Contents Subject to Change, As Needed

It's time to end this drought. Therefor, I'm here to relax the muscles and wet the ground with a diarrhetic torrent of mental sewage.

Externally, I continue to thrive in Chicago at a price. Enjoying my ever-accelerating thrift store empire and the deluge of must-haves that wash ashore has grown old. You can only possess so many antique gas masks and sets of custom tailored prosthetic legs before you decide that the sight of one more copy of Iococca by Lee Iococca is going to set off a chain of events that you refuse to be responsible for. This is amplified by the process of shedding such priceless garbage. Getting rid of a home filling amount of other people's trash that you once imbued with monetary value really makes you think. All of the hours of my life spent on this bit of junk and that, for I prefer to convert straight from units of time to objects of detritus exchanged for such time. That movie cost me ten minutes of my life and then another ninety-eight because it sucked.

I had a dream some time ago where I was living in a Morton shed on a small plot of land surrounded by trees. In the rear section of the shed, I had erected a humble kitchen and living area topped with a sleeping loft. The rest of the space was taken up with tools and workspace where I welded sculpture, repaired machinery, spat in the face of science and whatever else a Mad Engineer would find himself up to. It was beautiful. I'm not entirely sure how much of this was the original dream and how much of it has been romanticized in the following weeks. Since the initial dream, I've really fleshed things out in my daydreams. Wind generators made from old steel barrels and the biggest electric motors I can find, rewound to accommodate the added magnetic poles. An enormous wood burning oven/kiln/furnace/forge made from clay bricks hand formed from the nearby creek bed, complete with spinning chimney cover to capture the escaping heat and return it back into the system in the form of just enough electricity to power a thermostat and an automatic flue. A small grove of bamboo out back as quickly replenishing fuel? Okay, so there are some things that I still have to work out. It's become my "five year plan". As a person who finds "five year plans" repulsive, I can now understand their purpose, I guess.

Internally, the city has become a wasteland. Where I saw potential and untapped resources only months earlier, I now see uselessness and worthless cretins. There are still gems among the wreckage, but only in the form of people. I am not a city boy by nature and I think I've leveled up in Urbanity significantly since I got here, but it's soon going to really detract from the rest of my experience points. However, quitting cold turkey is not an option either. Not because I find myself addicted to city life, but because the concept of land ownership has become such a perverted and protected notion in these fine United States.

All of this in mind, I have been confronted with a decision that I have to make. Not a simple this or that decision, mind you, but an open ended, nigh rhetorical self-imposed question as to just what in the hell I'm going to do about this. I pride myself as a decisive person, but this isn't the sort of thing you can just proclaim. So, I plan. A plan is really no more than a fluid decision and my fluid decision is to leave this city, diddle around the country side for a month and arrive in a different, smaller city. The former being Chicago, IL and the latter being Eugene, OR. If you're reading this, I hope I spend some time with you on my way.

2009?

So, I've been not blogging of late, but I think it's starting again. And whenever I feel the need to read/write internet content, one of the most joyful/sad places to check is, of course, this fine blog.
Looking back, I think it's fair to say that 2008 was at least a year of some fine content for we three, though not as much as any of us probably would have idealized. This year has begun as anything but ideal in terms of our collective internet output of gibberish, and so, I'll go ahead and at least stick in a placeholder three months after new years in the hopes that this space will again stalwartly serve contain those malefic products of the wildly occasional writer-lust that we each cast out into the web.

Actually, I've been two-timing this blog with a typewriter. What a glorious outrage!

In Which Eric Remembers People From Another World

Nick Craig just set off a very bizarre chain of events.

1. I was in the bathroom taking a shit when my phone rang. It said nickcraig on it so naturally I thought "what the shit?" and then picked up.

2. Proceeded to have a half hour conversation with said nickcraig, he drunk, I still on the toilet unbeknownst to him. Highlights included:a recap of 5 year runion including tales of a nearly consumated convservative christian bigot vs. lesbian smackdown featuring Tiffany Mickleson and Anne Peters, good old FC nostalgia, a brief treatise on segregation and race relations in Middle America and the broader global community, and the obligatory State of the Joel address.

3. Here being where it gets truly wierd, this unexpected contact ignites an ill-advised and unquenchable desire inside of me to contact someone else I haven't spoken to in years. I hatch a plan to organize my own sort of 5 year reunion, but excluding all the people I wouldn't want to see.

4. I call Anne Peters. I apparently still have her correct phone number, she apparently still has my number listed, and she actually answers. We talk for a half an hour and highlights include: finding out that Ashlea Twait is moving to Seattle in a few weeks, discussions of Mindy and Sam and Carla, and coming up with the idea that my quest should take the form of a drinking game in which I become successsively drunker between each call I make. I would need to make a list of people, and order them appropriately so that the last person on the list is the one that would demand complete shitfacedness to contact.

5. I call Carla. She also answers. I find it absurd that this is working. I tell her about my strange night and the drinking game and we brainstorm about my list. We agree that Joel should be last. Or maybe Sam, but that I'd have to be too drunk, and would pass out before she answered. Geoff Lindsay has contacted her, as Sam has contacted me. When informed that Carla teaches preschoolers Geoff told her he would never trust her with his child. Carla is thinking about becoming a hairdresser, despite the fact that she gave me the worst haircut of my life, which I pointed out.

6. I ran out of steam. Ty, you would have been next even though you weren't in my class, but I know you're rocking out at Lollapalooza right now and I couldn't really bear to call anyone other than you. And I didn't really feel up to getting as drunk as it would have required. Nonetheless, one of the most enjoyably weird nights in recent memory.

Ty, I'm calling your ass soon.

To all Major Fractions...

I submit this conversation as redundancy that our triumvirate submit to a census. Also, as a pleading beacon that we concentrate this solution...though one mole of us remains constant, it gets split up between beakers...

Ludovic
awake, super magic awesome man!

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
kablam!

Ludovic
I can only imagine what that resurrection sequence looked like...
what's the word, my friend?

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i just squeezed out a tastey blues jam...
if you haven't read it already, the mrs. and i will be heading your way in august

Ludovic
I have read it already and I am readily awaiting your arrival...are there any other guests travelling along?

