SUN 17 SEP 2000

Thought for the Day
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
--William Blake

Furniture Porn

Hot legs! Huge overstuffed pillows! Smooth, creamy upholstry! Barely legal chair-on-chair action! The most explicit furniture photos you've ever seen in your life!!! You must be over 18 to view these graphic pictorials!!!!!

Forum to Revert to Bravenet
I recently switched my forum provider from Bravenet to InsideTheWeb because ITW seemed to be more reliable. Unfortunately, ITW has recently added the fun new feature of a pop-up advertising window that tries to sell you things you don't need and wants to follow you wherever you go. This will not do. The reversion to Bravenet will occur sometime this weekend, weather and authorities permitting.

Bad Cop! No Donut!
Most people have heard by now that you might not be eligible to become a policeman if you're too smart. But what about being too horny? Lately, cops all over the country have been getting in trouble for such indiscretions as groin-groping in Kansas, toe-sucking in Oregon, and even up-skirt videotaping in Minnesota. Guess there's more than one reason they carry those handcuffs....

Thought for the Day
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I appear to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
-- Sir Isaac Newton

The Bees Are Back in Town
After an absence of four summers, honeybees are beginning to return to the area as the season begins to fade. A parasitic mite wiped out about 90% of the honeybee population here in the spring of 1995, but now they have come back to buzz between blooms and hover annoyingly around outdoor fast-food trash bins just like they always used to. Otherwise, the signs of approaching autumn continue their usual rhythm. The tobacco has been harvested, the stalks standing green and bare except for the flowering tops and the scrawny yellow leaves around the very bottom. People are taking down their hummingbird feeders, lest the tiny birds linger too long and leave too late to outfly the encroaching winter. The fireflies have gone, and in the woods the deer are beginning to run -- I saw two of them yesterday evening, crashing suddenly through the undergrowth a few dozen yards away and instantly vanishing with a flurry of hooves into the darkening trees. Overhead, the geese that disappeared in the '70s and '80s fly south in triangular formation. They came back around five or ten years ago, but their numbers remain relatively small -- when I was a kid, there were two or three times as many as there are now. A hundred years ago, their flocks darkened the sky on their annual journeys south, and the air thrummed with the beating of their countless wings.

Thought for the Day
"Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training."
--Anna Freud

Sign of the Times

Just Say No to Books
In an effort to protect children from the evils of literature, a number of school and community libraries have banned such classics as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, as well as contemporary publications such as the popular Harry Potter series. Reasons for pulling the books from library shelves included "sexual situations", "violence", "cannibalism", "racist and offensive language", and the depiction of "an elaborate fantasy world [that] might lead to confusion". By those criteria, the next book banned could easily be the Bible.

Personal Observation
Investing would seem to be one of the few respectable ways to make money without actually working for it.

Royal Troon
Just outside Durham they've opened a new luxury apartment development called "Royal Troon". I have no idea what a troon is, much less a royal one, but to me it sounds a lot like "total idiot" or "complete bozo". As in, "Hey, did you hear about the guy who won a Darwin Award for driving his Volkswagen off a bridge with a bungee cord tied to the bumper? What a royal troon!" I suppose the developers have their reasons. Either that, or they're just a bunch of royal troons.

Thought for the Day
"Do. Or do not. There is no 'try'."
--Yoda

Hard Currency
Since the US is redesigning its paper money, some people have suggested that we examine designs used by other countries to find ways to make our money more interesting. I think we should take a tip from the Danish 1000 Kroner note. Or maybe a couple of tips.

So Stupid, It's Criminal
There are stupid crooks, and then there are really stupid crooks.

Alms for an Ex-Leper?
With rent and housing costs in the area rising steadily, homelessness is an increasing problem, and some people find themselves on the street through no fault of their own. But some make you wonder. This morning, yet again, I saw two or three guys at various intersections around town holding signs that said "Hungry - Homeless - Please Help - God Bless". Now, anybody can run into hard times, but these are tan, healthy, able-bodied white guys in their late 20s or early 30s who look like they just got back from a vacation at the beach. And they've been hanging around for two or three weeks now. There are Help Wanted signs all over town -- granted, they're mostly for crap jobs like kitchen help and wait staff, but if you're really homeless and hungry it seems like you'd take what you could get. All I can figure is they must be dot.com refugees from some e-business that went belly-up, and they won't take a job that doesn't offer stock options.

Thought for the Day
"Hierarchy is for ants."
--Robert A. Heinlein

In Case You Were Wondering...

As if to demonstrate that there's a "how to" book for any activity you could possibly think of, Luann Columbo has published the helpful guide How to Have Sex in the Woods. We imagine it offers information on skin-friendly bug repellants, identifying poison ivy, and how to avoid being mistaken for deer (wear bright orange caps). You can order it from amazon.com, or you could just ask some of our local teenagers, who already appear to be experts on the matter.

Last of the Fireflies
Firefly season is just about over. Even the deep woods are dark at twilight now. I hadn't seen any fireflies at all for the past few nights, but last night I saw one. Just one, blinking with forlorn hope, receiving no replies. Alone at last call. I figure he must be the nerdy firefly that nobody wanted to mate with -- when he flew close by I could swear I saw a tiny little pocket protector on his thorax. Maybe he should take out a personal ad: "Bright guy seeks flashy girl with warm glow for evening outings and possible LTR...."

In Bad Taste
In the foundations of a 17th-century house, archeologists found what they initially thought was a 300-year-old bottle of wine. It wasn't. The wine-tasting party has been canceled for obvious reasons. (Hmmm... maybe it was the ruins of an ancient frat house....)

More Sacreligious Humor
Two nuns move into an apartment together. The nuns think the place could use a little work, so they arrange with the landlord to perform the labor in exchange for rent credit. The nuns arrive to paint the apartment and realize they forgot a change of clothes. Not wanting to get paint on their habits and having been friends for years, they decide to paint the place buck naked.

As they are going about their business, someone knocks on the door. The nuns are worried about getting caught, so one nun asks, "Who is it?"

A voice answers, "Blind man."

The nuns look at each other, shrug, figure it can't do any harm, and open the door.

A man walks in and says, "Nice tits. Where do you want these blinds?"

Thought for the Day
"The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing."
-- Mr. Cole's Axiom