A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.

Here's the view from my "smoking room" at the moment. I woke up this morning and it had indeed begun to look a lot like Christmas. My "smoking room" is actually a broom closet in the stairwell, where I smoke because my girlfriend is a non-smoker, and I don't like her apartment smelling like a holding cell. And I actually rolled out of bed around noon. Other than that, everything's as I said, I think.

I think I'm still a little high from paint fumes. The apartment's finished, except I still have to mop the foyer. And give my landlady the keys. And relish the steam that shall pour from her ears when she realizes she traded hardwood floors for white walls and this:

(Closeup)

An excellent use of linoleum, to be sure. Germans have a slight problem with seeing the big picture sometimes; they're a little too detail-oriented.

Facts and Figures:

87 Liters of White Paint
65 man-hours
92 sq. meters of ceiling painted
3 m wall height
4 painting extensions, 2 of which broke
2 pairs of jeans
1 pair Addidas tennis shoes
1 pair Reebok running shoes
2 Lextite full-body condoms
6 brushes
5 rollers
1 man lost to illness, presumably malaria
1 man still missing in action

300kg of wood flooring disposed of, along with 1 old German lady's illusion that when an American offers you an all-or-nothing deal, he's bluffing.

Augie hits the crapper.

Rube admires the Hetzfresse's (sorry, still no link) spackle-moves.

After a week of painting, even the most unqualified handymen can afford to show a little painter-butt.

In abject frustration, Rube decides to paint the rest of the apartment with his sizable head.

In this case, 'experts' being a clever euphemism for 'Oompa-Loompas'.

Rube (R), in full painter regalia, prepares to rawk this house. White.

Ack!

Sorry, guys, I know you're all jonesing for some sort of anti-retard rant or something, but I'm painting my apartment this week. That means no TV, no radio, no Internet, no standing on the reload button hoping against hope that Velociman finally posted that picture of the pustule he promised us a while back. As primitive as can be, as they say.

There's also no heat, as long-time readers may remember. You see, I'm not really painting my apartment. I'm painting my old apartment, which I moved out of about a month ago. So you know it's done with love. Good lord, the paint-job looks like ass, despite what my esteemed colleagues have done to make it better. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit, paint neither dries nor covers the walls very well. And the unheated water that comes out of the tap does nothing to clean the brushes. FYI.

Keep the faith, my friends. There are pictures coming.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I lost all patience with crazy people. I used to feel sorry for them, and think, aww, poor crazy person. Maybe I could help or something. Now it's all I can do not to plant my boot in their face. It's like that smelly old lady who sits in the ATM kiosk and screams some sort of aggressive-sounding eastern European nonsense at me when I'm trying to get my money. I envision the joy on the faces of the jack-booted thugs who should, by all rights, be stomping her steaming, genetically-damaged innards all over the immaculately-tiled floors. Merry Christmas, you fucking crazy lady. Then there's the so-called "King of Augsburg," who's basically a 40-something attention-whore who dresses up like Ludwig II and walks around city hall like he owns the place. Let's not forget this one loon who jumps on the streetcar at all hours and sings opera at the top of his lungs. They should be tagged, shaved, and sterilized, the whole loopy lot of them.

That's why this post by Velociman aggravates me. Not only does he not engage them with violence, he gives them smokes! It's the two things that conspire to drive me batshit: non-violence with regards to crazy people, and the wanton giving of smokes to freeloaders. Now, in all fairness, I used to give cigarettes to anyone who asked. I could recognize a brother in need, and would happily surrender a Camel to silence the monkey, if only fleetingly. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it's wrong-headed in the most serious way. I didn't realize just how wrong it was until I went to Paris. I'll warn you now, in case you've never been in Paris: Don't ever smoke outdoors. Even in the nice parts of town, you'll be swarmed by sullen teenagers from every direction, demanding a cigarette; and offering not even the slightest nod of thanks once you give them one. You'll go through about a pack an hour in daylight, and you'll be asking for a brick-slap on the back of your skull if you light up at night. Since my last trip to Paris, I've taken a different tack towards freeloaders. If somebody comes up and asks for a cigarette, I ask for money. If I've got more than half a pack left, it's only 50 cents. If I'm down to the last 5 or so, or if the asker is drunk, it's a cool Euro per nail. You should try it; it works. You can make enough to buy a whole pack, and it's better than saying no, since it's completely fair. Unless it's a crazy person, in which case you should just say no because you're as likely to get a small rock painted with a smiley-face as you are to get a Euro.

Yee-haw! I got my search thing working again, in order to settle a personal dispute. As it turns out, I've only used the word 'twat' 3 times in 2 years. And, I might add, always in a non-sexual context.

"First of all, baby, it wasn't me. That's all I've got to say about that. I don't care what the bitch said, I didnt. Do. Shit. I was jsust sitting there typing away, like I always do. And you know how cute I look when I'm sitting there bangin-, I mean, typing away on my little Powerbook. Baby, can I just say you look beeeee-u-tiful tonight? You do. What? Oh, I mean, then she came over to me and said, 'Are you like a journalist or something?' And then I was like, 'Journalist? You trying to piss me off or what? Journalist?' And she was all, 'Well, you know...' playing with her hair and shit, twisting little curls around her finger and stuff. You know, I can read people. So, I deigned to retort: 'I'm not a journalist. I'm a blogger.' Which was probably exactly the right thing to say, you know, because then she was all like, ewwwwww, get it off me! which was fine by me, she's probably in j-school for all I know. What's that, baby? Naw, baby, I think blogging's sexy, especially when you do it. So anyways, I was just sitting there typing away about how bad the service here blows, I mean, you know, they're lax and whatever, and then I look over and the bitch is staring at me. I mean like retarded starin'. And that's when I noticed that not only had she done peeled off the label on her beer bottle, she'd already got started on her date's! Well, baby, that's when I realized it was time to get the HAIL outta Dodge, nowhutimsayin.

"Check please! I mustered through my risin' gorge. Now, stop that fussing. You know ya daddy treats ya right."

Well, looks like I've managed to become illegal again. The last time was in September, and then I managed to get a three-month extension. The twist in the spiel is, if I can manage to stay on German soil until April, I'll get a Green Card. Of course, what happens in-between will probably have a major effect on whether or not I'll be a hollow-eyed 80 lb. scarecrow by then, selling nickel-bags to schoolchildren to buy coffee and tobacco, but whatever, it's a start. I think I've developed my game plan; stay tuned...

Bureaucracies have their place in the order of things. They bring order and impersonality where it's needed. It's the earthly manifestation of the Rule of Law, where the rules apply regardless of identity or circumstance. To be sure, there are good and bad bureaucracies, but the point of it all is, poor and rich alike are affected by the red tape, thereby assuring some sort of lowest common denominator of suffering that unites, feel the love my brothers. Bureaucracies do have their drawbacks, of course. To wit, "going postal" is now officially in the American lexicon. But still, you have to admit that it all looks good on paper, like Socialism or torx screwdrivers.

So, now all that's left to hope is that I can phone it in for four months and back into the playoffs, to mix a metaphor or three.

Here I am again, sitting in what I now refer to in my head as the Worst Bar in the World. It's not the worst looking bar in the world. There are some rough-and-tumble jobs on the bad side of Bangkok, where betting your Baht on spontaneous bouts of Thai-boxing is a respected tradition. In one bar that I visited where the tuk-tuks dare not roam, I actually found a tooth in the ashtray. It was a human tooth, I assume, though admittedly I'm no dentist. There were dried blood patches on the floor, at least on the night I was there (perhaps not coincidentally it was Ladies' Night). There's also the late, great Stein Club in Midtown Atlanta to consider.

No, this bar is just the worst all-round bar in the world. You may recall the episode with the fütchen, about which I wrote a week or two ago. At that time, the staff was just too stressed to bring people beer. Tonight, however, they had a different reason. I walked in about a half hour ago; and, as usual, about half the customers were sitting around with warmed-over, greasy, empty glasses in front of them. The other half were either already drunk, or not the drinking type. I walked up to the bar to order myself a beer; I've given up ever getting served at a table here. The wait staff were sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes, as is their wont, and I actually had to tap one of them on their tattooed shoulder to get their attention.

Once I'd ordered my beer, the tall, slender, albeit buck-toothed blondie sauntered around to the business side of the bar, and started pouring a beer. After a few seconds of shooting nothing but foam into my glass, she called to the other "waiter" that he needed to grab a new keg from storage. "What, a new keg again?" he whined.

Again? I thought. When the hell could they have last changed out kegs? How many months could it take for such a ridiculous gaggle of slackers to actually dry up a keg? More likely the beer evaporated. Does this place even have a boss? What do you have to do to get fired here? In many places, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes while all the customers wait for beer from an empty keg is nigh Dickensian in its cartoonishly abject insolence. There's a niggling little thought in the back of your head that you forgot the password, and that everyone thinks you're a narc.

You'd think that years of abuse, culminating in having a waitress delegate her job to you, would be one of those lessons you'd never forget. You get burned, and you develop little rules of thumb to avoid making mistakes more than once; you develop little proverbs like, "always throw the circuit breakers before drilling", and "never moon a Chinaman". But sometimes you forget, and here I am again, in the worst little Kneipe in Germany.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.

