Interesting by Association

Why I Blog

My blog is a priceless historical document in the making.

Update: Blink?

Mystery Post

I was looking through my weblogs and found I was linked to from a site I didn't recognize. I clicked and discovered it was a trackback from a post I had made here. In it I said:

The problem is I can't find it here anymore. I remember posting it but now I wonder if it somehow got lost. Perhaps I just deleted it.

I was also looking at what searches brought people to iba. The first most popular search was for Andy Milonakis. The second were searches for "interesting wallpaper". I also got hits from searches for the following terms:

• "cannibal abattoir"
• "proof that monkeys can run a radio station"
• "ben affleck's address"
• "terrorists and pork"
• "marry a monkey late in life"
• "my spoon's too big"
• "hotheaded ice borers"
• "attack bunnies"
• "dehumanizing job"
• "interoffice dating statistics"
• "how to get over a narcissist" (my advice: concentrate on yourself)
• "mysterious sock"
• "buy trained monkeys" (Buy? Heck, we're giving them away!)
• "how to make penguins" (First you find a boy penguin, then you find a girl penguin...)
• "columbus ohio full frontal nudity" (Is there something going on in Columbus I should know about?)
• "common questions to ask a magic 8 ball"
• "what is interesting?" (Certainly not my page.)
• "abnormal sex positions"
• "you gotta see this" (See previous item.)
• "words that start with the letter f" (Um, "flugelhorn"?)

My stats page also told me that 76% of visitors to iba spend less than 30 seconds looking at my page. I feel like a blipvert. I hope no one has exploded.

Ya Ya... Ha ha...

Save the Pinatas! Justin will make fart noises for your viewing pleasure. In other news, I feel GREAT! If you're not bored yet then watch this and try not to yawn. Finally, BEER!!!

If you're driving down the highway and suddenly discover your brakes are out then simply summon your Giant Robot. If you're walking around and suddenly realize you've left your watch on your dresser back home then simply consult the INDUSTORIOUS CLOCK. I saw a movie featuring a character who had a tail, but now through the miracle of the internet you can see REAL people with tails (warning: it's kind of gross). Speaking of movies, unless CASSHERN is released in the USA with subtitles I will be forced to travel to Japan and learn japanese. Well, that is it for now. While I'm gone entertain yourself by surfing on over to flashcube where I found almost all these links...

Question

If anticipation means you're waiting for something to happen does cipation mean you're NOT waiting for something to happen?

An Ode to Swearing

My personal favorite from the bunch: Buggeration. (Warning, this is not work-safe)

Mental Stimulation Day

Do you ever worry some hyper-dimensional being will reach inside you and turn you inside out? You should. If that doesn't scare you then you might find the Fourth Dimension Writings of Charles H. Hinton interesting. You might also be interested to read The Life of the Half-a-Bee. The blissful Nuptial Flight is quickly followed by The Massacre of the Males . Now that's scary. Speaking of wee creatures you might want to read a more comprehensive book about the life of crayfishes.

If none of that grabs you then here is something to read to your child.

Farm Animal Porn

I was disappointed when my favorite farm animal porn site went legit, but I found a new site that features teddy bears, used motor oil, autoerotic asphyxiation, and ponies! I present to you: Farm Sluts.

Scary Movies

The Exorcist was a very scary movie. It would have been even scarier if it had been about possessed bunnies with huge white fangs!

For an intimate insight into the female mind don't miss Amy's Dairy.

World Wide Wednesday

It is (was) World Wide Wednesday over at Die Puny Humans. You need to send him your picture in order to prove that "the internet is made out of people." I thought that was Soylent Green that was made out of people.

Fresh off the Griddle

I want blueberries in mine! Go see them all!

The Days of Horkage

The changeover to a new web hosting service seems to be complete. If you've sent mail to in the past 48 hours or so, well, it might have kinda disappeared. While I was (attempting to) reconfigure the mail application with the new server information I discovered that you can add to the list of servers but there is absolutely no way to delete ones you don't need (or in this case, created by mistake). It is a stupid flaw in an otherwise excelent application. Fortunately I discovered the solution. It's kind of like discovering you turn the ignition key to start your new car but have to open the hood and rip out your spark plug cables to stop it — it works but is a dumb way to design a car. Or a computer application.

Both the thompaul.org and the paulthom.org domains will now bring you to the same page (i.e. this one). The pair of domains started as a joke because my mom always addresses me "Paul, I mean Thom" and my brother, Paul, "Thom, I mean Paul...". We figured this way she'd always be able to find our webpages. We were going to get dot com domains but by the time we tried to register them some guy already took one. Drats.

Final nerd trivia: the old permalinks are hopelessly munged so I need to fix all the old ones. But now I know how to avoid horking them ever again. The secret is to run MySQL to store the blog data and export the SQL data. Do not use the Movable Type export/import feature since it pretty much guarantees severe link horkage.

The Golden Age of Oxymorons

A few months ago I heard a talking head on TV utter what I thought was a pretty funny oxymoron. The phrase he used was "Jobless Recovery" which was funny since I thought a ecomonic recovery was all about jobs. So I Googled "jobless recovery" only to discover economists didn't think it was an oxymoron — they used the term all the time! Over forty-five thousand times according to google. The term was invented to describe the sluggish recovery back during the early 90's.

But these are different times. Things are much better now. So much better that someone decided to invent a new term to describe how good things are. The new term to describe what we are experiencing is "Jobless Prosperity". Apparently we are all going to prosper without jobs! Maybe they mean only some people wil be jobless or maybe only some people will prosper. Maybe they mean both — I don't know, I'll have to do some more research on that one. In the meantime, call me a cynic, but I'm still going in for my interview for that new manufacturing job next week.

The Green Mountain Boy

I went to another Dean2004 Meetup the other day. There weren't as many people there this time, of course, but the ones who did show up were there because they believed that this movement wasn't just about one candidate or one election. At the end of the meeting, Ron, the group's organizer read us something he had heard on The Chris Mathews' Show on MSNBC:

While serving as a foot soldier at Valley Forge, Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet series, The American Crisis, which began with the memorable line, "These are the times that try men's souls." His words still ring true today. I heard a song on the radio today that said, "it's times like these you learn to live again." I am trying — trying so hard to learn.

I also discovered a fun new toy.

Busy, Busy, Busy

The time has come for the big switchover. The new home of iba is thompaul.org, my OTHER domain. You won't need to change anything since paulthom.org will end up pointing there in a week or so anyway. Unfortunately, the entry IDs (and hence the permalinks) have gotten hopelessly munged so I'm going to need to go thru and fix them at some point in the near future. This also means if you linked to any of my entries your links are hopelessly munged now too. Stupid computers.

UPDATE: The herbal viagra entrepreneurs (or as I like to call them: The Fucking Spamming Scum of the Earth) have been busy. Luckily, MT-Blacklist works like a charm to prevent most of it. It is very satisfying to look at my log files to see all their failed attempts. But they don't just have herbal viagra, phentermine, and penis enlargement pills to advertise. They also posted hundreds of links about hot lesbian sex. Honestly, I don't have anything against hot lesbian sex — aside from the fact that by definition it doesn't include me. Unfortunately, I was forced to add the term "lesbian-sex" to the blacklist file to prevent further spamming. So those days of iba readers posting hot links about lesbian sex would seem to over.