Not only am I the #1 Google result for catamite dog-fucking douchebags, but thanks to SiteMeter, I now know that I’m also the undisputed world champion for this lovely turn of phrase:

I need a drink.

Apparently Michael Bane covered the new Ruger 450/400 on his site back in August. I don’t know how I missed the news.

In any case, I’m REALLY anxious to get my hands on one of these, and I hope Ruger doesn’t pull another XGI with this gun. Ruger has a very bad habit of announcing new guns and then either:

(A) canceling them, either before (XGI) or immediately after (rifles in .404 Jeffery) they go into production, or
(B) not actually shipping them until years after the formal introduction (Gold Label).

Hopefully, having Hornady ammo on the shelves will force Ruger to follow through.

Welcome to the blogroll, Cowboy Blob. He drinks, he shoots, he can’t sleep. Kinda reminds me of me.

Details are apparently not available yet, but Ruger has announced a line of new bolt rifles featuring a new trigger mechanism called the LC6. I’m guessing it’s something like Savage’s Accu-Trigger, but without that unit’s severe case of Ass-Ugliness.

Jack Palance is dead. Thank you, Democrats.

Hornady has brought out ammo for the .450/.400 3″ Nitro Express, and the promo pic shows a Ruger No.1. No word yet from Ruger, but hot damn, I WANT. Ruger’s already making barrels of suitable diameter for their No.1 in .405 Winchester, so it’s a simple matter of cutting a different chamber and stamping the caliber on the barrel. I’d actually considered buying a .405 Winchester and converting it, but Ruger might just save me the trouble. If the mere words “Nitro Express” don’t quicken your pulse, you fail at being a gun nut.

One of these days I’ll learn how to sleep. It’s not as easy as it looks.

Lunch with old friends at the Mongolian Barbeque tomorrow. I’m trying to see everyone before I leave. In a lot of cases, it’ll probably be for the last time. And, really, that’s for the best.

This amuses me to no end. I’m not only the number one hit for this phrase, I’m the ONLY hit. I couldn’t be more proud:

I’m starting a very half-assed attempt at throwing out old junk that I don’t want to haul cross-country with me. Curiously, I found an Apple PowerBook 190 in one of my drawers. I have no memory of owning or using this machine. Every laptop I can recall owning has been an IBM ThinkPad. And even if I had bought a Mac laptop (and the new Core 2 Duo MacBooks are lust-worthy machines), it wouldn’t have been this turd of a model. Strange. It won’t boot and I don’t have any hardware that can connect to its hard drive, so it shall remain a mystery.

Time for another attempt at sleeping.

The cold is finally in retreat. I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me; everything above the shoulders just went completely defective for 4 days. I barely left the La-Z-Boy, let alone the house, since Friday. Couldn’t eat, sleep, talk or breathe; got dehydrated to the point that my knuckles and lips split and bled. Had to be very careful just standing up to go to the bathroom.

Thanks to the folks who put up with me via IM and email, since I couldn’t communicate any other way. I know I was driving some of you a little crazy.

In other news, since everyone else on earth is blogging about the elections and Donald Rumsfeld, I won’t.

More to follow…

I’ll warn you right off the bat that this post is on the edge of whining, if not over the edge. At the moment, though, I’m so fucking furious I can’t help myself.

For three days now I’ve been really sick, the kind of sick where being able to breathe through my nose (or breathe at all, for that matter) and eat solid food (or anything at all, for that matter) and sleep lying down (or sleep at all, for that matter) is but a dim memory. And for the same three days, every time I finally find a comfortable position and start to doze off for the night (usually around 8 AM), my phone rings. And at least 5 times in the past two days, it’s been scumbag telemarketers illegally calling my cell phone. And every goddamn time, it’s been the filthy catamite dog-fucking douchebags of one “Platinum Benefit Group” calling from 888-669-8868.

Of course, I only know the name of the company because I Googled the number and found that they’ve been calling everyone ELSE in the world, too. You see, if I answer the calls, they instantly hang up. And if I don’t answer, they never leave a message. They obviously want me to call them so they can give me a sales pitch. Fuck them. I filed complaints with the FTC instead.

The late, great Bill Hicks wasn’t speaking about telemarketers specifically, but he absolutely nailed this one, as he usually did:

By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself.

No, no, no it’s just a little thought. I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they’ll take root - I don’t know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself.

Seriously though, if you are, do.

Aaah, no really, there’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you’re going, “there’s going to be a joke coming,” there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It’s the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself.

Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, “he’s doing a joke…” there’s no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend - I don’t care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking makinations. Machi… Whatever, you know what I mean.

I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, “Oh, you know what Bill’s doing, he’s going for that anti-marketing dollar. That’s a good market, he’s very smart.”

Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags!

