My idea of heaven looks a lot like this



what you can't see, just out of frame on each of these photos, is a scruffy looking guy in a comfy, overstuffed armchair, his feet propped up on a beer cooler and with a smug/serene expression on his face.

(a special, interim BWSNotWA goes out to the linked page, "Hot Library Smut".) (found via Neatorama)

In case you were wondering: yes, it is possible to fit a 35 gallon trash can, a 5 gallon cooler, a 20lb. compressed gas cylinder, 2 kegs, 1 driver, the Guinness tap and connectors and the assorted tools and bits for all of the above into one 2-door Saturn.

(there was even room for a passenger, if they didn't mind riding in the trash can... or could support 160lbs. of beer on their lap.)

I was at Mac's at 8:45 am yesterday morning, to be the first in line to pick up a keg. Not unexpectedly, there were three other guys there for kegs too. (Mac's is the closest liquor store to campus; even the Alumni Association and Tech Administration pick up kegs there). The guy behind me also bought two kegs, though he had only reserved one. I just have to wonder if he was thinking, "Dude, you can get two of these?" when he saw me paying for mine. (more likely is that after reserving the keg and letting his friends know, he suddenly found he had 20-30 more 'friends' after word got around that a keg was showing up at his tailgate).

One short-but-heavily-laden drive onto campus, and some setup later, meant Guinness was flowing before 10am. The Bud took a little longer, since Kyle needed to show up with his new tailgate trailer-- which is a near-masterpiece of modern engineering, incorporating both a gas grill and a draft beer setup on a trailer that takes up just a 5'x5' footprint, all encased in gleaming diamond plate.

(I took pictures, but haven't uploaded them yet. I'll get around to editing this post & adding those in the next couple of days.)

Much beer and food followed, with friends renewing old ties in what is now an annual ritual, a great way to keep up with the old college buddies and meet a few new ones, and of course-- any excuse to drink too much beer is likely a good one.

We floated both kegs, definitely killing the Budweiser, and getting real close on the Guinness. Maybe I could have squeezed another 3 or 4 pints out of the Guinness keg. I didn't mind wasting the last few glasses-- we'll call that the Angels' Share; besides, I was looking to get my deposits back without having to make a second trip down to Midtown.

A few surprises:
- A keg of Guinness still costs what it did 15 months ago, $147.
- all that crap fit in my little car. My comment to the beer guy, "You ever notice that the one with the smallest car gets stuck picking up the kegs?" His reply, "Yeah, and you've got leather seats, too," whereupon we heaved the second keg unceremoniously into a leather bucket seat.
- more folks than you'd think will take a pint of Guinness, given the option. never knew the stuff was so popular.
- nobody seems to be getting older. or is that just me? and in fact, it seems like some of us have lost weight, if anything. I'm sure it's just a trick of memory, I need to dig up some old pictures for reference...
- It only took about eight hours for 10 or so people to drink roughly 13 gallons of Guinness. I could have sworn that I'd have leftovers... no worries though. It was beer well spent.

Best Web Site Name of the Week
for the week ending 10 September

drumroll please... and some applause for:

Armageddon Cocktail Hour

While you're visiting over there you might check out these handy references.


(about the award -- past winners)

at least one other person out there cares about the Damn Novel. Some part of me is glad for that. (the small, sober part of me-- the larger, meat part of me is drunk at the moment, and couldn't care less...)

It may be some time before I get back to fiction; or at least, back to the fiction project that was previously designated 'the damn novel'

"Cool! Does that mean we're getting back to my story?"

woah. not so fast, Mitch. No telling when we'll get back to that one.

"Fucker."

Yeah, well, you're entitled to your opinion.

"Just how drunk are you at the moment?"

Actually, I'm surprised I can type, Mitch, let alone remember the HTML tags.

Back on point: so, checking the hit logs, someone in NC (Hiya, Cheese!) will surf in on occasion on the ole 'blogging the novel' link. Your faith is perhaps misplaced, but I appreciate the return business.

"What, you're giving up on the novel?"

Hell no. But I have no idea when the next burst of creative energy is coming... and there are other projects that demand my attention.

