Insignifica

Herida de Amor

A few years back, on a trip up through California (either back or forth to school, or up to see friends after graduation), I happened upon a Spanish-language rock station in the central valley. Though I don't always understand the lyrics, I like the music - much of it has more of a "grand" feeling to it, like 70s Meat Loaf or late 80s metal. On this trip I heard of cover of Nazareth's "Love Hurts", one of my favorite songs, in Spanish. It was both novel and very cool, but because of my lack of expireince in the language, I was unable to determine who was singing this version, or even what it was called. My subsequent searches on Google for "spanish love hurts" and the like turned up nothing useful.

Today, I was poking around the iTunes music store, and decided to get a copy of "Love Hurts". Low and behold, one of the choices is Herida de Amor by Ynido - and it's the song I heard all that time ago. I love it when a plan I didn't even think of comes together.

glass head

While shopping at Party City for my Cinco de Mayo party, we wandered into the Pier 1 next door. While most of the things there don't do anything for me, I happened upon the following in the back of the store, on a shelf with 3 others like it:

(click for larger image)

It's kinda hard to tell from the picture, but it's a glass woman's head, with no openings except for the neck, which it needs to rest on stand up. It's not a container, really, as it doesn't have a cork or screw-on lid. As far as I can tell, it's just art. Creepy, heavy art. The best part was that it was only $15, and I've always thought heavy things are supposed to be expensive, moreso if they're made of something breakable. I have no idea what I'll do with it, but I couldn't pass it up.

More pictures: Right Side View | Left Side View | Front View with Hand

tuesday update

Happy Tuesday, friends. A beautiful, if hot, day in southern California again - third in a row with near-90 degree temps. Such is life here in April, though.

This Saturday is the pre-Cinco de Mayo party at my place; if I know you and you'd like to come, shoot me an email and I'll send you more information. We've got a piñata and all sorts of delicious food and drink. If you like eat, drink, or hit things, stop on by.

I've been working on adding more daily links to the section over on the right, I've found a lot of people are using them. I also include entertaining comments if you mouse-over the links. Enjoy.

adventure

Happy Friday, all. It's been a great week, starting with last Friday's birthday celebrations, two concerts, a movie premiere, baseball and BBQ and friends yesterday, and now another weekend. I hope yours has been as good as mine.

I've also been winning a lot this week (and last) - I won the new Matrix movie on DVD in a radio station contest, a DVD box set at the Trekkies premiere, and Wednesday won $150 playing poker online. Tomorrow's a good day gamble, which is a possible Adventure!™ for the day. I was thinking of going to Pechanga, or possibly up to the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez. The Hilton in San Diego is also an option. Let me know if you'd like to join me for my Adventure!™

earthday

It's April 22, and everybody knows today is Earth Day - Merry Christmas, happy birthday to whoever's being born.

Happy Earth Day folks. Do something green today. I'm taking the day off work and hoping to see the Angels recycle the Texas Rangers. Oh, and carpooling. And I'm a vegetarian, for crying out loud. Save the planet woo!

McClintock

California State Senator Tom McClintock wrote the following about the pledge and "Under God" in an OpEd piece in the Eureka Reporter:

This concept [Natural rights as Americans granted by God] is the foundation of American liberty. And because it defines limits to the powers of government, it is supremely offensive to the radicals of the left. They abhor the words “under God” because these words stand in the way of an all-powerful state.

To McClintock, anyone who disagrees with the inclusion of the words "Under God" in the pledge must be a totalitarian and hoping for an "all-powerful state". He also lumps all "radicals of the left" into this category, either through a misunderstanding of liberalism or an attempt to gain support for his causes.

Frankly, this pisses me off as an American and as a liberal. Removal of "Under God" from the pledge isn't limited to "radicals of the left" - a good number of my atheist friends are Libertarians, and often side with Libertarians because of the over-religiousness of the Republicans. Plenty of religious groups also want it removed, because they say it cheapens the Almighty to have his name said in vain by those reciting the pledge. He's taking the standard Republican practice of being a "uniter" to mean one who unites all people who agree with him. If you're a Californian (or not), feel free to call Senator McClintock and let him know your true feelings. His contact information is below. He needs to know that Californians and other Americans don't all fall into his carved-out groupings, and his reading of the Declaration of Independence both distorts and dishonors the framer's intent.

Phone (Sacramento) : (916) 445-8873
Phone (Thousand Oaks) : (805) 494-8808
Email: senator.mcclintock@sen.ca.gov

Also, let me know if you make a call or send him an email. I'm curious to know his response.

6 months till halloween

I just realized something: Halloween is only 6 months away. That may not mean much to you, but it's my queue to begin work on the next year's party. I've got some costume ideas, though one my not work as I planned it. Others require a good deal of work, so that's on the table, not to mention projects, effects and displays.

