Recently my sister R complained about the amount of airtime Elmo gets on Sesame Street. I’ve long loathed the little red brat and I’ve had minimal exposure. Joel Stein wrote an article for calendarlive.com (L.A. Times) outlining everything that is wrong with Elmo. Very entertaining and educational, unlike today’s Sesame Street.

A while back I promised a recent photo of me before the big shave.? T sent me this one from the Fat Penguin show at the beginning of July.? Since I’ve started neglecting the shaving again we’ll after to wait for the after.

I found this on lifehacks‘ weekly comment round-up.

“It’s easy to get bad grammar if you spend too much time around people who don’t speak English good.”

Well here we are again. It’s that time of the week that we try to bring you some of the little gems we’ve found on the net. This weeks was a bit tough though, as I lost my bookmarks late last week - and bookmarks are key.

• Domain names are cheap and if you’re paying to host one low traffic domain its cheap to start hosting another. With the web being so cheap its no wonder people will register domains for just about anything. Free Bill Stickers is one such site.
• If you spend much time on-line you’ve come across the term Web 2.0. This pretty much means that the site welcomes interaction from visitors. It doesn’t take much. StillSpinning.net is 2.0 because people can comment. There have been a lot of voting sites that have popped up. Blufr is a favorite. You’re given a ‘fact’ and you have to decide if its true or false. A great time sink.
• Only 2% of the US polulation is left handed. At one point at work a few months ago, nine of my thirteen agents were left handed.
• And finally we’re going to talk music for a second. I have, in the past, been accused of being a music snob. Its true I take pride in the fact that I don’t listen to commercial radio and I don’t buy music a big box stores, but that’s pretty much the end of my snobbery these days - its more of a blissful ignorance. But not all commercial pop is bad, just poorly executed. Proof? Check out the cover of Outkasts Hey Ya.

I’ve added a few new quotes to the random quote in the upper right.? If you refreshed the site over and over you’d eventually see them all I guess, but this is much more efficient.

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”?? - Gustave Flaubert

“We are shaped by our thoughts, we become what we think.”? - Buddha

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”? - Groucho Marx

“We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”?? -?? Will Rogers

“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”? - Oscar Wilde

“No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather.”? - Michael Pritchard

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” - Mark Twain

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.” - Woody Allen

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Sir Winston Churchill

“I date this girl for two years — and then the nagging starts: ‘I wanna know your name…’” - Mike Binder

“When I turned two I was really anxious, because I’d doubled my age in a year.
I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I’m six I’ll be ninety.” - Steven Wright

“When I have one foot in the grave, I will tell the whole truth about women. I shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid over me and say, ‘Do what you like now’.” - Leo Tolstoy

I was sure that this story had to be fake. It just seemed too good to be true. Now I can’t confirm the actual story as I’m just a lone blogger and…I don’t care that much. It did confirm that it actually is on the ABC News site though.

Kevin Lafferty works at for the US Geological Survey as a parasite ecologist. He’s been spending his time and our tax dollars checking out the effects of the parasites in cat poop on the human brain. Apparently the effects are dramatic:

Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be more warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.

So…women who like cats are sweet and nurturing while men who like cats are dumb and dull. That’s the greatest thing science has done for us in a long, long time.

I could say that today was a bad day.? It would be easy enough to dwell on the fact that I very easily could have been fired and, had I had any other job prospects, probably would have quit at one point.? I could say that the powers that be saw fit to, for no other reason than to keep up appearances, to give us an additional five hours worth of work.? Like I said, I could dismiss the entire day as having been a bad one.? I could make a decent case for the week.

But sitting here in my apartment at the end of the day, I can see that it wasn’t all bad.? All of these events events only encompassed a few hours, and though I’ll have to to repeat part of it daily, it truely wasn’t that bad and there were good parts as well.

The specific moments that led up to my nearly getting myself axed even netted some positive results.? I sat down with my manager and we had a real heart to heart about things and our working relationship.? I apologized for my part and she for hers, and I can honestly say that we’ll work better together for it.? I got to spend some time with my agents and I managed to keep my cool most of the day no matter how hectic things got.

So I’m choosing to say that today was a good day.

I didn’t want today to go by without a post so here’s a poem I wrote years ago.? I remember penning the first draft of this in my American Lit II text book while waiting to have tires installed.

This is the original photo that became my header image. It was taken on Aug 7th, 2006 along Melton Lake Drive in Oak Ridge.

As you can see I’ve been playing with the color scheme on the site. I think I like the new earthy tones. Let me know what you think - comment people. Let me know you’re out there!

There are a few known problems with the site:

• When a page being viewed is shorter than the side bars the main column’s background color changes to the same as the side bars.
• Photos that fit in the old site are now too large.
• The site may or may not appear correctly in IE, depending on the screen resolution.
• No one comments (except Mel)

As these are fixed I’ll update this post. If you’ve found other issues let me know.