."
Pa: "No."
Me: "It's the first thing I've seen on Mtv in years that I can actually stand to watch."
Fi: "What is it?"
Me: "Well, it's a high school that has clones of, like, Joan d'Arc, Ghandi, Abe Lincoln, JFK, Cleopatra, and all these historical figures... it is absolutely hilarious... all kinds of famous people doing voices, too... Nicole Sullivan, Andy Dick-"
Fi: "What, it's a cartoon?"
Me: "Yeah."
Pa: [some form of sigh-type thing]
Fi: "I'll never watch it..."
Me: "Well, you're missing it... It's fucking hilarious... There was this one on the other day - JFK was in the media room getting it on with Catherine the Gr-"
Pa: "After we clean up Iraq, we need to continue right on into Iran, then Turkey, then [blah blah blah, let's make sure the entire world hates us before we annihilate it]..."
[I hereby give up on ever being able to get a word in edgewise when the two of them are in the same room together]
I think my friends are too commited to trying to be intellectual all the time and trying to solve other people's (like, say, G-Dub's) messes (which no one on the planet will ever do) to lower themselves to laugh at a silly cartoon. It's okay to laugh at Dave Attell (who is really funny) talk about getting a handjob from one of the Dixie Chicks, but a cartoon? Don't be so absurd.*sigh*
Saturday, February 15, 2003
www.8march2003.com, cont'd.
So, there is now a "disclaimer" on the site... I won't say what it says (it used to say much more, but has recently been severely abridged), because I'll leave it up to you to read it for yourself, if you like... When I first spoke about this page back in late October, I was convinced from the start it was a pile of crap... go figure I would be right...
Now, as to the nationality of the "author." I said in my first post that he seemed to be not American. Just something in the original page's wording that just wasn't sitting right (well, besides the whole "8 March" thing - Americans would say "March 8"). The later postings have gotten a little better at sounding "Americanized," I guess you'd say. After re-reading the original posting and the subsequent ones, I've decided that the person is most likely not British, but Australian. Just something in how it's all being said. Brits have their way of doing things, and so do Aussies... eh, just call it a hunch? Although Australians tend to call sweaters/sweatshirts "jumpers," the author calls them "pullovers" - better, but still not a very "American" term. I've also really never heard another American refer to a Native American Indian as an "Amerindian" (obviously trying to differentiate between Native Americans and the Indians of Asia). And the other word that jumped out at me was the term "trekking" as opposed to "hiking." Again... Sounds a bit more like something an Aussie would say ("trekking in the outback"), rather than an American ("hiking up a fucking hill")... Like I said, just call it a hunch...
What really astounded me was all the email the guy has posted on his page. I mean, we're talking HUGE pages full of stuff. First of all, some of it is pretty obviously the same guy... (I also sent him an email regarding the fact that in one of his postings he mentions that his wife was killed in a car wreck and "they had no children..." Then in another post, he mentions a few times about the auto accident that killed his "wife and daughter." That email has, for some reason, not made it into the huge list of emails posted, yet. lol - I figured he would have at least fixed one or the other...) What really has kinda cracked me up is that a lot of these mails seem to (still) think it's all real, and offer the guy places to hide from the "black vans" and stuff... And then, there's a lot of emails with a lot of references to the movie "The Core" which is due to be released very soon... He states that it doesn't have anything to do with the movie... so for once I will tend to believe him, because why post all the mails about the movie only to have them be the "right guess?" My call (so far) is a book, maybe... Maybe fiction, maybe "non-fiction." Perhaps it's a new super-special edition of that movie from M. Nyght Shamalamadingdong... Then there's always my orignal hypothesis that it's some new cologne from Abercrombie & Fitch... Who knows, really...
So, there is now a "disclaimer" on the site... I won't say what it says (it used to say much more, but has recently been severely abridged), because I'll leave it up to you to read it for yourself, if you like... When I first spoke about this page back in late October, I was convinced from the start it was a pile of crap... go figure I would be right...
Now, as to the nationality of the "author." I said in my first post that he seemed to be not American. Just something in the original page's wording that just wasn't sitting right (well, besides the whole "8 March" thing - Americans would say "March 8"). The later postings have gotten a little better at sounding "Americanized," I guess you'd say. After re-reading the original posting and the subsequent ones, I've decided that the person is most likely not British, but Australian. Just something in how it's all being said. Brits have their way of doing things, and so do Aussies... eh, just call it a hunch? Although Australians tend to call sweaters/sweatshirts "jumpers," the author calls them "pullovers" - better, but still not a very "American" term. I've also really never heard another American refer to a Native American Indian as an "Amerindian" (obviously trying to differentiate between Native Americans and the Indians of Asia). And the other word that jumped out at me was the term "trekking" as opposed to "hiking." Again... Sounds a bit more like something an Aussie would say ("trekking in the outback"), rather than an American ("hiking up a fucking hill")... Like I said, just call it a hunch...
