That reminds me, I meant to give some hell to the person who stole our sign.

Signs proclaiming "Bush Must Go!" have been springing up all over our progressive little valley here and Squanto (the Wife) and I, being also of that particular persuasion, forked over our six bucks for a sign too. It is basically a weatherized cardboard sign that fit over top of a cheap metal frame.

We had two problems. First, there were spaces at the bottom of the sign, on each side, for putting in an extra message of disgust toward the current administration. Most in town were buying extra anti-Republican bumper stickers and putting them in the slot. We were cheap, and wrote something in with a magic marker. The Squantalicious One decided on this saying: "A Village in Texas is Missing Its Idiot!"

We tried to put this down by the end of our drive way to no avail -- the ground was so rocky that the frame couldn't get embedded enough to hold the sign up. One day, the Wife decided enough was enough, and put the sign right out on the side of the road. Technically no longer on our property -- we live about 150 feet back from a 55-mile-an-hour two-lane road, complete with county-maintained culverts and ditches, etc.

At first, having the sign out there for all to finally see, turned my stomach into knots. I had visions of Right-wingers in pick-up trucks with Molotov cocktails driving up to my house, doing donuts in my front lawn as they whooped and hollered and tossed the flaming brews at the front porch.

After a couple of weeks though, I forgot my fears and went back to my usual existence.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, while I was down getting the mail, I saw that the sign, including the metal frame, had vanished. Gone. I checked the ditch, I crossed the road to see if it had blown off, but it was simply and utterly gone.

I have no idea who took it or why. Squanto, even more paranoid than me (where my paranoia leads to fear, here's leads to anger, and thus we both embrace the Dark Side) said it was probably the people about a mile down the road from us, the only house in town that has the guts to put out a Bush/Cheney sign on their front lawn. I figure it was more likely that some municipal worker saw our sign not on private property and said "sucks for them" as he threw the sign in the back of a dump truck. I can only hope he shook his head in sadness with a feeling of solidarity our over-zealous, ditch-encroaching protest.

...and some foreigners, too!

I'm so happy to say that I successfully avoided viewing any coverage of the Athens Olympics this year. Not a stitch. The only thing I saw was a still picture of two female beach volleyball players rolling around in the sand hugging... and I don't think that was on a site devoted to "sports."

This coming week, I plan to devote myself to missing any and all coverage of the Republican National Conventions outside of what's show on the Daily Show.

It truly is a great time to be an ignorant American.

I usually answer the phone by saying "Eric speaking." I find it cuts through a lot of nonsense. If people are trying to reach me specifically, they know it's me. If they're not looking for me, they can just hang up. It comes from years of working in offices where everyone's number was only one digit away from the cubicle next to you, and lots of times people didn't know they had the right person or the right place... I used to say things like "FamilyPC, this is Eric speaking," so they'd know they go the right business, if not the right person.

I still do this, and I there's few things more annoying than when the person on the other end says either

1) "I'd like to speak to Eric [or Mr. Griffith] please." Didn't I just say that?

2) "Hello Eric speaking," as if it's my name.

3) "Hello, this is _______ speaking," sometimes with just their own first name, as if I'll automatically know them. You called me, you frickin' nimrod.

I, of course, will regret posting this, as I know my friends will say all of the above every time I get a call now. Bastards.

Part of the Griffith Master Plan for Weight Loss is to give away as much of my bodily fluid as possible.

Thus, I have been giving blood as often as I can for the last year. That translates to every couple of months, because donors have to wait 58 days in-between donations, during which time all that retched blood grows back. I'm about half way to getting my first pin, for giving up One Gallon o' Plasma.

The Red Cross sets up a remote station every two months at the Ithaca VFW on State Street, right across from the beloved and seldom visited State Diner. I've tried to be there like clockwork. It's far easier to give here than it was to even find a place near where I lived in Massachusetts. Back then, I really wanted to give (especially after 9/11) but I never did. At the time I was considering it, so was everyone else, and the donations places (an hour's drive away) couldn't handle the capacity.

Usually the 45 minutes it takes to get through the donation are pretty innocuous. First trudge up the side stairs to the second floor of the VHW, which hasn't been redecorated since the early 1960s. An ancient, battered, and I suspect un-functioning Bingo sign sits on one end, over the doors to the bathrooms.

