The German word for "snow" is Schnee.

Most of you probably know about Mac "fanboys". These are people that hang out exclusively on Apple-related websites, and wait for years on end for the application to work, for free, at the Genius Bars in Apple Stores. You need look no further than Flickr to see how far this obsession goes: People photograph themselves taking their freshly-delivered Macs out of the boxes, like the birth of the first child. This is known as OOBE-pr0n.

What you may not have known, is that there's a similarly scary stalker element for Nintendo products. These are known as Nintendo Fanbois. I have no idea what could turn somebody into one of these, seeing as Nintendo really isn't all that. But I just noticed that the Wii's are starting to arrive, and the Wii-OOBE-pr0n is coming hard and fast.

I've personally owned a few pieces of Nintendo hardware. The NES was my first console after the venerable Atari 5200; I still play my Gameboy Color when I'm sitting on the can; and I bought my GameCube just 4 months ago, the first console I've bought since the Sega Genesis in 1992. Never once have I considered myself a Nintendo 'fan'. I have no idea who Shigeru Miyamoto is supposed to be, a fact that would get me kicked out of any Nintendo fetishist's house.

But the Wii? I feel goofy enough sitting around playing games with a normally controlled console; I absolutely will not subject myself to this:

The level of ragging that I would receive from my otherwise loving, gentle sweetie is beyond measure. I will die with dignity, and avoid the Wii, methinks.

Technorati Tags: nintendo, abject humiliation, wii

Currently plodding through a Heinlein novel.

Do not edit this page

Ok, that was easy. I'm on WordPress now like every other schmoe, so notice that the URL's changed for the start page. If you don't mind, just update your links! I also cleaned up the Blogroll for a bit, so if you're not on there anymore, just lemme know!

I also toyed around with the idea of putting Google Ads on the site. I got the following answer to my inquiries:

Hello Eric,

Thank you for your interest in Google AdSense. Unfortunately, after reviewing your application, we're unable to accept you into Google AdSense at this time.

We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below.

Issues:

• Inappropriate language

Fuck.

This is the Rube's blog.  Rube is an American living in lovely Augsburg, Germany.  Let's get together and have a beer!

I'm moving over to Wordpress from Movable Type. So this blog is really going to look like ass for the next day or two.

I found this picture on my cellphone, taken at Oktoberfest in Munich this year.

Hello? Could ve maybe have ze eye-contact, Meester Rube?

Despite how hokey and contrived it is, I love Halloween. There's nothing like the chill that runs up your spine when you sit around the campfire with the weenies a-roasting, trading eerie experiences and stories about hooks hanging from car doors.

When I was a kid, I loved watching monster movies.  Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr. and Sr., they all kept me up late into the night every Friday, when Ted Turner's flagship station WTCG sent forth the Friday Night Frights on Channel 17. 

Yep, I loves me a good scary flick, and apparently Osbasso, Mr. HNT Himself, does too.  And, following Osbasso's example, I figured I'd compile an off-the-cuff list of my top 10 favorite all-time scariest monster movies.

Number 10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Freddy Krueger was a damn fine monster, end of story.  The sequels were ridiculous, but the first 'Nightmare' was an original, violent, perfect-for-high-school-date horrorfest.

Number 9: The Fog (1980)
Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Janet Leigh of Psycho fame all on one screen: Now that's some lung power.  There's more screaming in this movie than all John Capenter's other movies combined, and for good reason: This is one scary-ass slasher. The Fog is one of those forgotten classics from the great horror wave that the 70s rode out on; great but forgotten murder-fests like Dead and Buried or The Howling.  Definitely worth checking out.

Number 8: Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965)
Not really your typical horror film, but a white-knuckle piece of Southern Gothic that really gave me the heebie-jeebies when I was a kid.  To me, Bette Davis was always the loony, axe-wielding Charlotte instead of the vamp everyone else knew her as.  And the scene of the murder, the guy with the missing hand, that's pure campfire goodness right there.

