Gawker Sez

If you're going to be an asshole on the internet, you should at least be real with yourself about it. Trust me, I know about this stuff.

Change and Obey!

I don't feel quite the belittling vitriol for the artist that the author of the American Digest piece does, but Sweet Jesus is this creepy or what? First saw one on a car here in brain-dead liberal Austin. Lots of cars have some kind of Obama sticker, fewer have Clinton stickers, and I have yet to see one for McCain, but it's early in this election year. I've been reading Liberal Fascism so I immediately thought--so he's coming right out and letting us know he'd like to do a Stalin on our wayward, sinning selves? And people think he offers redemption. Liberals are so ignorant of history they probably think it's just a retro-cool image.

I actually think Hillary would be less scary than Our Lord and Savior Barack Obama. Even knowing this, if I stare at this image too long I find myself wanting to lay down my silly notions of freedom and let Barack save my wicked soul.

Nothing a hockey-and-SM-porn marathon won't cure.

Is That a Real Poncho or a Sears Poncho?

St. Patrick's Day is a Sears holiday. How's that for playing against type: your curmudgeonly proprietress hates holidays. But I loooooooove hockey, even unaffiliated AA minor hockey. It's been many long years in the wilderness since a sentence such as the following was written and published about our hockey team:

Austin played a great defensive game ...

Greg Rajan is a great, great hockey blogger/writer. He does what he does with a perfect sensibility for his market, and he's been doing it for a good while now. I have not followed the Bats this year--I'm too involved with Center Ice to go and sit, alone, in Chaparral Ice. Getting people, even marginal hockey fans, to sit through an Ice Bats game is a hard sell. Worst feng shui I've ever seen, gah. But the Bats are poised to make the playoffs for the first time in years. They're finally playing like they're being coached by Brent By God Hughes. Took 'em long enough. So I'm once again reading Rajan every couple of days for his take on division/league hockey. This is truly a glorious time to be alive.

Seriously, though -- FUCK St. Patrick's Day.

The Ballad of Dooce

Best Story Ever

Would it be cliched to link to Dooce, who deserves every bit of success she has had? I have both loved and taken as cautionary the story of how she was fired from her college-grad-information-economy job for making fun of her coworkers and bosses on her blog. Then she met her husband, eloped, moved to Mormon Mecca, and had her daughter, blogging about it all the while. She now supports her family in what looks to me like style from her site and other related computer-y things, and Dooce.com is a cottage industry. This story about running into some of her old corporate superiors is what inspired me to fire up Blogger:

So I made the gesture to shake his hand when I realized that I recognized the other two men with him, and then BOOM, it hit me in the face like the lid of a titanium coffin. All three men were vice-presidents at the company that fired me in 2002. And the one standing in the middle was the one I used to make fun of for talking so loud that you could hear him over a low-flying F-16. AND HE QUOTED THAT TO ME.

I had to reach out and grab Jon's arm so that I wouldn't fall over, but they smiled kindly, congratulated me on my success, and said they were amazed that after all these years I was still taking the most mundane stories and making them sound like an Olympic event. Because they still read my website. And remember that one time I was walked to my car with all my office supplies in a box? And told never to return? Wasn't THAT the best thing that ever happened to me.

Tru Dat

The Gospel According to Dilbert

Catching up on Scott Adams' RSS feed after vacation:

There are few things in life less fun than a pickup game of volleyball.

My recent vacation might be one of the few things, though. Hmm. If I had to relive it, or play a pointless, demoralizing game of Pickup Volleyball ... yikes. Volleyball wins. He goes on to say:

It always seems like a good idea at the time. You imagine yourself and a few athletic friends passing, spiking, and diving to dig out great shots, as the ball almost magically never hits the ground. What actually happens looks like something from a movie where a virus has turned everyone on earth into spastic zombies. You watch in horror as grandma on her motorized scooter joins your side, along with two toddlers, a drunk, and a woman whose hands are apparently made of bubble wrap. And your team is the good one. What follows is a whole lot of people acting surprised they can’t punch an inflated ball in any directions but downward and backwards. Meanwhile your youth slowly drains away.

In flattering contrast, I'm only few weeks older than I was when I innocently, hopefully, and happily left for vacay, and it doesn't show hardly at all. Ugh, and sigh. Today is one of the so-so days.

Attention Whore?

People Are Weird and I Will Never Understand Them

I spend a lot of time on these here internet tubes, and have for years now. My former job was one of those state sinecures which are invariably described as "cushy" by most everyone (and as "that hairshirt of a job" by my smarty-pants writer friend), which meant it was cool to surf all day because there was no work. A conservative estimate of the time I spend reading blogs would be 2-3 hours daily. I rarely read comments. Even if they are not nasty blind crude attacks written by people who are certain they'll never be held accountable for their actions, and who would never have the courage to say such things in person, they're rarely written understandably. As in, subject, verb, object, with a basic grasp of punctuation. It's just draining and demoralizing to read them: ugliness married to stupidity. So I have a hard time understanding why anyone does read them, as though the tubes don't contain enough good stuff to chew on.

A phenomenon I understand even less is bloggers who want comments so badly they take to scolding their readers in order to obtain them. The Fellatrix has even threatened to take her toys and go home if her readers--all 20,000 of them last week, which seems like a lot to me--don't start jumping through hoops. Apparently she runs this very enjoyable blowjob blog solely in order to garner what she calls "reader response." There are ads, polls, and all manner of links on the site, at least some of which must send a little money and/or traffic her way, but here she is shaking her finger at us, her readers, for not paying enough attention to her. I don't know about the rest of y'all but I prefer my sex blogging without the heaping dose of guilt. Sweet Jesus, woman, surely most of these readers you so long for contact with are men. There's probably no more efficient way to alienate them than whining that they're ignoring you. You've got a great site, well put together and devoted to The Almighty Blowjob, which is widely recognized as a universal good. I would say there's no way to fuck that up but it looks like you might have found it.

I kind of hope she doesn't actually read this, ever, because I have a sorrowful blog with no readers and four posts, and I wouldn't allow comments even if I did have readers. This is because I am middle-aged, judgmental, and can barely tolerate people at all. Opinions, though--I got those. As well as a more than academic interest in The Almighty Blowjob.