I'm sick of Chaotic Good. It's gotten me nowhere! So I've decided to try Lawful Evil for a while, see how that works out. I can't wait to rub my hands together while hatching my latest scheme, whatever that will be.

Here is your long-yearned-for chance to vote for your favorite American novel over at the very, very unnecessary PBS. The Pynchon crowd has been yipping and yupping for Gravity's Rainbow (I suspect foul play may be involved), but most rational people will admit the superiority of Moby Dick. Eventually. Assuming the Objectivists don't get wind of this. (And thank the gods Battlefield Earth isn't a candidate or it would be over by now.)

Google gives interesting stats on your search behavior after you tell it to pay attention. As of today, my All Time Top Queries are:

1. weather 19403

2. [my] bank

3. weather baltimore

4. [my other] bank

5. winehq

6. nfl schedule

7. weather 21090

8. jboss datasource

9. zappa discography

10. spring framework

Meanwhile -- and isn't this exciting -- my Top Sites are:

1. en.wikipedia.org

2. ubuntuforums.org

3. java.sun.com

4. www.ubuntuforums.org

5. www.amazon.com

6. www.oracle.com

7. www.imdb.com

8. wiki.jboss.org

9. edocs.bea.com

10. www.jboss.org

I'm happy to know all this! It's really important! Thank the gods for Google!

Mark Shuttleworth on DRM.

Read about AOL threatening developers with their legions of Time Warner lawyers. Does anyone still use AOL?

So this is what has become of your proud warriors, masters of the seas, defenders of an Empire upon which the sun never set, the spiritual children of Drake and Nelson. So this is how the old world ends! It is a great mercy that Kipling is not alive to see it.

I've been playing this game every day until my eyes bleed for the past week. I honestly can't stop. It's a problem.

Memo to self (since I keep forgetting it), the command is: sudo update-alternatives --config java

All hail the Robot-Monkey Emperor! We Fling His Mechanical Feces!

Massive accumulations of snow pressing upon vehicles and apartment doors have slowed Coventry to idleness. Let us endeavor to speed Al Gore's Global Warming initiative in order to finally get rid of some of it! We are all stuck inside and stinking, growing our beards, evangelizing strange hobbies over the Internet, and mocking various celebrities. Hilary Swank! I mean seriously. Can you actually believe she's anything other than what she is (or a close approximate: a model instead of an actor, an idiot instead of a dumbshit) -- Hilary Swank! Look at her pretend to know things.

Nearby, across the frozen tundra, is Beefy Lou -- a man who neglects to enforce rules upon himself. Going over there is like revisiting some 5th grade experiment in putrefaction: his kitchen is a museum of failed food experiments, plate-cling, stove sputum, and garbage; his living room a theater of grotesque accumulations, including the regionally famous Leaning Tower of Pizza Boxes, a beer case container canyon no midnight intruder will ever navigate silently, and a mail-mound large enough to house several mature groundhogs fearful of Beefy Lou's shadow. I refuse to go into his bathroom, but I sometimes catch whiffs of odor from in there -- ever wonder what drowning in a septic tank would smell like? And worst of all he just sits around all day talking about how hot Hilary Swank is, and she's just not. I don't go over there much anymore.

ZXC meanwhile has become a minvironmentalist, which means he's obsessed with the impact his own behavior has upon the little things around his apartment. He measures the dimensions of seat cushions before sitting on them, then again after he gets up. He counts the number of times he changes television channels. He weighs tooth-paste. He writes haiku about toilet paper:

He's maniacal about it! I don't go over there much anymore either.

Then there's Dr. Jones, who is finally feeling remorse for the invention and promulgation of Islam, and has begun crafting a means of demonstrating to the afflicted masses how silly they've been behaving. At the heart of his scheme is a collection of cartoons showing the Prophet Muhammad in various every-day situations: buying bagels from the corner deli, driving a sports-car on a country road, taking a crap. He hopes that Islam victims will recognize themselves in these cartoons and realize that they are each their own Prophet Muhammad. I guess he's a humanist now, Dr. Jones. I won't be going anywhere near him anytime soon.

