So Thanksgiving really is a Catholic thing. Who knew? I suppose, then, that when the time comes and the elementary school teachers make 'Xander want to dress up in dippy little buckled puritan hats (assuming they let kids dress up as anything readily identifiable with any particular ethnic group in the public schools five years from now) I shall send him to school in Spanish Conquistador armor.

Rock.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today, actually, we had two Thanksgivings! One with my family, and then one with the in-laws. It was great to see all the families, whole and complete, for the holidays. I'm thankful for much (pretty much everything I could name, I'm thankful for, so really Thanksgiving is probably a pretty redundant holiday), but I'm especially thankful for this.

So, Deo Gratias!

Free PC toy of the week

If you have a PC and a CD-ROM drive, head on over to cdscratch.com and download a copy of the free Ots CD Scratch 1200. Basically this application emulates two turntables (you'll have to provide your own microphone) and allows you to play two tracks off the same CD (or two tracks off of two CDs, if you have two CD-ROM drives) at the same time (I have no idea how they manage that), match their tempos and pitches, and then scratch them on the two turntables. The app also provides some nice effects whch emulate various record characteristics (like surface noise and belt worble). It's a lot of fun. Or, as Jackie put it when she walked in during one of my furious DJ sessions: "Well, that looks really useful."

Most impressive for a free toy.

So I'm home sick from work this evening and I'm curled up on the couch surrounded by wadded-up kleenex and 24 ends (seriously, I don't really think they needed to do a whole 'nother 24 hours for season 2. The second season should've been called 12 or 8 and it would've been more effective and watchable. It's still Keifer Sutherland, though, and he's real cool as Jack "I Will Kill You!" Bauer... though his wife really got the short end of every kind of stick last season, which sucked. And for those of you who haven't seen tonight's episode: Darlene from Roseanne -- or Melissa Gibert's sister for the Little-House-inclined -- dies. Yeah, like we didn't see that one coming. Michelle Forbes is still on the show but she's looking a little worse for the wear when compared to her Ensign Roe days on ST:TNG -- though she was still at her best in Swimming With Sharks in my opinion, but I'm getting way far afield here) and then the news comes on.

I haven't watched the news in ages and I came to this conclusion: you have to be really really mentally sick in the head to watch the news. Either that or watching the news will make you mentally sick in the head. All it is is one terrible story about some awful thing happening to someone after another. And then they have the "Problem Solver" story which was about a dog who lost a litter of puppies (stillborn) and then the owner finds a litter of puppies in a shoebox in a dumpster, half-frozen to death which she then gives to the sad mommy dog ("Problem solved!"). It was just such a hollow thing to hear, such a lame attempt at a "canine interest story" coming right after the story about the young couple with the baby who had the house they were housesitting at broken into by crooks who raped the 22-year-old woman. There's no framework provided for how one should deal with any of these stories, no explanation, no letup; they just hit you with them one after the other. Oh, and then they keep you on the hook for 20 minutes by telling you at every commercial break that a "very popular" Christmas toy that is "probably on your child's list" will make their eyes burn and get puffy -- and then after 20 minutes of this sort of setup we learn that "very popular toy" is Crazy String. Like we didn't learn in elementary school that shooting Crazy String into another kid's eyes will make them burn? Duh! That was half the fun!!

So yeah, you have to be mentally sick in the head to watch the "news".

The Hillsdale Collegian, publication of my alma mater has a nice editorial about the lack of hipness over at the Natrional Review. I think a lack of hipness is the least of their problems.

Rod Dreher on Mary Stachowicz & Hate Crimes on National Review Online

Read this article. If you read nothing else today or this entire week, read this article. It's almost enough to make me change my opinion of NRO. But read this article.

Save your brain. Here's AnalogX's handy delay calculator. You tell it the tempo and it calculates the delay in milliseconds. Though I don't suppose there's any reason you couldn't make your own sliderule to do the exact same thing.

