brief interruption of my hiatus to note a few things:

why on god's green earth does floss cost so much? five dollars? SERIOUSLY?

MAN has it been busy. I'll spare you the boring details, but things have been a little rough. Working on a project where priorities are largely defined by the sponsoring organization's primary donor and his wife can be tiring. When wealthy Mrs. X asks for the website to be rose-scented, and intermediary Y decides he'd better hop to it or risk the collapse of the entire enterprise, humble web programmer Z has some long nights ahead of him.

But, with a minor milestone accomplished, I can return to the lovely internet for a little bit before attending to Crushingly Urgent Project #2 in a few hours. There's been a lot of good stuff that I've missed:

1. DCeiver's analysis of the Post Best Bets is predictably excellent. But I do have to give the GoGs credit for making their own picks. The merit of those selections aside (they seem fine), it's a shrewd move to point out the stupidity of WaPo poll participants before the rest of the internet can snarkily associate your paper with the Cheesecake Factory. I hereby suggest "blogproofing" as the technical term. Expect an RFC from the W3C shortly.
2. You might remember that AOL stupidly released a bunch of search data last week. It included the search query, the date, and a unique identifying number corresponding to the user who made the search. By tieing search queries together by those numbers, some users could be identified. The New York Times managed to positively identify an individual pretty quickly. But the real fun is coming now, as other organizations pore over the data to expose just what kind of creepy weirdos populate the internet. Something Awful has a pretty great collection of examples (text, but still probably NSFW).
3. George Allen got into trouble! This is fantastic, and not just because he appears to be a racist asshole who needs to be kept off the national stage. No, it's much more urgent than that: if his presidential ambitions aren't ended by these sorts of public displays of awfulness, I'd have to see Virginia political expert and UVA professor Larry Sab/ato on television for an entire electoral race. I'll do whatever it takes to prevent that grim, dystopian future from coming about.
4. Now for some geeky tech complaining: how did this make it to TUAW? For those who aren't interested enough to follow the link, it's a means of stripping iTunes copy protection by embedding an AAC file purchased from the iTunes Music Store into an iMovie project. You can then get it decompressed to an AIFF (like a WAV, but on the mac), which can be recompressed into a copy-protection-free MP3.

   But you can only do one song at a time. And because you're recompressing, it's a lossy process. In other words, this is a really stupid, inefficient way to remove DRM from ITMS songs. I haven't checked in on the HYMN Project recently, but if I wanted to un-DRM a bunch of songs, that's where I'd start. And if that no longer works, I'd see about writing an Applescript that methodically moves through an iTunes playlist, playing songs, capturing the output via Soundflower, then compressing to MP3. You could even have it automatically use the existing song metadata in the ID3 and filename. Alternately, you might look into burning to a virtual CD-ROM, which you could then rip (I'm not sure how feasible this is in OS X, but it's certainly doable in Windows).

   So the iMovie method: stupid. Don't bring that weak-ass shit in here, TUAW. That's right, I said it.

5. This hack walkthrough was linked off of the Slashdot frontpage. But it doesn't make any goddamn sense. If I understand correctly, step 1 is to fool the user into trying to log into the target website, except on your own server. This is called phishing, and it's not very complex — it's just tricking people.

   But instead of simply capturing the login and password before sending the user along, the author embeds some Javascript that eventually shows up on the target site (when the user's login request is sent in, via the phishing server). That Javascript sends the cookie that maintains the user's session back to the phishing computer, allowing the author to hop onto the user's session.

   The thing is, by that point he already has the user's login and password. He can make new session cookies whenever he wants — the cross-site-scripting stuff is completely and utterly pointless. Worse that pointless, it's stupid, since session cookies generally expire much faster than login credentials.

   From there he goes on to pwnz0rz the website, thanks to some security lapses that one would only find in high school CS classes. It's all kind of ludicrous. I'd really like to see an XSS attack example that does something useful. And hey, maybe I'm missing something here. But as far as I can tell, this article is kind of like writing up "How To Rob A Bank", with step 1 defined as "assume the security system is off and all the doors are unlocked."

life insurance commercial.

scene: quaint smalltown main strip. autumn. leaves falling. laughing grandmother, mother and daughter get out of car.

