fiona was here
wishing she had a clever tagline

I've always wondered how, with all the books in the world, there are enough ISBNs to go around. There aren't, it would seem, hence the plan to implement a new 13-digit ISBN to replace the old 10-digit system. I'm confused that I hadn't heard any precursive rumblings though.

So someone bought me a pair of underwear for Christmas. It was a sweet kind, unexpected gesture and I was so confused when I was given them that all I could say was, "Thank you," and pretend to be pleased. The problem is: they're horrible and nothing I would ever, ever wear unless I were under threat of death for some convoluted reason and then only if I were permittd to remove the chain. But because they're underwear the store won't take them back or allow me to exchange them for something less aesthetically horrifying. Which irritates the crap out of me because that money is gone forever simply because some people are too stupid to think things out.

And so children, today's Season of Gift-Giving lesson is: if I can't take it back, please don't fucking give it to me.

So George W. Bush would be arriving in Ottawa around now, supposedly.

The newspaper was filled this morning with anti-protest rants. How I hate the Citizen and it's inconsistent editorial policies. The main thrust of the arguments appeared to be that it was "disrespectful" to protest anything to do with the United States in front of dear ol' Dub because he's been democratically elected and to do so would be "disrespectful" of the democratic choices of Americans. Which must be the weakest, lamest argument ever to keep your head down and your mouth shut. Hitler won two elections. And like Bush and his Republicans, he and the Nazi party got a higher percentage of the vote in his second term. But I don't think anyone would suggest that if Adolf were to show up in Ottawa, that we should be respectful, or even vaguely nice, lest we offend the Germans. Not that I'm comparing Bush to Hitler; Dubya, for all his shortcomings, at least has a decent fashion sense.

I have this problem where I think I'm smarter than most people and therefore don't have to try to get what I want: the inherent magnetism of my vast intelligence is just supposted to attract the life opportuities that I want without any kind of effort from me. But I forget other people are smart too sometimes, and sometimes they're smarter than me and they end up kicking my ass because they don't get all cocky and shoot themselves in the foot with thier own sense of self-satisfaction.

I was reading a book about Neandertals and the theoretical reasons for thier seeming extinction and came across the following sentence: "Students of [archeologist Francois] Bordes in France have shown that there do indeed appear to be cultural traditions persisting through time in geographically defined areas..."It goes on to theorize that Neandertal tribes managed to remain "culturally distinct for thousands of years, with nothing between them but, say, an easily fordable stretch of the Dordogne River." Conversely, the Cro-Magnon sites show more diversity of form and style, which seems to correlate with the fact that evidence indicates they were more mobile.

As we all know, the Neandertals are now extinct and the Cro-Magnons evolved. When people stop exchanging ideas and new ways of doing things, stagnation occurs and evolution stops. What does this mean? Nothing really, although it's interesting to note how often George W. Bush has been compared to a chimp. Perhaps some members of the human race aren't evolving as fast as the rest of us and refusing to share ideas and knowledge and points of view won't facilitate evolution and those who refuse to do so (like, um, the crazy Christian right) will render themselves extinct with thier refusal to grow. That's what I'm telling myself anyway. It's the new Social Darwinism.

I ran across this map which illustrates so clearly how values in a geographic area tend to perpetuate themselves. But i'm not actually commenting on the election and will continue to not do so.

I keep wanting to post something about the U.S. election results and how terrified I am that this is all going to end so very, very badly for so many, many people who will try very hard to get out of the way and will fail miserably. But everything I say just sounds unspeakably hateful in a very unoriginal sort of way. So instead I'm propagating this which was lifted from riverbend's blog and is replicated here to remind us that anything can be funny if you find the right way to look at it:
I'm thinking of offering up the idea of "Election Condolences" to Hallmark or Yahoo Greetings. The cards can have those silly little poems inside of them, like:

Condolences and heartfelt tears-
You get Bush for four more years!

or

Sympathies in advance
For when they reinstate the draft!
We hope (insert_name_here) stays as safe as he/she can
And writes frequently while in Iran!

or

Bush and Cheney- what a pair!
Who said life isn't fair?
While Iraq gets tanks and occupation-
You have idiots to run your nation!

or

Cheer up...
Your son was too young for Afghanistan.
And it's still a bit early for Iran-
But there's plenty of time for Syria...
And he'll definitely serve in North Korea!

Perhaps it was intended as a warning not to go down the slide too fast.
(via This is broken.)

When I first started playing with this blog I found a feature that allowed me to reset the language. Only it wouldn't stay reset to "Englisch" and only some things would get translated. Now that I speak German (OK, not really.) I managed to reset the language and this time hit "sichern", which we now all know means save, instead of "abbrechen". which means cancel. It might have taken months before it occurred to me to try this if some random person named Michi hadn't stopped by. I love it when random people fix my problems. And now mostly everything's in English. Which means I need a different tagline.

So things look better now but they're still not behaving. For some reason my post from the seventeenth won't show up on the main page, although it appears in the RSS feed. Whereas my post from the 18th does not show up in the feed but appears on my main page. I'm convinced if I show it some love by continuing to play with it, it will want to behave properly.

And my new entries seem unwilling to show up on my main page.

I keep thinking there must be somewhere else where I can get what I want and there isn't. I have blogs all over the internet and nobody will let me do the stuff I want to: these people won't let me touch the html, those people lured me in with a free trial and in thirty days I will be unable to do any of the things I want, the jerks over there had some issue that I no longer remember, my young friends here showed much promise but proved to be too far bogged in beta to be of any real use yet. So it's back to learning German.

I can't seem to get things to do what I want at all around here. My del.icio.us feed won't display and I can't change the colors at all. There are templates built on templates built on templates and none of them seem to hold the secret to what I want to do. And my wrists fucking hurt so much that i'm quitting for now.

After having creating several different blogs for myself with some seemingly likely hosts, I have been forced to return here. "What do I want?" I hear the screaming horde asking. Well:

1. the ability to upload files
2. posting by category (and preferably secondary category options) (Ideally, I'd like to be able to create a hierarchical classification scheme for my posts like frassle but as I'm unwilling to expend any money at all ever that seems a trifle ambitious.)
3. full unrestricted permission to play with my templates
4. a "save as draft" option
5. little or no advertising (unless its Google "targeted advertising")

Will twoday.net offer me what I want? I don't know yet because it's all still in German. I am investigating whilst I learn a new language. Thus far:
abbrechen = cancel
veroffentlichen = post
offline speichern = save offline (save as draft)

My beloved former blog and all it's clever witty posts are being held for a ransom of $35 dollars which I refuse to pay. So I have decided to start over.

I don't speak German though. Which is proving to be a problem, my new blog host being, it would seem, German and everything, therefore, being written in a language I don't speak. Thank god for Google translation. I will either give up on this and find another blog host elsewhere or I will learn all the words related to weblogs in German.