More Bullshit

Ah, a mailbox full of fresh, steaming spam! I have recently re-activated my on-line 'job-seeker' services and my Bullshit folder is already filling up almost as quickly as I can hit 'delete'.

Luckily for me, I have several nigh-invincible methods of detecting Interweb bullshit.(Obviously, routine emails from trusted sources are usually exempt from this scrutiny).

The first method primarily deals with emails that use the acronym FWD , which stands for Filled With Doubts,( or alternately, Facts Without Documentation) in the subject line.
Using my FWD method, I can quickly determine the veracity of an email's contents by assigning a truthiness value based on nothing more than the subject line.

Any email with FWD in the subject line has an automatic 10% chance of being utter bullshit and this likelihood increases exponentially with each further usage of FWD, i.e., an email beginning with 'FWD:FWD' = 10 times 10, or a 100% chance of being bullshit.

There are some egghead traditionalist-types who question my FWD formula, so I will give voice to the opposition:

Traditional FWD theory is much more cumulative and complex than my simple FWD formula; unlike classical theory, mine is exponential and designed for idiots.

Classicists maintain that the most accurate way to detect BS is to assign a base truthiness value of 10 for each accumulated usage of FWD, i.e., FWD:FWD = 10+10, or a 20% likelihood of BS. Some of the more realistically-minded classical FWD theorists also assign values based on the number of email addresses included in the chain, for example,adding an extra 1% chance of BS per addressee is standard...I will concede that the traditional approach probably yields a more accurate result when it comes to detecting inaccuracies, but I will also argue that my exponential formula is much easier to deal with- simply delete everything with two or more FWDs.

My third detection method deals with job offers.
It's very simple: All unsolicited job offers are scams. If you didn't apply for the job, they aren't hiring you. Period.

-No legitimate employer will initiate contact with you via email- if someone wants to hire you, they will call you. On the phone.

-No one starts the hiring process with "Cn U Wrk 4 me?"...in fact, if you see any permutation of the phrase "U CAN" anywhere in the correspondence, automatically assume that you would rather not and assign that particular email the highest BS value allowable (plus 10% for re-stocking).

-Also be aware that corporate recruiters do not, as a rule, end their email addresses with Yahoo dot com or use cell phone numbers as their main business line. Just sayin'.

I recently received an email with this subject: "[My Name and Job Service] resume:File Clerk."
I do have File Clerk on my search index, so I broke my own rule and opened the Damned Thing.
It, of course, was a scam.

Here are some excerpts,with my comments added:

Dear Employee,

PLEASE READ CAREFULLY (you don't have to tell me twice)

About Us
SpiderSEO is an SEO Firm helping small and medium companies with their Internet Marketing and Search engine optimization efforts.

We take a unique approach that allows companies to help themselves. Marketing your company or products on the web can be costly. The secret to keep the costs down is to be able to so some of the work yourself. We are able to handle all your Internet marketing needs or teach you how to do it your self and act as a seo consultant.

Wait... the secret to keeping costs down is to "be able to so some of the work yourself "? That is a terribly odd prelude to a job offer. The letter then goes on to contradict it's own statement by offering me money for doing something that almost anyone can do, which is to cash checks:

YOUR TASK
This application is for the position of a Data Entry Clerk in SpiderSEO and the job will require you receive payments on behalf of SpiderSEO from clients and customers with outstanding payment from services rendered. These payments will come in the form of Money Orders which you will be required to cash at the bank or a cashing point after which you'll send these funds to the company via western union or Money Gram as the case maybe using directives that'll be provided to you. The salary is a minimum of $500/Week or $2200/Month (Remember to state your pick while forwarding the requested details below). More than a transaction can be handled a week . All transactions entries will be done using the Quick Books Online Pro &/or the Excel Spreadsheets. Transactions handled are TAX FREE, Paid by SpiderSEO..

Man, is there anything that isn't wrong with this come-on? First, NEVER cash checks for strangers. Duh.
Second,why would the company want their clients to send Money Orders to a third party when the Company could, according to it's own credo, save money by doing some of the work themselves, i.e., maintaining their own bank account?

