I'm just testing the move. Nothing to worry about... yet.

[Update]: DNS is transferred, finally (Frelling Hostik)... some images seem not to be in. Alex, your turn :)

As most of you have probably noticed, RAW360 has been pretty under-the-weather lately. Well not the blog but it's server.

The last straw has been cast.

The camel's back has been broken.

After much delay, we're going to be moving it over to a new server. This could take a week, maybe two. Both Tefkam, my wonderful benefactor, and I are pretty busy. Instead of trying to do this
between posts I'm just going to hold off posting here in the meantime. I could use a bit of a break and it's not particularly worthwhile to keep trying to post in between downtime when you all can't read it except in between same downtime.

I may post here and there at a revived No-Lyfe Journal. In the meantime, there are the following blogs on my Blogrolodexical, included below for your convenience: [Read More!]

There are worse things out there than convenience store hot dogs.

Fat-free turkey dogs, for instance, are worse. Even my dog won't eat those.

There are worse things than convenience store food that's been sitting out all day.

Convenience store food that just got out of the freezer and hasn't entirely thawed (much less cooked), for instance, is worse.

There are worse things than thinking that you bought convenience store chicken and taking a bite and realizing that instead you got convenience store fish instead.

Eating convenience store fish that's been out all day when you're thousands upon thousands of miles away from the nearest shore, for instance, is worse.

"It should be said that the person who spits at the mention of George W. Bush, but weeps for Arafat, is beyond twitting. Such a person is sick in the head. He represents a form of judgement so totally inverted as to be indistinguishable from madness. And yet among our intellectuals, this inversion is commonplace." -David Warren

A long time ago, Jolt Cola released a series of flavors. They had a citrus (ie Mountain Dew), orange, and white grape flavor in addition to their regular coke flavor. All forms of Jolt were, of course, loaded with caffeine and sugar.

They were absolutely wonderful.

As a college student, I used to make special trips to the one convenience store in the area that carried them. Some time after I left UH they stopped selling them, which was a tragedy.

Mountain Dew picked up the mantle not long ago when they launched cough-syrup flavored Code Red. In Taco Bell you can get this icky Baja Blueberry flavored drink, but I wouldn't recommend it. More recently they released grape-flavored Pitch Black.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, they released Livewire. Outside of Jones Soda, it is without a doubt the best soft drink ever made. Orange taste mixed with Dew-levels of caffeine and sugar make an absolutely winning combination. Since it remotely states like orange and has some orange juice in it (listed after water, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugar - a surefire mix for a good drink!), it makes a good breakfast-on-the-go.

Unfortunately, the product is apparently seasonal and it's presently being phased out. They apparently did this last year, but I never ran across the drink. When I discovered this, it ruined my next two minutes hard (thank heavens for my short attention span).

Since then, it's been harder and harder to get around town. Not impossible yet, though. Some convenience stores still have it in stock and I know where they are. But soon they, too, will run out.

I was getting lunch at a convenience store near my work that had only one bottle left. The only reason they still have it is because they had a mishap with their freezer last week and the row of coke including my precious Livewire was frozen solid. They apparently fixed the glitch because the Livewire bottle they had remaining was in convenient liquid form.

I'm not sure of the physics behind it, but frozen-the-unfrozen coke doesn't generally taste good. Something to do with the carbonation, I'd imagine. But when there's only one left, there's only one left.

Sure enough, it was flat as all heck.

And yet, even flat, this stuff is still better than 90% of the stuff out there.

Okay, I see the rock. Now what?

A great deal of my communication used to revolve around Instant Messenger. I had IM friends, but for the most part I used it to communicate with offline friends. I'm not much of a phone person, and my friends were spread out in Texas and beyond, so it was perfect.

Considering how much further away I am now, it would stand to reason that I would be using it more often than before. It hasn't exactly worked out that way. One of my decisions before leaving Texas was to cut down on some of the friends that were relying a little too much on me for moral support. I'm happy to help someone when they're down, but after the second or third year of being leaned on it gets old.

But the biggest reason is that I don't really have the time. I can't use it at work, don't have it set up at Eel's (and am unlikely to go over there to spend time online), and my computer situation at the apartment is spotty at best. It turns out that the last time I installed Windows on my laptop and primary desktop computers, I didn't tell Trillian (an all-in-one IM application) to log in on boot-up.

The other day, for some reason, it started logging in to Trillian. Suddenly I was bombarded with messages. Luckily most of them were from the people I did want to hear from and I got to update some of them on how things are going. But while I was talking to people I wanted to talk to, I lived in fear of being dragged into a conversation I didn't want to get in to.

It kinda reminded me why I stopped logging on.

Which is a shame because I really did like talking to people I hadn't in a while. I suspect I'm going to have to bite the bullet and make a new AIM account.

All Media, All Malleable
Ed Driscoll writes in Blogcritics about audience participation entertainment. What four goofballs with a computer and a video capture card is amazing, as the No-Lyfe group demonstrated. Thankfully for the potential audience that we would have inflicted our works upon, we never learned Flash.

Shrub in a "Scrum"
An interesting theory on the brawl that occured between Secret Service and Chilean officials last week.

Things you might see driving around texas
A pretty cool array of pictures from the Lone Star State.

Jet Crashes Before Picking Up Elder Bush
The title makes it sound like a closer call than it was (it was pilot error, not equipment malfunction), but it's interesting none-the-less.

Fox News coming to Canada [via LGF]
Sweet! We'll win them over yet...

America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland
Though a couple years old, since the ANWR subject is up for debate again, it's a handful of good links on the subject (coming from a pro-drilling perspective).

The Godless Party [via Ed Driscoll]
Written a while back by Rod Dreher, it's a good confirm-your-biases piece, whether your bias is that Democrats have abandoned religion or that Republicans faithlessly use religion as a baseball bad in the public sphere.

Clear Lake Falcons Football
Not that anyone cares, but my high school whallopped Houston Lamar to make it into the regional finals. Cool!

The Lovely Wife
A blog written by the wife of a newly placed Episcopalian minister.

Having slept through my alarm, I was late for work on Tuesday morning. A lot of contradictory thoughts whirled through my head. While my car has been broken in to three times in the last couple of years, this was the first time I knew the offender. One of them, anyway.

I guess that's why I started trying to make excuses and ponder ways that Quan wasn't the one. It was pretty damning, though. At the very least he was guilty of pillaging my car after it was broken in to. While I might be willing to overlook that, he knew it was my car. He was the one that lead the police to my doorstep. Why? I guess he was hoping that I would bail him out. The thought occured to me that if I had I might have been able to get my stuff back.

But the fact that he knew he was stealing from me didn't sit well. I didn't care if the car was unlocked by the time he got to it (if he wasn't the burglar). But honestly, it would have required a serious chain of coincidental events for him to happen to have my stuff. It would mean that he would have stumbled across my car in a part of town that he didn't belong at 3am on a random morning. While I wasn't sure if my CDs had been taken even days prior to the burglary, I think I would have noticed and I definitely would have noticed my missing CD player faceplate. So then if the CDs were taken before, the player by the burglar, and the glove compartment contents by Quan, I had three separate break-ins over the course of a week. Unlikely.

I did wonder what happened to the other fellow that got away with my good stuff. My guess was that even if he was caught he probably through my stuff wayside as he scrambled away. I wasn't going to see it again. It was just as well since I'd determined that the police weren't particularly interested in the second assailant. I got the impression that in their mind they got their man and a second offender might make it harder to prove that Quan was the one that jimmied my car open with the clothes hanger.

When I got home I talked to neighbors Stoner and Snowflake. Upon hearing the news, they immediately knew who the other person was. They couldn't remember his name, but they knew that he was a hefty black man with a pony tail that was from Arizona. Snowflake even lead me to the guys house. If ever there was the very definition of a crack house, this was it. Snowflake, a former narcotics raid officer (no joke!) confirmed my suspicions. Apparently upon getting kicked out of Thrifthaven, that's where Quan was.

I'd commented to Eel just a few days prior and said that I didn't know what Quan was in to. By virtue of his acquaintances I figured he at least dabbled in drugs. The crack house was still a disappointment. I try to make an effort to differentiate between the criminals and the real troublemakers at Thrifthaven, but it seems the deeper I dig in to anyone and the more I find out, the deeper into it all they are.

The next day Saul the Mumbler told me that he found a CD binder with a CD that had my name on it. I was really excited until I found out that it was a second CD binder that I'd forgotten about. That's when I remembered that there was yet another, full with factory CDs, that I'd also forgotten about. None of it irrepaceable. Yet another another binder hadn't been taken. While I'd ripped all of the songs on it, it was a parting gift by Audrey and I was extremely relieved to still have that. The songs were replaceable, but the CDs weren't.

