QuickSilver is an interesting thing.

Take a look at www.blacktree.com (as far as I can tell, the blog plug-in doesn't support HTML, nor, by extension, real links).

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Obligatory Parentary Advisory:

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time.

via WizBang

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We're back from Vienna now, and we were greeted by even more hospitable German weather:

I'm having to catch up on work, so there's not much time to be blogging, neither passively nor actively, at the moment. But here's some more pictures in case anybody's wondering just what the phrase "cold as a witch's titty" looks like in the implementation phase.

Tagged at Thundernose's. A coward's tag, but tagged nonetheless. So, figuring what better time to try out the Amazon function of my blogging software, I decided, why not?

Rube's Random 10

"Parklife" (Blur)	"Hank Williams - 40 Greatest Hits" (Hank Williams)	"Alice" (Tom Waits)	"Good for Your Soul" (Oingo Boingo)	"The Downward Spiral" (Nine Inch Nails)
"Red Headed Stranger" (Willie Nelson)	"Candy Apple Grey" (Hüsker Dü)	"Chips from the Chocolate Fireball" (The Dukes of Stratosphear)	"Darklands" (Jesus and Mary Chain)	"Reckoning" (R.E.M.)

1.) What is the total amount of music files on your computer?
I just spent about a week sucking all my music into iTunes, along with cover art and what-not. The final damage?

2.) The last CD you bought is:

"Excursions in Ambience 1" (Various Artists)

That was well over a year ago. I already seem to have everything I need.

3.)What is the song you last listened to before this message?

Live with Me, Rolling Stones from Let It Bleed

4.) Five songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm a sentimental goon, and tend to get all weepy if the right song comes on at the wrong moment.

Three Days, Jane's Addiction

Prodigal Son, Alison Krauss & Michelle Shocked

Mother Nature's Son, The Beatles

Streets of Baltimore, Bobby Bare

Oh, You Pretty Things, David Bowie

5.) Who are you gonna pass this stick to (five persons and why)?

I'll be passing this one along to:

• My Brother, no link, but I'd be interested to hear what he's listening to these days
• Augie, even though, being German, she'll probably just list a bunch of Kraftwerk CDs
• The Hetzfresse, just to irritate him
• Andy of "XOR", for pretty much the same reason
• And, finally, to Rappinhood, because I'd like to see if he puts his own records on there...

Well, that was entertaining. Damn you, Zonker. Damn you to HELL! I'll get this one back at the Wreckyll, if I remember to reserve a room...

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Gut Rumbles: the guitar face:

What a hoot; Acidman got me there. I don't even play guitar all that good, but when nobody's looking I stick out the tongue and squint my eyes like the guy from Uriah Heep, "Magicians Birthday"-style. It's all pretty ridiculous anyway when all you can play are a couple of sappy old Beatles tunes; I mean, it's not like you have to jump around the room and bash in your amp after Norwegian Wood, now is it.

While we're on the subject, I know that some of youse that drop by every now and then are musicians. I'm looking for a better way to guitar into my computer. I'm thinking of setting myself up with some sort of guitar synth, but I really have no idea what all I'll need. Any suggestions? All I've got right now is a jangly old western acoustic and a Mac. Well, it was enough for Matthew Sweet to get started...

What kind of rock was I under last week to make me miss this beauty:

With Moore sitting in the audience, the Dirty Harry star said, "Michael Moore and I actually have a lot in common - we both appreciate living in a country where there's free expression.

"But, Michael, if you ever show up at my front door with a camera - I'll kill you. I mean it."

Jeeps, I can't think of many things that would fill my pants quicker than Gunny Highway telling me he was going to kill me, then adding 'I mean it' just to make sure I knew he wasn't joking.

A man's got to know his limitations, Mike.

Via Evil White Guy

Acidman is looking for somebody to blame. And, as my old boss at UPS was wont to say, nobody's gonna be getting anything done around here until we find a scapegoat. Let's play!

Gloria Steinem

She didn't invent feminism, but she certainly became the poster-girl for it. The two-income, latchkey family is at the root of a multitude of problems in America, both economically and socially.

Tom Freston

The founder of MTV. Freston's behemoth is the reason the music industry, traditionally one of America's most innovative areas, has become the sole province Gangstas telling kids not to do drugs and digitally tone-corrected dotards and dotardesses like Cher.

Bob Saget

That's right, fucker, I said Bob Saget. Goddamn Canadian bastard was actually a very funny stand-up comic at one time. But then, he turned his sights on a network job, and hit the big-time with America's Funniest Home Videos. He turned into an unfunny, maddeningly-smug little camera mugger. This opened the floodgates for 20 years of sappy, horribly unfunny television 'humor', undoing decades of hard work by the likes of Redd Foxx, Carroll O'Connor, and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. See also, Dave Coulier.

George Lucas

How the fuck can you make Star Wars suck? I mean, farting ewoks?

Paul Allen

This no-good sonofabitch was a co-founder of Microsoft, the guys who brought you Bob. Paul, being one of the co-founders of Evil Itself, is a shoo-in for this list. I would've put Gates in there, but c'mon, how could you hate that cute widdle face of his?! Paul, however, knew what Gates was up to when they founded that company, and didn't shoot him. Adding to this infamy, Paul is also directly response for MS-DOS using the backslash (\) to separate directories, instead of the forward slash as God and AT&T intended. Although I suspect most of you mouse-jockeys have never noticed such a thing, I assure you it's diabolical.

Tim Berners-Lee

As you probably know, Berners-Lee invented the World-Wide Web, and is therefore directly responsible for comment spam. Fuck you, Tim.