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway, I doubt if SpiderSeo could find qwerty on a keyboard, much less anything of significant value to anyone on-line, but I do know that this post will get hits from people Googling fragments of the spam excerpted above.

Here's a Free Secret To Boost Your Site Traffic:

Whenever I cut and paste from a spam email, my website traffic goes way up. True!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next: Music Stuff.

Scam du Jour

I saw a Chris Hansen TV show recently that dealt with the subject of Identity Theft. What they found was alarming- in one case, the Hansen team , (with a credit company's help) sold a handful of bogus 'stolen' credit card numbers to hackers in a secret chat room.
The activity on the 'bait' credit cards was being tracked in real-time; less than two minutes after their on-line 'sale', the cards had been maxed out with purchases from over a dozen foreign countries.

Under two minutes.

There were also a few stories that followed this sad outline:


A lonely person in the USA meets 'their perfect match' on-line and an electronic romance develops. The 'match' , who invariably lives in a foreign country, soon starts asking the lovestruck victim to accept packages for them and, in some instances, to forward those packages to a foreign PO...the packages, of course, contain goods purchased with stolen credit card numbers...eventually someone gets arrested and/or bankrupted. That person is usually the victim, not the perpetrator.

How do the crooks get your data? There are quite a few methods.
Some you can do very little to prevent-if a store that you used your VISA at gets hacked, there is not much you can do since it's unlikely that you'll even know it happened- but there is one thing that you can do.

Your best defense is this: Don't be a total idiot.

I didn't think that anyone could be dumb or desperate enough to fall for totally obvious scams such as the one presented below, but after watching the Hansen show, I realized that this country is lousy with stupid, lonely, emotionally desperate people who will believe almost anything, including thinking that a gorgeous 20-year old Brazilian co-ed with a 38D bustline can fall in love with a homely, uneducated middle-aged American man of the variety that wears sweat pants and baseball caps in public.
Please.



Today's featured scam claims to be from the Department of the Treasury with the subject line: "US Internal Revenue Service".
The mailer's address is: "director@USA.gov"...it might as well read: "thatman@behindthecurtain.oz"

The letter contains good news. I'm gonna get Free Money! Check this out:

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined
that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $189.60.
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.
It will be stored in our secure database for maximum of 3 days
while we process the results of this nationwide survey.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons.
For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access your tax refund online, please click on the link below

Give me a break. This year's tax deadline hasn't even passed yet, so what 'annual calculations' are they referring to?
An official IRS letter would arrive via the postal system, it would contain the specific tax YEAR at the very least and it probably wouldn't rely on incomplete sentences to convey important information ("For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.")...additionally, the IRS doesn't calculate your refund for you unless it's part of an audit- if you are being audited, you will know. I have been through that and it sucks...anyway, I didn't click the link that was included in the email, but I am positive that it leads to a form that will ask you to supply information (SSN, Employer ID#,income,bank routing info, etc) that the real IRS would already have...in other words, if the IRS already knows that it owes you $189.60, why are you getting an email? You should have a check.

It goes on to ask the victim to allow: " 6-9 days while we process the results of this nationwide survey."

Survey? What "survey"? This email is a notification, not a survey.

Furthermore, if it takes 6-9 days to process your 'survey', why do they tell you that the data will be held in their "secure database for a maximum of 3 days." ?
What if it takes 7 days to 'process'? The data, according to the sender, would be deleted and it would therefore be impossible to 'process'.

The true reason for the 'delay' period is simple. It gives the crooks a few days to empty out all of your accounts before you unwittingly report this scam to the real IRS via a "where is my refund?" request.

Beyond the mathematical and logical flaws there is an additional mistake made on the part of the sender: This scam appeals to people's inherent trust of the Federal Government in general and of the IRS specifically.

That's a loser's bet but it's paying off for somebody or they wouldn't keep rolling the dice.