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
maybe noah parks.. that would be it.. and i kind of doubt it
no, i do doubt it

Ludovic
not to discourage, but I would be especially pleased if a reconvening were undisturbed by lesser fractions...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
so delicately worded

Ludovic
I take pride in my art...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i hear you... this trip will be ideally filled with a lot of reconvening, as the lady will have been in europe for so freakishly long

Ludovic
oh yeah?

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
will you have to work a lot?
like, at night and stuff?

Ludovic
early august? I believe that I will be unable to take any time off...it's a black-out month...moving season...though, I'll be done at 6:30 every night...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
ah, good.. i don't want to use your place as a motel
meaning.. i sleep there without seeing your shining face

Ludovic
I truly enjoy that our conversation is following along in the same vernacular as the absurdly bourgeois period film that I'm watching...
and yes, I would like to spend time with you when you are not rocking and/or sleeping...or when you are...doing either, I suppose...
so, yeah, anyway, I'm glad you're coming, fuck face...and I'm glad you're bringing your lady friend...I'll be glad to meet her...I hope that you can meet some of the talented and wonderful humans that I've encountered thus far in my Chicago adventures...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
we'll be ready

Ludovic
glad to hear it...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i'm ready for an adventure.. it's hard to find a job when everyone else is loosing jobs because of a flood.. i have a lot of time to sit around and.. be ready for things

Ludovic
I know it gets old, having everyone try to convince you to be where they are, but I'm going to try...
Chicago is pretty rad...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
i'll give you a fair shot.. for now, it's time for me to read the silmarillion until i fall asleep

Ludovic
sleep well, man of awesomeness...and keep the boss fruit growing, for it is our fate...

Ic slǣpe on eorðscræfe
word, son

I'm still curious about this anthology...

Could we have an anthology?

hey boys... 

So, I'm bachin' (pronounced "batchin'") it this summer, and It's making me crazy in a number of ways. However, as usual, these lapses in material "happiness, comfort and love"-making potential get me riled in a most introspective text-hemorrhaging manner. Anyway, last night/this morning I ejaculated the following collection of loose signifiers that I intend to make into fiction of some length:

Writing Project Brainstorm:

short story topics --> the gap;

 rurality and urbanity;

my generation;

- how fucked are we? why?  

technology;

society, political identity (vs. personality);

heterosexual-masculinity;

animality/primitivism;

drugs;

time/ambulation as a biological classificatory device/botany;

geomagnetic reversal;

 I realize that the gist of this brainstorm is heavily obtuse and science-fictive and, for me, it has already yielded three fairly concrete short story ideas that I intend to germinate in the coming days.  What I propose is FICTION most speculative! For, while our existential rants give us candid access to our shared and/or unshared emotional landscapes in light of our individuated urban experiments as they stand, I feel as though some of the greatest mojo that the triad has ever mustered came from our wildest and most fleeting hopes, our joking attempts to glimpse the future in all its probable absurdity. It's going in the movie. 

Anyway... my tripartite proposal/promise/dare is that fiction is coming to minortriad this summer and you two, or anyone else who reads this b-log should come along as well. The task I set is to extract the "rain" and the "torm" from a good heavy brainstorm and leave ourselves with some pure BS. 

Fattening the Brain Magic (a Tyler list...)

A) It took me quite a while to realize it, but apparently Janine Turner was a major sex symbol for me. I didn't know until just now when I saw an ad for some workout contraption featuring TA-DA!! Chuck Norris!...and a bunch of other random celebrities who don't have careers anymore...the last of which was TA-DA!! Janine Turner. At which point I thought...wow, she's...she looks familiar...she's...Maggie O'Connell?
3-I think I dated Jada Pinkett Smith...in high school...except she was white...and kind of a bitch. Yeah, tell me there's not a resemblance...
D. Getting really drunk makes me want to watch Waking Life. Inexplicably. I just want to ride in a boat car and listen to Speed Levitch pontificate on Golden Gate suicide until the Wiggins stop dreamin'...and I don't understand why...I think it's because I've never seen that movie sober...because it never seems like a good idea until I'm relieved of my judgement...
two!! putting relatively rare things online makes me happy, so, starting with the past, here comes Rock & Rule...the future holds KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park...hopefully followed by Andy Warhol's Frankenstein...

Thursday's Deep Thought Cache Dump... (a new list)

1. "Everybody Sees, and Everyone Agrees": The new Raconteurs album is certainly not bad, probably excellent, and definitely growing on me. It's so many shades of black.

2. Today I replaced my now former facebook photo with a photo of three of me on my living room couch engaged in some of the archetypical actions which comprise the living room and its identity. Upon looking at it again, I now notice that the picture is also chock-full of waldo-esque items. See if you can spot all of the weird bits in there!


3. Lyrics are fruity. These are some of the ones that David wrote yesterday and I'm recording in the hydra-facebook-photo I mentioned.

soft white hands lite pitchers of cream
fold napkins, polish silver, poach eggs, boil water and wait
Great lucifer's screams and oak tables ignite

at the awakening...
of the human skin dream
at the awakening...
of the human skin dream
pressing labor tired heaving beasts for meats
naked on pristine sheets of steam
her empty carapace ablaze and sips tea all night

at the dawning of the feast...
feast of the human skin dream
dawning of the feast...
feast of the human skin dream

4. Media from the Month gone by:

There will be Bud - a fine flv that should be googled, especially by anyone who has seen There Will be Blood, anyone who enjoys a good Daniel Day Lewis impression, and/or anyone who wears sweaters.

New Gnarls
{ What do you think?}
New We are Scientists

5. Okay, so I wrote this list on thursday, but it's now Sunday... Not as though anyone is actually checking the triad for updates urgently enough for this to fuck with anyone's day, but I thought I'd clarify things for those of you who enjoy thinking that time ought to make sense.

6. Doc Ellis is everyone's favorite baseball player. Or at least he should be.

7. For Tyler's Eyes Only: I can't upload albums to the ftp. Or at least, not the way I've been trying to do so; that is to say, in a folder and into the music folder.