Number 7: Jacob's Ladder (1990)
Good old-fashioned devils, demons, zombies, and chicks getting vaginally impaled by giant lizards.  Plus, it's Tim Robbins when he's not being a dick. The creepiest thing about this movie is probably unintentional, however, with Macaulay Culkin doing the weary-eyed man-child Gabe.

Number 6: Halloween (1978)
Still on Number 6, and already we've got two John Carpenter movies.  Halloween was the movie that started the whole Jason / Freddie / Chuckie craptaculousness that dominated the horror scene in the 1980s.  And Michael Meyers could still kick any serial killer's ass this side of Hannibal Lecter.  Which brings us to...

Number 5: Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Although billed as a psychological thriller and not as horror, any movie that can make a grown man sweat with and cover his eyes while watching people get brutally murdered is close enough for government work.  Name one thing that Jason did that was scarier than the Jame Gumb Tuck Dance *Shudder*.  Much as Halloween opened the door for the splatter movies of the 80s, 'Lambs convinced studios that making intelligent psychothrillers like Se7en and Memento could be profitable.

Number 4: The Mummy (1932)
Every other monster film from the so-called Golden Age of the 1930s up to the 1950s  is a steaming, ridiculous pile of shit next to The Mummy.  It's the only good movie that Karloff ever made, Frankenstein be damned.  Looking at Karloff getting his tongue ripped out and embalmed alive makes Lugosi's Dracula look like a Paulie Shore character.  The look on his face as they're applying the last bandages is pure terror and claustrophobic dread.  That movie still gives me nightmares, and welds me to the couch every time I see the opening title.

Number 3: Jaws (1975)
Ah, yes: Steven Spielberg, when he wasn't an ET-loving pussy.  My mom actually took me to see this when I was five years old.  My brother, who was seven, puked when the shark bit Cap'n Quint in half.  Any movie that can make a kid puke has to be high on the list.  This movie still has some of the best performances I've ever seen in a monster flick.  Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfus, and Robert Shaw: Who'd'a thunk it.

Number 2: The Thing (1982)
The third and final James Carpenter entry.  This is one of the best horror movies ever made, and the first one on this list that I bought on DVD.  Creepy crawling heads, jumping blood samples, guys getting body parts bitten off, nightmarish bugs popping out of dogs, and more slime and steamy entrails than a slaughterhouse floor, and you still never know who the bad guy was.  Man, what a ride.

Number 1: Alien (1979)
A slimy little alien chews its way out of John Hurt's stomach, flashes his silver pimp-grill at the astonished crew, and takes off into the airducts.  Monster movie gold. I saw this one at my grandmother's house in 1981, back when she was the only relative I knew who had cable television. When the Hurt threw himself on the table and started screaming, my grandmother covered my eyes so I couldn't see what was happening.  Though it was probably well-intended, the nasty-ass sound effects scared me more than the visuals probably would have.  I imagine this film is way up there on most people's lists, so I'll just leave it at that.  Best Monster Ever.

So, what does your list look like?

A couple of days ago, I was sitting in a bar that I used to consider the worst in the world. It's improved its fortunes of late, and has been overtaken by the current Worst Bar in the World by a large margin. The wait staff has changed a few times, and I believe that's the reason this bar has gotten better. It's not the fact that better people were brought in; the old staff was full of good people, mind you. I'm an optimist, and I believe that people must be corrupted before they can become bad. It's just that high turnover is just about the only way to keep a bar staff honest here in the workers' paradise. Complacence is deadly in the food service.

So, with fresh meat behind the counter and an admirably-patient clientele, fortune seemed to have been smiling of this erstwhile Worst Bar in the World. There was an English couple sitting next to me, reading through a German phrase book to order their drinks. What is the German phrase for a Slippery Nipple, you may ask? Rütschige Brustwarze, actually, but please don't order one, on the off-chance you might actually get it. They were speaking English to each other, and broken German to the barmaid, but everything was getting taken care of in order.

A couple of tables over, two German girls were discussing Great Britain, and the strange habits of its simple, hard-working folk. They were making sweeping generalizations about the Londoners, the Geordies; about their food, drinking habits, work ethic, and literature. I wondered if the two English people in the room, sitting next to me, were picking up any of their conversation, and could set them straight, or simply be amused that they're discussing it with such earnestness.