I have discovered two ways to foil ID thieves:

1) By maintaining a credit score under 400 and a debt load in excess of $10,000. Your ID ain't worth stealing if your credit score is 380 and you owe sixty grand in medical bills...if someone wants to get credit in your name, they will first have to pay off your accumulated debts.

2) By not having money or property.

Both of my solutions come with their own set of problems, but if you think option #2 is a good choice for you, let me know. I'll send you a link to my PayPal account and you can shed yourself of your monetary burden-for your own protection, of course.
I'll give all the money back as soon as the internet stops being so dangerous.

Get In Now!

I posted this link in one of my first-ever posts. At the time, I had a temp job that was so slack I had nothing better to do than spend entire days researching weird animals.
One of my enduring favorites is the hagfish, which is a really fascinating creature.
Did you know that the hagfish can tie itself into knots and cover itself with slime? It can.
Anyway, I had a brief period of hagfish-driven wistfulness, eventually moving on to the snakehead fish, the giant squid and other beasties ...but I kept drifting back to the hagfish and wondering...

NOW

Now you can make $30k-$50k a month, in your spare time, raising hagfish. I started with a motley collection of wading pools that I stole from suburban backyards and just this month I signed a 10-year contract with The City to convert their soon-to-be unfunded Municipal Swimming Pools into a series of hagfish hatcheries. I can barely find the time to write this, hurried as I am by meetings with my perpetually breathless team of expert helpers-even now we are lining up some other Big Cities and boy, let me tell you, they are ponying up some juicy incentives to help us annex their burdensome and unsanitary Public pools.

I can't tell you the details, since it's mostly illegal, but trust me-it's a sweetheart deal!

Big cities, not dead-end towns, but Big Cities- the kind you read about in the papers- are jumping on the Hagfish bandwagon faster than slimed lightning.

You can do more than read about the Big City hagfish goldmines- you can own one of them!

NOW IS THE TIME

The hagfish stands poised to break out of the muck and into the Fortune 500. The hagfish is a critical player in the booming North Korean marketplace and now you can bring a little of that Asian zest to your hometown.

The Koreans have been eating hagfish for centuries- more so now than ever, since the 'hag's' food of choice is dead fish, which Korea's polluted waterways produce in abundance. The hagfish thrives in an environment of untreated sewage and raw industrial waste, lending credibility and hope to the once far-fetched Utopian ideal of the world's oceans becoming a global hagfish paradise.

In N.K. there's not much to eat but hagfish and sewer cabbages, meaning that North Korea is actually thirty to forty years ahead of the rest of the planet, not fifty years behind , as some speculate.

WHY ?

Face it-the meat market has seen better days. First there was the Mad Cow scare; now an Avian Flu pandemic seems inevitable- I mean, migratory birds as carriers? That's frightening. The possibility of a world-wide decimation of poultry livestocks is a very real one, and it could cause an epic shitstorm in the Big Food markets.

Of course any domestic outbreaks would be covered up at first- or blamed on Canada, or both - but eventually it'll get out and then-no more chicken or turkey, goose or duck, pigeon or vulture, etc. No more eggs.

No more omelets or holiday bird feasting. What a fallen world it will be for the wretched masses who aren't ready to seize the future. The ones who didn't invest in hagfish when they had they chance. I'd pity them, but I'm too busy counting my money. When the chicken disappear, they're gonna leave behind a mighty big hole. I intend to plug that hole with hagfish.

HAGFISH IS THE NEW CHICKEN

Like me, if you've ever worked the 'C' shift at a frankfurter factory , you know that anything can be converted into a product that the majority of people will treat as if it were edible. This includes hagfish. Modern food processing technologies allow the entire fish, rudimentary skeleton included, to be pulped, pasted and formed into a variety of consumer-friendly shapes- why just last week, I signed a deal with Disney Inc. to manufacture a series of hagfish nuggets in the shapes of beloved Disney characters!

Q: What looks like Donald Duck, tastes like chicken franks and flies off of supermarket shelves?

A: Hagfish Nuggets!

