Every now and then, you're just cruising along, reading posts and drinking your beer, and the you come across something so foul, so hideous, so dizzyingly revolting you have to read it twice.

Quite often, that something has sentences like this in it:

She had about 8 inches of calf tongue hanging out of her...crotch

At Stevie's place, you never know what you're gonna get. And no, it's not a guest post by Velociman, I already checked.

That means new hotness, currently being announced at the Expo in San Francisco, and which will shortly be available in the Apple online store. No matter what you hear, don't let me near a credit card 'til the storm blows over, and the Keynote is but a mem'ry.

(Click to play)
Autobahn Fun!

The little lady and I watched the last 20 minutes of The Peacemaker last night. I'm aghast at the temerity involved, the balls you would have to have, to resolve a movie's climax with two people sweating over a timebomb as it counts down to zero, debating which wire to pull, and defusing it just in time. I would personally fund a university study, up to about 8 bucks and change, to determine how many movies include this tired old plot device; which movie was the first that used it; and what sort of dried-up, talentless hack dared put it into a multi-million dollar movie in the 1990s. They were using that crap weekly on CHiPs, for the love of Pete.

I also see on IMDb that the two writing credits, both somewhat appropriately named Cockburn (1,2), have exactly one (1) writing credit each, that being this film. Here's a tip fellows: Write every movie as if it were your last, because if you write this kind of bullshit despite having the kind of budget this film obviously had (they blew up a church!), it will be your last. How about letting the bomb go off and destroying New York? Too challenging for the average soccer mom? It worked for Somersby.

With the state of Hollywood being what it is, you can ignore the first and last 30 minutes of any movie you pick, and use that time to go take a dump, or smoke a cigarette, or, at least here in Germany, go back to the concession and buy yourself a well-earned beer. You're going to need it with shit like this to wade through. For shame.

I'll be taking my mom to see King Kong tonight, the English version of which is running at the local mall cinema tonight. At least here I know what I'm getting, and expectations are low. And there hero dies at the end, which isn't too much to ask for.

Let's take a look at the resolutions I made last year:

1. I did in fact make a half-assed attempt to stop smoking in early July. Check.
2. I called my mom once or twice. And anyway, she's over here now, so what the hell.
3. I visited Europe this year, for basically the whole year.
4. I think Jeckyll took care of this one for me.
5. I don't want to think about number 5. I had to throw that spoon away.
6. Number 6, oh, yeah, that was fun. I need to do that more often.
7. Too much.
8. Not enough.
9. Juussssst right.
10. Didn't come up, unfortunately, but I was prepared.

So so, 9 out of 10 ain't bad for a list of New Year's Broken Promises. Let's see what kind of softballs I throw myself for 2006!

shot00106

Originally uploaded by skben2003.

For some reason I just uploaded all my Doom 3 screenshots to fckrl, or fckler, or however it is you say that.

Share and Enjoy!

I'll have to be trying this out: QuickSynergy.

I walked down to the store today, to pick up sundries for the festivities tonight. As my mom's in town visiting us, I'll be making some of hometown favorites: Southern cornbread, green beans, a little bit o' Rube's nearly-famous homemade honey-mustard slathering for the salad, and a case of König Ludwig Dunkel, one of Germany's best dark beers.

As my lovely lady and I are walking down the street with a case of said beer in hand, an old man, dressed like a scruffy lumberjack and with a nose like an unpeeled artichoke, teeters up to us and breathes "Hey, there, mate, howzabout a nice Christmas beer for an old man!" in my stony, emotionless face. Of course, I told him to go fuck himself, seeing as Christmas is over and even if it weren't I'd rather stomp his face with my ice skates on than give him a beer that I'm going to use on New Year's Eve to pamper my guests, you COCK. SUCKER. What's up with these rotten sons of bitches? As if their desire to get 'faced was all the inspiration I'd need to suddenly renounce all property rights and give whatever I was carrying to whomever came up and asked for it first. What the fuck do I look like, asshole, Gandhi? Get your own goddam beer.

Man, I've got to stop reading all those Ayn Rand books.