I hand over my ID to the first volunteer at the table who marks down that I've arrived on a reservations sheet. She or he makes me sit on a metal chair and read the several page pamphlet that spells out all the reasons I would not/should not give blood: Had Hepatitis. Exchanged money or drugs for sex. Lived out of the country for more than three months. Fuck men. Got a tattoo in the last 12 months. The usual things.

I skim it, admire the pretty colors on the print outs, and go to the next station where a Red Cross staffer asks me my name, rank, and social security number. They pull up my stats from the last visit, and then print out the questionnaire. This I take to a private cubicle where I have to circle either Y or N for each query. The only Y I ever circle is the first one: "Are you feeling healthy and chipper and wonderful today?" or something like that. The rest are reiterations of the reasons not to give: Like to smoke crack out of shared needles. Had AIDS for lunch. Fuck men. Are a Republican. Etc.

I was also told this time, for the first time, that the Red Cross is very anal, and that if I circle an N, I should make sure the circle doesn't touch the Y. Must be they grade it with a computer, like the NY Regents test.

After I fill this out (but don't sign it), it's time for the stick, the prick and the pump.

First the same staffer sticks an electronic thermometer in my mouth. After growing up with glass thermometers, feeling the metal rod with the prophylactic rubber sleeve under my tongue now feels unnatural. My temp: 98.8.

Then the prick: she takes the middle finger of my right hand and rubs it down with alcohol, then uses a sterilized spring-loaded unit with a point on it break the skin on the finger. She squeezes out some blood then wipes it off, I assume to make sure it's not contaminated with rubbing alcohol. Then she squeezes more into this little plastic tube that sucks my life giving juice up like a sponge. She then puts a drop into a vial of blue liquid and watches it fall.

"You've got a high iron content," she said. With a finger motion she added, "look at it fall." She went on to tell me that most men have higher iron in their blood than women. I asked her if it was dietary, and she said she didn't know. Maybe testosterone causes iron.

Finally, the pump: she puts on the sphygmomanometer on my arm to check my blood pressure. She had to do it twice, because she couldn't hear my pulse (66) over the oldies radio station blaring in two different parts of the room. She seemed a bit worried and asked me if my usual blood pressure was like this. For a second I thought, 'here it is, hyper-dog-damn-tension, finally, after all these years.' I pictured myself clutching my chest, ala Redd Foxx. Turns out, if anything, it was low ( 114 systolic and 84 diastolic). All that clean living is finally paying off with wide open arteries, apparently.

She had her boss come over and witness me signing the questionnaire and he handed me to a phlebotomist who's name I was either never told or I promptly forgot. She brought me over to the area of six cots, arranged in an oval with an opening for entering and existing the spheroid. In the middle was a table filled with, uh, phleboto-items, the tools of the trade for extracting blood.

Since my last couple of donations I've continued to have a little red mark in the crook of my right elbow. So when she asked what arm to use, I said, "oh, lets try the left." I had visions of my right arm being unable to heal so I'd look like I was shooting up black tar heroin, when all I'm doing is donating my blood so those addicts have a supply after for the transfusions they need after they fall in the gutter, split open their heads, and almost bleed to death. I give and give for them, but I don't want to be seen as one. But the left arm -- no luck. She used the tourniquet and had me squeezing a foam grip, then she throw another sphygmomanometer on and pumped it up until the arm turned blue -- but she still couldn't get a good vein. So, she had my flip around on the bed. She popped up a nice one in no time on that side and with the usual warning "you'll feel a little pain here," she stuck me and I started to leak.

I've learned two things while doing this many donations lately. One, never look woozy if you're not, or they'll try to keep you there. Since there's no way to get off those cots that isn't awkward-looking, I get that a lot. The other thing is, don't close your eyes to relax. Last time I did that, I had the phlebotomizer harping on me -- I guess she thought I was passing out.

Instead, I stare. At the ceiling. The acoustic tile in the upstairs of the VFW is similar to what was in my room as a kid -- a never ending series of dots that are repeated exactly from tile to tile -- only this ceiling to panted an off white sometime during the Carter administration. Therefore, some of the holes are filled in with paint, some aren’t. Some of the bigger holes are now smaller. So instead of counting the holes, like I used to do as a child when I would try to go to sleep on the horrible summer nights when Dad made us go to bed when the sun was still out, I instead play a game of trying to see what holes are missing by comparing tiles to tile to tile.

All the while I squeeze the foam grip each few seconds, and I leak.

Or perhaps I gush. One of the other phlebotians saw my progress and said to my attendant, "Wow, he's really pumping!"

