Monday, June 26, 2006

snore....

Sorry, folks, but I'm bushed this evening. I assisted with a Big Special Project at The Store today, which required my presence there at 5:00 a.m. So right now my impetus for blogging is consists of little more than staring slack-jawed at the computer, clicking the mouse, and keeping that glob of drool from plummeting from my mouth to the tabletop. So I'll be doing Sentential Links tomorrow, when I have a bit more wind beneath my sails.

For now, just a couple items:

:: Man, is anyone else out there a new MySpace.com user who finds the whole thing a tad creepy? The only reason I signed up was to basically stick a link from there to here, on the off chance that any old friends with whom I've lost contact over the years are also MySpace users. Hasn't turned out that way, really. I've added some people who have requested "friend" status, but I'm wondering why I bothered, because I have yet to see a single hit in my referrals from MySpace. And one person actually phrased his friends-request to me that I seem cute and funny, which baffled me because "cute" isn't generally something that guys cite about other guys, and this person's profile indicates that he is straight. Can it be that he looked at my name and my long hair in the photo and assumed that I'm a woman? Aieee!!! Granted, my beard isn't all that prominent in the photo I use there, but my profile clearly indicates that I'm male and my blurb-thing refers to The Wife. Color me confoozled. Anyway, MySpace doesn't strike me as being terribly useful or even much fun, aside from my ability to search out folks who attended my high school and college. It's certainly not going to replace my Blogger account, by any means.

:: Scotty has details on BloggerCon Episode IV: Bloggers in the Park. Check out his suggestions and comment. Our shelter will be near the hill from which the view of the Buffalo-Niagara region is spectacular, so hope for a non-humid day so the view will be special! I've already stated that I'll bring a lot of plates, cups, utensils, and napkins; and I'll also use this event as my reason to thaw out the Polish sausage that's sitting in my freezer.

(I should note that, during the height of the recent Sabres playoff run -- before the Injury Gods decided to set up permanent camp in HSBC Arena -- I thought it would be wicked cool if somehow we could convince a Sabre or two to drop by the BloggerCon, with the Cup. That would have been the coolest thing ever.)

:: Another article in the News today about Niagara Falls International Airport as an air cargo hub. I would love to see this happen. It would be a beginning to a new industry in this region. I read a few weeks back about shipping from Canada becoming more important in the future, because the Port of Halifax will become a major port in itself by virtue of that most quintessential of reasons for economic development: geography. The harbor at Halifax is the deepest harbor north of Virginia, apparently. That will become important as cargo ships get bigger and bigger.

:: Sean is a fan of Lenox Tools. I'm unfamiliar with them -- but I lean back in my chair, twirl my ten-in-one Klein screwdriver in my hand, and scoff at Sean's measly six-in-one. Heh! (Kidding aside, it's more than worth the money to buy good tools and keep them clean than to keep buying cheap tools when the old ones break or wear out. And yes, I'm becoming a tool nerd. How did that happen!)

:: Notes from the childhood: while idly surfing the Web last week, I happened upon a site devoted to an eatery my family used to occasionally visit when we lived in Portland, OR. Imagine a Chuck E. Cheese-type joint with a giant pipe organ and a guy who'd come out intermittently to play it, and you had the Organ Grinder:

There's no easy way to describe this late, great pizzeria. The exterior resembled a spaceship owned by a clown with a fetish for custom design work. The interior recalled Hunter S. Thompson's fever dreams of Las Vegas' Circus Circus casino, sans high-wire wolverines.


I can't say I remember the place terribly fondly; it was a nifty joint we went to once in a while. I always figured that was because the place was on the other side of town from where we lived, but now that I see what a bare-bones affair at Chuck E. Cheese costs, I have other suspicions as to why the Organ Grinder was never a staple of dining out for us. More regular destinations were joints called "Pizza Caboose" (railroad themed; lots of fun there) and the Sunshine Pizza Exchange, which I don't much remember except for...nah, I don't much remember it. I don't even know why I remember the name.

:: What the hell is going on in Left Blogistan these days? Everyone's talking about whether or not left-wing bloggers take orders from Markos Moulitsas or some such thing. WTF?!

:: "Erasing the Smell of Sci-Fi":

Sean Maher, who played Simon Tam, the ship's doctor, in both Firefly and Serenity, also once tried to dodge the sci-fi stench. He told a Scottish newspaper that "I feel like Firefly and Serenity are their own genre. It's not science fiction so much as it's about humanity and characters and dynamics between people."


So, if it's got dynamic characterizations and solid storytelling, it therefore can't really be SF? Well, shit. I'm waisting my reading time, then.

That's all the blogging from me today. More tomorrow.

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