Category Archives: Idle Chit-Chat

Books ‘n’ Stuff

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How many books do you own?
Maybe 40 or so, only about fifteen here in the Czech Republic. I gave away hundreds of books before heading out. Very few of them will I miss.

What was the last book you bought?
I bought five books at once: Communicative Czech, Winter Warriors by David Gemmell, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, Women In Love by D. H. Lawrence, and No Saints or Angels by Ivan Klima

The first in the list is a textbook, the second is a fantasy novel with some pretty good characters. It says its number eight in a series but this writer does what I wish more fantasy writers would do: put an entire story between the covers of the book. This is something I’m going to have to deal with soon – I hope.

The next two I got because I had heard that these guys knew how to use language and I haven’t read much that was written in that era. So they’re kind of like school to me. Tess was a pretty good read – talk about your “Life’s a bitch and then you die” story. The language is flowery but not too overdone, and I did become a better writer for having read it. I also learned far more than I wanted to about farming techniques in rural England.

I have been meaning to read something by Lawrence for a long time, and Women in Love was one of his more controversial works, so I chose that one. I haven’t finished it, but I still pick it up from time to time. The language is rambling and repetitious when not contradictory, but what gets me most is that people say and do things that just make no sense to me at all. That the characters are also confused isn’t much consolation to me.

The last one is by a popular Czech writer, and it was fun reading as people visited places that I know know, like the crematorium near where I live, and the big graveyard nearby. I also learned more about recent Czech history, throwing off the communists and dealing with the aftermath. Yes, it’s very Czech. It’s a good read, though.

What was the last book you read?
72 Essays on the Czech language or something like that. I have it in the bathroom.

Name five books that mean a lot to you, and that you’ve read more than three times.

  1. The Monster Within by Jerry Seeger. I’ve read this book many, many many times. I’m reading it again right now. No book means more to me than this one, and I still love to read it. Now if I can get it published…
  2. The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel by Edward Abbey. To be honest, I have not read this three times. There’s one part, I know it’s coming, and it hit me so hard the first time I read it, I haven’t been able to get past it again. It’s a damn good book.
  3. The Princess Bride is so much more than the movie there’s just no comparison. Ironically, it starts a little slow, just like the book he is supposedly transcribing. I have read this one out loud more than three times.
  4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – need I say more?

I know, I can count. My powers of recall don’t work that way; I’ve got a couple more on the tip of my brain. I’ll add one in a little while when I think of it.

Challenge five people to fill this out on their blog:
Aser, Cheryl, Jerk McSwede, Delia, and um — the people that read this aren’t really a bloggy bunch. Not the ones who leave comments, anyway. Someone else out there, step up! Jerk McSwede, you can just leave a comment with your answer.

Note that if you use the above links to buy any of the books (or anything else, for that matter) I get a kickback. They sell cars over there, you know.

Thanks!

Whew!

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The last guests are gone, fuego is out galavanting about somewhere, and I’ve got nothing on tap. I’ll come up with a new poll today, I think, but the best part is I have large blocks of time, multiple days in a row for the foreseeable future, and that means writing. Writing novels, to be more precice; I have managed to squeeze in time to bang out a few short stories, but most of them still need work. I did get one submitted to the Piker Press last night, but it may not be their style (although they always remind me they have no style). It just doesn’t have a very happy ending, and they’re generally a pretty jolly crowd. The last sentence is bugging me this morning, too, but I can’t put my finger on why.

Somehow fuego and I got a final draft of Pirates done as well; it’s a good story. We’ll find some way to get it made even if we don’t get selected for the shootout.

I’ll try to get some eels out soon, too. It’s getting a little more difficult now to just do a brain dump for an hour and have an episode, as the constraints of what I’ve said before and the need to actually have a plot make things more complicated. We’ll see if I can keep it fresh, as the kids say these days.

Glad to see the comments kept up during the period of less frequent and less creative episodes. Thanks, guys!

Finally, please note that I have changed the bar-counting criteria in the tours stats. I no longer include bars I went to with the primary intent of having a meal, eliminating about ten bar/restaurants from the list. I’m pretty sure there are a couple of places I went to while hanging out with my brothers friends that I never got on the list as well. Good times.

Thanks!

My Mom can kick your mom’s sorry ass

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First, let’s get comfy with the facts. Maybe you think you’ve got a pretty good mom, but mine is better. (Sorry, mom, don’t mean to embarrass you, but facts are facts. You can’t argue with Science.) I grew up in one of those bizarre stable households where the children are loved and supported by both parents. Maybe you’ve read about something like that. I lived it. I still live it, but from a safe distance.

