Hello, this is Augie typing. I just finished feeding my spousal unit with kidney beans and now try to conquer his new beloved blogging software - anyone of you ever heard of ecto? Don't know anything about it except that he - my boyfriend - would not say:

"What's wrong with two Delhaize* bags and a bit of string ?"

... if I would ask him to go shopping with me for a new bra.

* - Tescos, for example.

In September 2001, I, like most Americans, took a step back, scratched my chin thoughtfully while looking at the rest of the globe, and decided, It's Got to Go. Well, here we are 3 years later, and it's still there.

The main difference between mainstream America and the rest of the world is that we know that if enough of us vote to get rid of the rest of the world, well, just don't be buying stock in Condé Nast is all I'm saying. I've been having a lot more dreams about nuclear war than I usually would've. Once them Mullahs get the bomb and vaporize Tel Aviv, the Israelis are going to be vaporizing some things we hadn't really been planning on letting them vaporize, for example Paris.

My mom took me on her knee when I was 10 (don't ask), after Reagan won the White House over charismatic homeboy Jimmy Carter. "Eric", she said (she always called me Eric. Rube came later.), "Eric, there's gonna be a war now. Whenever a Republican gets elected, there's a war. And if there's another war, which there will be, it'll be the end of the world, and everyone's going to die." Then, we watched a documentary about Nostradamus, and how he predicted everything from the French Revolution to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Orson Welles, in all his Paul Masson-fat years glory, was the host of this particular show, and he explained to my young psyche the dire years ahead, with overpopulation and widespread famine, and how men would feed upon men and the beast would arise in the middle east, and then something about hats.

But then, every culture has its myths about the end of the world, even the shallow, self-absorbed Dixie-Hippies' schicht to which my mother belonged. The population explosion never happened, then World War III became a made-for-TV fantasy, so then they invented AIDS to threaten the world and bankrupt the AYDS Diet Candy Corporation; then it was Mexicans, if I recall correctly. Now, it's got something to do with Bush and Jews, but I'm not sure exactly what it is anymore, it being late and me being drunk.

I think I prefer the Norse apocalypse to our hand-wringing version of the end the world. According to the Scandinavians, the end of the world, Ragnarok, has already happened. The gods and giants engaged in the final battle in time immemorial; a battle which laid waste to the Earth and induced an eons-long winter. This marked an end to the age of wonder, rendering the world safe for the only two survivors, which were a man and a woman.

Recently, I've been poking around the Internet a bit, slumming for blogtools. I say slumming because I'm generally an anti-tool kind of person. I sweated out the decision to switch to Movable Type, for example, for 3 months before I finally jumped. At the time, I was writing my own content management system, the now-lamented CMX®. After much deliberation, I decided to go instead with the industry-standard MovableType, because CMX® sucked like Denise Richards at a casting call.

A short while ago, I wrote an article, never published because it also sucked, concerning the integration of HTMLArea with MovableType. This was my publishing constellation of choice for a while. I can do HTML, but HTMLArea not only makes it unnecessary, it also works on Mac, thus allowing me to post both lazily and smugly. Then, a chain reaction of mishaps occurred. HostingMatters my hosting provider, upgraded the server which hosts all my stuff. This broke the Turing test I had installed, the wonderful scode plugin, which I subsequently uninstalled so that my comments worked and I could once again be called a White Monkey by the many visiting Muslims who find my site by googling "All Muslims Are Terrorists". Then, the comment-spammers found my site, and I began experiencing the joy of deleting 200 online poker ads per minute. Who the fuck plays that much online poker anyway? The joy of poker is eating Doritos, farting, and smoking cigars within the anti-woman shell that is the basement rumpus room, while pretending that Tuesday night is all about winning a handful of nickels you'll wind up tossing in that fucking wooden bucket in the corner that you really need to take down to the Kroger and toss in the big Change-Automat anyway. But I digress. This led to my upgrading to MovableType 3, which is still free for the small blogger, by the way. And it's ok, with TypeKey registration and all, which not one of you lazy fucks have bothered with. I know you've got to register with TypeKey to be able to post, but it's not like Janet Reno works for Six Apart, you fucking Unabombers, so get a grip. Skinner said it's on the up-and-up.

Where the hell was I? Oh, yeah, ecto. So, I went out and bought ecto, which cost a whopping $13 or something like that, so yeah, I'm broke now. Bloggin with ecto, yeah man, wonder what the poor people are doing. ecto lets you write in WYSIWYG mode, automatically upload pictures, and control multiple blogs. As long as you've got a Mac, that is. The Windows(tm)(r)(s)(c) version came with the price of purchase, but it's not a real big improvement over the old method of scribbling your blog entries on the backs of beer-soaked bar naps in your own snot and sending them to old girlfriends via U.S. mail. But it's free, so what the fuck.

And on the Mac it rocks.

Jacques at Y-2-Dray is weighing in on the CBC's Greatest Canuck debate. For me it's no contest: Wayne Fucking Gretzky.

I only got to see Gretzky play live once. It was in Washington, while he was still playing for Los Angeles with Robitaille and Sandstrom. He was about 32 or so then, and skated circles around Washington's entire team. At one point in the game, he actually killed off an entire 2-minute 5-on-3 without ever letting go of the puck. He went from end to end, the Caps forming a conga line behind him, and when Hrudek started banging his stick on the ice, he just dumped it and went to the bench for a martini. I fully expected him to run back on the ice and throw a bucket of confetti on Dale Hunter.

The man had eyes in the back of his head, the reflexes of a jungle cat, and hands like a high-dollar Swedish call girl. He scored 92 goals in one season, 215 points in one season, then he got bored and figured he'd start banging Janet Jones.

If Kurri got the assist on that one, he is, indeed, the finest wingman ever.

Everyone's somebody's kid. No matter if that someone is alive, or not. In situations like this one, I'll just quote Jason Robards on the subject of being a parent:

When does it end? It never ends. It's like your aunt Edna's ass, it goes on forever.

What's playing in iTunes?

Tumbling Dice from the album "Exile on Main Street" by Rolling Stones