I've been trying to read this post for the last 30 minutes now, but I just can't seem to get past the words, "a more aggressive form of all-out ass-probing", at which point my mind seems to wander. Can someone summarize that for me?

In the early days of computer gaming, most all games had a feature called the 'Boss Key'. This was actually a stroke of genius for whoever it was that came up with it. Basically what it did was whenever you pressed a certain key, usually escape, it would instantly pause the game, turn off the sound, and replace the screen with a picture of productive work, for example a spreadsheet with generic figures and headings.

The purpose of this, of course, was for that moment when you realized the boss was coming, you could quickly hit escape, start looking thoughtfully back and forth between a piece of paper and the faux spreadsheet and saying things like, 'looks good, looks good' and the boss would be none the wiser that not only were you stealing the bread from his mouth so you could play F19 instead of doing the job you were getting paid to do, but you were smugly, intentionally playing him for the fool while doing it.

The Boss Key is just a fond memory, nowadays. I guess it's because back then, computers capable of playing games were too expensive to be found in the home, so people just played games at work while the boss wasn't looking. But nowadays, everybody's got a honker of a computer at home, file-sharing software, and a broadband connection. What we need is a Wife Key. It would have the same function as the boss key, ideally. You could hit a keystroke combination, ctrl-alt-escape, for example, and that would instantly replace a screen full of midget porn and video sex-chats with, I don't know, the sports page or whatever it is that's also available on the web.

Or maybe it would be better the other way around. It would replace the 25 tabs of political blogs and stock quotes you constantly stare at with a full-screen video of Sylvia Saint (NOT safe for work, Kim) getting banged in every hole but the left nostril. At least then, your wife wouldn't suspect you of being the sad, sexless husk of a man the Internet has made you. Just a thought.

It's snowin', snowin', snowin' outside, and the Mom's coming over to visit us for Christmas. There'll probably be some dead animals on the table in a day or two, as well as some sort of songs about...something or other. It'll be just like in the old days.

And we've got a kickass tree, and little gingerbread people in the title bar. It's all about the yule here that the palatial new youbitch secret headquarters.

That's the Jakober Gate, right outside here, and it's a manly gate, as the sisters are writing in their blog whence this picture was stolen. St. Jakob, I think, discovered it on his way to find the holy grail in pamplona in the 1930s, unless I'm not mistaken.

You are a Social Liberal (61% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (85% permissive) You are best described as a: Capitalist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

via Zealot, who is a simpering, bed-wetting communist.

How the hell can anyone bring a child into a world where you can't even buy a fucking coffee pot that doesn't dribble all over the goddam counter?!

Dammit.

I realize this is like asking Albert Einstein for a game of checkers, but would y'all mind going over to the UW Daily Cardinal and reading this article?

And, friends, don't forget to click on "Respond to Article" down at the bottom. This is the future of journalism, folks.

We got our first real dusting of the year last night. The cold grey coffin-lid of winter has officially closed down on Europe, and it looks like we'll be getting plenty of snow this year. And I'm working at home now, tap-tapping away at the keyboard, sleeping at my desk, looking balefully at the phone when it rings, and the rest of the time at the depressing, watery light outside. It makes me wish I had a son to chase around the hedgemaze with an axe.

Oh, and the white trucks are back.

before moving to Europe.

Two words: Dog Tax.

Hi there, people of Rubonia. I'm sorry I haven't written in a while, but you know how it is, with things piling up on the desk of life, as the secretary of life bitches you out for not calling your mother and forgetting little Timmy's birthday, and why don't you get off your ass of life and call some customers instead of sitting around in your underwear, downloading porn and listening to Nine Inch Nails and Devo mash-ups with that stupid vacant grin on your gob. Well, you know what, secretary of life? Clean out your desk, you're fired, I'm sick of lookin' at ya.

