furtive explorations

I liken the vote count to the Hubble Constant problem. We can't even figure out which way the universe is swinging, let alone by how much...

Seriously tho, I'd rather have this battled out in the courts with bloody words and vicious, biting rhetoric than have to go out and shoot a bunch of idiots. And I'd much rather be watching our government wobble about on TV than have to go out and place my ass on the line to see it through. The nice thing is as I count noses amongst my friends and family, I'm sure that this country can't get too out of control. We're a pretty level headed bunch and still ready to do the right thing when the chips are down.

That's the great thing about being American (and one up for the French on this point as well); if our government gets to be too much of a bother we'll just shoot them all and start over. Heck if we get excitable we might just take Mexico while we're at it. They sound like they could use a little shaking up too. And don't bring up Canada. There is no reason to conquer them, it would just fuck up a perfectly good vacation if you dldn't have to leave the country to visit the north.

And if we do wind up freaking out and tearing it all down, try and wing a few lawyers too...

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

Really, that says it all, doesn't it?

Now, what we learn from that is if you want a good pseudonym for acting, Thursday is open. Friday is all over the map but tends to be a last name. Tuesday is a girl's name unless it's your last name. It's just girlie folks, sorry. Saturday is pretty unique but I think you'd have to make up a good hippie story about your family to get away with it. Monday is only a men's last name. Women, you aren't allowed to marry men named Monday and if by some chance you wind up with your estranged father's last name of Monday, you'll need to take your mother's maiden name or your husband's name before acting. Wednesday is a girl's name because it sounds like "Wendy" and because your brother's name is Pugsley.

As characters, Monday is always a man's name too. One poor schmoe gets stuck with it as a first name tho. Tuesday is almost exclusively women. Wednesday has 2 men firsts and 2 lasts and either 5 or 13 firsts for the women, depending on if you count all the Addams roles as 1 or 9. Thursday is pretty popular as a lastname here, with 7 for the women and 5 for the men. As a first it pops up 4 times as a man's name and twice as a woman's. Also one offshoot Addams middle name here. There is a dispute tho as she is also listed as Wednesday Friday Addams. We also see a disturbing trend rising as the same pr0n film keeps popping up in each category, The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Friday is off the charts thanks to various Crusoe roles and Dragnet variants and such. There is a number of legits though, all around. Saturday persists in being a girl's first name almost exclusively. Coupla men get it as a first name and a few titles like Mr. Saturday Night. Sunday gets to be a man's last name, scads in fact, and a few scattered reports of women going about 50/50.

What we learn from that is that writers suck for ideas and have calendars stuck in front of them for ideas.

The only cool thing there anymore is the quotes at the bottom of the page. Hey, I started blogging a lot earlier than I thought! Those range back to before Quake 2 came out. Man I'm old. =)

Or it could be that I opened like 10 programs and about 15 Netscape and IE windows at once and tried to load WinAMP. Plus, in retrospect, the giant bloodshot eye background may have been a mistake as well.

Hell! That's the worst part of EVERYDAY LIFE!!!

Can you imagine? Orange juice whenever you want! Fresh chocolate chip cookies on demand! A nice head-pat and a consoling word! YEAH! And then there's the aromatherapy body massages, the ritual bathing, the erotic interlu...uhhhh....nevermind.

I hate being sick.

Ok, that is an extra 208 words MORE than an "average man" per hour. Or, 3.472 more words per minute. Of course, that is assuming she talks in her sleep more than men do on average as well. Lets back up and try that with an average 7 hours of sleep (she is average after all) and an average 1 hour eating per day (she is average in that she talks through lunch and part of dinner). That leaves 16 hours a day of accelerated chatter. And that leads us to 312.5 more words a waking, non-eating hour or 5.209 more words a minute. Not too unlikely, so far.

Now let us assume that the plaintative complaints of men not getting in a word edgewise means they talk twice as much as us. That means 10,000 words a day for women. Given that they aren't chittering, hyperactive 11 year-olds but actual adults we will estimate that they speak at a rate of 1.3 words per second. At that rate, they spend 3.6 HOURS a day speaking. Continuously.

Ok, given that data, I feel that number really isn't that crazy. They spend an extra 1.8 hours a day talking over and above that mythical average guy. Fucking chatty bitches =)