Here's the view from my "smoking room" at the moment. I woke up this morning and it had indeed begun to look a lot like Christmas. My "smoking room" is actually a broom closet in the stairwell, where I smoke because my girlfriend is a non-smoker, and I don't like her apartment smelling like a holding cell. And I actually rolled out of bed around noon. Other than that, everything's as I said, I think.

I think I'm still a little high from paint fumes. The apartment's finished, except I still have to mop the foyer. And give my landlady the keys. And relish the steam that shall pour from her ears when she realizes she traded hardwood floors for white walls and this:

(Closeup)

An excellent use of linoleum, to be sure. Germans have a slight problem with seeing the big picture sometimes; they're a little too detail-oriented.

Facts and Figures:

87 Liters of White Paint
65 man-hours
92 sq. meters of ceiling painted
3 m wall height
4 painting extensions, 2 of which broke
2 pairs of jeans
1 pair Addidas tennis shoes
1 pair Reebok running shoes
2 Lextite full-body condoms
6 brushes
5 rollers
1 man lost to illness, presumably malaria
1 man still missing in action

300kg of wood flooring disposed of, along with 1 old German lady's illusion that when an American offers you an all-or-nothing deal, he's bluffing.

Augie hits the crapper.

Rube admires the Hetzfresse's (sorry, still no link) spackle-moves.

After a week of painting, even the most unqualified handymen can afford to show a little painter-butt.

In abject frustration, Rube decides to paint the rest of the apartment with his sizable head.

In this case, 'experts' being a clever euphemism for 'Oompa-Loompas'.

Rube (R), in full painter regalia, prepares to rawk this house. White.

Ack!

Sorry, guys, I know you're all jonesing for some sort of anti-retard rant or something, but I'm painting my apartment this week. That means no TV, no radio, no Internet, no standing on the reload button hoping against hope that Velociman finally posted that picture of the pustule he promised us a while back. As primitive as can be, as they say.

There's also no heat, as long-time readers may remember. You see, I'm not really painting my apartment. I'm painting my old apartment, which I moved out of about a month ago. So you know it's done with love. Good lord, the paint-job looks like ass, despite what my esteemed colleagues have done to make it better. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit, paint neither dries nor covers the walls very well. And the unheated water that comes out of the tap does nothing to clean the brushes. FYI.

Keep the faith, my friends. There are pictures coming.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I lost all patience with crazy people. I used to feel sorry for them, and think, aww, poor crazy person. Maybe I could help or something. Now it's all I can do not to plant my boot in their face. It's like that smelly old lady who sits in the ATM kiosk and screams some sort of aggressive-sounding eastern European nonsense at me when I'm trying to get my money. I envision the joy on the faces of the jack-booted thugs who should, by all rights, be stomping her steaming, genetically-damaged innards all over the immaculately-tiled floors. Merry Christmas, you fucking crazy lady. Then there's the so-called "King of Augsburg," who's basically a 40-something attention-whore who dresses up like Ludwig II and walks around city hall like he owns the place. Let's not forget this one loon who jumps on the streetcar at all hours and sings opera at the top of his lungs. They should be tagged, shaved, and sterilized, the whole loopy lot of them.

That's why this post by Velociman aggravates me. Not only does he not engage them with violence, he gives them smokes! It's the two things that conspire to drive me batshit: non-violence with regards to crazy people, and the wanton giving of smokes to freeloaders. Now, in all fairness, I used to give cigarettes to anyone who asked. I could recognize a brother in need, and would happily surrender a Camel to silence the monkey, if only fleetingly. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it's wrong-headed in the most serious way. I didn't realize just how wrong it was until I went to Paris. I'll warn you now, in case you've never been in Paris: Don't ever smoke outdoors. Even in the nice parts of town, you'll be swarmed by sullen teenagers from every direction, demanding a cigarette; and offering not even the slightest nod of thanks once you give them one. You'll go through about a pack an hour in daylight, and you'll be asking for a brick-slap on the back of your skull if you light up at night. Since my last trip to Paris, I've taken a different tack towards freeloaders. If somebody comes up and asks for a cigarette, I ask for money. If I've got more than half a pack left, it's only 50 cents. If I'm down to the last 5 or so, or if the asker is drunk, it's a cool Euro per nail. You should try it; it works. You can make enough to buy a whole pack, and it's better than saying no, since it's completely fair. Unless it's a crazy person, in which case you should just say no because you're as likely to get a small rock painted with a smiley-face as you are to get a Euro.

Yee-haw! I got my search thing working again, in order to settle a personal dispute. As it turns out, I've only used the word 'twat' 3 times in 2 years. And, I might add, always in a non-sexual context.

"First of all, baby, it wasn't me. That's all I've got to say about that. I don't care what the bitch said, I didnt. Do. Shit. I was jsust sitting there typing away, like I always do. And you know how cute I look when I'm sitting there bangin-, I mean, typing away on my little Powerbook. Baby, can I just say you look beeeee-u-tiful tonight? You do. What? Oh, I mean, then she came over to me and said, 'Are you like a journalist or something?' And then I was like, 'Journalist? You trying to piss me off or what? Journalist?' And she was all, 'Well, you know...' playing with her hair and shit, twisting little curls around her finger and stuff. You know, I can read people. So, I deigned to retort: 'I'm not a journalist. I'm a blogger.' Which was probably exactly the right thing to say, you know, because then she was all like, ewwwwww, get it off me! which was fine by me, she's probably in j-school for all I know. What's that, baby? Naw, baby, I think blogging's sexy, especially when you do it. So anyways, I was just sitting there typing away about how bad the service here blows, I mean, you know, they're lax and whatever, and then I look over and the bitch is staring at me. I mean like retarded starin'. And that's when I noticed that not only had she done peeled off the label on her beer bottle, she'd already got started on her date's! Well, baby, that's when I realized it was time to get the HAIL outta Dodge, nowhutimsayin.

"Check please! I mustered through my risin' gorge. Now, stop that fussing. You know ya daddy treats ya right."

Well, looks like I've managed to become illegal again. The last time was in September, and then I managed to get a three-month extension. The twist in the spiel is, if I can manage to stay on German soil until April, I'll get a Green Card. Of course, what happens in-between will probably have a major effect on whether or not I'll be a hollow-eyed 80 lb. scarecrow by then, selling nickel-bags to schoolchildren to buy coffee and tobacco, but whatever, it's a start. I think I've developed my game plan; stay tuned...

Bureaucracies have their place in the order of things. They bring order and impersonality where it's needed. It's the earthly manifestation of the Rule of Law, where the rules apply regardless of identity or circumstance. To be sure, there are good and bad bureaucracies, but the point of it all is, poor and rich alike are affected by the red tape, thereby assuring some sort of lowest common denominator of suffering that unites, feel the love my brothers. Bureaucracies do have their drawbacks, of course. To wit, "going postal" is now officially in the American lexicon. But still, you have to admit that it all looks good on paper, like Socialism or torx screwdrivers.

So, now all that's left to hope is that I can phone it in for four months and back into the playoffs, to mix a metaphor or three.

Here I am again, sitting in what I now refer to in my head as the Worst Bar in the World. It's not the worst looking bar in the world. There are some rough-and-tumble jobs on the bad side of Bangkok, where betting your Baht on spontaneous bouts of Thai-boxing is a respected tradition. In one bar that I visited where the tuk-tuks dare not roam, I actually found a tooth in the ashtray. It was a human tooth, I assume, though admittedly I'm no dentist. There were dried blood patches on the floor, at least on the night I was there (perhaps not coincidentally it was Ladies' Night). There's also the late, great Stein Club in Midtown Atlanta to consider.

No, this bar is just the worst all-round bar in the world. You may recall the episode with the fütchen, about which I wrote a week or two ago. At that time, the staff was just too stressed to bring people beer. Tonight, however, they had a different reason. I walked in about a half hour ago; and, as usual, about half the customers were sitting around with warmed-over, greasy, empty glasses in front of them. The other half were either already drunk, or not the drinking type. I walked up to the bar to order myself a beer; I've given up ever getting served at a table here. The wait staff were sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes, as is their wont, and I actually had to tap one of them on their tattooed shoulder to get their attention.

Once I'd ordered my beer, the tall, slender, albeit buck-toothed blondie sauntered around to the business side of the bar, and started pouring a beer. After a few seconds of shooting nothing but foam into my glass, she called to the other "waiter" that he needed to grab a new keg from storage. "What, a new keg again?" he whined.

Again? I thought. When the hell could they have last changed out kegs? How many months could it take for such a ridiculous gaggle of slackers to actually dry up a keg? More likely the beer evaporated. Does this place even have a boss? What do you have to do to get fired here? In many places, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes while all the customers wait for beer from an empty keg is nigh Dickensian in its cartoonishly abject insolence. There's a niggling little thought in the back of your head that you forgot the password, and that everyone thinks you're a narc.

You'd think that years of abuse, culminating in having a waitress delegate her job to you, would be one of those lessons you'd never forget. You get burned, and you develop little rules of thumb to avoid making mistakes more than once; you develop little proverbs like, "always throw the circuit breakers before drilling", and "never moon a Chinaman". But sometimes you forget, and here I am again, in the worst little Kneipe in Germany.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.

