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Phish and Pride

I was taking a crap a week or so back (sorry) and reading the almanac in my bathroom. I discovered that a Phish concert in some swamp in Florida was one of the top five grossing concerts in America in 2001. I pondered standing in a swamp with 50,000 smelly, stoned hippie wannabes listening to Phish and decided that it might be as close as I’d ever come to hell…

Tonight when I was out doing my errands, I pondered standing in the middle of a South of Market or Castro Street dance floor during Identity Politics Weekend, surrounded by thousands of virtually identical men in virtually identical white tank tops (and virtually identical stages of chemical meltdown), and I realized this just might give the Phish concert a run for its money…

By the time I got home, I was very relieved that (a) I don’t believe in hell, and (b) I’ll be in Fresno on the weekend of the 28th…

I think this is as much of a “pride” rant as I’ll bother with this year…

Tech Trauma

Bad idea: waiting until the last minute to do some domain-related stuff for a friend, thinking it will take about five minutes and then realizing that the system by which his registrar makes these changes is disturbingly convoluted and that nothing is working…

Sometimes I long to be one of those people with good old-fashioned, simple, AOL-type problems, like wondering why I can’t switch between my “manhole4u” and “2q2bstr8” screen names, or why I never seem to score anything from any of those “win the lottery” email messages I keep answering…

Hate Crimes

Anyone who disagrees with the idea that hate crime laws are tantamount to government legislation of individual thought should ponder this: in just about every state, you will face a stiffer penalty for murder if that murder occurred while you were also committing another crime (say, armed robbery). Hate crime legislation essentially places certain unpopular THOUGHTS in the same category with violent crimes…

I was sort of horrified to read recently that California has a law specifically banning the burning of a cross on someone else’s property “for the purpose of terrorizing the owner or occupant.” Why, pray tell, would it be legal to burn ANYTHING on ANYONE else’s property without their permission, regardless of motive? Doing so is just about always a threat, both to public safety and to the neighbor in question, and it’s most definitely not free speech…

Randomly Sunday

Mark left early to go do that Father’s Day thing. I’ve already called my dad too, and now (unless I get a little more motivated to do laundry) I have the rest of the day to ponder life. Or watch TV. After all, that “Father Knows Best” marathon is on again tonight. And you know how excited that gets me…

Weekend highlights:

  • Sister Betty’s birthday bash, where I not only got to eat miniature Krackels and windmill cookies (among my favorites) but also ran into a couple of old friends I hadn’t seen in a while, one of them a Devious Bi and one of them a Steve.
  • A seven-dollar breakfast at one of the last remaining Lyon’s, consisting of four pancakes, three eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, and hash browns.
  • Dinner with Dan, Jamie, and Mark at Rocco’s on Friday night.
  • Grapes on sale for 97ยข a pound at Safeway. Yes, I’m eating some now.

And the slight down side:

  • Mild gastointestinal distress all weekend. Most likely gluttony-induced.
  • Not getting that Father’s Day present delivered on time.

And then there’s the particularly appealing fact that I got to wake up at random moments in the middle of the night seeing that boy curled up next to me and realizing it will be an every night thing before too long. But that was mushy. And I wouldn’t want Rick to lose his banana pudding on graduation day. Congratulations, by the way…

After two days of not looking at it, I’ve also decided I like my new design. If any of you hate it, all I can say is, well, too bad…

Something I really don’t understand: the appeal of all these TV documentaries trying to offer scientific substantiation of Bible stories. The faithful are going to believe the Biblical account whether or not there’s scientific evidence supporting it. And aetheists aren’t going to care how much that rock formation may resemble someone’s idea of what an ark looks like. Given that neither the believers nor the non-believers are likely to be swayed, who are they trying to convince anyway?

New Look, Continued

I’ve done a bit of remodeling. Some minor fine-tuning will still have to happen, but I think it’s gonna have to wait until after the weekend. Let me know if you have any really horrible problems…

New Look

A picture of tonight’s fun. I haven’t decided how proud I’ll be of this encounter in the morning, nor if we’ll ever see each other again. But I may have to try it one more time, maybe in a few slightly different positions…

How to Use a Browser

I love it when all my work for the week/weekend is done this early. I might actually even be able to do something fun tonight. And even more fun tomorrow night…

OK, here’s a question. Why exactly do so many people type URLs into search boxes? If you’re trying to get to a website and you already know the URL, why would you not just type it into the ADDRESS bar? I’m asking this not just because so many of these show up in my logs, but because I’ve WATCHED so many people do it. They open their browser, wait for whatever “start page” to load, and then, instead of typing an address in the proper place, they do a freaking search for it. Which, of course, often leads them to some site other than the one they wanted in the first place…

Seems to me this is sort of like calling 411 and saying “I need the number for Joe Smith at 415-555-1234″…