Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

This morning, I’ve got bad Amazon remorse.

That’s sort of like buyer’s remorse, but a whole lot worse.

It’s the feeling you get after the doorbell rings, when you see the delightful cardboard box from Amazon–and all of a sudden you think of another book, something you didn’t order, that you really, really wish was inside that box.

Sigh.

Then again, the book I want may not be out yet. It’s:

If you observe these signs, please let me know!

1. I use IM mostly to chat with FeedBot.
2. I read more blogs in rss than John Scoble does. (The Scobleizer claims he reads 618.)
3. I tack “-ster” onto names to show approval–e.g. calling my colleagues “The Scottster and “The Rafester.”
4. At parties, I make notes on cocktail napkins of words I want to do Feedster search on later.
5. I talk, with a straight face, about Bookmarklets and Drill Me.”
6. In IRC, I also hang out with Feedbot.
7. I try to find my lost car keys with indexed search.
8. I start giving “normal” friends nicknames like “The Davester“–or calling my favorite candidate “The Deanster.”
9. I go Christmas shopping and come home with presents for Feedbot.
10. Even my kids refer to me as “The Bets-ter.”

If you hope to make money and more-a
you ought to imbibe Marks’s lore-a.
In media res
may be a nice place
but the money’s in Mediagora.

C’mon, you know you love Jeneane Sessum over at allied.

Or if you don’t, you must not know her–then I have just done you a favor.

I love Jeneane because Jeneane really gets it. grief

This just in, from the same group of brilliant minds who brought me StrongBad, the muffin joke, and Snoop Doggy Dizzle…..

Some wonderfully crazy LiveJournal dude has assembled the IM logs of
Kim Jong Il.

I blushingly admit to enjoying his conversations with a certain former Iraqi leader who now goes by handles like “TheSaddamizer”, “SunniSideUp”, and “WeaponsOfAssDestruction”–not to mention Kim’s earlier chats with “Bush43” and “BreakTheseCheneysOfLove”.

The humor is neither gentle nor PC. It’s kid stuff, and I freely admit I loved it.

How wonderful kitchens are, when we’re very small.

And sometimes, how terrible! I must have been three or four on that long-ago day when my mother got a big silver spoon caught in her cake-mixing beaters. We children had been watching her, hypnotized by the good kitchen smells and the hum of the mixer, patiently waiting for leftover batter to lick.

Suddenly–Whack! The spoon was pulled out of my mother’s hand and bent double by the beaters. The motor stopped droning and began to smoke. We looked at our mother. She looked at the beaters, tears came to her eyes, she was trying not to cry…. She didn’t like making mistakes–and she was still (from my point of view now) very, very young.

Of course, my sister and I began to cry at once, setting each other off to louder and louder wails. Then my mother started instead to laugh, so we both laughed too, and all three of us thought the whole thing was a wonderful joke.

This isn’t what I had planned to write about, but blogs can be like that….

Well, here’s my mom enjoying a happier moment, a few years before my earliest memory.

The illusion that we’re spying on “secret” kisses sells millions of movie tickets every year.

Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka has some great stuff to say about blogs and the borderlines of public, private, and secret:

In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate….

On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world.

This is why, incidentally, why people hate blogs so much. My God, people say, how can Livejournallers be so self-obsessed? Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won’t they all shut up?

The answer why they won’t shut up is – they’re not talking to you. They’re talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public…They’re writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you’re standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who’s obsessed now?

Read the whole post, lots of great stuff, starting off with Foo camp and Andrew Orlowski–who can kiss mah grits –preferably in public.

I never realized before that teaching evolution in our schools has long been a secret project of Apple Computers.

My gosh, I’m going to throw out my Macs and get a PC, because now I know secret agenda of Apple–to quote just a few here–

• The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called… Darwin!
• Consider the name of the company and its logo: an apple with a bite taken out of it. This is clearly a reference to the Fall, when Adam and Eve were tempted with an apple by the serpent.
• [The BSD-Unix] OS — and its Darwin offspring — extensively use what are called “daemons”…. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these “daemons” on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.
• Apple has just announced the “eMac”, a Macintosh computer designed specifically to smuggle Darwinism into our schools…it should be obvious to readers by now that it’s really a cryptic tipping of the hat to their true agenda: “Evolutionism”.
• One additional technique that I have noticed while perusing their new literature is the common cult tactic of indoctrination through a special insider language….For instance, an industry standard connection for peripherals is idiosyncratically retermed “FireWire” (or should we just be honest and call it “HellFireWire”?)

HellFireWire? Hey, give me the Blue Screen of Death!

Blistex

xxx