Yesterday was not bad enough to be rated "crappy" or even "bad", but there were a whole series of stupid and annoying events that occurred. Allow me to bore you with them. Hey, nobody forced you to come here. Besides, one man’s litany of inane and trivial woes is another man’s momentary amusement through schadenfreude.

Ever have one of those toast-falls-butter-side-down sort of days? I guess I was due for one. Yesterday I did the following:

• Woke up tired, accidentally brushed the toothbrush up against a cake of soap. Blech.
• While brushing, noticed that yesterday’s enormous zit/boil/mutant appendage that had been forming for a week on the end of my nose is no longer swollen and painful, but instead has replaced itself with an equally enormous painful, dark, and much more noticeable scab.
• Still in a stupor, spilled soup on my pants while packing my lunch.
• Attempted to fumble through the act of taking off said pants too quickly, fell over while standing up on one leg. Knocked thick skull on jamb of bathroom door.
• Finally got out the door and down the road, but the stupid CD changer in the car refused to play any of my custom mix CDs, instead accepting only the two B-52’s discs that I played to death last week.
• While driving, idly scratched an itch on the end of my nose, carelessly tearing off half of the enormous scab. The next few miles and several pieces of tissue are spent alternately blotting the end of my bleeding nose and dabbing at my right eye, which spontaneously watered up from the pain.
• Got to work and realized that I was a week overdue on writing a set of technical documents.
• Opened up the source material for the technical documents, finding, to my horror, that they were completely fucked up, having been left behind by another technical writer who had fled after only a couple of weeks on the job. Spent hours making them readable.
• Discovered that said fucked-up source material had inadvertently already been published on our website for public consumption. Began flapping pasty white arms like a panicked chicken, loudly demanding to everyone and noone that the documents get yanked, to little initial effect. Colleagues whispered and pointed in my direction, giving each other knowing looks.
• Attempted to regain sanity by creating Uncyclopedia articles on dystopia, foreskins, and Middlesex. Amused self briefly with short articles, but failed to restore sanity.
• Got halfway through soup before realizing that the funny taste was not from some weird chemical interaction with mouthwash; instead, it was actually due to the fact that it had started to turn rancid. Yuck.
• Missed mandatory company quarterly meeting by looking at a map view too zoomed-out to provide accurate information, and ended up in a neighboring city before I realized I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. With the map back at the desk and not in the car, I turned back and went to the office, penning an apologetic explanation to The Man. Ominously, there was no response to this message.
• Recieved paper cut. God damn, those hurt. Left for home.
• Woke up in just enough time to hit the brakes, swerve, and not slam into the driver ahead of me, avoiding fatal injuries and a hell of a traffic jam .
• In a sudden rush of lucidity due to immediately preceding activity of adrenal gland, realized that the map actually did show the proper information, and I had handed my boss a total line of bullshit, no matter how much I might have believed it at the time.
• Spent the rest of the commute with the shakes, coming down from the adrenaline rush and the whole "ohfuckthisisitI’mgoingtodie" routine.

Mercifully, the trend ended when I got home, but Jeezus, what a lame day.

I found that my brother-in-law introduced my writings to my mother-in-law. We’re all generally of the same political persuasion, and she has a doggedly tough Irish sense of humor. She also managed to survive her five kids, which is no mean feat, considering what my brothers-in-law are like. In short: she’s a tough cookie. There’s little I could write that would actually shock her… but still… I mean, if I stumble across some horrible monkey necroscat porn site, and want to inflict it on you gentle readers, well, it gives a fellow pause to know that his mother-in-law is reading it, doesn’t it?

Next up, though: diaper-fetish necroporn. I couldn’t find any monkeys.

At this division of the company I work for, we write software. Specifically, a web-based application. That means that the program itself sits on a customer server somewhere, and their users access it via web browsers. Isn’t that swell?

At any rate, we just released a new version of our software to fix some bugs. Routine stuff. A new version, of course, requires a new version number; here at Apple, they’re generally fond of three-digit version numbers, like OS 9.2.1, OS X 10.3.9, or iTunes 4.7.1. Our division is no different. What’s our web-based application’s latest version number, though? 4.0.4. Yep, 4.0.4, and apparently without a shred of percieved irony, or even humor, to hear the developers talk about it.

Am I the only one who finds this at least marginally ominous? Shouldn’t the same sort of rule apply like where large buildings don’t have 13th floors? I don’t have any particular qualms about what went into this release, but still…

Slightly wounded but as yet unbowed, that poisonous fucker Tom Delay is still at it, denouncing the judiciary branch of government for having the audacity to defy the political party that happens to hold the reins of government today. I particularly liked his prior statement that much of the press mischaracterized as an "apology". Here’s a news flash: he wasn’t apologizing for what he said; just the way he said it. What good ol’ Tom just told the world is that he doesn’t want to rip the guts out of American representative democracy; he merely wants it eviscerated.

Well, that’s a relief!

Naturally, DeLay says that, of course, he’s all for an independent judiciary, he’s just fighting the good fight against that nefarious threat to God, Country, and Mom’s apple pie: the dreaded legion of activist judges. Villains like Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was appointed to the nation’s highest court by none other than the disgraced criminal archfiend, former President and known Communist, Ronald Reagan. Apparently Roland Friesler is more to his liking as a model for contemporary judges. As a staunch advocate of national sovereignty, I reluctantly agree with DeLay when he is upset that a U.S. judge formulates his opinions based partially on international law. But then Delay continues to spout nonsense like this:

"… [Justice Kennedy] said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous.”

and this:

"Judges can serve as long as they serve with good behavior. We want to define what good behavior means. And that’s where you have to start."

I’m curious to know why this is so outrageous. I mean, if Justice Kennedy was shaping the nation based on the contents of GeoCities pages, I would be reasonably concerned, but I imagine that an erudite man like Kennedy is a bit more likely to be hitting sites like this rather than sites like this or, God forbid, something like this (the latter being most definitely NSFW). As for the "good behavior" of judges quote, he’s stating for the record that his plan is for the judical branch to serve at the pleasure of the legislative branch. This does not equate to independence, no matter how much spin you put on it.

DeLay proposes to emasculate a crucial defense against the establishment of a native tyranny. Revulsion at this is not, as DeLay and others suggest, some sort of stand against God and the GOP. It is a stand for Liberty. The United States cannot afford to tolerate this cancer on the body politic. The repugnant Representative DeLay must be excised from public service immediately; this is a sickness that cannot be allowed to metastasize.

I was just taking a peek at the hit statistics for this lonely little site, and found that I got a hit from Lithuania.

Lithuania?!? What the hell? Who do I know who lives there? Even stranger was the fact that the referring URL was cubelodyte.com, and not where I expected it to be coming from, the Apple discussion boards. I’d posted some messages there recently seeking help, and referenced this site for some example code. A few related hits straggled in from the Netherlands and Switzerland, but the referring URL was always the Apple discussion board. That made sense; a major corporate web presence gets hits from all over the globe, and some bored or curious folks would click on the links provided. Not so the recent hit from the Baltic. The mysterious visitor from Vilnius came straight to here.

Strange indeed are the ways and links of the Internet. Làbas, Lietuva!

After discussing something so uniquely Japanese as "hentai" pornography, I was suddenly compelled to write haiku about it.