Weblog 167

April 19, 2009~ 12:15am




That angry girl above pretty much sums up how I've been feeling the past week or so, and I'll be damned if I know exactly why. Sometimes life just gets gummed up, and it's from a place you can't put a finger on-- you just know you're restless, uncomfortable, snarly.

There have been plenty of things in the news that put me on edge, that infuriated me...(.i.e., the wholesale murder of local policemen, pirates in the Gulf of Aden, the failing economy) that...combined with the spring that will not burst forth the way we imagine it should - and this long, long winter goes on. Where are bees on flowers?



It feels that way in the heart as well.

I guess I've reached a dry patch. A soul parch. Last weekend, we watched W.  ____and that certainly didn't help. LOL!!

It was painful to watch the near past in such perfect relief: the sheer stupidity of the manipulated masses governed by a rich boy who felt he'd never gotten the respect he so craved.... from a father he was determined to 'one-up' even if it spelled disaster and death for the rest of us. What a sad commentary on this country's past eight years. Rich, power-hungry men sitting a room and spinning truth to their liking, headed up by an entitled Yale brat with poor self-control and an idea of leadership based solely on John Wayne and the fundamentalist Right.

The movie wasn't one of the best efforts of Oliver Stone. It felt like an ensemble of caricatures to me - the Condoleezza Rice character was pure Saturday Night Live parody for instance, and I couldn't keep myself from laughing each time she was onscreen. That's inexcusable in a film I'm sure Mr. Stone meant to have some actual 'kick' in its believability. At the end of the movie, all I could think is- sad, sad, sad... and the feeling's remained. Not because it failed, but because we did.

And I know only too well what that's cost us.

So......where are ya, Spring? Where is the light-hearted lift you normally extend for six weeks or so each year? Where are the blossoms and the temperate breezes....



the youthful feel, no matter a person's age? (I take that back....Saturday I looked around on the drive home from little Bill's 6th birthday party and yes, the trees are beginning their spring show of splendor) -so it's inside it hasn't happened- it simply hasn't arrived, and oh - I miss it.




April 19, 2009~ 5:15am
Up early here, before the sheer pleasure of going back up to bed to sleep till 1 p.m. (I love when I can do that on weekends!) -and am thrilled with the speed of my computer. Before retiring upstairs late yesterday evening, I finally got fed up with Flash ads and all Macromedia crap, so I deleted the biggest drag on speed and power resources and banished it from my system. NO MORE WATCHING FLICKERING, JUMPING, EMBEDDED SHIT that I wouldn't want to see anyway....no more BLOAT!



In my opinion, when Adobe© bought out Shockwave and claimed the internet as their own personal apple, that's when people like myself- who like their older OS, who don't care for Facebook and YouTube and MySpace- people who HATE COMMERCIALISM of any stripe, were royally screwed because it bogs down everything, keeps prompting to update-- and even in Firefox, if you don't have it, you get ugly green puzzle pieces plastered all over sites telling you to download a missing 'plug in'.

[Note: You can stop that entirely once Flash is gone by using 'about:config'. Type about:config into your brower bar, then type 'plugin' in the search bar. When you see 'plugin.default_plugin_disabled'-- right click, then click on 'toggle'-- which changes the value to 'false'. (I know that seems contradictory, but that's the value that turns those annoying green puzzle piece graphics and that intrusive top bar prompting you to download, off.) When you close out of Firefox, then bring it back up, it will be gone. Yea!!!]

Last night I DELETED all Macromedia from my system. (Adobe even has a small program on their site that will wipe your system clean of all previous versions; that's so you can cleanly install their latest monster but I used it to get rid of the sumabitch!)

And if you're still using Adobe Reader© - for GOD SAKES, install FOXIT! Loads instantly. For those who missed my older rant about Adobe©  you'll find links to both Foxit, and an amusing collective hate-a-thon site for the fuming sufferers of that fat, unwieldy Reader.

Last bit....before I went to bed, I set my computer to do a total defrag and chose 'Rearrange programs so my programs start faster' and 'Check drive for errors'-- and let it run. Everything works beatifully now, and all the sites that used to 'hang' while the tinsel and crap was loading, zip right through. Goodbye you bloated old bastard. You done ate the last byte of RAM on this system- ridden out on a rail, you greedy pest!




April 21, 2009~ 4:45am
How weird to have my poetry posting board unreachable. Servers must be down. I feel adrift.....a blank screen, floating



--not that there's anything earth-shaking to post-- but I'm so used to noodling in there to keep the brain cells firing.

I've emailed the wonderfully generous Danny to see what happened to his wires and hardware. The internet is like a body. Sometimes some of it succumbs to one sickness or another, and all you can do is hope it's not fatal. But if it is, I'll light out for places unknown and make camp again.

Funny, how attached we become to that which is based on air. It's only a tad more ludicrous than the fable of the Milkmaid And Her Pail. (At least that little lady had a real container to carry her stuff.) LOL!

Tonight I'll try and put up a picture or two from Bill's birthday party-- very 60's in its theme of martians and space rockets with all the kiddoes running around in green martian masks, looking for a leader to be taken to.....and a lovely sunny day it was too. (That's fortunate-- since we've had rain practically since the party.)

At times, the gods smile. Often a tiny, begrudging smirk- but they do smile a bit now and again.....(hope that extends to my poetry board. Hope I don't have to sacrifice a young goat to get it back because those buggers are too cute to have their throats cut. Maybe a burnt offering of toast will do- that, I'm good at.) Maybe this is my karmic payback for dissing Adobe. Perhaps this is retribution for scorning all things flashy, twittery and widgety- and immediately networked right from the wet breath of exhalation, right onto the screen.

(All I wanted was a little yard to play in. I do not now nor have I ever wanted to join the Borg: what I will say is the absence of ads and busy embedded crap all around me is a welcome relief-- board or no board.)




April 21, 2009~ 8:00am
My little posting board is still down for the count. I'm a poetry junkie, and I calm myself by doodling words, so I went ahead and created a third blog- a mirror, as much as I could make it- of my Cutecast forum, till it either heals itself-- or is buried for good.

No time for fussing with hooking the camera up here tonight to download pictures from Bill's party-- that'll be for next week. Tonight I scoured the web, searching for yet another free posting board that's not DELUGED with ads eventually, but no dice. Blogger's been good about that, so back to Blogger I came and was able to strip a lot of the garbage off the template. So if you're interested in reading the one bitty poem in there thus far, click on my old buddy the crow- and have a quick look at the new 'apartment'. (SCRATCH THAT! The OLD DIGS are back up!) Note from 2010: THAT BOARD HAS BEEN GONE SINCE DECEMBER 2009. Disappeared without a trace. The owner, Danny Damianus, who'd always been so helpful before ---has not uttered a syllable about it. All is just 'lost'....





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