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It bothers me when the subtitlers of a movie go beyond language translation and translate miles or feet into metric for me. For example, Tom Hanks didn’t say he was 322 thousand kilometers above the earth in Apollo 13, he said he was 200 thousand miles above it. That substitution–”322.000 kilometros” for “200,000 miles”– takes a liberty that I’m not comfortable with. And frankly, I don’t give a shit how many kilometers that is. It’s a movie, see; I don’t use that information for anything. Once I get past knowing that it’s a big number, I’m ready for the next scene. Thank you.

And now, the same screed translated into babelspanish:

Me incomoda cuando los subtitlers de una película van más allá de la traducción de lengua y traducen millas o pies al métrico para mí. Por ejemplo, Tom Hanks didn’ t dice él era 322 mil kilómetros sobre la tierra en Apolo 13, él dijo que él era 200 mil millas sobre él. Esa substitución–” kilometros” 322.000; para el ” miles” 200.000; — toma una libertad que I’ m no cómodo con. Y franco, I don’ t da una mierda cuántos kilómetros que sea. It’ la película del S.A., considera; I don’ uso de t esa información para cualquier cosa. Una vez que consigo pasado que sabe ese it’ número grande del S.A., I’ m listo para la escena siguiente. Gracias.

I was watching an episode of “Guess Who Married Your Mother?” or “I Married Your Mother?” or “Guess I Totally Bagged Your Mother!” a few minutes ago in the kitchen of this place in Miami I hang out in. The show was doing what all these shows do from time to time, which is to trot out an ex-star and have the “real people” played by the regular actors moon over him like he was the second coming of Christ Almighty. Or her, waltzing in as Mary. But in this case it was Patrick Swayze, so the Christ metaphor is probably the one to go with. Anyhow, it was one of those “Don’t look now, but PATRICK SWAYZE is sitting at the table right behind you.” “PATRICK SWAYZE? RIGHT BEHIND ME? [looks, swoons]“

The regular actors on this show play people who I assume are in their mid to late twenties. I play a person who is in his mid forties; I barely remember who Patrick Swayze is. I’m not sure I could pick him out of a police lineup unless he actually was the shit who knocked me down and took my wallet half an hour beforehand. The man flash-danced twenty years ago. Or danced dirtily, whatever. Since then he’s been in a string of piddly-ass movies. Or has had piddly-ass parts in slightly more than piddly-ass movies. The point is that the generation blankers on this show can’t POSSIBLY really know who he is, let alone adore him enough to suck his cock. But there they go.

Remember when Carroll O’Connor sucked Sammy Davis, Jr’s cock on “All in the Family?” Or when Gary Coleman sucked Nancy Reagan’s cock on “Diff’rent Strokes?” Sure you do. Is this a contractual thing? Or is it just somebody on the show asking for a favor, or (more likely) doing a favor for one of their old heroes who’s fallen on hard times? It’s probably that. That’s what it probably is.

I don’t mind favors being done for friends. Of course that’s a good thing. But when they’re not my friends, when it happens so publicly, when the favor involves me in the transaction somehow, then I start minding it. There should be a warning scroll during the show, to allow me time to change channels before I’m compelled to see things untoward: “Patrick Swayze’s cock sucked in the following episode, viewer discretion advised.” That sort of thing.

I’d never seen the show until it was on the inflight screens on a New Orleans-Miami leg last night. I happened to have some earbuds with me, so I tapped into the sound. Abomination! An all-around abomination! The acting, the directing, the writing–especially the writing–all designed to infuse me with hatred for those associated with this show. And by extension, all mankind.

The show is filled with so many cliches; so many cliches. The wise father who can be an idiot about the small things but knows the big picture; the wiser wife; friends and family, all wise in their own ways; the wise dog; and the single unwise, un-self aware antagonist lurching through the show that the others all will make wise in time.

From what depths of cynicism did this thing come? Because the writers, the producers, everyone, all had to be deeply cynical to allow this thing to waft over the airways. “Let’s make a Christian show,” they said. “Let’s make a Christian show that the people who write in complaining about real shows will watch.” So they called in their hacks and desperate has-beens and this thing, this rough beast, slouched toward Hollywood to be born.

