It's time I got a cleaning lady. It has to be a lady; I don't want a dude cleaning up my place, some dude walking around. And it should be a non-English-speaking lady, like a Mexican cleaning lady. The less English my cleaning lady knows the better. I feel like a Mexican cleaning lady is less likely to tell anyone I know about the weird and disgusting shit she'll be cleaning up, about my various embarrassing stains and odors and leavings. Same goes the dry-cleaner, laundry... anyone involved in cleaning up after me. The less English a person knows, the less concerned I am about what they think of me. How much does a Mexican cleaning lady cost? It has to be like minimum wage, right? Or can I pay her less if she's Mexican? Is there a Mexican Cleaning Lady Agency I can contact?

Contract a health ailment you are convinced is something terrible and fatal, finally visit a doctor, ponder your mortality in silent dread while the tests are analyzed, then learn it was something much less serious than you feared. This should give you at least two days worth of a good mood.

Most Saturdays I drive over to the Furry Lodge, dress up in a big bear suit, and rub up against anything in pink fur for about an hour. After that I'll pick up a 6-pack of Pabst, sit on the roof of the dry cleaners, and throw rocks at the Latino skate-boarders. They call me "El Chupacabra". Probably because of the bear suit. Finally, to cap the night off, I usually swing over to my ex-girlfriend's house and root through her garbage, searching for some shred of evidence that she desperately hates her life with her fancy husband and shiny new children, wishing like Cinderella she still had me in her life (and not in her trashcans). Then Animal Control usually shows up and knocks me out with a tranquilizer dart. Probably because of the bear suit.

Speaking of crazy, Beefy Lou has lost some more of his mind recently. He's been obsessing over his hands and feet, exclaiming how proud of them he is, how amazed by how well they work together. "If one of my feet has an itch," says Beefy Lou to anyone willing to pretend to listen, "one of my hands will immediately scratch it. No negotiation, no fee, nothing. Pure altruism!" And to anyone still within earshot: "This one time my left hand had shit on it, and my right hand cleaned it off! Actual shit!" And when calling on the phone, instead of a greeting you might hear: "You should see my hands clap. Such precise synchronization..." And so on like that. Nobody will choose to go near him now, so he is left with those loyal little friends of his, the ones attached to his body.

Meanwhile, my war with household insects has erupted once more this year. I've stocked the compound with Raid cannisters, citronella bombs, swatters, and those blue zapping lights that people in the eighties used to attach to their porches and patios. I have especially little tolerance for creepy insects like earwigs and roaches, alien little creatures imbued with preternatural menace. I've been seeing a lot of these lately, and they fill me with primal fear every time, so I've issued my hands and feet kill-on-sight orders for them, even if the hands are already engaged in cleaning shit off of one another. Certain creatures cannot be tolerated!

Wait there's Beefy Lou right now -- he's just run by outside shouting something about Jello. I think it was, "Jello must be yellow. Jello must be yellow." Ah well, even crazier today.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jones has been obsessed with World Cup soccer, and like all Americans who watch this game, he's certain he can improve it with certain modifications. These are not the typical improvements you often hear people espouse like instant replays, better timekeeping methods, forechecking, and so on. His improvements are a bit stranger. For instance, he recommends that the field become round and slowly rotate on a turntable while the goals remain stationary, sort of like a lazy susan or a revolving restaurant. That way the direction of the offense must always arc against the motion of the field, causing a light but persistent dizziness for players and spectators alike. How this is an "improvement", Dr. Jones won't say, but he claims to have gotten the idea after watching a documentary on mass hypnotism. For similarly enigmatic reasons, he wants every player to wear an astronaut's helmet, flip-flop sandals, a brightly colored inner-tube around their waist, and keep a live cricket in their mouth. And as a final insult to the audience he would have loud-speaks play an irritating buzzing horn sound during the entire game. Madness! He plans to petition FIFA for these changes soon after the end of this year's tournament.

Wait a moment! Now Beefy Lou has arrived outside my door. He's whispering something through the keyhole, wait... he's saying... "Old people... Old people... Old people are tragic... and.... and smelly.... Old people are tragic and smelly...."

Sigh.

And it just bothers me that this last remnant of extrasolar humanity, this loud-mouthed, self-obsessed crowd of whining idiots, who basically just spent the *entire* series squabbling over the most minute political issues, find *this* decision uncontroversial, *this*, the most radical decision ever made by anyone about anything, the most absurd plan ever devised by ape or robot, *this* they all go along with. Sure, Apollo, no problem, let's just FLY ALL OUR SHIT INTO THE SUN! NO PROBLEM, APOLLO! WHATEVER YOU SAY!

It's making me crazy.

This trailer for the new live action Star Blazers movie looks amazing. It was Star Blazers stacked on top of Star Wars that made me a Science Fiction geek lo these many years ago, and now I've become so cynical on the subject I should be cursing and spitting over the notion of a live action Star Blazers (the way I curse and spit at my scarred portrait of Ron Moore every morning). But damn, this looks like it could be really good. Nah, I guess not.

