I understand the significance of the POW/MIA flags, and I don’t see anything at all wrong with displaying them. This, however, is just wrong.

1. You do not display the flag of the United States of America, dumbass. If you’re going to have one to show your support for those who fought for this country, blow the seven bucks at Wal-Mart to get the other flag. (P.S. It displays higher than the POW/MIA.)

2. If you are going to display a flag to honour someone, for Christ’s sake, make it look good, or at least decent. Hanging displays are fine, but whatever that thing is upon which the flag is hanging, it’s not meant for displaying a flag. Not only that, but it’s ugly, rusted, has one satellite dish mounted on it and another right in front of it. It used to have three clotheslines on it as well, but the Millers took those off because they were rusted and unused, and mounted about neck level for an average adult male (or a tall-ish woman who sometimes cuts across the back to go to the strip mall). This is not a place to proudly show one’s support for war heroes, it’s an insult. The multiple layers of ratty, weathered duct tape are particularly flattering, I think.

3. Handcuffs are just that–handcuffs, not flag-hangers. I know what point you were trying to make, but this is a nice, residential neighborhood, not a fucking trailer park. Not that one could tell from the yard sale you’ve got on your front porch, but, whatever–that’s a whole ‘nother story. To make matters even worse, you’ve used two different colours of handcuffs. What’s that supposed to be–some sort of multi-racial support?

4. There are no fences between our houses and they’re probably not fifteen feet apart. Unless I want to live without daylight and keep my bedroom blinds closed all day, I have no choice but to look at this thing because IT’S SIX FEET FROM MY FUCKING WINDOW, YOU WHITE TRASH MORON!

View from the back of the house. Yup, it’s facing backward, can’t read the words forward from the street, only from the back yards of this house, that one and one more. Might glimpse it if you stood in the alley down by the skinny freak-boy’s house and squinted, but maybe not…and I’m not going near that guy’s place lest he decide again that we should have a conversation.

Here’s the view from the street. Maybe he’s hoping that everyone’s got a mirror in the car? Amazing view of the satellite dishes, too!

For fuck’s sake, why doesn’t this guy take his trailer trash family and friends and go LIVE SOMEWHERE I’M NOT!?

If you are going to injure your hand, it will be either a large wound or a deep one. It will be on your dominant hand, it will be in a spot that is either difficult to bandage or difficult to keep a bandage on, and it will happen either the day or the day before you have to have your hands submerged for a long time in order to do water changes. Two weeks ago, I sliced my finger wide open on the aluminum seal of a Repto-Min can. Yesterday, I ripped off a chunk off my finger on the rope at the Parris Island hole (#11) on the disc golf course. Both times, it was (of course) my right hand; one the night before water changes and the other the day before. The last time, I got a deep cut on my index finger from a glass that broke in the sink…the same day a shipment of aquarium plants arrived and needed to get put in the tanks.

I was browsing Digg (laundry avoidance tactic, already read Slashdot) and in a discussion about ATT/Cingular (whichever they are now), I found this hysterical little gem:

Oh and for the record, AT&T sucks balls. They have the absolute worst billing system of all time. They send you bills that are due yesterday, and charge you late fees. Or they just don’t send you a bill at all, and the next month they charge you double plus fees. Or, sometimes if you are really lucky, they send you a bill, you pay it, they send you the next months bill claiming you didn’t pay it, with a fee, then you pay what you know you owe (the current months bill) and the next month they magically found your payment from the past two months, which somehow means you don’t owe anything this month, in fact they owe YOU $2, so you ignore the bill, only to get one for two months the next month, with a late fee.

I larfed and I larfed and I larfed. Not because the poor bastard had such a hard time….well, not really.

P’s little rose-breasted grosbeak friend came back again today to stuff his face with seeds. Pretty little birdie; I wish he’d stick around.

It may have taken me forever, but I’ve figured out why I’m constantly plagued by stress-related conditions (or aggravations of existing conditons that are affected by stress levels) and have been since I came here. It’s because I have no “alone”, ever. I hadn’t always lived alone, but always had some time where I could be entirely alone and undisturbed. Maybe I had to go for a walk to get it if my significant other was hanging about, but the point was that I could–nobody around on the mountain. When I did live alone, I’d lock the door, unplug the phone, close the curtains, turn off the lights and turn on the stereo as loud as I could stand it. THAT was my stress relief, and THAT was why I could handle a great deal of stress without noticing any consequences–it didn’t get a chance to build. Here, I’ve got fucking SP’s worthless arse stuck here all day, EVERY FUCKING, FUCKING DAY, and going outside is pointless because there are more fucking people out there, and traffic noise, and that godforsaken oil pump jack. I don’t want to hear adults, children, cars, dogs, cats, or any noise that indicates an area may be inhabited by humans. The few instances that SP isn’t hanging about, P is here. Not that I don’t love him to bits, but he certainly qualifies as a person, and I need time with NONE. No people at ALL. What I want is first for SP to get gone. I don’t care where, or how, just gone. Then, I want a room of my own. Not shared with P, just mine. Basement would be ideal, or else no fucking neighbors so I can listen to music at whatever volume I like without giving them any excuse to complain and justify making noise of their own. I want no windows in the room, and one door with at least a deadbolt, for which I have the only key. In the room I want a twin bed, a comfortable chair, a side table and some kind of good sound system. Nothing else. No phone, no computer, no contact whatsoever with the outside–I come out when I’m good and goddamn ready. I think that would be the end of the tension headaches, the aching neck, inability to find a comfortable position to sleep, irritability, and perhaps even the bruxism. Will I ever get it? Not likely, unless my life is at stake, because P truly can’t understand how much I hate people and their fucking noise, noise, NOISE. He doesn’t even hear it, but to me, it’s like a dripping tap. Always there, slowly driving me insane. I like people on the Internet–I can shut them off any time I like, and they make noise only if I let them and happen to turn the speakers on. That’s the way all people should be except for P; he can stay as long as I get some time all alone. 😉