I also got a letter from the Gate County District Attorney's Office. They let me know that they were charging Quan with burglary and that they might subpoena me to testify. They told me to make a list of what had been taken so that they can demand restitution. I have yet to do so. What's the point, really? Is a man that felt it necessary to steal an anime convention badge, a box of toothpicks, and a car freshener really going to ever be able to pay me back?

Every day I get home I worry that my apartment has been broken in to. Every time I go out to my car I worry that Quan's associate broke in to take the CD player to match the worthless faceplate that he has. While it's extraordinarily unlikely they would do anything to make contact with me, Quan was pretty angry with me when they put him in the police car. He and his friends were angry with my apartment complex for kicking him out. Here I am and there is my car. There for the taking.

The previous two car theives were never found. While that makes me angry, in a way, it also prevented me from even worrying that I may run across them again. This time it was a neighbor and almost even a friend. Houston is a big city. Gate City is not. Even if and when I move out, if Strang is any indication Quan is probably out as we speak. Ironically it's because they caught him that I'm worried.

I'm not generally a paranoid person. I try to live my life in a way that stuff is just stuff. I'm not particularly careful, but I make up with it with flexibility.

Quan is poor. I'm not really worried about getting back what he took. I do, however, hope to get rid of what he left behind.

"Meritocracy, it's often noted, is the most vicious of hierarchies because it tells people not only that they have wound up at a certain level but that they deserve to be at that level. It may say something about the unwillingness of putative meritocrats to face the harshness of their own system that they need to acccuse people like [Prince] Charles, who make those harsh judgments explicit, of not being meritocrats but of really being aristos who don't want people to 'rise above their station.'" -Mickey Kaus

Roscoe Duke, my boss, is a good LDS man trying to start a family along with his wife. They've been trying since they married a few years ago but it didn't take until earlier this year. During the ultrasound that was supposed to determine the baby's gender some undisclosed complications were discovered and he had to take a few days off to follow up in Salt Lake City (the nearest metropolis with appropriate medical care).

He returned in good spirits - but then, he's that kind of guy. I was somewhat heartened when late last week he referred to the pregnancy in the present tense. He left today and said that what he finds out today will determine whether or not he'll be back this week.

Roscoe isn't the kind of guy to burden his coworkers or underlings with his problems. He didn't mention it having anything to do with the pregnancy, but reading between the lines I'm relatively certain that it's related to it.

Procreation is extremely important to people of LDS faith. While I'm not familiar with the particulars, I think it has to do with releasing souls from the Mormon equivalent of Purgatory. But coming from a non-LDS background, I'm absolutely certain that Roscoe would be an outstanding father. If there's one thing I've learned at Thrifthaven, this country needs more goods with outstanding parents.

I can only hope, wish, and pray that he gets the chance.

Linus recently returned from a trip abroad. His work place moved from one building to another. When he got there, he saw a coke machine. A little devil popped on his shoulder and said, "Hey dude, you can get a sugary, caffeinated, carbonated beverage. You should take advantage of this nice new maching and get one!

Then an angel appeared on his other shoulder and said "But Linus, you know that these drinks are dieretics. You will be more thirsty after drinking it than you were before you did. Plus, you will get into the habit of drinking one of these every day."

Linus listened to his angel and declined to take advantage of the coke machine.

Three-and-a-half months ago or so, I started work at Cooper & Price. Downstairs there is a free coke fountain. With Mountain Dew! A little devil popped up on my shoulder and said, "Dude, free coke! You can have as many of these as you want every day and it won't cost you a think!"

Then an angel popped up on my other shoulder and said, "Except in medical bills down the line."

"But you have health insurance!"

"Hmmm... he's got a point."

"Free, dude. Free!"

"Another good point. I'm going to go in the corner and twiddle my thumbs now."

And so my devil won.

Mainstays

UAB Blazers 20 (7-3, 5-2)
Army Black Knights 14 (2-8, 2-6)
Army finishes its Conference USA career with a total 9-41 record, making this 2-6 season about par for the course. Nonetheless, they have to be happy with the couple of wins that they did get this year with one against a tough Cincinnati team. UAB solified their bowl chances with their seventh win on the year. Army still has rival Navy to play and UAB has a tough one up against Southern Miss.

#11 Louisville Cardinals 65 (9-1, 8-0)
Houston Cougars 27 (3-8, 3-5)
Houston finishes off an extremely disappointing season with thorough loss to the Cardinals. Louisville pointlessly ran up the score in their quest for a BCS game, but I don't think a late-game touchdown against a strugging (to say the least) Houston team really impressed much of anybody. Louisville got an astounding 666 yards and still managed to demonstrate that were it not for three points in Miami and a superior Utah team, they'd very likely be the first non-BCS team to cross that line. They still have rival Cincinnati and Tulane to play while Houston goes home to figure out how to avoid another season like this one.

Memphis Tigers 38 (7-3, 4-3)
East Carolina Pirates 35 (2-8, 2-6)
ECU surprisingly made this one competitive when they tied in the fourth quarter, but a short field goal put Memphis over the top in a game that shouldn't have been this close. Memphis managed to pull it out against Southern Miss last game and nearly upset ranked Louisville the week before, so this game should serve as a reality check for their next one against an equally erratic South Florida team. The Pirates, meanwhile, face almost certain defeat against NC State for their season closer.

TCU Horned Frogs 42 (5-5, 3-4)
Southern Miss Golden Eagles 17 (5-4, 4-3)
Last year Southern Miss dashed TCU's chances at a BCS game and so the Horned Frogs took advantage of the opportunity to get even with their second and final conference win against the Golden Eagles before heading off the mountainous pastures next year. With this victory, they keep their bowl hopes alive and a shot at a winning record. Southern Miss, meanwhile, has lost their third conference game since the inception of the conference and face the possibility of their first losing season in over a decade. TCU's chances at a winning record are pretty good with only Tulane left to play. Southern Miss, meanwhile, must fathom the unfathomable: being worried about UAB next week. Not to mention #4 California.

Outgoing

Cincinnati Bearcats 45 (6-4,5-2)
South Florida Bulls 23 (4-5,3-4)
The Bearcats recovered from a devastating loss against Army early in the year to win four straight with a combined score of 167-57, disappointing three favorites (Memphis, TCU, and Southern Miss). Cincinnati goes up against rival Louisville next week as underdogs with a real chance to win. South Florida saw their bowl hopes dashed with three wins needed and only two longshot games left to play against Memphis and Pittsburgh. USF and Cincy will square off against next year as Big East teams.

Incoming

#25 UTEP Miners 57 (8-2)
SMU Mustangs 27 (3-8)
No surprises here except for the surprise that is UTEP's season. UTEP is almost certain to be a leader next year in the C*USA west, with every other team suffering 8 or more losses this year. SMU, meanwhile, should find itself right at home.

Tulsa Golden Hurricane 34 (3-8)
San Jose State Spartans 24 (2-8)
Tulsa smacks down a San Jose team that almost knocked off undefeated Boise State last week and moved themselves out of last place within the WAC. The good news for Tulsa is that having played in Hawaii earlier in the year, they get a 12th game for the season. The bad news is that it's against UTEP.

Marshall Thunder Herd 31 (6-5)
Western Michigan Broncos 21 (1-10)
Having lost any chance at playing in the conference championship last week, Marshall finishes out its season and it's MAC career with this one. A win is a win, but it'd be more impressive if it weren't against a team without a I-A victory. They should have their work cut out for them next year with Southern Miss, Memphis, and UAB in their division.

Standings below:

[Read More!]

Whenever a radio station goes under, you can count of just about everyone to suggest that the radio station could have been saved if they'd only played exactly the kind of music that they wanted from a radio station. There's some talk over at Kuff's place about what might have been done.

I never really listened to KLOL, so I don't feel particularly qualified to say that if they'd mixed Ben Folds with Phil Pritchett and They Might Be Giants they would have been successful (though I'm sure they have!), Houston Press music critic John Nova "Texas Bowel Movement" Lomax puts in his two cents about KLOL and the last major format changed station KIKK.

Could the likes of KIKK and KLOL have done anything to ensure their survival in light of all these factors? "Yes," and "probably not," respectively. As for KIKK, their stab at a Texas country format was half-assed and ill conceived. Alongside their Waylon & Willie and Pat & Cory, they played way too much Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Tim McGraw and Shania. They should have spun more Steve Earle, Hank, Guy Clark and Johnny Bush instead. There are quite a few stations in the Hill Country that have thrived after doing just that.

Mr. Lomax said much of the same when KIKK changed its face a while back and some people he interviewed agreed.

I disagree.

For a several month span during the rise and fall of its Texas Country period, I listened to almost nothing on the radio except KIKK 95.7. I was there when they jumped head-first into the Texas Country pool and when they started inching their way back out.

