Previously: Drought's End

"And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" -the Beatles

Afterwards we sat on the porch swing, cuddling and talking. I hadn't had such a nice evening in a long, long time. Finally she announced that she had to be going; she needed to make some money.

"I thought you said you stopped selling it?" I asked.

"I don't have anywhere to go, and besides, I really miss it. I'll call you tomorrow, maybe."

"Ok". I kissed her, and she was gone, walking down the street.

The next morning as I was watching The Rookie, the doorbell rang. Figuring it was probably Snakelady, I opened the door.

It was Annie's boyfriend, who I'd only met once. He looked mad, and I didn't give him a chance to talk. "She ain't here, man", I said. "She took off early last night." He walked back to his car, shoulders slumped dejectedly. I felt sorry for the poor fool, and relieved he didn't want to kick my ass; he's a big guy and probably wouldn't have had much trouble doing so.

Only a fool falls in love with a woman he pays for sex.

I finished watching the movie. "You know what a real criminal is? A real criminal is somebody who would deface a work of art like this with a color like that!"

I decided to go to JWs for a beer. An old friend I'd known since the kids were small was there, a fellow nerd. We talked about women and computers for a while, and went out to the beer garden. He had some skunk, he said. It wasn't very skunky but it was some pretty good weed. This was indeed a nice weekend!

My phone rang. It was a girl named Star, wanting to take me out to eat.

I didn't know anybody named Star.

I told my nerd buddy "I have to stop drinking so much. I just got asked out by some girl named 'Star' and can't remember anybody with that name for the life of me." The name, for some reason, put visions of red hair in my head, but I couldn't place her.

He left, and I had a final beer and left as well. As I walked out the door, Linda called wanting to shoot some pool. I drove over to get her. "You mind if Tami comes along?" she asked.

Sigh. "I guess not. I'm not paying her way, though." Third wheel Tami gabbered on about the guys buying her drinks the night before, annoying the hell out of me. Linda kicked my ass at pool twice, and I took them home. "Isn't it my turn to go to D'Arcy's with you?" Linda sked as she got out.

Sigh. I'd taken Charlie there twice; the first time it had been too crowded to get a table and we'd just had a car bomb, the IRA terrorist drink, and gone to Top Cat's to eat. I'd taken Tami to D'Arcy's twice when she was living with me. "I guess. But Tami ain't goin'!"

Charlie walked around the corner; she was there and said she wanted a ride to work. "You got that money you owe me?" I asked.

No, her boss was on vacation, she said. "This is that house I was cleaning." She would get paid for that one when the job was done. But nobody was there, so we went to the Blue Grouch and I bought her a beer.

"Do you know anybody named Star?" I asked. I figured Star was most likely a hooker, and if so Charlie had most likely run her off from Ralph's, as she and Linda always tried to do when a whore came by. That was one thing the three of them had in common - a dislike of prostitutes. Fat old Tami hated them because her young alien husband was always breaking her heart hiring them instead of giving her any sex, and Linda and Charlie didn't hate them, but they didn't like them scamming poor old Ralph out of his money as hookers are wont to do.

"I think she's friends with Kay," Charlie said. "Young blonde girl..."

I remembered a blonde that Kay had brought by over a year ago, a very good looking blond in her twenties, thin with large hooters. They had wanted to use my house as a whorehouse and I'd turned them down, and they left mad. The girl that had come with kay had a drug problem; she was a heroin whore.

Halfway through the second beer Charlie's phone rang; it was the guy with the house, he was coming to the Grouch to get her.

I got to bed early that night. And remembered who Star was - I think. Not the blond, but a redhead close to my age Julia had brought by a year earlier. She was a madam; a female pimp, with her own escort service.

I fell asleep with a smile on my face. I wonder if she'll call again?

Next: Bars and Star

Previously: "Lucy Furr" Burns in Hell

I look at the world and I notice it's turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps

-George Harrison

In Soviet Russia, whores pay YOU!

As I write this, I have a smile on my face and a song in my heart. There's nothing like getting laid after an extended period of celibacy to cheer up a man with the blues. Especially after getting an apology and money from her.

It had been so long I'd forgotten how good sex felt. And the sweet lies she told me as we laid there afterwards were almost as nice, saying she'd often fantasized about sex with me when she was fucking her boyfriend, and how much she'd missed my dick! Yeah, she was full of shit, but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

I wasn't in such a good mood Saturday. I wasn't in a bad mood - not when I got up, anyway. My old friend Ralph, the WWII Navy veteran who introduced me to a lot of the whores I've become friends with, had gotten out of Intensive Care last week, and I'd been able to see him for the first time, dropping by the hospital on the way home from work. A sick friend's recovery always cheers one up.

As I was drinking my coffee, I noticed that the floor was getting pretty dirty. It hasn't been swept since I threw Tami out. Maybe I'll do it tonight. I hadn't picked up my guitar in a longer time than I'd picked up my broom; it was dusty as well. Surely I'd gotten rusty. I tuned the old thing and noted that I should probably replace its strings; it was hard to get into tune.

I was happy to see that the rust hadn't attacked my fingers too badly, but the door that attacked my hand the previous week still had it a little sore, so I didn't play very long. I put a load of laundry in the machine instead, and drove out for some McNearFood, going through the drive through and taking it back home. I noted with delight that since Tami was gone, the food, gasoline, toilet paper, beer, and money were lasting a hell of a lot longer.

After breakfast I called Linda. "I'm going to go up and visit Ralph", I told her. "You guys want to go along?"

"Sure," she said, "but wait until after eleven, he has his therapy and they don't like him talking during it." Ralph's in the hospital for an appendectomy, but he also has asbestosis from years of being an inside wireman, an electrician. Back in his day, houses were full of asbestos. It kept them from burning down so quickly, but people didn't know how deadly the material was.

I went to the bank, checked my balance and cashed a check, then to the Magic Comb for a haircut. Hair freshly shorn I drove to Ralph's to pick up Linda, Charlie and Tami. Nobody was home.

I called Linda. "We're taking a walk", she said. She told me where they were, and I picked them up and we headed to the hospital.

"Where's Charlie?" I asked. They didn't know; she'd been gone a few days. Tami was badly hung over. They regaled me wath tales of their previous night's drinking, and guys hitting on them, and...

And I got the blues. I'd spent the previous night alone with strangers, sipping my beer in misery. "I'd really appreciate it," I said, "if you guys would change the subject. I really don't want to hear about it."

Tami went off. "It's always about you, isn't it?" She got louder and we got into a screaming match. Pretty soon the two of them were on my ass, and as we pulled into the hospital I'd had enough. "Fuck you two goddamned heartless selfish bitches," I said. "You can fucking walk home. Tell Ralph I'll come up to see him later," and drove off. I could see Tami jumping up and down like a five year old and screaming at me - what, I couldn't hear, because the windows were up and I'd cranked the stereo.

I went to Felber's and got a beer. Halfway through the mug Danny walked in. He's an old friend, Tami's son's father. I'd met her through him. At one point he'd apologized for introducing me to "the fucking cunt," as he put it.

"Hey, old man," I said, despite the fact that he's ten years my junior. "Still on the wagon?"

"Yeah, I'm doing good," he said. "I saw your car and thought I'd come in and say 'hi'". I bought him a Mountain Dew - the soda, not the illegal southern drink. We chatted for a while, and the girl Tami calls "Snake" walked in. Snake is the whore I call "Bighead" in these journals, and her hair was longer making her head look bigger than ever. If it was possible she'd lost even more weight. She really is a cartoonish character.

She was on my shit list, but as as I was so pissed off at Tami and Tami hated her so much, I was friendly. I told her I'd thrown Tami out and to give me a call. "I lost your number", she said. I borrowed an ink pen from the bartender and wrote my number down, but I wasn't sure if I got it right. "That's ok," she said, "I know where you live!"

She took her forty ounce beer and walked off, Danny left and pedaled to his AA meeting, I finished my beer and decided to go see Ralph. It was an hour later, surely the two female fucktards had gone by now.

As I was walking through the lobby to the elevators, they walked towards me. "He's asleep," they said, calmed down and out of bitch mode. I gave them a ride home and went home myself, and put Unforgiven in the VCR.

Halfway through the movie my phone rang. It was "Annie". You've heard of crack whores, and maybe met some? Well, Annie is a whiskey whore.