#8. For Eric's Brain Only: Hannah Thompson

9. I've just been be-face-friended by Ryan Holtan. This is perhaps the most depressing profile page I have ever seen. I encourage you to be-face-friend him just to witness this trainwreck (like, the kind little kids have in their mouths) and then to have a good laugh/cry/sneeze-gasm along with me and our only current (herpetic) mutual friend katie dakken. :D

10. And Finally---> I would like to offer an apology (socratic style) which pertains to the month-or-so-long gap that preceded this post. I had been assured sometime, perhaps in february, that there would be an incoming eric post, which would shock and molest us just how we like it. I liked the idea of this post so much, in fact, that I nearly decided to simply wait forever until it came, so that I would not hold three posts row-wise. Apparently, I got over it. And I'm sure, given his current face-status, that eric will chime in with something insane here right quick.

"Ours go to" 11. I might get flown out to Ioway for the graduating of Siri. Wanna meet up??

A Scenario:

I want to know a girl who is attracted to me for a very businesslike reason. I want her to be mortally dependent upon receiving my warmth. Not to say that it's going to require anything particularly out of the ordinary, maybe a night spent accidentally locked in a workplace freezer/fridge. I guess, actually, I want a girl who has good reason to believe that she is mortally dependent upon receiving my warmth, but does not necessarily have to be. We'd be in this goddamn freezer (did I mention she has HUGE eyeballs) and she'd get real worried and right there at the top of the list of precautions to be taken immediately would be "Body-Heat-Preservation and Reinforcement". However this went down, it would involve one sitting very close to this freakishly beautiful girl and getting to notice all the finer movements of humans without having to look at oneself in a mirror. The curl of the lip, the twitch of the eye, the whizzing exhale of the nose.... okay, apparently I'm also feeling kind of lysergic in this scenario, but I swear i'm not actually tripping at the time. No, we'll say it's one of the really unfortunate aspects of the situation that my stash happens to be just outside the freezer in my backpack.

Oh, but the point being, that i have no idea how people get together without history (a long string of common prior events) or the shared delusion, what I'll call fantasy (inspired by intense coincidence/luck/physics?). I guess I thought the whole "need for warmth" concept would be a pretty indellible coincidence. This is certainly a weird time for history-building. Currently my most up to do date auto/biographical knowledge is contained in some late-night digital scribblings for those eyes which should fall upon this blog, and in the mind of an only child who has come to consider me something of a surrogate brother. All the female perspectives on Peter Johnson that I can imagine right now are pretty odd, pretty disjointed, and pretty vague. A good stiff coincidence could clear that right up... Vivan the shared delusion of significance and the willing mutual suspension of disbelief!

Get Ready For Super-Ultra-Gigantic Megapost!

So... I'm suddenly flush with goods fit for blogging, so rather than give you that unfortunate backward in time effect that blogs are so good at, I thought I'd just slam them all in one space. Thus this post will be list like, though ridiculous in this capacity, because the list contents will be no more than temporally and authorially related and all a great deal too long for the standard list format.

First: Required Viewing

First Book of Armaments 16:1 And then Peter took the holy disc from the great singularity and blessed it. First, he gave thanks to the singularity, appealing to its oneness and threeness alike, and he was filled with knowledge of the goodliness of his action. Then he spake unto his two companions, holding the great disc, a rarification of so much ephemeral and human, aloft and pleading: "Take this brothers, for these representations have resonance wherever we exist and are rightly a part of our canon. Play this in the rememberance of three. And be it a covenant in our life, everlasting, Amen". And so, the men partook in the sharing of this absurd delicacy... not so great within itself, but the key to much that memory and the spirit normally withhold. And they were quenched.

(I got kind of carried away with that... if you're able to pick it out from within that vaguely lutheran-flavored queef, one or both of you is smarter/crazier than I have yet imagined. The gist of it is that tonight I'm uploading the Darjeeling Limited to the FTP [it leaked yesterday, Fucking FINALLY], a movie whose numerology and Wes Anderson stamp make it an irresistible force for triumvirate nostalgia. It's taking me back to the life aquatic on a cold Edina night as I type.)

Second: Retarded Reading
This next one is a little more straightforward at first, and consists of only official act thus far as a technical Waldorf Alumnus: my pseudonymous submission to the lit-rag whose name has changed this year from the Muse to the Crusader, if my reports are correct. I'm not sure whether I like this one, but Laura told me that she did, and that it was compelling writing such that her co-editors might not get it... Hell, if she hadn't liked it I would have posted it on MinorTriad anyway.

Fear and Loathing in the Gap
by "Brad Rowncliffe" '07

Graduating from college is a whole new kind of death. For many it can be felt as a subtle end in the process of translation from the life of protected kinship to the life of the experimental, liberal individual.

I remember, vaguely, walking around in a robed horde of black-capped, beaming initiates. We were under fire; battery-fuel filled capacitors snapped, daze-inducing as we crept into the gigantic tent. I felt like an asshole. It isn't the kind of magic that people seem to like to invent when they talk about graduation, or when graduations are dramatized. There's an effervescence they try to depict, an idealized clicking and whirring of new social mechanisms set into motion by this event and a clear new momentum that thrusts these newly licensed thinkers out into the myriad tributaries feeding that bountiful current that is American Progress. But really, it isn't there.

All of those plastic smiling gazes and leaking tear ducts and bottles of champagne, what are they for? I don't think they're all that deep. They're the swiftest and surest sign of a dubious undercurrent that tugs at the Baby Boomers. For someone who has spent four years reorienting his or her thoughts around a framework of rational, self-referential, critique this kind of symbol floats in on a nauseating breeze and ruins the cake. There is hope strewn all over the place, but it is a stupid hope, a shored-up, bootstrapped vision of a future in which we apply ourselves wantonly to the task of Horatio Alger protagonism and everything comes out Hollywood.

So, what is the point of all this hoping, longing, planning for easy integration? Do our parents long for a world in which we assume all their baggage, their parents baggage? I suppose that would figure. A generation whose rebellion was easily as effective as the war in Vietnam, which it sought to quash, has been jaded into a more legalistic, cog-like lifestyle than even that of their depression-era parents. The "60's" is pure camp sold back to them and bought for their children, a goofy era that was the beginning and end of an ultimately silly counterculture. The world they live in is immovable and the idea that their children will bring or even witness great and radical change is both rhetorically powerful and safely laughable to them.

I think we are a generation divided. On the one side there are the privileged and the willing. Their parents have been carbon-copied, thus their "important" traditions carried on, albeit with an oblique artificiality that bespeaks this preservation, a new generation of brats is squeezed forth. I don't know what these people think of life on earth, life in the United States, but I hope they damn-well love it.