I love halloween.

birthday weekend recap

More Birthday weekend highlights:

Saw Dread Zeppelin and two opening acts on Saturday night. Not as good as the show the night before, but fairly entertaining. I finally got earplugs for a concert, and enjoyed it much more.

Relaxing Sunday of Strato (a sweep, then sweeped), Soup Plantation, shopping, then non-s-word activities of playing with Legos, playing poker, and relaxing.

Back to work today, dentist appointment tomorrow, followed by work then attending the Premier of Trekkies 2 in Newport Beach with directors/producers, etc. I'm pretty sure they've still got tickets, let me know if you'll be attending.

Birthday highlights

Highlights from the birthday:

jews!

Google ranks results on a number of factors, often leading to less than savory sites coming up strong for certain words.

If you type in "jew" in google, the top result is Jew Watch, a site dedicated to "Keeping a Close Watch on Jewish Communities & Organizations Worldwide" - and not in the friendliest way. Google's put up a page about the results here.

Luckily, one of the factors in determining rank is who links to a page, and how many links there are. If you'd like to help change the top results, you can put code on your website pointing to a different site. The more pages that do this, the higher those pages will rank, displacing Jew Watch. Two of the other high-ranking sites are the "Jew FAQ" and Wikipedia's Jew entry. Just put the code below on your page to help out.

<A HREF="http://www.jewfaq.org/" TARGET="_new">Jew</A>

<A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew/" TARGET="_new">Jew</A>

Happy birthday me!

Happy birthday to my twin brother Matt, who turns 26 today!

Oh, and it's my birthday too. Doing dinner somewhere special, then seeing They Might Be Giants. A good time will be had by all!

Leave birthday wishes - Always happy to know who's reading =)

Interesting visitors

I get a lot of visitors to this website, mostly through search engines. Looking through my logs, I've seen a wide variety of different types of visitors. A small breakdown of the last two and a half hours:

- Regular reader No One Of Consequence;
- A reader using a proxy looking for ""katy hill" divorce";
- The Obidos (bookwatch) bot;
- Wil, checking out the Trackback ping I sent earlier;
- A Vancouver visitor looking for "rena sofer nude photo"
- An AOLer just visiting the site;
- Someone from Microsoft, perhaps a bot;
- A Qwest user looking for "alyssa rachael pace porn";
- A Charter Communications user looking at the main page;
- A Comcast visitor searching for nude Debra Messing photos;
- A visitor from New York looking for "erin nordegren tiger woods nude";
- A Department of Defence visitor searching for "TACO" and "MC02" (A program Chris worked on in 2002).
- A bot from Hellomachine.net;
- A student in Norfolk, VA at Old Dominion University searching for "free porno+org";
- Inktomi's bot;
- Google's bot;
- A BlogPulse spider;
- A Bellsouth Internet Serive user looking for ""kathy ireland" secret breast"';
- An AOL user hoping to find "amy jo johnson blowjob";
- After a web posting at 3:45pm, ots from Texas A&M, Covad, Blo.gs, MIT, and Hellomachine.net
- An ARPA visitor;
- Another Bellsouth user looking for "reece witherspoon porn" from a Netscape home page;
- Bots from NITLE, The World As A Blog, A different MIT bot, and the Obidos (bookwatch) bot;
- An Oklahoma Cox customer using Google Image Search to find my nude Tiffany pictures;
- Blogrunner bots;
- A Cleavland visitor from my new link at Shameless Agitator;
- Technorati's bot;
- The same ARPA visitor;
- An unknown visitor hoping for "free nude pictures of Anna kournikova in penthouse";
- A visitor from Manitoba, Canada looking for "Diana Rigg nudes"
- The Ask Jeeves/Teoma bot;
- A Deleware visitor looking for "denise playboy picture";
- Another mystery browser, looking for the Tiffany pictures from GIS;
- The ARPA user, once more;
- A Charter Communications user coming from Wil's site.

Interesting breakdown, almost everyone visiting is looking for porn (not that I ever hosted it, but I used to have a lot of keywords on the pages here). There are also a lot of bots visiting, both search engine bots and those that read the pings I send when I update, and come to see what's happened. That's just a 150 minute block of time; I have these logs going back a couple years. Very interesting to see who's coming, and where they came from.

concert weekend

Looks like a geekrific, exciting weekend coming up. I rarely go to concerts; no good reason, I guess, I just don't make it that often. The last shows I had tickets to was for Meat Loaf last year, but he canceled all the shows I had front row tickets to. Before that I saw Weird Al, and before that it was probably either Al or They Might Be Giants, many months earlier.