I hadn't seen Annie in months. She had been on my shit list, too, having ripped me off for twenty bucks the last time I'd seen her. My shit list had gotten so big I needed a mainframe to keep it straight.

She'd found some fool to be her boyfriend, one of her clients. She'd moved in with him shortly before swindling me out of the twenty bucks. I'd been madder at myself than at her; I'm number one on my own shit list.

With most whores, you'd best not pay them first or they'll wind up with your money and you still won't get laid. Get the goods up front. But I'd known Annie for a long time, and always been able to trust her. At least, until she got the boyfriend, when she'd hightailed it off with my money.

She was sorry for ripping me off, and had the twenty she owed me. And she and her boyfriend were fighting over drugs and whiskey. He bitched at her for drinking so much, and she bitched at him for his drugs. Not pot; Annie smoked a joint herself now and then, but the boyfriend was into harder drugs. She said if I'd come get her she'd pay me the twenty she owed me and we could have a few drinks.

I picked her up across town, and she'd lost weight - quite a bit of weight. I've called her "Big Fat Annie" in these journals before, but she wasn't so fat now. The boyfriend called my phone twice, and I just handed it to her. She'd argue with him some and hang up. She gave the twenty back and apologized again. We went to felber's for a beer.

"I missed you," she said. "I haven't been getting along with my boyfriend at all."

"Well," I said, "at least you're getting laid. I haven't"

"No, I haven't," she said. "We've been fighting, we haven't hardly done anything but fight. Want to go back to your place?"

We did.

Next: Bars and Star

Entropy ensures that life, the universe and everything is empty.

If you punched "42" in the snack machine at work you got Nacho Doritos. Then you got the Ranch Doritos. Now that slot is empty. So's my stomach.

Today's "normal" mcgrew journal was in a comment in the Batman story, The Batman Journal. I wouldn't have posted it as a journal, and in fact wasn't going to post the "paxil diary type" journal at all today and maybe even this week (unless something interesting happens, like I get laid), but I had to. I mean, how can someone living in a cartoon city not comment in a slashdot topic about a cartoon?

Smurf, the grouchy blue guy, is in it, as are a couple of felons. As I wanted it to be SFW there is no mention of the hookers.

One commenter in that thread referenced a story for the Sunday Times by someone named Jeff Dawson. I know a Jeff Dawson, but it's a different guy. He was accused of being a troll, so I came to his defense, only to have some AC respond "seek psychaitric help". Probably circletimessquare, back in the K5 days I was always telling him to take his meds.

Last week someone with a smaller six digit UID than me dissed me for the huge size of my tool; er, ID. What he doesn't know is that I have a five digit ID, but unfortunately I lost the password to it long ago (the last comment I made under that ID was Friday January 14 2000, @05:07PM, and indeed I mostly lurked back then. I had my Springfield Fragfest Quake site and was active on Planet Crap, where the likes of George Broussard and Tim Sweeney posted regularly. I was also still married and taking care of my daughters, who my ex mostly neglected, so I didn't have a lot of time for slashdot, getting fragged and running a web site and working for a living and raising a family and all.

The kids and I had lots of fun shooting at each other. Both of them are still heavily into electronic games, and Patty even manages a GameStop.

Want to know why Tim Sweeney is so afraid of piracy? Because when he was in college, he was a pirate. Thieves expect to be stolen from, copyright infringers expect their copyrighte to be infringed, honest people expect honesty and violent people expect to get the shit kicked out of them.

But Having only posted four comments at slashdot, I bought a house and was without internet access for several months, and got a new provider and new email address and lost my slashdot password.

If anybody knows how to get my old user name back (which is the same as my meatspace name), I'd like to know how.

I see that my old nemesis Pete Jongular is no longer an admin at K5. I'd go back there, but I lost that password too.

When I was metamoderating today, once again I metamoderated a comment that my own comment was the parent to. It was modded "informative" and I metamodded it as "fair".

Thought for the day: Love is not only blind, but deaf and tasteless. It does, however, smell.

Previously:
Fireworks
Fireworks Continued
On The Rebound
The Sky is Crying

Moms complain about how hard life is, and the kids just don't understand. Creature comfort goals, they only numb my soul and make it hard for me to see. My thoughts all seem to stray, to places far away. I need a change of scenery.
-Boyce and Hart, Pleasant Valley Sunday

It's been peaceful and pleasant this week. My case of the blues lifted fairly quickly; the fact that about everyone I know is having a far harder time of things than I am makes my blues quite different, Rather than feeling sorry for myself, I've been worrying about and feeling sorry for my friends.

Well, mashing my hand in the door Monday morning as I was leaving for work wasn't pleasant. My Mondays are like Aurthur Dent's Thursdays, I can't seem to get the hang of them. And I think I was a little hung over Monday.

I retrieved my car's left front wheel and its new used tire, and it sat in my trunk for a few days, as my hand hurt too much to change it. I finally had Charlie change it for me in exchange for buying her a pack of cigarettes. She owes me a bunch of money.

As I was at work the phone rang - it was Charlie, who was having a bad day. It was the first anniversary of her mother's death. Her mom was a year older than me, and died of lung cancer. Charlie's mom was bald from chemo when I met her, and I attended her funeral. It was one of the very few times I ever saw Charlie in a dress.

She'd been waiting for a paycheck, and her boss had been avoiding her. I think she's been fired. So she was at the Blue Grouch, and I told her I'd bring her some McFatsfood and loan her some (more) beer money.

Tami was there, which ironically made me happy, as she was the best person to be with Charlie on that day. Her mom died a few months before Charlie's mom.

Tami was red as a beet. The blonde dumbass had been swimming with Linda the day before, and had fallen asleep in the sun. She and Charlie were pretty drunk. I left Charlie her near-food, and loaned her the beer and cigarette money, and the money for the broken window, and then went back to work.

The phone rang all afternoon. Around two Linda called and asked if I would take Tami to the hospital and Linda to JW's after work to shoot some pool. I said yes to both; Tami was really sunburned. As hurt as I was and angry at her as I was, she was in obvious pain, even drunk. And the fool had been in the beer garden with Charlie, since you can't smoke in a bar in Illinois and Charlie smokes those damned things that killed her mom. They'll probably kill me, too, even though I haven't been a butthead since 1999.

I stopped by Ralph's to pick up Linda and Tami, and Tami said she'd used an aloe plant Ralph had and didn't need to go to the hospital after all. "I know you hate me and never want to see me again," she said, "but could I talk to you for five minutes? Alone? Please?"

I reluctantly agreed, told Linda I'd be back, and went to the Grouch with Tami. I've mentioned before that this is a cartoon city; the Blue Grouch is owned by a guy named "Smurf".

"You win! I really really miss my best friend", Tami said, crying. "I'll give you what you want."

I don't believe it; I think she's trying to scam me again. "I need some time away from you," I told her. "I need time to heal. We'll be friends again but I've made up my mind that the 'home for wayward women' is closed for good. I'm not going to let anybody not related to me stay there any more unless it's a girlfriend in a monogamous relationship. I get too attached and wind up hurt. It happened with you, and with Amy, and even with Linda and Charlie."

Both Linda and Charlie had spent a week or two at my place last summer. Ralph had kicked Charlie out, before Linda moved in with him, to make room for "Samantha" and "Mary", a couple of prostitutes. The eighty six year old WWII veteran is the guy who introduced me to most of the whores I know, including "Kay" and "Annie". I consider Ralph to be one of my best friends.

Charlie had moved in with Lance, and that only lasted one night. Lance is a violent wierdo, an ex-marine with a foot fetish who likes to wear women's panties, and he's in love with Charlie, and stalked her most of last summer. I let Charlie move in with me. Two weeks later she got herself arrested for a traffic ticket. She'd not had any money and was sentenced to community service a year earlier for driving with an expired license, and halfway through the community service her mom had been diagnosed with cancer and Charlie forgot about the community service. There had been a warrant for her arrest, and one night I was drinking with Linda and Amy (this was before Linda's stint in Dwight) and Charlie didn't come home.

Linda got a frantic call from Ralph; Charlie was in jail and he didn't know why. Visiting Charlie in jail a couple of days later I learned she had asked a policeman where she could find a pay phone, and he asked her for ID, saw that there was a warrant and hauled her in.