Zorak hates this kind of article and so do I.

First, it's too long. Way too long -- even for a pointless feature piece, which is what it is: a pointless feature piece... of crap. Ahem. Judging from the little scrollbar on the side of my browser I didn't even make it 1/4 of the way through the article before I lost interest. Had I managed, by some miracle, to maintain interest I would've been reduced in short order to vomiting. Sorry, but it's true. Which brings me to the second reason why I hate this article and others like it. I hate it because it's a blatant attempt at normalizing and legitimizing the shortcomings in character of the baby boomers. I hate it when the baby boomers (not all of them, just most of them) attempt to normalize their selfish, childish, irrational, mediocre behavior. God forbid anyone should ever be forced to face up to the consequences of their actions -- heavens, no! that sort of responsibility is only for society's convincted criminals! But I hate this selfish, mediocre tendency even more (if that's possible) when kids have to suffer because of it (as will happen in this case, should divorce become even further normalized in the minds of even one more couple).

It's not selifshness? Read what perfectly divorced wife Debbie has to say is the reason why she and Eli (not their real names, I hope) drifted apart:

Even now, it's hard to describe precisely what was wrong. You could call it a lack of connection, she says, which was a word she used in counseling a few years before the separation, but "what does that mean?" She understood "on a primal level" that there was something missing in her marriage, a kind of emotional understanding and support that she hadn't, at first, even known that she needed.

"Lack of connection" on a "primal level"? Give me a break.

So I'm reading all these headlines about a French air-strike and I'm thinking "Whoa! Way to go French! It's payback time for basically being a doormat for the last 200 years!" (and I would just like to say that the Flemish, unlike the Germans, defeated the French back in 1302 when they, the French, were actually a formidable and superior military power and not in the 20th century when all they, the French, could manage was a little stunt in Vietnam). But sadly, no. It's just an air traffic controller strike. How lame is that?

One of the disadvantages of working with some sixty or eighty other employees in a center with recirculated air is that when someone gets sick, everyone usually winds up getting sick (we call them plagues). So I have the latest iteration, it would seem: a headcold which, while not too debilitating (I'm still well enough to go in to work and ensure that the plague circulates for another week or so), has left me with what feels like a head full of Spaghetti-Os. So if my thoughts seem a little off this week, that's why.

Oh, and I will probably be moving to HaloScan comments sometime in the near future. The YACCS model, as they say, just doesn't scale. And I haven't given up on Moveable Type either. I just couldn't get that darned mt-load cgi to work (within 15 minutes so I gave up).

MIKE WENDLAND: Spam king lives large off others' e-mail troubles

I come in from the weekend and have to delete 120 messages -- multiply that by 60,000 employees and you have some idea of just how badly this affects just this single company -- and the spam king lives in a $750,000 house.

PS. His personal contact info isn't that hard to get. Not that anyone should do anything with that information, should they be able to get it.

SAPD to probe storming of wrong house.

Zach writes:

So a SWAT team invades a house. They shoot through a glass door, throw a concussion grenade into the building, beat the hell out of the three people living there (sending two to the hospital), handcuff the residents... and then realize they have the wrong house. Here is the best part:

"Later, after the scuffle, Officer Darron Lyn Phillips and other officers went to the correct address two doors down, knocked on the door and arrested the suspect without incident."