A few months back we (most of my friends and I) bought tickets to see They Might Be Giants at the House of Blues, the same location I saw them at two years ago. The date happens to be on Friday, my birthday, making it extra special. They're a great live band, more Rock and Roll than their normal craziness, though there's plenty of that. I also found out Corn Mo' is opening for them, and although I just now am reading up on him, he's definately someone right up my alley.

And if that's not enough, I won tickets today to a band I've been meaning to see for years - Dread Zeppelin. As their name implies, they're a Led Zeppelin cover band, but they do it Reggee style with a dash of Elvis thrown in. So after no concerts for many months, it's two in two days, seeing three "weird" bands. I'm geeked up.

I won an award!

While looking through my referer logs, I found a link from the Shameless Agitator website. I didn't know it, but appearently I won their daily "Shameless Agitator Award" on July 11, 2003 for my "I am an American" piece. The award is given to writers "not afraid to ask the tough questions, to go against the grain, to question conventional wisdom, and to think for yourself".

I'm very proud of the "I am an American" piece, and it's awesome to be recognized. Thanks also to Donna for the nomination.

dog kicker

From the news: Man charged with fatally kicking dog like a football

This is the type of story that pops up every once in a while, and rightfully enrages people. If this man did kick this dog to death, he committed a horrible crime. He deserves punishment as outlined in the law.

Consider for a moment, however, if instead of kicking the dog, he had electrocuted it or beheaded it. Still horrible, still heinous, right?.

What if, instead of it being his neighbor's dog, it was his own, and he ran a puppy mill, where he kept thousands of dogs like this one, in too-small cages. Is this better or worse?

Now imagine he sells his killed dogs for meat. Would you buy? Why or why not?

cockeyed.com

I had written up a piece on wondering what happened to cockeyed.com, which is seemingly replaced by a Chinese-language message board. I answered my own question, however, when I went to the website without the "www" in the address (cockeyed.com instead of www.cockeyed.com), and arrived at the correct location.

Rob says: "There is a strange DNS problem that is displaying the Wuhan University webpage when attempting to reach http://www.cockeyed.com. A fix is in the works. Thank you to everyone who wrote to tell me about it."

Thank goodness for that. It would truely be a shame to lose that site.

april 6, 2004

Lots going on out there this week and next. Today is Angels opening day (finally), and luckily I work in a baseball-friendly office, so we get to watch the day games here. And with 156 games being broadcast this year, that's a lot of baseball.

Today's my friend Jared's 25th birthday. Happy Birthday, Jared!

In the coming days, we've got my birthday charity party on Saturday (email me for more information or an invitation if I know you), then my birthday next Friday the 16th, and I'll be going to see They Might Be Giants at the House of Blues in Anaheim. We saw them there two years ago, it's a great venue.

I'm also likely going to be going to the premeir of Trekkies 2, which is opening at the Newport Beach Film Festival on April 20. That should be a good time. Hope to see my friends and regular readers at some event I'll be at soon!

cobain

Ten years ago today, music lost a great talent in Kurt Cobain. His body wasn't discovered until three days later, and it's interesting asking people my age about it, because we all seem to remember where we were and what we were doing, like an early 90s Kennedy assassination. And while it doesn't really make me feel old to think it's been 10 years, it makes me realize how young I was.

Friday afternoon musing

Why is it that I seem to post primarly on Mondays and Fridays? I have access to my website all day, every day, and I always seem to find myself wishing other people would update their websites more. It seems also that a lot of my posts have been updates, and fewer have been political essays. Ebb and flow, I guess. It's not like there hasn't been politics and religion in the news lately.

And with that, more updates. Angels baseball on the TV tonight, giving blood tomorrow, then not drinking alcohol to excess this weekend (I learned that mistake at New Years after trying to replace the pint they took on December 30 with vodka). My home could use some spring cleaning, though that's something that sounds like a good idea and I'm happy with after it's done, but the time in between leaves something to be desired.

Speaking of Desire, I'm re-reading the Sandman series (It's been about a year) from start to finish. Gaiman's depth and weaving are amazing, even in those early issues. Pick up a copy or borrow them from me if you haven't read them. They're fantastic modern mythos.

Trying to decide on photorific projects to take up with my new camera. I've never had a "good" one before, and I don't want it to just sit on my shelf. Of course, my video camera, which gets more use than most people's, I'm sure, sits on my shelf for the most part. "There are spring flowers to capture," I must tell myself, "Benny Hill-style shorts are just waiting to be filmed!"

bout rames 1

My entry for the latest Bouts Râmes contest:

"I believe the time has come," he said, "To bar
the most foulest of feathers, the disguesting plume,
from the ends of our pens," I strumed my guitar
at this poetry reading, amazed at the things that make a man fume.

Soon it was my turn, and I began my own tripe,
Vocalizing the hidden reasons behind the credo
that as soon as a pear, an apple or guava is ripe,
It should be hurled at passersby, like a fructose torpedo.