"Bullshit. Quitter."

Well. hmm.

maybe.

But I do plan to get back to fiction. This November, if not sooner.

someone should stop me from blogging while drunk.

"Yes, but that might stop you from blogging entirely."

aye, there's the rub...

##

In place of drunken ramblings, here are some more, um... beer related... um...

OK, so we all know my favorite brand of chemical dependence. On to the Pics-- three action photos from last week's tailgate:



new for version 2.0: The bar top, which is actually the top to an end table I made roughly 10 years ago from salvaged lumber. Right now it's unfinished, but I'll fix that for version 2.5. thinking of something simple, may just do several layers of plain beeswax.

also new are the black drip tray and the Guinness hat, which when not sitting jauntily on the gas cylinder doubles as packing material, going over the top of the draft arm and faucet (tap handle removed) along with the coiled beer and gas lines, and couplers during transit.

This may be yet another example of a left brain/right brain dicotomy:

Two sites, that I just can't stop reading lately. Each equally odd, and equally compelling, yet in two completely different ways.

Left brained, and previously cited, Armageddon Cocktail Hour. I posted this one almost as a joke, just based on the name (after all, I was using search engines specifically to find oddly named sites) but after keeping an eye on ACH for a week, I find QF's take on current events to be both scary, funny, interesting, and scary all over again. But then again, if it's the end of the world, then I should track down a likely someone and suggest that "maybe you and I should, you know, go out with a bang" (ah yes, even in the face of world-wide human society self destructing, it's amazing how easily one will give in to genetic imperatives.)

Right brained, and no less disturbing, is TV In Japan.

Yes. TV. In Japan. And all that entails. (submitted without further comment)

On top of this, let me just add that I'm suffering a repeat flare up of the inner ear infection that has left me, literally, off balance for the past day and a half. So it's been an odd morning.

Best Web Site Name of the Week
for the week ending 17 September 2006

the Ministry of Minor Perfidy

The link above sends you to a recent, topical entry. I haven't read enough of the perfidy blog to know if they have an overall focus (I post these as I find them, not because I have this vast store of funny named sites) (yet) but they seem to lean toward crass humor, a bit of weapons-of-localized-destruction, and general rants. They're angry. They're funny. They're posting. (so it's an above average blog)

(about the award -- past winners)

...and send the link to others.

Please.

link, to an MSNBC clip, Keith Olbermann and his commentary on 9/11 from ground zero, 5 years on.

It's a shame really; every now and then I used to mock Olbermann, because he used to do the sports over on ESPN. He has proven since 2003 (and earlier, I'm sure, but I wasn't following his reports then) that it is still possible, in corporately-owned media, for one man to have a voice and to say the hard things that need to be said.

disclaimer: as I've mentioned before, I don't make enough money to be a Republican. for some, since I don't claim affiliation with that particular party, that means anything I might say or believe in can be discounted.

If this even sort of applies to you, then you need to watch the video on the other side of that link. It's not about politics. It's NOT about politics. It's about action and consequences.

And if anything can shake you, even a bit, then that can only be a good thing even if you disagree with the POV presented. And I'll admit, you may still disagree with Olbermann, and his take on events, even after hearing his eloquent argument. That's OK; but if you refuse ahead of time to even watch one video clip because it might argue against points you've (for whatever dumb reason) already decided on, then I feel sorry for you and sorry for what our nation has become.

because I know you're lazy, and you won't page up if you don't have to, here's the link again. click. watch. it's only 8 minutes of your day.

Hell, here's the damn thing as an embedded object. (I don't post video; I'm making an exception)



...and send the link to others.

Please

So. I guess my blog has come of age: I had a spammer leave a bunch of fake comments last night. The joke is on him however, because: #1 no one reads this blog (sad but true) #2 all his comments were on old posts that wouldn't be read again even if I did have regular readers, and #3 it took me longer to type this entry than it did to delete the spam.

Hell, it took me longer to type in the entry title.