"Yeah," said my phlebotominister, but with the condition: "With this arm. Got a big juicy one on this side. Not so much on the other side."

My left side never felt so sad.

I barely caught this as they had a large box fan going right next to my head. So I only caught dribs and drabs of the rest of this....

The superviser came over on the others side of my cot, near my head, and he started grousing with the phlebs about the remote they had at the Temple Beth El. Apparently, they get all sorts of crap from the little old ladies who run the place. One of them accosted some of the technicians once as they sat down to have lunch, for taking time out while people were waiting to give blood. Even if it weren't mandated by the state, it probably would be with some union, so who you going to fight? But the techs managed to be passive aggressive about it.

"You should see K____," mine said, referring to a co-worker, "She brought in a ham sandwich and ate it right there."

Everyone thought this was a riot. Silly Jews! We eat pig meat in front of you and you don't know! Ha ha!

For some reason, after I'd filled my pint bag o' hemoglobin, she continued to talk to me about the little old women of the Temple. "They're just one of the worst to deal with, is all. Not all our remotes are that bad."

I just smiled with understanding as I held my arm aloft with a piece of gauze on the voluntary wound. That's when she gave me the kicker:

"You know, I think, what would be good for those people, would be to just eat a little ham, you know?" She said this leaning in, conspiratorially, wink wink, you get me, don'tcha white boy?

Now, if you're not familiar with my profile, I've got to say, it wouldn't be hard for someone to mistake my schnozzola for that of a person of Hebrew descent. Had I been in the right frame of mind -- perhaps I needed more blood flowing to my brain than the measly five pints I have left -- I would have engaged her in some banter in my natural goy state, and then finally ended with, "Damn you, you vicious pork-eating anti-semite! I am a son -- of Abraham!"

That would have been very funny. For me, at least. Though it might have been difficult coming back there to give blood after.

But all I could think to do, unfortunately, was to smile weakly and scuttle quickly to the snack area.

There, I consumed a juicebox, a brownie, and eight Oreo cookies. For strength, don't you know. And after another talk about put-upon minorities -- guy sitting next to me had a t-shirt from a high school out west on an Indian reservation where the sports team was named "the white knights" of all things -- I beat a retreat to the car.

[After a two year hiatus, this beloved feature of the Squished Frog Blog returns! Bow in laudation! Sing your hosannas on high in thanks!]

People who call me up trying to find something online -- and whatever Web page they're looking for comes up on the first search I put into Google! Just use the damn search engine, people.

It's long been a running gag in my family that if my dad has to write a check for the amount of $12 in some way, he'll just make it out for $13, because he can't spell the word "twelve." He confirmed this for me the other day when he mentioned how he did it again, and just now he called me and asked how to spell it. I think he's starting to wear it like a badge of honor. I've heard of worse badges.

Apple's iTunes Music Store has an audiobook section and in perusing it today I see that My Life by Bill Clinton is listed under fiction.

I can't believe it's August 18 already. Typical summer. I blinked and missed the whole thing.

I was just in my back yard with the dogs and saw a 2+ foot long snake. I started to try and pick him up with a stick (because I'm apparently, like, 8-years-old) and I was shocked to have him strike at the stick. And the little viper was shaking his tail-feather in a way not at all reminiscent of Ray Charles. I could see no rattle, I could hear no rattle, I saw no fangs or dripping venom. But I know rattlesnakes are not uncommon in the great state of New York (as a lad on a back road my parents came upon a man driving back and forth over a rattler he'd hit, making sure it was dead... he took it home to make a belt out of it) and I don't want my dogs running up on this bastard or any of his family and getting bit, even if he's not poisonous. Siren came over to see what I was playing with and almost stepped on the pissed off python, which sent me screaming for her to "LEAVE IT!" which usually works and did wonders at that decibel level.

After I put the dogs inside the fence, I went back to check him out and found him (slowly) slithering out of the yard. It was also pretty obvious that he'd just had something to eat. There was a bulge in him about half way down. It wasn't like he'd eaten a small pig or baby or something. But at the very least he'd had a field mouse. Luckily, he couldn't fit a dog. Well, maybe Paris Hilton's little rat dog, but I heard she found him, so I assume it's just a mouse.

I want to make it clear to the entire world right now -- especially those that love me and like to buy things for me -- that I do not ever want anyone to buy me the upcling DVD set of the original Star Wars Trilogy. If you look at this and still don't understand why, then you werent between the ages of 5 and 15 years old in 1977. Or you're a total piece of Sith.