She moved in with another guy after she got out of jail a week later. Apparently she, too, felt that we were getting too close, as the last thing we had done together was cuddle on the couch watching a movie. Later the hardass Charlie told me "God damn it, I hate you, Steve. You turn me into a powder puff girl and I swore I'd never be like that!"

Linda moved in with me when Charlie went to jail, then with Ralph after Ralph's whores, one of whom was a reformed junkie, had gone on a "double date" and left the old man alone. Charlie moved back in with Ralph after the guy she was staying with threw her out.

To a hooker, a "double date" is when you pay to have two women at once. It's very lucrative for the prostitutes, each of whom get paid two or three times what they normally would. I never saw the sense of it; I only have one dick, why would I need two women?

Wow, I really digressed this time, didn't I? All this happened over a year ago. But as I said, I told Tami she wasn't moving back in, took her back to Ralph's. Ralph's in the hospital in intensive care, his appendix had burst.

Linda and I went to JW's to shoot some pool, and Charlie called Linda wanting some help. There was a slumlord that wanted to hire someone to clean out a house he had evicted some poor children and their poor parents from, for cash money. Linda said "yeah ok but I'm shooting some pool right now."

Charlie showed up with Tami, and I gave the two of them the ride to the Ghetto. It turned out to be right next toor to where the DEA and the FBI and the local cops had violated our Constitutional rights last summer! The slumlord was who Linda and Charlie were visiting at the time; apparently they had done some cleaning work for him then, and they were there to get paid for it.

Linda wound up breaking an electric meter while removing a screen door. I wound up back at my house drinking with Tami. Too drunk to take her back to Ralph's, I let her crash for the night.

The next day after I got off work her sunburn had her in extreme pain. She was crying from the pain, and Solarcaine and naproxin wasn't helping, so I took her to the hospital.

She has second degree burns over a very large part of her body. The doctor told her he didn't know how she'd gone so long without visiting the hospital, and gave her a shot of morphine. She was stoned to the gills from the shot when I got her, and I paid the pharmacist for her prescription for demerol and let her crash again at my house that night.

I shot pool again with Linda last night. She had gotten to visit her infant, and had pictures. I swear, if babies weren't so cute the human race would have gone extinct a hundred thousand years ago. Linda's going to talk to Ralph's daughter to see if I can visit him, and she and I are going to the movies tonight.

I miss the old bastard. We're good friends; we drink together, and loan each other money when needed. I'm afraid I'll never get to see him again. Ralph's the oldest person I know, although far from the wisest. He's even a bigger fool when it comes to women than I am.

Sidestory: The Batman Journal
(a slashdot comment)
Next: Drought's End

Previously:
Fireworks
Fireworks Continued
On The Rebound

"The sky is crying, look at the tears rolling down the street. Ive been looking for my baby and I wonder where can she be?" -Elmore James

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but my date with Kathy is off. Friday night one of Jim's friends told her that all I wanted from her was sex, and she believed it.

I guess that's a good thing, because she has to be incredibly stupid to believe that. If all I wanted was sex I could get a hooker for less than the price of dinner at D'arcy's. Stupid woman.

It was sort of the last straw, though. I gave my car key to the bartender and got shitfaced drunk, and sat there and cried like a little girl.

The next morning the bar was supposed to open at 8:30. As I was drinking my coffee and waiting for it to open so I could retrieve my key, the phone rang. It was "Kay", one of my hooker friends, and a damned good looking one too, who I hadn't seen in months. She desperately needed a ride.

"Kay" is married to a local politician, a fellow I never met. More stupidity; prostitution should be legal and adultery should be against the law. Serves the bastard right, dumbass damned politicians. I told her my car was at Felber's and it would take a few minutes to retrieve it, and started walking. There were puddles everywhere.

Mike, who owns the place with his wife and daughter, was just opening up when I got there. "Came for you keys?"

"Yep. I'd stick around and talk, but there's another woman that's going to use me. I'll be back later."

"OK, I'll see you."

It rained off and on most of the day.

I drove out to where my friend said she needed a ride from. From what she had told me before (and of course I've only heard one side of the story), her lawyer-politician husband was verbally and physically abusive. They had been separated at one point, and he had gotten custody of their infant when she had taken him to a neighbor's house to use the phone, and the neighbor turned out to be a drug dealer who was arrested the next day. She claims she didn't know the woman dealt dope, but at any rate the authorities, at her husband's behest, took the child.

The two of them later got back together. She'd said she didn't really want to be with the man any more, but she couldn't stand the thought of being away from her child, and feared for the baby's safety at her husband's hands.

She was visibly shaken, and crying. I gave her a hug, and gentleman that I am opened her car door for her. "I lost my baby," she said.

"What?"

"My husband got arrested last night. He hit me and somebody saw it and the cops took him to jail and they took away my baby!"

Anywhere but this crooked town and a politician's arrest for hitting a woman would be in all the papers. But in Illinois where they say "vote early, vote often" and dead people vote, there was nothing about it in the paper this morning. It's likely that her husband paid off the witnesses and that the police swept it under the rug as well, but I don't know.

Linda called. "Where are you?"

"I'm giving a ride to a friend. What's up?"

"I got a ride so I'm at your house, I need to get some of Tami's things for her." She had another errand to attend to and said she'd be by later. I told her to call and make sure I was home.

"I didn't think you'd be gone so early", she said.

"Kay" gave me gas money and we went to my house and drank some coffee while she called around trying to find a place to stay. My "home for wayward women" is closed, and I woudn't want a hooker living with me anyway; I'd likely get in trouble with the law myself, and get my house taken away.

As we drank our coffee, Linda showed up and gathered the things Tami needed. She said she'd call me when she got home.

"Kay" found a freind to stay with, who drove up in front of the house. "Kay" Kissed me and left.

Poor girl. It seems that loser that I am, everbody I know is even worse off.

My daughter had bought me a copy of Passion of the Christ, Definitive Edition (also known as "The Jesus Chainsaw Massace"), so I decided to watch it. When the movie was over I read a litte Restaraunt At The End of the Universe a while, and decided to call Linda to see if she'd forgotten about me and my towels.

She didn't answer the phone. So I called Charlie. She didn't answer, either. But Charlie called back a minute later and said she'd be home in an hour and would call me.

It was quite a bit less than half an hour, because I drove through McDonalds for a burger and fries and salad, and before the burger and fries were done she called again. "I'm here, come on over". I put the salad in the fridge, bagged up the towels and drove over there.

Charlie was livid. "I can't get in the god damned house! That motherfucking bitch!"

"What?"

"Linda's parole officer came the other day and dumped out my purse, and didn't put the keys back in. Now that cocksucking Linda won't answer the fucking phone!"

"Well, hell." I said. "She's not answering when I call either. Let's go get a beer until we can get hold of her."

"I'm gonna kick that bitch's ass!" she said.

Beer at the Blue Grouch is only $3.50 a pitcher on Saturdays, so we went there and I bought us a pitcher. It started raining, hard, thunder rolling and lightning flashing.

Cowboy was there, and asked if I knew Shannon. No, I said. "Shes a lot lizard up on the north end of town. Died last week from a drug overdose. I figured you probably knew her."

Cowboy is a roofer who used to be a trucker. A "lot lizard" is what the truckers call prostitutes, and he knows I know a few.

One of Tami's alien husband's girlfriends had been named Shannon; once Tami had cried on my shoulder about her. She'd found a message on her husband's cell phone from her. I wondered if it was the same girl.

My phone rang - it was Brian, fresh out of rehab and still off the heroin. At least life's not kicking one person I know's ass.

As I was on the phone with him, Charlie's phone rang. A string of obscenities erupted, so I knew Linda had finally returned her call.

"That bitch won't even come over and let me in and it's pouring down rain!" she exclaimed. We finished our beer and she said she wanted to break into the house, so we went back. Charlie broke a back window to get in. I washed my towels and put them in the dryer, and we went back to the Grouch.

"You ought to tell Tami's husband about Brandon", she said.

"I'm not going to do that. Even if I was a vengeful sort I wouldn't. There's collateral damage."

"I would."

"I know you would!"

Her phone rang; someone needed a favor and was picking her up there. She'd call when they were done. I drove to Felber's and handed my key to the bartender and got another pitcher; I was pretty sure I was already pretty close to .08.

Charlie called, I told her I was too drunk to drive and would get the towels the next day. "Tami was in the background when I talked to Linda saying 'fuck Charlie'. So that bitch is on the street; I ain't lettin' her back in the house again."