I could disable comments from anonymous 'guests' entirely, or disable comments on posts older than a week (or something similar) but I'll wait to take those steps. I do plan to take a couple of minutes to check the hit logs, but I don't think I'll find anything there. Maybe I need to pay more attention to what topics I post on, make sure there's nothing worth reading (or spamming) here. [*chuckle*]

I have a working title, but I'm waiting for inspiration to strike, for something memorable and marketable to pop into my head so I can sell this book, first to a publisher, and then to slackers like you.

(I say 'slacker' not as an insult, but with all fondness. I'm one. The slackers are my target audience.)

However, the working title and it's cumbersome subtitle are not ideal for everyday references, so from now on I'll be referring to this project as the other damn book. ('other', because it's not the Damn Novel.) I feel the need to write something though, and if the Damn Novel isn't going to cooperate, we'll do what we can with what we got.

First up:

A table of contents. (which will double as an outline) Major categories:
- Cooking
- Recipes (as opposed to cooking; when I write this it'll make more sense)
- Slacker Housekeeping

...and actually, that'll be the bulk of the book. Doesn't seem like much. Let me tie this entry off and post it, and get to work on that outline.

I decided to move the Outline/TOC for the new project over to a content page (in fact, over to this content page) where I can quietly update it it without clogging up the main blog.

Though when it gets close to where I want it, I'll let you know.

What I plan to do is add links to each article on the blog that are going to become chapters in the book. Over time, we should see more and more of that ouline fill in with green links, until it really is a Table of Contents.

Taking the book in small chunks should also help. One of the more daunting things about the Damn Novel is that the plan is for something so big. This other damn book is just a collection of smaller parts.

My hope is that this exercise (outlining, writing in small bites) will teach me something about writing that I can then take with me to the fiction projects.

off of Wired:

[quote]
"We are objecting to the message that the fossil exhibits represent the scientific evidence of human evolution," said Bishop Boniface Adoyo, chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, which claims to represents churches of 35 denominations with 9 million members. "They do not. Human evolution is still a theory and this cannot be called as evidence.”
[/quote]

Gravity is a theory too. It would please me greatly if the stone-age-minds who attack science would stop believing in that one, and fly off the face of the earth.

[Pinklemonade]
Comment posted on September 18th, 2006 at 02:03 PM
by the way, the comparison between evolution and gravity is made frequently, but i dont think this i an apt comparison. we call the theory of gravity a law because not only does it adequately describe the phenomenon we observe, but it is useful and successful in predicting outcomes. it is demonstrably consistent. the theory of evolution does not do this at all. it may adequately describe our archeological and biological observations, but it isnt useful for prediction, nor does it have predictable consistency. so i see a major difference between the two.
[/Pinklemonade]


I'm not a physicist, but I played one at college.

##

Gravity is intuitive, as anyone who trips can tell you.

Also, when scientists were figuring out gravity, (Galileo, and later Newton w/ his laws of motion) they had the benefit of two very simple systems to study:

The earth, which is so damn big everything on a human scale just falls down, and the solar system.

w/ the planets: From earth, the planets do weird things. Their movements seem chaotic and random. It took a couple of centuries, a couple of geniuses, a new thought model (heliocentric) and a new math (calculus) to figure out that the sky dance of the wanderers could be boiled down to elliptical orbits and relatively simple equations.

(that's for a *simple* model)

When developing the theory of gravity into a law, the simplicity of these systems (two objects in the falling case, 9 observable objects-- at the time-- in the solar system) gave us a huge advantage.

##

Evolution is also observable. We also have a thought-model ("Evolution" is short-hand for that whole conceptual thing) and some math. Let me tell you why it then becomes a tough question:

We don't have 9 observable objects. We have trillions of individuals that are spread out over an unknown number of species and which have cycled through an unknown (but very large) number of generations.

Our time scale isn't a couple of decades (I think Saturn takes 30 years or so to cycle, as observed from earth), we're looking at thousands and millions of years.

The system ('life' as it were) is nowhere near as static as the solar system (where large lumps interact only via a single force over very large distances). Individual units can interact with others in hundreds of ways. While also interacting with the environment. While also undergoing personal change.

We can figure out things that are statistically likely, but not certain. And even when you think you know how it works, well, an asteroid falls in the middle of your argument and kills off the dinosaurs.