"grandma!" the little girl calls as she and the mother head into a shop. "come on!"

grandma smiles and makes her way to the parking meter.

"just one second, dear!"

she chuckles as the timer clicks to expire on the parking meter. "ahh," she smiles, patting the top of the meter. "wouldn't it be great if life were like this parking meter? if it were, i could just put a quarter in and stay here with my family. forever."

her face grows ominous.

"but IT'S NOT."

my daily jonesing for caffeine has led to the folks at both dunkin donuts and starbucks knowing my name and what my order is. which is nice, but the fabulously kind and wondeful guy at starbucks has gone from calling me "catherine" to "cathy," which....frankly, it's unacceptable. every time i get called "cathy" i shudder uncontrollably. it's not the name so much as it is me. ok, it's the name. i hate it, and i never have been or will be a cathy. throughout my ten years on the internet and participation in various mailing lists, IRC chat rooms, millions of IM sessions and blogging communities, i have become ok with "C," "cat" and "cath." but cathy simply WILL NOT STAND. at this point, though, it really just seems obnoxious to correct the starbucks guy. so each morning i suffer in silence. i know. i can feel your sympathy through the tubes of the internet. it's a difficult life.

UPDATE: relatedly, this article on a starbucks closing in new jersey is kind of hysterical. the starbucks is closing because the building it's in is slated to be replaced by condos and other retail, and the people talk talk wistfully about their starbucks memories like it is an old-timey store that's been around for a hundred years. just, like - did starbucks really influence the narrative of your life? are you really THAT sad? i find it hard to believe. exceprt:

Jeremy Bilas, 28, and his wife, Melanie, reminisced about going to the Morristown Starbucks for sandwiches and espressos before closing on their house, and about sipping hot chocolate at the coffee shop during Christmas season, before going to cut down their Christmas tree.

"We had to get one last coffee here today," Melanie Bilas said, as she shared an iced caramel macchiato with her husband. "We'll probably have to get our own coffee machine and make our own coffee from now on."

tommy and i have long made fun of that flomax ad, which ends with two older gentlemen toasting enormous bottles of water in the backseat of a car. because, see, they don't have to pee every two seconds now. and they can drink all the water. but i never paid attention to the copy of the ad until today, when i heard the voiceover say, "here's...TO MEN. here's to taking longer car rides with fewer pit stops."

it was just weird. why this emphasis on masculinity? i have never associated bladder control with manliness before, but perhaps that will have to change.

UPDATE: it seems especially weird as, upon seeing the commercial again, i caught that side effects include "a decrease in semen." that's not very manly.

i'm having a hard time deciding which subjects of recent nytimes articles are more reprehensible. by the way, this is a decision i am forced to make almost weekly. anyway, in one corner we have the nyc hipsters who are drinking rose by the bucketful. sample exceprts:

“A lot of younger people are buying rosés,” he said, adding that many men are no longer embarrassed to be seen drinking a pink wine. “Guys will bring it to rooftop parties and backyard barbecues. I’ve been putting rosé in an empty Gatorade bottle and drinking it in the park.”

...“I used to hate rosé,” said Alex Kapranos, the lead singer of the rock band Franz Ferdinand and a food columnist for The Guardian in London. “It was a Blue Nun-style secretary’s-night-out drink, and that put me off it. But a couple years ago I had a cold bottle on a hot night, and it was marvelous.”

Still, its old reputation was hard to shake. Jay McInerney, the wine columnist of House & Garden, compared rosé to Jackie Collins novels and Jerry Bruckheimer movies in his August column. “There was a sense that pink wine couldn’t be serious,” said Mr. McInerney, a rosé fan, who has been trying to lead a revival for years. “People were afraid of looking unsophisticated by drinking rosé. It wasn’t red. It wasn’t white. They didn’t know what to do with it.”