If TiVo were a beverage, it'd be a tall glass of Jamaican ginger beer with chipped ice and a lime wedge, while the Explorer 800 would be a paper cup of warm fake lemonade stirred with the finger of a nose-picking six-year-old.

Amen, brother.

The Explorer 800 is the same DVR (digital video recorder) I've had since January of 2003. I only had mine replaced once early on. Mine works as advertised -- which isn't saying much with the limitations this sucker has compared to the TiVo service and interface. Recently TimeWarner or Scientific Atlanta, whoever is responsible, uploaded new abilities to the unit without my knowledge and instead of being able to pause a show for unlimited amount of time -- like days and days if I wanted to -- the unit ends the pause after about half and hour and starts the show playing. Annoying if I want to restart a show I was watching at lunch later in the day. I'll be sitting in the basement office and suddenly heare people talking up stairs and go up to find Jon Stewart in the middle of a bit I haven't even seen yet on The Daily Show.

TiVo might not be long for this world if their deal with DirecTV -- their main customer -- comes crashing down. I have this dream that Scientific Atlanta would buy up the TiVo assets and upgrade all their boxes to use the real TiVo interface. That seems like the best out of a worst case scenario. The best would be that I could find a TiVo that would handle two digital tuners at once (the only upside of the SA box) and I could plug it in and use it tomorrow. But that's about as likely to happen as Bush coming out of the closet like a New Jersey govenor.

In answer to Sean's question, yep, I did finally stumble upon the Amber Spyglass in the eponymously named book. It kind of snuck up on me, as I thought it would be a telescope shaped thing, which I guess it is, but as the character built it, it didn't sound that way. (And it's in the part of the book I hate and have had to resist just skimming, where the "serpent" of the book is living with a bunch of horses with wheels. Or something. I guess they'd look cool if Peter Jackson ever did a movie of it, but I can't picture them like I can most of the other vivid elements of His Dark Materials... harpies! foot-high spies! Intention craft!)

[If you have not yet read the His Dark Materials trilogy, sucks for you that you didn't understand a word of what was said above.]

I don't usually like to build my blog entries off of what's been said elsewhere on the Web. I think that's lazy. Then again, I constantly refer to myself with that epithet, and even used "sloth" at some point this week, so what the hell.

Here are the two most earth-shattering bits I read today on the Web (sorry, I mean Web... or do I mean Web?):

This weekend was the kind of weekend that all other days of the year are meant to lead to. Pure laziness (even when mowing the lawn). Pure happiness (even when frustrated finding a parking spot).

On Friday night my parents called to ask if the Wife and I would be around Saturday afternoon, they wanted to bring me a present. Unlike most presents they bring, this one I (in theory) earned by doing some work for them earlier this month (which I'll get around to posting about sometime). Not that I needed a gift, and hell, they do enough for my brother's family and mine all year long that it was nice to just do something for them, but my unadulterated greed precludes me from ever turning down anything they give.

Saturday morning, Squanto and I decided to go shopping, and headed up toward Skaneateles (pronounced skinny-atlas), a small but very affluent burg located about 40 minutes away, on the north end of Skaneateles Lake, one of the Finger Lakes that bisect this entire region of the state so its impossible to drive east/west. We spent the morning and early afternoon wandering around the overpriced shops, remarking how much it felt like Cape Cod (where we were exactly one year ago). The only thing I bought was a big bank for my youngest nephew and we had lunch at a fantastic burger joint called Johnny Angels. There' should be a Johnny Angels in ever city in the union.

We were home by 2pm and after I mowed the lawn, got some chicken casserole cooking, and then I spent some time in the hammock listening to The Time Traveler's Wife on my iPod. The wife was lounging on the deck with her own iPod, listening to an audiobook called The Breathtaker. I'm hoping it leaves her addicted to serial-killer novels so we can talk about them incessantly into our old age.

My folks got to the house around 4:30 and presented me with a sleeve of Styrofoam cups as my present. I accepted this graciously, at about the same time that our idiot dog-boy Caper hit my mother full on in the knee with his shoulder -- the same knee she's getting surgery on in a few weeks to continue fixing whatever she tore up last year. She sat on my lawnmower, which was still in the yard dripping dry after I'd hosed it off, trying not to cry from the pain, and after she recovered enough to stand again (I was going to drive her to the door on the mower but she said no), my parents presented me with my real present: a reel mower. As in, a person powered lawn mower like people used to have in the 1910s. I'd almost bought one earlier this year, but couldn't bring myself to do it, and here it was, shiny and new and all put together for me. I need to buy a grass catcher for it and I'll be set to use it to sweep my yard for clippings and to get a little exercise in the bargain. (So we'll see how long I really want to use it.)