The problem was not that they did it half-assed, it's that they were rigid and in a way, went too far with it (and in another way didn't go far enough). For my part I loved the fact that they started playing only Texas Country music from 5-10pm on weekdays.

But there simply wasn't (and isn't) enough familiar music coming out of Texas to carry a station during peek hours. But because they roped it off as only allowing Texas music, they had to fill that time anyway. So they started replaying songs with greater frequency than even ClearChannel-owned 93Q. Robert Earl Keen is great, but not four times on the hour every hour.

They could have started digging deeper into the CDs of the ones that took immediately, but even after you play everything on Bleu Edmondson's or Jason Boland's CD, you're going to run out of material. On the national scene, there's always more artists to branch out to in order to avoid repetition or you can go back to an earlier CD put out by the artist. Bur Roger Creager had only two CDs, Dub Miller one, Bleu one.

They kept tweaking with it and started using a more generous definition of "Texas Country" playing George Strait, Mark Chestnutt, and Chris Cagle's one-hit over and over and over again.

The 5-10 slot and their affection for country music more-or-less ended at the same time.

But for the most part, Shania and Kenny weren't really the problem. I would go weeks without hearing either. Except that on the weekends they'd both get a heck of a lot of play because the weekends were roped off for national acts - or so it seemed.

The problem was that they viewed Texas Country Music as Texas Country Music (5-10pm), Nashville Country Music as Nashville Country Music (weekends), and classic country music as a non-entity (except when playing Willie & co. to fill the 5-10 slot).

If they'd been less rigid, they could have really tried to blend Texas acts with their inspirations (Johnny Cash, Hank, etc.), and even have thrown in some local alt-country (CCR and TGD) and better yet acts outside of Texas that fit within the mold (Tim Easton, Matthew Ryan, etc.). They honestly could have even thrown in select Nashville stuff to round it out and provide a bit of more familiar stuff.

Of course, that's me saying what kind of music station I would want, falling into the same trap that I noted above. But whatever they'd done and however they'd mixed it, I would have prefered something mixed so that when I turn on the radio I wouldn't have had to look at my watch to find out what I was going to hear.

Maybe that wouldn't have worked. Maybe a market like Houston is simply too big and full of non-natives for that sort of thing to work. Unfortunately, because KIKK screwed it up I'm not sure we'll get the chance to find out.

Before concluding, I should repeat that despite the mistakes I believe that they made, the contribution that KIKK did make while it existed cannot be overstated. In a six month span, I saw the Firehouse go from usually empty to sometimes so crowded that I had to leave. Artists that couldn't get 50 people to show up in Dallas were playing to large and enthusiastic crowds in Houston.

More's the pity that it didn't work out.

Chris Elan posts his thoughts on the Aggie Bonfire:

In February 2001, in Carrollton, TX, I met Jerry and Bulinda Ebanks, whose son Michael was killed by the accident. We went to dinner at a Cracker Barrel (me and my underclassman wearing our dreadful penguin performance suits). Since I was a student public relations manager for Texas A&M, I quite expected the conversation to turn to Bonfire and the tragedy of Michael's death. But the Ebanks did not discuss that. We spent over an hour sharing our love for Texas A&M, and extolling the virtues of what we all firmly believed is the greatest University on God's green earth. If I had any doubts about the Aggie Spirit prior to that meal, the Ebanks washed them away with their graciousness and candor.

You see, Michael's older brother, Keith, Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of '89, had died five years earlier in a car crash. The Ebanks had buried two of their Aggie sons within five years of each other. Yet Texas A&M still felt like home to them. Texas A&M was family.

Not being an Aggie myself and coming from a Longhorn family, I don't particularly understand the tradition-fixation that Aggies have even though I am a traditional-minded person in many ways. But to the extent that their odd array of ring-drinks, woops, that tree and countless other goofy things produce that kind of school loyalty - I really can't help but admire that.

A&M and UT play each other in a week or so in their annual gridiron grudge-match. With A&M football having turned the corner they stand as good a chance of winning as they've had in a few years. I will, of course, be rooting for the Longhorns. But the further I get from Texas, the more I find myself wishing both teams well.

Chris Elan posts his thoughts on the Aggie Bonfire:

In February 2001, in Carrollton, TX, I met Jerry and Bulinda Ebanks, whose son Michael was killed by the accident. We went to dinner at a Cracker Barrel (me and my underclassman wearing our dreadful penguin performance suits). Since I was a student public relations manager for Texas A&M, I quite expected the conversation to turn to Bonfire and the tragedy of Michael's death. But the Ebanks did not discuss that. We spent over an hour sharing our love for Texas A&M, and extolling the virtues of what we all firmly believed is the greatest University on God's green earth. If I had any doubts about the Aggie Spirit prior to that meal, the Ebanks washed them away with their graciousness and candor.

You see, Michael's older brother, Keith, Fightin' Texas Aggie Class of '89, had died five years earlier in a car crash. The Ebanks had buried two of their Aggie sons within five years of each other. Yet Texas A&M still felt like home to them. Texas A&M was family.

Not being an Aggie myself and coming from a Longhorn family, I don't particularly understand the tradition-fixation that Aggies have even though I am a traditional-minded person in many ways. But to the extent that their odd array of ring-drinks, woops, that tree and countless other goofy things produce that kind of school loyalty - I really can't help but admire that.

A&M and UT play each other in a week or so in their annual gridiron grudge-match. With A&M football having turned the corner they stand as good a chance of winning as they've had in a few years. I will, of course, be rooting for the Longhorns. But the further I get from Texas, the more I find myself wishing both teams well.

A Bombardier's Reflection [via SlingsAndArrows]
James Earl Jones celebrates the 40th anniversary of Dr. Strangelove by reminiscing and recounting the making of the movie.

Humans Were Born to Run, Scientists Say
An interesting evolutionary argument that the ability to run is not a product of our current shape, but rather the reason for it.

Fight Club, Part 2
I suppose there are less fair ways to take out your anger...

Please make me apologize… The FCC as Marketing Partner
Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban on using would-be censors and the FCC to your organization's advantage. Not being a big basketball fan I've never really read his blog, but if this is indicative of the stuff that's on there I might start poking my head there more often.

The triumph of the religious right
Right wing and pro-gay? Right on
Some looks at homosexuality, the 2000 elections, and the factors and consequences.

Behind Scenes, Informer's Path Led U.S. to 20 Terror Cases
The Muslim that set himself on fire in front of the White House was aparently an informant. This article takes a look at one of the ways the front line of the War on Terror is being faught.

The Real Gilligan's Island [via IP]

Blame Bush
A parody blog that has a lot of fun with the "Everything is Bush's fault" sector of the left. It reminds me a bit of a blog idea that I'd love to do if I had the time: a point-counterpoint right/left blog poking fun at the dumbest arguments made by both sides of the aisle via hysterical, paranoid, and inept "spokesmen."

"I loved D&D. I played it until I was about 12, when I stood up and took a look at whom I was playing with. I realized that while I wasn't cool, I didn't want to be a D&D guy." -TP Milton

Clinton Library Unveils Displays
Well I take back what I said earlier about Clinton's library. I suppose presidential libraries in general are cheerleading stations (I've actually not been to one in my adult life). As I've said before and elsewhere, If I ever become famous I want the words of my harshest critics included in any such things. But then again, I don't have the ego for politics.

A Tale of Two Maps
Nothing here most of us didn't already know. Rural America votes Republican and urban America votes Democratic. The author, however, does a good job of looking at all of the issues involved and repercussions. It's a worthwhile read.

First Looks at 2006 - Racing for the Senate
It had to start some time: a good primer for the 2006 senatorial elections.

Ain't Seen You Round the Burger World in a While
That is one good lookin' burger, but I doubt it measure's up to Rudrucker's 1lb burger. It's not a meal, it's a mission.

How 'Dungeons' changed the world [via Kevin]
A great look at how RPGs reinvigorated young imagination.

Forging, Casting and CNC Machining
A good, solid look at the differences between forging, casting, and using a CNC machine for lathing. For those interested, anyway.

Meet the Author: Wilson Rawls
I link to this because the Idaho Post-Register article I wanted to link to is for subscribers only. In any case, it turns out that Rawls lived a good part of his life in Falls (where I work and am right now) and was here when he wrote, "Where the Red Fern Grows," which was my favorite junior high school reading assignment.

[Part 3]

Right before I left Houston, I went to a Blue October show with Jay and his then-girlfriend. We couldn't find a parking spot very easily except in one place that was so great that parking there had to be illegal. I saw no signs marking it as illegal so I parked there - and preceded to worry throughout the entire show that my car had been towed.