But now, among a certain group of global style setters ordering rosé is a sign of being in the know. Dropping the name of a Provençal rosé like Domaine Tempier can be code for having recently frolicked in St.-Tropez or Cap d’Antibes, where rosé accompanies leisurely seaside lunches. Even Pamela Anderson, in the days before she wed Kid Rock in St.-Tropez, was snapped by paparazzi on a yacht, a glass of rosé in hand.

EVEN pamela anderson?!? the height of class!

in the other corner, we have the "boat ravers" of chicago, making the waters of lake michigan even nastier:

In one undulating line of boats, several small to midsize yachts were bound together in the center of one cluster. Banners spelling out the name of local clubs hung from their sides, and coordinated sound systems blared music from local D.J.’s.

In the surrounding boats, bikini-clad women tried to stay upright as they danced on slippery runners or hopped from boat to boat looking for better drinks. Others tumbled onto giant floating trampolines or fired four-foot squirt guns at one another. On a few boats, grills were being fired up.

Fueled by wealthy boat owners and the young women they and their boats can attract, the daytime parties have become a magnet for local nightclub owners and promoters who use the scene to draw people to their clubs once the sun sets. Last year club owners upped the ante by ferrying D.J.’s out to spin during the day.

“It’s like maximum exposure,” Jason Kalendr, 28, better known in the club scene as DJ Kalendr, said during a break from spinning tracks one recent Saturday, his baseball cap turned slightly sideways. “Everyone who is in this business is out on the lake.” He, like any well-known Chicago D.J., spins for free on the lake.

it's almost impossible to choose! what's really amazing about these articles is that they overshadowed even the asshattery of the past couple of weeks' modern loves, a seriously amazing feat. anyway, in this case, i think i'm going to have to go with the rose-drinking hipsters. the boat ravers can't help being douchebags; they were practically born that way. it is sad they must take their activities out onto the water instead of remaining in their normal dens of terrible clubs that charge $20 for a cover; but this is america, after all. we cannot hold them back. but choosing to drink pink wine? because of its "cachet," because it won't get you as wasted as other drinks, because it's a code for the south of france? UNACCEPTABLE. especially unacceptable are those who have been "trying to lead a rose revival for years." in response i am going to go drink a bottle of red and 12 sparks.

check out this gorgeous ring my coworker k. made herself at a metalsmithing class. how awesome would it be to be able to make your own jewelry like that? i've been googling metalsmithing classes in the d.c. area, but can only find ones in the suburbs and a spectacularly expensive one at the corcoran that only meets in the AM. any tips?

wow, yesterday night was a SPECTACULAR evening. let me detail its events to you:

1. my italian tutor stood me up/forgot about our lesson

2. it was pouring rain like it can only pour rain it atlanta

3. this thunderstorm apparently caused all the traffic lights in all of atlanta to go out, which meant bumper to bumper gridlock as well as playing various games of chicken as i tried to dart my way through intersections where no one seemed to care that cars from the opposing lanes were trying to get through

4. i was desperately low on gas, so i made the grievous, grievous error of attempting to stop at the BP near my house, aka the Gas Station of Doom. i consider it a lucky trip to fill up the tank when a) i find a pump that is working b) i don't get hit up by some sketch dude for money to enable his multiple trips to the package store across the street. really, you need just exactly $3.89 to fill up the air in the tires of that car over there that you say is yours? funny how that's the same price as a small bottle of vodka.

5. the trip to the Gas Station of Doom was, in this case, a mistake. the two pumps i tried weren't working. well enough, i thought. let's try the chevron down the road.

6. the chevron down the road had eight swat cars with screaming sirens flashing on top of them in front of it. i guess there was some sort of bust going on there. i don't know. i didn't care. i was like, fuck this. i need me some gas and it is probably safer than it's ever been with all these police around. bring it, chevron!

7. no pumps at the chevron with the swat bust going on worked.

8. i drove to a gas station 10 minutes out of my way. it always looked bright and welcoming when i passed it on my way. i soon realized that this was a facade, as EACH OF THE TWELVE PUMPS had signs taped to them that said either "out of order!" or "no gas!" with cheery exclamation points. which, what the fuck. WHY DO YOU EVEN EXIST?!?