As a bonus, hag's hide can be fashioned into small, versatile articles such as those that would normally be constructed of leather- a belt, a wallet, or a pouch that a child could use to carry marbles and a pitiful handful of coins collected from passers-by. These items can be cheaply manufactured overseas by unpaid orphans, stamped with a look-alike designer logo and sold on cable TV and parking-lot "flee" markets for a ten-fold profit.

Even better, the copious slime that the fish produces when stressed contains the same proteins as egg albumen, making it a perfect substitute for eggs in many dishes, especially baked goods. Remember, after the chicken is gone, so is the egg.

THIS EVOLUTIONARY THROWBACK IS A MONEY TREE!

I've even taken the financially prudent step of registering "Hulafish" as a business trademark- 'Hagfish' as a brand name has fared poorly in our focus groups, but everyone one loves the old-fashioned, yet hip sound of 'Hulafish'- it's similar phonetically to tunafish, which gives the consumer a "comfort platform" from which to encounter my product. Your product.

Our product.

I NEED YOUR HELP

That's a lie. I need your money.

A mere $50,000 will grant you semi-exclusive Hulafish farming rights in one or more specially selected zip codes. Some of our carefully selected regions are so desolate and inaccessible that they are virtually uninhabited, making them prime areas for intensive development- you can recoup your initial investment with just one mass spamming, selling sub-farms and franchising sweatshops for the production of "Hulaskin" shoes.

My friend, if you can't sell a product named "Hulaskin" on the Web, you should be living in a Marxist collective, not investing in my product.

URGENT

Unless I can get $50k soon, the City will withdraw it's offer- and the hagfish will never save the world. Instead of millions of dollars in subsidized profits , myself and my fellow visionaries will have only our broken dreams and the pained expression on our faces as we once again tell our teary-eyed and malnourished children that this Friday, as every Friday before, there will be no Hulafish on our barren plank of a table.

Don't let this happen.

Send money NOW, before it's too late.

For the children.

I'm In The Cut-Out Bins

I found this on the Intertube while I was trying to find copies of some old comics that I wrote. Note: I was able to find myself by googling (w/") "Dark Fantasies Comics" , which was the name of my publisher. The books are being sold in bulk lots on eBay, 10 books for 4 bucks...sigh...anyway, it's a weird feeling reading a review that mentions oneself by name.

This spinoff from Dark Fantasies tells the strange (and sometimes hard to follow) tale of an immortal woman/goddess/angel and her immortal husband/god/demon who is trying to kill her—or maybe just trap her on an astral plane. Allan Coberly’s story is more than a little convoluted, and he isn’t helped much by Ben Fogletto’s art or sense of page layout, which makes word balloon placement haphazard at best. If you’re a fan of Dark Fantasy Productions, though, then you’ve probably already cracked the verbal/visual code and shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out just who or what a “destiny angel” is, and why anyone would want to destroy such a gorgeous and powerful celestial babe as she.

It's an honest and fair review, although the site lists publication as 1986- it was 1996. And there was no "code" that I was aware of- it was just a mess. A train wreck of monumental insignificance.

I wrote the script and I had a hard time following the art... I remember getting a test copy of the book in the mail. It followed my script for a while and then it changed... my lead character was wet, nearly naked and carrying a gun. What the?...in the margin you can see my angry scrawl :" She doesn't bathe with firearms!"

What the hell?

"Holy Mackerel?" Nobody says that.

I called the publisher, who was also a close friend of mine.

"Man, have you seen the art for #1? It's totally off-script! It doesn't look like the thumbs at all! What happened to my dialogue?"

"Well, you have to live with it. I need you to re-write #2 and #3 and take out all the occult references and sex scenes."

"Uh...it's a vampire comic- for 'mature readers'- haven't you read it? You paid me to write about lesbian vampires and that is what you got."

"Well, now I'm paying you to re-write it without the vampires and lesbians. If you don't, I will."

"Why the change?"

"My wife won't let me publish the tittie vampire books anymore."

"What? You have a wife? Since last month?"