And every early morning the Fancy Man stands on his head at the strip of ground between Parking Lot 5a and the playground (where the snow has been removed for garbage bin access). I don't know why either.

This dude has some photos from the anti-Putin rallies in Russia, including the arrest of Garry Kasparov, a Russian McDonald's, and some scary looking dudes wearing sky cammo (because, presumably, they can fly), or possibly idealized-ocean cammo (for swimming in idealized oceans, all blue and yogurty and singing hippie songs). But hey there, Pootie-poot, free Kasparov! I really must insist.

I guess my stern language to Pootie-poot did the trick: Kasparov is free, and none the quieter either. Some strangeness from this article: Russian cops will beat you with a truncheon then fine you $38? I understand the RU culture and economy is different from ours but something still seems uneven there. And also: 30,000 people "patronize the McDonald's restaurant at Pushkin Square on an average day"? E-gad! Wonder what they do at Times Square...?

Praise be to the Robot-Monkey God Emperor
We fling his mechanical feces
We collect his electric bananas
We debug his warm brown fur

In Virginia a crazy dude went crazy and the busy-bodies got busy over the bodies, picking away and squawking. The photos of the crazy little douchebag reminded me of Michael Myers, so I watched Halloween again, in which Dr. Loomis says, "No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong [...] with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes... the *devil's* eyes! [...] I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... *evil*!"

John Carpenter's Halloween is a masterpiece, the archetypal "slasher" film that inspired hundreds of imitators. I think it's even better now than it was in 1978 because it breaks many of the conventions set by those later films. For instance, in much of the film Michael appears in broad daylight, standing and staring at his intended victims or following them around in his car, all workmanlike in black overalls but with a ghastly pale Halloween mask on. These daylight scenes are the most effective to me, the most thrilling, because the audience knows who and what Michael is, and what he's intending. In other slasher films the killer must scuttle about in the dark, peer through dense foliage, keep to the shadows, as if afraid of being recognized, or scaring the prey away, or of coming to the light in some symbolic sense; but Michael Myers just doesn't give a shit. He'll stand in your front yard and stare at you through a window. He'll wait for you at the end of a sidewalk as you're returning home from school, always to disappear the moment you look away. He never attempts to hide from or fool anyone; he's a pure predator, with no guile, no guilt, and no sense of his own strangeness.

I also love how Michael's psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, has this absolute conviction, this moral certainly, that Michael is irredeemably evil. Usually the psychiatrist character wastes his time trying to understand the monster, reason with it, prescribe it some pharma, *communicate*. That never works. That guy always dies. Dr. Loomis has the benefit of experience; he shoots the monster as soon as he gets the chance. Some people just need to be put down.

Oh, and don't forget that music, that music is awesome!

All hail the Ravenous Monkey-Bot
From whom all pancreatic ailments originate
We fling his mechanical feces

Without the help of a Monkey-Bot
There can be no pancakes

Without the help of a Monkey-Bot
There can be no monkey-bots

Without the help of a Monkey-Bot
Who will be the King?

This short CG film is way cool.

As excited as I am for the new re-re-release, this sort of thing concerns me. I hope Scott's not going Spielberg-Lucas on this thing, trying to fix what doesn't need fixing, and adding in extraneous scenes nobody needs. Airbrushing wires and smoothing out model mattes are one thing; reshooting entire scenes is another. Hell, even Spielberg and Lucas never brought one of the actual actors back for their midnight edits.

Warning: This will not interest you. I now have a new and improved weblog posting program for posting to this here weblog. Reason is some annoying bugs, like Google Reader's bizarre lack of support for XHTML making every post sans line breaks. That's fixed now, observe:

(The secret was switching from XHTML to HTML. Which discovery is why I'm paid so well for this sort of thing.) Another problem was with the archive links on the archive pages themselves not updating. To fix that would mean regenerating every archive page every post (or once a month somehow), so I just removed the links entirely. Who cares.

And finally streamlined everything to the point where the app is now really just a plugin for text editors smart enough to support plugins. E.g., with gedit now I just have to click Tools - Post and the current post is posted (stupid English). Now I don't have to write a real-time spell checker or a search function or whatever. I'm a genius!

But no, you can't have it for your own weblog because I just don't like you.