9. i drove to another gas station (my fourth attempt, NOT THAT I WAS COUNTING) even further out of the way. at this point i was dead on the inside. if this works, i thought mechanically, i will not kill anyone. if it doesn't work, i will kill everyone, and it will be pleasing.

10. hallelujah, it worked! nobody has to die! but as i stood there pumping the gas in the sketchy shadows of the sketchy gas station in the sketchy neighborhood, an incredibly scary looking hobo noticed me and rode up to me on his bike. (wtf? when did hobos get bikes? hobos on wheels. a weird occurrence.)

"excuse me, miss?" he called.

now, i have a policy of never giving money to panhandlers, but i always try to be polite about it and brush them off with a curt smile and a "no, i'm sorry." but this hobo was unlucky. he did not know i had just been on a trip through gas station purgatory. he did not know that i was on the verge of sticking a gas nozzle up somebody's ass.

"hey there, miss!" he called again.

i turned around with my arms crossed and looked him straight in the eye. i shook my head very slowly, and i growled, low, "no."

the hobo stopped his bike, said quickly, "ok, sorry miss! have a nice night!" turned around, and hightailed it out of there.

11. i came home to find the power semi-out - that is, the lights sort of work at a weird half dimness, but my alarm clock, my fan, and the internet are not working. but my laptop (and thank goodness, my ability to watch episodes of the wire) is fine. i don't understand why, but tommy told me it has something to do with hertzes. megahertzes? voltage? laptops? i don't understand.

12. THE WORST PART OF ALL: i have no beer in the house.

i swear to god, i take back all the complaining about d.c. not being a bike-friendly city, or everything negative i ever said about the el or the metro. they are shining examples of public transporation that can do no wrong and smell very nice and are perfect. where as driving can go suck a big one.

i did the unthinkable today: i left something on top off my car and drove off with it still there. not that it's so unthinkable, i just thought stuff like that really only happened in the movies. it was especially sad because it was a delicious chicken sandwich i had bought after a four-mile run, and it was important because i have no food in the house except cheese and tortillas, and thus i was forced to make myself a cheese and tortilla sandwich for dinner tonight. it was delish. really. also, i'm lying.

anyway, as i was driving off, i must have been distracted by the TERRIFYING HORDES of mariah carey fans surrounding the philips arena, which is adjacent to the cnn center and where that unstoppable force of hair extensions, thighs and sparkles is apparently having a concert tonight. surprisingly, many of the female concert attendees seemed to be accompanied by their boyfriends. true love is going to a mariah carey concert with your special lady friend. also, many of the female concert attendees - in fact, most of them - were wearing astoundingly short miniskirts with astoundingly high heels. ladies. i am all for miniskirts, and i am all for heels, but when you wear them together, you know you can only look like a ho.

these shoes for fall: hideous or TOTALLY AWESOME?

sometimes it's a fine line. and i've been at work for 10 hours now so i'm not really clear in the head.

tommy's mom's accident is so terrible (though from talking to both him and beth they sound like they are handling it so remarkably well and capably), and i am so far away from charlottesville/d.c., and i feel so impotent, that i don't know what to do, except send their mom terrifying amounts of garish get-well balloons (since flowers aren't allowed. neither are latex balloons. as stanley said, "Anti-latex, anti-flowers... If these hospital folks are anti-Barry-White, I move to label them "anti-gettin'-it-on.").

...oh yeah, and talk about hemorrhoids.

remember a while back i posted about HEAD ON which you APPLY DIRECTLY TO THE FOREHEAD, and which is slowly driving me down a path of insanity? i seriously think their strategy is to actaully cause seizures/headaches through their incessant commercials and drive the market for the product up that way.

well, it gets worse. a few days ago i noticed on tv an ad for activon, for arthritis pain, and you know what? you apply it directly where it hurts. of course.