What really astounded me was all the email the guy has posted on his page. I mean, we're talking HUGE pages full of stuff. First of all, some of it is pretty obviously the same guy... (I also sent him an email regarding the fact that in one of his postings he mentions that his wife was killed in a car wreck and "they had no children..." Then in another post, he mentions a few times about the auto accident that killed his "wife and daughter." That email has, for some reason, not made it into the huge list of emails posted, yet. lol - I figured he would have at least fixed one or the other...) What really has kinda cracked me up is that a lot of these mails seem to (still) think it's all real, and offer the guy places to hide from the "black vans" and stuff... And then, there's a lot of emails with a lot of references to the movie "The Core" which is due to be released very soon... He states that it doesn't have anything to do with the movie... so for once I will tend to believe him, because why post all the mails about the movie only to have them be the "right guess?" My call (so far) is a book, maybe... Maybe fiction, maybe "non-fiction." Perhaps it's a new super-special edition of that movie from M. Nyght Shamalamadingdong... Then there's always my orignal hypothesis that it's some new cologne from Abercrombie & Fitch... Who knows, really...
You know what else makes me kinda pissy? Ppl dat spel shit all stoopid on da net. Wot's dat all about? Not only is it ignorant, it's not even funny and it's hard to read. Yes I realize that most of these people writing like that are, like, twelve year-olds and stuff like that (or, at least it sure seems that way)... which makes me worried about our country's future when these kids get out into the world and realize they don't know how to spell. So when I come across blogs that are all screwed up like that, I treat it like the ones I come across in Portuguese... NEXT!
Friday, February 14, 2003
If You Want to Win an Election, Just Control the Voting Machines
THIS was a very interesting article I came across a little while back, while rummaging around on the net (in my never-ending search for stuff that makes me go "hmmm").
THIS was a very interesting article I came across a little while back, while rummaging around on the net (in my never-ending search for stuff that makes me go "hmmm").
You know what makes me kinda pissy? When I go to the Blogger home page to try to find something new and intersting to read in the "recently updated blogs" section, and I'll see one with a really interesting title (in English) and I'll go there and the whole page is in, like, Portuguese or something... That sucks... I can't read Portuguese... I guess I could use the webpage translator from FreeTranslation, but it would be better if I knew all those languages in the first place... Damn, why didn't I take Portuguese in high school? Why, Why, WHY?!?!? ... oh... they didn't offer it? Yeah, I forgot. I took French, instead... from a Greek woman... that spoke Spanish... Mondieu, hermanos... err... yeah...
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Wow... THIS PAGE is jam-packed full of all kinds of really humorous stuff...
NOTE: It's not all stuff slamming G-Dub. There's other stuff, too, like a JOHN STEWART PAPERDOLL that's quite good, as well... kind of silly and pointless, but good, nonetheless...
This is good. Really good.
"...up Shi'ite creek without a paddle..."
(Here's the main page. There's a lot of good stuff to read/do here. The "games" section is particularly enjoyable.)
"...up Shi'ite creek without a paddle..."
(Here's the main page. There's a lot of good stuff to read/do here. The "games" section is particularly enjoyable.)
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
State Can Make Inmate Sane Enough to Execute
What What WHAT?!?!?
Read the article HERE (you'll need to register for a FREE account at http://www.nytimes.com - no biggie, right?)
HERE is the original background story on Mr. Singleton from 1998.
hmmm... so... rule someone insane, so you can't kill him... get him treated... make him better... then kill him... good call... *sigh*
What What WHAT?!?!?
Read the article HERE (you'll need to register for a FREE account at http://www.nytimes.com - no biggie, right?)
HERE is the original background story on Mr. Singleton from 1998.
hmmm... so... rule someone insane, so you can't kill him... get him treated... make him better... then kill him... good call... *sigh*
Monday, February 10, 2003
Friday, February 07, 2003
What a Sped
This is courtesy of my brother's weblog, courtesy of Cnet. Seems this goofball put software that captures keystrokes (what a person types) on a bunch of computers on a college campus... and faces a pretty stiff hammering for it... whether he actually will be punished as he deserves is debateable...
read the article HERE
This is courtesy of my brother's weblog, courtesy of Cnet. Seems this goofball put software that captures keystrokes (what a person types) on a bunch of computers on a college campus... and faces a pretty stiff hammering for it... whether he actually will be punished as he deserves is debateable...