Weird: today I went into BestBuy -- traditionally one of my favorite stores -- and I felt physicially sick. It could be I'm coming down with something, but it was more than that. The store felt empty and hollow instead of exciting and fun, like it usually does. I don't know if this is because I didn't have any money to buy or even ogle comfortably all the things I would have wanted (I did buy a spindle of 50 blank CD-Rs and 25 cases for $5 after rebates and a music CD, though, so I'll 'blog about that tomorrow or the next day), ordinarily, or if it's because I don't want all those things like I used to and now when I see it all there with the loud music and the people throwing Radeon graphics cards into their carts and then with all the Xboxes and DVDs coming at you from every direction... it was truly oppressive and I couldn't wait to leave: only I had to wait because they had the checkouts cordoned off so one had to walk all the way to the back of the store to then file around the queue back to the front of the store to check out and leave -- yes, just like pigs. Last Christmas season I went to BestBuy like 8 times to buy gifts for everyone. I think, this year, I've just made my only trip to that store. This is very anti-capitalist of me, but there is the beginning of feelings of disgust in me for people who buy things they don't really need (or don't need in order to make the world a better place or their families happier). I know: it's good that people can spend their money on whatever dumb stuff they think they want. Our whole way of life is based on people who spend way too much on cars, toys, housing, and whatever else. I'm certainly not going to be the one to tell other people how to spend their money: it's just by-and-large bad stewardship is all (most people don't need that faster, bigger computer -- especially not if all they do is game or surf the web... Now, electronic music production, on the other hand...). And I guess it's a good sign that I'm starting to feel sick about all this materialism and what-not... it was certainly a lesson I needed to learn as I doubt I would've given any of this a second thought even as recently as three or four short months ago.

But there are many good things out there. To whomever invented the casserole: THANK YOU! It's so great to just take whatever leftovers you have in the fridge, mix them up, throw them in a Corningware dish, top with cheese, and cook for 35 minutes. Instant dinner. Tonight we had baked surf n' turf ziti. Believe me: it was better than it sounds.

I loathe Susan Ager, but she's on to something here... of course, usually, as soon as she gets on to something, she shoots herself in her silly Birkenstocked foot with her tired freeze-dried incohate liberalist rhetoric. But she doesn't get that far this time. Which is good.

At Cedar Creek Church outside Toledo, for example, worshiper Laurie Wuerfel sipped on coffee and told a reporter, "Who wants to sit in church if you're uncomfortable? I grew up in a Catholic church, and I hated sitting on those benches."

She brought her two sons along to the new, nondenominational church with 1,400 seats soft with four inches of cushioning topped by burgundy upholstery.

The boys drank hot chocolate.

As a friend might say "if you think your butt got sore sitting on those hard Catholic benches, think about how much more it's going to get hurt when it's licked endlessly by unquencheable fire?" Of course a Catholic Church nearby in Canton which Jackie and I went to once when we were Church shopping has the same individual, padded comfy seats (and a huge overhead projector which projects the latest prayers and song lyrics -- they change far too quickly to be contained by any single hymnal! -- onto a screen high above the altar).

I have to say again how much I appreciate reading Zorak's 'blog. Anyway, as much as I love her 'blog, I couldn't make it past the first paragraph of this article she linked to: New Gadgets May Spark Deregulation.

NEW YORK (AP) - It almost sounds too "Star Trek" to be possible: A multipurpose cell phone that also serves as an FM radio, walkie-talkie, garage door opener and TV remote control.

Huh? Has this person, Brian Bergstein, ever watched an episode of Trek? I don't recall in any episode, including those of the goofy Original Series, any character using their communicator to open a garage door or change the channel on a television (though the way "Enterprise" is going, those days are probably not long off: "T'Pal... activate the garage door opener!" "No!" "C'mon, T'Pal!" and the episode just runs on that little disagreement as "drama" for the next 53 minutes). It's just... too silly for me even to think about. I'm sorry. This isn't so much "Star Trek"-level technology as it is "A-Team" technology.

MSN.com the "everything is either about Harry Potter or sex or why your boss is a dummy" web-portal attempts to provide some enlightenment this "holiday season" with a list of Eight Sexy Holiday Tips. I'm not sure where the "sexy" is supposed to come in. Good communication (which encompasses tips one through... well, eight) is pretty much required for holiday survival, much less paving the way for any sort of "sexy holidays".

So, all in all, I was disappointed to see that none of the suggestions even mentioned Christmas lights.

