ashcroft's war on head shops

now glass pipes, water pipe, and other smoking devices are under attack from ashcroft. glad to see that we are devoting so much time and money to keep people from smoking pot. don't we have bigger issues than this? like the trumped up war against iraq, or maybe the failed search for osama, perhaps we could fix the accounting problems, or we could work on the economy, fix the increasing unemployment problem(we could start by fixing my unemployment problem), work on making minimum wage a livable wage, oh here's something, the fact that korea has nukes and a 3 stage icbm that can reach la. aren't those things more important than shutting down places that sell pot paraphernalia? what's next? shut down coke because kids are using their cans to make trailerpark pot pipes? actually i think i can find a way to shut down most of american manufacturing, just by devising a way to make a pipe out of it. products that come to mind:

coke cans, tobacco pipes, tin foil, lighters, rolling papers, dollar bills(both for snorting and for rolling), plumbing fixures, screens for your faucets, two liter bottles, mayonaise jars, rubber tubing, knifes, cigars, cigarettes, tampax cardboard applicators, metal pens, film cannisters, carmex, vicks vapor rub, stove top burners, the ground, the lake/ocean, cake pans(brownies), betty crocker brownies, food(munchies), water(cotton mouth), eye drops.

it just all seems so silly.

unemployment problems

applying for unemployment in nevada is like trying to get front row tickets to see u2 at a sold out concert. it's calling over and over again, except that you don't get a busy signal if their busy, you get through and have to go two levels down through their menu before you are told that they are busy. what a joke. i've already called 15 times today, and i've been calling for 2 months without being able to get through to a real person. two months. i guess that's part of their cost cutting measures, as i can never get the unemployment i should have been paid for the last two months back, as they have no retroactive payment. if anyone from the nevada government is reading this, FIX YOUR DAMN SYSTEM!

on to happier topics, i downloaded the latest version of urban terror over the weekend, and i have actually been playing it. i used to play ut all the time, but then i fell out of playing it when i moved and was without an internet connection for a few months. it's kind of nice to be getting back into it. i do have some problems with the new version, mostly because they took my favorite weapon out and replaced it with a number of other weapons. i'm sure i will get used to it, but right now i keep wanting to use the m-4, and it's not there. supposedly quake night is being ressurrected soon, so i need to get in good gaming shape.

killer bees

i don't know if they really were, but i did see a very large swarm of bees outside my back door today. they buzzed around for around 10 minutes, slowly drifting southeast, until they disappeared behind another house. it made me think of the gear daddies song 'african killer bees'

on to sports, i hope the america's cup is able to go today, this watching weather delays is really starting to piss me off.

my brain on drugs

for the last few weeks i've felt like my brain was that egg being fried to illustrate what drugs did to your brain(or what they want you to believe). as a result i haven't been writing very much, and what i have written doesn't make a whole lot of sense. so i'm going to steal wil wheatons idea of writing a stream of consciousness(it really breaks up the stream when you have to stop to look up how to spell consciousness) and see where it takes me. it seems like i keep covering the same topics here, and that i never do anything about them, which is in itself a topic that gets covered here. it seems some great conceit to write this stuff thinking that anyone cares what i think, or that me writing it makes a slight difference in the world, but i guess i don't know what else to do. i tend to write here without thought to whether my parents will read this(i don't even know if they do, i told them the address once, but that was right when i registered it and there wasn't anything up) , or my employer to be(not that i have one yet), but i give this email address out so it would seem that they could be reading what i write, and i wonder what effect it has on their hiring decisions. i also have applied for some web design stuff, and i list this site as one i've designed, which may or may not be a good idea. especially since it only works in exploder 6.0, netscape 6.0 mozilla 1+. i bought some rechargable batteries from fry today, they were 8.99 for 4 aa batteries, and regular batteries are 4.25 for 4. i think it was a pretty good buy. oh and they came with the charger for that price. it was kind of necessary to buy batteries as i need to replace the batteries in my mouse, my keyboard, and my cd player. anyhow, i'm off to spend money i don't have to be at happy hour with my friends and to maybe meet a girl, not that it's being set up that way, i'm just desperate, and i've been told that she is cute.

daily show superiority

it's kind of sad that there is better coverage on the daily show than on network news, and to top it off, they offer satire as well.

don't you wish right now that we could force bush into a vote of confidence? just rating him on his speaking abilities would get someone else in office. how did a drunk, cokehead asshole who failed high school speech class become president? how did a drunk manslaughterer become the first lady? why is tony blair such a bitch lapdog? why don't we just buy our own island, move there and secede? who's with me?