Accents are fascinating–I’d love to have a collection of them. I don’t know whether it would be better to create a block of English text and have it read by individuals with various accents to hear the differences in the same words, or to just have them say something using their own words (and therefore their own idioms), but I’d love a collection. Not just US and Canada (though the US in particular has an enormous amount of variety, and I’d know a Newfie or a Caper anywhere in the world), but all over. I’d listen to a Scotsman or an Irishman read the phone directory for hours just to hear the lilting brogues. Geordies are difficult to understand at first, but once you listen for a while, it’s really quite pretty and sounds a good bit like Scotland or Ireland. England–indeed, London alone–has so many different sounds for the very same words. Nothing in the world sounds quite like a Cockney. 🙂 Swedes, Norwegians, Danish and Finnish speakers of English make it sound like music, going up-and-down, up-and-down. So do Indians (dots not feathers). French, Spanish and Italians make it sound smooth, Germans and Austrians chop it up. P was playing an Excel tutorial a while back and as I listened, at first I thought “Sounds like German or Austrian, educated at a good school in England”, then as I listened longer, I thought, “Dutch?” and then got it–South Africa. Asians have to work hard to make certain sounds because they do not exist in their language; P made that poor Chinese guy say “loes pok” three times and still didn’t hear “roast pork”. I heard it the first time, though, because there’s a large Asian population in NS and I’m accustomed to the accent. English is an ideal language to hear accents because it has bits of many languages and that makes some words easier and others harder for speakers of certain languages. It is difficult, though, to be a natural mimic like me and NOT seem like I’m making fun of people for picking up their accents after being around them for a while. Anyway, I want a world accent collection. 🙂

…as in “Christ! More hobbledehoy!” 🙂

An old Scots word for an awkward, rustic adolescent boy.

“I got the tank from/set up the tank with instructions from a guy who’s been breeding cichlids for (x-number of) years.”

Did you? Well, that must be why it’s such a smashing success. You’ve already had one killed and another is in a hospital tank because it got beat up, and yet you still don’t grab a clue. The difference between a 20H and a 20L is six entire inches…and precisely what part of “too fucking small” did you not understand?

(Spoiler warning, not that it really matters because the whole thing’s transparent anyway.)

I knew what this was before I decided to watch it. It’s slash, blood and gore, and little more. Well, lots of boobs and the occasional arse, but given what passes for a plot–college guys backpacking around Europe in an effort to do as many women as possible–I can’t say that’s a surprise. Anyway, even though I was not expecting a real plot, dialogue that went much beyond screaming, or anything remotely resembling realism, I can still say I was disappointed. I slogged through the first forty-five minutes or so without much trouble, but after that, it was a chore to sit there…and I really could’ve done without the vomit. People scream, people get tortured and killed, the heterosexual American guy survives (the closet gay dies, of course, since homosexuality is evil and deserves to be punished), escapes (killing some of his Slovakian captors) and tries to save the Japanese girl, but she sees herself and is horrified by her disfigurement, so (of course–she IS Japanese) she commits suicide. Heterosexual American Guy finds the evil frustrated-wannabe-doctor and chops off the same bits he (the American) lost, then drowns him in the toilet like the shit he (the doctor) is. Of course the doctor was cruel and insane; everyone knows those Slovakians are uncivilised savages anyway. The evil Russian and Czech girls and the bad French guy who lured them there in the first place all get what’s coming to them (of course they do), courtesy of Heterosexual American Guy, who does, of course, speak fluent German because he is Cultured, Educated, Heterosexual American Guy. Sorry if I spoilt it for you, but you’d have figured the whole film out in the first twenty minutes anyway. Ninety-five minutes of my life that I’ll never get back, but at least I spent it in my comfy chair.

Poor P didn’t get to play in his much-anticipated tournament; it was cancelled because the weather was shite. 🙁

Let’s see….stay home alone all weekend, or spend the weekend at a disc golf course full of fucking people when there’s both a grand opening and a tournament on. I could…

flip a coin

Even though Debian-based distros aren’t supported “officially”, I thought it would be as simple as converting the rpm to deb with alien, but it wasn’t, so I had to get the tarball. Couldn’t get the right kernel headers to save my soul, but finally figured it out. Got the right compiler and got it installed, but you can’t use the configuration script on Debian-based distros, so I had to get something called the “any-any update”, and got the configuration working. VMware is then good to go, but the virtual machine won’t boot from the XP CD. Oookay, GnomeBaker can make an image of it and I’ll change the CD drive to mount the ISO instead of the physical drive. Worked fine and installed fine, but didn’t pick up the network card even though mine’s about as generic as it gets, and wired, too. Finally figured that one out (a VMware thang), but the screen resolution was still wrong, and I had to hunt down the option for that as well because it was through VMware, not Win. All good to go now, though–XP is up and running (using VMware video driver, though, ’cause I saw some threads about problems with nVidia drivers and decided not to bother because I don’t care about hardware acceleration).

Why did I install XP when I have already dual-boot, don’t use Win much at all and knew it wouldn’t be as easy as it had been on SuSE with the rpm? Some things you do just because you CAN. 🙂