"Yeah, I met her at a Star Trek convention- I was drinking with her and her fiance, and he got hammered and went into their suite to pass out. While he was conked out in the next room , I fucked her and the next day she dumped him. Now she is pregnant , so we had to get married."

"Dude. Please tell me you just made all of that up."

"No, it's true. Her name is xxxxxx. Now she has my last name."

"Uh...um...Dude. You probably shouldn't be making lifetime commitments with someone who will fuck around while they are engaged. Like, with her man sleeping next door and all. It's a bad sign. "

"Screw you. Just rewrite the book, I'll pay you again."

"Uh...OK. Why, though?"

"She is a Jehovah's Witness and the vampire stuff is Satan worship and the nude parts are pornography, which is also Satanic. Or something."

"Uh...lessee...you met this Jehovah's Witness chick at a Star Trek Con, got drunk with her and her man; ditched the dude, knocked her up in a hotel - now you are married and she thinks you are a Satanic pornographer? I didn't know Jeeho's even drank, much less do Con parties...
You are making this up, aren't you?"

"No. She went back to her faith after we got married. No more vampires. No more boobies. It has to be rated PG or G now."

"Um...so, like what do you want? I suddenly have a hundred pages to rewrite."

"I dunno. Whatever. Just follow the art. Keep it clean."

"Great. How soon?"

"Now."

Anyway, the new wife was OK with the gun and the not-quite naked woman. In fact, she didn't bat a lash when I inserted a deux ex machina gunfight that killed some of the characters that were important to the first version of the story but meaningless in the second version.

Hmmm...scantily-clad women and gun violence is OK, vampires and sexuality is not... so I wrote a lot of scenes like these below, lots of guns and bathing- feel free to insert your own captions.

Let's make it a contest:
I'll send a prize to the best entry- in other words, if you enter, you'll probably win. A cash prize!
Anyone still awake?
Here are a couple pages with the original dialogue removed. Fill in the blanks any way you want.

These scenes are from issue #3, which was never published. I never wrote another comic book but I'd like to someday ...who knows? Can you draw?

UPDATE: Contest ends like, whenever. Number of winners dependent on how many bags of cash I can scrounge up.

Being Awesome is Hard Work

Remember Rube Goldberg? Rube would like my style. This is my desk at home - this morning, I waited until the last possible second to convert music from a vinyl record to a computer file .
On the right, there is a turntable- music leaves the turntable, goes into the 1970's console below it- (which actually has 'PHONO' I/O), is routed through the smaller mixer into my computer, which displays it as a wave form and converts and saves it as digital- then it goes from PC into the smaller mixer (center) and finally into my cheap-ass desk stereo and $20 speakers.

There are easier and better ways to to do this, but my way is more fun.

Anyway, I got the album recorded just in time to rush down to the station for a quick lunch. It's our Spring Fund Raiser :


Sushi!

Then I headed out to the West End for a Focus Group. That will be getting a post of it's own.

Then back to the station, where I sat in on our Local Show with DJ Jeff and MC Wendy:

I am Co-Director of Local Music and this is my section. Being Co-Director means that my colleague Mike Rutz does all the work and I get half the credit. He's pretty amazing- keeping up with all the local stuff is hard.

Anyway, I gotta get ready for tomorrow morning's show.
Tune in at 7am EST on the web.


My program is called The New Breakfast Snob- vote for it !

Full story after the dust settles....

A Bad Way to Start the Day

Yesterday was a really enjoyable day. After work I ran into an old friend at the market and it was a genuinely good moment- like a mutual :" wow! not only can I not believe that you are still alive, but you actually look healthy!"

It was reassuring to see someone else who lived through the 'party years 'and came out more or less intact- it really was. I went home feeling good about the present and hopeful about the future, which is a fairly new and unfamiliar mindset for me, but one that I enjoy a lot and could really get used to.

I wrote to friend about how happy I was - and I wasn't even high.

I must be pretty well-adjusted, I congratulated myself.

That was a jinx.

