By the senate adding secret provisons to the Patriot Act to make protests at political events a crime. Yup you read that right.

Actually head on attacking the ACTUAL purpose of the First Amendment - free political expression.

Damn you Food Network! Your Food Challenge shows are addictive as hell. I can’t stop watching them! Will they get the birthday cake high enough? How will they pull off a Elvis theme? Wil they be able to move it to the judging table without it breaking up? Oh no! Damn you I say!

You ever think Dorothy Hamill (who looks nearly the same as she did thirty years ago) ever gets depressed that her fame has become based on her trademark hair style? Wonder if she wishes to run off to Borabora and grow it out long and wild? The same with other stars like Drew Carey or Weird Al whose hair and personal styling are nearly trademarked with thier identity. Think they’d like to slap thier younger selves and say “you’ll regret that”?

Anyone else see Battlestar Galcatica this week? While it verged away from heavy plots of previous months, it contained some little things that will surely surface later - and more than a few real acting gems.

I think James Callis is real Emmy material, but of course being on a popular scifi show he’ll never be nominated. Which is a damn shame since his portryal of the Doctor Baltar is so very subtle and facted it makes your heart speed up whenever he’s on screen (and not just because he’s a euro trash hottie). You just can’t help but wince as he slowly descends into each new level of internal hell, and gasp when he turns another villianous corner . You don’t want him to be crazy because depsite the fact that he inadvertantly played the accessory patsy to his race’s genocide you still don’t hate him. Sure, he might have been a womanizing egotistical asshat genius, but he wasn’t seditious or evil. Nothing he did, or was, deserves what he’s getting. Wether he’s doing it to himself or not. Even he’s not sure what the truth is.

To pull off with all that off deserves an award, Damn it.

Okay, here I am hoping I have some ITMS dev team readers here, long shot I know… My mom gave me $50 in itunes for basically being the most perfect child she’s birthed (Up yours Chris! HA!!), so having money to blow, I thought this would be an ideal time to pad out my 80s collection.

I WANT ITUNES TO LOOK IN MY LIBRARY AS I ADD SONGS AND TELL ME IF I HAVE THEM ALREADY!

I want it to say “Oh waitaminnit toots, it looks like you might have this song already (show a list of any close matching titles and/or artist names) Do you still want to buy this song?” and then give me a yes and no button.

That’s all I want. Really. PLEASE. All this three window crap so I can more effortlessly jump between my genre list, my shopping cart and the store window is a pain in the ass and avoiding it would be worth the world to me. Even if it only came in the form of coloring the title names in the store so I knew oh I have that” would be GREAT. Please?

(BTW who wants to do a 80’s song swap? I’m old, I’m not scared to admit it damn it.)

I think this is the silliest product ever. It drives me insane very time I see it because for one, Campbells soup is NOT hard to make if one were so moved. It’s not brain surgery or anything. Sure this product cuts a couple steps but is it worth it to pay 3x more for 1/3 as much soup?

According to all the advertising on TV they are selling this product to three markets:

1: Over-hassled moms who have so little time to breathe that all eating must take place in a car while transporting entire 4th grade soccer team in a minivan to a birthday party.

2: Macho construction workers for whom a liquified entree is practical around electrical power tools and heavy construction equipment with questionable cupholders.

3: Trendy homeless teenage skateborders who wear helmets while leading mysteriously hectic and exciting lives of hanging out in library parking lots and laughing en masse because teenagers all know soup from a can is sooo cool.

Now these three extremely divergent groups have one thing in common: They can be sated by a mere 6 oz of below average soup served up moderately warm and alluringly encased in a styrofoam sheath for a meal. Right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

Karla concurs and adds that it’s not the easiest food to handle.

Oh where to start.

A previous linee had begun commenting on the numerous “If you like-” pamphlets that had been placed on a long table that ran beside the disorganized and insanely LOOONG line to see Stan Lee at the Library in my hometown. I was reading them most were silly, this one made me laugh out loud. After that I grabbed every one I could see.

At first I thought it, being a scarcastic wise ass myself, it was someone having a go, but after looking at them as a whole I have to only conclude the person was, in fact, an idiot.

Others were (and this is as it was written - I didn’t change the spelling, or rather mispellings):
Fiction for the Sports Lover…
For those that Beastieality is to conservitive

If You Like Stephen King…
Your a bigger freak than I

The last couple days I have been in FONT HELL.

Every once in a while, usually when I need it most, my font app (Suitcase) goes tits up. Usually this requires me to pitch all my application prefs for it, start from scratch, and make my sets and stuff ALL over again. It can take a day or two to get back in the swing.