##

Though I pulled the gravity/evolution analogy for the sake of humor, as you point out there is an incongruity in that argument.

the more apt comparison is to the science of geology.

The time scales are equally large. The interactions are also complex, and exact predictions impossible.

I can't tell you what color the next variation of a particular species of flower will be. I can't predict earthquakes in California, either. (more precisely: "SO, this geology of yours tells you how diamonds are created, and the places they form. Where's my diamond, sucka? Come on, fork one over. 50 carats and up, I don't want the small fry, fool.")

Geology does describe the causes and mechanisms that provide for earthquakes, and evolution is also a descriptive science. The failure of each is in the complexity and chaotic nature of the systems they attempt to explain.

##

[Pinklemonade]
Comment posted on September 18th, 2006 at 01:31 PM
i would really like for a very knowledgable scientist with no agenda whatsoever to explain to me the strengths and weaknesses of the evolution model. it has many, many stregths of course. correct me if i am wrong, but isnt one of the weaknesses the lack conclusive evidence of the actual bridge or switch from one species to the next? we have remains of several species which are very similar and which are no longer extant. but can we say beyond speculation that there really was a gradual switch from one species to the next rather than just the presence of more than one similar but utterly distinct species? i honestly dont know, and whenever i try to do some curosry research on it (i havent time or patience to read a scientific book on the matter right now, not to mention i wouldnt be sure which book is trustworthy since this is such a politicized issue) all i can find is information that is heavy on the rhetoric and agenda, so i dont know if what i am getting is the facts, or a selective presentation of the facts.
[/Pinklemonade]

My area of expertise is beer the physical sciences (if you'll forgive the language: "Shit that blows shit up") as opposed to the so-called 'soft' sciences (because the gear isn't nearly as cool-- I mean, a 5mi. diameter particle accelerator; I want one in my back yard) so my understanding of the science behind evolution is not as comprehensive as it should be to answer your question.

Since I've been drinking, and since this is the internet, obviously this is no obstacle to me responding.

##

The time-scale involved is *huge*

I can't tell you who half of my great-grandparents were, either. (or any of my 16 great-great-etc. for that matter, and that's only going 100 years of so back)

The fossil record is spotty. Sorry. There's no way to fix that. Currently, some scientists are really looking at DNA (particularly now that we can decode whole genomes) but that's like 'listening' to music by reading the binary code off of a CD. ("oooh, I love this part 0001010100010110111010100...")

You doubt the conclusions; because similar species might be descendants, might be ancestors, might be existing concomitantly, might be unrelated but similar in construction (in the broadest sense: birds, bats, and bumblebees all fly), and might even be broad variations in a single species that only appear to be divergent from the physical evidence. (technically, Chihuahuas and St. Bernards are the same specie. Though before we could get puppies, there are practical considerations...)

The whole thing is too big. For me (YMMV) the basic ideas of

- mutation (species diverging over time because individuals are all different from one another, and even within the context of a 'specie' the differences will add up)
- selection (differences between individuals make a, um, difference)
- heredity (stuff that works for me should also work for my kids)
- & random crap (not just asteroid-precipitated-mass-extinctions, but also geographical isolation, wild mutation-- snakes with two heads, et. al.-- climate change, disease, a sudden fad where lemmings are served as hors d'oeuvres in haut cuisine restaurants...)

add up to a system that makes sense as a whole, if requiring a bit of [*cough*] faith.

##

and for the record, the orig. post was a joke. a one liner. (well, with some spite behind it, but still a joke)

"Why do we give out the award on a Tuesday when, by the dating system we employ, each week actually starts on a Monday? "

excellent question. I'm going to refer that to the appropriate committee right now. moving on...

Best Web Site Name of the Week
for the week ending 24 September 2006

Ed Loves Bacon

Odd though; the site isn't about bacon. I can find no mention of breakfast meats at all-- except perhaps in passing-- but I'm not going to listen to all of their podcasts to find out if or when they did in fact report on rashers.

