I promise that I shall never trust in the old advice, “Oh thank goodness it’s raining, I don’t need to take my allergy pills today!” Especially when it rains for 2 or 3 days straight. Even shutting out the outside world didn’t help and it caught up with me last night. So today’s been a sleep in late and be domestic kinda day. Only a few errands (mainly to get allergy meds) and I’ve been home doing a bit of tidying between a lot of sitting down.

I have little entertainment to share except this recent gem from The Onion: Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past. My TiVo can download video podcasts, which is about the only way I’ll watch them since most web video just bores me. I never bought into the whole “small screen” entertainment, no matter how cute the podcaster might be. Keep an eye on the news ticker for some fun headlines as well.

Funny… but also very true. I love the Kathy character, “Two times a week I travel 6 miles to rent and return videos.” And the fond memories of going to the store and finding out that the video you wanted was already being rented. But what I most remember about Blockbuster stores is that you could easily gauge how queer the surrounding neighborhood was by how many copies of each gay and lesbian movies they had and whether or not there was a specific section just for those films.

“Japan finds itself in crisis, with our society and culture temporarily reverting to a pre-cyberunification era,” said Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, communicating non-telekinetically for the first time in his nearly 150 years of post-cryogenic life. “Though many citizens have been limited to algorithm-based emotion detection, neutron baths, speed limits below the speed of light, and other barbaric inconveniences for over a week now, I promise we will pull through.”

On the less fake tip, I think it’s time to cull my LiveJournal default view list. I have a lot of people and communities there that should probably be moved to their own lists. I missed reading about my friend BK’s accident over the weekend because of the other things that had pushed his Saturday afternoon posting about it back a page or two. It was only not seeing him around the gulag on Monday that made me wonder where the heck he was. At his height, he’s hard to miss standing up, and at my height, I can pretty much see most everyone even when they’re sitting down, which apparently both of us were doing with pain yesterday, though my soreness was self-inflicted… well Justin-inflicted anyway.

There must be something in the air, as I’ve seen a lot of people writing about moving or removing their journals from areas that imply social network to their own domain or to other spots in the blogosphere that are less “me too!” and more “i dig what you do.” There won’t be a “mass de-friending” as seems to cause such drama on LJ, but there are some people I’ll be reading more often than others. People I’ve met in person, people I regularly talk to virtually, people whose lives I should be caught up on. There really are no set guidelines, but I think I’m at my limit of feeling that livejournal, like other social networking sites, has made the concept of friendship a little too easy.

This might not be the best time for me to do this as I feel I’m experiencing a bit of a social reversal of fortune lately. Instead of hearing “what do you want to do this weekend?” on Thurs/Fri, I hear “what did you do this weekend?” the following Monday often times to which the answer “nothing” is not an exaggeration.

Still, vacation looms on the horizon and I hope to come back refreshed and ready to close out the summer.

If Someone Wanted To Publish My Blog Entries For Money, I Wouldn’t Say No from The Onion.

My blog is more of a hobby than anything else, something to do for fun when I get home from my bookstore job. I’ve never dreamed of making a living from it. Though hypothetically speaking, if The New Yorker—a publication that I’m sure pays top dollar—wanted to publish my August 9, 2005 post “Creative Thinking Spots” in its “Shouts And Murmurs” section, I’d consider it. Didn’t cross my mind when I wrote that post, and that’s certainly not why I wrote it, nor why I have a Google news alert set up for New Yorker editor David Remnick, but I can understand how someone on their staff might think the piece is a good fit for that section.

Not that I haven’t thought about ways to use my blog to earn money, but all of the methods I’ve seen so far were just too snake oil for my taste. More than a few of the paid review sites said that they would pay regardless of a positive or negative review of their product, movie, etc. But research on the web showed that much like the pay per click/pay per surf boom, people had a hard time redeeming their money and their blog posts were turned down for random reasons.

That said, if a bunch of free and interesting kitchen gadgets were to make their way to me in the hopes that I would test them out, take pics and write up my experiences here — I wouldn’t be too put out. I’m just sayin’…

Even CEO Can’t Figure Out How Radio Shack Still In Business

“I’d like to capitalize on the store’s strong points, but I honestly don’t know what they are,” Day said. “Every location is full of bizarre adapters, random chargers, and old boom boxes, and some sales guy is constantly hovering over you. It’s like walking into your grandpa’s basement. You always expect to see something cool, but it never delivers.”

While it isn’t quite as bad as they make it seem, this Onion headline cracked me up. I’ve just come back from yet another unsuccessful visit to Radio Shack. All I wanted was a spindle, tall or short, of Dual-Layer blank DVDs. Not an uncommon request, especially since I’ve seen them at this location before. I go in today after a quick stop at the Post Office and I look at the shelf. Nada. I guess my shock was so apparent that an employee actually asked me if he could help me with anything and I told him what I wanted and he had no clue what I was asking for, even though we were standing right in front of the blank DVDs. I told him that I already knew they didn’t have it and that I’d seen it there before and he says, “Well we’re a Radio Shack Express, so we don’t always get the stock that other stores have.” Radio Shack Express clearly translates to “Buy your batteries, sign up for a new cell phone, grab some ipod or digital camera accessories and get the hell out.” Everything else in the store must be display dummies, I swear. Thankfully my need for the media isn’t dire, so I can have amazon ship it to me, but still I totally agree with that article. I don’t know how they’re in business either.

This may be the greatest headline for a blog post I’ve seen in a long while, even better because it’s true: Deaf Lesbian Chainsaw Killer Found Guilty. Sadly Queerty is having loading issues this morning, you can read their take on it in my Google Shared articles, and the original story on CNN.

Ann Coulter number eighty on Boston Phoenix’s list of the 100 Unsexiest Men.

Wait a second, I think I was an abused child as well: Majority Of Parents Abuse Children, Children Report - yes, it’s all coming back to me, early bedtimes, no between-meal snacks, homework before television. I smell a lawsuit!

There is so much crap out there that’s passing for news, and a lot of it is causing the worst in people to rise to the surface. I just needed a laugh.