The child actors! Make them sound like miniature adults, with miniature complex relationships with their miniature pals! And let there be huge, awkward spaces of silence when characters read the spines of books or gaze off into the middle distance as other characters leave and enter scenes! And let the bridges between awkward gaps be filled with soft little lighthearted jokes about milk! Yes, let that happen! And give some real people some lines, too, so that the painfully embarrassing shortcomings of the show can be refocused on them. And make them retarded! Christians love that!

I have this colossal hatred for 7th Heaven.

Earthrace – The Boat

In March 2008, Earthrace will attempt to set a new speed record for a powerboat to circumnavigate the globe running 100% biodiesel, and with a net zero carbon-footprint, in order to increase awareness of the environment and the sustainable use of resources.

“Net zero carbon footprint.” While I don’t want to detract from something cool–I like it when cool things happen– this phrase is beginning to really grate. This boat has a 3,000 gallon fuel tank. A non-trivial amount of energy went in to making it in the first place. It’s only “net zero” because the company buys carbon offsets. I could make a Hummer or a Boeing 727 “net zero” doing that.

You know, if *everybody* bought carbon offsets to reduce their carbon footprint to “net zero,” we’d still have a problem. I don’t care how many trees you plant, a 727 still does what it does.

Before someone says that I don’t understand the concept behind carbon offsets, let me just say this: I understand it. It’s a wonderful way to roll around in your cake and then eat it. It’s a wonderful way to keep doing what you’re doing with a clean conscience. I *understand* that. You gave at the office. You adopted the skinny televised black kid in Ethiopia. What you didn’t do was leave your Hummer at home and walk to the grocery store.

“Net zero carbon footprint.” Jesus Christ. The phrase is about to become absolutely meaningless as every damn company piles on with its own product. It’ll be like what happened to the word ‘retarded’ when it leaked out into the mainstream; psychiatrists had to come up with some other word. A perfectly descriptive term, ruined by squatters.

When a can of coke is advertised as having a “net zero carbon footprint,” the retardeding of the phrase will be complete.

King pardons Saudi rape victim – CNN.com

It’s funny how seriously the world community takes the kingdom. As if they have some sort of point, some sort of gravitas.

The need for the pardon defies all. The kingdom will not last another 50 years. So says the Great Curmudgeon.

In solidarity with Gillian Gibbons, I’ve decided to name my son’s old teddy bear Muhammad. Also 3 of my lawnchairs, the kitchen table, the old skillet that the teflon’s peeling from, the brown patch in the backyard, and the keys to my truck. These are all henceforth renamed Muhammad.

The stuff that collects under the couch between vacuumings I rename What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People? .

I swear I need some symbolic something to go apeshit over, too. I’m totally lacking in symbolic apeshittery. I feel kind of naked because the only response I have now to somebody else’s godly freak-out is a kind of bemused anxiety, which I’m getting kind of tired of, frankly. Thousands of screaming townsfolk marching on my house with torches and stones in their hands, and all I get is bemused anxiety to fend them off? That rarely works. So that changes now, Jack.

From now on, I consider the act of shaking someone’s right hand an affront. AN AFFRONT TO EVERYTHING I HOLD DEAR. If I see someone, a Right-to-lifer or a Sudanese fringewit Muslim or who-have-you, shaking someone’s hand with his or her right hand, I reserve the right to call for their fucking heads. Because shaking someone’s hand with your right hand…why, you may as well have murdered puppies in my living room. Shat right there in the gumbo. The only way I’ll cancel the fatwa is if I get some serious fucking media play. The world has to realize the magnitude of the blunder before I’ll call it off.

While I’m at it, I also call for the heads of those people who haven’t named their various kitchen appliances or outdoor furnishings Muhammad. These people make my blood boil. And those who haven’t had an abortion or performed an abortion, who are high on my holy shit list? Death to them.

THE WORLD WILL ACKNOWLEDGE MY SYMBOLIC APESHITTERY.

Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.

The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.

And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.

Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.

Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.

We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.

Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.

And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.

In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.

I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.

That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.

I don’t watch much television. It’s not that I’ve become an unbelievably productive person because I don’t fritter all that time away in front of the tube anymore–I haven’t–it’s just that the bulk of my frittering is done in front of a computer instead. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still pretty smug about it regardless of the fact that I haven’t really benefited from it.