The other aisle is filled with catastrophists, catastrophists simply waiting for catastrophe. We live with a sincere wish for something authentically defining, an event which would stab into the softness of the ever-billowing boundaries that confine and proscribe our lives, which would lay bare the power relations that hobble our thinking and then violently explode them, leaving us with a clearer, messier, more visceral understanding of what the human animal needs and should value in life. We want something so inhumanely sublime in its scope, schedule and magnitude that there is simply no resisting the symbolic force of its many contexts. Something that mangles devastatingly and excretes communities whose task is to negotiate the form or to sputter and drown.

We understand, though perhaps we do not all think about it in these terms, that to be human, to be even an aborted fetus or retarded quadruple amputee, is to be among the luckiest and most improbably constituted matter in the universe. People are the side effects of raw atoms and energy and often they are way too worried about preserving that tiny, comprehensible slice of existence within which they can feel purposeful, meaningful and reasonable.

That's where I sit, right now. I do seemingly insane things every day in the service of systems that were broken before I was born. I am ultimately subjected to the whims of anyone who bears enough of the pure, rarified human agency of currency. I have no de facto recourse, even to reclaim the smallest bit of my biological habitat. I am a prosthetic beast whose ultimate happiness lies not in my ability to do good works or fulfill some other absurd criteria, but in my ability to somehow festoon all the aspects of my life, my body, my dare-I-say soul, so that I might incidentally feed my head with enough love, comfort, respect, excitement, suspense, ire... or some complex of emotions such that I continue respiration. I know there are better ways for me and for a whole lot of other people to get our biologically mandated jollies here on this planet. I am already way too lucky for this bullshit, and so are you.


Third: Zoom In
This is what happened when I ran out of Craigslisting for the day..... It kinda bugs me, but it's a little more personal than the other one, and it seems like stuff I'd joke about with you guys, or the conversation that I would manage to not have with my mother.

A Slice of Life:

I'm sitting here today with nothing to do but wait on answers which will likely never come. The arrival of any of these replies will signal that I have now progressed to any number of squares one, many of which are frankly quite exciting, but others of which lead down a path of belabored inquisition that ultimately terminates in an oddly arranged new schedule of drudgery. It is only via securing this sort of obligation that one of no means such as myself is able to remain free and alive.

For some reason, this experience also makes me want to write passages like the above.

I walk around, sometimes purposefully, in pursuit of one or more of these answers, other times just to get a new perspective on Portland. This was something I did during college, but not with any necessity and not often enough to scratch the surface of Portland's many views.

I haunt the Internet. Looking for anything that appears to have a job at the other end of it. I painstakingly craft Facebook status updates, they emerge in a range that should only be characterized as encompassing the involuntary utterances of the retarded - or perhaps autistic - to the mildly cannibalistic, schizophrenic. Recent entries have included my current address, which under the new Facebook status formatting conventions comes out to be something like "Peter apt. 8 4107 SE Gladstone St., Portland, OR, 97202."; entries which vaguely illuminate the nexus of my simultaneous longings for food and companionship, such as "Peter forages for interesting protein..."; and entries in which I make non-attempts at inside-humor with myself, like "Peter wishes he had more tea... ".

Specifically, I wanted some more of the shroom tea that I drank from a Nalgene bottle at a really fun party, and thought that the perfect way to assuage these feelings would be with a little foppish quip about me needing more tea displayed to the Faceworld. Beneath which, there would be me, the me that is hyper-present in the psilocybin-tickled brain, the me who feels no more at home than in an early fall garden: naked, hairy, panting, hair touching the back of my neck and shoulders, breath sharp and falling out in moist white tufts. I love being shocked at the number of fruits I can collect with two hands. My translucent skin, the flesh, bone and gristle beneath, suspend these juice filled bodies in a perfectly tight and delicate grip as I gallop around...

Anyway, today I need something for the status that makes it clear that while I am waiting for something, I'm not busy and I crave interruption. Not because I think anyone reads my Facebook status, but because I'm probably also going to vote in November, so I must believe in bullshit.

Be Kind, Please Rewind...

Embracing this new toy, if for nothing else, as a way to more easily control your brains through cinematic suggestion, I present to you (via the ftp) Animation:

The Point
-A silly little ditty from Harry Nilsson (yes, that Harry Nilsson) narrated by Ringo Starr.

Rock & Rule
-Find of the year, I tell you. Though it was last year that I found it...on laser disc...and just now got around to popping it into my giant laser machine. A surreal trip into an absurd future where bipedal house pets bring forth demons with the dark magic of rock 'n roll. Celebrity singing voices!

This second one I had to lovingly transfer and compress myself, which proved problematic (and the quality was pretty shitty to begin with), but now I think I have a system down, so there will be more obscure films to come when I find them at my place of employment as polite society does away with the rotting magnetic abomination that is VHS by giving them all away to the less fortunate. Personally, I enjoy the ghosted images and twiddling with the tracking. Also, I never actually pictured myself hunkered over a laser disc, a toothbrush in one hand and a cloth wipe in the other, painstakingly polishing away the scuffs. Not that I regret it, I just never thought I'd let things go that far...

My brain will be remaining on standby for the insertion of pretty, pretty pixels of your devising as well. Left to my own devices, I will otherwise end up filling my headhole with such nonsense as can be currently found in the shiny donation cup that is Videodrome...I like to picture it as one of those big red vortexes at the mall that you drop a penny in and watch it roll around and around and around until ffzZZOOOOOOMMMmClink! If I could go back in time, I'd shove my little fist in there every chance I got and pretend I thought it was a giant Take-A-Penny-Leave-A-Penny. One of these days, I may actually get around to looking up how to link directly to files on the ftp from here...maybe...

Everybody Smooch Comcast! Now, Wash Your Mouth!

I dunno, maybe they wear nice lip gloss....

S0 first, Juno.  This movie is odd, uncomfortable, something megan would force tyler to watch while sunning-in his curly locks... thus, delightful. Don't pay monies to cronies for your viewing experience: take a dump on those arcane business models and fuckin' grab that shit from the FTP! I've completely traded in that new media, crinkly wrapper, over-stickered, over-packaged, plastic smelling high that comes from "legitimate" intellectual property procurement for a new kind of glee. This feeling I want to pin down is the deep-spinal arpeggiation I feel when worthless suburban bandwidth finds form and meaning in my waiting hands. With every byte I upload, still more with each imaginary byte that you and they download, I fill with bits upon bits upon bits of ethereal pirate fairy dust. I don't need to scrape up my pennies for extra plastic widgets and make lemonade out of a fairly gross, wasteful situation which only the music makes tolerable, reasonable; I piss a wide stream of it down a laser tube and into your awaiting mout... i mean minds... Anyway, I ramble...

