What Muppet am I?

Interesting...


You are Sam the Eagle.
You are patriotic and devoted. And extremely anal.

HOBBIES:
Patriotism, Being appalled at what everyone else is
doing.
FAVORITE MUSIC:
The National Anthem of America

FAVORITE MOVIE:
"An American In....America"

LAST BOOK READ:
"Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,
Eagles are from America"

QUOTE:
"Please stop that now! It's un-American!"


What Muppet are you?
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Got this in email a while back.... Makes ya think.

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then to loosen up. Inevitably though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone - "to relax," I told myself. But I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

Things weren't going so great at home either. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I soon had a reputation as a heavy thinker. One day the boss called me in. He said, "I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."

"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently, and she began to cry. I'd had enough. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche, with NPR on the radio. I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors... they didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.

As I sank to the ground clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked. You probably recognise that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.

Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was Porky's. Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home.

Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

Soon, I will be able to vote Republican.

A SO much better browser:

My Dream

I dream, everyone does. I don't frequently remember what I was dreaming, excepting in random and very foggy memory fragments. But this morning I had a dream that I actually remember in some detail:

I was a member of a scientific team who were responsible for the development and launch of a probe to examine some sort of small object in space. I don't really remember what, specifically, but it wasn't huge. It seems like it was an asteroid or a comet.

Anyway, the probe we were designing was very cool. It was a sphere at launch but once in space it broke into four wedges, like a quartered orange. Each wedge was responsible for different scientific measurements and had antennae and solar panels which deployed when it split up.

It also had a very sophisticated thruster system, in that it was capable of countering external effects of Newton's Third Law. It was capable of precise movement in a single dimension and remain stable in the other two.

There was even computer-modelled imagery in my dream, showing NASA-like simulations of the probe's mission.

The funny thing was that part of the testing involved running piping and wiring through the interior of a 1961 Lincoln Continental. For some reason, this car had to be used for the experiment because if the suicide doors. Anyway, we had to move through the lab testing area by crawling through the car's interior.

Unfortunately, I woke up at this time and never got to see the undoubted success of our awesome probe, developed with the assistance of the Lincoln-Mercury Corporation.

I blame this dream on influence from a dream from another friend of mine who shall remain nameless but not blameless, and is known for his up-fucked imagery.

Baby names

There are days when I hate having to sit behind my desk working on some project that needs to be done the day before yesterday. Today is not one of those days. I ran across a web site that is not only funny, it's downright hilarious. It's a site that one Diana Goodman started up and it deals with people who are nearly insane. Or at least they appear to be so, judging from some of the crackheaded names they want to "give" their children.

Diana makes poignant comments (read "bitingly sarcastic") about many of these postings, which almost all come from a baby name site. She mentions the site in her pages but I couldn't find it. Doesn't really matter so much, as the sentiment seems universal, judging from the responses garnered through the 15+ pages.

Diana's site is here: Not Without My Handbag. Diana, if you ever read my humble blog, please tell me where you came up with your dotcom name. Actually, that begs another site with dotcom names in a similar vein. But this post is about Diana's site and I invite you to read a couple of excerpts that made me spit laugh, they were so funny (The part in regular text is the entry on the baby name web site, the italics are her response):

What is a nature realated name for a boy? I am pregnant with a boy and I already have four girls. My girls are Summer Skies, Autumn Night, April Shower, and Spring Flower. Please help I am due in November.
Star Light

Star Light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, let this lady be a mental patient whose "children" are actually straws she stole from the hospital cafeteria.

My favorite name are:
Xev Chiana Louise
Nikita Gia Ravin
Gavin Charles Bailey
Tristan Michael Ares
I want kids to entire the world unique.
When they turn 18 can always change it. I hate name like Collette. She would get picked on. Kids are not always PG!

Yeah, well I like names not stupid. Names actual exist. Pronoun, verb like too. Names suggest cruel, unusual. Fourth Amendment Constitution ban 'Nikita' for all but French assassins, bald Russian men. Friend, good! Fire, BAD!

(Helpful reader and SciFi channel viewer Joan adds that Xev is a character from Lexx: "She's a virgin love slave, in love with an animate dead assasin." and Chiana is from Farscape: an "escaped convict, genetically altered by her home planets government to be a nymphomaniac" and spread an STD across the universe. What does this say about Mama's ambitions for wee baby Xev Chiana? Do we really want to know?)

The disclaimer is that I don't hate all of the names that are mentioned here. My own beautiful neice's name is McKenzie, a name which is bandied about frequently on these pages. But many (most) of the names are, indeed, a little (lot) odd (freakish).

Go to Diana's site. Read. Laugh. Appreciate. Learn. Mock.

Sunburn, auctions, memories, and harmony.

Ouch. Sunburned neck. I always think about putting on sunscreen; I realize the dangers of skin cancer. My dad had skin cancers on his neck and hands which were, fortunately, treatable. But in the time when he was exposed to the sun continuously, people didn't wear sunscreens. Plus, he was fighting a war in sunny North Africa and Italy and didn't really have much time to think about slathering on some SPF. But I do resolve to be more active about putting some on rather than just thinking about it. Keeping some in the car might be a good idea. Duh.

I love auctions. I'm almost addicted to them. My favoritest of auction companies is Braun and Helmer. Dad took me to them when I was very young and I thought that it was like a toyland of "stuff". Dad also taught me to wait for a good bargain all the time. So auctions seem to be a sort of raison d'etre for me to find a good bargain. Saturday I got a 32" Quasar TV for $110 and Sunday I got a garden tractor with a drag, mower deck, and front blade for $150. It's an older tractor, a Sears model, and it's been pretty well maintained. I went to the auction on Saturday with an idea towards getting one of those cool zero-radius-turn mowers but it went for $4000. There was a Ford 1910 (model #, not year) tractor that went for more than $7000. I'm convinced that I should be going into the tractor restoration business. There was even an old Farmall Cub tractor in really rough condition that ended up going for $1800. (The picture is a different tractor)

In contrast, the auction yesterday had a beautiful 1972 Lincoln Continental with 57,000 original miles that only ended up going for $3250. When we went back to pick up the tractor, I found out that they pulled the car from the auction with the view that it was really worth more than that. I agree with that but it means that the seller has to start over again and start marketing it. I don't think he was totally happy about that but he didn't find out until the end of the auction.

I think that one of the reasons I like auctions so much, other than to find way cool deals, is to sort of get a piece of the history of other people. I find myself wanting to be the caretaker of the things that people no longer want yet someone liked well enough to buy or make. There are items that we think are ugly today yet were considered high-fashion in their time. And we feel connections with the mundane. The guy who owned this tractor hadn't used it regularly for several years, as he'd bought a newer and bigger one. Yet, when it was wheeled out for the auction, his daughter was upset that he was getting rid of it, saying that she'd grown up with it. As an aside (aren't all of my blog entries asides, really?), I was upset with my sister for giving away the old Allis Chalmers tractor that I grew up with. It's the first thing I ever drove, the sound lulled me to sleep on many summer nights as my dad would mow into the darkness, it's a part of my childhood. Never mind that it was ancient, it was ours. It was mine.

There are little knicknacks that are parts of our lives which are part of the "background noise". Things that are in our world for our entire lives and when they go away we feel their absence. A particular piece of furniture; an old table lamp; even the way a room is arranged. We get used to them and they become part of that noise. When they change, so changes the noise. It's different -- not quite right. It's a little out of tune. I guess that when I buy that little knicknack, I try to bring a sense of harmony into my own life and allow those who grow up with something and wonder what's happen to it to imagine that it's gone to a good home.

The need to blog is strong in this one.

I know I haven't blogged in more than forever but I have a really good excuse!! Yeah, I do... Ummm... My dog ate it. I dropped it in the mud and couldn't read it. No, really!

No, really. I've been up to my shiny metal ass in work which has allowed me precious little free time to expound on life's humor. I'm taking a few minutes now while I run some utilities on another computer. Were it not for this need, precipitated by interesting and strange random freeze ups, I'd be back nose to the grindstone.

Today's problem centers around getting this silly ticketing system to work. I have XP installed, patched, and firewalled; ASPemail installed but not tested; IIS installed and tested; and the Liberum Help Desk installed. That's the biggie right now: I can't get the stupid software to run. It's basically just .asp scripts which feed into an Access database. The problem is that I can't get to the helpdesk itself which is accessible via a web interface. It keeps telling me that it can't view XML input using XSL style sheets. Gah.

After it finishes, I'm going back in. Wish me luck.

BTW: Here's the message I'm getting, in case someone reads this who understands more than I:

The XML page cannot be displayed. Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

A name was started with an invalid character. Error processing resource
'file:///C:/Inetpub/... etc'

<%@ LANGUAGE="VBScript" %>
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