This is sort of a journal crossed with editorial comments and my own (perhaps wild) views on any and everything. There will probably not be any continious themes, or rhyme and reason to it. This is just the kind of stuff I sometimes ponder while walking the dog or sitting in a drive through lane.

June-25-04:

AT LONG LAST I am back in action. My webtv died on me, and I borrowed this ancient sega dreamcast thingy from my brother-in-law, but you cannot do ANYTHING on it except read web pages and check web-based email, so my poor site has been gathering cobwebs for the last three weeks or so. I'm back now, and I'll try to get the new stuff I've written on here in a timely fashion. I've got lots to catch up on, but I'm gonna get on it ASAP. M thanks to those who visited me durring my downtime, it was nice to see that I was still being read. :) On that note, I'll start the updates.

June-7-04:

Over the last week or so, I have seen "Monster" and "Aileen:The Life and Death of a Serial Killer" on DVD. I would now like to indulge in a little rant on the legal system, and that ninny Jeb Bush. Whether you are for or against the death penalty, I think most people with and I.Q. above fifty can agree that it is a very serious matter, and should not be taken lightly. In the case of Aileen Wuornos, her mental competency was called into question for a number of reasons. However, during the whole of her trial and imprisonment, she was evaluated for less than an hour by psychiatrists. I mean a TOTAL of less than one hour over a span of more than a decade. The last evaluation was right before the execution, and the thumbs up report was sent to Jeb Bush: this final interview had lasted fifteen minutes. EXCUSE ME?! The State of Florida is so efficient at delving the human psyche that they can make such decisions in fifteen minutes? I can't even settle on a pizza topping in fifteen minutes. If you ever wanted to see the judicial system at its absolute worst- this is the kind of case you are looking for. Come on, now...if the people of Florida are looking for this kind of decision making in a governor, they should toss Jeb Bush out, and swear in a potted plant. At least the plant won't require a salary.

May-28-04:

I have recently added a little blurb on my award application, stating that I won't consider certain types of sites (you know, porno, hate sites, etc). Now I will tell you why I even thought about it in the first place.

A few days ago I was surfing the net looking for poetry to read, and I came upon a site filled with "poems" all about killing and dismembering women. As I'm sure you can imagine, I was not exactly overjoyed. This brought to mind the age old question "What is Art?"

I'm sure everyone has their own ideas about what art is, and just as importantly, what it is not. I can not accept that anything written in meter, or with a rhyme scheme, is automaticly poetry. There has to be some kind of magic in a piece (whether it's a painting, poem or novel) that makes it into art. Clearly, not everyone would agree.

Norman Mailer won two Pulitizer prizes, for example. I read two of his books. The Executioner's Song was a well done true crime book about Gary Gilmore.

Ancient Evenings was a loosely plotted book based in ancient Egypt, and mostly concerned with grody sex. I'm talking very graphic, very nasty stuff here. I could almost overlook the incest thing, because ancient Egyptian royalty did, in fact, marry their siblings and other such nonsence. When I got to the part about the god Set boinking a cabbage, however, I just gave up. It was just endless, really. The freaky sex was the entire point of the book, not the story line (paper thin as it was).

To me this is NOT art. Pulitizer prize winning author or not, this is just Penthouse Letters written from a prison for the criminaly insane.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that he could not define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. The same is bound to be true of art.

May-25-04:

Very early this morning, I was up waiting to call work to see if my august presence (snicker) would be required yet again on one of my alleged days off. To kill time while waiting for it to get late enough to call and have a shot at someone answering the phone, I read the WebMD page.

An article on "confusing foods" caught my attention. The point was that foods that have long been considered no-nos are sometimes touted as "miracle foods" (chocolate relives anxiety; wine lowers cholesterol, etc), while foods that have long been thought of healthy will suddenly kill you (toxic metals in salmon, too many sugar carbs in fruit, etc).

I had to stop and ask myself this: Does anyone REALLY care, and if so, why?

For as long as I can remember, the public has been given periodic updates on surprising things that are going to kill us.
(In the 70's, someone discovered that toothpaste causes cancer in lab rats-this had no impact whatsoever on anyone's oral hygine)

My point (and I do have one), is that everytime you turn around, something will be newly discovered to cure what ails you, or kill you outright.
Who knows what to believe?

At any rate, we are all certain to die of something at some point.
If you avoid doing something incredibly stupid, like baiting alligators or leaping in front of buses, I figure you have done your part, so what the hell- have the wine with the salmon, maybe they'll cancel each other out.