AND THEN, even worse!!! the other day came on a commercial by the same people for, you guessed it, hemorrhoid cream. GAH!H!H!H! freedom from hemorrhoids? FREEdHEM hemorrhoid cream. freedom from hemorrhoids? FREEdHEM hemorrhoid cream. freedom from hemorrhoids? FREEdHEM hemorrhoid cream.

if you would like to join me on my trip to crazytown, you can see the whole series of commercials here.

okay, so, yeah. i am making a profile on match.com. BUT. i am doing it so i can see what profiles on match.com look like so i can help a friend create her sure-to-be-alluring profile. already, it's off to an auspicious start:

The username you selected is already in use.
Please enter another username, or choose one of the usernames we've suggested.

* catherinea531
* catherineapookie

just for the record, catherineapookie is going to be my new IM name.

UPDATE:
friend: um..yeah they suggested (name)bug for me
friend: i think i'll keep that one
pablohoney: hahah
friend: cause...just....yeah.
friend: that's me
pablohoney: wtf like those are the most stereotypically retarded names ever
pablohoney: POOKIE? BUG?!?!
friend: hhaaha
friend: how about qtpie
pablohoney: next it's going to be like, catherinea was not available, would you like catherineschmoopie

so the past couple of days, npr has had those great couple of pieces on foreign service officers and their day to day lives. today? a piece on stretching for the elderly and why some people can jump high, delivered by two of the most annoying-voiced npr correspondents ever.

seriously now. ah well. somebody on the itunes shared music network has a lot of lyle lovett albums, and that is washing away all the nasal-voiced bad memories.

the past two mornings npr has had a couple of interesting pieces on life in the foreign service. having heard stories growing up from my grandparents and mother (my grandfather was a career foreign service officer and ambassador, from tunisia to saudi arabia to colombia to kuwait), and being friends with KG, i know the work of a foreign service officer is not always as romantic as it may seem to outsiders. and it can be particularly hard on children and spouses. anyway, i recommend listening.

on the advice of tommy i downloaded adium to manage all of my many, many instant messaging accounts (well, three, really. gtalk and two AIMs). and i like it. but i have a question - for the life of me i can't figure out how to set up alerts on people. i use alerts on a number of folks - family, coworkers, friends i like knowing are online so i can chat with them - but i am adium dumb and can't find out how to do them. not even google or adium help is helping me. any suggestions?

UPDATE: nevermind! literally right after i posted this i figured it out. am dumb.

UPDATE II: i should mention that i've more or less been converted to macs. i use my own at work now as much if not more than the PC, and after abusing tommy's this past weekend, i like them a lot. now if cnn would just pay me and i would stop spending money on multiple plane tickets back to d.c., i'd have one in my hot little hands right now.

also while i'm at it, here are my firefox tabs:

MIGHT I BE ABOUT TO BUY A DRESS FROM FOREVER 21? i might be. and if so, i blame the governess. ask HER about it.

tommy's sister beth posts on the trials and tribulations of her retainer and subsequent visits to her orthodontist, which makes me want to ask gross retainer advice of the internet. who doesn't have that feeling from time to time?

anyway, my orthdontist owned my soul for nearly six years - yes, i had braces from fifth to nearly tenth grade, and there was fun stuff before and after that - teeth pullings, TMJ issues, all the basic hilarity. apparently i have an incredibly small mouth, so all my teeth were majorly effed up. i still have nightmares about rubber bands and metal palette expanders that my mother had insert a key into every day to, you know, expand my mouth. when i was let loose from his shiny metal grip, i was given a set of retainers that was plastic and served me well for a couple of years. i took care of them; they took care of me. my tiny teeth in my tiny mouth stayed beautifully straight.

of course, then came college, and boyfriends, and drinking. the combination of all three proved deadly for my teeth - i sure as hell wasn't going to stick in my retainer when i a) was drunk off my head b) was staying the night at my new boyfriend's that i was eager to impress and i certainly wasn't going to whip out my geeky retainer. and so, the retainer, it languished in its sad little bright pink case. where...it got kind of gross. i don't know what happened to it. i don't think it was mold. it was...something. tooth fairy dust. yes, that's it! or residual plaque and nastiness? maybe more likely.