How about some SCARY DEPRESSING SHIT!

1. This is another list. Just making sure you noticed. 

2. Computers are scary. The past is repeating itself. 

 

http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:LyWM5zIgLnMJ:www.eurotrib.com/story/2008/1/12/191247/981&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a 

3. This is slightly scarier, though, at least there will be women. Ha ha, suckas!

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h110-393&tab=summary

4. This is ridiculous... 

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/bush-quip-might.html

5. This is disturbing. Not the events so much as the fucking commentary. (I also kinda wish that digg wouldn't give away my punchline like that.)

http://digg.com/world_news/Dad_Sodomized_A_Hole_Teen_Stepson_Who_Raped_His_Daughter

Thanks ladies and gents. Try not to sever thine own pretty heads, goodnight. 

Widening Out My Internet Habitus....

A list, for listing's sake.
A list, also, for a new year and renewed triad.
A list, mostly, to pass the time and to record the most recent path of my internet pacing, my digital mantra of late.

1. Apply for jobs --> constantly craigslisting
2. Look for housing --> somewhat less pressing craigslisting
3. RLSlog.net --> No one seems to have more insight into the great empire of the pirates
4. Mininova.org --> Maybe rlslog missed something?
5. isohunt.com --> you gotta be fucking kidding me... there must be a torrent for that!
6. shareminer.com --> maybe some music then
7. facebook.com --> oh jesus, nevermind... wait, holy shit! what is that tiny photo of? they're MARRIED!?!?
8. funfail.com --> gotta be able to search out some tunes somewhere...
9. sordo.freehostia.com --> alright, fine, let's see what these assholes seem to think is worth downloading...
10. boingboing.net --> no, i'm not going to watch boingboingtv!!
11. digg.com --> this is composting at its finest, all the raw informing power of the net ground up and packaged in a sophomoric candy shell...
12. achewood.com --> ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha hah ah ah ah ah...
13. wunderground.com --> check the weather... of course using the page that pays homage to the group of lunatic acid freaks who sprung timothy leary
14. edition.cnn.com --> just in case i want to see what paris and lindsay are up to
15. sparksfromflint.blogspot.com --> reminds me that i miss robby... and wish he wrote more... and am glad that he's no longer a member of the waldorf isolation great bloggers club...
16. andcomfort.net --> i wish i knew more about php... I need a blog template with a rotating background image like that...
17. minortriad.blogspot.com --> serious internet longing/ecstasy/inspiration with every view
18. tvokay.com/tv-links.cc --> they ain't tv-links.co.uk, but they are the gold standard in non-bittorrented video content these days...
18.1 ninjathis.net --> veoh download frontend --> vivá la liberación
19. convergent.blogspot.com --> candy!
20. Finally, when i'm really out of shit to do, i visit the vacant lots: most notably the as-yet-unused thingstodoonacid.blogspot.com --> classy!

Aw, grandma got you another wack sweater!

It pleases me so to read these words. I have not amusing holiday anecdotes, nor tales of wanton drunkenness. Words that I bring to the table describe nerdish tragedy and dorkly triumph. A pair of weeks thence, I stumbled on the notion that if one could use one of these fancy (albeit, underdeveloped) iPod Touch thingamajigs to connect to one's home network through a VPN over the internet and subsequently use VPC to control one's home computer, one would have the power of one's desktop in the palm of one's hand. At least, whenever one was within range of a wifi network connected to the internet. A seemingly brilliant idea.
Such a notion pushed me to research the possibilities. Theoretically, it could work. In practice, there are several technologies that need a bit more development. However, the research involved installing Mac Tiger Server on one of my numerous home computers. In fact, it's running right now with three active accounts; mine, and both of yours. The problem is that Mac Tiger Server doesn't give me the control over FTP and web services that I'd like. Anyway, basically, my news is this: I'm setting up a web and FTP server that we can use for things such as this blog. Also, much more. Currently, I'm working on a project to build an x86 machine into a G4 tower case so that I can test different operating systems on it to see which one will suit the concept the best. Why an x86 machine? Because the Ubuntu project is abandoning PowerPCs (and so is everyone else). Why try to retrofit the damn thing into a G4 Tower case? For shits and giggles. Why embark on this project at all? Because I've spent almost all of my free time lately researching network protocols and modern programming languages and no one has stopped me yet.
Though the initial goal has been long forgotten, I have found new meaning. The project has become as such: Though the Triumvirate doesn't convene as much as it used to, it is not defunct...we are something like retired superheroes, merely going about our lives with one ear pricked up in the direction of our long silent communicator watches, subconsciously waiting for the call back into the action of the old days...I want to facilitate the communicator watch. No, that's not quite it. Not entirely. I also want to recreate that time in the van on the way home from Decorah the weekend the Focus smashed into the ditch...when we had the wifi network setup while driving down the road at 60mph. The same freedom of information and ease of connectivity except, like, wherever we go and whatever we do.
I suddenly realize that I promised tales of nerdish tragedy and dorkly triumph...well, I was really referring to the downfall of my iBook...again. It was replaced by a broken G4 iBook that I got from work for $50 and fixed...it was up and running later that night. It served me well for approximately five weeks. Apparently, the G4 iBooks have a defect. In every G4 iBook, the processor will eventually separate from the logic board in a more or less unreversible way. Long story less long, I fiddled around until I had created a makeshift tablet pc out of parts from my old iBook and this new iBook. Currently, it's serving as a way to control my Mac Tiger Server, which doesn't have a screen, keyboard, or mouse of it's own.
Anyway, I'm buying a used powerbook, building a Frankenstein server, watching too much anime and want it all to somehow add up to keeping in touch with you two assholes more than we have been...

Shooting Off at the Christmas Mouth

Christmas Eve proved to be an odd but not unpleasant experience. Two intensely hoppy microbrews on a chronically empty stomach did their share in giving me rosy cheeks to complement my multicolored scraggly Santa beard. Mix in a glass of pinot and stir by grasping cousins in both arms and carrying them around upside down while other cousins hop lightly onto any other exposed bit of weight-bearing flesh. Now, stuff your holiday Peter full of well-seasoned meat, and highly adorned starch and sugar. Now, with dinner accomplished, it's time for weird conversation carried out by variously tipsy people pushed out of comfort zones by the sheer weight of long-held religiousity and ritual, and the simple pressure accompanying the huge magnitude of exchange upon which daintily rests the fragile and precarious sanity of each of the young children in the room. I learn through a series of generally over-powered exchanges that each of the children has been very good this year, each performing the staggering number of tasks that can only be carried off through a complex division of mental gymnastics which provides children with a life of gradually decreasingly-unreflected zen and their parents, or perhaps just their mothers, with the complementary existence of unreflected, facilitatory, chaotic fanaticism. I throw people into a tailspin by confessing that among presidential candidates I resonate only with two predictable losers: an over-goofy, constitution-carrying, babyface and a (gasp) republican, (gasp) libertarian, (gasp) anti-federalist. It doesn't seem to make any sense. What about Jon Edwards? No, only socialists and avowed fed-killers are allowed on my political bandwagon currently.

I discover that the raw-hide, bone-like instrument that the dog has been slovenly jostling back and forth across the room is actually a dessicated dick of beef. They come in a box, thirty all hard and red and glistening. My uncles chuckle at this reality and pass me a Scarlett O'hara. This is apparently the manifestation of booze that corresponds best to wrapping paper and the act of witnessing childlike glee. As I sip the sweet, tart drink, I stare off into space, thinking about how the dog would fare encircled by her snacks, staring straight down the barrels of thirty re-bodied bull penises.

Finally, the time comes, and one uncle becomes my designated driver back to the big city. I say my goodbyes to all and am shuffled into the latest in business-acceptable automobila. And as we glide through the sparkling dark of the wet portland night I am made privy to those things which uncles hope will find common ears of masculinity, deviance, humor and zeal in their nephews. Finally, I am dropped off. I don't feel the facial dullness or the tingling shifting weight of alcohol any longer, they've given way to a deeply pleasant warmth. I stand in the street and watch as my uncle's car heads around the block before lighting a cigarette. Despite its apparent preference for plying me with drink, Christmas Eve is clearly on shrooms.

P.S. Thanks Eric for destroying those textual blueballs. Apparently, I've got semen reserves all over the fucking place, just raring to be digitized.

Offspring of the virgin's womb

Maybe it’s that holiday spirit, maybe it’s that I just got the official Forest City update from the Johnsons, maybe it’s that I just read through the entire history of this endeavor, maybe it’s the gentle goading of Peter. For whatever reason, I’m so nostalgic I could shit. This really was a brilliant idea, and it has served us well, and my laziness is no reason for it to stop now, just when we see each other the least, just when we need it most, just when the vestiges of the Triumvirate could be crucial to sanity and a last ditch effort to remain distinctly un-adult.

You guys are funny fuckers and I need an old school laugh, so god damn it, serve me up a hot heaping plate of bullshit lightly seasoned with assholery and kingfuckerchickenery.

I mean, for god’s sake Ty, I haven’t seen you since you dove the dive of a plastered swan onto your coffee table and beat down your true inner nerd by breaking your geeky computer games into shards and frisbeeing them around the room. That was a fantastic weekend, but too long ago. For all I know you’re now a long haul truck driver with a penchant for Billy Graham and Long Island Ice Tea who has children or pets or houseplants or something. For all you know I’ve pierced my balls, taken up yoga, and invented a revolutionary sex toy.

Because there are only a few people in the world who are blessed enough to know precisely how funny this is, I give you selected vignettes from A Very Thompson Christmas:

1. My grandmother put a hairbrush in my stocking. Maybe she thought my pubes might be getting a bit unruly, I don’t know.

2. Uncle Bob doesn’t really understand that his particular brand of political humor and incessant goading doesn’t really mesh well with the newest member of the family, an ADHD 9th grader that Cindy and Calvin have adopted. Most of the inside jokes cause Khalil to look exceedingly alarmed and ask "Are you going to do that to me?" At which point we explain that no, of course not, nobody in their right mind would do that. "But that really happened?" Yes, grandma Doris used to do that to Cindy and Carol and Bob. Then he announced that he was riding a bike back to Seattle. And grandpa tried to go with him.

Anyway, I don't have much of consequence, but I wanted to pretend there was something. Merry Stuff and Happy Things in any case. Post something. I don't care if it's a transcript of a conversation your balls had with each other, I'll read it, and I'll even enjoy it I promise.

Blogger Acquiesces

At last, the time has arrived when I have both a bounty of time and this fucker finally allowed my refugee blog accounts to move on into this sharper, snazzier, 2.0-ier blogspot. Anyway, I'm so goddamn done it hurts to be here. It makes me twitch just thinking about the fact that I'm going... getting freer, poorer, happier by the second. Anyway, I defy you both to exceed my output in the next few months on this blog, mostly because I love it when you guys write stuff that makes it to my face... The thesis is done, the discourse will continue... See you all soon!

Apocalypto

I hate the way that lately I only get jacked up enough to write on minortriad when I've had a proper injection of hot-cinema-beef. Well, that's precisely what this was. See this movie, it's beautiful and snappy enough to suppress even the most deep-seeded of anthropological/archaeological criticisms from coming to mind until well after the 139 minutes of digital glory have played out.

Even juicier than his cinematic craft, is Mel's overall message. Civilization is ultimately destroyed by the duping of the masses by the powers that be (in this case Mayan priests). This film is no cop-out to some kind of universalized Christian morality whose corruption and violation spells disaster. In this vision of Mayan civilization, the great accomplishments of mathematics, astronomy, technology, and art become the carrots to keep the donkeys marching on through a field of slavery and carnage toward a smallpox-infected future. Viewed in light of the historical liberties taken in producing such a vision, Mel's message seems not to be aimed at the Maya in the least, and clearly enough aimed at the "powers" which pull the strings of the Western global hegemony. Apocalypto:Mel Gibson::Loose Change:Alex Jones... and I feel oddly delighted about that.

happy bird meat day

I do not have a particular purpose for posting, but I feel I would be remiss not to take advantage of this time when I am sitting on a couch with no particular immediate responsibilities, other than the responsibility not to abuse the hospitality of the Nelson-Penlands by vomiting a Thanksgiving medley on their upholstery. If nothing else, I suppose this day provides me a conveient template in which to structure my thoughts. In the spirit of the Pace Thanksgivings of my recent past I would like to go around the table, and each of us will say what we are thankful for prior to eating. I will be playing the roles of everyone. Bear in mind that the object is to see how far we can make it before someone makes the first exceedingly sarcastic comment. Usually this is about as far as Uncle Bob.

Today I am thankful for:

The spilling of beans all over the kitchen and into the cranberry sauce, thus creating the first annual beanberry loaf.

The imminent winter.

The movie Bad Santa and the continuous joy it brings me to hear Billy Bob Thorrnton say "fuckstick."

That we decided to so thoroughly document our high school experiences, allowing me to get nostalgic last night and scan through a goodly number of pictures of Joel. Joel looking dumb. Joel eating a sandwich. Joel laughing uproariously.

That my parents and sister will be here in a week, and that my sister wants to stay in my house, a house which contains among other things, Christopher McKay who will likely offer my sister pot, sex, or both. (And there it is. That must have been Bob.)

That I might not have to be at home for the predicted death of Sandy the dog, which will take place within the next 2 weeks to 1 month. I don't really want to see what happens to the dog, or my dad.

Please feel free to add your own heartfelt contributions. I will see you bastards soon. Keep it unreal.

Masculine E. Tea: The Bitch is Dead Now...

Yesterday I went to Casino Royale... This movie caused my head to fall off, and I thought I should tell you about it.
The movie was one that David, Peanut and I had initially attended as a means by which to bolster some vague sense of masculinity which we claim to possess at some level. Casino Royale was not in fact the sort of film that one would ever want to go see in the hopes of reinforcing modernist metanarratives of masculine power and accomplishment. Casino Royale was great and frustrating because it refused to cop to these notions, deciding to instead reenvision and comment on the typically modern agenda of Bond movies with a truly subjective, postmodern outlook. The Bond that we are left with at the end of this film, the Bond who is now realized as the modern man-weapon stereotype spy that the world knows as "Bond, James Bond",is a creature who finds himself in this mindset only after first coming to reject it and with full knowledge of its flaws. He casts off his sociopathic spy persona only to find himself betrayed in every instance and hurl himself back into the relative comfort, security and simplicity of his double-o life.

Creepy, right... and then we had to stop so David could buy himself some Lebron James's...

digital message, optical bottle, electric sea

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

REMINDER: Never give out your password or credit card number in an instant message conversation.
Kitchen Paint says:
here, how's this?
Milkman Dan says:
there, it's Kitchen Paint again...
Kitchen Paint says:
sweet, if you change yours to weaker eye, eric will have a frickin cow, do it
Milkman Dan says:
how's that?
Kitchen Paint says:
because his is pollutant, and weaker eye is another one of our classic bush lyrics
Kitchen Paint says:
or you could do bone driven
Kitchen Paint says:
awesome weaker eye
Milkman Dan says:
have you ever noticed how some of these new children's toys coming out have some whacked up names... ...I mean, you see these adds for stuff, and it looks perfectly normal until you hear what it's called and you can't help but think "What the fuck is that?!"...
Milkman Dan says:
I just saw a commercial for Rugrats toys from some fast food joint and if you put them all together you could make one bit Reptarlanpinbar... ...whatever the fuck that is... ...at least, that's what it sounded like...
Milkman Dan says:
big, not bit...
Milkman Dan says:
but anyway, I swear to God that's what the guy said...
Kitchen Paint says:
cool
Milkman Dan says:
mhmm...
Kitchen Paint says:
i love tomorrow
Kitchen Paint says:
i finally perfected the tabs for the intro
Kitchen Paint says:
no i just have to perfect the actual playing of the intro
Kitchen Paint says:
now, that is
Weaker Eye says:
I see...
Kitchen Paint says:
and we can get bass for that
Weaker Eye says:
cool...
Kitchen Paint says:
so then the kitchen paint cried out to the weaker eye saying....
Weaker Eye says:
I've got your damn herring right here!!!
Kitchen Paint says:
well, said the weaker eye, you can't have it, because....
Kitchen Paint says:
I'm Fucking Freezing!!!
Weaker Eye says:
you and your damn big fuck off beard... ...if it wasn't for that, we wouldn't have so many people taking flights from New Jersey to Hong Kong... ...you bastard...
Kitchen Paint says:
well, retorted the kitchen paint brilliantly, "i've got news for you....
Weaker Eye says:
but no, you have to be big man himself and eat all of the oysters yourself... ...well, you've got it coming man... ...it's coming for you and it ain't your normal two bit soccer mom in her minivan... ...this is something big...
Kitchen Paint says:
"damn you, you never did understand" screamed the weaker eye, for his wrath was growing, "i've got problems too you know, i have big fuck off problem, and i'll have you know, they aren't pretty"
Weaker Eye says:
well aren't you the squirmy little half naked girl swinging from branch to branch? I'll tell you something mister, plaid ain't the last thing I'll ever wear...
Kitchen Paint says:
and with that the weaker eye summoned what little strength he had left, lept out of his comfortable socket and began to urinate into the small bucket of white paint
Kitchen Paint says:
take that you heinous fiend!
Weaker Eye says:
uhhh, who's ~lyss~? do you know?
Kitchen Paint says:
alyssa maguire
Weaker Eye says:
ok... ...just wondering...
Kitchen Paint says:
damn you, not only have you interrupted the wonderful saga, but you have also changed your name back to milkman dan!!!!!
Weaker Eye says:
haha...
Kitchen Paint says:
butch
Kitchen Paint says:
cassidy
Weaker Eye says:
and
Kitchen Paint says:
paul newman?
Weaker Eye says:
the
Kitchen Paint says:
your mom?
Kitchen Paint says:
Dick Cheny?
Weaker Eye says:
Sun
Kitchen Paint says:
Glance Pid?
Kitchen Paint says:
we should seriously write a whole long story with three or four people on messenger some time
Weaker Eye says:
dance
Kitchen Paint says:
it would be great
Kitchen Paint says:
kid
Weaker Eye says:
Kid
Kitchen Paint says:
we should though
Weaker Eye says:
small goa
Weaker Eye says:
t
Weaker Eye says:
pygmy women
Weaker Eye says:
teeny tiny titty twister
Kitchen Paint says:
is it bizzare porno night over at the old levad place?
Weaker Eye says:
no, I'm just saying random things that come to mind...
Weaker Eye says:
fermented blue cheese...
Kitchen Paint says:
oh that's right, every night is bizzare prono night at the old levad place
Kitchen Paint says:
!!!
Kitchen Paint says:
i like blue cheese
Weaker Eye says:
Nasferatu was my grandmother's pimp...
Kitchen Paint says:
awesome, nosferatu
Kitchen Paint says:
have you ever watched that movie?
Weaker Eye says:
whatever...
Kitchen Paint says:
it is fucking hillarious
Kitchen Paint says:
it's a silent film, so everything is incredibly overdone
Kitchen Paint says:
great great great
Weaker Eye says:
finger bang the yin yang until your bing bang is a color other than purple...
Kitchen Paint says:
how did you hear about my bing bang
Weaker Eye says:
selective channels...
Kitchen Paint says:
oh yeah
Kitchen Paint says:
awesome
Weaker Eye says:
now squeeze me them knockers and drown out the talkers and knock the old ladies off of their walkers...
Kitchen Paint says:
please tell me you made that up?
Weaker Eye says:
of course I did...
Kitchen Paint says:
we need to get a copyright on that, pronto
Weaker Eye says:
can do, chief...
Kitchen Paint says:
Canned Doo?
Weaker Eye says:
Potted Meat Product...
Kitchen Paint says:
new chia meat
Kitchen Paint says:
grow beautiful grass on all your favorite meat products
Kitchen Paint says:
ham, bologna, turkey, chicken, salami, linguini, and many many more
Kitchen Paint says:
(chia meat is not licensed for head cheese in some states, see our website www.chiameat.com for details)
Weaker Eye says:
and for our Eastern friends, cat and dog as well!!
Kitchen Paint says:
i'm cool
Weaker Eye says:
Goldengate watercolor...
Kitchen Paint says:
oh dear, three way
Weaker Eye says:
I've embedded my guilt up to the hilt and I hope that this joy never ends, as I push in and out I'm surrounded by doubt and passion and warmth that she sends...
Kitchen Paint says:
did you just make that up
Weaker Eye says:
yeah...
Kitchen Paint says:
dear god man, you're writing our lyrics
Kitchen Paint says:
that rocks
Kitchen Paint says:
i'm saving this conversation
Weaker Eye says:
cool...
Kitchen Paint says:
muffins make me cool
Kitchen Paint says:
if i wear them in my pants
Kitchen Paint says:
i've seen you sporatically typing in this window, what is it you have to say?
Kitchen Paint says:
driving in my car, i smoke my cigar, the only time i'm happy's when i play my guitar
Kitchen Paint says:
yeahhhhh yeahhhh, yeah yeah yeah
Weaker Eye says:
I know this mechanic who's good, but Satanic, and fixes the cars kinda strange... ...he chants and he prances, does Satanic dances, and that's just for one oil change...
Weaker Eye says:
that's really dumb... ...but I like it all the same...
Kitchen Paint says:
dude, that rocks
Kitchen Paint says:
god, we have to keep all of this
Kitchen Paint says:
we are going to have some awesome songs
Weaker Eye says:
I'd have to agree...
Kitchen Paint says:
i like that last limeric a lot
Weaker Eye says:
that one took more time than the rest...
Kitchen Paint says:
and i don't think the musical aspect is going to be as hard as i initally estimated
Kitchen Paint says:
once i learn a bunch of this crap i'll just start modifying it all a little and add in some stuff that i think sounds cool
Kitchen Paint says:
and that's how it'll all start
Weaker Eye says:
sounds fine with me...
Kitchen Paint says:
good
Kitchen Paint says:
guess what i just found out
Weaker Eye says:
that five thousand pounds of strawberry custard fell out of the sky onto Nantucket?
Kitchen Paint says:
chase was wearing bikini underwear again today
Kitchen Paint says:
black
Weaker Eye says:
again?!?
Kitchen Paint says:
thought i'd share the pain
Weaker Eye says:
he needs to stop doing that...
Kitchen Paint says:
yeah
Kitchen Paint says:
kinda makes you think things doesn't it
Weaker Eye says:
he was telling us about it in Chemistry a couple weeks ago...
Weaker Eye says:
kinda makes me try not to think things...
Kitchen Paint says:
that's really gay
Weaker Eye says:
that's REALLY gay...
Kitchen Paint says:
uh huh
Weaker Eye says:
may the hot fires of hell consume me, may the human filet knife renew me, may the meaning of life just confuse me, and I just want my girlfriend to do me...
Weaker Eye says:
except ex the "hot"
Kitchen Paint says:
nice
Weaker Eye says:
this is fun... ...just sitting here coming up with shit off of the top of my head...
Kitchen Paint says:
i bet
Weaker Eye says:
name something cool...
Kitchen Paint says:
what?
Weaker Eye says:
just name something that's cool...
Kitchen Paint says:
oh, umm, brendan?
Weaker Eye says:
ok, something more vague...
Kitchen Paint says:
snow?
Weaker Eye says:
snow... ...good...
Kitchen Paint says:
the light shining through the bathroom while i take a crap early in the morning before marching band?
Weaker Eye says:
wow, that's a good one...
Weaker Eye says:
my motherly instincts towards baby sea turles and killer gray apes from the movies...
Kitchen Paint says:
you thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever
Kitchen Paint says:
true
Weaker Eye says:
nifty sixties sock hops and jumpin' fifities rock bops and just watchin' while the chalk drops and breaks upon the floor... ...the white outside of snow days and the yellow tint of sun rays are sinking through the gray haze as death knocks on your door...
Weaker Eye says:
it would make more sense if the sixties and fifties were switched around...
Weaker Eye says:
nifty fifties sock hops and jumpin' sixties rock bops...
Kitchen Paint says:
yeah, that one goes in many different directions, it's very complex, i like it, make sure to save this stuff
Weaker Eye says:
hmmm...

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Watching Night Come Amber says:
Pretty nifty, eh? I figured we needed something to comment on.