But there are reasons, I think, to feel smug about it, viz: I just finished spending an entire month in Dallas because I had to. I spent the bulk of that time in a hotel room. The bulk of the time I spent in the hotel room, the television was on, because it was sitting there not 3 feet away from the bed. So during the last month, I probably spent more time watching tv than I have in the past 3 years combined. And I noticed several things that one may not have noticed had one been watching television more or less constantly during that time.

One of them is that television news–all of it outside of PBS–uniformly sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean it’s not actually news anymore; it’s pre-digested opinions about people–personalities–who simply shouldn’t matter. It’s a vanilla milkshake, a naked pandering to the fail, the people who desperately want to be among the winners, who imagine themselves at the head table where nothing real matters anymore.

I saw several Dallas news shows, along with some morning news shows, Fox news (which you might think, and I would have thought a month ago, is kind of unfair of me to use to indict all news shows, but you and I would be wrong), and CNN. I saw Wolf Blitzer and Hardball and Tucker, 60 Minutes and 48 Hours and Face the Nation.

Do you know what I learned after watching all that? I learned that Britney Spears is totally fucked up. I learned that again and again and again. Everyone wanted to weigh in on Britney. Guests were empaneled on news shows so that the reigning talking head could canvas them on their Britney opinions.

Now, I care what Britney Spears does and says as much as the next guy, as long as the next guy doesn’t give a flying fuck what Britney Spears says or does. Me and him, we could not care any less. You could not underbid us on it. We simply don’t care what Wolf’s guests think about this. She’s some kid from Louisiana that got rich somehow; good for her, but that’s all we need to know.

What we do care about is the news. What is going on in the world? What happened in Sri Lanka yesterday? What’s Putin up to? How close we gettin on that frickin cancer cure? That’s what we want to know. But we don’t spend money the way the fail do, in clumps and gobbets that depend on the television for guidance. So (apparently) we don’t get television news aimed at us anymore.

Fox news… Fox news has been an evil tabloid since its inception, spewing vitriol and obnoxiousness 24 hours a day. But CNN? When did CNN become a tabloid? When did CNN begin to spew tawdriness and fail? When did that happen?

Okay, fine. Fine. Television is not aimed at me. I get it. But television is aimed at somebody, and it is huge and relentless. And it shapes people, and that shape is conformity, banality, and failure. I get it. So I’m smug, of course, but it’s not a happy smug.

Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84 – CNN.com

“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut once told a gathering of psychiatrists, according to the AP.

Smoking kills. You at 84.

CNN.com – Experts predict one more Atlantic hurricane – Oct 3, 2006
FORT COLLINS, Colorado (AP) — Hurricane expert William Gray downgraded his forecast for the 2006 Atlantic storm season again Tuesday, predicting one more hurricane, two more named storms but no intense hurricanes.

He also has an amazing 95 percent accuracy in predicting how many dumps he’ll take during any given day! His 11:30 pm “Daily Dump Forecast” is eerily accurate.

Bonehead.

Follow up to this and that.

CNN.com – Season’s hurricane forecast downgraded – Sep 1, 2006

DENVER, Colorado (AP) — Hurricane forecaster William Gray downgraded his expectations for the 2006 Atlantic storm season Friday, calling for a slightly below-average year, with only five hurricanes instead of the seven previously forecast.Two of the hurricanes will be intense, according to Gray’s forecasting team, based at Colorado State University.

“We have made changes in our predictions for this season in order to maintain our reputation for accuracy,” a spokesman for the team said.

In other news, the Ministry of Truth announced today that “Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy.”

Follow up to this post.

I’ve got everything back. Everything except an updated “contacts” list in Outlook. The one I’ve had to settle for is several months old, so it lacks only a couple updates.

All my email was saved. All my work stuff was found. I found the contents of my desktop in a file called “userdata” in the file recovery program. In Windows Explorer, the userdata file contained a bunch of nothing. Weird also that a search in the file recovery program returned no .pst files; I had to manually find those bad boys.

Let this be a lesson. If I learn nothing else from this near-fiasco, I’ve learned…okay, I’ve learned nothing. I’ll keep not saving everything on a regular basis, and I’ll keep clicking buttons that I have no business clicking. And that’s just the way it is. Courage.

Ren: You fool! Don’t press that button! That’s the History Eraser button!