Now being I am a font organization whore (folders by foundry, then by letter!) it takes me a long time to do 26 or so Adobe folders, and as many for a few other foundries I have. It’s a hassle I shouldn’t have to do becaue I don’t want all my good fonts mixing with those unsavory cyrillic and graffiti fonts from the other side of town.

So, anyway, tonight after another day of the fonts I needed mostly just plain not working (and pyschocotic bouts of me cursing like a sailor and then crying like wee girl) in Suitcase 10.1, because I hadn’t upgraded it since before Tiger (probably the reason for all this heartache) began trying other apps instead of trying their new version and paying through the nose to be an unhappy camper every six months. I wasn’t liking the new choices much.

Then Dave, my personal saviour many times over, pointed me to Linotype FontExplorer X.

OMFG. It’s iTunes for fonts! It’s wonderful! It’s FREE! FREE! You heard me gawdamnit. EF AR EE fraking EE - FREE! It’s every bit the app Apple should have made instead of that suck ass limited Font Book program they stuck in a couple years back that chokes like a 5 cent hooker if you have over 200 fonts. (Which means of course that Apple will steal the whole everything and release their own version next release. It’s that good.)

Breakdown: You can make sets of fonts (think playlists) have “smart sets”, make folders of sets (I have a retro folder with my various retro collection each in a set) - and did I mention it’s itunes like? Dear god it’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a font app and more. Oh, and like iTunes, if you decide you need more fonts, you can buy and download them directly from the app. I want to french kiss my monitor right now.

The best part, I don’t have to make folders! When I hit apple+O to import more fonts I can tell it that I want ot make a new set of the folders I select and EACH folder gets it’s OWN FOLDER already named and everything! If I select multiple folders, it makes multiple folders! Sweet Jesus that saved me, and I’m not kidding, eight hours!

And when I activated fonts? They worked! And get this the program can activate fonts as needed on it’s own as you open apps from before. No more warning screens saying that font you used last time is not active… it’ll go do it for you.

The app is still beta, and I will note it DID crash me hard a few times (once it killed every running app but itself, and once requiring a restart because NOTHING was accessible) but I think it was due to trying to add too many folders or fonts at once, but IT” BETA. I can’t imagine how much better this can be once it’s gold.

I faithfully reported the bugs I found to linotype and I will make a animal sacrifice to my new God later. This is worth a couple goats easy. (A windows version is coming out soon, quit yer bitchin!)

Oh, and more more thing - when you go to install it it will ask to navigate and import your fonts - don’t do it there if you are a font organizer like me. Tell it NO, continue setup and do it by hand That way you can import in your folders as sets (as you need and like them organized) so they aren’t all in one big pile.

Unwanted unmatching socks+$=love for some stray pet. Aww… now off to round up the drawer of naughty socks to buy me something fabulous.

I would so use this for TP in my bathroom. If I had the room, and my mom never visited my house again that is.

Somewhere, on a farm in Idaho, they are breeding a super race of
heart shaped potatoes that will take over the world. I don’t see Golden Palace writing a check for any of these though.

And while we’re approaching February:
A deformed hotdog that looks like a sex toy on the those scary websites you swear you never look at.

here’s one shaped like a… uh sexual implement of some sort. And here’s a potato chip shaped like another. Or how about a Penis-shaped Cheeto for that valentine?

NOTE: In my defense I was neither looking for penises or potatoes, it just kinda worked out that way once I got lost in the “everything else” section.

The right is a licensed copy of Swanky Mo from decalgirl.com, I love them so much. And so do other people I gather by the royalty checks!

Seen on the FreeCycle list today:
Wanted Any Collage Text Books academic books, Math and science: Any and All Kinds:

Looks like she could use English too. So I wrote and said “Hey that’s spelled college (because “collage” is a paper craft). Now, I didn’t say dimwit or anything and I got this back:
YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO BE RUDE: MY 9 YR WROTE THE MESSAGE FOR ME: I THOUGHT SHE DONE A GREAT JOB!!!!!!!

OMG. Done? DONE A good job? Oh sorry, OMG: DONE?
Do I even have to wonder if the kid is homeschooled by mom?

Don’t mind me I’ll be crying in the corner wishing for spontaneous teleportation to Canada.

“The Monster at the End of the this Book” (Starry furry and loveable old Grover) was one of my favorite childhood books. So much so, when I find copies at stores I buy them to give away to friends with kids.

So now that I can read the book online makes me so very happy.

Send the link to a kid, or better yet read it with your if you have them the right age.

Dave tagged me knowing I’m an easy mark… so here we go.

