Blog: Ramblings and Rants

After a nice drive through downtown Portland with Strawberry Blonde—top down, of course—we crossed the river for dinner at a new favorite: The Original Hotcake House (now The Original Hotcake and Steak House to bring in evening diners). I don’t know if it was the pair of ten-inch diameter hotcakes, double-scoop of hashbrowns, six thick slabs of bacon, or mooching Strawberry Blonde’s skin-on, hand-cut fries that did me in, but I am bloated. I was so full leaving the greasy spoon that I couldn’t smoke.

Maybe another time I’ll tell you about Portland’s The Original Hotcake House and the Pancake Natzi. For now, I’m off to bed.

In a response to a post about the Belief-O-Matic I answered Samuel with the following. Since that post is rather old, it is unlikely to be discovered by most casual visitors to this blog. So, I thought I’d share my comments regarding Catholocism and me in a new post.

Tony Pierce has a very interesting (if contentious) post about how to blog. Most of his list is right on the mark; some misses by a mile.

tonypierce.com busblog

13. if you havent written about sex, religion, and politics in a week youre probably playing it too safe, which means you probably fucked up on #5, in which case start a second blog and keep your big mouth shut about it this time.

14. remember: nobody cares which N*Sync member you are, what State you are, which Party of Five kid you are, or which Weezer song you are. the second you put one of those things on your blog you need to delete your blog and try out for the marching band. similarilly, nobody gives a shit what the weather is like in your town, nobody wants you to change their cursor into a butterfly, nobody wants to vote on whether your blog is hot or not, and nobody gives a rat ass what song youre listening to. write something Real for you, about you, every day.

15. dont be afraid if you think something has been said before. it has. and better. big whoop. say it anyway using your own words as honestly as you can. just let it out.

Spider-Man India Costume Design

Press Releases - Gotham Comics

SPIDER-MAN INDIA—SPIDER-MAN EXTENDS FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD TO STREETS OF BOMBAY!
Bangalore, India (June 14, 2004)—Marvel Comics & Gotham Entertainment Group—Indian publishing licensee of Marvel Comics and the leading publisher of international comic magazines in South Asia—announces the launch of Spider-Man India.

Spider-Man India interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern India, with an eye to making Spider-Man’s mythology more relevant to this particular audience. Readers of this series will not see the familiar Peter Parker of Queens under the classic Spider-Man mask, but rather a new hero—a young, Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar. As Spider-Man, Pavitr leaps around rickshaws and scooters in Indian streets, while swinging from monuments such as the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal.

Mumba’s (Bombay’s) first web-swinging superhero will be joined by a reinterpretation of the classic Spider-Man villain, the Green Goblin—reinvented as a Rakshasa, an Indian mythological demon.

We’re off to see the Garfield movie. For Strawberry Blonde’s birthday, Mojo (our nine year-old) is taking the entire family to see the flick. For the past few weeks I’ve been manufacturing ways for her to earn the cash necessary to cover the four of us.

I saw a half-hour Comcast-original show on Jewel last night. Of course I’d heard Jewel’s music on the radio, but I never realized she wrote it. Previously I had thought Jewel another of the crop of vacuous pop divas like Britney, Xtina, Mariah Scarey, et al. She’s actually a quite intelligent 30 year-old who writes layered, mature songs with depth of thought and emotional sagacity.

As I listen to her music now, catching up on the songs I missed, I see this artist in a whole new light. Her music, in fact, fits perfectly on my playlist list with other emotional tracks from the likes of Creed and Five for Fighting.

Off to the movies.

I saw a shooting star tonight. It was bright, sharp, and flew diagnolly from N by NW to S by SE. I made a wish.

A moment later I watched the International Space Station skitter across the inky velvet blanket of the sky like a tiny spider.

“The tail is beginning to wag the blog,” says Lev Grossman in his TIME Magazine article, Meet Joe Blog (Jun. 21, 2004). “Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they’re fast, funny and totally biased.”

The article covers everything from the Drudge Report to Slashdot to Baghdad blogger Salam Pax. Wonkette and Gawker are covered extensively, of course, because mass media cannot mention the word blog without Nick Denton.

This could be a problem for the blogosphere as a whole.

Thanks to an invite from a Weblogs, Inc. buddy, I now have a Google GMail address. If Google gives me any invitations, I’ll be kind to my friends (I won’t post them on eBay).

The Fantastic Four

As I write, I’m watching the Fantastic Four movie on the other monitor. This is not the film slated to open 1 July, 2005; that one hasn’t even been cast yet.