When we got out of the show and walked to where my car was, I don't know if I'd ever been so happy to see my car just where I left it.

As excited and happy as I was, it did not remotely compare to how happy I was to see it just where I left it at 3:30 or so on Tuesday morning.

My worries had increased when I figured out where Quan had gotten the spare key: it was in the glove compartment. I'd meant to give it to Eel but just hadn't gotten around to it.

The police officer was repeatedly asking me if I'd locked my car. I told him that I didn't know for certain, but I thought that I had. Then I added, "If Quan got ahold of my key, then I guess I hadn't."

Quan emphatically stated that I had not locked my car. The police officer asked me again and I gave him the same answer.

There were two fears running through my mind:

1) My car had been stolen.

2) Worse, my car had been used in the commission of a crime.

So when we turned the corner and my car was there, I was thrilled. The officer asked me to look and see if anything was missing. The first thing I discovered was not was what missing, but what was added: in the front seat was a rigged wire clothes hanger.

When Quan emphatically denied having ever seen the hanger, the picture of what had happened became much more clear.

The officer took the hanger and asked me again to see if anything was missing. As I did so, they asked Quan to turn around and put his hands behind his back.

When I discovered that my CD binder and CD player faceplate were missing, I wasn't particularly surprised. The glove compartment looked kind of bare, but I didn't say anything because I had just cleaned the car and that might by why. Nor, considering the worst-case scenarios that were running through my mind, was I particularly upset.

"My car was broken in to?" I thought. "That's all this was about? Ha! I'm darn near used to this! It even... *sniff*... reminds me of home."

The officers looked in Quan's van for my stuff, but didn't find any. That's when they told me that a neighbor had called the police and said that there were two men looking in my car. By the time they arrived, they only found Quan. The assumption was that the other one had left with my valuables.

Quan was less than happy with me, sarcastically yelling as they put him in the police car, "Thanks a lot, man. It was unlocked!"

On the back hood, they put out the contents of his pockets which included about 8 knicknacks from my glove compartment. That made sense, I thought, since he'd gotten my keys.

That's when I freaked out and ran to the trunk. The officers asked me to please slow down. I guess they didn't like the idea of anyone moving quickly. I checked the trunk and breathed a sigh of relief: my $500 digital camera was still in there. I'd been thinking it was safe, but the fact that he'd gotten my keys made me realize that I wasn't.

I stayed out there for another hour or so while they sorted things out. It was cold and windy and I was freezing. They took a catalogue of things the things that were mine and gave me the documentation to get it back from the evidence room in a couple of days.

The cops eventually called it a day and I went back to my room so I could get at least a little sleep before having to go to work. Fat chance.

As I laid in bed, I counted myself lucky that they hadn't taken out the radio unit, worried that the other guy might be back for it, and curious as to whether or not they might enjoy my CD collection.

to be concluded...

[[Part 2]]

The Week Before

The police certainly aren't strangers to Thrifthaven, but they'd been around three times in the previous two weeks and each time, my alley on Thrifthaven was short another tenant.

First it was Ryan Dees, a young black man that lived about four apartments over. They'd already picked up Ryan at a friend's house, but they came to search his apartment. He was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time earlier and somehow they got him on "possession with intent to distribute." Personally, I'm those charges are a little suspect and while I've no doubt that Ryan partook in probably large amounts of illegal narcotics, it would actually surprise me if he was a big-time dealer.

The second guy I didn't know very well and I'm not even sure what they got him on. He'd only moved in a week or two prior and other than a few brief hellos, I never got to know him.

The third, and least surprising, was Strang. He apparently missed his scheduled court date for the drug lab that he'd been caught with earlier in the year when they showed up on his doorstep and, in the process, discovered that Strang had - to say the least - fallen off the narcotics wagon.

Almost immediately after Strang moved out, Quan Chang moved in. Quan was Strang's friend and he'd been hanging around from time to time. A short, skinny Asian fellow Quan seemed nice enough and had a wonderful (and wonderfully friendly) golden labrador retriever. I often couldn't understand him through his accent, but when he asked for some help getting some stuff into his apartment I obliged.

Quan was in less than two days before the complex's owner was knocking on his door. Little to my knowledge, Quan missed the somewhat crucial step of going through management before moving in. The eviction was something of a sad scene with the owner all but yelling at Quan to get out all the while Quan's dog's tale is wagging and he was quite obviously thinking to himself "LOOKIT! LOOKIT! I GOT A NEW FRIEND!" as he tried to get the owner to play with him.

Quan had until morning to move out. Unaware that I was a witness to the exchange, his parting words were, "I'll be back, Alex. Talk to you later, man!"

to be continued...

Part 1: 3AM
Part 2: The Keys
Part 3: Quan Chang
Part 4: The Lowdown
Conclusion

Her story is she's changed her mind
She just can't help herself
She wrote please don't meet me at the Lynnville train
Cause I'm coming in with someone else
He's a quiet man, the neighbors say
But his pain won't go a way
So for better or worse he's going down
To meet the Lynnville train

Dateline: 2002 - Not my finest hour.

I was excited to see that the band Blue October was coming to town. BO ranked as one of my two favorite non-country Texas bands and I'd missed the two their two previous trips in to town. By heavens I wasn't going to miss them again.

There was only one problem. The same problem that prevented me from seeing them the last two times they had been through town: the ultimate Blue October fan, and the former love of my life, Audrey Elciem.

The good thing about parting ways in a city with millions and millions of people is that when you do, you don't have have to worry about running in to them accidentally. And so it was with Audrey and I. When things collapsed, I was pretty clear in establishing distance and nixing her invitation for a friendship.

But Houston's size is finite, and seeing each other again was inevitable.

I'd missed the last two Blue October shows, due in part to Audrey. One before our parting when I had an urgent need to get out of town and clear my head of all that was wrong with us and then shortly after because I knew she'd be there. But I wasn't going to keep missing shows on her account and when they came back around, it had been at least six months and I had at least marginally moved on.

None of that alleviated the big problem: she was going to be there. She was going to be there with him. Him being Vince Washburn, the guy who came in and asured my exit from her life. I'd never met Vince, had nothing against him beyond the adversarial relationship of new flame and old. Honestly, he seemed like a pretty decent guy - which made me hate him all the more, of course.

But it wasn't about Vince. It wasn't even about Audrey. It was about the fact that Audrey had swung from one relationship vine to another while I was somewhere in the pit. That's not to say that things were really bad in my life. My love life tended to go in two month cycles, one month with more opportunities than I know what to do with and then the next recuperating from all of the stress of said opportunities. This was during the latter part of the cycle.

While I knew I wasn't going to give her control over me via making me miss another BO show, the thought of showing up alone while she had a date and an enterouge of admirers pinged every narcissistic insecurity that I had. The truth is that I'm generally not that concerned with appearences or even of showing up exes. In fact, most of my relationships with old flames have been quite cordial. But none of the rules ever applied to Audrey. She was always a special case. And so it was here.

So the most obvious solution was to find a date. Except that my cycle was at a downturn and honestly I didn't need that kind of headache as I was, the week preceeding the Blue October show aside, happily single. So I needed a pretend date.

The first candidate was a friend in College Station that was apprised of the Audrey situation. She not only agreed to help me out and go, but offered to even act "familiar" with me (with certain understood guidelines). But while she is a real sweetheart, reliability isn't particularly her strong suit and I wasn't too surprised when she cancelled.

The next pick was a girl in Austin that I dated very breifly before she turned an about face and called the whole thing off. To be honest, I was somewhat relieved when she did, but I never told her that and being the hyper-neurotic sort, she was absolutely sure that she had broken my heart to itty bitty bits. So in her mind she owed me big time and I was somewhat prepared to take advantage of that.

Unfortunately, being the neurotic sort that she is she started assuming that this was some sort of plot to get back together with her and suddenly started hedging. Could she bring this other guy? Being a third wheel was hardly better than going alone so I wasn't enthusiastic about the idea. She said that was fine and then - just as I had suspected she would as soon as that conversation ended - found a reason not to go.

There was a third candidate that was completely enthusiastic about the possibility of helping me "stick it" to anyone that would have the audacity to break my heart. But I decided that wouldn't be a good idea since I was actually legitimately interested in her and that would be a really, really lousy way to get things started.

So I had two days to find a date, which was pretty hopeless. When I started wondering how much hiring out an escort for the duration of the show, I realized that it was all getting really out of hand and that I was letting her control me in the exact ways I had spent six months trying to avoid.

So I went alone. I decided of a place that I could go where I was unlikely to run in to her and decided to wear all black. Not only would all black help me blend in with the darkness of the room, but this was an alt-punk-rock show and everybody else where would be wearing all black, too!

