When we got to the park this morning, I noticed some graffiti written on one of the picnic tables. The instant I read it, I knew who’d written it because I saw them when they left yesterday. Two guys, one old and one younger, both rednecks (one obviously so), driving a battered white Lumina bearing bumper stickers with such pearls of wisdom as “POW M.I.A.”, “Support our troops!” “Bush/Cheney ’04 (nope, not making that up), and the kicker, this little beauty:

Not my image (I couldn’t get a shot of their car), but the same sticker, and yes, that does say “The 700 Club.” Anyway, here is what one of them wrote on the picnic table (click for full-size). I think it was the younger one, because he’s the one who was sitting on that side yesterday.
Westboro Baptist Church wants YOU!

Nope, nothing screams “LATENT HOMO” louder and clearer than someone who begins his picnic table personal ad with “No Queers.” Or for that matter, puts a personal ad on a picnic table in the first place, apparently in hopes that some woman will read it, pity him and hang around until he shows up. Uh…yeah. Dude, relax. Queers have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that you can’t get a woman; they don’t even like women. They’re actually doing you a favour, since more fags means less competition for you, and men (I use the term in the most generous possible sense) like you can not afford competition. You are the reason you can’t get a woman, because even though you won’t admit it, you’re probably more attracted to the old guy sitting at the table with you than you are to any woman, and even if you weren’t, no woman in her right fucking mind would touch you with a thirty-five foot pole in the first fucking place. LOOK at yourself, facrissake!!

Has it never occurred to you that losing fifty or sixty pounds, cutting that nasty nest of hair and wearing something that doesn’t look as if you’re dressed to watch NASCAR on the tube might go a long way toward getting you a little feminine companionship? Of course, you’d have to pull the stickers off your car and never, ever open your fucking mouth lest she find out you’re an uneducated far-right, Bible-thumping lunatic, but looking a little more attractive would be a good start. The harder you try to prove that you’re a man the less you look like one. Just give it up, lean over the table and give him a big ol’ frenchy with lots of tongue. We won’t even watch!

Special thanks to my partner in crime; the only way I was able to get even the couple of bad pictures of them that I did get was because P let me pretend I was aiming the lens at him, and was willing to go close enough to say, “Hi” (I wasn’t–might catch “teh homophobe”). I’d tried sneaking around them earlier, but every time I was within 100 ft., they were staring at me like they’d never seen a live woman that close before when no restraining order had been issued. Hell, maybe they haven’t; that really wouldn’t surprise me.

I couldn’t make up shit this good if I tried. Their very existence is comedy-fucking-gold. Ah, I do love the American midwest!!

There, you see? That’s what happens when you get something into your stubborn little head and refuse to even consider what I’m telling you. A whole pond full of sturdy goldfish don’t all get sick with a bacterial infection at the same time just because of some temperature fluctuation and a mini-cycle, but when you don’t quarantine new stock long enough, you absolutely can (and usually do) end up introducing some unwanted nasties along with the new fish. I told you a week ago that I suspected parasites, and went into some detail as to why. You knew you had introduced two new commons two weeks before, you said yourself that you should have quarantined longer (I’d bet you didn’t quarantine at all), and you know as well as I do that common goldfish are usually at least on the same filtration system as the disease-ridden feeders, if not actually in the same tank. You even said it was probably a pre-existing condition of one of those fish. You could have borrowed a microscope or even bought a cheap one and done a scrape–I even offered to give you step by step directions–but you wouldn’t. I gave you a video link to see Costia in action so you’d understand how small they are and that it would be impossible to see them without microscopic inspection. Did you pay attention? No, you did not. Instead, you believed someone who told you that it was likely columnaris, in spite of the fact that goldies practically never get that disease, and in spite of the fact that your moors were not black, but slimy grey. Instead, you lost five out of your seven fish.