We had a nice dinner, looked at many pictures my parents brought out of my nephews (including this one of Josh, the youngest -- he's starting to get a real face now, instead of that generic vaguely Churchill-esque head that all newborns have), and just had, as my grandparents might have put it, a "nice visit." The folks left around 7:30 to get home and feed their own dogs.

Bon (Squanto's real name, for those of you just joining) and I watched a couple of newborn birds wandering around our front walk and bushes for a while, then wandered around the perimeter of our yard, something we've only done a couple of times before, pointing out trees that need to be chopped down, limbs that need to be cut, pulling a few dead ones ouf and throwing them into the brush. We found a vine of wild grapes growing in the back. She tried a fewand spit them out quickly -- nasty. She laid in the hammock for a while and wouldn't let me in with her, afraid it would bring the whole thing crashing down. So I swung her as high as I could to see if she'd scream, but she only cursed at me.

We fed the dogs and then sat on the front porch for a while, watching the hot-pink clouds slowly turn to grey as the sun set.

Eventually we went inside and watched a DVD, My Life Without Me, a very good flick about a woman who's dying and decides not to tell anyone.

I read some more of The Amber Spyglass (which still doesn't have a spyglass in it at the half-way mark) before I went to bed at mignight.

This morning, Sunday, let's just say waking up was nice. Damn nice.

The wife was obsessed with the thought of a waffle for breakfast. We don't have a waffle iron, though. So, we tried to decide what restaurant in town would have a killer breakfast menu with waffles and all we could come up with was Wegmans, the local uber-grocer. Down at their cafe, we found that wasn't the case-- no more made-to-order waffles. Bastards. So we bailed and drove up to College Town on the off chance that one of the eateries up there we don't get to often would have a brunch -- and lucky us, Ruloff's had a brunch menu so varied that she didn't even get waffles, she ended up with Eggs Benedict.

We were determined to get some ice cream afterwards at the fabled Cornell Dairy Bar, which we'd heard about a lot, but never been to when it was open. And we weren't any luckier today -- no Sunday hours. Bon says my mission this week is to get over there when they're open and buy ice cream sandwiches. I accept this mission. (Yes, that's a real fake cow on top of the Dairy Bar, but for a while, it wasn't there...)

(It's amazing how much of this weekend was food-centric, huh? Well it's not over yet...)

We stopped at the CollegeTown Bagels closer to home and grabbed a couple of small "chocolate mice" desserts and some bagels before returning to our own abode. After eating them (almonds for ears! Clever!) and playing with the dogs for a while, and experimenting with the new reel mower, we have hit the PCs for some work.

And that's the most diary-like blog entry I've made in a long time. Its probably boring as hell, but damn, it's been a great dog-damn weekend.

I try not to think about things like the deaths caused by Charley in Florida, or Iraqi uprisings, or all the usual pain and suffering that goes on in the world on a weekend like this, but actually find it harder not to let it intrude during good times -- Democrat liberal-pussy guilt, I guess. Whereas on a typical day of bullshit or a weekend of laboring I don't think about that at all. So next weekend, I'll be back to labor (helping my parents put up a new ceiling in their kitchen) and I'll forget the pain and suffering... and I'll be longing to think about it while sitting in my hammock, doing nothing at all.

I did some ego surfing on a new search engine today called IceRocket , which apparently is a Google rip-off from rich-guy Marc Cuban but with thumbnail images of the sites it links to. Seems pretty out of date, as all the links that come up to this site when I searched "squished frog" show the old design. I also found a bizarre Web page at RottenEggs.com that makes direct reference to the "Why Squished Frog?" page of this very sight as if it were related to the Muppet Movie. Or something. I honestly can't tell.

Which is my way of saying, I've got nothing much to say. Not much going on. Would have been at a play last night -- the Hangar Theatre's production of Cats, which is apparently selling out fast -- but we switched our tickets so Bon could go to a class last night, which she skipped because of rain. Instead she watched three episodes of the Daily Show, two Queer Eyes, and then we watched the end of Last Comic Standing. In between and around all this viewing, I read The Amber Spyglass, which is riveting (albeit getting laden down with a few to many fantastical creatures), and doesn't even yet have an amber spyglass in it.