This morning I couldn't find my wallet or my work IDs. They are always in the same place, so I never look for them until it's time for the bus.

They were not there.
I missed the bus.
I looked everywhere- nowhere to be found.
I missed the next bus.

Owww...my stomach starts hurting. No fair!
My guts are on fire. I feel sick.

I know it's just stress, but knowing that doesn't untie the knots in my bowels, it just makes me angry at myself for letting the stress bother me so much, which makes the knots constrict, which makes me angrier at myself...so I distract myself with nightmare scenarios about what is happening with my wallet and ID , which I was certain had fallen into the wrong hands.

Called my bank. No activity on my account. Good.

But one of my passkeys is for the Federal Reserve Building. What if some psycho uses it to get inside and does some crazy shit that I get blamed for? I know it's pretty damned unlikely that such a thing would occur , just like I knew that my heart probably wasn't going to stop beating in the next ten seconds- but it didn't stop me from feeling these fears.

I was going into panic mode without knowing it- and I really should know better.

Then the phone rang.

I should have known better to answer it, but I thought it was work and I needed to call in anyway.

It was a collection agency. From a medical visit in November that should have been workman's comp. It was all straightened out by my former employer- they asked me for the bills and told me they'd cover it, since it was on-the-job. I had all the paperwork saved- I had mailed it months ago, but kept copies just in case.
I told the agency that I'd fax that stuff directly to them and they said fine, no problem.

Well, damn. I can't find that paperwork anywhere. It must be with my wallet, which I can't find either.
I'm shaking and sweating. The panic is here.
I've let it get to me.
All the crap I've been through and a little thing like a lost wallet is going to break me?
That sucks.

I take a pill and walk around the block. I feel the chemical comfort , just as warm as the sunshine on my face. I smile at a jogger and he smiles back.

I pet someone else's cat.

I look at a bucket of spilled paint on an otherwise pristine and newly renovated porch. There are sneaker prints, yellow on gray, in a sort of tip-toe circle around the spill. What a mess.
Bummer for them, but it cheers me up for some reason.

When I return home, I feel almost human. I call my old employer- they say :"don't worry, just have them send us the bills, we'll get it fixed- it's only $65, we'll cover, no sweat".

Hey! That's pretty cool! I still can't find my wallet though.

And it's too late for me to go to work. I'm out a day's wages and I'm too tranquilized to be very productive.

The phone rings again. I answer without thinking, that's how mellow I am.

It's a Focus Group company that I have done a number of Focus Groups for. At a FG, a group of demographically correct persons are presented with products and asked to evaluate them.

One time I tasted unmarked sodas and told them I disliked them all, which was true. I got $50 and a box lunch for those opinions.

Another group was comprised entirely of male whiskey drinkers.

( note: if a FG company calls you, tell them that you use whatever product/service they are asking about, even if you don't. If you are not a potential customer , they won't select you)

We were presented with a great number of experimental bottle and label designs and asked to rate them on a scale of 1 to ten and give a short explanation as to why we did or did not like them.
Our group were all expecting to be sampling the products , not looking at labels, but we set about doing as we were asked. They were paying $100, after all.

One of the bottles - I forget the brand, Old Overcoat, I think it was- was a 'novelty' design, shaped just like an American football with a spout at one tip and a small square base at the other. It was full of brown liquid and really did look like a football standing upright on a kicking tee.
About five seconds after the instructor left the room, one of my groupmates started making little feint passes with the football bottle- we knew we were being observed, but I am sure we'd have started tossing that thing around if we weren't under adult supervision...anyway, when the instructor came back and asked for our ratings, we all started laughing.

One gentleman raised his hand.

"Y'all need to make that football bottle outta plastic. That glass is gonna bust upside somebody's head."

"Upside some...?", asked the instructor.

"Yeah. Like when you're playin' catch.", I chimed in.

A younger kid bipped himself on the forehead with the heel of his hand to illustrate what we meant.

"So...you feel safety may be an issue."

"Liability too, " said the man who wanted the plastic bottle.