I got there pretty early so that I could stake out my spot that would allow me to avoid her and also see where she was so that I could avoid her further. Much to my shock, there on the balcony where I intended to hide out was my good friend Brian's older sister and also my friend Stephanie and a couple of her friends. This would be perfect - I'd be surrounded by attractive female-types!

But she was only there for the opening act, Canvas. She was dating their flame-handler (if you've ever seen Canvas, you know who I'm talking about) and when Canvas got off the stage, she and her friends went to hang out with him. Just seeing her there, though, had a really relaxing effect. In addition to being Brian's sister, she was my friend. She reminded me that I do have friends and whatever Audrey might think of me, I'm not a pathetic nobody. That was my high point of the night.

I hadn't seen Audrey all show long and figured that she'd probably gotten a migraine or something. So I made the mistake of buying a T-shirt. That's when they found me. Well, her best buddy Ed found me and directed the gang of three (Ed, Audrey, and Vince). My first thought was "Steph, where are you?!?!?!" followed by a couple of deep breaths and realizing that yes, I was in fact breathing, and I would survive this.

Audrey and I talked just a moment. Ed and I talked a second or two. I almost extended my hand to shake Vince's, but the second we made eye contact he looked away and within seconds he guided Audrey away to somewhere - anywhere - else. The encounter lasted less than two minutes.

When I got home I talked to Brian and told him about before I could tell him about running in to his sister there, he asked, "So how was it?"

"Outstanding! Vince actually looks something like me except shorter, squatier, and less self-confident," I said, without a hint of the irony I would realize the next day.

"I meant the show."

"Oh, it was alright."
His story is he's changed his mind,
He just can't help himself
So he's getting on board the Lynnville train
And moving on to someplace else
As the train pulls out he watches them both
Standing in the pouring rain
He's headed for a new life down the line
On the Lynnville Train

Robert Earl Keen
"Lynnville Train"

[Part 1]

"Do you know where your car keys are, sir?"

"I'm sorry. What?"

"Do you have your car keys in your possession, sir?"

"I think so..."

"Could you please locate them for us?"

"What's going on?"

"Sir, right now I just need to know if you have your car keys in your possession."

"Hold on."

"Sorry to wake you at this time of night."

"It's okay. I'm waking up pretty quickly at this point. Okay, here they are."

"Do you have another set of keys?"

"Not that I know of."

"Are you certain?"

"Oh wait, yeah. There was another set hidden in the car. Oh... crap."

"Do you know this man?"

"Yeah, that's Quan."

"How do you know him?"

"He lived over in 216 for a couple of days."

"Would you describe your relationship with him as a friendly one?"

"Sure."

"Do you know why he would have these?"

"My keys!"

"Are you sure these are your keys?"

"Yeah. What's going on?"

"I can't tell you that right now, it might impede the investigation. Could you come outside with us, please?"

to be continued...

[Part 3]

I heard the knock at four-thirty in the morning. I thought I heard some folks talking in Spanish and figured they had the wrong address so I decided I would just sleep through it. They knocked harder.

So I stumbled out of bed, around all the junk in my room, and answered the door expecting to see some sheepish person that was looking for someone else.

Instead I found three Gate City cops staring at me with a former neighbor off to the side.

"Are you the owner of a gold Ford Escort with Texas license plates XXX-XXX?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you know where your car keys are, sir?"

I was too tired to be able to answer the question immediately. I was awake enough to know that I really, really didn't like that question.

[to be continued...]

For an upcoming post that takes place in the Houston music club Fitzgerald's, I looked up their web site in search of a photo. While I didn't find a photo, there was a want ad for a sound engineer. Not a job I'm particularly interested in, but I found it's description interesting:

Fitzgerald's is looking for experienced sound tech's to mix for

name acts on industry standard equipment in a family environment.

Fitzgerald's? A family environment. What?! It's a craphole. Don't get me wrong, I love the place, but it's an absolute craphole. That's part of its charm. It also isn't known for particularly family-friendly acts.

So I thought maybe that it had changed or something, so I looked up the band list. While I don't know who any of these people are (except Phil Pritchett and Honeybrowne, of course), there are more than a few acts that don't convey "family environment."

Lone Star Porn Stars
Cellcyst
Hell City Kings
(a Black Sabbath tribute band)
American Thighs
Sean Reefer & the Resin Valley Boys
Oedipus Complex

Not to mention that this is the dive that I saw Insane Clown Posse at.

So I guess they mean that the coworkers have a familial kind of relationship?

Either that or the owner's (or manager's) kids have the most fun on the block, bar none.

Update: Someone from Hell City Kings wrote a response to this on another post. Lest anyone misunderstand me each line above is a different band and Hell City Kings is not "a Black Sabbath Tribute Band." Hole in the Sky is (or is at least doing a Black Sabbath tribute night at Fitz), but since most of us aren't familiar with that entity, I decided to put a description in there instead of using the band's name. My apologies to anyone offended blah blah blah.

What It's All About - Hollywood now handles abortion with breezy self-righteousness. It didn't use to, Meghan Cox Gurdon
Hollywood & Abortion, Kathryn Jean Lopez
TV & Abortion, Jonah Goldberg
Life and Death - The pro-life themes of HBO’s Six Feet Under, Radney Balko
Conservative writers tackle the subject of abortion in entertainment and its idiosynchreses. It's certainly a tough subject to tackle. I do tangentially in one of my novels. Should the book ever get published, I suspect that it would have to be altered into a miscarriage.

The Unpardonable Sin [via Kevin]
An interesting account of disgraced Baylor basketball coach Dave Bliss's search for forgiveness. He's apparently taken real strides to righting his wrongs, but I have a difficult time relating to a coach who went to Baylor because of it's strict religious nature and then tried to convince his coaches to lie and say that a recently slain player's money was coming from drug sales instead of Bliss himself all to cover up NCAA infractions.

Coyotes in River Oaks
Wolfen 2
Kuff and Pete respond to reports that there have been coyote sightings in Houston.

On the trail of Kerry's failed dream
I've barely read the Newsweek account of Bush's and Kerry's campaign that I linked to last week, so I haven't gotten a chance to look at this one yet, but here it is for anyone interested. I hope to write on the Newsweek account later. My reaction to it may be a surprise to some of you -- or not.

Clinton Library Features Impeachment Area
I was wondering how they would broach this subject. They did so head on, so kudos for that.

11-Year-Old Girl Suspended For 'Dangerous' Cartwheels At School
Egg on their face
The top is an account of a young girl suspended from school for doing cartwheels during recess. I was going to post it, but it was old news before the next RAW Links was ready. The bottom is Chris's post on the matter. Chris doesn't say much, but his comments section becomes a point-counterpoint between an area person and the father of the girl that was suspended.

Playboy, responsibility, and prolonged adolescence
Hugo Schwyzer has a good post on a lecture and discussion on the World War II generation, Playboy magazine, and the baby boomers. Prolonged adolescence is a particular fascination with me and something I could post on to the ground.

"Let's Roll, Kato!"
DavidMSC has a host of links about the old Green Hornet TV show. I saw several of the reruns on FX way back when and it was a nidge better than the Batman series it was knocked off of. There were some awfully goofy moments, though. What surprises me about the Green Hornet and, to a lesser extent The Shadow, is how the properties never gained a strong hold in the comics market. Both knocked around from company to company, but never really found a home and so now both are somewhat dated to their respective eras.

With all of this White Rain, Cold Sand, Translucent Film, and Calcified mountains occuring all around me to the appaent expectation of Idaho residents, it has dawned on me that this might actually be something of a natural phenomenon. Last week I said that I would look in to what this stuff was and where it was coming from and here are the results of my investigation.

The first, and most prominant thing, is the white rain. So I put "white flakes falling from the sky" into Google. The first web site to come up had a series of poems about "snow" and "snowflakes."

Figuring that the term "snow" was probably just shorthand for "snowflakes," I decided to look up the latter.

That query led me to an informative Caltech site. Snowflakes, it seems, look like a clear sort of chinese star. Since what I see is white and not clear, I thought I might be barking up the wrong tree, but the site said quite clearly that these things do fall from the sky.

I ran across this page on the Caltech site, which discussed how these flakes can be harvested in a convection chamber. While that wasn't of any help since what I saw was coming from the sky and not any "chamber," it did give me the idea to look in to how snowflakes are created.

So I queried that and found myself on a Michigan State site quoting a Lansing State Journal article about how these things come to be:

t turns out that "pure" snow is made up of snowflakes which are made up of from 2 to 200 separate snow crystals. Snow crystals are crystals that have formed around tiny bits of dirt that have been carried up into the atmosphere by the wind. So snow crystals are really soil particles that have been dressed up in ice.

[...]