Because Mom is so great, there are three important lessons I did not learn.

Mom takes good care of us. Almost every meal I ate as a child was a home-cooked masterpiece. As the Pickiest Eater On Earth, I did not fully appreciate how much toil went into each dish I pushed away. Years later, at a dinner with mom’s side of the family, I watched Dupes push a plate back that still had squash casserole on it (he feels the same way about that stuff I do), and say, “Thank you, Munzy, that was a wonderful meal.” I realized he never, ever got up from the table without thanking the cook. I, on the other hand, had never given the wonderful meals I had been served my whole life a second thought. I try now to always thank the cook, but I’m sure I miss sometimes.

There are a lot of things I’ve probably forgotten to say thank you for. Big things like plane tickets, little things like, well, all those thousands of tolerances and smiles that made me who I am now. It’s impossible to say thank you for each and every one, there’d be no time for anything else. For all those little things my only way to say thank you is to crash ahead with this big dumb experiment called life and do the best I can. For the big things, though, the numerable things, specific thanks are in order. Thanks, Mom.

Now, forty years later, I’m pretty good at please and thank you. Better than some, not as good as others, but ahead of the curve. I’m a nice guy, polite out the wazoo. (Mom may beg to differ.) But that leads me to the third thing I didn’t learn so well. The thing that’s going to decide whether I’m hanging out with the sheep or the goats when the final horn blows. Please and Thank You are phrases to show appreciation for something someone else has done. More powerful than either of those, and the lesson I have yet to master, is the phrase “Let me do that.”

There are lots of permutations of that phrase, but it comes down to pulling your ass out of the comfy chair after the Thanksgiving dinner and helping with the dishes. It’s about running to the store when you’re tired, or folding someone else’s laundry. There could be a lot more ‘Let me to that’ in my family, but after all these years it is a lesson I’m still working on. Living alone is good practice for that.

I guess. like the rest of humanity, I am a work in progress. Overall, however, things are going well for me. I’m on a good road, and it was Mom who pointed the way.

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Thanks!

Googleday, bloody Googleday

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It’s been a while, so I climbed into the way-back machine to see what’s been bringing people here. Some are interesting, others, not, but hell, it gets an episode out without making any demands on my creativity.

  • saturday has a morning shirt – linked to a crappy episode
  • Tomas pronounced Tomash – linked to an old story about a czech road trip
  • “no squirrel” – I don’t have to tell you where that one led.
  • pictures “girl drinking beer” – went to the bars of the world category page.
  • the best cool games and racing games shooting games in the whole wold –
  • Death by Squirrel – the usual connection
  • “I love amy”-lee 2004 – I guess lee loves amy, too!
  • short stories on disguise, anonymity and behaviour – linked to the stories category page, where thiere might even have been something appropriate. Probably not, though.
  • hwy 60 in chile – Chile, New Mexico – they’re pretty similar
  • INTERSTATE 60: EPISODES OF THE ROAD (2004) – came within seconds of the search above, but from halfway around the world.
  • boy gets haircut in czech prison – linked to my episode about my landlord
  • explanation of edward gorey style – linked to an old, old episode about the books I had with me at the moment
  • Roma+time – top match discusses the strange way time works at one of my favorite hangouts
  • “reusable space vehicle” – one of my more outrageous get poor quick schemes.
  • dog injuries thorn in leg from cactus – I hope they found something more useful than this.
  • zepter vacuum cleaner – just ask. I know all about that stuff. fuego and I practically invented the damn thing.
  • roma pizzeria mac road – links to the same episode as the last one. Such an odd combination of things they may actually have been looking for this site.
  • czechs reserved people – linked to a story about how czechs may be standoffish, but at least they’re not New Yorkers.
  • “the open bar” san diego – the episode really doesn’t express what a crappy bar that is, but I like the way it flows.
  • “plastic miniskirt” – the other top contenders were muck more enticing than my Bulwer-Lytton episode.
  • poems about mr.little – went to the Idle Chit-Chat category page and nowhere else.
  • googles+x-ray+power – I love bad spelling. Went to an episode like this one.
  • get you drunk quick – my classic episode isn’t scoring as high anymore.
  • “pacific beach” shorts men’s -“beach boy” -“san diego” – back to my pants.
  • m o j a v e r o s e b o o b s – if this is not the perfect three-word summation of my life, I don’t know what is. Lead the searcher to Bobbi.
  • things to write in y e a r b o o k s – this is a seasonal one; I’ve gotten quite a few lately. Links to this episode about y e a r b o o k s
  • alpha romeo 1985 – linked to the much-loved episode about H i g h w a y 60, which is particularly interesting for the comments.
  • b u d v a r bar – Gotta love them b u d v a r bars.
  • Sunday Bloody Sunday – I rated surprisingly high on that search on Yahoo Japan. Linked to an episode about the day after a big night.
  • toast plate thermodynamics – not the usual way people reach the egg pages, but in interesting one.
  • small google pictures on old faithful – linked to one of the Y e l l o w s t o n e episodes.
  • bacteria mats – linked to the same episode, where there is actually a picture of bacteria mats.
  • “bare legs” japan|japanese|sapporo|hokkaido winter|freezing – linked to an episode that has nothing to do with Japan.