I am not a fish vet. I’m not a vet at all. I’m not a human doctor, and I don’t even have a degree in pharmacology. I stayed out of your thread at first because I don’t keep goldfish and I don’t know much about them, but when you were getting what I thought was very bad advice, I posted in the moderator forum in hopes of turning your “mentor” in what I believed was the right direction. It didn’t work–all she’d give me was a single line in the thread and no explanation at all–so I had to go to the public forum and tell you myself. No, I’m not a vet, but unlike the person whose advice you chose to heed, I don’t talk out my arse and just make shit up when I don’t know. If I don’t know, I’ll say so. If I think I do, I’ll say that, I will explain why, and you can bet it’s backed with everything I’ve read and learned, not with a two minute, three line post of “shit I heard somewhere and cobbled together with a healthy dose of conclusion-jumping”. I earned the “Administrator” under my goddamned name because I care enough to do my homework and yours, too. You backed the wrong fucking horse, and I hope you’re proud of yourself because I’m not proud of you at all. I may have been going on Mama’s intuition, but Mama’s intuition is backed with logic, science and the very best educated guess that I can possibly give, so goddammit, pay attention when I’m talking to you!

P.S. Just so you know, tetracycline is not “harsh” unless it’s exposed to sunlight, which can render it toxic. It’s overused and there are strains of bacteria with resistance to it, but I guess no one ever told your “mentor” that the oft-recommended Maracyn Two is mino-fucking-cycline, in the same family as THE REST OF THE GODDAMNED TETRACYCLINE DRUGS! If tetracycline were harsh, minocycline would be as well, but it’s not. She got “harsh” from the fact that it is UV-sensitive. When someone tells you something that incorrect, question that person’s crediblity, for Christ’s sake, and stop taking her advice because she’s just talking out her arse.

I hate you, you stupid fake-disabled POS, but even more, I HATE THE GODDAMNED WHITE TRASH THAT HANGS AROUND YOUR HOUSE. You, with your scraggly old arse parked on a chesterfield (!!) on the front porch, sleeping like some old drunken bum, I can stand. I can walk away and forget I ever saw you, or at least until the nightmares come. When I’m working, however, and it’s a beautiful day to have the windows open, YOU NEED TO TELL THAT LITTLE SHIT THAT THE REST OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD DOES NOT WANT TO HEAR HIS GANGSTA (C)RAP MUSIC. I don’t care if he’s washing somebody’s truck (it’s not yours–I know that much) and I don’t care if he’s the little shit who mows your lawn. This is a neighbourhood, and you’re not the only person (if, indeed, you are actually a person) who lives here. Look around you…what do you see? That’s right! You see houses BECAUSE THIS IS NOT A FUCKING TRAILER PARK. I don’t know who you are or where the hell you came from, but I do know what part of town you belong in, and it’s not this one. Civilised people (well, mostly) live here. You are low-rent white fucking trash and you need to find another fucking place to be.

Well, that was sort of disappointing. I have grumbled, growled, complained about and harboured passionate hatred for Samba since the Mandrake days, and I fully expected to have to fight with it every step of the way when I decided to configure it this morning so that my desktop, laptop and P’s desktop can all share files. No fight–I installed it, stopped the daemon, edited smb.conf to our network name, added shares, added users and restarted the daemon. Same thing on the laptop/ I’m now listening to my music on crappy laptop speakers instead of my good speakers and soundcard….because I can. I still haven’t tested P’s access, but since Samba is built for Win/Linux sharing, and I’ve never had any problems with his before, I suspect it’ll be just fine once I allow access through his firewall. Kind of a letdown, though, when Geek Girl doesn’t get to tinker. On the bright side, for some reason, I can’t get Audacious to play mp3 on the laptop. Totem will, but Audacious complains, and that’s okay because it means I get to fix something. Bonus points because I didn’t break it in the first place. 😆

Cute little half-sized laptop–the Asus “3ePC”! Unveiled at Intel’s Computex keynote yesterday. Rumour has it that the earliest it’s likely to be available is December, but if it is available then, I’m going to have one. It’ll retail for $189 (so they say), and although it’ll run Win (so they say), it comes with a custom Linux distro (which I’d replace with my own). I want it because it’s so goddamned cute!

Okay….little experiment with image placement here….

Did that work? I like this template, but goddamn, they make it hard to get an image where you actually want it to be.