Anyway, I just found out that next week I will get paid $75 to spend an additional $75 on stuff I get to keep at a well-known Big Box store with a local HQ. This company recently laid off most of it's best salespeople and replaced them with scrubs. It was in the news.

As a result, service sucks and sales are down. Who could have guessed?

My mission is to "mystery shop" and report back on my experience for a total of $150 in cash and prizes- so I'll make up the money I missed at work today- and I never would have gotten the call if I'd gone to work. So at least that worked out. Whew!

Fuck. I might as well get my birth certificate and SS papers and head down to DMV and get a new driver's license- then I can go to the bank and cancel my debit card and withdraw a few bucks until I get a new card.

So I walk out to my car- which I see I have left unlocked- and there they are.

My wallet and IDs, on the passenger seat where I left them last night.

More Blogging Secrets

It's easy to make money blogging. First, find a job with an Infernal Blog Machine (IBM). An Infernal Blog Machine looks like this:

You probably have one like it at home, except the home versions will let you play video games and show you dirty movies. The kind at work usually don't let you do that sort of thing- they are pretty useless for much but blogging.
The only game mine has is some really bad text-based role-playing game (RPG) where you assume the persona of a legal document inside a box- you might be a real estate purchase contract, a deposition transcript or even a medical record. In the game, you move yourself from one virtual location to another and make a written note of when you do so. Sometimes an NPC will email you and ask you where you are and you get points for knowing the correct answer. If you give the wrong answer you lose and the game is over.
It's a really boring game but since I always answer the questions correctly , I can blog between RPG sessions. It's not much of an RPG, really. You get put in a box and sent to a warehouse and don't do anything for years. After seven years, your character gets shredded but that's OK. You have 6,500,001 other ones just like it.

To keep my wits sharp between gaming sessions, I like to read and drink coffee. I wish I could do both at the same time, but I can't.
I read books on the bus on the way to work, but you are not allowed to drink coffee on the bus.
I drink coffee at work but I am not allowed to read books on the clock.

In some ways, my commute is the best part of my day. I get to sit and read for two 30-minute periods each day, which I find simultaneously stimulating and relaxing. Lately I've read a great Kafka translation (seated below), a trio of Jim Thompson crime novels (Pop. 1280; The Killer Inside Me and Taking Texas by the Tail) and a deceptively brilliant novel of dark comedy , Damned If You Do, by Gordon Houghton. It's the only book I've read of his, it being a gift from a friend.


It's a sign that someone
knows you and cares about you when they give you books that you like, even if you've never heard of the author.
(Thank you to my lifelong pal 'Sco')





So you read a little , ingest some hot bean squeezins' , play a little bit of the RPG and take a break. While you are on break, you might as well blog. If you're like me, you probably hate it when your boss and co-workers read your blog over your shoulder; so I came up with a solution for the privacy problem. I build a wall.
These boxes are the 'real-life' equivalent of the document RPG that's installed on my BM at work. These boxes have just advanced from first to second level.

I didn't get much blogging done at work today. Instead, I went to a lunchtime anti-escalation demonstration at the State Capitol. Due to my vast fame and incredible good looks, I was placed behind the podium- I was all set to make a fiery extemporaneous denouncement of all things Dubya - don't think I can't- but I was just up there to make the pictures pretty for TV. Aw, shucks. They already had good speakers lined up, including one man with two sons in Iraq- multiple tours I think. I was behind him and the wind flapping the signs made it hard for me to hear everything.

After work, I engineered a live performance by In Fervor, a talented and very likable duo doing a Radio Tour- how cool is that! After that, we had a Music Director's meeting. It was short and sweet- major progress is being made at the station- there have been some bad things happen but we are correcting them- running a listener-supported all-volunteer FM station takes a lot of work,but we've been on-air for over two years now, something almost no one thought was possible and we are getting pretty good at what we do. It's a group effort.

So tonight I'm blogging for free, on my own time. I had planned on writing something depressing but I had such a good day I wrote this instead. Maybe next time.

Spamette

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