Stupid Girls
She’s a freak and as ugly as a can of toads packed arse-end up, but I like this song, and the video even more. Girls don’t need to be Paris Hilton or Jessica Simpson; they shouldn’t even want to. I’d rather be Pink than Paris because Pink has some spunk. Paris isn’t anything but a spoilt rich brat in a grown-up body. Well, that and a skank ho’.
P looked pretty proud of himself when he brought this in to me, probably for the most part because he calls me the Mad Scientist, but also because it’s somewhat risqué. I’m not a big fan of MC Light, but they were out of regular and it’s better than nothing. Oh, and yeah, my desk really is this much a mess. 🙂
Originally uploaded by Mean and Pinchy.
I just glanced as I walked toward the creek, and thought this was another crayfish burrow, but then I realised the dirt was loose, not packed, and there was something inside. I poked gently with a stick to tease the critter out and saw that it was a cicada nymph (dog day harvestfly…or not, depending on what page I’ve read), just emerging from the ground. I’ve seen lots of adult cicadas, and hundreds of empty exos still clinging to trees, but this is the first time I’d ever caught one just as he was ready to emerge. (Must be a Gentoo user. “emerge cicada”.) If he’s the one I’m thinking of, he sounds like this. When I first came here, I thought they were some kind of machinery off in the distance because the only ones I remembered hearing back home sounded more like this.
In my efforts to ID this cicada, I also finally found a name for the brown, grasshopper-y critters we’d always called “sandcrackers” back home. They’re called Carolina grasshoppers, Dissosteira carolina, and they’re common throughout North America. Cool, though, since I’d wondered for a long time what they were. I can’t find a sound file for them, but I do recall thinking that Rafe the Lazy (striped raphael catfish) made a sound very much like it when he was disturbed to be moved to another tank. Sort of “cricket on steroids with a head cold”. 🙂
Got a 125 and a 55 on the way. Oh, do you? Well, that’s a little factoid that you conveniently forgot to mention before I spent half an hour explaining why you had way too many huge fish and one far too aggressive fish for your current tank. Suuuure you have new ones on the way. No, really–I believe you. If you think for a moment that I don’t know you believe you’re “special” and can somehow override their instincts and their waste production to keep this combination of fish in a single tank, you’re wrong. I know what you think you can do, and you’re dead wrong. Dead fish wrong.
There. I’ve installed a pink theme, changed my icon theme and put Hello Kitty on the desktop. If this doesn’t better a day that started with an asshat, nothing will. Well, either it’ll cheer me up or pink me to death. 🙂
Yes, PLEASE email me two fucking enormous pictures of your fish first thing in the morning! Don’t crop a thing–with truly humongous pictures, I can absolutely see exactly why she has cloudy eyes when all you have for water parameters is a vague, subjective description, entirely free of those pesky numbers, courtesy of some dickhead at the pet store with his trusty dip strips! Why, there’s no reason for you to bother checking the Articles section for a problem profile that describes EXACTLY THE PROBLEM YOU HAVE, COMPLETE WITH TREATMENT OPTIONS. Why would you do that, or even post on the board when you can just email li’l ol’ me right here at home? Why not–I have nothing better to do, right? You know, I might actually be familiar with what you feed your fish but for the fact that you’re illiterate, use no punctuation, and insist upon posting EVERY FUCKING WORD in bold, italic, coloured text and it makes my brain hurt to even look at anything you write, much less to actually read it. Yes, PLEASE keep treating me like I’m your own personal fish care consultant, and by all means ignore everything that I’ve tried to pound through your concrete fucking skull. Truly, it thrills me to no end when you do that. I get up every morning and just thank God that you’re alive.
Asshat.
Wouldn’t It Be Good
Every time I hear this song, I’m taken right back to the time that Tisha, Tracey, Karen, Cheryl and me were at Tisha’s dad’s cabin. Electricity and water, but no phone and the bathroom plumbing wasn’t hooked up yet. We’d all been loaded drunk the night before, and I was sorely hung over when Tracey came to wake me up because Tish was stuck in the outhouse…freaking out over a spider, and nobody else could get the door open. I distinctly recall lighting a cigarette, sticking it in my mouth and stumbling blearily outside to find out what the fuck was going on, as Wouldn’t It Be Good played on somebody’s ghetto blaster (Cheryl’s?) in the background. I got out there and Tish was getting hysterical about the spider (though there are no venomous spiders in NS). I tried to open the door, but it was stuck and I couldn’t push it. My head was pounding, the sun was blinding me, it was hot and I felt like a camel had shit in my mouth, so I told Tish, “Get back as far as you can”, and kicked the door in. If I’d felt better, I probably couldn’t have done it, but I was so pissed off at getting awakened with a horrible hangover that I think I’d doubled my strength. I still don’t know how Tish managed to get stuck in there; I never asked, just went back in the cabin and back to sleep. 😆
If you take fifteen minutes to learn how to use EasyTAG, you can save yourself literally days of typing. All tagged and good to go, and all it took to “reset” the incorrect information in gtkpod was deleting my .gtkpod directory and redoing the import. Now that all of the genres are correct, it was able to automatically create playlists by genre for me. Could do it by other (artist, year, whatever), but I didn’t want that. God I love automation. 🙂
I still can’t get Rhythmbox to import my library; it keeps saying that the files are not a stream even though I’ve got the gstreamer “bad” plugins as well as the “good”. I refuse to install the “ugly”. 😆 Might give Amarok another go, or maybe Banshee. Dunno, but right now I’m going to load up the wee iPod and get water changes started, as I should’ve been doing almost an hour ago.
…until you try to put it all in boxes? Yes, but not this time. Don’t know what you’ve got until you try to organise it? Well, that’s closer, but still not quite. Don’t know what you’ve got until you try to edit the mp3 tags on years of files when you’d historically not cared whether they had any tags at all? Yes, that’s the one. I could grow old doing this, but gtkpod and Banshee both use tags instead of file names to sort the library, so it’s this or guess what I’m putting on my iPod. Well, back to work!
I decided this AM that I’d try an upgrade from Breezy to Dapper rather than a clean install even though I had Automatix installed, mostly because it takes me forever to get things just the way I want them. I’m not big on “default”. I had to remove the repositories that Automatix added, but that’s no big deal; I’ll just put them back with “dapper” instead of “breezy” when I get around to it. I copied all of my personal files over onto another partition, just in case, but I need not have worried because it went just fine. So far, it looks like everything works as it should, I kept all of my custom settings in Gnome, and they’ve fixed the bug in Gnome panel that made the volume control icon disappear if you used certain themes, so I can now use the full Nuvola theme without having to use the Gnome default icon for volume (Nuvola’s is much prettier). What used to be just a mini-command line is now a customisable desktop search (lots of options I’ll never use, some I will) and a mini-command line as well. Anyway, it’s pretty cool, and although I’m not one of those people who has to immediately install bleeding edge software, I do like to have the latest officially supported version. Now, I do. 🙂