CharmingGeek.net Funness

This week, I’m reading the second in the Hitchhiker’s trilogy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I’m just going to take a brief moment to say that reading this book is making me dumber. Granted, I have been called a book snob, and a movie snob, and probably other kinds of snobs, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a little intelligence in my media. (ie Gwen Stefani’s “Holla Back Girl” should be sent to solitary confinement.)
I just finished G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. Although this book was also a fantasy/adventure novel with less than 150 easy pages. However, I got the impression from the writing that Chesterton had read a book before. In comparison, Douglas Adams’ books are mind-numbing and surprisingly repetitive. (I don’t think I can stand to read the phrase “large, friendly letters on the cover” one more time.) Maybe I’m old-school, but I don’t think that one writing a novel should ever use copy and paste. Additionally, I may be overreacting just a bit to Adams’ attempts to use mathematics and logic within the context of his [science] fiction.
Anyhow, since I don’t like quitting, (and this book is hardly a challenge) I’m going to try to finish this book as quickly as possible so I can move on to something with a little more substance. This is in no way a indictment of the movie. The screen adaptation of the book/series deviates considerable from the original novel and either because of or in spite of this turns out to be mostly enjoyable. It probably helps if you’re a fan of British comedy and/or science fiction, though. Still, I could have done without the theme song: probably worse than Stefani’s song.

Maybe you’ve noticed the Google ads. Yeah, I guess I’ve sold out. It’s really something of an experiment. I’ve been against putting any kinds of commercial ads on this site for quite a long time, but I thought I’d give adsense a try. These ads aren’t too obtrusive, and should be geared toward the content of my site. I’ll be monitoring them to see how much revenue they produce and whether it’s worth keeping them around. Hopefully I can recover enough to cover my domain name registration and hosting within the year. If not, then I don’t think I’m willing to put up with looking at these ads. If you love me, you can click on some of these ads and visit my sponsors. Maybe you’ll earn a penny or two for me.
It’s either unethical or unprofitable for me to click on my own ads, and I see this as a real drawback. The ads Google feeds are specifically geared to the content of the site on which they are displayed. Well, since I provide the content of this site, and the content is dictated by whatever happens to garner my interest at the moment, then it makes sense that the ads would be perfectly geared to me. Besides, I don’t get an awful lot of visitors to my site, and nobody visits it more than me.

I know some of you guys are familiar with the convenience store staple, “The Bomb.” Basically, it’s a really big burrito. A really big microwavable burrito, of course. A fellow talks about “The Bomb” here. Now this is just funny on too many levels. The movie Waking Life doesn’t mention this burrito by name, but couldn’t have done much better than this:

Man, this must be like parallel universe night. You know that cat that was just in here, who just ran out the door? Well, he comes up to the counter, you know, and I say, “What’s the word, Turd,” and he lays down this burrito and kind of looks at me, kind of stares at me, and then he says, “I have but recently returned from the valley of the shadow of death. I am rapturously breathing in all the odors and essences of life. I’ve been to the brink of total oblivion. I remember and ferment a desire to remember everything.

So what’d you say to that?

Well, what could I say? I said if you’re going to microwave that burrito, I want you to poke holes in the plastic wrapping because they explode and I’m tired of cleaning up your little burrito doings, you dig me? Because the jalapenos dry up. They’re like little wheels.

I say all that to say this:
An alert reader sent me this link. Highlighting the paranoia that has gripped American society in general and our school systems specifically, this school in New Mexico was locked down for two hours because some kid brought a 30 inch long burrito to school as part of a class project. Somebody assumed that the large, wrapped cylinder was something deadly (you figure out the logical progression here)and next thing you know, we have snipers on the roof.
Well, maybe next time he’ll just build a cake or something.

It’s really late, and I’m up because I’m playing with my computer, trying to build a new toy. Today I found out that I don’t have the necessary TV capture card to build a Freevo. I almost went out and bought one, then I realized that I don’t watch TV. I guess, theoretically, if I had a Freevo, I could watch even less TV because I could skip commercials and record things then never watch it. I decided instead to install Fedora Core 3 and use the box primarily as a music server. With Fedora, though I should be able to do practically anything I want with it. It’ll probably end up being a general purpose file server and web server, too. Of course, when I say I can do practically anything with it, I should specify that I’m running with a PIII and 256MB of RAM. Oh, and also I’m running Linux, which means, well, I can’t do like normal stuff that I’d do with a real computer.