Small World

Last night I was on the T making jokes with some friends and three women nearby overheard and laughed at us. Not really at the jokes, they were laughing at us.

But we started talking with them, and one turned out to be from my home town, Charlottesville. And in fact she was the younger sister of this guy Terence I went to high school with. We were on the quiz team together but I haven’t heard from him in years.

He’s apparently in law school at BC, but the only information I can find on him is that in 1998 he liked the television show Felicity, “because I feel like I can relate to it.” I don’t know much about Felicity, but Terence was always a cipher to me– one of the smartest, most dedicated students in the school, well-dressed, intensely private. I always sensed that he disliked me, but of course at that age I was both paranoid and intensely dislikeable, so who knows.

Not that I’m any more likeable now, given the threatening phone calls I’ve recieved about the site.

Obscure Products

I saw a picture on Al Jazeera (couldn’t read any of the text, but the photo series are nifty) of the White House behind some steel blockades. In fact, I could see that they were Blockader Brand Steel Barricades. As with trade magazines for industries I’m not involved in, I like to look at industry safety supplies and specialty catalogs for commercial purposes. Look at the things people want and need, and the businesses that spring up to serve those wants and needs, and you begin to understand the world that goes on around them, commercial and otherwise.

For example, church stores. Nonspecialists work with churches, too, of course. At a conference awhile ago I spoke with the IT director for most of the mid-Atlantic region’s Catholic churches. Powerpoint is big in sermons these days, apparently, and email has made church newsletters much cheaper. And imagine the potential for burka sales! You could shop without having to leave your home and be exposed to the gaze of men. I hear that the burka merchants of Kabul have had some dropoff in sales recently, but I imagine that the Internet could bring them new business from all over the world. Or maybe they’ll branch out into more revealing clothing, like chadors.

The Browsers and The Browsed

I was using the Camino (formerly Chimera) browser, which is based on Mozilla, the basis for Netscape and so forth. But I gave up on a new version coming out, and switched to Safari. Shortly before noticing that there’s a new Camino out. We’ll see which I stick with.

And as to things you can do with that software, I’ve read two web comics recently about violence, lust, and jealousy. One of them is not at all funny and is called Three Men. The other is called
Something Positive, and it’s both funny and wicked.

You All Suck

I hate everybody. I hate overly sincere leftists who think the word ” phallus makes them smarter than anyone. I am particularly annoyed by stupid knee-jerk right-wingers and their Gipper-loving, France-bashing, not-very-funny sense of humor. Oh, sure, garden-variety stupidity always pisses me off too. But there’s nothing like a war to bring out my dislike of humanity.

I may have said this before, but I distrust human nature so much it’s almost Catholic, except without the redemption part.

Hypermediocrity

I’m totally obsessed with fischerspooner right now. Some of the stuff (Emerge, in particular, with the rather encouraging lyrics “you don’t need to emerge from nothing, you don’t need to tear away”) is fantastic and uplifting and just fun dance music. But what grabbed me first was the same trashy, brazen attitude I liked in artists like Peaches and Gravy Train. The song Mega Colon absolutely epitomizes the aesthetic: a sultry woman’s voice singing a song you’d otherwise attribute to a fourth-grade boy. Literally, pottymouthed.

It reminds me of this rant in Vice Magazine awhile back about how the only guys who think thong underwear is sexy are the ones who still think girls don’t poo.

In related news, a black hole is born, and feces befoul our fair parks, our dainty knees, our family homes, and our innocent, sacrosanct childhood memories. Of course we’re going to sue someone about it.