And, of course, the usual suspects.

I got a link from babelfish translating the main page into German. I looked at how it handled the bit I wrote in czech a few days ago, and apparently it assumed it was just some dialect of English it could not deal with. Which is how that writing probably looks to the Czechs, as well.

Thanks!

A quiet week in blogville

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fuego is getting married this week, and I have been swept up in the activity, the non-stop go-go-go of preparation and hanging out with a bunch of people who are on vacation in a foreign country. I’m not even sure when I’ll be able to post this notification that I won’t be posting much.

Episodes should return to their irregular schedule around May 7th.

Thanks!

Productivity was never less productive

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Instead of doing something useful, I spent the last little while taking a random sample of pages from the blog in an effort to estimate just how big this thing is. I sampled 20 episodes added up the word count, divided by 20 and multiplied by 427 (that total may include an episode or two that I never published). None of the randomly selected entries was an Eels episode, and one was a haiku.

The total? Almost 170,000 words, not counting the titles or the introductions. If it was a novel, it would be a very fat one. There’s a significance there, a message, but I sure don’t know what it is.

Thanks!

Sometimes talking just won’t do it.

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At the table next to mine, there is a guy explaining something to his companion. She’s not buyin’. She has rocked back in her chair, her arms folded beneath her breasts, her long hair flowing and framing her pretty face. Her skeptical face. She’s nodding in apparent agreement, but the only one who believes that is the sap digging his way deeper and deeper. The dude’s a steam shovel.

I don’t know what they’re talking about and it doesn’t matter. She’s pissed off. He knows it and is trying to fix things. Not a syllable comes out of his mouth that doesn’t make things worse. She’s beyond pissed off, but she sits there, nodding. “Yes, yes, I see,” she is saying. “Just how big a jerkwad are you?” It’s a rhetorical question; at this point she is interested in him only for the stories he’s providing. She’ll have some good times sharing his excuses with her girlfriends.

So she sits, listening intently only for the ammunition, while he does a spectacular job making a jackass of himself. I know what I’m talking about. Jackass is my middle name.

They just left, she steaming ahead while he trailed uncertainly behind. “I can do better,” her posture said, and she was right.

Up until that moment I was in her camp. The dude was a schmoe. A spineless kiss-up buttercup. [Remind me to copyright that phrase.] But she knew she could find another boyfriend. I prefer people who aren’t so certain certain about things. My kind of folks are the ones crashing over the waterfall with no boat and certainly no life vest, the ones who wake up each morning with an intoxicating combination of anticipation and dread. Parents, I think, must feel this way. Artists do as well, I imagine. There are forces beyond your ken, beyond your control, that will, when you least expect it, sweep you over Niagra.

She cared not for the life flowing around her. The world is hers to control, and she will control it. When I saw that I didn’t like her any more, no matter how worthless her current companion is.

Maybe it’s not fair to expect someone to show their doubt and dread in a mall bar. Maybe she wakes up every morning and wants to roll over and sleep but there’s just so much. Maybe she has a fire that burns so hot it frightens her. I don’t think so, though. She walked out cold.

Thanks!

Yet-to-be-hatched chicken counting

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Things are going really well for me right now. I finally got the punch in chapter one of The Monster Within that I was looking for. Finally. There’s a minor ripple effect I have to deal with, but finally the prologue goes Bam! I feel good about that. That story, man, it still gets me. Even if no one else likes it, I sure as hell have enjoyed reading it, and it hasn’t gotten old.

I was testing some of the database functionality in Jer’s Novel Writer and was cleaning up the characters who aren’t in the story anymore. Nothing like deleting the memory of a dozen once-significant characters to make you think about how far you’ve come. And about the sequel.

