I'm not good with dates.  Of any variety. I'm trying to remember if my grandfather had his accident on the 21st or the 22nd. I know he died on the 28th. Was he on the assorted machines for six days or seven? I'm not sure.

Whatever date it was I've been giving a lot back lately and whatever I get I find myself having to scrape harder for.

The exchange rate has sucked.

Not just losing people but losing interesting people. People with genuine personality. My life has gotten far less interesting wtih their passing. They could always offer something funny or instructive or warm. Over the past year my life has become far less funny, instructive and warm.

Life has become far less interesting lately.

Detroit City Councilman abandons home/mortage...and takes up in a massive condo.  And he doesn't seem to understand how this reflects poorly on him and hopes voters can see past this when he runs for mayor of Detroit. Maybe this shouldn' be surprising, it is Detroit after all, but what kind of bubble does this guy require to make him think that abandoning his mortgage would be brushed off and ignored? Yeah, his home value fell through the floor.  Tough. The guy still earns $80k a year and can afford to have a home. And the fact that he then moved his family into a massive condo doesn't exactly cast him in a better light. I hope he not only loses the mayor race but gets booted from the city council as well. The city of Detroit has a lot of problems and a fair share of them stem from people in positions of authority who don't possess the ethical and intellectual material to warrant such positions.
 
And then there's Miss California. Yes, she's ghastly. I actually watched the Miss American pangeant. Well, the first there minutes or so where all of the contestants are introduced before some miserable dance number. Miss California was less than impressive. I don't see how she warranted second other than a particularly weak field, but then after seeing last year's winner at the beginning of the broadcast, I'm curious if the majority of fields are relatively weak.
 
Two things have struck me about this whole ordeal. One is how this whole mess is being portrayed. She keeps saying it's her right to say what she wants, etc. and that's fine. I don't think anyone does, or at least should, have a problem with what her saying what she thinks. The problem is that it's hateful, bigoted and ignorant. She can play the "Biblical" thing all she wants, too. Plenty of that claptrap is hateful, bigoted and ignorant as well when hateful, bigoted, ignorant people want something to back them in an argument. And I am perfectly fine with her wanting to display these qualities for everyone on national television.
 
The second thing is that going on and on about how you would have been the winner is just sour grapes. Congratulate the person who did win and shut the hell up. You're a sore loser California. A ghastly sore loser. You weren't wronged in any way. You lost.

I don't even feel like a successful outsider, I feel like the successful outsider's more disturbed brother.
 

 
and this was like the first hit on my image search which just seemed odd:
 

 
I empathize jon. Oh, lord, do I empathize.
check out Garfield Minus Garfieldfor more genius.

The kindle really annoys me. It's big selling point is that it has a brand spanking new look/interface that mimics the look of actual paper. But why would you want that? I don't want that. If I want actual paper I'll pick up an actual paper.
 
I want text that I can customize entirely.
 
I want news that will shape itself to my reality.
 
If I want the letter K to be bold red and old english script while the rest of the article is in lucinda and three sizes smaller than the Ks, then I should be able to have that. And digital news copy should be striving to create an individual look rather than simply mimicking the structure that paper has imposed on it.
 
Being digital medium should be liberating.
 
Give me Red Letter Articles.
 
Give me a different look.
 
I pick up the newspaper and it's boring. The columns are always the same width. There's always a picture on the front, in color, of horror or tragedy.There's always a headline meant to grab your eye because it is bold and in VERY LARGE PRINT as if they had reached up and ripped the words from the ticker over times square and pasted them in place.
 
Tell me a story is important with a little blue canary printed at the beginning of the story and a picture of people drinking coffee while reading stories with big red letter Ks all over the place.
 
I don't want a digital newspaper. I want an interactive medium that can be bent and shaped into my reality. Give me blue canaries and red letter Ks.

and this time it's by building blocks.
 
Borrowed Lego Star Wars for my Wii the other day and I've been hookcd on the thing ever since. Before I started I thought the inability to die would be a serious crimp in the fun but it hasn't really mattered as losing stud points is more than enough penalty (especially when the payoff for enduring multiple deaths isn't significant - such as raising an x-wing from the swamp while my computer partner avoids deflecting phaser blasts and getting zero/zip/zilch for my efforts other than a, "hey, look, there was an x-wing in the swamp." Give me coins or something for that time spent).
 