So, now it's just me, here in the palatial new YouBitch offices, wondering what my next move is going to be. There is that certain tingly excitement you feel in your gut at such times. There's opportunity behind every loss, surely, you have the chance to take it, all of it, as much as your greedy, ambitious little hands can grab. There's nothing holding you back. But there's also nothing pushing you forward, at least, nothing from outside. You're on your own, little Rube; you can flap your arms all you want to in space, but it won't move you an inch; that shit don't work in a vacuum. Up there, you can fly faster by breaking wind than spreading your wings. It's why rockets will get you to the moon, but airplanes won't. It's the ugly side of Zen.

Need a ctrl-alt-delete within a Windows Remote Desktop Connection? Hit ctrl-alt-end. I wish I'd known that sooner.

Need to reboot a Linux machine that's lost it's hard drives, giving you the unenviable error message:
"I/O Error: /sbin/reboot"?

type the following two commands into the terminal:

echo "1" > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
echo "b" > /proc/sysrq-trigger

And I'll be damned, it reboots.

Also good for giggles on fileservers and such; but really only during peak times.

So, I was sitting at the trainstop tonight, on my way home from work, listening to a podcast of Nightline on my iPod, in which they covered the spreading avian flu epidemic and, jumpin' jehosephat, we all gonna die. But I knew that. However, they had sound bites of Chimpy McHitler doing a couple of press conferences, and I'll be damned if he doesn't butcher this one even worse than nuclear. Did you know we're sitting on a pandemic of Èvian Flu? If you've ever wondered what the French were doing to contribute to the end of mankind as we know it, aside from accordion music, now you know.

I swear, the boy's sounding more like a cross between John Wayne and Emily Litella with every passing sentence. In a matter of months, he'll be giving the State of the Union address, and will sign off $200 billion to preserve our natural racehorses.

People, I'd soon shit as look at ya, as my dear departed grandfather was fond of saying to us grandchillens. There's just nothing quite as awe-inspiring as a good ol' blue funk at the beginning of the week. Today, despite being Tuesday, was Monday here in Germany, for all intents and purpose. The long weekend was over, and I enjoyed three days of true sloth, the likes of which I've not enjoyed for quite some time here. Yesterday was the Tag der deutschen Einheit, or German Re-unification Day, and therefore a holiday. I don't have a television at the moment, so I'm not quite sure how the yokels down in dogpatch celebrated, or if they celebrated. The closest I've heard to someone marking the occasion was a documentary on the Columbine massacre that was on one of the state-run television channels last night; I guess replaying the awe-inspiring "Tear down this wall" speech would've been regarded as sycophantic. They could've maybe just shown the thousands of Pershing II protesters instead of Reagan, just to be fair. I mean, despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, there wasn't just bottomless love and gratitude for Reagan here in the 80s; there were also some nay-sayers.

So, 15 years later, what have we got here? The Wessies (West Germans) hate the Ossies (East Germans), the Ossies are all Nazis, the country's being run into the ground by Greens and Socialists, and Rube's got a headache to complement his weird-ass earache. And the beer? Color me unimpressed. Sell me on it, people, it takes more than beer to offset an 80% tax burden. This isn't really blowing my skirt up. Maybe it's time for an "OK, Mr. Gorbatchev, you can put that wall back up" speech, and a new Cold War to stir the drink. Gorby's going to be here in Augsburg on Saturday, so maybe I'll give it a shot.

I'll soldier on. Europe's OK, despite my visceral hatred of cold weather and accordions.

Who do you want to be? I'm pretty happy with who I am, all things considered. I mean, the joints are getting a little too creaky to be right where I want to be. I get earaches a lot. Earaches? When the hell did that start. I seem to recall something about an earache the last time when I was 10 years old, in Washington, watching a Caps game. During a raucous pre-game pillowfight in the hotel, I was blindsided viciously by one of the other running-men, and fell ear-first into the corner of the nightstand. Screaming children, dancing lights before my eyes, and an eardrum gushing blood onto the bed, from what I can remember. But there's a groove for you; I didn't even need alcohol back then to pull the ol', "Hey y'all, watch this!" It just happens naturally to children, without the need for finely-aged and/or -brewed refreshments, like, say, your run-of-the-mill blog meet, with bullwhips and such.