Thursday, February 06, 2003
When did they start putting caffeine in Barq's Root Beer? I mean, I know that it's been a few years, but I distinctly remember there USED to be a little thing on the side of the can/bottle that said "NO CAFFEINE" and now, they put caffeine in it... and it doesn't taste any different, or better, or whatever they were hoping to do by adding it... I don't feel the urge to drink it more than I used to... in fact, now that there's caffeine in it, I am actually tempted to drink it less often... because I'm no longer the caffeine junkie I was when I was, say, 17... pisses me off, too, because it was the best of all the sodas. SO I will just stay with muh Gatorade, I guess...
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
Monday, February 03, 2003
Okay. I feel I have to continue a small bit on my feelings towards the whole Columbia thing...
I can remember seeing the "Enterprise" (the one that has never really "flown") piggyback on that 747 during those tests in the '70s (with that big white cap over the engines) and I remember thinking how cool it was... Then the one day, they let it disconnect and glide to earth on its own ... I watched the first shuttle launch on tv (it seems like it was maybe 1981?). I can remember thinking that it was the coolest thing I had ever seen... even today, when I sit and watch shuttles launch, I can't help but be in awe of the "total coolness." When it does that big roll about ten seconds after launch to get into the right attitude, it's just incredible... when I watch that roll, I realize the awesome power that is being unleashed to create the energy to get that big thing off the ground, let alone into orbit above the earth... After Challenger, I never lost sight of the dangers involved in all the awe... we're all only humans... and none of us is perfect... it is horrible that mistakes have to be made that result in anyone ever losing their life... I hope this is the last time I ever have to feel this way about a space program that has the incredible potential for all the greatest of possibilities.
I can remember seeing the "Enterprise" (the one that has never really "flown") piggyback on that 747 during those tests in the '70s (with that big white cap over the engines) and I remember thinking how cool it was... Then the one day, they let it disconnect and glide to earth on its own ... I watched the first shuttle launch on tv (it seems like it was maybe 1981?). I can remember thinking that it was the coolest thing I had ever seen... even today, when I sit and watch shuttles launch, I can't help but be in awe of the "total coolness." When it does that big roll about ten seconds after launch to get into the right attitude, it's just incredible... when I watch that roll, I realize the awesome power that is being unleashed to create the energy to get that big thing off the ground, let alone into orbit above the earth... After Challenger, I never lost sight of the dangers involved in all the awe... we're all only humans... and none of us is perfect... it is horrible that mistakes have to be made that result in anyone ever losing their life... I hope this is the last time I ever have to feel this way about a space program that has the incredible potential for all the greatest of possibilities.
Hey, can anyone tell me how to change your browser's (IE) "maximum simultaneous connections?" I can't remember where it lets you do that... I just remember it's somewhere weird. Kinda pisses me off that Bill couldn't put it in a more obvious place (I canna seem to locate it in the "Internet Options" thing)...
If you can help, PLEASE leave me a message in le section du comments at the end of this post... much grass.
If you can help, PLEASE leave me a message in le section du comments at the end of this post... much grass.
Saturday, February 01, 2003
How are you supposed to react when you watch another space shuttle disintegrate before your eyes? I can remember when it happened in January (28th I believe?) of '86. I was sitting in Mrs. Lucas' college prep junior english class (we were not one of the schools that gathered all of our students to watch the first teacher go into space and all that) and she came in and told us... and I was sitting there, waiting for the punchline... I was so sure she was making a joke or something... a couple seconds later, I realized there wasn't going to be a punchline and that she wasn't joking about anything... I can remember coming home and throwing on W.A.S.P.'s "The Last Command" and just blaring it in my room as loud as I possibly could, trying to pound the thoughts out of my head. Like every child probably on the face of the planet, I wanted to see the earth from the moon, be the first man to step foot on Mars, live on a space station... my brother and I flew Testors rockets, water rockets, built rockets and space shuttles out of Legos (and pseudo-Legos) in the '70s... Yeah, Star Trek was humorously cool in its fictionalized, Shatner-ized kind of way, but real outer space was even cooler. Every time I watched a launch or landing or even saw a picture of a space shuttle after that day, I always thought of the Challenger, without exception... in the countless shuttle missions I would see in the years to come, I would never forget about the weird shit I saw and felt in January of '86... Things happen from time to time that bring back old memories - some good, some not-so-good - sometimes faint, sometimes in floods...
So what do you say? What can you say? I couldn't begin to know. To the families, friends, workers, aspiring astronauts... I am sorry...
So what do you say? What can you say? I couldn't begin to know. To the families, friends, workers, aspiring astronauts... I am sorry...
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