And: if Ed loves bacon, then who is this Aaron guy and why does he get listed first?
And: Why does Ed love bacon so much that he named his site after not just the tasty smoked strips of pork fat, but also the fact that he is enamored of same?

setting all that to one side...

looks like Ed and Aaron do a show roughly once each month. Hats off and deep respect to any podcaster who can score a Kevin Smith interview. That must have been pretty cool.

(about the award -- past winners)

'schnitzel' is just German for fried cutlet.

The original version of this recipe (wiener schnitzel ) called for veal cutlets, but today we use turkey because we don't want to condone the abuse of baby cows no matter how tasty the end product might be. mmm... tasty, tasty baby cow flesh...

anyway:

Turkey Schnitzel

shop:
1 lb. Turkey Cutlets, or if you can't find nice fillets just get a pound of turkey breast
oil (peanut, in my case)
a little flour
2 eggs
panko bread crumbs

the sauce:
chicken bouillon
2 tbsp. butter (or more)
a little flour
flat-leaf (Italian) parsley-- a few ounces, chopped.
1 lemon

hardware:
ye ole electric skillet, or some other frying pan
cooling rack

recommended beer:
Wheat beers, pilsners, and-what-*won't*-go-with-Guinness?

Lab procedures:

If the butcher sells you some nice thin turkey cutlets/fillets, then you're good. If not...

Stand your turkey breast on end, and slice it into two thinner pieces. Repeat, if necessary. (these end-on slices can be easier if the meat is a little frozen.) Take these slices (or the fillets) and pound them even flatter with the back of your hand on the counter. (this can be therapeutic)

set up your fry station, 5 stops: a plate with raw meat, a plate of flour, a dish with your two eggs (beaten), and a dish with the panko; and then the cooking surface

a note on panko: these are Japanese style bread crumbs. Typically, you can find them on the ethnic food aisle of your local megamart. Can you use regular bread or cracker crumbs? yes. Will it taste the same? no. What do Japanese bread crumbs have to do with a German recipe? hey, look, a blimp.

trust me on the panko. it's worth finding some.

Moving through the stations: Your cutlet first gets dredged in flour (knock off the excess), dipped in egg (again, let it drip a bit), breaded with the panko bread crumbs, and then laid down in the skillet-- which has been pre-heating over medium high heat and dressed with a bit of the peanut oil.

You don't need much oil--just a drizzle-- but you are likely going to be adding a bit each time you add or flip a cutlet. This is because the breading does a really good job of absorbing oil, so whatever you add is getting taken up right away. The other reason to keep re-applying is that the breading doesn't really brown unless there's some oil in the pan.

What I have is an old beer bottle, with a pour spout like you'll see on liquor bottles in a bar. (I have two, a brown one for the peanut oil and a green one for olive.) With this rig, I can be fairly precise with the oil. If you were to say, fill up your pan with about a quarter inch of oil, that'd do the trick too, but your breading would end up a lot 'slicker' then if you micromanaged the process a little bit.

I'm not sure how else to describe the technique... well, let's talk amount: for each side of each fillet I'm using from 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of oil. A little practice, and I'm sure you'll find your own way through the process.

Brown each side (only takes a few minutes). When you get the timing down, you'll only need to flip each piece once-- quick cooking times are one of the reasons we pounded the meat into flat cutlets. That, and the meat was naughty.

For a double recipe, I'm looking at about 8 of these schnitzels. I work two at a time, and keep the cooked ones on a cooling rack (over a drip tray, or just paper towels) until I'm done with all the meat, and the sauce.

... So next up is the sauce.

Don't clean the pan. We're going to make the gravy right there. (if you were using the 'excess oil' frying method, you'd want to drain that out, but still don't clean up yet.)

In the same pan, add chicken bouillon (1 cube, or roughly 1 teaspoon loose granules) & about a cup of water. Dissolve the bouillon while you deglaze the pan over low heat. To this you'll add about a tablespoon of flour to thicken, and the 2 tablespoons of butter. And when that comes together nicely, you'll add the juice of one lemon, and two handfuls of chopped parsley.

Cook the sauce down (or add water) to get to the thickness you'd like, and serve.

