News and Updates

1. Well that had an impact.  Now my spammer is pinging me at 3 or 4-hour intervals instead of 5 or 7-hour intervals, and with 140 hits instead of 135.  Nice to know my writing gets results.  Next step: I figure out how to make money from this.  Stay tuned.

[EDIT (four hours later):  Now it's up to every hour and a half!  Pretty soon it will just be a constant barrage and I will have the most popular blog on the internet as measured by hit count.  Ad revenue, here I come!]

[EDIT 2 (6/4): Every time I post something, the spamming gets more intense.

I have you now, my little spammer.  Dance, monkey, dance!]

[EDIT 3 (6/5): Well, for a while there they took a break (see the little gap there toward the right?) - I'd say they were ashamed of being caught out, but that would assume spammers have shame.  I think they just got tired.  And now they're back.

Dance, monkey, dance!]

2. If I have to click on a link to see the rest of a list, the rest of the list will forever remain a mystery to me.

3. So the ammosexuals are already talking about assassinating people if the election doesn’t go their way in November – that must be a new record, even for them.  “Freedom” my ass – all they want is the ability to kill whomever disagrees with them, immediately and without consequence to their precious snowflake selves.  Threatening violence against elected officials and promising to use “the bullet box” if the ballot box doesn’t work out in your favor is a signal of just what kind of power-mad would-be petty tyrants those clowns are.  It is also treason, and should be treated as such.  Honestly, anyone who makes or seriously repeats this argument should be rounded up, sedated to immobility, and deposited in a locked and well-padded room until the sane people get tired of feeding them.  Either that or tried in the courts as the traitors they are – coordinated assassination campaigns against elected officials easily comes under the Constitutional definition of “levying war” against the United States – to suffer the obvious legal consequences of their stated goals.  Their call, really.  I’m good either way.

4. I spent the day discovering how far behind I am in my various work projects.  This is what happens when your biggest deadline turns out to be a week earlier than you thought it was.  So it looks like it’s going to be a fun-filled, thrill-packed weekend of academic work.  And technically I’m not even under contract until Monday.  Good times.

5. On that subject, I made the mistake of reading the comments in the online version of Our Little Town’s newspaper under an article about the importance of education and the value of the professors who provide it, and wasn’t that an eye-opening experience all over again.  Apparently we professors live lives of wealth and luxury, constantly jetting off to exclusive vacation spots on the taxpayer’s dime while doing no work whatsoever.  All I want to know is how did I miss out on this?  I’ve been teaching at the university level in this state for two decades now.  Not once have I been offered any such compensation and yet even so here I am working – on a weekend evening, no less.  I think I’m owed some back pay.

6. So far George RR Martin seems to be averaging a corpse every four pages and a dastardly plot every ten, which is quite a pace for a book as thick as my thigh.  It’s basically a well-written medieval soap opera crossed with a Machiavellian primer on Renaissance Italian politics.  I can see why it’s so popular.

7. Bernie Bros scare me.  I listen to them complain about Hilary and the nominating process and declaring that they will not sully themselves to vote for anyone other than Bernie, and all I hear is “Nader, 2000.”  That worked out just so, so well for the country, didn’t it?  People forget that when Bill Clinton left office in 2001 the United States was more or less at peace (as much as we have been since 1946), had experienced nearly a decade of economic growth and private sector job gains, and enjoyed a budget surplus of over $100 billion.  Clinton was, in fact, one of only two presidents to post budget surpluses in the last half century – both of them Democrats, oddly enough.  Within three short years of Republican rule under George W. Bush we were involved in two undeclared wars – one justifiable, one a Freudian farce, and neither of them paid for by any kind of taxes or even given any professional accounting because God forbid right-wingers actually be asked to chip in for anything – and not surprisingly racking up the largest deficits in human history.  By the end of W’s reign we had gone through two recessions and had racked up a budget deficit measured in trillions, and the good times so painstakingly achieved in the 1990s were mere figments of memory.  So spare me the calls for purity – I’m going to stick with the people who will do the least damage, and none of them are running on the Republican ticket this election cycle.  I miss having a responsible conservative party to complicate my electoral choices.

8. Boneless wings are just high-end chicken nuggets.

9.  I still haven’t had time to dig out from the last semester – there is a pile of paper nearly a foot high on the white banquet table in my office – and the summer session is about to begin.  And I discovered that since the software that powers our Online classes was just upgraded, it no longer has the capacity to create in bulk the personal discussion areas that we use to communicate privately with our students.  Oh, I can still create them individually – a process that consumes time, energy, and whiskey in copious quantities – but there you have it.  Why is it that when computer people talk about upgrades it always seems to end with degraded functionality?

10.  The turkeys are now about as tall as they’re going to get, but still only about half as wide.  In this they remind me of myself, circa 1984.