This Fantastic Four was completed in 1994, but never released—not even straight to video. It was shoved way back on a shelf and all but forgotten. Like my first ever Napster downloads, “Busstop” by the Hollies and “Cherokee Nation” by Paul Revere & the Raiders, impossible to find in even vintage record stores, the Internet has opened the path to the Fantastic Four movie.

June is the Birthday Month for me. 3 June is my life-long friend, Anna. 5 June is my step-daughter Mojo. 9 June is my mother. 10 June is my girlfriend, Strawberry Blonde.

But wait! There’s more. Immediately preceding the string of birthdays is Mother’s Day. My mom is a mother, as is my sister and my girlfriend.

After all the birthdays comes Father’s Day, on 20 June this year.

June is a busy month for me.

I think this issue is being taken a little too seriously and literally—especially by the commentors on Calacanis’s original post—because of one article, which was written in early 2002 if you read the fine print at the bottom (or read the URL). Were copyright infringement on blogs really such a hot issue, we would have heard about it left and right the last two years. As Jason Calacanis proved with that one post, were any blogs to have been sued in the last two years for a dispute over Fair Use of an image in a blog, the news would have spread across the blogosphere like wildfire. And it hasn’t.

I’m grumpy. I’m having a bit of a snippy day. Maybe it was dealing with DEQ (Department of Environmental Quality) and the DMV (Deptartment of Motor Vehicles, for my non-American readers).

It started off as a good day—I finished writing up my interview with desktop publishing guru, David Blatner, which I’ll publish on the Design Weblog tomorrow. I’m excited about the interview, and happy with the pleasant e-mail conversation David and I had around it.

Then I had to go to DEQ and the DMV.

Maybe my sour mood has more to do with my grandmother’s failing health. I found out about that last night.

Maybe it’s because, half way through making dinner, I realized that the can I was holding was not the diced tomatoes I required but tomato paste. The kids didn’t know the difference.

Maybe it’s just stress over everything we have to do before Mojo’s ninth birthday party Saturday.

Maybe it’s pre-withdrawal stress from my plan to quit smoking.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been so busy today that I didn’t get a chance to call Anna for her birthday until it was too late on the East Coast for me to call her.

Maybe it’s because my mother is the victim of sexual discrimination at her office.

Maybe it’s because of that reactionary holier-than-thou moron I let suck me into an argument today. “Give me your opinion on this…” Then: “I don’t care what your opinion is. This is mine, and I’m right despite all the sources you cited and evidence you produced.” It was my own fault; I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get sucked in.

Not even a mindless game of Way of the Stick made me feel better. Hell! I even whipped up a whole new FileMaker Pro database to format blog posts, and that didn’t make me feel better. Making a FileMaker database for fun always makes me feel better.

Maybe I’m just tired.

Maybe it’s just the cumulative effect of a lot of things.

Then again, maybe it was the DMV that started it all.

From Slashdot: Brew Your Own Auto Fuel For 41 Cents A Gallon

Iphtashu Fitz writes “Damon Toal-Rossi of Iowa City, Iowa had enough of the high price of gasoline, so it didn’t take too much for his friend to talk him into switching to biodiesel, an alternative fuel based on soy or vegetable oil. But after a few months of driving 10 miles to a biodiesel fuel station he decided it was time to start brewing his own. It didn’t take him long to find a recipe for biodiesel, and with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant, he figures he’s now getting 44 miles per gallon out of his diesel powered VW Golf and only paying 41 cents a gallon. According to the National Biodiesel Board the number of biodiesel stations in the US rose by 50% last year (to a whopping 200). The president of the American Soybean Association claims biodiesel has almost the same amount of energy as petroleum-based diesel, but cleans an engine’s fuel injectors and cuts down on the number of required oil changes. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why diesel powered cars are making a comeback in the US.”

I saw the headline in my RSS aggregator and thought: “Brew my own gas for 41 cents a gallon? That’s a helluva lot better than $2.36! The method is probably a wildly geeky technique requiring chemistry skills and gadgetry I don’t yet understand, but hell, for that kind of savings, I’ll learn.”

The irony of it is this: It’s not that geeky, and the gadgetry isn’t very advanced. I could do it… But I drive a Mustang, a car whose fuel-injected high-performance engine requries high-octane unleaded, not diesel.

In “It pays to avoid a ticket — or fight one” MSN Money details practical and frugal technicques for fighting a speeding ticket—and thereby saving thousands of dollars on your insurance rates.

The best advice is simply not to speed, at least not brazenly. But if you get nailed, fight it — because a $50 ticket can cost you thousands once your insurer gets wind of it.

A few minor observations: