1. Mark Twain
2. Geoffrey Chaucer
3. William Shakespeare
4. Jesus Christ
5. Winston Churchill

Discuss.

The other night, while sitting in a candlelit room watching Return of the King with my beee-u-tiful girlfriend, I started to have an internal dialogue. I enjoy the Lord of the Rings films. They're amazingly well-done, as far as production goes. And some of the images are just about overpowering. They're poorly acted, in my humble, but in a sort of way that fits the overall weirdness that a simpering little dandy like Tolkien probably would've liked.

So, there at the end when SPOILER WHOA SPOILER Aragorn has defeated the dark powers-that-was with some small assistance by midget-folk, and is being crowned king, and everybody's getting all weepy, I said to myself, "What's up with these fucking monarchists? Don't they realize that there's going to be ethnic cleansing and genocide, starting with those hairy little Drúedains, as soon as Captain Eugenic there gets his in-bred ass in the saddle? Checks and balances, people!"

In Middle Earth, I would've been a plurocratic revolutionary, speaking truth to power and spreading democracy, undermining the authoritarian might-is-right rule of hereditary tyrants like Mr. "Ein Volk, Ein Land" Aragorn . Well, that or a barber. Get a haircut, you pussies.

I mean my post, not Dvorak's.

All the hand-wringing that Mac fans do about whether or not Apple will survive is good reason to write a column saying Apple won't. The Mac cultists love to defend and extoll their beloved machines until they froth at the mouth, citing style or simplicity or general coolness as the reason they love their Macs. Those people are dorks. It's a machine, people; get over it.

As a rule, I don't like desktop Macs. They cost too much, and once you look inside, it's just about all commodity hardware. They even use the same cheesy CD drives that every PC in the world does, hiding the "eject" button with an ill-fitting, tilting faceplate. In the old days, for a PC guy, a Mac's guts were a confusing blend of exotic components: Motorola chips, where Intel was expected; weird 3.5" 800K floppy drives, instead of the usual 5.25" 360K or 1.2M drives; SIMM banks, instead of DIP sockets; 50-pin SCSI ribbons instead of God's own hard drive interface, ESDI. It was truly different. Today, a desktop Mac has IDE drives, IBM-made CPUs, and the memory can be bought at the grocery store next to the cigarettes. About the only difference you'll see, hardware-wise, is the FireWire port, but even that's beginning to give way to the ubiquity of USB 2.0. It's the same cheesy hardware you'll find in any tired old PC; it just costs twice as much.

Notebooks, however, are a different story. Here, Apple really is the king, in my opinion. You simply cannot compare a clunky Sony Vaio running clunky Windows XP to a Powerbook running OS X, I don't care how many card-reading orifices the thing has. The 15" Powerbook I'm writing this on is simply the most efficient computer I've ever used. The OS X paradigm, along with Apple's hardware philosophy, fits perfectly into the laptop world. You don't ever shut the computer down, for example; you just clap it shut and it goes to sleep. You open it up, and it's immediately ready to use. I've had this computer since March, and I've only booted it into OS X about 10 times so far, mostly for system updates. Bluetooth is built right into the laptop, as is 802.11g (I would say 54Mbit 'Wi-Fi', if anyone could tell me what the hell 'Wi-Fi' stands for). There's USB, FireWire, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and a modem. There's also a PC card slot, though I've never used it, so I don't know what this guy's talking about. All-in-all, the Powerbook is rock solid, and it's a joy to work with.

I'm no Mac zealot, though. I like both my Mac and my Linux-running desktop PC. If you've got the money, buy the Apple. If not, then burn in hell, you Gates-rimming plebe.

Little cellphones today all have cameras embedded in them. You can just click on the shutter-button, and bling! there's a picture in your phone. So, I was wondering if there's a way to send that directly to the police. For example, if you're pretty sure you're about to get mugged, you could just take a picture of the guy and send it quick-like to the cops. Then, you could say, "whoa, G, you might as well keep on moving: five-o's got your mug." Of course, this may come across as somewhat antagonistic, which muggers generally don't like. Anyway, if you send an MMS to 911, does it work? It should. Then, we could all be bitch-ass little snitches at the touch of a button.

I ask, because I had exactly this dream last night. Except, I took the picture of the guy, then the little "Send" button on my phone fell off. I looked all over the place for it, and the robber was standing there, tapping his foot and looking at his watch while I searched all over the ground like Velma looking for her glasses. Had I been the robber, I would've just pistol-whipped my clumsy ass and taken the phone away.

I missed my blog's birthday. It's now 3 years old. Now it's going to be all bitchy until Christmas, where I'll have one last chance to make up for it.

I started this albatross as Rube's Nest, in December, 2001. At that time, I also registered youbitch.org as a tribute site to my ex-girlfriend, just in case anybody was wondering about the name. For some reason, I started writing crap here everyday instead of over at Rube's Nest. And I still have the delusion that I'll get the rest of my horrendously tedious travel diary up over there Any Day Now. It's looking good: After 3 years, I've already done almost a third of it. Only 9 more months to type in there!

But that's mañana. Today's Monday, and that's drinking day. Prost.