I played some Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow on the Xbox yesterday after work with Joe, who's in the path of Charlie right now and I have called him twice now to urge him to get the hell out since he's on the edge of the evacuation zone and I think it would be better for him to find his house flooded after it's all over rather than during. He wasn't going to go, but I think he's going to go stay with someone at a higher elevation. Maybe he'll take the cats.

That's cats mentioned in two paragraphs in a row.

That's three. Might be a record for this blog, as we're more of a dog-blog.

This morning, I got back to the grind early-- I was up with the Wife as she got ready for work, after a week of sleeping in until the last minute. It's time to feed the beast... Web sites are ravenous creatures, always seeking some new morsel of content to swallow and display, and I am little more than a zoo keeper assign the task of slaughtering new vittles for it. Luckily, it keeps the vomit to a minimum...though there was a bit of spew this morning, as I referred to a company in a story yesterday as a "corporation" when it's monitor is really "systems." I cleaned up that little bit of up-chuck off myself and I'm ready to again throw some meat to the digital critter.

How's that for a metaphor for my life?

The blissful weekend is soon to arrive and will probably not amount to much as the rain will likely continue (Charlie's overspill?) which means not time in the hammock. I've got some florescent lights here in the basement filled with dead flies that need to be cleaned out. And a couple of units for hanging bikes from the ceiling of our garage to get them out of the way... not that I'll ever ride the $5 bike I got at the police auction a couple of months ago and my brother kindly tuned up for me, since 1) it's always raining and 2) I'm a sloth.

Maybe I'll get some writing done. Would be nice to take the dogs swimming somewhere, just not sure where we'd go that won't be thronged with boaters or drinking teenagers and broken bottles. Ithaca's a great animal town in many ways, but for dog-friendly facilities it's pathetic. The Wife has suggested in the past that I take my extra time and desire for something more to do with my life and channel that toward trying to get an multi-acre off-leash dog park built in this area, but that seems selfish of her... I don't ask her to spend her free time trying to get a comic-shop/porno-theater/ice-cream-stand combo with Laz-y-Boy chairs in the lobby built for me. Sheesh.

Here's a noise you don't hear every day: The screams of bunnies.

Oh, and do they ever scream. At least they do when they're in the razor sharp talons of a hawk, oh yes. Yesterday I was sitting down on the back deck to have some lunch (homemade chili, homemade salsa, and crappy store-bought chips... I need to learn to make homemade Tostitos) and heard a blood-curdling shriek from my yard. My first thought was one of the dogs had got caught it something, perhaps with a head under the fence. So I bolted up right, making a lot of noise with the wrought iron deck chair.

That noise was apparently enough to startled the hawk that had silently descended upon one of the dozen or so rabbits that call my yard a home. They'd be a real nuisance if we had a real garden (the rabbits, probably not the hawks), but all our plants are up on the deck so only the bugs (and our dogs) can ruin the growth.

This particular hawk had its brown-gold wings out-stretched and gave a quick flap after I stood, and took off in an arch around the yard. I saw his erstwhile prey scamper for the woods. I had foiled the hawk's lunch plans.

I started calling for the Wife, who couldn't hear me over the washing machine she was filling. When she finally came out, I told her about it, pointed out the arc of the bird's withdrawal from the scene. She said, "Good god dammit! Wait, come back! Take a few more of them!"

Squanto, as I like to call her, is a blood thirsty vicious woman. But that's part of her charm.

I'm not sure what she has against the bunnies, as they haven't done much outside of entertain us with their frequent courtship rituals (running at each other and jumping straight up in the air, for example) amidst the clover in the yard.

Last year we found a dead bunny in the driveway that I figure had been hit by a hawk we scared away in a similar fashion. I had to move him off into the woods with a shovel. It makes me wonder just how many of the little over-breeding rodents have been popped out of the back of my house without my seeing it.

But I know that in the future I'll be keeping an ear out to hear the frightened screams. The unholy, terrible screams.

Years from now I expect if I'm ever interviewed by a sociopathic serial killer in a glass cell, he'll ask me about the screams, and even worse, what followed the screams... the silence.

Assuming I can hear anything over the washing machine.