But somehow the earache lain in wait for two-and-a-half decades, ready to pounce. I've been sick for about 3 weeks now, which really isn't like me. Normally, I've got an iron constitution, seeing as over the years I've built up an environment of toxins in my body that's inhospitable to your average germ varmint. To all life, really. The soupy buildup of nicotine, alcohol, and stress toxins in my blood would put the post-Katrina sludge in New Orleans to shame, just wait until the Rube-Tsunami hits, then let's see Curious George wriggle out of the media storm that follows. "Rube: What Went Wrong?"

Yeah, well, enough about that shit. On with the show. I'm not getting any younger, despite the wash of childhood diseases and injuries that may yet wait around the corner on my walk home tonight.

What? The Braves won the division? It's like baseball season is on fast-forward every year. I didn't see a single game since April. Damn.

Man o man, I can't believe they actually did that this year, with that bunch o' bums they were fielding in April. But then, ever since Cox started beating his wife when the team loses, the Bravos seemed to have stepped it up a notch. For Ms. Cox' sake.

More and more, it seems to me that there's nothing new or innovative in life. I think the more you understand something, the less you enjoy it. Take computers, for example. I understand computers. I've been working on them now almost thirty years, ever since my first home job, the risible Texas Instruments TI 994/A. My second computer was the much more suitable Mattel Aquarius, replete with 16K expansion board. 16K? I remember thinking it was the shit, something I could never even dream of filling up. Consider the following BASIC program:

10 ? "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10

That's about 25 bytes, and also about the extent of my BASIC programming abilities at the age of 11. I remember there was this other kid in my sixth grade class who also had an Aquarius. I remember him bitching because he only had the 4K expansion, and he didn't have any room left in memory for the data sets that he used in the Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG he'd programmed on it. I would have loaned him mine, but I was humiliated into lying that my flight simulator was almost finished, so sorry, no dice.

In the eighth grade, I took my first computer-oriented course at school, which was called "Business Computing on the Apple ][". I'm not exactly sure what eight-graders are supposed to understand about business computing, or what we were supposed to think of the cleverly hackerish use of square brackets for the roman numerals in the Apple ]['s name, but I was nonetheless intimidated into swearing that I would never buy a computer, much less one that had the colors of the international homosexual conspiracy brazenly embedded in a fruit. Subtle it ain't, the old Apple logo. Instead, I would live my life in buckskin trousers and shoot at revenuers with my kentucky windage, wishing for simpler times when men were men, and night was dark. Which of course is why I'm now a UNIX system administrator, and write blog entries in bars on my Apple laptop.

So nowadays, I understand that every laptop is basically a remix of different off-the-shelf parts, with a selection of the available software, as money allows, nothing special. There's only the capacity of hard drives, the speed of the processor, and the amount of RAM installed that make any dent. It's all the same shit. There are many computer companies, but only a few huge factories that pump out the shit that they all build into their computers. There is no wonder, no joy, mystery to any of it.

This principle applies to everything in life. At least, it applies to anything built after the second world war. German engineers are no better than the Americans anymore, they all use the same CAD software to get their shit done, and, with the Internet, there are no magical metallurgical formulas, no secret underground laboratories, no oil fields in the Balkans that make a difference, only Google results. Nowadays, there's only the price of commodities on the global market, the intricacies of international currency markets, and the sewing together of the same, tired old components by some poor saps in Taiwan for each and every manufacturer in each and every field of business, be it shoes or MP3 players.

Depressing.

[22:20]
I'm giving the New Worst Bar in the World a second chance tonight. For about the eighth time now, I guess. These guys are the worst of the worst. They're even worse than I remembered, and that was bad enough. I've been sitting here now for about 10 minutes, and they haven't even acknowledged my presence. There's 4 chicks behind the bar, just a-wiping them counters, a-polishing them glasses, and a-wasting my fucking time. I guess I keep coming back out of morbid curiosity, of the literal kind. I've got to see how long it takes for this place to die off.