anyway i still wore my retainer once in a while, but i can no longer ignore the fact that my bottom row of teeth are getting scarily more crooked. soon i will be back to the situation where two of my teeth actcually lived behind the rest of them. so i'm wearing my retainer pretty regularly. but it is the nast. and i am repulsed every time i put it in. as i well should be. does anybody have any suggestions that don't involve me going to a new orthodontist and getting an expensive new retainer made? perhaps voodoo magic? seducing a rogue dentist? anything? because i'm getting concerned my retainer will soon grow legs and walk away.

a couple of people have asked me about the design. well, i'm here to tell you: i was inspired by/ripped off the v/ox blog. sorry v/ox dudes. except for the green, which i picked at random and has the magical ability of looking like a different color on every monitor i view it on. the header font is poynter agate comp, which i used because i used that a lot when i was designing pages for last quarter's project (cause it's a startribune.com font) and i like it. i had wanted to use that for the post titles, too, but tommy didn't have it on his computer and he was the one who implemented it so i believe we're using minion myriad. the header is temporary until brilliance strikes us, which, seeing the rate we move on blog stuff, will be two years from now. which reminds me that the blog's four-year anniversary is coming up, which: whoa. there'll be candles and cake and stuff, don't you worry.

some small fireworks went off near reagan just as my plane touched down last night. besides the worry factor in people, uh, setting off fireworks near an airport, it was pretty awesome.

my favorite lede of the day, by far:

Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian palaeontologists say they have found the fossilised remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom".

the article goes on to reveal these interesting finds:

Professor Michael Archer said on Wednesday the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolf-like fangs were found as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo.

"Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big, powerful forelimbs. Some of them had long canines (fangs) like wolves," Archer told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio.

Vertebrate palaeontologist Sue Hand said modern kangaroos look almost nothing like their ferocious forebears, which lived between 10 million and 20 million years ago.

The species found at the dig had "well muscled-in teeth, not for grazing. These things had slicing crests that could have crunched through bone and sliced off flesh", Hand said.

The team also found prehistoric lungfish and large duck-like birds.

"Very big birds ... more like ducks, earned the name 'demon duck of doom', some at least may have been carnivorous as well," Hand told ABC radio.

awesome. via more patriotic than you, who's got a detailed illustration of the duck.

This is why I don't like Sudoku. It's a puzzle that isn't complex enough to hide its plodding, algorithmic nature. There's a discrete set of steps that one can employ to solve every one. Once that becomes clear, it ceases to be a brain teaser and simply becomes a mechanical routine you have to go through. Why not just use or build a machine to do it for you? Or better yet, not do it at all?

This is also the reason that I no longer have much respect for Will Shortz. Computer-assisted though it may be, editing crossword puzzles requires knowledge, finesse, and cleverness — the clues don't write themselves, after all (although I imagine there's a database of frequently-used ones employed to flesh out the puzzle after the original clues have been entered and the computer has arranged them — any way you slice it, puzzle editor is probably a pretty cushy job). But by hitching his wagon to the Sudoku craze, he's pretty well surrendered any pretense of curatorial merit that he might have claimed before. Are we really supposed to believe that these Sudokus can help you unwind, but these Sudokus are optimized for the beach?

Give me a fucking break. There's no creative act here: to make one of these puzzles, one simply has to run a program and enter a weight value to determine how many squares remain blank (with that value lying in the range [solvable-solved)). It's as simple as that. I imagine there are other, more tedious ways to generate these puzzles — maybe Shortz uses those methods, although I have a hard time imagining that it affects the final product very much.

I suppose I wouldn't be able to resist attaching my name to a machine that prints free money, either. But I'd probably try to keep my name in a slightly more humble font size.

i wasn't going to link it out of respect to patient confidentiality and the troubles he had with his last blog, but it's too good to not. a good friend of tommy's and mine from college who must be close to being a real doctor by now (how does all that stuff work? surprisingly, my intake of scrubs and grey's anatomy has not really educated me on that whole process) is blogging again, and it's great. who else could write so hysterically on rectal exams? not me!

