CarnivAOL V

   The latest edition of CarnivAOL has been published. Head on over and check it out. As well, remember that I will be out of town for the next edition. Andi, of She Said WHAT? has graciously offered to host the September 27 edition. Send your submissions to her at Artloner. <~~And remember that this is an AOL screen name address. If you are sending e-mail from outside of AOL, you will need to add the (at)aol.com part.

His name is Wash, hellooooo

Why am I not surprised?


"The Pilot"

Which Firefly character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

   We've been watching the Firefly series on DVD again. One or two episodes a day, as we have time. Every time I watch an episode of this series I am struck by how well done it was. I marvel that FOX couldn't make it fly. The feature movie, called Serenity, comes out just a few days before we get back from Italy. We'll have to be making plans to go see it the following weekend. Who else here is a Firefly fanatic?

The now of it all

 ONE...
   I looked at my watch today, for the date, instead of the time. I'm not sure why. If I'd only just thought about it a little bit, I would have realized that I'm leaving for a three week vacation in Italy tomorrow, and I've been telling absolutely everyone for weeks that my departure date is September 12th. But I didn't think about it that way. I just glanced at the little window on my watch that tells the date. It said, "SUN|11."

It is September 11th.

   Now, I'm not a very sentimental person. I have never attended a 9/11 memorial. Never really even thought about it before. I'm one of those guys who say, "isn't it about time they stopped playing America The Beautiful at baseball games now?" But, when I glanced at my watch this morning, and realized what the date was, I had a sudden pause.
   On September 11th, 2001, thousands of men and women kissed their families good morning, poured themselves a cup of coffee, and left for work, just as they did every morning. They were just regular people going about their regular lives. Like you. Like me.

   And then a group of insane people flew out of the sky and ended their lives.
  
   And I had this thought: 
Total death toll in World Trade Center disaster-2752
Total American Death toll in Iraq War to date-1896  (if you add other coalition troops, that number reaches 2093)
Estimated Iraqi death toll-somewhere between 24,680 and 27,930
Amount of credible evidence that Iraq had anything at all to do with the September 11th terrorist attacks-

...

...

::sigh::

   Somewhere, Osama Bin Laden is laughing.

Other things I am not...

Blogadelic
Blogalicious
Blogmatic
Blog-o-matic
Blogellectual

Growing list to be added to as new words occur to me.

(That last line edited because the Casablanca reference was completely out of place)

missed a couple o' days, dint I?

FOUR, THREE, TWO...

   I am completely unblogatory right now. I Couldn't think of anything to say if I was being paid for it. At least three pieces languish unfinished in my journal entries folder, and I can't seem to even generate the interest to look at them. See, you miss me already.

Five'll getcha seven

 FIVE more sleeps before departure day.

   Dayum! I have been creeping quietly around the edges of J-Land for a week trying to avoid this seven things meme that's going around. I thought it had just about run its course, and I was safely out of the woods when, Bam! Lahoma tagged me. With a two-by-four. Upside the head.
   I'm a bit dazed, but I'll give it my best shot. Not because, as Lahoma opined, I love these things, but because I don't want to dis the girl.
   So, here goes:

7 things I plan to do before I die

1) Visit the U.K.
2) Break 100 on the golf course
3) Visit another planet (at least I used to plan to do this one, but time's ticking away)
4) Learn to type
5) Make a difference
6) Hold a grandchild or two
7) Live to be 100

7 things I can do:

1) See
2) Smell
3) Taste
4) Feel
5) Hear
6) Breathe
7) Wiggle my toes

 7 Things I can't do:

1) Disprove the existence of God
2) Run a four minute mile
3) Irish clog dance
4) Use a gun
5) Suffer fools gladly
6) Get all the way through a Robert Jordan novel
7) Play the Sousaphone (or any other musical instrument, for that matter)

7 things that attract me to the opposite sex

1) Sauciness
2) Smiles
3) Wiggle
4) Warmth
5) Confidence
6) Curves
7) Huge...tracts of land

7 things I say most often

1) Release the hounds
2) I find your lack of faith disturbing
3) Nobody gets out alive
4) You're the man now, dawg
5) Can you hear me now?
6) You're awesome, you make me sweat
7) As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly

7 celebrity crushes

Well, I'm not fourteen, so I wouldn't call these crushes, but the seven celebrities I find most attractive right now would be:
1) Elisha Cuthbert
2) Charlize Theron
3) Salma Hayek
4) Eliza Dushku
5) Jennifer Connelly
6) Gwen Stefani
7) Julianne Moore

7 people I want to send this to

No

   OK,Lahoma?

Updated: Dec. 7, 2005

Seven books I love:

1) Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
2) Dune (the whole series), Frank Herbert
3) Norstrilia (and all the short fiction of), Cordwainer Smith a.k.a. Paul Linebarger
4) Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut
5) Zygal-A book of mysteries and translations, bpNichol
6) The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
7) The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Seven movies I would watch over and over again:

1) The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Peter Jackson
2) The Star Wars (original) Trilogy, George Lucas
3) A Knights's Tale, Brian Helgeland
4) Matrix, The Wachowski Brothers
5) Gladiator, Ridley Scott
6) Highlander, Russell Mulcahy
7) Pirates of the Caribbean, Gore Verbinski

   OK, Simon?

The Bi-Monthly Call goes out

 SIX more passages of the sun through the sky will occur before "I'm leaving on a jet plane" for my Italian vacation. While I am waiting, I have put out The Call for submissions to CarnivAOL. The fifth edition is coming up next week. Get your submissions in. As well, I am looking for a guest host for the edition to follow. If you are interested, check out the details at the CarnivAOL journal and let me know.

Let the countdown begin

 SEVEN more days until the family and I board a "big pretty white plane with red stripes, curtains at the windows, wheels, [that] just looks like a big Tylenol," to fly us across the Atlantic ocean to Italy. For the three weeks extending from September 12th forward until October 2nd I will be generally unavailable to blog, barring an occasional, affordable Internet cafe, or a relative of my wife with a computer. I hope you all won't miss me too much.

Faith based initiative

   I was sent the link to this cartoon by a friend who, apparently, knows what I appreciate. For a Maritimer transplanted to Texas that I have met in person a grand total of once, I'd have to say he done good. Thanks for the heads up, Alec.
   Those of you who are offended by this cartoon will no doubt leave me asinine comments claiming that the bible is somehow authoritative, just because someone says so. Those of you who don't get the cartoon will probably leave comments calling me a misogynist and a homo-phobe, because it makes you feel better in your ignorance.
   For the rest of you, I hope you get a good chuckle over it. I know I did.

   OK. At least two people have told me they don't get it. The secret folks, is that this is just the first panel of the cartoon. You have to click on the link to see the whole thing.

I grow tall

via She Said What

My japanese name is 井上 Inoue (upon a well) 直樹 Naoki (straight tree).
Take your real japanese name generator! today! <~~this line apparently created by Rum and Monkey's electronics owners' manual translation generator.
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

The moons of Saturn got in his eyes

   In the introductory post to my series on the JREF, I described a typical test of a person who claims to possess the ability commonly referred to as dowsing. Last week an applicant for the $1,000,000 challenge was tested in Germany. This gentleman claimed to be able to locate a hidden cell phone using a pendulum as a dowsing implement. The record of this test is representative of the way these things tend to go.
   And yes, I still owe you a wrap up of that series. Stay tuned.