Atrocious service. There's an entire floor of guests here where I'm sitting, and we all came in about the same time. Probably about 10 people. There's no way they could've missed us, and anyway, I'm sitting on the railing, with my sizeable noggin in plain view of God and everybody. Let's watch...

[22:30]
Welp, still high and dry here. The staff have, in the meantime, made a perfunctory round of the lower floor down there. They didn't bother to put out their cigarettes to do it though, just left them burning in the ashtrays. Never a good sign. I'll light a cigarette and see what happens.

[22:35]
Cigarette's out. Somebody's coming up the stairs, oh wait! She's got a notepad with her! She's either a waitress or a reporter, and either one would suit my purposes at this point. Meanwhile, more customers are grousing around and looking nervously over their shoulders, the silence of the taps a deafening presence in the room. My hatred hangs over this place like a cloud. Thalia Bar and Grill, I am your own personal Simon Wiesenthal, you worthless, arrogant bunch of fucks.

[22:39]
The reporter took my drink order. I ordered a beer, and I'm anxious to see if she fucks it up. That would be just like the AFP to do something like that. Arrogant Cowboy American Orders Mai Thai, Asks Twice for 'Cute Little Umbrella'. It's a sting, I fucking knew it. I will bring this place down around their ears. The Duke would.

[22:41]
After leaving something on my table that most certainly looked like a beer, the waitress was unresponsive to my admittedly lukewarm thank-you. Fucking narc.

[23:30]
This fucking bitch. She only came up one more time, and that was to clear off another table, and then she went back down without asking if I needed another beer. I guess I don't, seeing as I've gotten attached to this one, as spending an hour with a beer brings you closer to it. I shall shit upon this bar, its name will be stricken from every card, from every column, and every positive blog entry I ever wrote about it, should there actually be any. The Thalia Movie Bar and Grill is, without a doubt, the worst bar in the world.

I'm in a chatty mood tonight. That may very well be because it's Sunday, and Sunday in Augsburg means Biscuits à la Rube, and Grits au Fromage. Such breakfasts are good starts to any day, even when served at 4:30 in the afternoon, in filthy pajamas.

So, what shall we talk about? Let's talk about the weather. In a cruel turn of fate, the weather finally got warm the week after the kids went back to school. Fuck 'em. Treats them right for living in the arctic circle. Move back to the world, kids, there's sunshine and hurricanes.

Ok, that's the weather. Let's talk shop. I got a steady gig now, which doesn't take much time, and doesn't pay all that badly. I'm self-employed, so whenever a steady source of income shows up, it's always welcome. It doesn't quite make up for the 2 and half months of project work that I just did for which I didn't get paid, but it makes telling certain customers to go fuck themselves that much easier.

I actually worked for one customer for up to 60 hours a week for the last two months. Even though I relaxed my normally-exorbitant hourly rates for the sake of customer relations, the bills are running up into the tens of thousands. Thing is, I haven't seen a dime of that money yet, and the way things are looking further upstream, I don't think I'll ever see any of the money. The other party, who's basically doing sales for the project while I do the work, has decided that almost all of the customers we've been servicing like overworked whores lately are 'Reference Customers', who will be useful down the road for bringing in other customers, and therefore won't get billed. Which means I won't see any money from them at all. Which means I'm pretty much figuring out whether or not spending time in the big house is worth the ass-whipping I'd like to lay on my salesman. Still too close to call.

The press might want to stop trying to milk this one.

Mama Moonbat and Her Multitudes

30 people? I've had orgies bigger than that, and I don't recall getting phone calls from Murdoch over it, either. In fact, through most of the "summer" here, there was some sad-assed march against the Hartz IV welfare reforms, which involved somehow making people actually fill out more forms to keep getting unemployment checks. Every Monday night, the teeming masses of about 20 or 30 people would march through the town square to the train station, with some buffoon up front shouting rhyming missives about Schröder or something through a megaphone. And I always wondered to myself, usually through a beery haze, if he really saw himself as some sort of revolutionary figure, with the streaming red banners of the International Communist Conspiracy waving all about, black confetti falling from the medieval buildings around them, as the oppressed volk breathe a sigh of relief that they finally have a voice. Instead, I mean, of the 20 or 30 bongo-playing dopeheads who were shouting, incoherently, his dumbass rhymes back at him, to the derisive hootin' and hollerin' of the Monday-night Maximilian-Strasse promenaders, with the intention of getting their $2000.00 a month benefits extended past the 3-year limit.