Here's the view from my "smoking room" at the moment. I woke up this morning and it had indeed begun to look a lot like Christmas. My "smoking room" is actually a broom closet in the stairwell, where I smoke because my girlfriend is a non-smoker, and I don't like her apartment smelling like a holding cell. And I actually rolled out of bed around noon. Other than that, everything's as I said, I think.

I think I'm still a little high from paint fumes. The apartment's finished, except I still have to mop the foyer. And give my landlady the keys. And relish the steam that shall pour from her ears when she realizes she traded hardwood floors for white walls and this:

(Closeup)

An excellent use of linoleum, to be sure. Germans have a slight problem with seeing the big picture sometimes; they're a little too detail-oriented.

Facts and Figures:

87 Liters of White Paint
65 man-hours
92 sq. meters of ceiling painted
3 m wall height
4 painting extensions, 2 of which broke
2 pairs of jeans
1 pair Addidas tennis shoes
1 pair Reebok running shoes
2 Lextite full-body condoms
6 brushes
5 rollers
1 man lost to illness, presumably malaria
1 man still missing in action

300kg of wood flooring disposed of, along with 1 old German lady's illusion that when an American offers you an all-or-nothing deal, he's bluffing.

Augie hits the crapper.

Rube admires the Hetzfresse's (sorry, still no link) spackle-moves.

After a week of painting, even the most unqualified handymen can afford to show a little painter-butt.

In abject frustration, Rube decides to paint the rest of the apartment with his sizable head.

In this case, 'experts' being a clever euphemism for 'Oompa-Loompas'.

Rube (R), in full painter regalia, prepares to rawk this house. White.

Ack!

Sorry, guys, I know you're all jonesing for some sort of anti-retard rant or something, but I'm painting my apartment this week. That means no TV, no radio, no Internet, no standing on the reload button hoping against hope that Velociman finally posted that picture of the pustule he promised us a while back. As primitive as can be, as they say.

There's also no heat, as long-time readers may remember. You see, I'm not really painting my apartment. I'm painting my old apartment, which I moved out of about a month ago. So you know it's done with love. Good lord, the paint-job looks like ass, despite what my esteemed colleagues have done to make it better. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit, paint neither dries nor covers the walls very well. And the unheated water that comes out of the tap does nothing to clean the brushes. FYI.

Keep the faith, my friends. There are pictures coming.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I lost all patience with crazy people. I used to feel sorry for them, and think, aww, poor crazy person. Maybe I could help or something. Now it's all I can do not to plant my boot in their face. It's like that smelly old lady who sits in the ATM kiosk and screams some sort of aggressive-sounding eastern European nonsense at me when I'm trying to get my money. I envision the joy on the faces of the jack-booted thugs who should, by all rights, be stomping her steaming, genetically-damaged innards all over the immaculately-tiled floors. Merry Christmas, you fucking crazy lady. Then there's the so-called "King of Augsburg," who's basically a 40-something attention-whore who dresses up like Ludwig II and walks around city hall like he owns the place. Let's not forget this one loon who jumps on the streetcar at all hours and sings opera at the top of his lungs. They should be tagged, shaved, and sterilized, the whole loopy lot of them.

That's why this post by Velociman aggravates me. Not only does he not engage them with violence, he gives them smokes! It's the two things that conspire to drive me batshit: non-violence with regards to crazy people, and the wanton giving of smokes to freeloaders. Now, in all fairness, I used to give cigarettes to anyone who asked. I could recognize a brother in need, and would happily surrender a Camel to silence the monkey, if only fleetingly. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it's wrong-headed in the most serious way. I didn't realize just how wrong it was until I went to Paris. I'll warn you now, in case you've never been in Paris: Don't ever smoke outdoors. Even in the nice parts of town, you'll be swarmed by sullen teenagers from every direction, demanding a cigarette; and offering not even the slightest nod of thanks once you give them one. You'll go through about a pack an hour in daylight, and you'll be asking for a brick-slap on the back of your skull if you light up at night. Since my last trip to Paris, I've taken a different tack towards freeloaders. If somebody comes up and asks for a cigarette, I ask for money. If I've got more than half a pack left, it's only 50 cents. If I'm down to the last 5 or so, or if the asker is drunk, it's a cool Euro per nail. You should try it; it works. You can make enough to buy a whole pack, and it's better than saying no, since it's completely fair. Unless it's a crazy person, in which case you should just say no because you're as likely to get a small rock painted with a smiley-face as you are to get a Euro.

Yee-haw! I got my search thing working again, in order to settle a personal dispute. As it turns out, I've only used the word 'twat' 3 times in 2 years. And, I might add, always in a non-sexual context.

"First of all, baby, it wasn't me. That's all I've got to say about that. I don't care what the bitch said, I didnt. Do. Shit. I was jsust sitting there typing away, like I always do. And you know how cute I look when I'm sitting there bangin-, I mean, typing away on my little Powerbook. Baby, can I just say you look beeeee-u-tiful tonight? You do. What? Oh, I mean, then she came over to me and said, 'Are you like a journalist or something?' And then I was like, 'Journalist? You trying to piss me off or what? Journalist?' And she was all, 'Well, you know...' playing with her hair and shit, twisting little curls around her finger and stuff. You know, I can read people. So, I deigned to retort: 'I'm not a journalist. I'm a blogger.' Which was probably exactly the right thing to say, you know, because then she was all like, ewwwwww, get it off me! which was fine by me, she's probably in j-school for all I know. What's that, baby? Naw, baby, I think blogging's sexy, especially when you do it. So anyways, I was just sitting there typing away about how bad the service here blows, I mean, you know, they're lax and whatever, and then I look over and the bitch is staring at me. I mean like retarded starin'. And that's when I noticed that not only had she done peeled off the label on her beer bottle, she'd already got started on her date's! Well, baby, that's when I realized it was time to get the HAIL outta Dodge, nowhutimsayin.

"Check please! I mustered through my risin' gorge. Now, stop that fussing. You know ya daddy treats ya right."

Well, looks like I've managed to become illegal again. The last time was in September, and then I managed to get a three-month extension. The twist in the spiel is, if I can manage to stay on German soil until April, I'll get a Green Card. Of course, what happens in-between will probably have a major effect on whether or not I'll be a hollow-eyed 80 lb. scarecrow by then, selling nickel-bags to schoolchildren to buy coffee and tobacco, but whatever, it's a start. I think I've developed my game plan; stay tuned...

Bureaucracies have their place in the order of things. They bring order and impersonality where it's needed. It's the earthly manifestation of the Rule of Law, where the rules apply regardless of identity or circumstance. To be sure, there are good and bad bureaucracies, but the point of it all is, poor and rich alike are affected by the red tape, thereby assuring some sort of lowest common denominator of suffering that unites, feel the love my brothers. Bureaucracies do have their drawbacks, of course. To wit, "going postal" is now officially in the American lexicon. But still, you have to admit that it all looks good on paper, like Socialism or torx screwdrivers.

So, now all that's left to hope is that I can phone it in for four months and back into the playoffs, to mix a metaphor or three.

Here I am again, sitting in what I now refer to in my head as the Worst Bar in the World. It's not the worst looking bar in the world. There are some rough-and-tumble jobs on the bad side of Bangkok, where betting your Baht on spontaneous bouts of Thai-boxing is a respected tradition. In one bar that I visited where the tuk-tuks dare not roam, I actually found a tooth in the ashtray. It was a human tooth, I assume, though admittedly I'm no dentist. There were dried blood patches on the floor, at least on the night I was there (perhaps not coincidentally it was Ladies' Night). There's also the late, great Stein Club in Midtown Atlanta to consider.

No, this bar is just the worst all-round bar in the world. You may recall the episode with the fütchen, about which I wrote a week or two ago. At that time, the staff was just too stressed to bring people beer. Tonight, however, they had a different reason. I walked in about a half hour ago; and, as usual, about half the customers were sitting around with warmed-over, greasy, empty glasses in front of them. The other half were either already drunk, or not the drinking type. I walked up to the bar to order myself a beer; I've given up ever getting served at a table here. The wait staff were sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes, as is their wont, and I actually had to tap one of them on their tattooed shoulder to get their attention.

Once I'd ordered my beer, the tall, slender, albeit buck-toothed blondie sauntered around to the business side of the bar, and started pouring a beer. After a few seconds of shooting nothing but foam into my glass, she called to the other "waiter" that he needed to grab a new keg from storage. "What, a new keg again?" he whined.

Again? I thought. When the hell could they have last changed out kegs? How many months could it take for such a ridiculous gaggle of slackers to actually dry up a keg? More likely the beer evaporated. Does this place even have a boss? What do you have to do to get fired here? In many places, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes while all the customers wait for beer from an empty keg is nigh Dickensian in its cartoonishly abject insolence. There's a niggling little thought in the back of your head that you forgot the password, and that everyone thinks you're a narc.

You'd think that years of abuse, culminating in having a waitress delegate her job to you, would be one of those lessons you'd never forget. You get burned, and you develop little rules of thumb to avoid making mistakes more than once; you develop little proverbs like, "always throw the circuit breakers before drilling", and "never moon a Chinaman". But sometimes you forget, and here I am again, in the worst little Kneipe in Germany.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.

Here's the view from my "smoking room" at the moment. I woke up this morning and it had indeed begun to look a lot like Christmas. My "smoking room" is actually a broom closet in the stairwell, where I smoke because my girlfriend is a non-smoker, and I don't like her apartment smelling like a holding cell. And I actually rolled out of bed around noon. Other than that, everything's as I said, I think.