A standard menu is meat & three: tonight we had two veggies (broccoli and asparagus, both steamed) and a starch (garlic bread. garlic mashed potatoes are good too, particularly with the gravy)

Starbucks announced yesterday (note how they hoped to hide the announcement by waiting until a Friday afternoon-- a strategy employed by many businesses, and the white house) that prices are going to go up in October, due to the rising costs of building an evil coffee empire by toppling 3rd world governments in coffee producing areas then sending in their crack barista-troopers to seize control fuel & labor.

It'll be an extra nickel. We'll pay it. Like any pusher, they know they have us by the balls.

When I did the garlic bread for Thursday night's dinner, I did it the usual way: slice a loaf of nice sour dough french bread on the bias ('cause it looks all fancy like, that and we get a larger surface area on each slice), melt a stick of butter in the microwave, add an obscene amount of garlic powder to the butter, brush the butter w/ garlic liberally on both sides of each slice of bread and over the top of the loaf...

hopefully you read these in advance before you try the recipes, because you really needed a long piece of foil (longer than the original loaf), using that as a work surface for all of the aforementioned butter slathering-- or you can clean one really messy counter later...

and wrap your bread in foil, pop in the oven at 350 degrees or so and give it 10 to 15 min.

You can prep a loaf in advance, and keep it in foil in the fridge for an afternoon, or overnight.

##

This is fine for a family dinner. However, for single servings (and I'll concede that a 20" loaf of garlic bread may in fact be a [*cough*] single serving) it is a bit much to go through.

So this afternoon (having bought two lovely loaves of the sourdough, now freezing for later consumption) I decided to do a batch of garlic butter, to have on hand.

I almost hesitate to call this one a recipe.

Garlic Butter

shop:
8 oz. tub of butter
obscene amount of garlic powder (or to taste)
an ounce or so chopped parsley.

hardware:
a mixing bowl
a spatula
a fork

lab procedures:

first, a note on butter. I bought [ahem] Land O Lakes Spreadable Butter with Canola Oil (8 oz.) [/endplug] because it comes in a tub (which I reused), I've purchased and eaten it in the past, and true to the label it is in fact 'spreadable' more-or-less right out of the fridge.

You could use two sticks of regular butter, or buy whatever brand of margarine, oleo, or butter-substitute suits your fancy. Heck, with the amount of garlic I usually put into this, an adventurous vegan could likely use silken tofu with no noticeable difference.

(note to self: garlic silken tofu? might be something there...)

So-- what there is of the recipe: Leave your butter on the counter for a half hour or so to soften. Dump in a mixing bowl, add as much garlic as you can stand, and combine with a fork. Since I had some fresh flat-leaf parsley on hand (leftover from the Turkey Schnitzel) I chopped some of that up very fine and mashed it in with the rest. Then, using a spatula, put the newly-seasoned butter back in it's tub (or some other handy container) and re-refrigerate.

I'm not sure that the parsley adds much in the way of flavor; it's primary purpose is as a clear visual warning: "Dude, this isn't plain butter ". (I also took a marker and wrote GARLIC on the lid.) Other herbs, though, can certainly be added with excellent results. (It's hard to go wrong with the Simon-Garfunkel-Loadout: parsley, sage, rosemary, & thyme.) (& as is typical: it'll be better after a few days in the fridge, when the flavors have had a chance to combine and disseminate)

Aside from bread, garlic butter can be added as a simple 'sauce' to fish, primarily, but also to chicken and even steak. (one of the best things to do to fillet mignon, if it isn't already wrapped in bacon, is to simply add a healthy dollop of herbed garlic butter)

The hard part of being productive in the mornings is making it over the high curb that separates 'awake' from 'the blissful sleep I only get between the hours of 5 and 9am'. Even if I've already slept for 8 hours, the sweet golden moments of that four-hour window provide the most restful sleep I'm likely to get this side of the grave. I think it's because at that point just before sunrise, my house is about as cold as it's likely to be all day and the poor sun is still too weak to really be a bother yet, so circumstances all conspire for a lot of huddling and snuggling under blankets.