Stimpy: So what’ll happen?

Ren: That’s just it! We don’t know! Maybe something bad; maybe something good! I guess we’ll never know. Cause you’re going to guard it. You won’t touch it, will you?

I’d like to preface this by stressing that I’m not usually an idiot. Usually I can feed and clothe myself with practically no help. I can operate a car with a stickshift and successfully troubleshoot the fridge icemaker when it starts bogarting the cubes. I read books with big words. So when, yesterday, I partially reformatted my hard disk by mistake, well, I got to thinking about the many, many things I can do that don’t cause unbearable hardship and grief. Washing my own hair, for example.

Everytime I boot up my computer, a momentary window appears that allows several different pre-boot options. Everybody’s pc does that, of course, unless it’s set not to. I’d always escaped out of the window (to save those three or four seconds that elapse before booting continues on its own). Prior to yesterday.

This newest computer has been a rock. Unshakeable. I’ve never needed to tinker in any way with the boot process; Windows comes up, like the sun, and I go about my business. But I’ve idly wondered, as I’ve watched it warm up, what some of the pre-boot functions called. This computer has a different BIOS from my last machine, so the options were different. “Safe Mode” was there, of course. But so was something called “Fastbuild,” and something else called “System Recovery.”

On my last machine (that’s sitting on my son’s desk), an automatic disk scan occurred if the computer shut down abnormally. But this new computer has never once (at least obviously) performed any kind of diagnostic on itself after a bad shutdown. I wondered–as I waited for the machine to boot–why that was. Did it need to? Sure it did, if only to identify bad sectors and cauterize them. Maybe there was some setting in either “Fastbuild” or “System Recovery” that was switched off. Maybe I should switch it on, just to make certain that the hard drive knew where its bad sectors were. In order to make this rock-solid machine even more rock-solid.

So I hit “ctl-F” to enter Fastbuild. Turned out that was where the BIOS settings could be manipulated. I didn’t really want to mess with those, because it takes a lot of trial and error to get things right in there, and I was just idly curious. So I exited that and clicked on “System Recovery.” Ah! Here it was; a couple paragraphs with several exclamation points. The last paragraph stated that, if I did choose to recover the system, none of my data files would be harmed. That was good. The first paragraph was about two column inches long and looked boring, so I didn’t read it. I already knew everything I needed to know: if I recovered the system, nothing bad would happen.

I pressed “yes.” Another screen came up to tell me that certain things were wrong with my computer and the program would continue. A friendly little progress bar appeared at the top. “Time to go” read 18 minutes. That was good, too, as a final check. I mean, how much damage could a program do in 18 minutes? I left to make myself a sandwich. It was a good, successful sandwich.

Eighteen minutes later–right on time–the program completed and rebooted the computer all by itself. The usual boot process started, the usual pre-Windows windows appeared, and then something weird happened, as I ate my sandwich: A “Welcome to Windows” splash came up, followed by a sexy woman’s voice saying “Welcome to Windows.” That was odd. But even odder was the next screen, my desktop. It was barren. Barren except for an “AOL offer” icon, a “Help & Support” icon, and a “User’s Guides” icon. Barren as the Gobi Desert, if the Gobi Desert contained only computer icons, and only three of them.

“Christ Almighty,” I said. Also “Great Fucking Shit” and “Oh my fucking God.” Another screen superimposed itself on my cracked and bleeding desktop, wondering if I had a printer, and if so, where was it? “You’ve got to be fucking bagging me,” I added.

I canceled out of all the prompts in order to call up “My Computer” and take a look at my C: drive. Things were… things were still there! Outlook…there! Winpatrol…there! Thank God! Then I clicked over to HP-owner desktop in the file tree. There! But…where was everything? WHERE WAS EVERY FUCKING THING?

Calm down, calm down. Surely it’s still all there, I said to myself. I’d found things that wouldn’t be there if the drive had been completely turned back to its factory state; surely the rest of my stuff was there somewhere. So I searched for the names of files that I knew resided on my desktop and nowhere else. Things like my “Northern Exposure” download file and my “pa55word5″ file. Not…..there! Gone! Christ on a hatstick!

ALL the critical data files on my desktop–files that “system recovery” told me would still be there after I recovered the system–gone!

