"A scene consists of people who define themselves by being consumers of art."

Had a nice evening with the female half of bikupan, in which we went over to her neighbor's house that she's watching and cooked a meal in their million-dollar kitchen. Mmm, All-Clad cookware. We ate pasta & vegetables which were too bland because I wasn't paying attention, and drank the bottle of wine I bought, and blathered about stuff. The house itself was very nice on the inside (high ceilings, huge kitchen, etc.) but was inexplicably covered with big fake rocks on the outside, like a Disneyland ride. I got to meet her dad, who is a cool guy.

The strange mixed taste of the neighbors with the fancy house can be summed up thus: They had one of those expensive dishwasher-sized storage things for wine with the controlled temperature and humidity and all built into the kitchen counter. And they had a bottle of two-buck Chuck in it.

Altogether a very good evening talking with her about life the universe and everything. Then of course I looked at my messages and apparently I was supposed to do a build for work at 10:30 and I didn't, and I hadn't been explicitly told but I should have known, and I'm going to get fired and have to live in a box in the alley and die of yaws.

Sometimes with the work anxiety I seriously cannot tell whether they're setting me up to get canned or just have really poor communication systems. Hey! Maybe it's both! More likely the latter because people are pretty nice there, but I'm wondering what is going to happen still.

Sunday is the auto show. I have tickets for Zeb and myself, and two others if someone else wants to go.

Please help me plan

My career in Unix system administration is floundering. I need career advice, O Group Mind.

[Poll #417645]

people just keep sending me these.

Dangles with string pull, surgical steel bar

( nsfw, but then again so is my user icon. lolls! )

Aaaand another one from nrrd

cordiloquy your mission, should you accept it, is to kill this guy.

FUN CZAR!
FUN CZAR!
FUN CZAR!

The social rank of language in these here united states

1. Senior managers take pride in their inability to write clearly; it shows that they do not have to do work.
   
   
2. Reading, like religion, is now an activity reserved for children, women, and the old. Men in their prime do not read books.
   
   
3. People who speak in complete sentences or, worse, entire paragraphs are labeled as "foreign", "possibly homosexual" (if male), or "stuck up".
   
   
4. People who do not read well or speak clearly, but are either wealthy or very religious, are regarded as being wiser than writers or readers.
   
   
5. Poetry has been dead for almost 100 years.
   
   
6. Short short stories, vignettes, and blogs are the largest pieces of text that anyone under 50 wants to consume.
   
   
7. Dialogue in film has been replaced with sound effects.
   
   
8. Inarticulate illiteracy is mistaken for sincerity.
   

Key concepts

Just so we’re all on the same page and on message, here are the talking points and focus bullets for the current discussion:

• Terrycloth monkey mothers
  
• Gluten-free military units
  
• The Rapture and pets
  
• Open-source gardening: bête noire or shibboleth?
  
• Sunsetting jam bands in your enterprise
  
• What you don’t know about your child’s neckwear
  
• Faith-based gateway drugs
  
• Flan safety
  
• Dietary Fiber and the Polisario Liberation Front: Four Rules You Need to Know
  
• False Omelet Syndrome
  
• The Bible Key to “Party of Five” episodes
  
• Greek stuff
  

If you have any questions please ask your Coordinator.

Okay, I give in, I'll use the word.

This is, in a word, fascism. A huge military ceremony, locked in and out and down, costing an insane sum paid for by the desperately poor, and “in honor of” the soldiers serving far, far away. Please don’t wave your own flag; we’ll have someone to do that for you. I can feel my will being triumphed from here.

Ring of steel as Bush sworn in

A few square miles of central Washington will be transformed into an armed camp next week as the biggest security operation in the city’s history is mounted for President Bush’s inauguration.

When Mr Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, are sworn in for the second time on the steps of the Capitol building at midday on Thursday, the US government will be at its most vulnerable. Just about every member of the executive, Congress and the supreme court will be in the same place.

To protect them, 6,000 police officers, 2,500 soldiers and hundreds of secret service officers will flood the area around Capitol Hill and Pennsylvania Avenue, the route of the inaugural parade, scanning the expected 750,000-strong crowd of supporters and protesters.
( the most secure party ever )