Four Jobs I’ve Had In My Life
1. Wendy’s salad bar attendant - I still am not one for salad bars)

2.Newspaper assembler (third shift) - You know those ad sections? We’re the ones who hand assembled them. Yeah.

3: Meijer Bagger/cart wrangler - Yup that was me.. One of those poor smucks who have to work outside in -10 degree weather pushing a huge row of carts through the ice and snow, or in the hottest part of summer when that black asphalt equals the surface temperature of the sun. Wonder I never went postal. I was one of thebest baggers they had though. I later became a cashier and was one all through design school. Once you have that crap job, you want to go to college, swear.

4: Best Buy District Artist - I made those signs for the music department when they actually had hand made ones. First job out of design school, okay?

Four Movies I Could Watch Over And Over Again
1. Shawshank Redemption
2. Grosse Pointe Blank
3. Vegas Vacation - the best of the lot
4. Spiderman - I just like Spidey

Four Places I Have Lived
Oh here it’s gets boring.
1. Springfield, OH - hometown
2. Sant Rosa, CA - one summer in 1988 doing repertory theatre
3. Miamisburg, OH - after design school
4. Middetown, OH - almost ten years now

Four TV Shows I Love To Watch
I’e said this before so here’s the first four that come to mind that aren’t on the list I made last week, but still have on Season pass

1. CSI
2. Good Eats
3. Dog Whisperer
4. Farscape (RIP)

Four Places I Have Been On Vacation
1. Las Vegas
2. Florida Keys
3. London
4. Our medieval mega-war in Pennsylvania

Four Websites I Visit Daily
1. Tuaw
2. Fark
3. Metafilter
4. Flickr

Four Of My Favorite Foods
1. Cheese, all kinds
2. Italian anything
3. dutch baby at the Original Pancake House
4. Dark Chocolate

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now
1. At the movies
2. See my pal Rachel in Columbus and have late Xmas.
3. Eating carrot cake pancakes at IHOP
4. In the Keys

Most wonderful place I’ve ever been.
1. London, hands down.
2. The Keys
3. The big field behind my parents house
4. Emeril’s

Four Bloggers I Am Tagging to follow me in this
1. Shannon
2. Grillboy
3. Esther
4. Karen

That’s right, there is a site on pictures, and fiction, regarding Smoking Nostril Exhales.

No I didn’t read the fiction, somehow I don’t want to know where the cigarette would go.

Here’s some celebrities I consistently find myself surprised they aren’t scientologists because they just have that “something ain’t quite right here” vibe that the El Rono’s give off also:

Melanie Griffith
Catherine Zeta-Jones
Elijah Wood
Melissa Gilbert
Harry Hamlin & that plasticine wife of his, Lisa Rinna
Katie Couric
James Spader
Mark McGrath
David Caruso
Jude Law (though brits aren’t much into the whole cult of El Rono thing)
Nicolette Sheridan
That Karen chic from Wil and Grace
Kathy Najimy
Terri Hatcher (maybe it’s her weird and clearly deviated septum that makes her nose all crooked at the bottom and bugs me to no end since having had a septum surgery myself she’d be better served TO get a nose job to fix it)

Not much there now, but I went WTF. I have a Lj blog now.

Seems all the other “hip” SCA girls and boys have LJ blogs, and since I had one I wasn’t using (got the account just so I could comment on LJ blogs) I went ahead and personalized the one I had to look similar to my medievalbeads.com site and I’ll use it to talk about medieval crap that my non-sca readers won’t give a damn about. I’ll link it to my bead site later.

Some people have gotten fired for blogging, I might manage to get banished! HA! Swweeet. Let’s see them put that one on metafilter.

Anyway, if you are on LJ and are SCA you might want to visit… The World According to Griz. I might turn it into a project diary as I work on stuff.

Oh yeah one last thing - Livejournal sucks ass. That is all.

The Blackberry device is looking to be on it’s way out of the US soon, if the court is gonna do what it’s hinting to solve a patent dispute. The bad part is, the next thing to fill in would be the Palm Treo 650. Which is pretty damn shoddy.

Mr Man is on his third one. The first one went to his boss, when his went down with a mysterious malady during a trip. Then the second replacement broke on Mr Man by occasionally dropping all audio for several hours at a time for no reason. Never knew one day to the next if he could actually use it. It could get and make calls, just not hear anything. So now he has a third one running. Numerous ones in the company have gone down in just two months. There is always a Cingular box coming in or going back.

The shitty part is, while Cingular has a neat little online store you can access with your cell phones to download ring tones and games and stuff, no such luck if you have a Treo. Denied. You HAVE to have your computer and upload apps to it through Palm Desktop. Sure that doesn’t sound so awful, it’s cheaper if you don’t count in the cost of the apps to download them off the makers websites.