The shape that a snow crystal will take is dependent upon the temperature at which it was formed. The temperature in the highest clouds is around -30°F and they are made up exclusively of ice crystal columns. The other three shapes are formed in a narrow temperature range. When the temperature in the clouds is 3° to 10°F the star shaped crystals form. From 10°-18°F the plates form, and from 18°-23°F columns form. From 23°-27°F needles form and from 27°-32°F the plates reappear. As the snow crystals grow they become heavier and fall towards Earth. If they spin like tops as they fall then they may be perfectly symmetrical when they hit the Earth. But if they fall in a sideways fashion then they end up lopsided. Falling snow crystals clump together forming snowflakes. Each snowflake is made up of from 2 to about 200 separate crystals.

So that apparently settles that.

From there, I deduced that just as this "snow" seems to accumulate on the ground and create "cold sand", it might also accumulate elsewhere. Since mountains are, by definition, higher than we are and thus colder, it stands to reason that snow would accumulate up there first, explaining the "calcified mountains."

The last mystery was the easiest. If snow was occuring in October, then the temperature apparently can get below freezing up here in October despite all existing evidence in Houston to the contrary. That being the case, the translucent film that somewhat looked and acted like ice was probably ice.

And with that, the mysteries of this strange land called Idaho have been solved.

Beavers Weave Stolen Cash Into Dam:

GREENSBURG, La. (AP) - It was probably the world's richest beaver dam. Beavers found a bag of bills stolen from a video poker casino last week, tore it open and wove the money into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek north of Louisiana Highway 48. Major Michael Martin of the East Feliciana Parish Sheriff's Office says bills used to build the dam were still whole.

The money was part of 70- to 75-thousand dollars taken from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg. About 40-thousand dollars was recovered. Authorities expect to find the rest in a safety deposit box at a bank in Mississippi.

They sure are resourceful creatures, aren't they?

When I got out of bed and the apartment, there was some frozen water on the windshield of the car. In leiu of a scraper, I scraped it off with my credit card and got it to the point that I could see. My general procedure is to scrape much of it off so that I can see just enough, drive slowly down the hill giving any people that might be in my way (though I can generally see them) time to get out of the way and cars that know what they're doing time to pass, and by the time I reach the main road and have to drive faster than 10 miles an hour the water has melted and I can see perfectly.

On this particular morning, though, the fog was particularly much or my defrost wasn't working and I couldn't keep vision for more than a couple of minutes. When this happens, as silly as it sounds, I drive with my head out the window until I get to the main road, again by which point I can usually see enough to go faster.

It was so bad this morning, however, that I couldn't see at all out the side window and couldn't poke my head out the window to see the turn that I needed to make. So I stopped the car and got out to see exactly where I was and find out where I could pull over to figure something out.

It didn't surprise me that I was in the middle of the intersection. What did surprise me, however, was the dog that was sniffing the dead flies frozen bumper.Given that I stopped the car and got out to look around within seconds, if I'd gone five feet further I probably would have run the little guy over.

Mainstays

Memphis Tigers 30 (6-3,3-3)
Southern Miss Golden Eagles (5-3,4-2)
Southern Miss was ahead 26-14 in the middle of the third quarter but couldn't hold on to it as Memphis took a one-point lead at the end of the fourth quarter and scored a fieldgoal in the fourth. Memphis got over 500 yards on the day split almost equally on the ground and in the air. This should help lift Memphis's spirits after getting Crushed by Cincinnati and losing a heartbreaker to Louisville last week and the week before. The Tigers are bowl-bound and with South Florida and East Carolina to play, could well be looking at an 8-3 year. It just gets harder for Southern Miss at this point, with TCU, UAB, and Cal left to play.

UAB Blazers 20 (6-3,4-2)
Houston Cougars (3-7,3-4)
UAB becomes bowl-eligable for the first time in the program's history with this one and Houston's difficulties against the Blazers (despite last year's convincing victory) continue. Coach Watson Brown reshuffled the defense that gave up over 100 points in the last two games and it apparently worked out. This was a long-shot for the struggling Cougars, who with only Louisville left to play will likely end the season at 3-8. UAB still has Army and Southern Miss to play.

South Florida Bulls (4-4,3-3)
East Carolina Pirates (2-7,2-5)
The good news is that the Bulls pull off their second straight and still could become bowl eligable. The bad news is that it was against and easy ECU and they don't have any easy opponents left with Cincinnati, Memphis, and Pittsburgh left to play. The bad news for the Pirates is that they're 2-7 with a difficult Memphis and nearly impossible NC State games coming up. There is no good news for the Pirates.

Tulane Green Wave 45 (4-5,2-4)
Army Black Knights 31 (2-7,2-5)
TUlane managed to pick up their third win while the Black Knights seem to have returned to losing form. More impressive for the Green Wave is that they accomplished a lot of this on the heels of their freshman running back when their QB got hurt in the second quarter. The bad news is that Ricard may be out for the rest of the season - and the rest of the season is TCU and Louisville. Army has their own worries with UAB and Navy - both winning teams - left to play.

Outgoing
#14 Louisville Cardinals 55 (7-1,5-0)
TCU Horned Frogs 28 (4-5,2-4)
The Cardinals rolled over TCU, scoring early (17 points in the first half-quarter) and often and racking up nearly 600 yards of offense in the process. Cards QB Stefan LeFors passes 5,000 yards for the season with four games still to play on the year. TCU, meanwhile, can only become bowl eligable and avoid a losing season both in the conference and for the year if they can beat Southern Miss (one of only two teams they lost to last year) and Tulane. Louisville has two gimmes against Houston next week and Tulane in the final week with a tougher game against Cincinnati separating them.

Incoming
SMU Mustangs 38 (3-7)
Nevada Wolf Pack 20 (5-5)
SMU takes their second straight win for the first time in a couple years in an upset against Nevada. The difference in this game was a defensive player with a name I couldn't pronounce to save my life - Alvin Nnabuife - who scored on two fumbles, one of which by running it 95 yards and SMU QB Jeff Rowe, who threw for an outstanding 341 yards.

Louisiana Tech Bulldogs 38 (5-5)
Tulsa Golden Hurricane 21 (2-8)
Louisiana Tech won by 17 points in a 38 to 21 victory. That's all ESPN apparently wants to tell me.

UTEP Miners 35 (7-2)
Rice Owls 28 (3-7)
UTEP's outstanding season continues, though this one probably shouldn't have gone in to overtime (and wouldn't have, were it not for a pair of safeties in the third quarter). The good news for the Miners is that they've faced down the toughest of the WAC-to-C*USA set and should cruise past SMU and Tulsa to a 9-2 record. The bad news is that the WAC doesn't like to give its bowl games to its eastern teams, but UTEP isn't too far east and they'll be hard to turn down if they can win the next two. Rice has but one game remaining against a not-easy Louisiana Tech team. Unless they can pull off an upset, they're likely going to end up with the same record as the cross-town rivals they beat in week one.

Bowling Green Falcons 56 (8-2)
Marshall Thundering Herd 35 (5-5)
Marshall is taken out of MAC playoff contention with this loss against an impessive Bowling Green team that has now moved into first in the MAC's west division. Marshall - sporting one of college football's least impressive offenses - can take heart that QB Stan Hill threw 31 for 49 for 348 yards. But other than that they're unlikely to see a post-season in the bowl-anemic Mid-American Athletic Conference even if they take next game against Western Michigan.

Ball State Cardinals 21 (2-8)
Central Florida Golden Knights 17 (0-10)
UCF loses their second squeaker in as many weeks, tightening their grip as the worst team in college football right now with their loss to a nearly as bad Ball State. They face another klunker in Kent State next week. The difference is that Kent State will be coming off a two-game winning streak while Central Florida has now lost their last fourteen.

Standings Below:

[Read More!]

"My main feeling is disappointment that [the Scott Peterson trial is] over: For many, many months I've been able to look up at TVs in bars, restaurants, the gym, etc. -- and when the Peterson trial was on, I knew right away that there was no actual news to report. Now I've lost that valuable tool."-Glenn Reynolds

I've been looking to get a treadmill over the past couple of days. They seem to fall into about three categories: cheap ($100-150), expensive ($600-800), and way too expensive ($1,400+).

Since the treadmill is something of an experiment, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about spending hundreds of dollars on it because it might end up as a glorified coat rack.

The problem is that the cheap ones look awfully, I dunno, short to me. While I'm a relatively tall guy, my legs aren't hugely long (Eel and I wear the same length pants and she's 5'9"ish), so I don't think I need a hugely long machine. On the other hand, if I have a short machine, it might mean that I have to take short strides, which might make it uncomfortable, which might make it a $100 coat-rack.

So the question I have is whether or not they really do make these things in "short people" models that wouldn't work for me (and any other help/advice you can give me in this regard).