So I didn't buy the laptop in time to get the free RAM from Amazon... chances are, based on what I've read, I couldn't have used it anyway. I guess I could have sold it, but I also went and saw a version of the same laptop down at Staples for around $799. Not as much RAM but then again I guess I could buy the RAM from Amazon that would have been free and still up grade it and be getting off cheaper than the Amazon model...

Ultimately, I have yet to see the perfect laptop, and the whole thing has me royally POed. I'm hoping that someone comes up with something perfect in the next month while I still have the money burning a hole in my virtual wallet.

There's an incredibly good chance that before the week is out I will have purchased this laptop (with free 512MB DIMM of extra SD-RAM, woo-hoo!).

This is a pretty harrowing retail experience for me.

As a technology journalist, I've seldom had to buy computer products that cost this much. A mouse or game or software package here and there, but spending over a grand on a computer? I've done it for others... I've helped The Wife buy I think three computers in the last eight years (all Dells, all still running -- in fact I'm using one of those hand-me-downs right now as my main work station), and bought a laptop for my mom last Xmas (with Dad's money) and a desktop for my brother and his family just a month ago (an impulse purchase).

I haven't spent this much money on a computer that would be just mine and only mine since college, when I took out the Apple loan to buy myself a Mac IIsi that took me years and years to pay off. I was lucky, it was the only "student loan" I had after four years of college, but I can't imagine what it must be like to owe more.

Anyway, I want a lighter, sleeker, laptop that will also be damn cheap. The two notebook computers we have, inherited several years ago -- the price was right -- are both okay for around the house, but not exactly travel-friendly. However, I've got the money and I feel like I should buy a laptop now now or I'll keep regretting it. I missed out buying a Dell Inspiron 300m and now regret that, with no discernable reason for such regret. But it bugs me.

I think it's because I have this fantasy about what having a new wireless-enabled laptop will mean. It goes like this: First, she would slather her naked, creamy white skin in chocolate puddi-- wait, sorry, wrong fantasy. (By the way, that one ends with her buying me a new laptop because she gunked up my new one with pudding.)

It goes like this: I'd use the new laptop to go and visit hotspots around Ithaca during the day to get food I don't need to eat and to do my daily work while out of the house. People would see my cool-ass silver-surfery looking laptop [Quick aside: If I buy this computer, I will name it Norrin Radd]. People would stop to engage me in conversation about its cool-ass-ness and we'd talk about wireless and then the city and then our families and interests and we'd become bestest friends ever and we'd hang out and play games and I'd eventually be the best man at their weddings and our families would vacation together and help each other with landscaping projects & moving furniture & installing track lighting and they'd agree to be executors of my will when I'm cremated and sprinkled in Cayuga Lake from a helicopter.

All thanks to my funky new laptop.

Then again, if I spend that much and the hardware is a big chunk o' crap, or I never go outside with it, well, I'll feel like a dumbass.

Who'll be executor of my will then? Huh?

Decisions, decisions.

(I apologize for all the Silver Surfer related mentions in this entry to those who don't know the former herald of the Eater of Worlds from your elbow. Your loss, though.)

For some reason I can't understand, this site has completely avoided getting any comment spam -- that is, someone uses a program to flood the comments on blog posts with nonsense words that have hyperlinks to (usually) porno sites. This is done by sites to increase they're Google PageRank. I've never had any, yet Joe's site gets tons of it and he hasn't updated his blog in months.

This week though, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) site, of which I am the proud volunteer Webmaster and which is powered by MovableType, the same tool I use for my blog, got hit with a massive attack of comment spam. It wasn't the first. It took me hours to clear it, since I'm not using a fancy MySQL database to run it. Even when I turn off the ability on the posts to make a comment, these script kiddies seem able to flood it with spam.

Which all means, I have to take some time soon to update to the latest version of MovableType, 3.1, to avoid that happening again. That should suck away a few hours, though it's still less than I'd have to deal with if I was posting all the content on the site myself.

Speaking of the CBLDF, total fanboy moment: one of the board members of the Fund is Neil Gaiman, who anyone who knows me well knows I frickin' worship. Last year, I dropped him a note through his site thanking him for sending so much traffic to the site (whenever he mentions the CBLDF, traffic goes through the roof, since he has many non-comic-savvy readers to bring to the table). He actually wrote me back. So I had his e-mail handy to forward him a message yesterday that was sent in to the CBLDF's Yahoo!Group address, and only comes to me. And Neil kindly wrote me back with a thank you.