Sunday morning as I was walking back to retrieve my car, Charlie called. "Can you come over?" she asked. "Sure", I said, "when I get to Felber's and get my car back."

When I got there she was working in the garden, just finishing up. Ralph's little dog was there happily wagging his tail. We all went inside and watched What Women Want. And I had an epiphany. Women get what they want from me, so they don't have to give anything back. That's why assholes get the women and nice guys don't.

When the movie was over we went to a Chinese restaraunt. She bought.

I still have a dinner date at D'arcy's, but now it's with Charlie. But damn it, I'm sick of chasing women. It's not a romantic date; I owe her for the Chinese.

Next: "Lucy Furr" Burns in Hell

Previously:
Fireworks
Fireworks Continued

I'm a loser, and I've lost someone who's dear to me. I'm a loser, and I'm not what I appear to be.
-The Beatles

I got off work last night, and since it was Thursday the draft beer at Felber's was only seventy five cents. I try not to miss going there on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the seventy five cent nights.

It was pretty empty for a Thursday. There were four or five people by the Linux game machine on the bar by the front door. Most people don't know that those MegaTouch machines at all the bars run Linux, and I wouldn't have either except that a few years ago when I was at Mojo's, Rier tripped over the cord to his and unplugged it. When it booted up, well, it was pretty obvious what OS it was running.

Kathy was at the other end of the bar with two Budweiser bottles in front of her. I walked down and sat a stool away, figuring Jim must be around somewhere.

"Hi," I said. "Where's your old man?"

"I left the motherfucker."

"No shit? Where are you living now?"

She told me the address, up at the north end of town, which I promptly forgot. "I'm staying with my daughter until I find a place," she said.

I moved to the stool next to her. "I figured that was his beer."

"It's mine."

"There are two of 'em there..."

"Oh, wow, there are. I've been drinking since six this morning. I haven't had any pot."

"I guess it's been a bad week for everybody. I threw Tami out."

"What? Why?"

"She was fucking some twenty five year old kid all weekend."

"What's it to you? You two weren't together!"

"If she was going to fuck somebody she should have been fucking me!"

"She told me she wanted to."

"Huh?" I was a bit discombobulated by this.

"Yeah, she said she kept trying but every time she tried you brought up her husband."

"She told me that she wasn't ready," I said. "She wanted to do it 'for the right reasons', that she wanted to be divorced first."

"She really had strong feelings for you", she said.

"Wow. Um, wow. I don't know what to think," I stammered. I changed the subject, a little embarrassed. "Your hair's different," I said. "I like it."

"What's different about it?" she asked suspiciously.

"The color's different, it's lighter. Something else too, that I can't put my finger on, did you cut it?"

"No, I just dyed it. I've been dying my hair since I was sixteen."

Kathy's pretty damned good looking for a woman my age. She's not my age, she's almost ten years younger, but cigarettes and booze will make a person look older. She's fit, and has a nice body and a cute little button nose and glasses.

There's something about a woman with glasses that turns me on. I guess I'm a freak.

Some guy maybe twenty years my junior with a ponytail sat down on her other side and started hitting on her. I said "'scuse me, I need to make a phone call. Watch my beer for me, would you?"

I went outside and called Linda. "Can I come over Saturday and use your dryer? I need to wash some towels." My clothes dryer has been broken for the last couple of months and I've been hanging clothes up to dry.

"Sure," she said, "If I'm still living there."

"Huh?" This was an incredibly perplexing night. I was going to ask her about what Kathy had said about Tami.

"They took my baby today."

"Huh? What do you mean they took your baby? Who took it?"

"DCFS came out with two sherriff deputies and took her today."

"Huh? Why? What happened?"

"It was all the fighting and all the cops that have been showing up since Ralph went in the hospital."

"My God," I said. "That's terrible. Jesus, I'm really sorry. I wish there was something I could do!"

"You can buy me a beer."

"Ok," I said. "Let me finish the one I have and I'll come get you."

"I'm at the Blue Grouch".

"Ok, I'll be there shortly." I hung up, and the phone said I had a missed call - Charlie. I called Charlie back, and she said she needed a ride in about an hour. "Sure" I said, "just call me." I went back in, and there was a bald fellow getting ready to sit in my stool.

"Hey, that's my new boyfriend's stool!" Kathy said, and winked at me.

I put my arm around her and smiled. "Yeah!"

And then she grabbed my ass! And introduced me to him - he was her son in law, her daughter was there with her. I asked Kathy out for dinner. And wound up getting kissed right on the mouth before the night was out!

I think I have a new girlfriend - fingers crossed! Of course, with my luck she and Jim will be back together before Tuesday when I'm supposed to take her out; right now I'm so broke I can't afford to pay attention. Monday's payday and I have to buy a tire for my car that evening, I've been driving on the donut since the blowout in Cahokia.

I finished my beer and told them I'd be back. "Can't you have one more beer?" Kathy asked. I sorrowfully told her I had to go help a friend out with a ride.

When I got to the Grouch, Tami was there with Linda, who was sitting next to Bill and Danny. This isn't the same Danny that fathered Tami's kid, this Danny used to own the place. He's a bona-fide war hero and gets pissed off if you tell anybody he's a hero. "I didn't do anything anybody else wouldn't have done," he once told me. But shit, the guy's got two purple hearts and a silver star from that damned Vietnam war.

I talked with Bill and Danny for a while, then pulled Tami aside and asked her about what Kathy had said. She denied it. And told me that the kid she'd been having sex with stole all her money!

Charlie called; she was outside the Grouch. "I'm inside" I said, and went out to give her the ride, and back to Felber's. I didn't want to drink with Tami. I did want to drink with Kathy!

By eight thirty or nine I told her and her family I had to go home as my damned clock was going to annoy me early. I'm meeting her after work today at Felber's.

I went home happy, and fell asleep on my porch swing with a beer in my hand.

Next: The Sky is Crying

Previously: Fireworks

I drove back to Felber's, angry and dejected. I didn't really believe Tami'd had sex with the kid half her age, but I'd tried to explain how I'd needed a friend and not had one, and she had lashed out at me in a cruel manner. Some friend she was!

The truth was, I'd grown too close, way too close to a married woman. There had been times that I was tempted... and she would say that she wasn't ready. She wanted to do it "for the right reasons". She wanted to be divorced first. She wanted to be best friends with the person she was going to have sex with - and she had told me, and others, that I was her best friend.

I decided she was going to have to stay with Charley and Linda. I just couldn't do this any more.

I drank one beer at Felber's and went home. I got another out of the fridge, and halfway through it Charlie called. Could I loan her five bucks for cigarettes? Charlie works construction, and said tomorrow was payday. I drove out to Ralph's to pick her up.

She denies it, but Charlie likes girls. I'd seen her hit on Tami and other women before. I think she's transgendered, but like I said she denies it. Despite the fact that she's not bad looking and has a REALLY nice ass, I don't think I've ever seen her with a man.

We went back to my house and opened a couple of beers and I told Charlie my tale of woe. "You just disappeared," she said. "why did you leave?

I told how she'd gone out for a smoke with Tami following her, how it was my anniversary, how Tami had followed the kid inside and Charlie afterwards.

"I went in to go to the bathroom," she said, "when I came out you were gone."

I told her about Tami's parting shot.

"She didn't fuck him", Charlie said. "She's like that when she gets mad, you know."

We drank a couple of beers and I took her home, and went home to bed. Damned alarm clock, I hate it.

But the clock never had a chance to go off. Five minutes before it would, Charlie called, very upset.

Charlie's young brother, Cory, is only thirty, and Linda, forty seven and reformed after her stint at Dwight and on parole herself, were now a couple. Linda had given birth on April Fool's day, two days before my vitrectomy. Charlie's brother had a girlfriend, who I'd never met but Ralph had said was "damned good looking" but supposedly had broken up with and now Cory was living at Ralph's as well.

The young Cory, dumb as a doornail, had first fallen in love with the baby and then supposedly with Linda. Charley said the two of them had assaulted her. "That fucking bastard and that no good cunt beat my ass. That god damned Tami was in on it, too.

"I lied to you last night. I didn't want to hurt your feelings any more, but Tami's been fucking that kid all weekend", referring to the twenty five year old whose name I never caught.