I guess this counts as web ephemera if anything does: it's a page where alamuni of Richelieu Valley Regional High School (I'm afraid to speculate as to where that might be, exactly), in this case the class of 1985, have left posts. Why is this interesting? Well, because right at the top of the page is a post left by Steve Rooney. Who is steve Rooney? Well, aside from playing bit parts on Alton Brown's "Good Eats" program (Rooney plays the Mad French Chef, among other characters), he also went to Italy for a spell with Mario Botali for the "Mario Eats Italy" (trust me, Mario really did... all of it... seriously, it's not there anymore... look for yourself!) program.

So if you ever wanted Steve Rooney's hotmail address, I guess now you have it.

The Food Network was good enough to run one of the original pilots of Alton Brown's "Good Eats" television program tonight. It was cool to see how it all began. Anyway, I began looking online and found a number of good sources for all my "Good Eats"-related questions, including this very comprehensive FAQ.

Here are a couple of questions that have bugged me the most:

111a) Where are the kitchen scenes from seasons 1 to 4 shot? They are shot in a real home in the Atlanta area but the house does not belong to Alton. (Post 251.1)

111b) Where are the kitchen scenes from season 5 and on? Beginning with season #5, Alton's own production company, Be Squared, began shooting Good Eats. My sources say that they purchased a real house—also in the Atlanta area—solely for use by his company. No one actually lives there.

And, oh no, that same site actually has transcripts for each of the episodes, including my favorite, "Three Chips for Sister Martha" (three tweaks to the famous Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe which yield puffy, chewy, and thin cookies). I love the green muppet they have in that episode, noted cookie expert Maj. Wilfred D. Cookie.

Alton: Now, I'm a little pushed for time so I'm going to turn this over to a noted cookie colleague. You may know his brother from ...
Maj. Wilifred D. Cookie: I told you never to mention that ruffian. All he knows about cookies is how to shovel them into his face!

Hee!

I think my favorite "Weird" Al song of all time is "The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota". No other song even comes close, I think. It's on the UHF album which, regardless of if you're a "Weird" Al fan or not, should be in your CD library (though they haven't released a 20-bit gold remastering of it, though... which kind of stinks).

Recurring Dreams

In a post below I mentioned a cryptic dream I had a few nights ago. Every once in a while I have a dream (they're always different) that gives me a glimpse into a different potential life I might've had (or might still have, God forbid). It's kind of cool to think of all the different Victors in all their possible worlds, some affluent -- and really big(ger) jerks -- some really impoverished. Some Victors live in Moscow, some live in New York, some still live in my parents' basement, and some in Hillsdale. I guess the dreams are their way of checking in with me. I wouldn't trade my life now for any one of theirs.... But still.... Well, curiousity, they say, is a sin -- or at the very least an occasion to sin. And I'll buy that.

But my post inadvertantly sparked a conversation about dreams, and particularly recurring ones. I think we've all had a variation of the dream Kat Lively mentions below. Mine usually involves Latin and I'm either back in High School or in College. I know I need to go to Latin Class and it's always on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But I can't remember what time. Or what room. And so I always miss it. Is it four absences and you automatically fail the course or can I be absent as many times as I like so long as I pass the midterm? The midterm is this week? But I haven't been to a single class!!! And Dr. Holmes is going to be so disappointed.... Arrgggh!!

(It should be said I never fully applied myself to Latin and that I regret that. I regretted it then and I regret it now. My conscience is a MoFo).

I can't say as I've ever had (and remembered) quite as Portentious a dream as The Kairos Guy had (in the comments below). I've heard the voice of God clearly on only one occasion and He coud only manage to say "two" before I started interrupting: "Weeks? Months? Not years, I hope? What?! Oh, shoot. Sorry, God!" So, God, if you want to reach me, probably keep at it with the whole ineffable epiphany punch-to-the-stomach bit: those seem to be doing the trick so far.

But I, for one, fully expect and hope to have The Karios Guy commenting in my comment boxes for many, many years to come!