So I spent an hour on IMs telling anyone I knew could that knows who Neil is that "I'm on a first name basis with NEIL FUCKING GAIMAN!" (Sort of.)

Such a dork.

Still, I like writing that because... well, I'm on a first name basis with NEIL FUCKING GAIMAN.

I'm completely off the wagon. I haven't gained any weight back, knock on dead trees, but damn... in the last day I ate a half pound of M&Ms and more chili than is good for any colon. I bought a half gallon of chocolate Panda Paws ice cream and promptly hid it from the Wife in the freezer in the garage as if she'd berate me for it, and I wouldn't blame her.

When I told her last night about the illicite treat, she only gave me our trademarked admonishment: "You're bad(TM)." I couldn't argue.

You decide:

"So, when you move into your fancy new office, you want me to provide you with some boudoir photos?" he asked.

"Uh...." she started.

"You know, a nice shot of me in a Speedo or something?"

"Sweetie," she said, "I don't even like to see pictures of hotties in Speedos."

After several uncomfortable seconds of faux-weeping, he said: "You did hear how you phrased that, right?"

She thought about it and said, "Yes. I did. And I suck."

"Yes. Yes you do."

I was planning to write about the wonderfulness of The Village, the new movie out this past weekend from direct M. Night Shyamalan (and if you haven't seen it, stop reading right now). Because, well, I was just blown away by it. I haven't stopped thinking about it much since Saturday. I sat in the theater watching the credits and said to The Wife: "I defy anyone to tell me they saw that coming."

Apparently, the world is defying me.

I must be the most absolutely obtuse movie-goer in the history of moving pictures. According to Yahoo!Movies , the average grade this film is getting is a C+ from critics. No one they use has given it an A rating -- and I think it's the best film I've seen since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

(Before anyone asks, ofcourse, I adored Spider-Man 2 and Hellboy this year, but I knew what to expect. The good-guy would win in the end, it wasn't much of a surprise. Eternal Sunshine and The Village though -- I never knew where they'd take me. The Village was one of those films that made me think about what they'd done for a long time after. That happens maybe with two or three bits of TV or movie entertainment a year, and I cherish it. Sure, it's nice to spend your money, eat your popcorn, and escape for a couple of hours, but it's also nice to see something that makes me just say, "Woah." Joss Whedon could do it almost weekly on Buffy and Angel...)

Most of the critics' bad grades seem to hinge on disliking the twist at the end of the Village, which I thought they pulled off with aplomb.

I've never seen a Shyamalan film that I didn't like. Everyone loves The Sixth Sense, that one doesn't count, but no one seemed to like Unbreakable, and that is arguably the best super-hero film of the last 30 years. (Note: not "comic book film" since it's not based on a comic, though most comic book films are also superhero films since the superheroes genre has overwhelmed the comic industry.) I thought Signs a perfectly scary flick -- probably because I was terrified of Bigfoot movies as a child and haven't had the guts to take my Blair Witch Project DVD out of its case since I bought it years ago. (I admit that I don't do good with dark woods. I'm not a camper.)

Maybe it helps that I went in with a blank slate -- I knew there'd be a surprise, it's the signature of a Shyamalan flick, but I wanted the film to guide me along. I didn't want to try to think ahead of it, I didn't want to guess, I didn't want to know until it was revealed in Night's own good time. I've felt that way since Sixth Sense -- I didn't see the end of any of his films coming at me, except maybe Signs since the water thing seemed telegraphed. Still plenty of scares to be had in the flick. Basement scene in the dark, anyone? (Though, yeah, why the aliens give a crap about that farm house is beyond me.)

Perhaps even more shocking than the "twist" in The Villiage is the stabbing -- the most horrific murder or attempted murder I've seen portrayed on film since Saving Private Ryan. Not very often Hollywood lets a movie switches protagonists half-way through, but, in this case, it worked perfectly.

I've thought about it and thought about it this morning and I can't see where reviewers can see this end as a cop out, an anti-climax, or "one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream" (according to Roger Ebert). Did these people watch the Twilight Zone and try to guess the ending all the way through or just enjoy the damn program? It's not like I haven't felt burned by twist endings before (See Vanilla Sky), but in this case, I was happy one hundred percent (the box-office win is something of a vindication, but if that really mattered, no one would criticize George Lucas for casting Hayden Christiansen as Darth Vader).

Now the end of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle? Saw that coming a million miles away! Suckfest!*

*This is comedy, as I have not yet seen H&KGTWC.