"She's just been using you. You should have heard some of the shit she said about you. The neighbors called the cops, and they were going to arrest me! They said I had to leave until eight fifteen, can you come get me?"

You can imagine that I felt like my heart had been stomped on. I got dressed, shut off the alarm clock and turned on the coffeepot and picked Charlie up by the railroad track, half listening to her rant about Tami and Linda and her asshole brother and the kid Tami had been fucking all weekend.

I dropped her back off at Ralphs. Before she got out of the car she yelled "Linda! Watch this, bitch!" and all of a sudden she was all over me in a very pleasant liplock, her hand on my crotch. Then she calmly got out of the car and sat down in the yard.

I drove to work, perplexed.

My phone rang at work about the time I was due for a break. It was Tami, and now she was upset. Not nearly as upset as me, I can tell you! She said she'd started her period and needed some pads and wanted a ride to borrow money from a friend, and she'd give me half the money.

"I haven't eaten in two days!" she said.

I wanted to give her a piece of my mind, tell her how badly she'd hurt me, how she'd been leading me on. It was apparent now that it had been a ploy to keep me from getting a girlfriend so she would have a place to stay.

I gave her the ride and a piece of my mind. "Can we talk this over when I'm sober?" she asked.

"No. Hell no." I castigated her the whole trip. She came out of her friends' with a ten dollar bill. I took it and gave her a five, and dropped her off at another friend's house.

Before I did she told me "You won't have to put up with Cory any more. There was bedlam again after you dropped Charlie off and they arrested him this morning on a parole violation. You can't associate with another felon when you're on parole. They didn't arrest Linda because she lives there."

After work I went home, terribly depressed. The phone rang - it was Tami's husband. "Is Tami there?"

"She don't live here any more," I told him. "I threw her out."

"What? Why? What happened?"

"I really don't want to get into that right now", I said.

He gave me a number and said he'd wired some money to her. He's an alien, so sometimes it's hard to understand him through his thick accent. "If she..." something or other "...I'm going to focking keel her!"

No sooner than I got off the phone with the alien and Linda called. "Could you bring some underwear over for Tami? And would you take me somewhere to shoot some pool? I have to get out of here for a while."

"Sure," I said.

Next: On The Rebound

I know it isn't true, love is just a lie made to make you blue. Love hurts. -Nazareth

Thursday was my wedding anniversary. On July 3, 1976, I wed Evil-X. And I just had my heart broken... again.

I'm an idiot. I keep getting used by women who pretend to have feelings for me.

Evil-X and I were going to be married on the nation's 200th birthday, and it appears that historians say we actually did, in a manner of speaking. Before my divorce it seemed a wonderful date to be married on. I would never forget my anniversary, and there would always be fireworks.

Now I wish we had chosen a different date, because I get grumpy on that day. I wish I could forget my anniversary.

I probably got grumpier than usual, because Tami and I hadn't been getting along.

I got home and she was busy with some errand or other; I had her drop me off at Felbers while she ran errands. Thursdays are seventy five cent drafts, so I had a few. And a few more with her.

I'd planned on going to visit Mike in Columbia on Friday. He always has a lot of good fireworks, and I need to be with true friends on that particular day, especialy on years I have no girlfriend. By girlfriend I mean one I have sex with, not somebody else's wife. Whether or not you believe it, and most people don't, I've never had sex with Tami.

That was a big part of the problem. I've needed to get laid in the worst way, especialy on that weekend. And Tami gets in the way of that. Everybody thinks she's my girlfriend.

She didn't want to go to Columbia. "We need some time apart", she said, and was certainly right. And I've needed some time to myself; she's had my house in the daytime, while I haven't had it at all; my house or time to myself.

Some time after finishing a half pint of cheap whiskey and a six pack of beer, we had words and she stormed out. I went to bed.

The next morning I got up early and called Mike, and told him I'd probably stop by Jeff's in Cahokia on my way down. I've known Jeff and Mike for literally decades; we were friends long before I was married.

As I got on highway 55 I saw what looked like two tractor-trailers laying on their sides, right before sixth street hits the highway. It looked like a dozen cop cars there.

The car was acting funny, and I started smelling burned rubber. Worried, I pulled off at the first rest area and checked the tires out. They looked fine, so I continued. A little more than halfway there there was a noise and what looked like debris, and the car started shaking. I pulled of on to the shoulder and checked everything out. The left front tire looked a little low but otherwise everything looked fine. I finished the trip with the cruise control set at fifty.

I went to Jeff's in Cahokia and knocked on the plywood sheet in the front where the picture window used to be. I heard the back door open, and walked around. Jeff's girlfriend's teenaged son was at the door. "Jeff here?" I asked.

"Yeah, but he's sleeping".

"Well, wake him up!" We went inside. Although it was ten o'clock, everyone there was asleep. Jeff came out with a bowl of hemp buds.

It seems I wasn't the only one with woman problems; in fact, his were pretty much identical to mine, only worse. Like me, he'd had a woman living there that he hadn't been having sex with. I'd thought she was his girlfriend.

She was getting an apartment and he was glad - "I'm sick of the psycho's drama. It's always something. I used to be able to watch TV in peace, but there's always a crowd of teenages there and she's always bitching."

Like Tami, Glenna's bipolar. She reminds me of Jeff's late brother's first wife. Now THERE was a psycho bitch from hell! In fact, one time we were all at Mike's watching a movie and her son, Todd, exclaimed after the first psychotic episode "Oh my GOD, that's my MOM!"

And indeed it was; the actress (Kathy Bates) even looked like Debbie. The movie was Misery. Jim, Todd's dad who I'd known since high school, had recently died of untreated heart disease; his employer don't offer health insurance. Unlike civilized countries, the USA does not have universal health care and it kills people.

Jim was my best friend. If you want to troll me, speaking out against universal health care is a sure way to press my buttons. Jim died in 1992, two weeks short of his fortieth birthday.

After visiting Jeff for a while, I asked him to come along to Mike's. He said he couldn't, there was stuff around the house he had to do. He walked outside with me, and my front tire was flat. Damn!

"I've got a pump", he said. "Open your hood and I'll get it."

We aired up the tire, I closed the hood and left. I was halfway to the interstate when BLAM! The tire blew. I changed the tire, and saw why I'd smelled burning rubber. Apparently the tire's belt had broken, because the tread was good everytwhere on the tire but one place, and there the cord was showing. I'd worn that spot completely down on the trip.

I went to Mike's on the donut spare. When I got there, I took his Dell apart.

He'd had something wierd go wrong with it. No matter what video card was in it, the card wasn't sending a signal to the monitor; it was in a permanent sleep mode. I'd told him I'd look at it, but with gasoline costing what it does it was a long time between trips down there so he'd paid some guy $90 to fix it.

Only after he got it back, neither his CD burner nor his DVD burner worked. The BIOS had reported "unknown drive". I decided I'd take a CD ROM from another old computer he had and reload the drivers from his Dell disks. I did so with my finbgers crossed - if the BIOS didn't recognise the CD ROM I figured I was screwed. But the PC did indeed know about the CD, I loaded the drivers, swapped the drives back and fired it up - and it still didn't recognise the drives.

I fail it.

I put the computers back together, made sure it was otherwise working (besides the CDs) and opened a beer. We went out on his porch and he handed me a bowl and some bud. I'd hoped to get some hydro from Chris, but Mike said Chris stopped growing.

Nothing was going right. First I'd run Tami off; had a bad trip down to the St Louis area, had a blowout, hadn't been able to get Mike's damned Dell fixed, and Chris wasn't growing weed any more.

After two bowls and a beer, Mike's teenaged son came up. His oldest had just moved out, and a little girl, maybe five, had moved in. Mike and Rita are already raising her three grandsons, as her daughter and son in law had the kids taken away for neglect.

Drugs. Now they were raising Rita's great neice as well, for the same reason.

Matt said "hold your ears and watch this!"

Mike said "God damn it, Matt, get that shit away from the house!"

Matt proceeded to show me a new way of blowing shit up. Blowing shit up real good. He had a bottled water bottle in his hand, walked way out in the yard (Mike has fifteen acres), did something to the bottle, shook it, dropped it and walked away.

BLAM! The bottle exploded in a shower of foam, as loud as a shotgun going off. It seems that if you put a couple of ounces of "Works" toilet bowl cleaner (will Microsoft sue?) in a bottle and drop in a piece of aluminum foil, screw on the cap and shake it, the aluminum and chemical react violently.