Jer’s Novel Writer is gaining traction as well, and I’ve decided to press hard to get a version ready for this year’s Apple Design Awards. It’s got “Think Different” written all over it.

So I’m sitting here chicken-counting. The eggs haven’t even been laid yet, but I’m thinking about taking time out from shooting Pirates to accept my major software design award in Cupertino. On the way back to Prague I’ll stop in New York and entertain the agents clamoring for my attention.

You know what’s cool about this fantasy? I can hit on only a tiny part of the dream and things are still grand. Things are happening, things are moving, and if it was only hard work that mattered I would be automatic. But I have chosen fields that are more that just hard work, although hard work is still the biggest part. (Hensley once told me that in response to the question ‘how did you get so fast?’ Oscar Peterson, one of the greatest pianists ever, said ‘If you spent eight hours a day playing, you’d be fast, too’. That’s a misquote of an incorrect memory, so, you know, don’t go dropping that line in jazz clubs where you want to appear to be intelligent. If you can find a jazz club that actually has jazz.)

Right. Back to the chickens, Any individual project seems like a huge long shot. All put together, it’s almost too much to handle. It is the classic American irrational exuberance, that annoyingly cocky confidence in self, combined with the drive to get it all done. That’s what pisses people off about Americans the most. Except, well, invading all those other countries with purely hypocritical justifications — that makes them hate us too, but the real reason they hate us, (aside from our intolerable arrogance, and well, our loudness in bars) is that they want to be us. They want to Get Things Done.

Man, I’m going to catch hell for saying that.

You know what makes you an American? Your car. If you drive a car every day, you’re an American. It doesn’t matter where you live.

Although drivers here pretty much suck. You could argue that Romans are better drivers than Americans, and I’m up for explaining how wrong you are. I admired those guys once, but Americans are just plain better drivers, except in Los Angeles and St. Louis. Maybe New York. Those guys in New York are such bitchy little victims it has to show in the way they drive. Saint Louis, I have no explanation for that one. All I can say is if you’re in a car there your top priority should be getting your wheels the hell out of there. People just… do things. No cause, just simple random effect. Great hurtling tombs of steel and plastic fling themselves about, blind and oblivious. St. Louis, in the middle of everywhere. It’s like Death Race 2000 there, only five better.

OK, I’m done now.

Thanks!

A little brain teaser

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Tonight I had to enter a password. I carefully typed a series of keys, and got a message that my password was incorrect. I changed nothing, pressed no button, did not move the mouse, or alter the state of my computer in any way. I typed exactly the same series of keys again – same keys, same order, doing nothing differently, and this time was allowed in.

How can that be?

Thanks!

Bleh

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I’ve had a cold the last few days, and while it hasn’t been that bad, it seems to have completely obliterated all creative spark. So there’s not much to say today, either. Ironically, the programming has been going very well—I’ve made big strides on the next release of Jer’s novel writer in the last few days.

I am feeling better, so maybe I’ll come up with something tonight worth posting.

Thanks!

Losing your hard drive sucks

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You might recall, if I bothered to mention it (I’m not going to go back and look) that I had some trouble with the hard drive in my laptop back in November. For a couple of days the machine would not run at all. When I fired it up the drive just went clickety-clack, clickety-clack, while the screen showed the “I’ve got no hard drive” icon. Finally I figured I had nothing to lose and hit the computer firmly five times. Zing! The drive jumped to life and worked perfectly. I didn’t lose a single byte of data.

I said to myself, “Self, next time that drive takes a powder, percussive maintenance may not work. It’s time to get a new drive.”

On a sunny Friday afternoon in April the drive went clickety-clack again. I didn’t even bother to power it down, I just smacked it a good one and it started to work again. For maybe five minutes. Another whack, a little more time.

I keep pretty well backed up all the time, but it was time to devote myself exclusively to scraping every one and zero off the old dog and onto my external drive. I also have backup software that is all about putting things back where they used to be, so after I copied all the except the system folder onto the external, I created an additional backup using the backup software. Those, combined with my usual Internet backup, had me backed up out the wazoo.

On the weekend there was no getting a laptop drive here in the Czech Republic, but the old drive was hanging in there. Sunday I did a little bit of work, always knowing that at any moment my computer as I knew it could simply cease to exist. Monday morning I updated the backup made with the backup software and bought a new hard drive. What has followed has been the long and arduous task of getting things back the way they were. I loaded the operating system without any problems, then while the updates loaded over fuego’s Internet connection with agonizing slowness I reinstalled the backup software.

