Yesterday seems to have been international day here on the blog. Besides the no surprise US and Canadian hits I also had hits from Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, and France. Of course all that pointless screwing around I was doing a bit ago didn't hurt in boosting the hit count.

I should really know better than to screw around with the formatting of this thing. All it does is cause me to waste time I could be doing something useful with, like eating cookies.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

If you've been sitting in despair waiting for their next tour you're in luck. Motley Crue have reunited. I guess someone in the band must need money. It will be interesting to see if anyone else in heavymetalland is inspired to get back on the road. Former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore might be a candidate. In recent years he's been doing the renaissance festival thing as Blackmore's Night, but I can't imagine he's making huge bucks off it. Could he put together a new version of Rainbow, and would it make him any money? Deep Purple is likely out, because from all accounts he split because he couldn't get along with the rest of them.

Might as well make one more post before I go to bed. If you look at my Blogger profile you'll see that it lists me as a Libra because of my birth date. I find it amusing and bemusing that anyone takes astrology seriously at this late date. Of course the fact people do is just a reflection of their lack of knowledge in all sorts of other areas. It could be worse. At least people in North America haven't taken up the Japanese obsession with blood types, which many look to for some of the same kind of things astrology claims, like romantic compatibility. If you've ever looked at webpages for Japanese celebs and pseudo celebs you've likely run across listings of their blood type.

For some reason the thought of the winter boots I wore as a kid just came to mind. They were navy blue nylon things that if I remember correctly had zippers on them. I certainly remember the felt booties, or liners, or whatever you'd want to call them, that they had. They were detachable, and presumably replaceable, although that never happened in my case. I can also remember the winter boots I wore in high school, at least I think that was when I wore them. They were big clunky things with the most ridiculously stiff and thick laces I think I've ever seen, laces that were so long I ended up wrapping them around the top of the boots a couple of times. They were rather hard to tie.

I gave up wearing winter boots years ago. These days I just wear running shoes as I do the rest of the year. I just don't see the need for winter boots even when its -20 and you're freezing your butt off.

I was just reading some stuff about a Harry Potter fanfic writer who had her apartment broken into and her and roomies computers stolen. Now folks, including many she doesn't actually know, are actually making donations to replace their stuff.

Someohw I doubt complete strangers will be donating me any money anytime soon.

Okay.

This time I mean it.

For sure.

If it doesn't happen you can come after me with your pitchforks and your clubs.

Its about bloody time.

Chapter 8 will come out within the next week or so.

Honest.

Fer shure!

(Of course for most visitors the above will be utterly meaningless, but for certain of you, you KNOW what I'm talking about.)

Just had a first. I hit the "next blog" link on here and up came a blog that tried to dump a trojan onto my machine. Thank goodness for my antivirus software.

Just in case anyone passing thru is a guitar nut, here's a few places worth checking out. The Fender Forum Ibanez Collectors World. The Guitar Gallery.

I just went past the $10,000 entered mark at Where's Willy today. It amazing how much money passes thru your hands over the course of a year. I've also started entering my bills at Canadian Money Tracker as well.

The supposed attempt on the Serbian president I mentioned yesterday apparently wasn't. They're now claiming it was a case of road rage by a US Embassy employee. That guy has got to be one of the luckiest men alive, as the presidential bodyguards didn't just shoot his car to bits. However many people in Serbia aren't buying the explaination. Presidential supporters cling to the idea it was an assassination attempt, while Serb nationalists opposed to the president claim it was all a setup to generate sympathy. Probably not a surprising result in a country as divided as Serbia.

Since I'm sitting here not doing much I might as well post a link to an online comic I came across. Its called No Need for Bushido Its kind of entertaining with some not bad artwork, and bound to make you smile a bit if you're into manga and old samurai movies.

An interesting article ran in the San Francisco Chronicle today, discussing the appearance by major league baseball players Jason and Jeremy Giambi last year before a federal grand jury in a steroid trafficking case. Both men admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs. What I found especially interesting was their willingness to take pills without knowing what they were, trusting that the pills weren't harmful, or conversely weren't placebos they were paying a lot of money for.(One was possibly the female fertility drug Clomid.) One can't help but wonder if Jason Giambi's health problems this year had anything to do with him being on "the 'roids" last year.


You wouldn't catch me doing that kind of thing. I don't like needles.

Looking at the cover of the latest Wired today, which features James Cameron and a blurb about all these high tech research things supposedly on the way, I couldn't help but think of how similiar it can be to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. It features the same kind of breathless techno fetishing of stuff that often doesn't actually appear. Anyone who has paid attention to PS and PM content over the years will be familiar with all the "gee, that REWLS!" high tech stuff they've blabbed about that has never come to pass, including stuff of questionable scientific credibility in the first place. I'm probably not the first person to see similarities with the long defunct "pop science" magazine Omni as well. Omni often did the same kind of thing, but like Wired tried to appear more upscale that PM and PS, and was more interested in fringe stuff like life extension and psychics.

There was an apparent attempt on the life of the president of Serbia yesterday. Someone rammed their car into his a number of times, with no success. Apparently things are so bad for wannabe Serbian assassins these days they can't even afford to buy a cheap gun for assassination purposes.

I was gonna post a spoiler warning, but frankly a spoiler warning would just let you guess what happened anyways.

It's byebye Ken Jennings, finally. He was beaten tonight on Jeopardy. It will be interesting to see what we see of him after this. Will he use his celebrety to break into some form of entertainment job, or will he go back to his job as a computer software dude? Somehow I think the latter is far more likely. Of course he will be back for their Tornament of Champions sooner or later.

Watching the latest Delta State episode, "Claire's Crackup," was rather a frustrating experience, namely because the episode suddenly jumps to Brodie apparently being in trouble and nothing is really resolved about what's happening to Claire. This is a really good example of something that I've noticed in a few other episodes, which is that they seem to be trying to cram too much into a 30 minute package at times. You'll be watching and something will happen without enough explaination so it seems like you've missed part of the episode when you know you haven't.

If you've ever tried to use one of those online translation things I hope you realised that the translations don't always work very well. A case in point is a hit I got on here tonight from someone in Columbia. They used Google's translation service to look at my entries from September. It translated my description of some attendies at the final Montreal Expos game as "fairweather fans" as "los ventiladores del fairweather," which even a non Spanish speaker like me can tell is just plain wrong. Obviously an idiom like fairweather fans translated literally is not going to be correct. Unfortunately I've seen websites where I suspect such a program was used, as the English used has all sorts of weird phrasing that could be the result of overliteral translation.

Time for another random Japanese culture link. Today's selection: the homepage for those Japanese psychedelic troubadors, Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO(there's some topless women in a few places on here, so minor viewer discretion advised). Incidentally one of the labels that currently has Acid Mothers albums in their lineup is Canada's own Alien8 Recordings.

I've mentioned before that I'm a regular reader of the Fanficrants community at Livejournal. Unfortunately right now they've got anonymous posting disabled due to trolling problems, and I can't comment on anything. Grrrr! Stupid trolls.