I clicked Outlook up to make sure all my email archives still existed. Outlook requested the serial code before it would initialize. Of course I didn’t have it; it used to be in the “Serial Codes” text file on my now-pulverized desktop! Same thing with Excel, same thing with Word. I searched for .pst archives, because surely they were still there, with all my correspondence. Gone! It must save to the muthafuckin HP-Owner Documents & Settings file! What about my work file, with all the stuff that I painstakingly entered by hand over literally a hundred hours the last year? Not there! Must’ve been in the muthafuckin HP-Owner Documents & Settings file! For the fuck of Buddha!

Like I said, usually I’m not an idiot. Usually I’m pretty cautious when it comes to my computer. I do have some backup files spread out on my kids’ computers, but they’re almost a year old. So a year’s worth of puttering and writing and squirreling away links and fiddling with my computer to get it just so, to make it the rock-solid computer of my dreams, is gone. It’s like a fire swept through my house. A very persnickety fire that charcoaled only things I’ve touched in the past few months.

I’ve got a file recovery program running in the background right now; maybe it’ll find a few odds and ends that I can work with, I don’t know.

And I know it’s all my fault, too. That’s probably the worst part. If I’d only bothered to read the first paragraph of the System Recovery screen, maybe things would be different. Maybe I’d be driving to the grocery store, shifting gears like all get out, feeling good. I don’t know.

I still make a good muthafuckin sandwich. Now, if you’ll excuse me, #$% ^**@-$%%&?? *%&#$^%; #$$? % #@@ #$&&?-$%??!!@.

Yesterday a stranger-woman at work came up to me and said “You look just like this guy who used to work here.” [hmyeswellhrmphchortle] A couple minutes later I noticed her across the room pulling somebody aside and pointing at me. Her head bobbed, her friend’s head bobbed, and they smiled in agreement.

I think this has happened to me three times in my life. “You are the spitting image of Joe Blow! Isn’t he the spitting image of Joe Blow??” I don’t know how often it happens to other people; I can’t recall ever having personally witnessed it happening, and I can’t recall ever inflicting it on anybody. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe my face is so plastic and ordinary that it reminds people of other people more often than other people’s faces do.

It’s disconcerting working with people who think I look like somebody else. What kind of guy was he? Did he represent my body and facial features properly? Was he funny but reserved? Was he a hard worker and fairly competent?

Or was he a complete asshole? Do I have to overcome the impression made by my doppelganger on the people around him lest I be deemed an incompetent shithead by association?

You know sometimes that happens: one has to overcome impressions and prejudices squatting inside somebody’s skull that have no business being associated with you, but are anyway. And you also know that sometimes the thing squatting inside his skull is so large that you won’t be able to divert it by clean living alone. As long as your physical description matches the template, you will be unfairly tarred.

It’s why you don’t see anyone walking around with Hitler mustaches anymore.

I hope I won’t be forced to shave.

“I wandered into myspace a little while ago. Very depressing. I’m pretty sure it’s not depressing because of the energy that is represented by the people who bother to put their lives on display, and my recognition that I don’t share that energy; I’m pretty sure it’s depressing because of the immodesty, the lies, the self-congratulation, the bewildered urge to connect to the corporate monster, the startling off-hand revelations, the depth of misplaced hope, and the sluice of links to others who do the same. I’m pretty sure that’s it.”

editor’s note: Moments later, satisfied with his prose, he put down his beer, walked out into the inky darkness of the backyard to allow the dogs their night-time dump, and fell into the pool with all his clothes on.

Rolling Stone : The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

I linked through to RS from somewhere else for some reason; doesn’t matter. What matters is the awful, awful things they’ve put in their top 500 albums chart.

Everyone has his limits. “No U2 album shall be above every Who album,” for instance. Or “No ‘Greatest Hits’ album shall be in the top 400.”

Rankings are a combination of opinion, mood, timing, and probably 10 or 100 other factors, only one of which measures what the scale is supposed to measure. And when RS or SI or the Sun Herald or anyone else puts out a “Top x” list of anything, they anger or perplex every single reader. Every single one. There’s no one at home saying “Wow, they got it exactly right again, Alice.” No one. Not even Alice’s idiot husband.