Perhaps the largest apology I owe is to the numerous people I have rectalized over the past two weeks. You know who you are. Even more deserving of my guilt are those I had to perform multiple rectal exams on because of errors I made in the initial process. To the woman with a history of gastric ulcer who presented with melena, I'm sorry I didn't go deep enough the first time. To the nursing home paraplegic patient with colitis, I'm sorry that I accidentally smeared the sample on the wrong side of the guaiac card. To the young man with a Dieulafoy's ulcer, I'm sorry I failed to realize that there were no cards in the room until after I performed the exam. And to myself, I'm sorry that I took off my glove prematurely after my very first exam, and was holding the guaiac card in my bare hands asking an attending to confirm the negative result before he pointed out to me that I should wash my hands twenty times over. Again, that's disgusting. Additionally, I apologize for the fact that I can never remain completely silent during a rectal exam and instead either make an incredibly awkward comment ("This is why I became a doctor" or "This is less fun for me than it is for you") or make oochy-ouchy noises reminiscent of everyone's favorite gynecological surgeon.

All it needs are some dancing hamsters. Warning: link will bring you to a page with sound and ridiculousness.

Via Mike via Carey.

we here are the #1 result for "too drunk at wedding."

it was actually a post about jason and corbin's wedding, though it could have applied to ryan and lisa's, or david and heather's. or, you know, ANY WEDDING I GO TO. two exceptions: tommy's cousin's wedding in vermont, because, you know, got to at least attempt to come off well for the relatives; and tommy's mormon friend's wedding. where there was a) no beer b) no dancing c) only rows and rows of bottled root beer. that was a fun one.

holy crap. there is very little that can make me laugh to tears at 6:30 in the morning, but i think official blogcrush fontana labs, in the greatest blog-return ever, might have hit upon it. may i present you with rapebear.

UPDATE: as an aside, you should go through and read that blogcrush link. i forgot that was the night somebody got "i heart pumping" written on his face, along with a borf tag on the arm. it was wonderful.

I went to the barbershop in the lobby of the office today. It was a weird departure from my normal national haircut franchise habits. The place was operated half by authentic-looking old coots and half by the sort of intense Asian women that tend to staff the low end of the haircut market. I got one of the latter.

But that wasn't the remarkable part. Rather, the bit that stuck out was the overpowering Republicanousity of the place. There was a picture of W on the wall; that was the first and most obvious sign. But once the haircut began, they started flooding forward:

• On the recent rain: When I timidly pushed the boring smalltalk about the weather forward by making a not-very-serious reference to global warming, the lady cutting my hair objected. "It's all God!" she insisted. "The rain, the wind, the water — we don't make any of that stuff. Whatever it is, it's God doing it." Okay.
• On Warren Buffett's Recent Charity: "There's something fishy. There's some gimmick, I just don't know what," observed the gentleman in the chair next to me.
• On the oil sands of Canada: There's a lot of them! It's going to be great.

Seriously, this all happened over the course of maybe, maybe twelve minutes. No mention of brutalizing detainees, but if I'd had the extra time afforded by using a credit card instead of cash, I'm sure I would've heard something.

huh. maybe i shouldn't buy a mac. TELL ME WHAT TO DO, INTERNETS!

(also: scroll down to the bottom of jake's post for some wonderful news about futurama. or, you know, just click that link. i like to think the fact that tommy and i have seen every rerun of that show at least three times on adult swim has played some small part in its resurrection.)

WE HAVE ARRIVED.

(we actually arrived several hours ago but have been hanging out and eating and viewing the down with our lovely hostess, jeanie, who is subletting me my lovely room in her lovely house for the summer.)

but, anyway! atlanta! seems pretty cool. much more to come, probably sunday.

and, before the clock strikes midnight: to tommy, and jeff, and jon, and charles, and all the other beer drinkin boys out there - i wish you a very happy beer day. i am too sad not to partake in a celebration this year.

"This group should not to be confused with the real-life band The Misfits, led by Glenn Danzig."

Words of wisdom.

I donno, man. I have misgivings. I know that it's my duty as an aspiring liberal elite to pledge my undying love for all things Garrison Keillor. Just look at my friends: Matt and Emily are both currently leaping to the guy's defense, and Charles was practically brought up with Garrisonianism as a secondary religion (complete with weekly Sunday observances). Keillor writes in magazines I wish I wanted to read, and A Prarie Home Companion is, obviously, one of dear NPR's biggest properties. It seems like Keillor's creative output should be right up my alley.