I think I'm still a little high from paint fumes. The apartment's finished, except I still have to mop the foyer. And give my landlady the keys. And relish the steam that shall pour from her ears when she realizes she traded hardwood floors for white walls and this:

(Closeup)

An excellent use of linoleum, to be sure. Germans have a slight problem with seeing the big picture sometimes; they're a little too detail-oriented.

Facts and Figures:

87 Liters of White Paint
65 man-hours
92 sq. meters of ceiling painted
3 m wall height
4 painting extensions, 2 of which broke
2 pairs of jeans
1 pair Addidas tennis shoes
1 pair Reebok running shoes
2 Lextite full-body condoms
6 brushes
5 rollers
1 man lost to illness, presumably malaria
1 man still missing in action

300kg of wood flooring disposed of, along with 1 old German lady's illusion that when an American offers you an all-or-nothing deal, he's bluffing.

Augie hits the crapper.

Rube admires the Hetzfresse's (sorry, still no link) spackle-moves.

After a week of painting, even the most unqualified handymen can afford to show a little painter-butt.

In abject frustration, Rube decides to paint the rest of the apartment with his sizable head.

In this case, 'experts' being a clever euphemism for 'Oompa-Loompas'.

Rube (R), in full painter regalia, prepares to rawk this house. White.

Ack!

Sorry, guys, I know you're all jonesing for some sort of anti-retard rant or something, but I'm painting my apartment this week. That means no TV, no radio, no Internet, no standing on the reload button hoping against hope that Velociman finally posted that picture of the pustule he promised us a while back. As primitive as can be, as they say.

There's also no heat, as long-time readers may remember. You see, I'm not really painting my apartment. I'm painting my old apartment, which I moved out of about a month ago. So you know it's done with love. Good lord, the paint-job looks like ass, despite what my esteemed colleagues have done to make it better. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit, paint neither dries nor covers the walls very well. And the unheated water that comes out of the tap does nothing to clean the brushes. FYI.

Keep the faith, my friends. There are pictures coming.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I lost all patience with crazy people. I used to feel sorry for them, and think, aww, poor crazy person. Maybe I could help or something. Now it's all I can do not to plant my boot in their face. It's like that smelly old lady who sits in the ATM kiosk and screams some sort of aggressive-sounding eastern European nonsense at me when I'm trying to get my money. I envision the joy on the faces of the jack-booted thugs who should, by all rights, be stomping her steaming, genetically-damaged innards all over the immaculately-tiled floors. Merry Christmas, you fucking crazy lady. Then there's the so-called "King of Augsburg," who's basically a 40-something attention-whore who dresses up like Ludwig II and walks around city hall like he owns the place. Let's not forget this one loon who jumps on the streetcar at all hours and sings opera at the top of his lungs. They should be tagged, shaved, and sterilized, the whole loopy lot of them.

That's why this post by Velociman aggravates me. Not only does he not engage them with violence, he gives them smokes! It's the two things that conspire to drive me batshit: non-violence with regards to crazy people, and the wanton giving of smokes to freeloaders. Now, in all fairness, I used to give cigarettes to anyone who asked. I could recognize a brother in need, and would happily surrender a Camel to silence the monkey, if only fleetingly. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it's wrong-headed in the most serious way. I didn't realize just how wrong it was until I went to Paris. I'll warn you now, in case you've never been in Paris: Don't ever smoke outdoors. Even in the nice parts of town, you'll be swarmed by sullen teenagers from every direction, demanding a cigarette; and offering not even the slightest nod of thanks once you give them one. You'll go through about a pack an hour in daylight, and you'll be asking for a brick-slap on the back of your skull if you light up at night. Since my last trip to Paris, I've taken a different tack towards freeloaders. If somebody comes up and asks for a cigarette, I ask for money. If I've got more than half a pack left, it's only 50 cents. If I'm down to the last 5 or so, or if the asker is drunk, it's a cool Euro per nail. You should try it; it works. You can make enough to buy a whole pack, and it's better than saying no, since it's completely fair. Unless it's a crazy person, in which case you should just say no because you're as likely to get a small rock painted with a smiley-face as you are to get a Euro.

Yee-haw! I got my search thing working again, in order to settle a personal dispute. As it turns out, I've only used the word 'twat' 3 times in 2 years. And, I might add, always in a non-sexual context.

"First of all, baby, it wasn't me. That's all I've got to say about that. I don't care what the bitch said, I didnt. Do. Shit. I was jsust sitting there typing away, like I always do. And you know how cute I look when I'm sitting there bangin-, I mean, typing away on my little Powerbook. Baby, can I just say you look beeeee-u-tiful tonight? You do. What? Oh, I mean, then she came over to me and said, 'Are you like a journalist or something?' And then I was like, 'Journalist? You trying to piss me off or what? Journalist?' And she was all, 'Well, you know...' playing with her hair and shit, twisting little curls around her finger and stuff. You know, I can read people. So, I deigned to retort: 'I'm not a journalist. I'm a blogger.' Which was probably exactly the right thing to say, you know, because then she was all like, ewwwwww, get it off me! which was fine by me, she's probably in j-school for all I know. What's that, baby? Naw, baby, I think blogging's sexy, especially when you do it. So anyways, I was just sitting there typing away about how bad the service here blows, I mean, you know, they're lax and whatever, and then I look over and the bitch is staring at me. I mean like retarded starin'. And that's when I noticed that not only had she done peeled off the label on her beer bottle, she'd already got started on her date's! Well, baby, that's when I realized it was time to get the HAIL outta Dodge, nowhutimsayin.

"Check please! I mustered through my risin' gorge. Now, stop that fussing. You know ya daddy treats ya right."

Well, looks like I've managed to become illegal again. The last time was in September, and then I managed to get a three-month extension. The twist in the spiel is, if I can manage to stay on German soil until April, I'll get a Green Card. Of course, what happens in-between will probably have a major effect on whether or not I'll be a hollow-eyed 80 lb. scarecrow by then, selling nickel-bags to schoolchildren to buy coffee and tobacco, but whatever, it's a start. I think I've developed my game plan; stay tuned...

Bureaucracies have their place in the order of things. They bring order and impersonality where it's needed. It's the earthly manifestation of the Rule of Law, where the rules apply regardless of identity or circumstance. To be sure, there are good and bad bureaucracies, but the point of it all is, poor and rich alike are affected by the red tape, thereby assuring some sort of lowest common denominator of suffering that unites, feel the love my brothers. Bureaucracies do have their drawbacks, of course. To wit, "going postal" is now officially in the American lexicon. But still, you have to admit that it all looks good on paper, like Socialism or torx screwdrivers.

So, now all that's left to hope is that I can phone it in for four months and back into the playoffs, to mix a metaphor or three.

Here I am again, sitting in what I now refer to in my head as the Worst Bar in the World. It's not the worst looking bar in the world. There are some rough-and-tumble jobs on the bad side of Bangkok, where betting your Baht on spontaneous bouts of Thai-boxing is a respected tradition. In one bar that I visited where the tuk-tuks dare not roam, I actually found a tooth in the ashtray. It was a human tooth, I assume, though admittedly I'm no dentist. There were dried blood patches on the floor, at least on the night I was there (perhaps not coincidentally it was Ladies' Night). There's also the late, great Stein Club in Midtown Atlanta to consider.

No, this bar is just the worst all-round bar in the world. You may recall the episode with the fütchen, about which I wrote a week or two ago. At that time, the staff was just too stressed to bring people beer. Tonight, however, they had a different reason. I walked in about a half hour ago; and, as usual, about half the customers were sitting around with warmed-over, greasy, empty glasses in front of them. The other half were either already drunk, or not the drinking type. I walked up to the bar to order myself a beer; I've given up ever getting served at a table here. The wait staff were sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes, as is their wont, and I actually had to tap one of them on their tattooed shoulder to get their attention.

Once I'd ordered my beer, the tall, slender, albeit buck-toothed blondie sauntered around to the business side of the bar, and started pouring a beer. After a few seconds of shooting nothing but foam into my glass, she called to the other "waiter" that he needed to grab a new keg from storage. "What, a new keg again?" he whined.

Again? I thought. When the hell could they have last changed out kegs? How many months could it take for such a ridiculous gaggle of slackers to actually dry up a keg? More likely the beer evaporated. Does this place even have a boss? What do you have to do to get fired here? In many places, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes while all the customers wait for beer from an empty keg is nigh Dickensian in its cartoonishly abject insolence. There's a niggling little thought in the back of your head that you forgot the password, and that everyone thinks you're a narc.

You'd think that years of abuse, culminating in having a waitress delegate her job to you, would be one of those lessons you'd never forget. You get burned, and you develop little rules of thumb to avoid making mistakes more than once; you develop little proverbs like, "always throw the circuit breakers before drilling", and "never moon a Chinaman". But sometimes you forget, and here I am again, in the worst little Kneipe in Germany.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.

Here's the view from my "smoking room" at the moment. I woke up this morning and it had indeed begun to look a lot like Christmas. My "smoking room" is actually a broom closet in the stairwell, where I smoke because my girlfriend is a non-smoker, and I don't like her apartment smelling like a holding cell. And I actually rolled out of bed around noon. Other than that, everything's as I said, I think.