I searched my feelings today and decided that the Battlestar Galactica finale still annoys the snot out of me! They flew all their technology into the sun! What were they thinking!? They have no idea what kind of viruses are floating around down there. Are they going to switch from laser cutters to stone axes? Don't they want plumbing anymore for the gods' sake? They don't need electricity?? I guess because they no longer have anything with a plug attached to it, why not! Don't they even want refrigeration!? A comfy freaking chair to sit on? Oh, I hate that Apollo so much! I hate I hate I hate you Ron Moore!

Imagine Avatar, ok, that dopey James Cameron movie? But now replace all the sexy blue cat creatures with slimy Jabba the Hutt monsters, all lying around farting and puking and compelling slave girls to dance or suffer the teeth of the Rancor. It's much better, right?

Avatar is Dune for dumb people. There, I've figured it all out so you don't have to.

Some of you, my adoring flock, will find me unpredictable when I say unto you, "I did not hate the Lost finale". I actually rather enjoyed it. I know, I know, the whole afterlife thing is hokey, and not unexpected, and the character reunions didn't always click firmly into place (especially Sayid and that blonde girl; I thought his big love was that Iraqi woman..?), but I was satisfied anyway. There remain a thousand plot holes and ten thousand question marks; the resolutions were mostly *magic* (a wizard did it!), but I didn't mind. This was *low* on the BSG scale of finale-suck. So who cares if the island is the geological equivalent of Marsellus Wallace's briefcase? So what if some of the characters got shafted (the last few episodes this season made me think of an amateur chess player who finds himself in a position too complex for him to understand very well so his strategy is to exchange pieces until things simplify enough for him to stabilize his game. Similarly the Lost writers went about killing off all the characters they couldn't fit into their endgame, reducing the plotlines into something more manageable. They sort of succeeded. I guess they did.)?

Of course, I might have been happier if the island turned out to be a giant alien spaceship, and all the 815 survivors were abductees undergoing experiments, a-and Jacob was an alien-human hybrid, and the smoke monster was fuel exhaust, and....

Flyers pulled off some beautiful fractal symmetry last night: down three games to zero in the series, they win three games and force game seven; then down three goals to none in game seven, they score three goals and tie the game; the fourth goal is the fourth game is the win -- outstanding!

I wanted to upgrade my hard drives so I installed this one from scratch -- something I haven't done for well over a year. It took around 8 hours to get everything set up correctly, mostly because I had some Oracle migration issues (note to self: use the export and import tools, not backup and restore). Mostly I'm happy with 10.04, and since it's an LTS I'll probably stick with it a while. Some bullets:

* The new default theme is awful, and whoever decided to move the window buttons to the left needs to have a shoe thrown at them. I immediately moved them back, switched the window border to Litoral and the controls to Industrial. Ah, better.

* Again there were sound issues, and I had to edit two more config files to get four speakers working (the center one is a lost cause at this point). They do a good enough job though and I'm content.

* Eclipse menu items were sans icons again. I encountered this in the last release, and fixed it by clicking on a setting in the Appearance Preferences dialog. Now the Gnome developers have removed that as well; they really don't want me to have icons next to my menu items. I finally learned how to get them back with this command: gconftool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons --type bool true.

* The IM client is more integrated with the desktop now, and it's almost interesting to run it again (I've been non-IM for years now). There are also social networking interfaces built in, but I'm not much of a social networker. (I find most people either boring or irritating, and the small percentage that remain soon find me either boring or irritating. And so it goes....)

* The boot-up time is now very fast. I almost want to power down more often just so I can marvel at the boot-up speed. (Of course I won't. There are too many environmentalists that I want to annoy by leaving things on all the time.)

* I will try to keep things simple for this OS, cruft-less, minimal. I will not install Amarok and its legions of KDE libraries, even though I love Amarok more than any other computer program ever. I will use -- eegh -- Rhythmbox. I will not install any alternative window system, no matter how much I hear about how cool the new KDE 4 has become, or how perfectly clean and simple Xfce is. I will be content. I will eat salad with little bits of chicken chopped up in it, and watch the Ricky Gervais Show, and laugh like I did at Yardale where I had a 4.0 grade point average.

Brrrrrb

Beyond even the proprietary barricades around its products, Apple is evil because it employs the same shitty business tactics that everyone condemns Microsoft for employing. Five months ago Apple bought what was a nice, useful web-based music service called Lala. Today they killed it. First they crippled it, like a sadistic kitten pawing at the limbs of a terrified little mouse, then they killed it. Now it's just twitching, out there in the grass, squeaking for some solace from a rodent god that long ago abandoned it.

First thing I want to know is, why did the word "secretary" become pejorative? It seems like a perfectly fine word. Are we going to start calling the Secretary of State the Administrative Assistant of State?

Second: when is Software Engineer's Day? Isn't it a little sexist to pick an occupation held mostly by women and set a special day for it to give her presents, take her out to lunch? Would you do that for a predominantly male occupation like pipe fitter? Could you imagine a Pipe Fitter's Day when all the electricians and welders at the oil field take the pipe fitters out to lunch and buy them flowers?

Bah!