But it just isn't. I will grudgingly admit that his Mr. Blue persona is merely Salon's fourth-worst regular columnist, but that's more of a testament to Carey Tennis and Anne Lamott's staggering solipsism and King Kaufman's pugnacious irrelevance than anything else. And I'll also admit that I'm intrigued by the PHC movie. But that's just because Maya Rudolph is hilarious, the rest of the cast looks great, and Lindsay Lohan appears to play a wayward and impressionable young girl.

I should say that I'm not biased against PHC's central conceit: I actually like the idea of old-timey radio-ousity. Ask Catherine! I'm a big fan of The Big Broadcast on WAMU, where Ed Walker plays crackly serials from the golden age of radio (this is because I am a million years old). But PHC just isn't particularly remarkable, authentic or generally good. Okay, you've got some wry Wodehouse-ian banter, and some authentic-sounding musical performances, and various nods to the idea of an older, better time. That's all fine.

The problem is that this package comes wrapped in a masturbatory reverence for an imagined Midwestern cult of mediocrity. I get that the asceticism is part of the joke — except it isn't, not really. The overarching straight man routine is never tweaked or explored or used to anyone's advantage. God forbid that Keillor or anyone else be forced to sacrifice a drop of dignity. They can put on a good old-fashioned program of entertainment, by gum — it just can't be too entertaining, is all. That'd spoil the fun, you see.

And to top it off, this allegedly charming slice of Americana is perpetrated by exactly the sorts of liberal-minded folks that perpetually find themselves stymied by the country's appetite for rosy-hued nostalgic bullshit. I'm sure there's a gay married couple somewhere in Lake Wobegone who the neighbors have made some charmingly off-the-mark comments about. But let's get real — we come to bury Mayberry, not to praise it.

Perhaps I'm misjudging the appeal of Keillor and his Prarie Home Companion. I have to admit that I don't think I've ever made it through an entire episode — the only show on NPR that makes me change the channel faster is Michael Feldman's ponderous (and incorrectly phoneticized) Whad'Ya Know. I feel as though I've heard fragments of plenty of shows, however. And in my admittedly brief experience, the joke seems to be that the show isn't all that funny — or happy, or sad, or dramatic, or moving. Its only concern seems to be in promoting a sort of bovine stoicism. I really don't understand the appeal.

On the other hand, I don't have any relatives from the midwest, and I drink kind of a lot of coffee. I wouldn't be surprised if one of those is the source of my incomprehension.

i feel like a traitor somehow, but i thought i should let you all know...sometime this summer, i do believe i'm going to buy myself a mac.

a few factors have played into this decision by me, a lifelong PC user. 1. tommy thinks i should get one because i like pretty things and don't use a computer for much more beyond internet, email, photoshop and word processing (he says his reasoning is less simplistic than that but it's true, i do like pretty things). 2. i'll actually be making more money at cnn this summer than i've made at a job before, thereby allowing myself to actually purchase my own tech goodie instead of getting it as a gift from tommy. i might even get a new ipod. and/or a sidekick. 3. pretty much every single one of my friends has a mac and i am nothing if not a conformist. even my relatives are working on me. at dinner with the family last night my cousin brought out her laptop and let me play around with it while she talked about all its awesomeness.

so, yeah. sorry PC diehards. the transition won't be for a while, and i'll certainly keep the dell around, but it appears it's time for a change. scary!

remember when i pointed you towards the video of somebody putting a roll of mentos into a bottle of diet coke? well, somebody went on to do the next logical step: 200 LITERS OF DIET COKE AND 500 MENTOS. (via)

Man, what a tease. Tycho of Penny Arcade wrote a paragraph with a reference to HilariousInjuries.com. Imagine my excitement! Sadly, it doesn't exist. Not yet, anyway. What a tease.

Well, while we're waiting for someone to monetize that idea, placate yourself with these two videos that Justin showed me earlier today.

And with that, I'm headed to the beach. But, as previously discussed, I should still be online. Beachblogging to come! Possibly!