I think I'm still a little high from paint fumes. The apartment's finished, except I still have to mop the foyer. And give my landlady the keys. And relish the steam that shall pour from her ears when she realizes she traded hardwood floors for white walls and this:

(Closeup)

An excellent use of linoleum, to be sure. Germans have a slight problem with seeing the big picture sometimes; they're a little too detail-oriented.

Facts and Figures:

87 Liters of White Paint
65 man-hours
92 sq. meters of ceiling painted
3 m wall height
4 painting extensions, 2 of which broke
2 pairs of jeans
1 pair Addidas tennis shoes
1 pair Reebok running shoes
2 Lextite full-body condoms
6 brushes
5 rollers
1 man lost to illness, presumably malaria
1 man still missing in action

300kg of wood flooring disposed of, along with 1 old German lady's illusion that when an American offers you an all-or-nothing deal, he's bluffing.

Augie hits the crapper.

Rube admires the Hetzfresse's (sorry, still no link) spackle-moves.

After a week of painting, even the most unqualified handymen can afford to show a little painter-butt.

In abject frustration, Rube decides to paint the rest of the apartment with his sizable head.

In this case, 'experts' being a clever euphemism for 'Oompa-Loompas'.

Rube (R), in full painter regalia, prepares to rawk this house. White.

Ack!

Sorry, guys, I know you're all jonesing for some sort of anti-retard rant or something, but I'm painting my apartment this week. That means no TV, no radio, no Internet, no standing on the reload button hoping against hope that Velociman finally posted that picture of the pustule he promised us a while back. As primitive as can be, as they say.

There's also no heat, as long-time readers may remember. You see, I'm not really painting my apartment. I'm painting my old apartment, which I moved out of about a month ago. So you know it's done with love. Good lord, the paint-job looks like ass, despite what my esteemed colleagues have done to make it better. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit, paint neither dries nor covers the walls very well. And the unheated water that comes out of the tap does nothing to clean the brushes. FYI.

Keep the faith, my friends. There are pictures coming.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I lost all patience with crazy people. I used to feel sorry for them, and think, aww, poor crazy person. Maybe I could help or something. Now it's all I can do not to plant my boot in their face. It's like that smelly old lady who sits in the ATM kiosk and screams some sort of aggressive-sounding eastern European nonsense at me when I'm trying to get my money. I envision the joy on the faces of the jack-booted thugs who should, by all rights, be stomping her steaming, genetically-damaged innards all over the immaculately-tiled floors. Merry Christmas, you fucking crazy lady. Then there's the so-called "King of Augsburg," who's basically a 40-something attention-whore who dresses up like Ludwig II and walks around city hall like he owns the place. Let's not forget this one loon who jumps on the streetcar at all hours and sings opera at the top of his lungs. They should be tagged, shaved, and sterilized, the whole loopy lot of them.

That's why this post by Velociman aggravates me. Not only does he not engage them with violence, he gives them smokes! It's the two things that conspire to drive me batshit: non-violence with regards to crazy people, and the wanton giving of smokes to freeloaders. Now, in all fairness, I used to give cigarettes to anyone who asked. I could recognize a brother in need, and would happily surrender a Camel to silence the monkey, if only fleetingly. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it's wrong-headed in the most serious way. I didn't realize just how wrong it was until I went to Paris. I'll warn you now, in case you've never been in Paris: Don't ever smoke outdoors. Even in the nice parts of town, you'll be swarmed by sullen teenagers from every direction, demanding a cigarette; and offering not even the slightest nod of thanks once you give them one. You'll go through about a pack an hour in daylight, and you'll be asking for a brick-slap on the back of your skull if you light up at night. Since my last trip to Paris, I've taken a different tack towards freeloaders. If somebody comes up and asks for a cigarette, I ask for money. If I've got more than half a pack left, it's only 50 cents. If I'm down to the last 5 or so, or if the asker is drunk, it's a cool Euro per nail. You should try it; it works. You can make enough to buy a whole pack, and it's better than saying no, since it's completely fair. Unless it's a crazy person, in which case you should just say no because you're as likely to get a small rock painted with a smiley-face as you are to get a Euro.

Yee-haw! I got my search thing working again, in order to settle a personal dispute. As it turns out, I've only used the word 'twat' 3 times in 2 years. And, I might add, always in a non-sexual context.

"First of all, baby, it wasn't me. That's all I've got to say about that. I don't care what the bitch said, I didnt. Do. Shit. I was jsust sitting there typing away, like I always do. And you know how cute I look when I'm sitting there bangin-, I mean, typing away on my little Powerbook. Baby, can I just say you look beeeee-u-tiful tonight? You do. What? Oh, I mean, then she came over to me and said, 'Are you like a journalist or something?' And then I was like, 'Journalist? You trying to piss me off or what? Journalist?' And she was all, 'Well, you know...' playing with her hair and shit, twisting little curls around her finger and stuff. You know, I can read people. So, I deigned to retort: 'I'm not a journalist. I'm a blogger.' Which was probably exactly the right thing to say, you know, because then she was all like, ewwwwww, get it off me! which was fine by me, she's probably in j-school for all I know. What's that, baby? Naw, baby, I think blogging's sexy, especially when you do it. So anyways, I was just sitting there typing away about how bad the service here blows, I mean, you know, they're lax and whatever, and then I look over and the bitch is staring at me. I mean like retarded starin'. And that's when I noticed that not only had she done peeled off the label on her beer bottle, she'd already got started on her date's! Well, baby, that's when I realized it was time to get the HAIL outta Dodge, nowhutimsayin.

"Check please! I mustered through my risin' gorge. Now, stop that fussing. You know ya daddy treats ya right."

Well, looks like I've managed to become illegal again. The last time was in September, and then I managed to get a three-month extension. The twist in the spiel is, if I can manage to stay on German soil until April, I'll get a Green Card. Of course, what happens in-between will probably have a major effect on whether or not I'll be a hollow-eyed 80 lb. scarecrow by then, selling nickel-bags to schoolchildren to buy coffee and tobacco, but whatever, it's a start. I think I've developed my game plan; stay tuned...

Bureaucracies have their place in the order of things. They bring order and impersonality where it's needed. It's the earthly manifestation of the Rule of Law, where the rules apply regardless of identity or circumstance. To be sure, there are good and bad bureaucracies, but the point of it all is, poor and rich alike are affected by the red tape, thereby assuring some sort of lowest common denominator of suffering that unites, feel the love my brothers. Bureaucracies do have their drawbacks, of course. To wit, "going postal" is now officially in the American lexicon. But still, you have to admit that it all looks good on paper, like Socialism or torx screwdrivers.

So, now all that's left to hope is that I can phone it in for four months and back into the playoffs, to mix a metaphor or three.

Here I am again, sitting in what I now refer to in my head as the Worst Bar in the World. It's not the worst looking bar in the world. There are some rough-and-tumble jobs on the bad side of Bangkok, where betting your Baht on spontaneous bouts of Thai-boxing is a respected tradition. In one bar that I visited where the tuk-tuks dare not roam, I actually found a tooth in the ashtray. It was a human tooth, I assume, though admittedly I'm no dentist. There were dried blood patches on the floor, at least on the night I was there (perhaps not coincidentally it was Ladies' Night). There's also the late, great Stein Club in Midtown Atlanta to consider.

No, this bar is just the worst all-round bar in the world. You may recall the episode with the fütchen, about which I wrote a week or two ago. At that time, the staff was just too stressed to bring people beer. Tonight, however, they had a different reason. I walked in about a half hour ago; and, as usual, about half the customers were sitting around with warmed-over, greasy, empty glasses in front of them. The other half were either already drunk, or not the drinking type. I walked up to the bar to order myself a beer; I've given up ever getting served at a table here. The wait staff were sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes, as is their wont, and I actually had to tap one of them on their tattooed shoulder to get their attention.

Once I'd ordered my beer, the tall, slender, albeit buck-toothed blondie sauntered around to the business side of the bar, and started pouring a beer. After a few seconds of shooting nothing but foam into my glass, she called to the other "waiter" that he needed to grab a new keg from storage. "What, a new keg again?" he whined.

Again? I thought. When the hell could they have last changed out kegs? How many months could it take for such a ridiculous gaggle of slackers to actually dry up a keg? More likely the beer evaporated. Does this place even have a boss? What do you have to do to get fired here? In many places, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes while all the customers wait for beer from an empty keg is nigh Dickensian in its cartoonishly abject insolence. There's a niggling little thought in the back of your head that you forgot the password, and that everyone thinks you're a narc.

You'd think that years of abuse, culminating in having a waitress delegate her job to you, would be one of those lessons you'd never forget. You get burned, and you develop little rules of thumb to avoid making mistakes more than once; you develop little proverbs like, "always throw the circuit breakers before drilling", and "never moon a Chinaman". But sometimes you forget, and here I am again, in the worst little Kneipe in Germany.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.

Here's the view from my "smoking room" at the moment. I woke up this morning and it had indeed begun to look a lot like Christmas. My "smoking room" is actually a broom closet in the stairwell, where I smoke because my girlfriend is a non-smoker, and I don't like her apartment smelling like a holding cell. And I actually rolled out of bed around noon. Other than that, everything's as I said, I think.