This is what I want: the reader at home can peruse a list of 500 albums, can see a blank interspaced every five numbers, and can say something like “Well, obviously Hambone Lardstump’s seminal Bloodpuppy album comes in at number 15.”

And they can’t cheat. They have to come up with, say, a top 500 albums of all time list, then remove every fifth album. In other words, they can’t just come up with a top 400 list, then shoehorn blanks in there. Because I’d still get mad at them, that’s why!

No angst, no fuss, and everyone stays happy. Even Lardstump’s rabid followers.

Psycho Path voted weirdest street name

Pitiful, just pitiful. When my curmudgeonhood culminates and I finally put my house at the end of Gorilla Shit Industrial Incline, this contest will be in the bag.

The source poll is here.

On January 6, 2006, Henan Province’s Dahe Daily newspaper reported that the local police department was unable to take an ID photo of Ye Xiangting from Yelou Village in the Yangzhuang Township of Wugang City, Henan Province. No image of Ye Xiangting showed up in the computer photos, and there is still no clear explanation for the result.

Gentlemen, I think this is the real thing. Oh, I know I said that about the hungry Buddha boy in Nepal, the Jesus head in the loaf of bread, and the Mary in the cabinet. Also, there was the fiasco about the Rigellian spaceship landing on the white house lawn in ‘02, for which I apologize. And the thing about the shitting statue of Percival is just plain embarrassing now; sorry to all those I induced to leave their jobs, sell their worldly possessions, and follow the shitting Percival; I was wrong. But this; this one I have a good feeling about.

“The police station chief told the reporter they have encountered two similar cases. They are unclear about the cause and hope the experts can offer an explanation.”

Right, good job there, Kolshak. I’m glad you’re on the case. “Two similar cases.” Third world, what is wrong with you?

“Ladies & Gentlemen, men of the press, your Royal Highness,

“We at Blithering Idiot Co are excited about the future. Confidently upbeat. Future-wise, we see ourselves moving forward. And not just moving forward in the sense that everything must move forward in space-time, but in a whole other, more exciting sense that you have to take my word on.

“My predecessor at Blithering idiot, a fine man, led this company on a new path. He dared to lead when others lay back and said ‘It will never work!’ They said ‘The change is too much!’ They said ‘The tank is about to blow!’ Well, I’d just like to say to those doubting Thomases that he was one hundred percent correct, in the sense that two out of three is one hundred percent. And I’d like to build on the successes of this man, this towering hero, by dismantling his initiatives and replacing them with entirely new ones. May he rest in peace going forward.

“Make no mistake, we also plan to learn from our mistakes, if we’ve made any, which we have not. We will learn from these non-mistakes in a looking backward, vibrant fashion. For we at Blithering Idiot regard every mistake that we’ve never made as really an opportunity, an opportunity to improve our synergies and initiatives seamlessly with regard to things.

“So as we stagger from opportunity to opportunity in our march into the future, let us always remember that, even though other companies may tie a bow on a sack of horseshit and call it pretty, we would never, ever do such a thing, unless it were both lucrative and unattributable.

“Thank you and God bless you all.”

When I come up with a concise term or phrase that’s well-formed, I naturally assume that someone else has already come up with it. Maybe it’s not used the way I use it, but I assume it’s out there, somewhere among the web’s data bits. Sometimes I google the phrase just to see how others have used it. It’s similar to how I didn’t expect “Like Swift Dead” to show up on a search; it’s a completely mal-formed stew of a phrase. Means nothing, comes from nowhere. Similarly, I don’t expect “Crackling Castle Porkpie” to return any results either. Hold on while I check that.

Nope, no crackling castle porkpies. But It’s odd when I google something that I know is well-formed and come up empty. It happens sometimes. In a way it’s gratifying to think I’m the first person who’s put these two or three words together and tossed them out on the web, but in another way it’s kind of spooky. Like I’m in a deserted hallway in a deserted hospital at midnight trying to keep my footsteps from echoing.

Anyway, here’s a short list of things that googled empty for me that shouldn’t have:

1. googled empty
2. nuts and hayseeds
3. crime and sanctuary

Actually, “crime and sanctuary” has started to google (although only as an innocent conjunction of clauses), but “googled empty” and “nuts and hayseeds” are still quiet. Even “google empty” and “googles empty,” as phrases with a meaning, are unlinked. Gratifying, but spooky.