Having spent a couple of weeks in the States recently, I missed places like that: A watering hole, to be sure, but not a saloon or a meat market. There were clean tables about, and comfortable chairs, and dark corners where you could hide; a place to read, or to write, or tap away on your laptop, or just sit and think for a bit, or just be alone to have some peace of mind. They'd bring you a glass of beer, if you wanted, or leave you be, and no one seemed put out by the fact that you were sitting there watching everything, smiling, observing as it all flowed by.

In short: It was nice.

Sitting in bars, watching humanity go by. Blues music on the speakers, bar staff doing their job, or not. Drinkers sitting in the corner waiting for other drinkers, waiting for inspiration, or maybe just waiting for last call. Indicators, you could call them, annoying little Jiminy Crickets that tell you when you've had enough.

You've got to hand it to humans, they've found a common language that every one can speak. Every civilization that has ever existed has found a way to brew beer. It's probably the only human invention that can claim that. The Aztecs never even figured out the concept of the wheel, but there they were on Saturday night, getting loaded and hitting on barmaids.

I've seen a lot of shit happening in bars across the world. I've met a lot of strange characters, and taken part in that strange subculture that exists between Happy Hour and closing time. I remember sitting in a bar with a buddy back in 2000, knocking back Scotches in a late-night dive in Salzburg. We were killing time before going back to the hotel, having spent the day touring a salt mine, drinking it up, talking smack. An Austrian soldier grabbed me by the shoulder and asked, in German, if I we were Americans. Frank Sinatra was playing on an honest-to-goodness Wurlitzer in the corner, and I told him, likewise in German, we were Americans, and if he'd sit down and have a drink with us, I'd be buying.

He said he didn't speak English, but if I was buying, he'd be more than happy to rattle on and let me translate. Soldiering is a job I respect, so I figured I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. He pulled up a bar stool and sat down, clinking glasses with me and my friend, introducing himself with much effort, hi, how are you, nice to meet you, et cetera. Having exhausted his English, he turned to me, and asked if we were soldiers, too. I said, hey man, do we look like soldiers? Then he shook his head and said, "prepare for war."

Within the next five years, he explained, the world will begin to explode. Austria will close its borders, Germany and France will be overrun by immigrants and descend into civil war, and countries in the Balkans will solidify under evil rulers, and begin attacking their neighbors. Italy will be the first to fall, and its conquerors will take the war to France. Unrest would then continue to the Low Countries, Scandinavia, the Baltic Republics. At which point, Central Europe would be adrift in a sea of starvation and war that America would be slow to rescue them from.

I stared at him, a bit overwhelmed. He was drunk, that much was clear, and I began to wonder just what they taught their solders there in Austria. Then he stood up and said, Amerika ist die letztze Hoffnung, and kissed me, right on the lips. (You know, I wanted to write "but not in a gay way" right after that, but what could be gayer than kissing a dude on the lips in a bar at three in the morning?) Luckily, he sat his glass down on the bar and walked out the door, before it got to that awkward exchanging of telephone numbers and hotel key-cards stage.

My friend sitting next to me, who didn't understand a word, said "what was that all about?" I sat there silent for a moment, then said, "the guy's obviously a Sinatra fan..."

I, Rube, the blogger behind YouBitch!, am known throughout the world as a man of taste. No one is more demanding than I when it comes to what I choose to wear. And believe you me, money is no object when it comes to quality footwear. Therefore, it's a pleasure to present to you, my dear reader(s), the finest piece of footwear that I have ever owned, the Malleo Sprint Ankle Brace.

As you see, these are $172.00 well-spent. While the basic black never goes out of style, the subtle use of turquoise blue in the logo decals (which sadly peeled off the first day I was wearing it) really gives this objet d'art that much-appreciated flair! Whereas other manufacturers might include an embossed logo plate to mark up their own products, the Malleo Sprint identifies itself with quality and design. In fact, the only identifying labels left after initial use were the washing instructions sewn inside the boot, which are translated into near-perfect English right under the proud heading, "Made in China".