I think I'm still a little high from paint fumes. The apartment's finished, except I still have to mop the foyer. And give my landlady the keys. And relish the steam that shall pour from her ears when she realizes she traded hardwood floors for white walls and this:

(Closeup)

An excellent use of linoleum, to be sure. Germans have a slight problem with seeing the big picture sometimes; they're a little too detail-oriented.

Facts and Figures:

87 Liters of White Paint
65 man-hours
92 sq. meters of ceiling painted
3 m wall height
4 painting extensions, 2 of which broke
2 pairs of jeans
1 pair Addidas tennis shoes
1 pair Reebok running shoes
2 Lextite full-body condoms
6 brushes
5 rollers
1 man lost to illness, presumably malaria
1 man still missing in action

300kg of wood flooring disposed of, along with 1 old German lady's illusion that when an American offers you an all-or-nothing deal, he's bluffing.

Augie hits the crapper.

Rube admires the Hetzfresse's (sorry, still no link) spackle-moves.

After a week of painting, even the most unqualified handymen can afford to show a little painter-butt.

In abject frustration, Rube decides to paint the rest of the apartment with his sizable head.

In this case, 'experts' being a clever euphemism for 'Oompa-Loompas'.

Rube (R), in full painter regalia, prepares to rawk this house. White.

Ack!

Sorry, guys, I know you're all jonesing for some sort of anti-retard rant or something, but I'm painting my apartment this week. That means no TV, no radio, no Internet, no standing on the reload button hoping against hope that Velociman finally posted that picture of the pustule he promised us a while back. As primitive as can be, as they say.

There's also no heat, as long-time readers may remember. You see, I'm not really painting my apartment. I'm painting my old apartment, which I moved out of about a month ago. So you know it's done with love. Good lord, the paint-job looks like ass, despite what my esteemed colleagues have done to make it better. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit, paint neither dries nor covers the walls very well. And the unheated water that comes out of the tap does nothing to clean the brushes. FYI.

Keep the faith, my friends. There are pictures coming.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I lost all patience with crazy people. I used to feel sorry for them, and think, aww, poor crazy person. Maybe I could help or something. Now it's all I can do not to plant my boot in their face. It's like that smelly old lady who sits in the ATM kiosk and screams some sort of aggressive-sounding eastern European nonsense at me when I'm trying to get my money. I envision the joy on the faces of the jack-booted thugs who should, by all rights, be stomping her steaming, genetically-damaged innards all over the immaculately-tiled floors. Merry Christmas, you fucking crazy lady. Then there's the so-called "King of Augsburg," who's basically a 40-something attention-whore who dresses up like Ludwig II and walks around city hall like he owns the place. Let's not forget this one loon who jumps on the streetcar at all hours and sings opera at the top of his lungs. They should be tagged, shaved, and sterilized, the whole loopy lot of them.

That's why this post by Velociman aggravates me. Not only does he not engage them with violence, he gives them smokes! It's the two things that conspire to drive me batshit: non-violence with regards to crazy people, and the wanton giving of smokes to freeloaders. Now, in all fairness, I used to give cigarettes to anyone who asked. I could recognize a brother in need, and would happily surrender a Camel to silence the monkey, if only fleetingly. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it's wrong-headed in the most serious way. I didn't realize just how wrong it was until I went to Paris. I'll warn you now, in case you've never been in Paris: Don't ever smoke outdoors. Even in the nice parts of town, you'll be swarmed by sullen teenagers from every direction, demanding a cigarette; and offering not even the slightest nod of thanks once you give them one. You'll go through about a pack an hour in daylight, and you'll be asking for a brick-slap on the back of your skull if you light up at night. Since my last trip to Paris, I've taken a different tack towards freeloaders. If somebody comes up and asks for a cigarette, I ask for money. If I've got more than half a pack left, it's only 50 cents. If I'm down to the last 5 or so, or if the asker is drunk, it's a cool Euro per nail. You should try it; it works. You can make enough to buy a whole pack, and it's better than saying no, since it's completely fair. Unless it's a crazy person, in which case you should just say no because you're as likely to get a small rock painted with a smiley-face as you are to get a Euro.

Yee-haw! I got my search thing working again, in order to settle a personal dispute. As it turns out, I've only used the word 'twat' 3 times in 2 years. And, I might add, always in a non-sexual context.

"First of all, baby, it wasn't me. That's all I've got to say about that. I don't care what the bitch said, I didnt. Do. Shit. I was jsust sitting there typing away, like I always do. And you know how cute I look when I'm sitting there bangin-, I mean, typing away on my little Powerbook. Baby, can I just say you look beeeee-u-tiful tonight? You do. What? Oh, I mean, then she came over to me and said, 'Are you like a journalist or something?' And then I was like, 'Journalist? You trying to piss me off or what? Journalist?' And she was all, 'Well, you know...' playing with her hair and shit, twisting little curls around her finger and stuff. You know, I can read people. So, I deigned to retort: 'I'm not a journalist. I'm a blogger.' Which was probably exactly the right thing to say, you know, because then she was all like, ewwwwww, get it off me! which was fine by me, she's probably in j-school for all I know. What's that, baby? Naw, baby, I think blogging's sexy, especially when you do it. So anyways, I was just sitting there typing away about how bad the service here blows, I mean, you know, they're lax and whatever, and then I look over and the bitch is staring at me. I mean like retarded starin'. And that's when I noticed that not only had she done peeled off the label on her beer bottle, she'd already got started on her date's! Well, baby, that's when I realized it was time to get the HAIL outta Dodge, nowhutimsayin.

"Check please! I mustered through my risin' gorge. Now, stop that fussing. You know ya daddy treats ya right."

Well, looks like I've managed to become illegal again. The last time was in September, and then I managed to get a three-month extension. The twist in the spiel is, if I can manage to stay on German soil until April, I'll get a Green Card. Of course, what happens in-between will probably have a major effect on whether or not I'll be a hollow-eyed 80 lb. scarecrow by then, selling nickel-bags to schoolchildren to buy coffee and tobacco, but whatever, it's a start. I think I've developed my game plan; stay tuned...

Bureaucracies have their place in the order of things. They bring order and impersonality where it's needed. It's the earthly manifestation of the Rule of Law, where the rules apply regardless of identity or circumstance. To be sure, there are good and bad bureaucracies, but the point of it all is, poor and rich alike are affected by the red tape, thereby assuring some sort of lowest common denominator of suffering that unites, feel the love my brothers. Bureaucracies do have their drawbacks, of course. To wit, "going postal" is now officially in the American lexicon. But still, you have to admit that it all looks good on paper, like Socialism or torx screwdrivers.

So, now all that's left to hope is that I can phone it in for four months and back into the playoffs, to mix a metaphor or three.

Here I am again, sitting in what I now refer to in my head as the Worst Bar in the World. It's not the worst looking bar in the world. There are some rough-and-tumble jobs on the bad side of Bangkok, where betting your Baht on spontaneous bouts of Thai-boxing is a respected tradition. In one bar that I visited where the tuk-tuks dare not roam, I actually found a tooth in the ashtray. It was a human tooth, I assume, though admittedly I'm no dentist. There were dried blood patches on the floor, at least on the night I was there (perhaps not coincidentally it was Ladies' Night). There's also the late, great Stein Club in Midtown Atlanta to consider.

No, this bar is just the worst all-round bar in the world. You may recall the episode with the fütchen, about which I wrote a week or two ago. At that time, the staff was just too stressed to bring people beer. Tonight, however, they had a different reason. I walked in about a half hour ago; and, as usual, about half the customers were sitting around with warmed-over, greasy, empty glasses in front of them. The other half were either already drunk, or not the drinking type. I walked up to the bar to order myself a beer; I've given up ever getting served at a table here. The wait staff were sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes, as is their wont, and I actually had to tap one of them on their tattooed shoulder to get their attention.

Once I'd ordered my beer, the tall, slender, albeit buck-toothed blondie sauntered around to the business side of the bar, and started pouring a beer. After a few seconds of shooting nothing but foam into my glass, she called to the other "waiter" that he needed to grab a new keg from storage. "What, a new keg again?" he whined.

Again? I thought. When the hell could they have last changed out kegs? How many months could it take for such a ridiculous gaggle of slackers to actually dry up a keg? More likely the beer evaporated. Does this place even have a boss? What do you have to do to get fired here? In many places, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes while all the customers wait for beer from an empty keg is nigh Dickensian in its cartoonishly abject insolence. There's a niggling little thought in the back of your head that you forgot the password, and that everyone thinks you're a narc.

You'd think that years of abuse, culminating in having a waitress delegate her job to you, would be one of those lessons you'd never forget. You get burned, and you develop little rules of thumb to avoid making mistakes more than once; you develop little proverbs like, "always throw the circuit breakers before drilling", and "never moon a Chinaman". But sometimes you forget, and here I am again, in the worst little Kneipe in Germany.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.

Here's the view from my "smoking room" at the moment. I woke up this morning and it had indeed begun to look a lot like Christmas. My "smoking room" is actually a broom closet in the stairwell, where I smoke because my girlfriend is a non-smoker, and I don't like her apartment smelling like a holding cell. And I actually rolled out of bed around noon. Other than that, everything's as I said, I think.