“Ooh, you know what Bill’s doing now, he’s going for the righteous indignation dollar. That’s a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We’ve done research - huge market. He’s doing a good thing.”

Godammit, I’m not doing that, you scum-bags! Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!

“Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill’s very bright to do that.”

God, I’m just caught in a fucking web.

“Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar…”

How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don’t you?

“What didya do today honey?”

“Oh, we made ah, we made ah arsenic a childhood food now, goodnight.” [snores] “Yeah we just said you know is your baby really too loud? You know?” [snores] “Yeah, you know the mums will love it.” [snores]

Sleep like fucking children, don’t ya, this is your world isn’t it?

Bill Hicks and Mitch Hedberg are dead, while Janeane Garofalo and Dane Cook still walk the earth. Where’s the justice in that?

So, as I mentioned, I’m sick. Everyone knows I’m sick. But that doesn’t stop SEVEN FUCKING PEOPLE from calling me and waking me up after I finally manage to doze off at about 8 AM.

It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.
- Mark Twain’s Christmas greetings, 1890

Edit: make that EIGHT! EIGHT FUCKING PHONE CALLS! AH HA HA HA HA!

Still sick as a dog and dumb as a post.

Welcome to the blogroll, Xavier and Mad Ogre.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about a border fence to secure the United States. Here’s my proposal:

A chance to play around with a shiny new MacBook Pro made me think about what a laptop should be, and why. The MacBook in question is certainly a fantastic piece of hardware. Unfortunately, Apple is also asking (and getting) cubic dollars for these machines. The price tag on this one came to something north of $3k, on academic discount, no less. That’s quite a bit more than my first car cost. Still, the MacBook’s owner intends for his new acquisition to be his only computer, and wants it to last him through a good portion of a 10-year M.D./Ph.D program. Amortized over 5 years, that price tag looks more reasonable.

Oh, did I mention he’s going to be taking his new machine back and forth to school every day? And that said school is in the middle of downtown Detroit?

Which is, to me, the problem with most laptops sold today. They’re too expensive, too big, too heavy, too power-hungry, and too fragile to be truly portable. Let me define “portable” here: I’m talking about a machine you’re not only physically capable of carrying with you all the time, but one that you *don’t mind* carrying with you. I want a machine I can throw in a backpack or messenger bag without worrying. I do not want to worry about: loss or theft of a machine I can’t afford to replace, how much charge is left in my battery, where the nearest power outlet is, whether anything got broken when I accidentally dropped the computer while reaching for a beer, or if I’m further screwing up my already-screwed-up spine by lugging a dozen pounds of laptop & accessories with me all day.

And before anyone starts writing a comment about this: no, a PDA is not a substitute for a laptop. I don’t care if it’s a Crackberry, a Treo, an old-school Palm, whatever. I spend 90% of my computer time looking at a word processor, Bash shell, web browser, or instant messaging client. I need a *real* keyboard that can actually be used for *typing*, as well as a monitor that’s large, clear, and bright enough to not further hasten my descent into blindness.

Here’s what I want:

3-pound laptop with a 12″ screen of at least 1024×768 resolution. Integrated video is fine.

Low-power, preferably x86-compatible processor. Maybe a Via, an AMD Geode, a Transmeta Efficeon, whatever. I won’t be transcoding video or playing games on this thing; if it can come close to a 500 Mhz Pentium III, I’m happy.

Gobs of RAM. At least a gig; two is better. Plenty of RAM offsets the low speed of the processor and basically eliminates the need for swap, which is relevant in light of the next point…

NO hard drive or optical drive. A true zero-spindle machine. Instead, build in at least 8 gigs of flash memory, maybe 16, and throw in a couple USB ports so I can plug in a thumb drive. Flash is now cheap and reliable enough that this isn’t an insane idea. No spinny parts means more reliability, less power consumption and less heat.

A case, keyboard, and hinges designed by the ThinkPad design team. They have their shit squared away better than anyone.

A true all-day battery. Between the low-power processor and the lack of drives, getting 8 hours of *real-world use* out of a reasonable-size battery isn’t asking too much.

Power adapters for AC, cigarette lighter, and hell, maybe even USB. Charge up your computer with your other computer!

Wireless A/B/G, plus an Ethernet port.

Open, well-documented hardware throughout, so I can run whatever I want on it. No Windows of any form, thank you.

Sell it for less than $400; $300 is better.

Now, I don’t expect anyone to actually build this. It’s amazing, though, how close this is to what the good folks at the One Laptop Per Child project are trying to build. And if they actually reach production, I’d be more than willing to pay $200 for one of those machines. That way, I’d be paying for my own machine and buying one for some poor brat at the same time. Which is just the kind of thing I do, because I Am A Good Person.

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In other news, the first cold of the season is upon me. Time for bed.