What a bunch of fucking parasites.

Just in case y'all missed it, the photos from the wedding are up. The bachelor party photos have yet to clear customs, ahem.

And speaking of Herr Doktor Probst, he's got his own blog now. Check it out. I'm sure we'll be seeing more from him, as soon as the monkey-in-the-mirror 'Test' posts scroll out of the way.

Mutual friend Martin Bruch also has an interesting blog, as long as you're a Mac weenie like me.

This is perhaps the most beautiful, romantic thing I've ever read (NSFW):

Ladies, find the ugliest man you know (and my e-mail address is linked on the right) and I'll assure you that you'll soon forget where your clitoris ends and his tongue begins. Within hours, you'll be thinking that you breeched birthed and adut male.

From skippystalin, of course.

Hope their sites can stay online after the vicious Bitchdotting they're getting here.

If anyone ever tries to tell you that open-xchange is worth the trouble, kick them in the nuts. Hard.

Upon describing me as "mature":

That wasn't really the word I was looking for, but I couldn't find any nicer synonyms for "old" in the thesaurus.

Man, I'm tired, but I can finally relax a little, now that I'm down to my one or two nightly cocktails, instead of the caligulan excesses I've been subjected to of late. The preceding week was a grueling, besotted blur that I strongly believe will make me rethink my entire position on alcohol. Ok. Yep. Good point, Mr. Oblongata. Ok, I continued, nodding thoughtfully while clamping the unlit pipe between my well-formed incisors, I do believe you've got a point after all.

Alcohol is a funny thing, as long as your definition of funny has a lot in common with Hermann Goering's. For us drunkards, it's an almost unbearable hit parade of mortifying moments that accompanies even the most insincere, shallow attempts at soul-searching. Again and again, it makes you pose the question to yourself that we've all had to try and wrestle at one point or another, namely: What the fuck was I thinking? I lost my goddamn cell phone in the drunken haze last week. I loved that cell phone, sort of. I realize now that I'm in the market fer one a em's sexy iTunes phones, but, honestly, I'd rather have a Nano. In fact, I'd rather have even a fool's hope that I'll have enough money to buy smokes for another glorious month o' puffin', but I don't, so I guess I'm not so much in the market fer as I am up shit creek without a paddle in the absence of.

I lost my phone during a 300-yard long, meandering stumble home from the bachelor party. I know that I didn't leave it in the night club, because I remember making a phone call or two on my way home. I'd called my lusty companions, asking them if they'd check around the club and see if they could find my digital camera, which was missing, and bring it to safety. I then called my baby, and let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I would be home within an hour, 300 yards being what they are at 5:30 in the morning, and that hopefully she hadn't forgotten the earplugs I'd recommended she buy, lest my easily-foreseen yet completely unavoidable sawing and clearing of the rainforest disturb her for the 2 or 3 hours that I would actually be allowed to remain in bed, owing to the 9 o'clock meeting I'd cleverly scheduled for the next morning. When I was wrenched from my snoring paradise by Satan's Alarm Clock, I was sadly without a phone, yet, remarkably, with my digital camera in my pocket. Had I actually been talking to my friends and loved ones on the camera? How very, very David Lynch.

But let's not forget the human costs. I almost punched out some rummy hobo in a bar for hitting on my sweet baby Saturday night, after a boozy pub crawl. He was drunk, and my sweet baby was looking very sweet indeed, but there ain't more than one rummy hobo who's laying on hands around here, and that rummy hobo is me, buddy. I don't suppose the late hour or the gigantic bar-tab had anything at all to do with my rush to visit justice on this poor, lonely sap.

Alcohol has cost me plenty, but I guess there's no point in stopping now.