things are getting cheap

fry has a 80GB hard drive for $49. i have now seen two milestone hd price marks, first the $1/MB now the $1/GB. if only i had the $49 to buy one. i need a job!

pain and politics

so i haven't been able to run since the tournament 18 days ago. i'm just now able to ride bike without my kneed aching. i'd chalk it up to being old if it hadn't happened before. hopefully i will be able to start practicing and playing pickup this week.

evidently professing solidarity with a country is the same as having been supported by them for years. are we, as the american public, really buying that saddam and obl are best buddies? even in that tape he barely could stand saying that he supported iraq. get real, iraq is a secular country, the thing obl would hate. take religion away from obl and you destroy his power. now why would he want to be friends with someone who would take all his power away?

and bush, what makes the supporters of this war think he'll have the stamina to follow through on rebuilding iraq? has he followed through on anything? besides cutting taxes to the upper class, but even in that he hasn't addressed the economic problems he created. have we gotten obl? rebuilt afghanistan? fixed the enron type problems? are we really safer, or do we just know our colors better now? hell it runs in the family, his daddy couldn't finish iraq off the first time, what makes you think that a bad carbon copy of bush number 1 is going to? i mean daddy had the chance to do it right and he blew it. when you win a war, you occupy the country you defeated, you don't let the evil person ruling them stay in power, why did you fight the war if you were going to do that. did we leave hitler in power after ww2? no! lots of talk, but no follow through. come on, their name says it all, they're pussies.

and what's up with colin powell? every day i lose more and more respect for him. maybe it's because i went to school briefly with his daughter, but i used to think he was intelligent, but evidently he's just bush's little lap dog. shrubs hand is so far up colin's colon that you can smell the shit leaking out at 50 paces.

defend our liberties now

and people wonder why we need to make a huge fuss every time our rights get curtailed welcome to nazi germany meets soviet union meets 1984.

todd indebtedness

so i received "just for fun the story of an accidental revolutionary" today from todd. i don't remember why he bought it for me, i think it was for some computer help i gave him, but it might be an attempt to create a feeling of indebtedness towards him, hoping that i will give him some big thing at a later date(it's not gonna happen todd). in all seriousness thank you todd, i'm looking forward to reading it(i've actually gotten to chapter iv already, and i've only had it for 30 minutes).

now on to the evil that was wednesday night. it started around 10:00am when i received a call from carmen telling me that craig and dave had gotten comp tickets to see big bad voodoo daddy at house of blues that night, and would i like to go? i agreed quickly of course, and we decided to meet at 3950 for martinis. it turned out that we had 2 extra tickets, and we spent some time considering what to do with them. we ended up giving them to a couple sitting at the bar. i was the actual delivery agent, and this is how the exchange went down.

---start of cute little intermission story---

dan: what are your plans this evening?
they: huh? (looking at me as if i was a weirdo looking to make a coat with their skin)
dan: it's nothing bad, and it doesn't involve doing anything with me.
they: ok, we don't really have firm plans.
dan: i have 2 extra tickets to big bad voodoo daddy at house of blues tonight, and i'm looking to get rid of them. would you like them?
they: hmmm. that could be cool, how much do you want for them?
dan: nothing, i didn't pay for them, and i certainly wouldn't ask you to pay for them.
they: (looking at me like i'm working some angle) are you sure?
dan: yeah, just enjoy the show.
they: let us buy a round for your table.
dan: (with full knowledge that a round would be $36 plus tax) no, that isn't necessary.
they: are you sure?
dan: yes. have a good time at the show.
they: thank you.

they later tried to buy drinks for us, and we tried to turn them down, and they ended up just buying 1 drink for the whole table. i think they found out how expensive the drinks were and realised that even at full face value the tickets were only worth $40 so it made no sense to spend $36 on drinks for us. anyhow, i hope they went to the show and had fun, i know i had fun giving the tickets away.

---end of cute little intermission story---

so then we went to the show, and all hell broke loose as far as drinking and being drunk and losing my coat and cell phone, finding it again, hitting on girls, giving them my card(how fucking lame and old am i?), doing shots of jack with some girl at the bar, dave waving his penis around hob, not remembering how we got home, falling over in the bathroom and pulling down the shelves in said bathroom, me waking up in the spare bedroom and not knowing how i got there, and being badly hung over for the next day. a vote was taken thursday afternoon, and the decision was a firm "no more of that!"