“Software installed successfully,” the window proclaimed, only… it wasn’t there.

Backup is a free program for Apple’s .Mac customers, and it’s worth every penny. I have given up submitting reports of grammar and spelling errors in the user interface (Spelling! In a product from a multi-billion dollar company.). Then there’s the fact if something goes wrong while you’re backing up you stand to lose your entire archive, and you’re certainly not going to restore anything until you redo the backup successfully.

I have no idea why the first attempts to install the software failed – this was about as clean an environment to install to as you could possibly imagine – but finally I futzed around and got it installed – mostly. While I was connected to the Internet it would try to read my archives up there and crash. There was no way for me to tell it, “Hey, screw the Internet, I’ve got a disk here.” Launch, read internet archives, crash. Great software design there, guys. I get the feeling Apple just paid some guy a six-pack to throw a backup application together that took advantage of their web services.

All right, so the easy way to restore wasn’t working out so well, so I’ve been doing it the slow, difficult way. My external drive kept seizing up reading one particular file, which made my life really friggin’ swell, and moving gigabytes of data around just isn’t a speedy process. Things will be better when I’m done – I downloaded newer versions of several programs I use, and there’s a lot of junk that is still tucked away in the backup that I will likely be able to delete.

So now I’m back. My plan tonight is to crank out several pent-up blog episodes, so by the time you see this there will be a veritable deluge. That’s how it goes in the blogosphere. Feast or famine, baby, feast or famine. I will be writing them here in a little bar, so perhaps you will be able to watch the evolution of my writing ‘style’.

Thanks!

Just Checking In

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(Edited out an opening sentence that made no sense after I changed the abstract.) The other day I wrote a long rambling episode about why I’d be a horrible boyfriend right now, as it all relates to why there hasn’t been as much popping up here. No need to go into detail but it boiled down to the fact I spend almost every waking moment working and I have no income. Just what every girl dreams of.

Case in point: Yesterday I woke up at 4:30 and my mind was fizzing with new ideas for margin notes in Jer’s Novel Writer. I’ve got a big release coming up and it’s great to see the software moving along every day. I worked, stopping briefly for tea and snacks, until I called it a night about 11:30 pm. That’s all I did yesterday. Nineteen hours with breaks, writing software. Good thing it’s only a hobby. I got up early this morning because I thought of the best way to handle loading old files that don’t have all the necessary data.

Today I got the software to the point I can write without worrying about losing my work, so that’s what I’ve been doing this afternoon. It’s been tougher than usual to switch from the programmer head to the writer head. Programmer head is in the the wide-open leaps-and-bounds part of development, while writer head is mired in the nitty-gritty of finishing novels. At least the product of the programmer head is making things easier for the writer head.

Of that there can be no doubt. One of the things driving programmer head is that the new margin note system will make things easier for writer head. I started using it for the first time this afternoon and while the old margin notes were sweet as honey, the new ones just plain ‘ol rock. Today’s “writing” has been going through the story and flagging areas with different types of margin notes, so when my writer head is feeling a little more creative it can follow along and smooth things out.

I’m at Crazy Daisy now; I’ll head over to fuego’s in a bit and blast this into the blogosphere. The Anti-Amy is here but not working, so I can’t try to overcome the final smile barrier, but I came damn close to flirting with the blonde I mentioned in passing in a previous episode. (The episode where the New Yorkers came in. I hope a few more New Yorkers read that.) I got a big hello from her when I came in, but later I noticed that everyone gets a larger-than-czech-median greeting from her. Still I think mine was better. It was once again my attempts to pronounce “chicken” that really got us started. She was willing to let me slide with my first attempt but I kept at it – I knew the first shot was not good at all. Laughter and joy was shared by all.

In the She-Who-Smiles-Rerely episode I also mentioned the tipping custom. Here you add on to you bill more to make things round off than to reward service. A few nights ago this was really brought home to me. I was in the cheap beer place with fuego, and we had enjoyed a cheap beer or two. The bartender/waitress, a very pretty blonde woman, came by to close up our tab. it came to 148. The way you tip is to give a higher number when they give you change. I struggled, and she helped me. “Fifty,” she said, meaning 150. That’s what a czech would have done – tipped two lousy crowns. Really not tipping at all. And she expected nothing more, to the point she assumed that’s what I was trying to say. I then managed to say 160 correctly and come out looking like a big tipper. Which I was. I would have been embarrassed to leave a tip like that in the US, but here I’m a crazy-ass tipping maniac.