I think I'm still a little high from paint fumes. The apartment's finished, except I still have to mop the foyer. And give my landlady the keys. And relish the steam that shall pour from her ears when she realizes she traded hardwood floors for white walls and this:

(Closeup)

An excellent use of linoleum, to be sure. Germans have a slight problem with seeing the big picture sometimes; they're a little too detail-oriented.

Facts and Figures:

87 Liters of White Paint
65 man-hours
92 sq. meters of ceiling painted
3 m wall height
4 painting extensions, 2 of which broke
2 pairs of jeans
1 pair Addidas tennis shoes
1 pair Reebok running shoes
2 Lextite full-body condoms
6 brushes
5 rollers
1 man lost to illness, presumably malaria
1 man still missing in action

300kg of wood flooring disposed of, along with 1 old German lady's illusion that when an American offers you an all-or-nothing deal, he's bluffing.

Augie hits the crapper.

Rube admires the Hetzfresse's (sorry, still no link) spackle-moves.

After a week of painting, even the most unqualified handymen can afford to show a little painter-butt.

In abject frustration, Rube decides to paint the rest of the apartment with his sizable head.

In this case, 'experts' being a clever euphemism for 'Oompa-Loompas'.

Rube (R), in full painter regalia, prepares to rawk this house. White.

Ack!

Sorry, guys, I know you're all jonesing for some sort of anti-retard rant or something, but I'm painting my apartment this week. That means no TV, no radio, no Internet, no standing on the reload button hoping against hope that Velociman finally posted that picture of the pustule he promised us a while back. As primitive as can be, as they say.

There's also no heat, as long-time readers may remember. You see, I'm not really painting my apartment. I'm painting my old apartment, which I moved out of about a month ago. So you know it's done with love. Good lord, the paint-job looks like ass, despite what my esteemed colleagues have done to make it better. At 25 degrees Fahrenheit, paint neither dries nor covers the walls very well. And the unheated water that comes out of the tap does nothing to clean the brushes. FYI.

Keep the faith, my friends. There are pictures coming.

I'm not sure exactly when it was that I lost all patience with crazy people. I used to feel sorry for them, and think, aww, poor crazy person. Maybe I could help or something. Now it's all I can do not to plant my boot in their face. It's like that smelly old lady who sits in the ATM kiosk and screams some sort of aggressive-sounding eastern European nonsense at me when I'm trying to get my money. I envision the joy on the faces of the jack-booted thugs who should, by all rights, be stomping her steaming, genetically-damaged innards all over the immaculately-tiled floors. Merry Christmas, you fucking crazy lady. Then there's the so-called "King of Augsburg," who's basically a 40-something attention-whore who dresses up like Ludwig II and walks around city hall like he owns the place. Let's not forget this one loon who jumps on the streetcar at all hours and sings opera at the top of his lungs. They should be tagged, shaved, and sterilized, the whole loopy lot of them.

That's why this post by Velociman aggravates me. Not only does he not engage them with violence, he gives them smokes! It's the two things that conspire to drive me batshit: non-violence with regards to crazy people, and the wanton giving of smokes to freeloaders. Now, in all fairness, I used to give cigarettes to anyone who asked. I could recognize a brother in need, and would happily surrender a Camel to silence the monkey, if only fleetingly. I'm not sure how this tradition started, but it's wrong-headed in the most serious way. I didn't realize just how wrong it was until I went to Paris. I'll warn you now, in case you've never been in Paris: Don't ever smoke outdoors. Even in the nice parts of town, you'll be swarmed by sullen teenagers from every direction, demanding a cigarette; and offering not even the slightest nod of thanks once you give them one. You'll go through about a pack an hour in daylight, and you'll be asking for a brick-slap on the back of your skull if you light up at night. Since my last trip to Paris, I've taken a different tack towards freeloaders. If somebody comes up and asks for a cigarette, I ask for money. If I've got more than half a pack left, it's only 50 cents. If I'm down to the last 5 or so, or if the asker is drunk, it's a cool Euro per nail. You should try it; it works. You can make enough to buy a whole pack, and it's better than saying no, since it's completely fair. Unless it's a crazy person, in which case you should just say no because you're as likely to get a small rock painted with a smiley-face as you are to get a Euro.

Yee-haw! I got my search thing working again, in order to settle a personal dispute. As it turns out, I've only used the word 'twat' 3 times in 2 years. And, I might add, always in a non-sexual context.

"First of all, baby, it wasn't me. That's all I've got to say about that. I don't care what the bitch said, I didnt. Do. Shit. I was jsust sitting there typing away, like I always do. And you know how cute I look when I'm sitting there bangin-, I mean, typing away on my little Powerbook. Baby, can I just say you look beeeee-u-tiful tonight? You do. What? Oh, I mean, then she came over to me and said, 'Are you like a journalist or something?' And then I was like, 'Journalist? You trying to piss me off or what? Journalist?' And she was all, 'Well, you know...' playing with her hair and shit, twisting little curls around her finger and stuff. You know, I can read people. So, I deigned to retort: 'I'm not a journalist. I'm a blogger.' Which was probably exactly the right thing to say, you know, because then she was all like, ewwwwww, get it off me! which was fine by me, she's probably in j-school for all I know. What's that, baby? Naw, baby, I think blogging's sexy, especially when you do it. So anyways, I was just sitting there typing away about how bad the service here blows, I mean, you know, they're lax and whatever, and then I look over and the bitch is staring at me. I mean like retarded starin'. And that's when I noticed that not only had she done peeled off the label on her beer bottle, she'd already got started on her date's! Well, baby, that's when I realized it was time to get the HAIL outta Dodge, nowhutimsayin.

"Check please! I mustered through my risin' gorge. Now, stop that fussing. You know ya daddy treats ya right."

Well, looks like I've managed to become illegal again. The last time was in September, and then I managed to get a three-month extension. The twist in the spiel is, if I can manage to stay on German soil until April, I'll get a Green Card. Of course, what happens in-between will probably have a major effect on whether or not I'll be a hollow-eyed 80 lb. scarecrow by then, selling nickel-bags to schoolchildren to buy coffee and tobacco, but whatever, it's a start. I think I've developed my game plan; stay tuned...

Bureaucracies have their place in the order of things. They bring order and impersonality where it's needed. It's the earthly manifestation of the Rule of Law, where the rules apply regardless of identity or circumstance. To be sure, there are good and bad bureaucracies, but the point of it all is, poor and rich alike are affected by the red tape, thereby assuring some sort of lowest common denominator of suffering that unites, feel the love my brothers. Bureaucracies do have their drawbacks, of course. To wit, "going postal" is now officially in the American lexicon. But still, you have to admit that it all looks good on paper, like Socialism or torx screwdrivers.

So, now all that's left to hope is that I can phone it in for four months and back into the playoffs, to mix a metaphor or three.

Here I am again, sitting in what I now refer to in my head as the Worst Bar in the World. It's not the worst looking bar in the world. There are some rough-and-tumble jobs on the bad side of Bangkok, where betting your Baht on spontaneous bouts of Thai-boxing is a respected tradition. In one bar that I visited where the tuk-tuks dare not roam, I actually found a tooth in the ashtray. It was a human tooth, I assume, though admittedly I'm no dentist. There were dried blood patches on the floor, at least on the night I was there (perhaps not coincidentally it was Ladies' Night). There's also the late, great Stein Club in Midtown Atlanta to consider.

No, this bar is just the worst all-round bar in the world. You may recall the episode with the fütchen, about which I wrote a week or two ago. At that time, the staff was just too stressed to bring people beer. Tonight, however, they had a different reason. I walked in about a half hour ago; and, as usual, about half the customers were sitting around with warmed-over, greasy, empty glasses in front of them. The other half were either already drunk, or not the drinking type. I walked up to the bar to order myself a beer; I've given up ever getting served at a table here. The wait staff were sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes, as is their wont, and I actually had to tap one of them on their tattooed shoulder to get their attention.

Once I'd ordered my beer, the tall, slender, albeit buck-toothed blondie sauntered around to the business side of the bar, and started pouring a beer. After a few seconds of shooting nothing but foam into my glass, she called to the other "waiter" that he needed to grab a new keg from storage. "What, a new keg again?" he whined.

Again? I thought. When the hell could they have last changed out kegs? How many months could it take for such a ridiculous gaggle of slackers to actually dry up a keg? More likely the beer evaporated. Does this place even have a boss? What do you have to do to get fired here? In many places, sitting at the bar smoking cigarettes while all the customers wait for beer from an empty keg is nigh Dickensian in its cartoonishly abject insolence. There's a niggling little thought in the back of your head that you forgot the password, and that everyone thinks you're a narc.

You'd think that years of abuse, culminating in having a waitress delegate her job to you, would be one of those lessons you'd never forget. You get burned, and you develop little rules of thumb to avoid making mistakes more than once; you develop little proverbs like, "always throw the circuit breakers before drilling", and "never moon a Chinaman". But sometimes you forget, and here I am again, in the worst little Kneipe in Germany.

A new series of posts, tentatively titled "Reading Other People's Posts in the Voice of William S. Burroughs, with Associated Sound Effects and Brilliant Production Values". Emphasis on the tentative.

Just because I find her t-shirt to be enticingly stretched, and also because I like to involve my girlfriend in such things, we decided to begin with Christina's Joke of the Day, from January 16, 2005.