Muahahaha! I found the offending attribute (float) in the stylesheet and removed it so the text doesn’t wrap around the images anymore. If I wanted to publish a magazine, I’d publish a magazine; this is my bitch blog! In this respect, I like CSS because now my old posts are un-fucked-up all on their own and all I had to do was remove a line (or two–forget) of code.

P.S. I’ve got the window open and I’m hoping my little robin baby will show up again today. If he does, and that dumbfuck comes anywhere near me, I swear I’ll brain him with a fucking shoe! I’m all for equal treatment of the handicapped, you see.

I hate that fuckin’ asshole next door. The old bastard got a power chair (for which I have no doubt the taxpayers had to foot the bill) and now they’ve erected an enormous ramp on the front of the house. Well, whatever. Today, I discovered that I have a new baby robin, and he’s young enough that I could get pretty close, so when he was outside the window, I grabbed the camera and went out. I got off one so-so shot when dumbass comes around the corner. I took another shot, thinking that I’d creep closer to the bird when he left. He didn’t leave, though; he barrelled right through and scared the bird off….somewhere. I wanted to fucking SMACK him. Facrissake. Go around, fuckface–it’s not like you have to walk or anything. VA pays everything for you and that bunch of white trash that hangs around your house, just waiting for you to die, so go ahead–blow a couple of battery cycles and go the other fucking way. Disabled, my arse; you’re “abled” just fine when there’s something you want to do.

I have a shitload of stuff that I’m supposed to be doing (right now), but what am I actually doing? Trying to decide whether to go with the pink or the orange. I usually do that when I’m bored, or sometimes when I’m trying to put off something that I don’t want to do….like everything I have to do today! Decisions, decisions…or at least avoidance thereof. Some days, you just feel like a big puddle of “dunno”.

An aquatic frog that’s only 1/2″ after a year? You’re either starving it, a poor judge of size, or just plain lying. Lady, you’re in Minne-fucking-sota and here in the good old US of A, there are two types of aquatic frogs available in the hobby. ADFs are one and ACFs are the other. If your frog is albino, then there’s a 99.9% chance that it’s an ACF. ACFs may start out at 1/2″, but they goddamned well don’t stay that way for a year. Period.

P.S. “Platy’s.” Jesus H. Christ. ARRRRRGGGHHH!

I have been with P for almost eight years. He is amused by “Hair is an entity”, but he’s a typical guy in that he has never once asked me a hair question (hey–that wasn’t a hair question!) I guessed he probably knew I have hair, but beyond that, I couldn’t have guessed. Nearly eight years into what I consider a very good and close relationship, he comes up with….

P: “How do you get your hair like that?”

Me: “Like what?”

P: “Like that…in the back.”

Me: “Thank you, Paul Mitchell–that was helpful. Do you mean the way it’s cut?”

P: “Yeah! Down at the bottom.”

Me: “Ah! How do I get it straight across the bottom?”

P: “Yes.”

Me: “Well, sometimes pruning shears, but mostly I just use scissors.”

P: “You cut it yourself?”

Me: “Yes, and I have for nearly all of my adult life. I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve had it professionally cut, and I don’t have to use them all. Most hairdressers suck with curly hair, and stylists cost too much. I know my own hair better than a hairdresser, and I can cut other people’s hair, so I can do a passable job on my own.”

P: “You cut it yourself. Huh!”

I love my husband, and he knows more about me than any other living human being. He can even pick out the conditioner that I use if I remind him to make sure the bottle says “conditioner” and not “shampoo” (they look almost identical). Somehow, though, he did not notice that for nearly eight years, I never once “got my hair done”, mentioned that hairdressers are expensive, or even mused about “trying a new style”. He must have been asleep all of those times I went into the bathroom with my haircutting scissors, a huge hand mirror, pick, comb, clips and a plastic bag, then came out with considerably less ‘fro than I had when I went in. Men.

WTF did they do to Flickr? It was down for a few hours several days ago, and ever since, it’s worked like the server is a $3.99/month shared host from some second-rate provider. It’s fucking FLICKR, facrissake; Yahoo! knows they host images and their bandwidth requirements are high, so why is it that they’ve slowed the goddamned site down‽