• www.transitive.com sucks ass. One page, no links, about some shitty company. If I hadn't already typed in the link before checking with it, and if I wasn't utterly dedicated to bringing you only the finest and complete time filler, I'd have surely not mentioned it at all. Plus the background successfully makes black, large, bold text hard to read and that has to be worth nothing at all. Of course, intransitive isn't even properly listed in DNS so it's completely useless.
• www.tense.com actually got my jaded ass excited. Yes, this is the domain that dragged my ass out of bed to make notes so I'd remember to check it out. What would I find? Would it be edgy, exciting, angst strewn, jarring or even outrageously ugly? Nope. It is owned by someone in Hong Kong who runs www.restaurants.com and isn't even active. Now I'm tense with righteous, holy anger! I shall bring down all the fire at my command and hurl invective across the ocean with deadly electrons and lasers. "You poopy heads, let my domains go!
• www.comparative.com is another in a string of failures. Not for me, I just don't think DigiMedia can last much longer. At least when they go down in flames they will free up some useful domains. This shit is about to cease paying for itself: While a particular URL awaits development, we may lease it to direct a particular demographic to your site. For example, we are currently leasing Swimming.com to a swimwear company, and Bed.com to a bed and mattress company. Such generic URL-based advertising allows you to reach a very specific audience.
• www.superlative.com is an Internet Solutions Company. They are A World Leader in Internet Marketing! That's right! If you call them they can get right on Putting the Internet to Work for You. Wow! And for the past 5 years I've been working on the web, I've had it backwards this whole time! Their first solution should be getting a better web hosting company, their site is dogass slow. Then, they get a site designer that doesn't prefix every URL on the site with "f-". No, I have no idea why they would do that Wonder-Cat. They are just insane I guess. Heck even a nice feline like you knows better.
• www.modifiers.com is owned by Shell Oil. No idea on that one. Maybe fending off a vicious mutations caused by petrochemicals lawsuit? www.modifier.com was a no show too but that's ok, it's likely run by a group of pierced and tattoed freaks. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I just don't want to stumble in to that while thinking about grammar. I'd wind up proof-reading people's arms and we all know where that leads. It leads to pretending you have a superhero pet cat.
• www.dangling.com is the sort of thing your basic person just won't get. Or, actually, to be perfectly honest, shouldn't. It features Live shoeplay sessions! and Chat with real danglers and dippers!. That's right folks, it's not just a foot or shoe fetish site, it is so specialized, it is only for men who like women with loose, dangling shoes. Be afraid. They have videos. Also, to enter the site you have to "1. Under penalty of perjury, I swear/affirm..." Wow! It's not just a fetish site, it's a court of law! Best of all, item 8, forces you to affirm to "8. Thank you" in order to enter the site. That will hold up in torts, I can assure you.
• www.sentence.com is dead as is the company that registered it. *sniff* Why a capital company needs that domain I have no idea...
• www.sentance.com leads you to DotZup which is yet another in a long line of pseudo-yahoo's that prey on typoists. =) typoist.com is available if you want it.
• www.diction.com leads to even viler terrain. ESpecials isn't spanish folks, it's just a nightmareish E-fixing...
• connotation and www.denotation.com were busts. Not even the plurals got me anything...
• www.plural.com is at least a pleasant e-business site. Their slogan, "strength, multiplied" isn't bad. Their client list is impressive. Their whole web presence just screams... buzz-word compliant! The more logical plurals.com is oddly dead. It is supposed to be a redirect but the site it send you to 404s =) good job guys...
• www.apposition.com is a non-responder. I bet they get like three hits a year too.
• www.spelling.com sends you right to Dictionary.com where fun can be had by all.
• www.thesis.com sucks all ass. One, WTF would anyone need "name@thesis.com" as an address, Two, WTF would anyone let these java-snowflake bastards send them span in exchange for a free account? They also serve alienbasecamp.com and addicts.com which both have to be big sellers. What kind of demographics does that provide? Oh wait, they are all weak-minded, believe anything they read on a web-site types... especially the thesis.com ones...

BTW, my memory for grammar terms was helped along with HYPERGRAMMAR which really needs cool echoing sound effects or the voice overlay effect where it sounds like a thousand anal-rententives shouted it all at once. Too bad it doesn't live up to that intro. Stick these two lines together: This package is currently under construction! and Copyright © 1994, 1995 and 1996 by the University of Ottawa. So it would be safe to say they are lying bastards up there in Ottawa. Under Construction, in my book anyway, implies that you have worked on it in, say, the last 5 fucking years! this will give me post-fodder for years if I stretch it out properly.

While I wrote the tense bit, I was listening to Britney Spears so I was understandably in a violent mood. Sorry. No excuse on the rest though, turns out I'm an asshole...