In order to keep the price down, Malleo eschewed such niceties as double-stitching, cotton laces, high-quality materials, metal eyelets for the laces, or hard plastic ankle supports. What remains is a sleek, flexible, and sporty ankle brace that bends with you, and will stay tied together for an impressive 15 to 20 minutes at a stretch.

In order to put things into perspective, I'll compare the Malleo Sprint Ankle Brace to the second-most expensive piece of footwear I've ever owned, the CCM Pro Tacks Sr. Ice Hockey Skates.

At $280.00, these pro-level skates have a noticeably lower price than the $344.00 that a pair of Malleo Sprint Ankle Braces would have cost. The Pro Tacks are made in the sweatshops of Ontario, using cheap Canadian labor, in contrast to the fine old-world Chinese craftsmanship of the Malleo product. Although cheaper than the Malleo Sprint, the Tacks do include some features not found in its more expensive counterpart, such as leather uppers, cotton laces, metal eyelets, superior ankle support, Kevlar shielding, and a 4mm high-carbon stainless steel blade that allows the wearer to walk on ice. The skates also provide superior ankle support to the Malleo, but all of this comes at the cost of that Malleo Style.

$172.00 for a fucking ankle brace. What kind of fucking Mafia operation is the German health-care system?!???!? I ought to sic the police on these cocksuckers for insurance fraud. There's getting fucked, and then there's getting FUCKED!

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck . Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

>:-(

These dirty, socialist, backstabbing, money-grubbing cocksuckers! I just got a bill in the mail for an ankle brace that I got from a local orthopedic place. $172.00 for an ankle brace.

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FFFFFFFF
UUUUUUUUUUU
CCCCCCCCCCCC
KKKKKKKKK
!!!!!!!!

F.U.C.K!

fuckity fuck fuck fuck
damn!

For no reason, I present you now with a list of (at this time) 189 movies that are banned in Malaysia.

OK, Team America and Dogma I can understand. But Ally McBeal? Schindler's List!??!? What bunch of Nazis would ban Schindler's List?

Anyone who's been there will recognize this scene. Cigarettes and coffee, bullshit and ammunition, the things that make a visit to the Straight White Guy the hoot that it always is.

Eric and Fiona were, as always, the consummate host and hostess, making sure there were enough ribs to go around.

Brothers and sisters, I'm here to tell you, those things were tasty. As a recent convert to the pleasures of the flesh, any flesh, I was like a child at Disneyland, eyes wide with wonder. That mess o' ribs was easily enough for ten people, and we three just about finished them off. Eric was dogging it, focusing as he was on the biscuits, otherwise we would've had them. The evening continued comfortably, owing to a pleasant meat-eater's high and a bottle of 12 year old Scotch that, sadly, didn't survive the night.

The next morning, after the pork hangover wore off, Eric and I did get a chance to double-team the lovely, topless, and above all discreet Sylvia.

(apparently, discreet has a whole different shade of meaning in other cultures)

Although the plan was to go out shooting, the closest we got was eating cheeseburgers outside the range, as documented by Eric.

It was a beautiful day; nothing ventured, but much gained, if only in the area of lazy whiling that we all too often forget to explore. And besides, I've heard that getting your clock cleaned at the pool table builds character.

As you might have gleaned from my last post, I'll be flying to America tomorrow. Normal warnings to potential terrorists apply. I'll be in the North Georgia/Atlanta area until October 24th. Anybody up for a beer? Send me an email or write a comment, and maybe we can organize an ad hoc blogmeet.

The first time I met Ken, in May of 1994, he scared me to death. Walking up the stairs to his office, the top floor of a storefront in the old downtown of Norcross, Georgia, I felt like I was entering a haunted house. The walls were alarmingly slanted; as I walked up, the steps creaked, the lights were out, and, despite the hot summer outside, the interior of the building was cloaked in gloom and seemed cold, somehow. I was there for a job interview.