And sometimes it's just fun to go in and fire with reckless abandon.
 
What's surprised me the most, though, is how enjoyable the prequel sections are. I hated the movies. I thought they were long, tedius and wholly lacking the fun that made the first three star wars movies so damn good. Young Anakin needed a spanking, Qui-Gon Jinn was too good of a character to die so early (as was Darth Maul - this would have been like killing Vader in the first Star Wars...). And the writing sucked.
 
But it just sort of works with Lego. The stories are condensed (sometimes altered), the action is more fun, and the whole messy saga is just interesting again. To the point where I've considered throwing the old movies in and watching them (though I still won't bother with the abominations that Lucas made twenty years later).
 
So the next time George Lucas gets a hankering to ruin a franchise (well, too late for Indy, I guess), just give your ideas to Lego, George, and get out of the way. They might be enjoyable next time.

I'm just entirely lacking energy lately. I'm not working on what needs to be worked on, I'm sleeping too much and then staying up too late because I slept too much.
 
I feel old when I'm going on all of 29.
 
 And right now, I just want a big cheeseburger with all of the fixings and a coke. and a tigers game in tigers stadium. I can't remember the name of the movie but it was a little Asian flick where everyone was given a film of one moment from their life to take with them into heaven, and the movie was about people picking that one moment. And after the moment was picked, and recreated and filmed by the crew, everyone got to watch their film in a theater. And as they watched their film, they would vanish into heaven. I wonder what moment I would choose. Right now, I think it might be visiting Tiger Stadium as a child. It was the definition of childhood to me. I feel much too old at times for my age.

Yes, the bonuses alone are more than most people earn in a decade.  Yes, it kinda makes most of us a little angry to see them being handed out, especially to people who don't appear to have really earned them. Yes, it would be nice if these people would simply fall on their swords and refuse the bonuses.
 
But if it was you or me, we'd probably look at the bonuses as something that is ours and see little reason to return them. From everything I have read, it was in their contracts to receive these things and as long as AIG is in business, they must honor those contracts.
 
It's something each member of the House and Senate should have known and which Geithner quite likely did know and knew he could do nothing about. And considering how the House or Senate refused to pass any sort of legislation immediately stopping their own automatic pay raises, I don't want to see any of them complaining about these bonuses as they clearly weren't willing to give up their own, either.

It's 230 in the morning and I think my day is finally coming to an end. It began with the cap to my coolant reservoir tank snapping in half and it's ended with evacuating around 60 gallons of water from the basement.
 
There's just been so much rain.
 
It stopped aound 1-130am. There's a nice breeze. Walked around the yard and there are newly formed lakes everywhere. Looked up the weather at weather.com to see if I was due for any more rain. I'm not. But they're saying the temps are going to drop more than 30 degrees over the next 5 hours. 56 now to under 25. I'm wondering how much of the standing water will have time to freeze before slipping into the ground and into larger ditches and streams. There's a spot in the low end of the yard where it's probably several feet deep if it froze solid across the top and you fell through. I'm not sure I've seen so much water out there.
 
Wondering what tomorrow will bring. As long as another reservoir cap doesn't break, it will almost have to be better.

40 lashes and 4 months in prison.  While we have been worrying about Islamic Extremism, we have kindly forgotten that while we were invading Iraq that just to the south, our good friends were 19 of the hijackers who crashed airliners into the world trade center, the pentagon and a pennsylvanian corn field. When talk of war with Iran was occasionally ramped up over the past four years, the fanatical religious extremism of our good friends is never mentioned.
 
And in a story that we usually only hear about from Pakistan, Afghanistan or some other country that is okay to bomb and invade, a 75 yr old woman has been convicted in Saudi Arabia of, well, "mingling." Her 24 yr old cousin and his business partner brought her two loaves of bread and this oh so suspicious activity was reported to the Saudi religious police. And this 75 yr old woman was sentenced to 40 lashes and 4 months in prison followed by deportation.
 
I hope the bread was cinnamon raisin nut bread because anything less and it just so wouldn't have been worth it.