(ahem)

For complaints and copyright questions, please go screw yourself.

[This is a book review I've written for next month's Die Neue Szene, the local scene-rag, in case anyone feels like reading it.]

"The Adventure of English : The Biography of a Language" (Melvyn Bragg)

£ 8,99
Hodder & Stoughton, London
2004

In this adaptation of his 25-part BBC Radio program, The Routes of English, British author Melvyn Bragg introduces us to his personal image of the English language. Alone from the title, one can see that he views his land's language not as a mere method of communication, but as a living, evolving entity. Covering its arrival in England with Germanic tribes from Europe, to its current status as the global lingua franca, the book really does become an exciting, expansive adventure.

Mr. Bragg does an excellent job of personalizing the subject. One feels that English could very well have "died" during several historical periods, and possessed unique abilities that ensured its survival. Mr. Bragg manages to place the language, rather than its speakers, at the center of the action.

This book is not without its faults, however. There are enormous amounts of information covered, and sometimes it is boring, quite frankly. Long lists of words that came from other languages, for example, could probably better have been shortened without disturbing the overall effect, although Mr. Bragg does a respectable job of presenting them in a cohesive narrative. At other times, important subjects are barely touched upon. Old English, for example, is covered almost exclusively in third person, and is never presented to the reader in any detail.

Despite its shortcomings, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is just that: An entertaining adventure, full of interesting tidbits, trivia, and historical perspectives. It is certainly worth picking up, if you have £8.99 laying around that you'd otherwise just throw out in the street somewhere.

After reading this, and this, I have to ask myself just how many times in his life Mr. Burge has been describe as, "a hoot".

Because, Mr. Burge, you are "a hoot". And I mean that in a totally non-gay way.

And speaking of Iowahawk, I perused his pages and found it amazing, astounding, and a bit unsettling how many words you can type using just your off-hand. I'm right-handed, for example, and here's what I came up with:

starter
server
streetway
street
cart
cats
trace
treat
taser
yesterday
stray
start
sex
sea
see
very
vary

It helps, of course, that I'm using a German keyboard. And that I'm blind drunk. But, in some small way, I think that David Burge, looking down upon us, would approve, if only in a sneering, condescending way.

In Snatch, the main character was named 'Turkish' because his parents were supposed to be on a plane that crashed. In Top Secret, 'Nick' explained that his father though of the name while he was shaving. In one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies, he was named 'Handsome Stranger', after his father. And now, Sandy brings us this:

but this couplethey named their kid Yahoo because they found love on the Internet!

At the rate things are going, if I ever have a son, he'll probably be called 'Rohypnol'.

And not just me. It's making weird noises, and worshipping the devil. No matter what you hear, do NOT OPEN THAT DOOR!

-Rube.

Gak! That's one ugly chick, right there. Probably best for everybody that she blew herself up. It would've been better, of course, if she'd done it all by herself, but Muslims are like that. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you take a couple of Jews with you.

Looking at that picture:

Reminded me of nothing so much as:

"Promised me the moon and the stars, 'e did..."

I think I've never worked with a more frustrating, bug-filled P.O.S. as Word 2004 for Macintosh. Normally, I use either OpenOffice or TextEdit for text-processing jobs. (Update: Check out Pages for basic word-processing and page layout; it's the tits.) Either that, or ecto, which I'm using right now.

This thing will probably grow as I use Word more; you might as well bookmark it and check back frequently.

That wacky, wacky as-you-type spellchecker

I just about turned Clippy back on at this point.

Notebook View

So, down in the bottom left-hand corner of the document there's this little toolbar

And if you click on the fourth button, "Notebook View", you'll get this dialog:

Just two little quibbles here: "Some formatting" should say "ALL FUCKING FORMATTING THAT YOU WERE EVEN THINKING ABOUT, DIPSHIT!", and then maybe a third bullet-point that says, "This is not undoable. Don't even ask."

Word Help

What's wrong with this picture?

A) The window controls are hidden. There's no way to move or drag this window. To close it, you have to press Apple+W.
B) I've typed "reveal markup" into the search field. There's no reference to the menu item, "Reveal Markup", just a bunch of crap about HTML exporting.
C)When you drag the scroll bar in the panel with the search results (left), it ghosts. That is, it doesn't drag the contents with it, as you would expect of any program written after, say, 1993.

Interface
A) When you hide or reveal certain panels, the display the very very gay "Genie" effect, whether you've disabled that effect in the OS X Preferences pane or not.
B) When you copy text from a document with "Track Changes" turned on, into a document without it turned on, it inexplicably copies the old revisions into the new document. I simply cannot fathom this.

I always wondered about this:

After vasectomy where do the sperm go? They dissolve and are absorbed into the body. Dead and unused cells are absorbed by the body throughout life. Antibodies to sperm develop in 50 percent of men who have vasectomies. Normally, antibodies protect the body against viruses and bacteria. Sperm antibodies will not affect your general health. But they may lessen the chance of restoring fertility if vasectomy is reversed.

So, sometimes it's reading between the lines that teaches you the most: If you have a vasectomy, your body will produce goddamn sperm-antibodies, Jesus, cue the discordant string bit and tilt the camera, what the hell are sperm-antibodies and is there a cure?

Surely there's a page around there about where the eggs go after a tubal sterilization. Which, apparently, after much googling I've determine has, in fact, almost nothing to do with tubas. Directly.

Man got groove.

Brian is blogging the Apple feeding-frenzy on my personal finances. And through him, there's this little gem:

Apparently, the Apple legal team had a late night last night.

I might have made it a little too easy on myself this year.

In no particular order:

• My nephew is 6 feet tall
• My niece can drive
• My mother turns 60
• My prostate starts acting up
• Dubya gets elected
• The World Trade Center is destroyed
• Beyoncé
• My best friend stops being a bartender and starts being a high school history teacher
• Janet Jackson's tit
• WiFi
• Windows XP
• The Jawja Blogfest
• Iraq
• Dubya getting elected again
• Scott Williams dies
• My mother turns 66
• My brother gets old
• My old company goes out of business
• Y2K
• Blackberries
• Rathergate
• Afghanistan
• Arry Leonard Williams dies
• Enron

What, I gotta come over there and beat y'all into shape?

UPDATE: The Red Sox did what?

"Samwise Gamgee, you may kiss the beard. Er, bride."

Let's ramble a bit, shall we? And I apologize for using 'Ye' as if it was an old word for "The". 'Ye' as a definite article is a typographical band-aid from the renaissance. You see, the word 'ye' is actually the middle-english word for "y'all", that is, second-person plural. As in, "O Come, all y'all faithful". Before the advent of movable lead type, English had a couple of extra letters. There was a weird-looking lower-case theta that looked sorta like a Y that was used to write the "th" dipthong. Anyway, all the printing equipment during the Gutenberg times was imported to England from continental Europe, and was sadly devoid of the extra English letters, so they started using letters that sort of matched, giving us Ye Olde Publick Restroome, for example. Sad, really, but you should see the contortions you have to go through, now that the tables have turned, in order to print exotic letters like the German umlauted ones, Ä,Ö, and Ü. Well, they screwed us with the printing press, let's see how they like 7-bit ASCII.

The printing press was the death knell of the theta, along with most of the Greek holdovers in Romanized lands. But still, they consider themselves the Old World over here. Germans tend to look at America as a mischievous young land, struggling through its teenage years. Never mind the fact that the United States was a successful constitutional republic when Germany was still a part of the Holy Fucking Roman Empire; it's really all a state of mind. Politically speaking, Germany is only about 12 years old, having been formed shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. Before that, it was two countries. 60 years ago, it was part of a decaying state known as the Third Empire, following the First (Holy Roman) and Second (the Kaiserreich). Apparently, and perhaps appropriately, the Weimar Republic of the transbellum years doesn't count. It wasn't technically an empire, so maybe that's why.

So, what are we in now, the Fifth Reich? Sixth? It's all such a blur. But how do you measure the age of such lands? If politically, then obviously the United States is one of the older countries around. Many of the cities here in Europe are extremely old, but does that really justify the title, "the Old World"? Echota, in Georgia, was founded by Indians over 30,000 years ago. Of course, they never even discovered the wheel until some carpetbaggers rolled a conestoga over them, but productivity and scientific advance are apparently no gauge.

What prompted this anyway? I think it was this post at Hog on Ice. I've been to the American cemetery in Luxembourg, and it's devastating to behold. Neat rows of white crosses and Jewish stars, as far as the eye can see, tended lovingly all these years, each square foot a sincere and touching thank you from the soul of Europe to us descendants of the soldier that sleeps below it. I looked at that cemetery for a few hours, and was moved. Then, I drove a ways down the road and saw another sign, smallish with white text on a brown field, which read simply, "zu den deutschen Gräbern". I followed it, and found myself in a patch of forest, closed off by a stone gateway. I went through the gate, and beheld a quiet, green meadow with thousands of simple headstones. There were no American flags, and no golden statue promising everlasting peace or gratitude. There were just the stones, well-tended by gardeners but otherwise ignored. On no headstone could you find a name, or a rank, or a birthplace, or even a date. There were just the words, "Ein Deutscher Soldat" engraved. I knelt down and place my hands on one of the crosses (there were, of course, no stars as headstones), and pressed my head against the stone.

Sucked.

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.