The door to the office stood open, the spooky half-light revealing two rooms that were stacked high on all sides with dusty old pieces of computer equipment, ten years obsolete or obviously broken. There was a blonde sitting at the reception desk, filing her nails like Sam Spade's secretary in the Maltese Falcon. I introduced myself, and asked where I could find the boss.

She pointed at a dark hole in the wall, a doorway without a door, beyond which lay a dark room, strobe-lit by the sputtering of a faulty flourescent light fixture. I walked slowly toward it, and warily poked my head inside. At the far end of the room sat a dark shape, half-obscured by a desk piled high with old floppy drives, ribbon cables, and tabloid-sized computer magazines, still in the cellophane mailing wrappers. A swing-armed lamp switched on behind the stacks, and an enormous pony-tailed hippy-head leaned round it, eyeglasses reflecting the white, pulsing light. "Well, hey there! You must be Eric", boomed a radio-announcer voice. "Well, yes I am," I answered. That's when I noticed there were two gigantic Doberman pinschers about three feet away from where I was standing, staring at me like I was a six foot Milk Bone. That's pretty much how it went for the next six years.

Our little company was called NSS, Inc. You've probably never heard of it, but it was the best computer support company in Georgia at the time. We had customers spread from Rockmart to Savannah, made up of people that taught the blind to use computers, or examined old men's prostates, or maybe built fuel tanks for F-14s. At any given time, we were supporting over 2000 seats. We helped our customers transition from DOS and UNIX workstations to Linux and Mac and Windows NT; we showed them what email was, and what it was good for. We explained to them what then-cryptic acronyms meant, like WWW and Y2K. The tech world is never what you might call stable, but the 1990s was a frantic time to be the computer guy. We were a 2-man operation, and we helped usher in the Internet revolution.

And that was only during work hours. Any time we weren't screwing computers together or crimping 10base2 connectors, we were discussing anything and everything. Ken had an amazing grasp of history, logic, and rhetoric; and more importantly, he had the talent to apply concepts across disciplines. He could use aristotelean logic to figure out what was causing a Novell server to abend. In the same vein, he once explained to me an elegant and sophisticated Libertarian system of government using a Token Ring network diagram as a visual aid. He had a talent for abstracting a concept, transmitting it through time and space, and rematerializing it unharmed in a completely different setting. All this happened as an aside to our real job. During lunch hour, or the time between calling it a day and actually leaving the office, that's where the real magic of NSS happened.

Pretty early on, Ken stopped being just a boss, and became what you might call a mentor. The amazing discussions that we had taught me how to truly understand what I was doing, and what it meant in the greater context of life. I quickly understood that the processes I learned could be reduced to principles and applied to anything. I had acquired a lever that could truly move mountains, that of applied rationality. And I had never even imagined such a thing until I met Ken.

For six years, we spent every workday together, but we never saw each outside the office. Although I was a heavy drinker at the time, and Ken had an impressive cabinet full of single malt Scotch behind his desk, we never had a drink together, not a drop. I knew that he had a gun-safe in the server room, stocked with a legendary array of firearms, from Uzi to Desert Eagle. Or maybe he didn't; I never saw him open it, and didn't really want to. It was all about the work, the conversations, and the intellectual boxing matches that I always lost, to good effect.

Over the years, he has been a huge influence on me. His intelligence, knowledge, and clarity have been an inspiration, and can serve as an example to us all of how men should be. I wouldn't be half the man I am today had it not been for the time I spent with him as a part of NSS, and I would like nothing more right now than to shake his hand and tell him, thank you, with all my heart.

Ken Ashbaugh died last Sunday, at the age of 56. His services will be held Saturday, October 14th, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I've booked my flight from Munich to Atlanta, and will be there to pay my respects to this most remarkable man.

Hot-linking is the embedding of other people's content in your own web page, usually without attribution. You do it, for example, when you copy the URL of an image and paste it into the code of a blog post. Instead of hosting that image yourself, you're basically stealing someone else's bandwidth to display something.

