ectoblog.com

I just realized that if I do this long enough, eventually I’ll blog the exact same thing I blogged previously without even knowing it. It’ll be like noticing that today’s Beetle Bailey is a slight re-working of a Beetle Bailey from 1977. Except that instead of being disgusted with Mort Walker’s cynical or senile recycle of an old strip,  I’ll be the senile old guy recycling old ideas. In fact, it might have already happened. There’s really no way to know for sure.

(as far as I know, today’s Beetle Bailey is not recycled from 1977)

In the Sun Herald there’s a page, usually not far past the editorials page, which I call the ‘fluff’ page. It may even have a name, but I don’t know it. It’s the page that contains a smattering of celebrity gossip, a ‘this day in history’ section, and a ‘birthdays’ section. Maybe a crossword puzzle or sudoku too. I at least glance through most of the page, but I find myself actually analyzing the ‘birthdays’ section. It’s a 2-column list, usually of 20 or 23 or so famous living people, why they’re famous, and how old they are today. The two things I particularly notice are 1) why exactly each person is famous, and 2) how many people are older and younger than I am. The first is to be moderately outraged that it’s a list of ‘famous’ people, not ‘important’ people. So it’s very heavy on actors, very light on, say, physicists and philosophers. The second is to be disturbed when the bottom person in the first column is younger than I am. Which, of course, means that more than half the famous living people born that day were born after me.

I find that I’m not disturbed very often. Yet. But the bottom of the first column can only become more disturbing as time passes.

I do this to myself every day.

Air Force One is one ’spiffy ride,’ Obama says – CNN.com

“Hey guys, what do you think of my — this spiffy ride here?” the president asked the group of reporters traveling with him on the presidential plane.

All I’m saying is that Obama needs to be careful. The Press is dangerously close to changing the meme from “fresh new non-Bush” to “dangerously-underqualified un-President.” And when a new meme leaves the station, it leaves the station.

This is the perfect time to get rid of pennies and phase out the dollar bill. I mean, if you can’t do something so fiscally sensible in the worst of times, when can you do it?

Today I retired my ‘GetYourWarOn’ link from its regular spot in the always-open ‘Humor’ folder in my bookmarks to its new spot in the almost-always-closed ‘Old Humor’ sub-folder. It was indeed a sad day, but David Rees left me no choice when he retired GYWO. What’s he got left at mnftiu.cc after GYWO’s gone? Ironic overuse of ‘lol’s and ‘rofl’s? That goes only so far. In fact, Wednesday Feb 11 2009 is as far as it goes.

So now the link is officially retired to a sub-folder. It had a good run, but now it’s over. And it’s not like it’s in bad company, either; lots of good old links creaking around down here, links that gave a lot of value once upon a time. Like ‘Cockeyed.com’ and ‘Halfbakery links.’ And ‘LILEKS (James) Welcome!’ And ‘SpinWeb’ and ‘FARK.com’ and ‘Fuck the South.’ And ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture…’ and ‘Institute for Naming Children H…’ and ‘GorillaMask.net: Updated d…’ and ’sometimes, Sigmund,’.  And even ‘Doonesbury;’ Doonesbury is down here in the Old Humor sub-folder, but only because my Doonesbury fix is now supplied from the ‘Chron comics page’ link in the main folder.

The Old Humor sub-folder has value; I open it from time to time. Every few weeks or months, I remember it’s down here, and roll through some of the offerings in four or five minutes, to see if the links still go somewhere. It’s not like the ‘really old humor’ sub-sub folder, which only gets an airing every year or so, and from which there’s nowhere to go but away. It’s not like that.

So now the Humor folder is pared back down to places I really do go every day or every other day, places like ‘Chron comics page,’ and ‘Comics I Don’t Understand,’ and ‘The Onion,’ and ‘Museum of Hoaxes.’ Except for ‘Museum of Hoaxes,’ which I really don’t click on all that much anymore. Not much at all anymore, really.

I guess I need to review the ‘Museum of Hoaxes’ charter soon, see what the hell that’s still doing up there.

I tried to get my little pickup truck an inspection the other day, but the guy at Snowball & Sons & Daughter–it may have been Snowball–told me the window tinting was too dark. I figured it might be, even though I bought it last year with a valid sticker on it. I guess I don’t know the right inspection guy to go to. So I’ve been driving it around for the last few weeks with an expired sticker, steeling myself to either get a professional tint remover to charge me a couple hundred bucks to remove the tinting, or set aside an entire day to do a bitter, half-assed job of it myself with a scraper and some razor blades. Then I remembered about the Google thing you kids have on the internets today, and typed in “how to remove tinting from a car window,” which returned this, which in turn saved me a bucket of time and money and made me feel very good about myself and the world for a few hours.

In sum, the Google you kids have today is substantially better than the card catalog system at Long Beach Public Library ca. 1979, which is worth remembering from time to time.