Now it’s back to the novels. A lot of people start things, many people have good midgames, but the finishers are few. I’m striving to be a finisher.

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Thanks!

Hell-Cricket

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I have a piece over at Piker Press this week. I was looking for something different in tone and I got it, by jing. I intentionally didn’t over-edit the piece, so it’s a little rough, but it works OK.

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Thanks!

Google me this, Google me that

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Happy Easter! It’s a day for not working, which means it’s a Google Day! (Actually, these are quite a bit of work now, which makes it all the more mysterious why I do them.) This episode is dedicated to the sisters.

Note that with this episode I have returned to my obfuscational ways, inserting spaces were I don’t want to distract the search engines from the original.

  • squirrel master half baked picture – linked to the explanation page
  • drink your beer song – could have linked to any number of places, but Google chose this deceptively titled one about the Anti-Jerry
  • guest poems linked to the guest poems, of course
  • x-ray gogs explained – in a great recursive cause and effect ring, searchers no longer go to the page I first mentioned x-ray gogs while describing Rose, but to Google episodes like this one.
  • getting a life – who would have thought I’d have an episode named that? I mean sure, I know eggs, but life?
  • The Secrets of the Last Eunuch – if my blog didn’t already have a name, this would be it. Linked to a sappy Amy episode.
  • things to do while you wait for toast to pop up – I don’t know why, but I like the way this seeker thinks.
  • “poodle” birthday girl message party ideas – I just cut and paste, kids.
  • cover friggin sestry – attracted to punk rock with accordion and uppity frou-frou canines
  • crap filled crepes – I don’t know what they were looking for, but I like the way they think.
  • half of page blank in comcast start page – maybe they should ask comcast about that rather than google.
  • ivanka praha hair – it funny how many hair searches I get.
  • fire eel with a twitch – sometimes therapy helps
  • mopar tits – linked to a google episode like this one, but that search linked to this juicy episode
  • crazy countertop height bar stools – it was the word “crazy” that put the Bars Tour category page at the top of the search results
  • Motorcycle Partys Show those puppies
  • star named beauty – you know, I don’t know crap about anything like that, but it sure is nice to know someone is searching for it. And in the end, they could have done worse than end up here.
  • pardubice photos hejduk – an up-to-date hockey fan is sadly disappointed.
  • elk poop description picture – hit on two other episodes like this one, but the picture (for what it’s worth) is here. You know what’s crazy? These guys really want to see pictures of elk poop.
  • talent show ideas – at this moment, I’m number four at Yahoo for that search. And now that I think about it, I do have a few ideas that would be memorable…
  • anti-squirrels – I had thought we mentioned them only in the comments, but no, they made it to the top level in an episode like this one from long ago.
  • definition fern bar – I’ve been in a few, but I never defined one. I’m thinking, though, that the guy who searches the Web for the definition probably belongs in one.
  • arabic legend stories of Cassiopeia – this site scored high strictly on the weight of the word story. But heck, I really want to know…
  • Pictures of Dead Bison in Yellowstone – obviously a pent-up need as this episode came up on the 6th page of results.
  • “sunday bloody sunday” explanation – linked to a morning after episode that includes the B i l l y I d o l Incident.
  • “i was trapped” naked “my clothes” “my shoes” – linked to the Stories category page
  • aftermath nicole – I guess I’m not the only one who’s met her.
  • squirrel safety path – this was a Japanese search, so I can’t help but suspect the path was to protect the squirrels rather than protect us from the squirrels, but let’s face it, if the squirrels are in the cult, they’re not looking for safety
  • squirrel pants
  • “explosive welding” – scored pretty high. I guess not that many people talk about this very fun way to join two materials. Linked to an episode about trumpet bells.
  • m o o n l i g h t s o n a t a steam – not sure what steam has to do with it, but it put me right at the top. A more mature version of the story is in the Piker Press Archives

It’s the Easter season, so there’s been a surge in H u n k y J e s u s and Indulgence searches. P o s i t i v e D r i n k i n g is big these days, and it leads to an episode that starts slow but really gets rolling. Fryers are back with a vengeance, accounting for about 50% of visitors on the weekends. One episode like this one, called V e n i, V i d i, G o o g l i gets a lot of hits from Italians.

Thanks!

Programming note

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Over at the gallery you can now see pics from around Slovakia (panorama is on page 2), one new inconsequential addition to the Czech bars album, and a few shots of snowy rooftops taken from my bedroom window.

Thanks!