I don't really mind people hotlinking my stuff. I get a lot of referrers from forums, for example. People link to a lot of stuff from my sketchbook pages, despite the generally low quality of the drawings. I usually let it slide.

But for some reason, I just couldn't help myself when it came to these guys. The general douchebaggery of the page made it irresistible. Hint: Check out 'Hobbies'. They'd loaded this picture from my server on their page without asking. They won't notice it, either, at least until their browser cache expires.

I could've done worse; just ask A-Heldin. She learned the hard way.

Love is, as they say, a many-splendored thing. A man's dealings with the fairer sex are the sweetener that makes his life bearable. It gives us dignity and hope, and keeps us in line when we'd rather be smashing chairs over each other in a swinging-door saloon with straw on the floor.

But a man's psyche troubles him sometimes. There's a bitter feeling, not quite jealousy, really, more like an undignified curiosity, that creeps into his head. How do I stack up? What's she really thinking? Does she sometimes say to herself, in tender moments, "wow, that was a good orgasm, but not quite as good as that one time, when that muscle-bound bartender did that thing with his thumb..."? It's not that we, as men, begrudge her past orgasms or anything. I mean, we're glad she had them. Why shouldn't she? But still, it's the male brain's duty to throw shit like that around when it doesn't have anything productive to take care of.

Men generally have only two problems with women: They're not virgins when you get them, and they don't die when you lose them. With exceptions, of course. Coming to terms with either of these things seems nigh impossible for the male ego. Luckily, nature has compensated for this by making men borderline autistic. As long as we aren't directly confronted by the history or future of our women, we're pretty good at convincing ourselves they don't exist.

Some guy in her past had more money than you; some guy had a bigger johnson than you; and some guy had better moves in the sack than you.

And you know what? That guy was probably me.

When I was a kid, Georgia looked a lot different than it does today. In addition to speaking English, we also had a different flag. Here's the old Georgia flag that I grew up under:

Now, the astute among you will discern a certain element to this flag that is a bit, shall we say, politically incorrect. This flag was introduced in 1956, and incorporated the Confederate Battle Flag, last seen in the Late Unpleasantness. This was done, legend has it, as a response to the growing Civil Rights Movement.

Fast-forward a bit to the Clinton presidency. Having our first black president, it became fashionable to declare the struggle for Civil Rights won, and for the Southern states to slowly divest themselves of Confederate symbolism. In 2001, drunk with the spirit of reconciliation and brotherhood, Georgia started flying a more neutral flag, reminiscent of its antebellum flag.

Attractive, if a bit hard to get tattooed on your biceps. As a compromise between the banjo-playing Beatty-rapers and the Freaknikers, the Confederate Flag lost its prominent place, but remained hidden in the footnotes. After 9/11, people began complaining that the Confederate Battle Flag, a symbol of violence and sedition against the U.S., had no place on an official American symbol. So, Georgia once again replaced their flag with a more neutral version.

Now, many people mistakenly call the Confederate Battle Flag the "Stars and Bars." In fact, it's hard to say the words without the same Southern drawl that Uncle Jesse used when he said it. But the Stars and Bars was actually the official National Flag of the Confederacy, and looked like this:

Now, let me get this straight: Instead of displaying the Battle Flag as a part of the State Flag, Georgia actually adopted the entire Confederate National Flag? You crackers aren't even trying any more.

The question I'm struggling with is whether to forsake the Confederate Navy Jack, and remove it from my backpacks. I wear it as a person who's proud to be from the Southern U.S., but I've been called out on it a couple of times. And when you look at it realistically, what exactly is it about that flag that I'm proud of in the first place?

Dear Sony,

It's not exactly good word-of-mouth advertising when your products explode while sitting on people's laps. And it's not exactly helping matters when one of the victims is the main developer of Linux.

Luckily, no bikini-girls were harmed in this incident.

Well, looks like everybody's favorite future Worst Public Defender Ever had a hell of a weekend. There's something you don't see every day, unfortunately.

The Bastidge is in Baghdad. What the Hell's he doing there, anyway?