• www.grammar.com drags us off to www.complaints.com. I don't know why but I think it is damn funny. While at the site I was going to look up Hammacher Schlemmer and complain but there is no overpriced useless plastic kitch section.
• participle is for sale. Features a sexy asian chick as eye candy to confuse you into not being pissed that some useless flack snagged a good domain name only to try and pawn it off on you. Also, there is a nice animated "I love you" graphic and random bonus "~" tilde chracters scattered about the page.
• www.verb.com is "coming soon." Since the index.html is dated "Oct 9, 2000" we'll assume that is a lie, right? Also, why they choose to break the site into 4 frames for laying out three phrases, "verb", "coming soon", and "info@verb.com" I have no idea...
• noun.com's DNS servers pretend it doesn't exist. For that matter, neither does adverb.com act like it wishes to be found.
• www.adjective.com is more like what I expected to find. Though I have to say this "The adjective for Tuesday is: Suzy's" started to bother me. Leading us to...
• www.possesive.com which is owned by someone who hasn't bothered to do anything with it. You get the NetSol placeholder.
• www.pronoun.com is going to waste as well, been around for years and still no sign of a site.
• www.preposition.com is owned by a damned Swede. It is even a word in their fucking language? No, of course not, how could it be, those godless heathens. Or maybe I was thinking of the Swiss? Sad loss to the english speaking nations though.
• www.conjunction.com has some rocking style! Of course, like verb before it, that style is wasted on a single page with exactly three links, one email, one to Babylon5, and one to Dave Mathews Band. At least it is owned by a non-filthy Canadian. Unless he's a frenchie of course. Oh yeah, it is copyrighted so you just watchout if you steal any of the 25 words that make up the site.
• www.interjection.com leads to a shitty ad for a hosting company. They offer "a revolutionary suite of Web-based tools" and "the most affordable, easy-to-use, and functional e-commerce solution on the Web" and "with no programming required". Wow! how can you go wrong with completely anonymous copywriting like that? Here's a game, given those phrases, try and see which of the 40,000 remaining web-hosting companies we're talking about. Then follow the link and discover how generic they are. Keep in mind that they "redefined webmastering". Of course, to them, the new definition is "sell shit to other morons with our help and we'll take the lion's share of the cash!"
• www.partsofspeech.com dumped me through a refresh redirect to pricefire.com. Some cheesy auction rip-off probably not worthy of a real link. Ain't that a shame?
• www.phrase.com is under construction. *sigh* From the site header: Last-Modified: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 23:30:34 GMT. That's ok, the header image on the site is dated: Last-Modified: Sun, 16 Mar 1997 19:05:00 GMT. Yes folks, 1997!
• www.clause.com is owned by your basic huckster types. Their site has no connection with the word clause or even with rational thought. They are selling fortified results with their new Secret-a-gogue-One™. The human race is doomed, you know, doomed. This site, which like roaches will likely long outlast us, will be shown to alien societies at the trial to determine if they should use their time-travel technology to save us from our own decay. This site and Jewel's poetry will be the final nails in our coffin.
• www.subject.com is semi-slick. The random character sizing is so 1995 I just can't look at it. It is "an epitome of navigation" but I think he was using the other definition of epitome, the one that means scattered by psychos. It is all links. Links to links to link pages. Like yahoo only with shitloads more ellipses.
• www.predicate.com is owned by a predicate logic software company. "Building the foundation for repeatable success." Turns out all you need is predicate logic, screw hard work!
• www.object.com is also quite predictably owned by a software company. At least they make a good compiler, if you are one of three people who doesn't work for either Steve Jobs or EDS who bought one of of the NeXT step machines...
• www.complement.com is missing in action. Probably thought they were buying www.compliment.com. And amusingly, that last one brings us right back to where we started, at www.complaints.com!

Oh come on, I was kidding on the whole Swede/Swiss thing. I still hate the French though.

Stop touching that...

Diabolica needs watching, it's shifty and clearly up to shady dealings. Great characters with seriously different styles. It almost looks like every character is stolen from a different artist. It's like Dick Tracy on crack.

Oh yeah, tomorrow or the next day I'm going to add a comic section for comics being eye-balled so that I don't keep losing track of them =)

Then it occured to me that no one fucking reads this.

Actually, that isn't true. More than half the people who post here occasionally read it. Heck some of them even read other people's posts rather than just proofing theirs in the wild.

In all seriousness ...uh huh... I have gotten a couple of hits back from comic artists without any begging at all! And, I'm pretty sure that if you mail me and say you hit the site, I can filter enough of my friends IPs out to guess what machine you were surfing from/through. My logs are that sparse. This machine also serves pjh.org which currently consists of a single "there is no real site here right now" page. It takes from 10 to 40 times the hits my blog does. And it's dead.

It's a good thing I'm stubborn enough to press on even in the face of rampant apathy. Hey, that might make a pretty good banner slogan!

One man's toxic waste is another man's potpourri. What? I don't know; I think it's some kind of soup.

I notice that Ron Howard is still giving the family work. =) Look for the shamefully under-utilized Clint. Look for his dad, Rance, too! And, his son Bryce. Also, note that the movie is dedicated, sadly, to Clint and Ron's mother, Jean.

Oh yeah, there are like a million people hiding behind the who-noses... Rain Pryor, Molly Shannon, Jeffrey Tambor (who rocked as the mayor), Christine Baranski (who I completely sympathize with the Grinch being in love with =), and Bill Irwin who is an irregular on Sesame Street.