So here’s how we found it really inconvenient. We’re in the Vegas airport, I wanted to play a game that it didn’t have on his Treo but did have on his old phone. The old one I could have just pulled up the store and downloaded it and be playing it inside five minutes. But no. Even though the thing does access internet and you can cruise the web pretty well even download PDF or word files, and work them, it can’t install programs on itself. You physically have to dock it and upload to it from your computer. It’s stupid, and essentially the same thing as my 1999 handspring, only with color screen and has a phone attached to it.

They need a way for it to do what the regular phones do, buy stuff and use it instantly.

We’ve become so pissed at it, Mr Man has gone back to his old motorola and will be giving the Treo to an underling to learn how to use so they can do tech support on it, and then pass it off as a replacement for the next exec who has broken his again.

So, there ya go, if you are lookign to replace your blackberry, forget Treo.

So — in wandering aimlessly on the net (haven’t done that in a few days) I stumbled on Oprah’s site for some reason and I am clicking around and come to the page for all the upcoming show topics that they are looking for guests on. I notice quite a few of a similar theme…

HUSBANDS: Has your wife let herself go?
CHILDREN: Has your mother let herself go?
Has your friend let herself go?
Have You Emotionally & Spiritually Let Yourself Go
Have you let yourself go?
I’ve Been Betrayed and I Can’t Let Go!
Let Yourself Go? What’s Your Comeback Plan?
Have You Never Let Yourself Go?

Now, there are like fourty other topics on there too (I edited them out), including a last minute tickets for her upcoming Dave Chappelle show if you are super fan. (Hey, remember that link a few weeks ago about her and Cosby trying to take him down? LOL) Someone on her staff though is pulling a Maury Povich with the whole ‘letting go’ thing.

Maury only ever seems to have five topics:
1: s/he’s cheating on me
2: my big fat baby in diaper
3: The DNA Cavalcade of Babydaddys
4: is this person a chic or a dude beauty pageant
5: kids with life scarring and debilitating physical ailments that would make John Merrick sick to his stomach

I never knew why they bother to have a stage, every other show is a DNA Cavalcade and as soon as the answer was revealed the angry/upset party promptly runs off stage and everyone chases after and the next ten minutes are behind a set next to the coffee maker and a wardrobe rack talking them into coming back out.

Oh oh, I just let me daytime viewing habits out. Well, BT (before Tivo) that is. After Tivo I’m much more primetime. Like yesterday I watched the new Lincoln biography special on History channel, oh many is THAT great. Do watch it, it is on again the 21rst at 8pm. It’s three hours long, but it’s a FAST three hours and it’s really engrossing. You’ll only wonder if that one british expert on it is actually a chic or a dude a few times in between pondering if Lincoln was really gay or just played with some.

I rather like #19 myself.

The most amazing things I learned in 2005:
– Octopuses can be violent ninja-like shark mass murders
– Dropping 15 Mentos in to a 2 liter of diet soda will make the liquid shoot out to astounding heights in nano time.
– George Bush can work an iPod

Not so hot. Ouch.

Not that I would read it anyway, I mean books are so 10th century.

Sorry about that. Caught up in some projects around here.

Some random thoughts:

1: Anyone else think the Progressive Insurance guy is kinda hot?

2: Four days till Battlestar is on again, damn it. Gots to get my Tragic Baltar fix.

3: My cat Zelda really seems to like to wear jewelry.

4: Mr Man is thinking of another Vegas trip - again.

5: My dog Maggie turned 7 years old today.

6: Tried sushi (at a new Japanese place on Tylersville road) again. Hated it. Again. I think this is the 6th or 7th time we’ve tried to like it and failed, honest. We’ve just accepted we’re hot food people and fish has more flavor when it’s cooked. But then I don’t like coffee either, I’m the anti-hipster.

The news is all ablaze about the fact that the guy who shot Pope JPII is out of jail. They are asking how is this possible? How can this monster be out of jail???

Gee, apparently Turkish prisons have some laws about being released when you’ve done your time, and not holding you without charges because they want to. Go figure.

See, this is why they aren’t a superpower.

I have 60 shows on Season pass (not kidding) but if I had to choose….
(in no particular order)

Robot Chicken
My Name is Earl
The Office
Medium (Bridget steals the show)
ER
Scrubs
Battlestar Galactica
Reno 911 24
Mythbusters
Unwrapped Lost

EDIT: I had to edit the list, I can’t believe I forgot Lost and 24! I should have made this a 20 list.

Whats your ten?