An interesting look at enemy communication in Fallujah:

Sitting on a third-story roof, Staff Sgt. Eric Brown, his lip bleeding, peered through the scope of his rifle into the haze. Moments before, a lone bullet had whizzed past his face and smashed a window behind him. "God, I hate this place, the way the sun sets," Sergeant Brown said.

Sgt. Sam Williams said, "I wish I could see down the street."

But these marines did see a black flag pop up all at once above a water tower about 100 yards away, then a second flag somewhere in the gloaming above a rooftop. And the shots began, in a wave this time, as men bobbed and weaved through alleyways and sprinted across the street. "He's in the road, he's in the road, shoot him!" Sergeant Brown shouted. "Black shirt!" someone else yelled. "Due south!"

The flags are the insurgents' answer to two-way radios, their way of massing the troops and - in a tactic that goes back at least as far as Napoleon - concentrating fire on an enemy. Set against radio waves, the flags have one distinct advantage: they are terrifying.

The insurgents are coordinating their attacks at a time when they have nowhere left to run. American forces have pushed south of Highway 10, the boulevard that runs east to west and approximately bisects Falluja. American intelligence officers believe that many of the insurgents have retreated as far as the Shuhada, a relatively modern residential area that is the southernmost neighborhood in Falluja.

Lozey: You're wearing a cap!
RAW: Why yes, yes I am...
Lozey: I've never seen you in a cap before.
RAW: It actually took me a long time to find one. They don't make many my size. My head's too big.
Lozey: Really, that's interesting because I have to wear kids caps because my head's too small.
RAW: It just goes to show you, I have a big head and you have a little mind.

[WHAP!!!]

There are two things that I don't like about the commute from Gate City to Falls every weekday. The first is that it takes two hours out of my day that could be otherwise better spent. That's somewhat mitigated by the fact that it gives me a good chance to unwind after work.

The other thing, however, has no upside whatsoever. It just - forgive the pun - stinks.

Cow excrement.

There is a sizeable lot just south of Falls. A lot of cows. A. Lot. Of. Cows.

A lot of cows eating.

A lot of cows pooping.

So many cows eating and pooping that it does not matter if I have all the windows closed and the air conditioning off.

So many cows that on warm days it smells up to ten miles down the road.

All this despite my nigh-non-existent sense of smell.

But when I explain this to Eel, she says that I am quite lucky. If she hadn't gotten the residency match here, her second choice was Greeley Colorado, the feed lot capital of the world, renowned far and wide for its pungent odor.

Lucky me!

As many of you know, Texas passed a law regulating on a state level what kinds of license plate frames a car can have. I can't remember the specifics, but the long and short of it is that it can't cover the state's name. If the registration stickers still went on the license plates, that would be an issue as well.

Since that covers most license plate frames, I was sure to got a UH one before they stopped selling them.

In Idaho, the stickers still go on the license plates, except that instead of going on the top - like Texas's used to do, they go on the bottom. This creates a bit of a problem because it's at least partially - if not wholly - covered by my license plate frame. I've been keeping an eye out on the road to see what other drivers do before I put my Idaho plates on.

I also checked the Rothers UH store to see if they had anything that would leave the bottom area uncovered. I discovered that they do still sell license plate frames, but they have new "Texas Legal" ones that don't obstruct the state's name.
That's all well and good, but these things are absolutely hideous. They look like those stickers that were cool when I was in elementary school. All shiny and all that. Even if these things didn't obstruct where the registration sticker is, I wouldn't dare put one on my car.

What are they thinking? Does anyone prefer this glittery crap to a nice standard plate frame?

I ran in to the same thing when I was trying to buy a UH sticker for my car, forcing me to buy a plain white one.

With the help of y'all, I finally discovered what my hat size is. Turns out, it's the absolute largest size that most web sites show measurements to. As such, the pickings were pretty slim. I figured I wouldn't be able to find a UH cap, and I couldn't. I tried looking for UT or OU caps, but no success there, either.

So I went with the old stand-by and inadvertantly became a bandwagoneer and ordered a Houston Astros cap. They were up 3-2 in the series against St. Louis when I ordered it, but ended up losing the next two games. Sorry about that!

But anyway, so while the picture to the right may not seem like a big deal to you, as someone that hasn't worn a cap since he was in middle school, I'm darn near ecstatic. I haven't been this excited about anything wardrobe related since I found shoes that fit.

The Internet is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Idaho's white rain returned last week.

Here is what I was able to deduce:

It leads to build-up of cold sand on the car and on the ground.

When it builds up on the passenger side window, if you roll the window down it will all fall inside.

It's no fun whatsoever to drive in.

It leads to an increase in mountain calcification.

Idahoans still think nothing of it.

This weekend, I will make a concerted effort to discover what exactly this stuff is.

ABCNews: Some Say U.S. No Longer Feels Like Home

Like Sinicki, Dowling didn't start thinking about moving abroad last week, but she said her concern was more about the role Bush's religious beliefs seem to play in his governing, and the role of religion in American society — what she called "aggressive Christianity."

"There is this aggressive morality that seems to me to have nothing to do with Christianity," she said. "Our fathers were mostly Unitarians, not at all holy rollers."

She also said it feels like there has been a closing of the American mind.

"I can't understand when in our nation's history being an intellectual, having a questioning, curious mind, wanting to travel, became bad," she said. "I don't understand when it became stigmatized."

She said Italy appeals to her because it is a country that holds secular values, with a "mind your own business" attitude to religion and an acceptance of the fallibility of its government.

"I do love my country and it hurts me very deeply to see what's happening here, to see us so far off course," she said. "But I've met a lot of evangelicals and they believe it deeply. They'd rather vote for fetuses and against gay people, rather than voting against war, with thousands dead, against guns, which we know kill people. When you're talking about deeply held religious beliefs, you're out of luck."

We heard this sort of things a lot from celebrities four years ago, but I don't remember hearing it as much from every day people.

This sort of attitude is one of the reasons - fair or not, probably not - that the left gets tagged as being without a love of this country. It either represents a willingness to leave when things aren't going great or such an intense dissatisfaction with half the electorate and presumed disagreement with their native country that it makes one wonder what they do like about this country.

Yet as Andrew Olmsted points out, leaving when being dissatisfied is one of the reasons America even came in to existence. Beyond that, I've long said that anyone sufficiently left of center that one of the parties seems completely beyond the pale to them might ought to leave and be happier in a surrounding more intellectually and politically in-tune with their beliefs and priorities.

On the other hand, that's gotten a bit harder for me to say lately because someone close has been mulling over expatriation if Bush were to win. Another has been contemplating a move to Canada for some time and I can't help but believe that this election will provide a new fire under her posterior to follow through.

I kept that in mind as I cast my ballot. I even considered it when I was looking for bright sides of a Kerry presidency. But I voted by politics and my guy won, so now I just have to wait and see what happens.

Interestingly, there seems to be a lot of sickness going around this week. Today half the work force was struck down by this strange ailment coming in numerous seemingly unconnected forms "headache", "stomach ache", and "flu." Young men appear to be particularly vulnerable as in our department 3/4 of the people that couldn't come to work today were both young and male (the department is split almost 50/50. It can hardly be a coincidence that everyone is getting sick all at once.

There must be something going around.

On a completely unrelated note, the long, long-awaited online RPG game EverQuest 2 was released to retail stores yesterday.

"The more Maureen [Dowd] gets on 'Meet the Press' and writes those col umns, the redder these states get. I mean, they don't want some high brow hussy from New York City explaining to them that they're idiots and telling them that they're stupid," -Senator Zell Miller (D-GA)

"I'm not a highbrow hussy from New York. I'm a highbrow hussy from Washington. Senator, pistols or swords?" -NY Times Columnist Maureen Dowd

I've been listening to a lot of stand-up comedians through Rhapsody at work and have been enjoying it a great deal. I started with Bill Hicks and have recently moved into the Blue Collar Comedy set, but am running dry of acts there, too.

So my question is whether any of you are fans of stand-up comedy and, if so, who would you recommend?

Eel and I have lately been discussing, among other things, growth and geography.

It's more or less her position that it's always best for someone to definitively leave their home upon graduation and either see the world or stake out their own ground elsewhere. She is concerned that those that stay in the same area their whole lives are missing out on the growth that comes only with living an independent life which requires, among other things, physical distance from where they were raised.

To a degree, I can understand where she's coming from. I'm a firm believer that there is a certain age (that I would place around 20) where someone living with their parents becomes a problem. And I agree that independence is part of the foundation of growth. Not long ago, I passionately argued with a friend to keep her from transferring back "home" to live with her family (if not in the same domicile, the same neighborhood).

But at the same time, I really like having roots and I'm not sure that cutting them is necessary for personal growth.