Mike and I drank and smoked and smoked and drank. Rita and all the kids left. Mike said Matt had some professional grade fireworks he was shooting off when they got back. We smoked and drank some more, and by nightfall everyone but Mike and me were still gone, and MIke had passed out. I went inside and crashed on the couch in the basement.

I slept through the fireworks.

I woke up about six thirty the next morning, and everyone was asleep. I went to the car for my thermos and poured a cup of coffee. It was cold.

I heated a cup in the microwave. Mike got up eventually, I took a shower and limped home the hundred miles on the donut, at fifty, stopping halfway home to let the spare tire cool off. The car's mileage computer said I'd averaged 32 MPG for the tip - not bad for a comfortable car like that!

I fed my daughter's cats, cleaned out the litter box, and went to DJ's for breakfast.

The phone rang - it was Tami. "Whatcha doin?"

"Eating breakfast at DJ's and feeling lonely and sorry for myself. What are you doing?"

"I'm at Ralph's. Come on over, we got a lot of movies!"

Linda and Charlie (Charlie's a woman) live there. They'd run off Ralph's hookers when Ralph went in the hospital with appendicitis. He's a tough old man, an eighty six year old WWII Navy veteran. Charley's asshole brother had moved in after he got out of prison for grand theift auto, so I haven't been visiting Ralph much. Now Tami was there as well.

I took Charlie and Tami to the Blue Grouch and bought a pitcher. Drinking with two ladies was best thing ever for my lonliness, even if they were only friends. But I'd started getting feelings for the married Tami; it was a good thing she wasn't staying with me any more.

Charlie went out for a cigarette. Tami went out after her. I went out as well.

Toothless Bill was hitting on Charlie and some twenty three year old kid was hitting on the forty two year old Tami, and she was loving it. I was feeling sorely neglected. Tami followed the kid inside, Charlie went inside and I said "fuck it" and left for Felber's.

I needed friends, and apparently had none. Charlie didn't know about my anniversary, but the thoughtless heartless psycho bitch Tami did.

I called Charlie's phone and cursed Tami out, and said she wan't moving back in with me.

Monday when I got back from lunch there was a message on my work phone - Tami was "sorry it had to end like this". End? It had never begun!

She called again after work. "I almost went to jail last night". The place had been a madhouse the night before and the cops had showed up, right as Tami was knocking Linda on her ass. We started to Felber's, and I told her how hurt I was that she'd ignored me for the boy toy, right when I needed a friend the most.

This pissed her off. I took her back to Ralph's. As she got out of the car she yelled "Sex with Brandon was pretty good!"

I'm miserable. I never even had sex with the woman but she still managed to break my heart.

Next: Fireworks Continued

I saw a sig this morning, "My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old."

While I was metamoderating this morning, one of the comments was attached to Fat People Cause Global Warming, Higher Food Prices.

A few thoughts came to mind. Now, I'm a skinny nerd, have been skinny most of my life. I gained forty pounds after my divorce when the doctor put me on Paxil, but when I stopped taking the Paxil I started losing again. The Paxil made me normal weight - 165 pounds on a five foot nine inch frame.

Yesterday in my office I froze my ass off. The fatsos I work with have the air conditioning cranked up to "polar". I had my space heater running until it warmed up outside enough to shut the heater off and open the window.

So us skinny people contribute, too. We don't have our air turned up as high, but skinny people are as averse to cold as fat people are to heat. We keep the heat higher in the winter than fat people. Old people have theirs turned up even higher; it's hard for me to visit my WWII Veteran friend Ralph in the winter because his house is always sweltering.

TFA (actually some lame blog) claims that fat people are causing food shortages. This is simply incorrect. Fat people aren't fat because of the quantity of food they consume, it's mostly the quality of the food they consume. Here in the US, poor people are usually fat, and the reasons are many and varied.

Healthy food costs more than fattening food. Potatos are dirt cheap. Hamburger is the cheapest meat you can buy. The average poor person's diet is fattening because they can't afford healthy food.

And in the poor neighborhoods, there are no supermarkets. Lots of Burger Kings and Kwiki-Marts, with their stock of overpriced junk foods, but the Krogers are all in the neighborhoods where people can afford to spend lots of money. The poor folks often don't have cars, so you might think it would be to a grocery's advantage to put stores in the 'hood where poor people can walk and rich people can drive - but the affluent are pussies who are terrified of poor people and would rather starve than drive through a ghetto neighborhood, even with the doors locked.

It also doen't take varied metabolism into consideration. Tami's fat, and when we eat out she usually takes half her meal home in a takeout box, while I finish mine. My skinniness is due to an overactive metabolism, while her obesity is due to an underactive one. I probably get less exersize than her, so it's not due to laziness.

Her friend Jennifer is twice as fat as Tami, and tall as well. Tami says Jennifer eats less than she does.

TFA also doesn't take height into account. A seven foot tall guy is going to need a lot more food than the four foot seven inch Tami. What's more, her weight is no more her fault than a tall guy's height; nobody gets to choose their metabolism.

I'll tell you who is responsible for obesity - the multinational corporations like ADM (headquartered about forty miles from here). High fructose corn syrup should NOT be in anything but soft drinks and deserts, but the fattening stuff is in about everything. So is monosodium glutimate, a drug that tricks the brain into thinking food tases better than it actually does. The better food tastes, the more you'll eat.

TFA claims that greenhouse emmissions are higher due to fatasses hauling their huge carcasses around, but I see no difference in my car's gas mileage with two fat passengers than I do driving by myself. I guess it could be argued that fatsos need those giant SUVs (21st century station wagons), but the argument would be specious. Fatsos tell me my Concorde is comfortable, and it gets thirty miles per gallon on the highway.

So lay off the fat people. Especially the ones without money.

So I'm at Yahoo News and every damned page displays the urgent warning "Your current security settings prohibit running Active-X controls on this page. As a result, the page may not display correctly".

I haven't been reading Yahoo news at work much lately for this very reason; we have IE as our browsers, and Active-X is of course disabled. The IT guys are no fools.

So I click a link to another story and alt-tab to slashdot (hey, my breaks aren't long enough to wait for page loads from our overloaded T1).

A paragraph into slashdot and Yahoo's page pops back up to tell me yet again that my "current security settings prohibit running Active-X controls on this page. As a result, the page may not display correctly".

It's bad enough that the stupid browser is popping up a dialog box to tell me that a nonstandard gizmo that is only supported in one browser is disabled (of course it's disabled, DUH), but to have it bring the focus to the page with the popup, on top of the page I'm actually reading, is beyond stupid and far beyond rude and far, far beyond arrogance.

How can I get this awful browser that won't properly support standards to stop popping up the stupid "error" message and interrupting what I'm doing, short of enabling the useless and dangerous Active-X? Is there a registry hack I can perform?

Can we get Microsoft to simply remove the abomination that is Active-X from their browser, period?

Have you ever used Active-X for anything other than advertising? I'm curious.

On a positive note, Active-X is better than Evil-X. I'm glad I got rid of her!

Sometimes the fucking moderation itself is flamebait. As much as I try not to bite, well God damn it the fucking arsewaddles that moderated yesterday need to have their asses bitchslapped. Fucktards.

In Supreme Court Holds Right to Bear Arms Applies to Individuals an AC wrote

Re:Sweet (Score:4, Informative)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26, @01:47PM (#23952023)
The average /.r is male, and we are already allowed to bare chests. Thankfully, we don't go outside much, so other /.rs dont have to see our bare chests all that much. We are also sociophobic, so we don't have enough friends to take pics of us and put them online too.

Note that the retarded mods gave this an "informative", despite the fact that it was a JOKE and if taken seriously is seriously offtopic.

I responded

Re:Sweet (Score:0, Flamebait)
by sm62704 (957197) on Thursday June 26, @02:09PM (#23952571) Homepage Journal
The average /.r is male, and we are already allowed to bare chests

You must be gay. We heterosexuals dearly and truly wish for the female of the species to bare their chests at every opportunity!

Especially those of us who can't get one of our own.

How in the fucking hell is that comment in any way "flamebait"?? WTF???

modecx was also unfairly modded flamebait with an interesting response to my comment:

Re:Sweet (Score:0, Flamebait)
by modecx (130548) on Thursday June 26, @03:24PM (#23954591)
You must be gay. We heterosexuals dearly and truly wish for the female of the species to bare their chests at every opportunity!