Sometimes people say things that make you want to pop 'em right on the nose. For example, last night after baseball practice two guys are talking next to me, and the one guy says, "yeah, Fahrenheit 9/11 sure is a helluva movie, ain't it?" Wow, it'd been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten what a hair-trigger Michael Moore button I have till someone pushed it.

Do people around suspect that there's a libertarian in their midst? My secret shame...I wonder if I'm going to have to register myself on some webpage somewhere?

You know what Eric's really afraid of?

Can't say I blame him, though it would never occurred to me. You may think this makes Eric one sick puppy, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Unless, of course, it's chilly out. Got a reputation to keep, here, not only for myself. For America. But if this comes true, oh buddy:

The Gebühreneinzugszentrale (the fee collecting central office or GEZ) is now even coming under direct fire from German industry and other groups for its ridiculous plans to introduce computer fees starting next January. You can listen to the radio and watch TV with your PC now, get it? Pretty much everybody here, the politicians, as well (for once), see this move to milk anybody who owns a PC connected to the Internet (are there PCs still out there that aren’t?) for over 5 euros a month as an idea that is, well, not a very good one. The politicians won’t budge quite yet, but that might just change any day now.

As Clarsonimus points out, it'll pretty much be a cold day in Hell before they shut down the milking machines, but still. The GEZ-verbrecher getting the tar-and-feathers treatment makes for a nice dream, doesn't it?

I have to admit, those are indeed some great-looking racks.

My favorite?

But are they real?

click for full size

Art is the residue of passion. That's what I read, anyway, in an old National Lampoon cartoon, the punch-line of which was, "OK, so you get to sleep on the 'art' spot." Low-brow, to be sure; but in every ham-handed, proletarian joke there's a nugget of truth. And a Jew.

There's a lot of things that keep my brain occupied, and I don't understand the half of them. Sometimes, it's like there's some brilliant novelist from the 1930s sitting next to me, spouting clever saws about brandy or the unwashed masses and urging me to use that line in my next blog post. Other times, it's like an old college buddy asking me what I've been doing with myself the last 15 years. I keep explaining, and although it makes sense to me, he just doesn't get it.

The tops of my feet are numb. I can't feel a thing on them. I usually notice it when I'm laying in bed; I can feel the covers on my toes, but the tops of my feet tingle, and don't feel the sheets sliding over them. I'm not sure what you do with an anomaly like that. It's not like you need to feel the tops of your feet or anything. But I take it as a symptom of a larger problem. Two weeks ago, I tore the ligaments in my ankle at baseball practice, and had to go to the doctor. When I was there, decided I'd ask the doctor about the numbness, and see if it rang any alarm bells. He told me that it would be 'highly irregular' for someone my age to have connection problems between the spine and foot, and we left it at that.

When I was 18, I dislocated my hips from my spine. I think it happened during ice hockey practice, with a bad hip check. I didn't realize it until the free-floating spinal column moved a half-inch to the left and cut off communications to everything below my waist. I was in my dorm room at Georgia Tech, at eight o'clock in the morning, getting ready for class. Having just gotten out of bed, I was walking around in my boxers, which coincidentally were covered in red hearts, and gathering my books for my calculus class. I leaned over my desk, and lost all feeling in my legs. I fell backward onto the floor, and couldn't move. A minute or two later, my friend from across the hall walked in to see if I was ready for the long walk to class. I was laying on the floor in my underwear with a sheaf of notes in my hand, my legs pinned backward under me, and I just kind of looked at him. "Close the door, and don't tell anybody," I remember saying. He walked in, and closed the door behind him. Taking my hand, he pulled me off my legs and onto my stomach. Suddenly, I could feel my legs again, and I stood up. I skipped calculus class that morning. I climbed back into bed and covered my face for the rest of the day.

So now, maybe I should get a second opinion. The novelist in my brain is also, unfortunately, a hypochondriac. He tells me the doctors in these days don't know what they're talking about. Of course, he comes from an age when doctors prescribed cocaine as a 'pick-me-up' and actually had an official cause of death named 'Old Age'.