John F. Kennedy

I know he died before I was born, but he was responsible for the entire bad part of the 60s. He got us into Vietnam to save the French(!), and gave Generation IX something to bitch about until the present day. Inexplicably, his babies in Vietnam and Cuba are thrown into our faces every time America tries to do something good in the world, and yet every pampered playboy candidate from the Democratic side of the fence tries to waltz into the White House with his mask on. Go figure. Maybe he actually did some good by keeping the Democrats effectively out of office for 40 years? Naah.

William S. Burroughs

I liked Burroughs' first couple of books, Junky and Queer. They were gritty, gripping, and entertaining to read. But after that, he spent 50 years showing people that you don't need to be able to write to be a writer, and you don't need to be able to think to be an intellectual. Once he got his thinking cap on, all he did was bastardize literature with pop vapidness, and utterly destroyed American philosophy with hate-filled, nihilistic crypto-elitism. His material was the prototype for celebrity pseudo-intellectuals like Timothy Leary, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky. Through his association with one-hit wonders like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, he installed the backdoor through which intellectual thought slipped out unnoticed in the 60s.

Lou Gerstner

Rounding out our trio of technical goats is this sack of shit. Lou is the reason you're probably reading this page with a Microsoft browser, on a Microsoft OS, after clicking a link with an overpriced, ergonomically baffling Microsoft Mouse. You see, Lou was in charge of IBM back when they were developing my beloved operating system, OS/2. They'd successfully wrenched it from the jaws of Microsoft Perfidy (actually, Microsoft Perfidy sounds like a great name for a new product, doesn't it? Then, when you called tech support, they'd ask you, "So, do you have the latest Perfidy?" And you could respond wryly, while watching a little hourglass run out sand and turn itself over for an eternity, all because somebody else's fucking computer crashed across the office while you had a drive mapped to it, "Yes, Mr. Tech Support Guy, I do indeed have the latest Perfidy, you soulless, soulless cur."), and it was developing into an advanced, beautifully architected system which was superior in every way to its competitors from Microsoft and Apple. It should have been the OS that the computer revolution ran on. Gerstner didn't have the vision to keep OS/2 advancing, and, waiting until I'd spent about, oh, $2000 on various OS/2 versions and programs which are today about as useful as 1990 Sugar Bowl Tickets. But Gerstner didn't want to stop there! He also arranged to buy Lotus, the guys who were Office before Office, and drive them into the ground, just so the Microsoft Applications Division could sleep at night without worry that there might have been some competition out there or something. If I can figure out how Gerstner managed to destroy Novell, I'll have his ass in a cell with Martha Stewart for shady corporate skullduggery.

Jesse Jackson

I'll just let Acidman explain that one. My thoughts exactly.

Well, now, that was fun. Maybe we should reduce it to 5, though. 5's a meme; 10's almost like work.

If you think you've got some good search-engine placement, just lookie what Rube's got.

Yeah, buddy, send in the horny mexicans, there be room for evvabuddy here in El Rube's Rancho de Amore.

I would think I'd get more hits over that one. My top ten searches?

There is style, there. I'm not saying I'm disappointed, just a bit confused. Oddly enough, it looks like Apple's G5 intro got google-bombed into the #5 spot. I guess the number 3 spot on the world-wide supercomputer list is just not enough for some people.

Over at A Small Victory, they've started the ol' fat-chick/skinny-chick theoreticals up. Why in the world does anybody debate this point? The cool thing is, the extremes are out. There's people over there dredging up stories about that 300-lb. gorilla-woman they bagged in college who really wasn't that bad in the sack, and had a good heart to boot, not that I asked and oh, don't worry, I always wear my dinner on my shirt. I'm sorry, guys and gals, but if fat-mouthing gets your goat because your chick's a whale...sorry, I can't think of a good animal metaphor to end that sentence, but still, you're the one with the problem.

I wouldn't date a fat girl. They're not attractive to me, and therefore it would be silly for me to date one. I also wouldn't date this Teri Polo chick because she's a fucking actress! Have you ever talked to an actress? Jesus, it's like holding a conversation with your hand after jerking off, I mean really, thanks for the amusing lay, honey, but I've got a book to read. I need a bit more intellectual grab-ass than that. I need a girl who can talk about something that's not written in all-caps on a piece of paper after her name and a stage direction. I mean, really, up until the 1970s actors and actresses weren't even considered polite company.

So, will I be considering my possible future with Teri Polo, spending late nights drinking cheap wine and discussing with her the theological implications of the theory of relativity, and the destabilizing influence of voice recording on the natural evolution of human language? No, I doubt it.

Will I be masturbating vigorously over the upcoming Playboy spread? Yes. Yes I will. At least until the cashier at the gas station catches me.

UPDATE: Get a load of this guy at Michele's

My theory is that guys who go for girls with bodies like 11-year-old boys actually would prefer to be with 11-year-old boys.
Posted by Dirk on January 18, 2005 07:24 AM

Yes, "Dirk", because all 11-year-old boys have 36-inch hips and perky, pouting breasts with well-defined yet subtly protruding nipples, as well as expertly-manicured vaginas. My theory, Dirk, is that men who have trouble telling Playboy models from 11-year-old boys better just stay the fuck away from my nephews, that's all I'm saying.

I can't go on, just kill me now, god and sonny jesus.

Via Augie, and I don't even wanna fucking know what she was doing surfing around for MS-Pr0n, jesus, my eyes, it may well take me a while to get over this one, in fact I may just have to break into spontaneous grown-up straight-mail non-teen-beat oriented good ol' surfing for tits after this.

My eyes, to repeat. Good god-a-mighty, my eyes.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.