However, I can be pursuaded to leave my warm and comfy bed, but usually only by the thought "dude! get up and get moving or you're gonna get fired! "

...of course, the 7am staff meeting was cancelled this morning-- which I would have known if I bothered to check my voice mail yesterday-- so I can only lament the lost sleep while I nurse a large coffee at a nearby Morebucks and get some 'work' done on the internet.

I'm just glad I bothered to bring the ac-power-thingy with the laptop today (for unrelated reasons) --so burning through a battery with my coffee this morning is an viable option.

##

(in this case, the double hash isn't just a page break or pause, we're moving on to a new topic)

One of the things I've noticed off of the tabulas main page-- and it should be expected, given that tabulas accounts are so easy to sign up for-- is that occasionally a recently updated blog from random-user-whomever is nothing but an advertisement, or worse, a splog. [article from a couple weeks ago on Wired]

I'm not complaining about folks who are legitimately doing reviews and recommendations. Obviously, if I'm telling you about a favorite of mine, I'm going to link you to someplace to buy it, or to get more information.

You can usually spot a 'spam blog' because the links are peppered everywhere in each post, and they go to places that seem to have little to do with the text in the entry (or to a really random url that has at least one number in the domain name, i.e. homemortgage9-dot-whatever) --it's all just a ruse to boost some spam website's page rank on google. (seems like a lot of trouble to go through but there must be a financial incentive or no one would bother.

The problem is that while we (people, generally) can spot one of these after reading an-entry-and-a-half, there's no good way to set up a computer filter. And other than the fact that they're eating up Roy's bandwidth, I'm not sure that these 'fakes' are necessarily a problem.

And at least for now, the splogs are a small minority. or so it seems to me and my rather unscientific sampling of the tabulas community.

I recently picked up a new external drive for my cheap-ass laptop, 320mb (nominal, about 300 in practice), USB 2.0, etc. etc. from Western Digital. The fact that I've heard of that drive company is of course a plus, though I've bought stuff from 'no-name' folks too. (without problems, mostly)

I'm very happy with it. I'm going to link to it [link goes to price comparisons on froogle; I paid $190 retail, with tax].

(you can interpret this as an ad and call me a hypocrite for immediately 'contradicting' my last post)

The speed is nothing to brag about-- oh, the drive is fast enough, one of those 7200 things, whatever that number happens to mean in practical terms-- but since the USB ports on my deck are not 2.0, I get a feeling that it could be faster.

The external is part of ongoing prep-work for the eventual laptop upgrade, though, so if it does happen to work better on a new computer that'll just be one extra bonus.

another week, another website:

Best Web Site Name of the Week
for the week ending 1 October 2006

Stomp Tokyo

Obviously, with a name like "Stomp Tokyo", they've got what you need in the giant-rubbery-monsters-destroying-Tokyo-line. (someone should do a fiction timeline taking into account all the movies, anime, & tv shows-- something like this-- so we know just how many times we've destroyed Tokyo. My bet is 529. Anyone want to set up a pool?)

But wait, there's more! Snuggled in amongst the many video reviews, there's the Japanese Spider-Man, the Indian Superman, and quite a few old sci-fi & horror flicks, including [*shudder*] the '78 Star Wars Holiday Special.

##

an honorable mention goes out to Grampa's House, not for the name (which obviously needs a little work; and the award is for the best name after all) but for the blurb which immediately smacks you in the face when visiting Grampa's House,

[quote]
Lord Protector of Madagascar -- Founding member of the Lunatic Fringe -- Admirer of Stalin -- On a good day, still a sociopath.
[/quote]

Go spend some time with Grampa. But don't stay too long, I don't know if you'll be able to come back as the same person if you're there for more than a few minutes.

(about the award -- past winners)

I don't know why, but netscape decided suddenly that it was a brand new install, as opposed to the program I've used at least twice daily for the past two or three years.

(I blame the most recent windows patch. damn you microsoft bastards; you guys could at least lose gracefully when someone picks a competitor's product...)

No real problems operationally, except of course that I lost all my bookmarks. I found a backup from May when I installed and tried firefox for a day, so a lot of the basics (sites I've been frequenting for at least that long) are in place, but we'll have to see how many of the others I remember.

I had a half dozen or so BWSNotWAs lined up, too. [grumble]