Some of our disagreement, I think, comes down to our personal experiences. Some of our personal experiences, though, come down to the choices that we made because we disagree with one another.

Eel was pretty anxious to get out of southern Louisiana when she graduated. She left Lafayette and went to college in Oklahoma and later northern Louisiana. From all that she told me, this was necessary for her development and in her shoes I would likely have done the same.

I, on the other hand, went to college thirty miles or so down the road. If I hadn't been dating Anna at the time, there's a one-in-three chance that I would have gone to Texas Tech in Lubbock (600 miles away). But even if it hadn't been for Anna, UH and Texas A&M would have still had the inside track due, primarily, to proximity.

Simply put, I had little desire to leave Houston.

The conversation started by my mentioning that a lot of Clear Lake alums go to the University of Texas (or A&M) and primarily hang out with each other. I thought, and think, that's a shame. One of the best things about college for me was the ability to shed old friends and make new ones. The only friend I had at UH that I knew beforehand was my roommate Adam, but even in that case he went from being a casual-but-friendly acquaintance to a central figure in my life.

But Eel's connection between social circles and geographic distance is a good one. Why do I believe that it's perfectly okay to not really go "away" for college and yet frown down somewhat on keeping social circles knit?

I'm not sure, but I still believe it to be true. I don't consider my personal growth to have been stunted by my staying in Houston. Truth be told, under different circumstances I could have spent the rest of my life in that town and I don't think that I would have been a lesser person for it.

Hanging on to old friends - at the exclusion of new ones - on the other hand, is often a dead end. Even if I hadn't left Houston, most of my closest friends would have moved on anyway. To the extent that I made a mistake during my college years, it's probably that I didn't make as many new friends as I could have. But honestly that had more to do with a full-time girlfriend as with anything else, and since I don't regret my time with Anna, it's hard for me to say what might have been different.

Perhaps if I'd dumped Anna and gone to Texas Tech, my life would have been fuller. Maybe I would have joined a fraternity or made a plethora of lifelong friends.

But eventually I would have had to leave Lubbock. Maybe I'd have ended back up in Houston, leaving my life a Houston-based one with a four year stint in parts north. By choosing the path that I did, though, I laid down roots that could have lasted a lifetime. No breaks and no round-trips out of town and back into it.

Which brings me to something in my personality that is unique to me and people like me: all things being equal, I want roots. I'm not as sold on the "citizen of the world" idea and the idea of living my life in a handful of places is wholly unappealing to me. Faces will change, friends will change, but I'm particularly partial to the idea of home being a place and not a series of places along the way.

I find the transportability of people to be a very odd thing. Moving for a better job, moving for more snow or sun. Moving because the company you work for gets a special tax break for relocating their headquarters. No, it's often not really a choice, but I'm nonplussed about how often it is. The wired world that keeps us together also keeps us moving farther apart. In R. Alex's perfect world, people moving hundreds of miles from "home" would be the exception and not the rule.

Sometimes, it's best to move on. The truth is that even if Eel hadn't come along, there's a good chance I would have left Houston anyway. Part of me was ready to try something new. Despite looking everywhere for work between losing my job at UFC and meeting Eel, I still likely would have stayed in Texas or moved to my native state of Virginia. Somewhere that I have roots.

I type this from Idaho, where I will live for another year and a half or so before moving on to somewhere else for a year before moving on to where Eel and I end up on a permanent basis, assuming that things work out according to plan. Sometimes life doesn't work out like you plan are rarely are all things equal.

But I don't consider that cowardice to feel that way. Nor a sign of ill-development. Nor a sign of much anything else other than the subjective preference of being of a place more than just in it.

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Clemens takes his 7th Cy Young Award
Congrats to The Rocket!

Call Centre Diary [via FatGuy]
A diary of a call center team leader. Good stuff.

Freedom squelches terrorist violence
The argument put forth is that terrorism is borne more from a lack of freedom than poverty.

How Bush Did It
I haven't read this one, but I've been licking my chops looking forward to this in-depth account of both campaigns in the 2000 election.

Bush Looking Anew for Alaska Oil Drilling
Outstanding! While there's something to be said for divided government, there's also something to be said for what one party can get through that a divided government can't. If Bush can pull this off, anyway.

Red State Welfare: Quit (Most of) Yer Bitchin’ [via MTPolitics]
A great response to those accusing Bush states of hypocrisy by voting for the "small government party" while recieving more money from the government than it puts in.

Republic of Cascadia
A pre-election sucession proposal including states from both the US and Canada. One potential problem: neither Washington nor Oregon are hugely anti-Republican or far left.

Finding people to each lunch with in high school was always a struggle for me. Not because I didn't have any friends, but because (a) my real friends never had lunch with me, (b) my casual friends insisted on eating lunch with people I had no desire to, and (c) my social circle wasn't huge.

One semester I found a group of people in the second category: people I didn't mind hanging out with and didn't mind hanging out with me. It was the ROTC crowd, but they were generally cool guys. Though I never took them up on it, I actually got invited to real life high school parties.

There were two red-headed girls in the group. The first was in the group when I was. She was part ROTC and part punk. She always seemed very interested in talking to me and even more in initiating some sort of physical contact with me. She'd touch my arm at every opportunity. Sometimes she'd caress it while staring into my eyes. Our last class of the day were in rooms right next to each other and she'd seek me out at the end of each and every one. She'd take my arm some days, my hand others, and one day in the hallway out of the blue she almost kissed me - she tried for the lips but I wasn't paying attention and she hit the cheek right beside.

In retrospect, I think she might have liked me.

In retrospect, I think if she'd hit me over the head with a baseball bat and said, "I like you, you fool!" she might have made it obvious enough for me to grasp at the time.

In retrospect, it's a good thing she didn't and that I didn't.

Then there was the other red head. She started sitting at the table the week that I left. She was, in fact, the very reason that I left.

She was a nice enough girl. Didn't smile a whole lot, but then again that's not unusual. She was total ROTC, which left me a little more generally indifferent to her than I was with the first red head. But there was one problem: the very site of her made me physically ill.

The thing is that, objectively speaking, she wasn't an unattractive person. She had an average build and an average face. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about her appearance other than the nauseating way that it turned my stomach. It was the strangest thing. At first I thought it was just a weird thing I would get over after a couple of days. But instead of getting better, it got worse. By Wednesday I couldn't eat anymore at lunch. By the end of lunch Friday I'd taken a trip to the bathroom to vomit (none came out).

To this day, I don't know what it was.

I got in to Taco Bell at about 10pm or so. One wouldn't think that a Taco Bell would be crowded at 10, but for whatever reason it was. I considered going to Taco John's down the road, but was generally too lazy. Besides, even if there wasn't an empty seat in the house, there were only a couple of people in front of me.

The guy in front of me was mulling over what to get, thinking that the 1/2 lb. beef and tater burrito might be a good pick, but he hadn't had it before. Feeling a bit social, I decided to go ahead and intervene, telling him that it would be a good pick. Since arriving in Idaho, it's what I get any time I "run for the border."

He thanked me for my input and promptly ordered something else (I couldn't hear what). I went ahead and got my beef & tater burrito along with a combo meal. I was exceptionally hungry and had a fresh roll of toilet paper waiting back at the apartment.

The kitchen was in a form of chaos. Even moreso than fast food kitchens usually are. I bided my time trying to figure out if the person that served me was male of female. Named "Bobbie," I couldn't tell if it was a girl (as that spelling sometimes indicates) or male (as the more traditional spelling usually is). He/she/it had a face that was absolutely buried in acne and wore a pony tale. Not much chest to speak of, but was without masculine shoulders.

The thought had occured to me that ten minutes or so had passed and I still hadn't gotten my food. Looking closer, neither had the person in front of me. He was considerably less patient about this than I was. The guy he was with had gotten his foot within minutes of ordering it.

I went ahead and utilized my combo meal cup and filled it with Mountain Dew. One taste of it and I knew it was flat. So I tried the strawberry soda and it was not only flat but syrupy. A middle-aged man filled his cup and took a drink.

"Flat, isn't it," I said. It wasn't really in the form of a question.

"Tastes fine to me," he replied.

The next person got a Pepsi and drank it as if it were not flat. I tried the Pepsi and it was flat, dag nabbit.

No one else seemed to notice this.

The Androgynous one asked the guy before me to the counter. Using my keen eavesdropping skills, I discovered the problem: "Sir, I'm afraid we're out of refried beans," could they substitute melted cheese for the refried beans instead. "Hot diggity!" I thought. "I'm getting nacho cheese instead of beans!"

The guy replied, "But I ordered a bean burrito..."

"I'm authorized to put a lot of cheese in there," the person behind the counter replied. He consented and talked to his buddy, who'd