You know, the only women who actually want to go topless in public are mostly the overweight middle-aged variety whose tits sag to their stomach, (which is equally saggy) because they thought going without a bra was a good idea for one reason or another; these women are in the same demographic as those who refuse to shave their armpits or ape-like legs, you know, as a way demonstrating their unsuppressed feminine nature--or some stupid shit. Let me share some wisdom: there's a reason Venus de Milo and similar visages are classical archetypes of femininity; and doughy middle-aged neanderthal-esqueness just doesn't fit into it.

There are some things which just shouldn't be seen, and I shudder at the thought of having to look (which I would, it's like a train wreck) at droopy boobs all flying around an swingin' with the gait that some of these heifers sport. Not to mention, it's a physical hazard there's a definite need to put leashes on those puppies! In all fairness, I'm not fond of seeing manboobs, beer belly and ass-crack flying all over the place, either. Same exact thing in my mind, I have no gender bias in this issue.

Now, if attractive, physically fit women (or men) want to go topless--you're all welcome to it. However, I still feel it's necessary to to place armed guards at all places where spandex is retailed, with authorization to shoot to kill all fatties who dare waddle over to touch the form fitting fabric.

But I have it figured out - the Microsoft PHBs had mod points yesterday. No wonder their OSes and apps suck so badly.

Re:Then STOP releasing the product! (Score:1, Troll)
by sm62704 (957197) on Thursday June 26, @09:27AM (#23947955) Homepage Journal
I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs.

I find it hard to believe that Gates would think that Linux programmers could do something that his well paid staff can't! I don't think I've ever rebooted Linux unless I was replacing the kernel by trying a different distro or updating an existing one. And even then there's only ONE reboot; you put the CD in the drive, reboot, and the distro installs.

If I was Gates, heads would have been rolling years ago. But I agree with you, I think the email is bogus. The line at the bottom:

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.

I wouldn't be "scared" and I can't believe Gates would be, either.

many, many years ago now, in the late 90's

The late '90s was only a decade ago, young fellow! Many, many years ago my electric bill came on Hollerith cards.

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

I've been vindicated for all those times I've been modded "flamebait" when I insist that people at Microsoft must be incredibly stupid. How can you NOT anticipate that people just might want to download something from a download page?

Go ahead, Microsoft employees, mod me down again. I'm sure with all the people at Microsoft there are lots of very intelligent folks, but when Pointy Haired Boss is in charge and Catbert is head of HR, it doesn't matter how smart Dilbert is, the product is going to look like it was designed by Uncyclopedia authors [uncyclopedia.org] who are high on something [uncyclopedia.org].

The email reads like something I might have written. Had Microsoft not had a defacto monopoly they would likely have gone out of business years ago.

I'd like to know what idiot came up with some of the Microsoft "innovations" like menus that don't show all the menu items? Don't they try their poorly designed crap out on real people?

"Skews me" while I read the rest of the user rants and shill excuses.

Pathetic. Almost as pathetic as Windows Vista.

I could have sworn I've mentioned it here before, but maybe not. At any rate, a fellow named Bill Wellington wrote a letter to the Illinois Times about an article titled Cutting-edge - Springfield researcher takes a revealing look at Civil War medical practices that implied, if not downright stated, that medicine today is no more advanced than it was in Lincoln's time. he wrote:

HAS MEDICINE REALLY ADVANCED?
I thought the article on Civil War medical practices [Tara McAndrew, "Cutting-edge," May 13] was humorous, in a strange sort of way. "Civil War medicine is notorious for being gruesome." Wow, we sure have advanced a long way since then. Or have we?

Back then they treated diarrhea with calomel, which contained the toxic element mercury. How barbaric! Today we put mercury in flu shots and highly encourage young children and the elderly to take them. Some required childhood vaccinations and most dental fillings contain mercury. Progress?

Today we sometimes treat cancer with radiation. Radiation causes cancer. Today we sometimes treat cancer with chemotherapy, a known poison derived from World War II nerve gas. People's hair fall out and they feel worse. Today we sometimes treat problems by surgically removing the damaged body part. Something like "Well, we're not really sure how to heal this part of you, so we'll just remove it. You didn't really need that part anyway." Progress?

It is ironic that we think we have advanced so far in 150 years, yet some of our medical practices are still a little barbaric.
Bill Wellington
Springfield

Being a cyborg I couldn't take this attack on technology laying down. So I fired off my own letter, which was printed June 12th

THE MARCH OF PROGRESS
I doubt I've ever seen more ignorance than was expressed in Bill Wellington's letter to the editor [May 29]. Perhaps Mr. Wellington hasn't been to a doctor in the last half-century, or maybe he's too young to have a clue how much medicine has advanced in my own lifetime.

Half-a-century ago, when I was 6, I had a tonsillectomy. The procedure was routine for tonsillitis. I was gassed with ether, which produced severe nausea after I came out of it. That subsequently infected the surgery area, and I had serious complications as a consequence. I wouldn't wish being gassed by ether on anyone. They no longer use ether, and tonsillectomies are now rarely done at all.

Six years ago, when I was half-a-century old, I underwent hemorrhoid surgery. The operating room would have made Star Trek's Dr. McCoy jealous. There was all manner of electronic readouts letting the surgeon and anesthesiologist know every facet of my vital signs; the vacuum tube hadn't even been invented in Lincoln's time. The anesthetist said, "OK, you're going to go to sleep now," and I was under, faster than you can snap your fingers. When I woke up I felt fine, not even woozy (although I was warned that I was indeed intoxicated and should not drive).

Two months ago, I underwent a vitrectomy as a result of a detached retina. In Lincoln's time I would simply have gone blind in that eye, as there was nothing at all that could be done for a detached retina.

In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, McCoy gives Capt. Kirk a pair of antique reading glasses because his only cure for age-related presbyopia (farsightedness) is eyedrops that Kirk is allergic to. In Lincoln's time there were no such things as cyborgs. By dictionary definition I now am one, as a result of cataract surgery. As a result of that surgery, which involved replacing my eye's natural focusing lens with a Crystalens implant, that eye is no longer badly nearsighted as it was all my life (20/400), I have no presbyopia or need of reading glasses, and of course the cataract is gone. My vision in that eye is now better than 20/20 at all distances!

The first cataract implant, according to Wikipedia, was done in 1949, almost a century after Civil War. Until this surgery became common, 20 years later, most cataract sufferers were blind. In 2003 the FDA approved the new type of implant I have inside my eyeball. Previous implants required the patient to use reading glasses afterward, but the new implant can focus, and most patients have very little need of any corrective lens afterwards. For the first time in my life there is no "corrective lens" restriction on my driver's license!
Vice President Dick Cheney is a cyborg, too, as he has a heart pacemaker. A man with Cheney's condition during the Civil War would not have survived. My cousin suffered an infection of her heart. She had an artificial heart for months before a human heart was transplanted into her chest. She, too, would have not survived Lincoln-era medicine.

There were no antibiotics during the Civil War. We now have effective drugs for male impotence, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. We have antiviral drugs. Polio has been vanquished. Tuberculosis isn't the death sentence it was in the Civil War. Indeed, a modern operating room looks nothing like a 19th-century operating theater. In fact, to someone my age it looks like science fiction. Comparing a modern surgical unit to a 19th century one is too absurd to even be laughable.
Steve McGrew
Springfield

Apparently I'm not the only Springfield nerd to read the Illinois Times. Today's issue corrects me.

BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY
In his letter to the editor [June 12], Steve McGrew made an extremely convincing argument about the advance of medicine since the Civil War. Only a few minor errors caught my attention.

It was in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, not Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, that McCoy gave Kirk the antique reading glasses as a gift on Kirk's birthday. Moreover, in II Kirk was an admiral; in IV he was demoted to captain after commandeering the Enterprise to rescue a resuscitated Spock from the ill-fated Genesis Planet.

I don't know why I remember all this; I haven't seen any of these movies for more than a decade. And I try to hold myself back from being so nitpicky (aggravating, I know), but "resistance is futile" (grin).

Live long and prosper, Mr. McGrew: "The human adventure is just beginning."
Thomas W. Yale
Springfield

I don't think I know Mr. Yale, but I'll raise a glass to him at Felber's tonight! Are you here on slashdot, Mr. Yale?

A fellow named Arabwel used a term I wasn't familiar with. So I googled, and... remember that Google game where you win if you you do a two word google and there are no results? Well, I googled Arabwel's term and was greeted with "Your search - arsewaddles - did not match any documents".

Intrigued, I asked him what an "arsewaddle" was. It turns out he had just coined the word; a new insult.

Meh (Score:1)
by Arabwel (1211118) on Wednesday June 25, @10:44AM (#23934757)
I am not surprised. then again, my opinion of Google has plummeted because of the unbelievable arsewaddles they employ, so.... *shrugs*

Expand that link to see the whole conversation.

But what this journal is about is that I, at least, love the sound of "arsewaddle" and would like to see it become part of the popular lexicon. But first we have to figure out exactly what an arsewaddle is.

Help me out here, would you, guys? What do you think an arsewaddle would be?

PS- I just did the Google search again and it's been used in a MySpace page. It is apparently being used as a verb there.

One of the nice things about metamoderation is you get to see some stuff you missed before, that come up for you when you metamoderate. here's one:

My faith...
by - on Thursday February 07, @03:17PM (#22337950)
I'm an American Muslim who was born and raised here. While I choose to reserve my opinion over the images of the Prophet I do find a lot of the comments on Slashdot to be disappointing. I've been a part of this community since its very inception and have done my best to contribute my expertise to relevant topics. However, its troubling to see that whenever anything Islam-related is posted, there are endless tirades painting my faith with a broad brush of extremism and ignorance.

As I've seen in the past, this sort of post always garners responses such as: "well if you're so level-headed then why aren't you changing the Muslim world?" Unfortunately, all 1+ billion of us are treated as if we're one big happy family. I have no more power to change the world of Islam than I do my own country's domestic and foreign policy beyond the established routes (i.e. voting, debates, etc). We make small but significant gains in our own ways but none of possess earth shattering abilities to make miracles happen. If we--as westerners--are really bastions of knowledge and free thinking then I'd do far more to educated the masses about my religion instead of having it hijacked by both non-Muslim Islamophobes and international extremists.

I will say that discussions littered with such ignorance and hate don't help people like me when we try to open up dialog with members of our religion. As much as people here may call the anti-portraitists relics of the past its very difficult to defend enlightenment and modernism when its laced with veiled Islamophobia [1]. Its even more difficult when people outside of the religion have the audacity to tell Muslims what is and isn't antiquated or kosher. Defining our religion for us wreaks of orientalism and causes even the most moderate to stop listening. I certainly hope I don't get modded or flamed into oblivion because this discussion needs to start somewhere.

[1]: Lets not beat around the bush and call it what it is when 15 century old stereotypes are thrown back in our collective faces even though they may have been debunked already. It even offends me.
Original Discussion: Muslim Groups Attempt to Censor Wikipedia
Rating: Insightful.
This rating is Unfair Fair | See Context

Of course, by the time one metamoderates a moderation, the discussion is often or even usually archived. Yesterday I metamoderated a moderation of a comment for which my comment was the grandparent comment, which I found kind of weird.

Some thoughts on the above comment:

its troubling to see that whenever anything Islam-related is posted, there are endless tirades painting my faith with a broad brush of extremism and ignorance.

Be glad! They're as extremist and ignorant about ALL faiths; most of them anyway, it seems. Any mention of religion at all and the athiests attack. Often no mention of religion is needed for them to flame and troll.

Yes, troll. A troll is NOT "an unpopular opion" as some here seem to think (I get modded "troll" all the time, especially if I'm too blunt about an opinion). A troll, according to wikipedia, is "someone who posts controversial and usually irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response[1] or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.[2]" (emphasis mine).

The Muslim gentleman quoted above is in the monority, but so are Christians and Jews. Slashdotters generally worship science (or what they percieve to be science, and they're generally as wrong about science as most Christians are about Christianity) and Americans worship nothing but money.

Tolerance goes both ways. Athiests need to tolerate, too. If you substitute "gay" for "muslim" in you anti-Muslim rant and it sounds homophobic, perhaps you might need a little self-reflection.

Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld, the counterpart of the Greek Hades.

The widely accepted myth about Hades and Persephone was also told of Pluto and Proserpina in Roman myth. Pluto and Proserpina are almost exact replicas of their Greek equivalents, as the Romans' ideas about the spirits of the underworld were very vague before adopting Greek mythology. Venus, in order to bring love to Pluto, sent her son Amor, also known as Cupid, to hit Pluto with one of his arrows. Proserpina was in Sicily, at the fountain of Arethusa near Enna, where she was playing with some nymphs and collecting flowers, when Pluto came out from the volcano Etna with four black horses. He abducted her in order to marry her and live with her in Hades, the Greco-Roman Underworld. She is therefore Queen of the Underworld. Notably, Pluto was also her uncle, being the brother of her parents, Jupiter and Ceres.

In Greek mythology, Plouto or Pluto was a nymph.

Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, or power provided by wealth. In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low. This can apply to a multitude of government systems, as the key elements of plutocracy transcend and often occur concurrently with the features of those systems. The word plutocracy (Modern Greek: - ploutokratia) is derived from the ancient Greek root ploutos, meaning wealth and kratein, meaning to rule or to govern.

Wage slavery is a term first coined by the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836,[1] though articulated as a concept at least as early as Cicero[2] and elaborated by subsequent thinkers, particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution.[3] It refers to the similarities between buying and renting a person, and denotes a hierarchical social condition in which a person chooses a job only within a coerced set of choices (primarily working for a boss under threat of starvation, poverty or status diminution),[4][5][6][7] which make that "person dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood,"[8] "esp[ecially] with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from...[wage] labor".[9] Wage slavery, in the libertarian socialist and anarchist usage of the term, is often understood as the absence of:

• A democratic or anti-authoritarian society, especially with nonhierarchical worker's control of the workplace and the economy as a whole,[10][11][12]
• Unconditional access to non-exploitative property and a fair share of the basic necessities of life,[13][14] and
• The ability of persons to have say over economic decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by those decisions.[15]

In terminology used by some critics of capitalism, statism and various authoritarian systems, wage slavery is the condition under which a person must sell his or her labor power, submitting to the authority of an employer in order to prosper or merely to subsist.[16][17][18]

List of minimum wages by country

Living wage is a term used to describe the minimum hourly wage necessary for a person to achieve some specific standard of living. In the context of developed countries such as the United Kingdom or Switzerland, this standard generally means that a person working forty hours a week, with no additional income, should be able to afford a specified quality or quantity of housing, food, utilities, transport, health care, and recreation.

This concept differs from the minimum wage in that the latter is set by law and may fail to meet the requirements of a living wage. It differs somewhat from basic needs in that the basic needs model usually measures a minimum level of consumption, without regard for the source of the income.

Fascism is a term used to describe authoritarian nationalist political ideologies or mass movements that are concerned with notions of cultural decline or decadence and seek to achieve a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation or race, and promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.[1][2][3][4][5]

Fascists promote a type of national unity that is usually based on (but not limited to) ethnic, cultural, national, racial, and/or religious attributes. Various scholars attribute different characteristics to fascism, but the following elements are usually seen as among its integral parts: nationalism, militarism, anti-communism, totalitarianism, statism, dictatorship, economic planning (including corporatism and autarky), populism, collectivism, autocracy and opposition to classic political and economic liberalism.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies)[1] is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:[2][3]

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

The above text comes from Wikipedia.

I, for one, do NOT welcome my plutocratic overlords, who certainly create hades for their wage slaves. Their heaven on earth depends on my hellish life's wage slavery to create the wealth they control.

Contrary to popular opinion, one does not become wealthy through intelligence, hard work, perseverance, or creativity. Although in many cases these attributes (and more) are necessary, especially for someone not lucky enough to be born into wealth, none of them nor evem all of them are gurantors of wealth.

The one necessary ingredient to obtaining wealth is dumb luck.

It has been noted that there is a correlation between intelligence and wealth, but when you consider that some of the results of wealth's lack, such as poor nutrition, disease, living in a dangerous environment, etc can cause or contribute to brain damage, is it any wonder that poor people are often lacking in brain power? Rich kids don't eat lead paint or live by the interstate highway.

And rich kids' parents can afford decent education, unlike the children of wage slaves who are educated by the government-run schools.

"There but for the Grace..."