Saturday, August 19, 2006
Good news and epiphanies
If you've been here in the past few days, you've probably already noticed what the good news is; the sidebar's fixed (mostly)!! :-)
When Blogger rolled out their new system, my sidebar dropped to the bottom of the page; if you saw it like that, sorry for having it look so bad and be a pain to get to everything. I hadn't changed ANYTHING on my blog that day, so I knew that nothing I'D done had caused it; the downside of that was that it gave me no clue as to what to do to fix it. Luckily for me, a tech god on a forum for Blogger issues found the problem; my Webring code is currently not playing nice with Blogger (if you're one of the other folks having sidebar issues, by all means try removing the code for any webrings you've got from your template and see if that helps).
The blog of the lovely person who helped me is here
http://phydeaux3.blogspot.com/
and if you're interested in tech stuff, especially the new Blogger changes, go pay them a visit-tell 'em Omni sent you. :-)
My new hero used something I'd never heard of to determine the culprit in my sidebar train wreck; "Firefox DOM inspector"... which it turns out that my husband HAS and never thought to use to help me, grrrrrrrrrr. I've never seen this marvelous application in action, but apparently it can tell you what each bit of code for a page is doing; in my case, it revealed that the Webring script was opening tables but not closing all of them, and one of them was "trapping" the sidebar. I don't know whether this happened because Webring recently messed something up, and the timing matching the release of Blogger beta is just a big coincidence, or if the alteration to Blogger made it vulnerable to a pre-existing Webring issue; the unpleasant memory of how the last big change Blogger made allowed several of the scripts in my sidebar to ignore the right-justify command in some browser/operating system combos (see my post of 7-12-05) even makes me wonder if it's possible that Blogger is MAKING the Webring script malfunction... it doesn't really matter, though, as Webring's code HAS to be able to work on Blogger, so they're the ones who're gonna be stuck trying to fix things.
Until their code is corrected, I'll have their big banner messing up my layout a little from where I stuck it at the end of the sidebar (all hell would break loose if I just left the code out of my template), but I've given them a full report, so hopefully that last issue will be handled soon; in the meantime, at least my blog looks almost normal again.
As scary as it was to see my layout fall apart, it pales beside what all too many other bloggers have endured because of Blogger beta; while desperately seeking a solution to my own problem, I encountered a slew of people whose blogs have vanished, or frozen, or locked them out, or rejected their customizations, or lost all their comments. If you're thinking about migrating your blog to beta in the near future, DON'T; *I* won't be changing over until they hold a gun to my head, believe me.
Epiphany #1 came from reading a ridiculous post about how our leaders need to essentially act like saints rather than like human beings with power (I'm not saying that it's ridiculous to WISH we could have that, but that it's ridiculous to seriously suggest that it's possible in the real world). The thought that came into my head was, "I wouldn't WANT leaders who appeared to be acting like saints, because that'd mean that they were up to such huge wrongdoings that even in their arrogance they felt the need to cover up very thoroughly, and, worse, that they had the ABILITY to totally hide their evil deeds, which'd make them more terrifying than any totalitarian lunatic ever created"; this made me stop and think, because it was a new idea for me. Then it hit me; this is another part of why most people instinctively dislike and distrust the virtuous, and disdain to accept them as friends or romantic partners when common sense would indicate that they're the folks they SHOULD be seeking out and valuing above all others... because we subconsciously suspect that they're plotting mischief (or worse) beneath a false veneer of goodness, that they're the worst kind of baddies and are trying, not just to do us an ill turn, but to TRICK us, which we hate more than almost anything. Like with so many other counter-intuitive aspects of human nature, there's a reason behind this warped thinking; sociopaths, con artists and other evil types will often pretend to be paragons of virtue in order to deceive people long enough to do them harm, and by shunning those who seem "too virtuous" we avoid that... but at what cost, both to the truly virtuous and to the quality of people we accept into our lives?
Epiphany #2 came courtesy of my friend Jax, whose insightful blog is here
http://butchjax.wordpress.com/
In her post called "Thoughts on future and past life friends"
http://butchjax.wordpress.com/2006/08/14/thoughts-on-future-and-past-life-friends/
this jumped out at me:
"Because time does not exist, looking into the future is no different than looking into the past, because it's all happening at the same instant of now. Therefore, those we have strong connections with aren't past life friends, but future life friends. Maybe that connection is telling us that they will be with us in the future!"
Time is one of my heaviest issues: quantum physics shows us that time does NOT exist like we think it does, and some theoretical physicists believe it doesn't exist at all... neurobiologists have discovered that much of our perception of time is created for us by our brains (see my post of 6-4-06), contrary to what the laws of physics say is going on... the existence of precognition proves that the future already exists, to some degree and in some form; I've posted about all these things, but I'd never made the leap that Jax did, that we could be "connected" to people (and presumably also to objects, energies, etc) in the FUTURE as well as in the past and present.
News flash!! This afternoon, it occurred to me out of the blue that, although I've probably watched 1000 hours of metal videos on VH1 Classic since I discovered it 7 months ago, I've never seen them show anything by Lizzy Borden; I wondered briefly why that would be, since, although it's a very minor band, MTV DID show them a handful of times on the Headbangers Ball and thus has them in the vault (they own VH1), but gave no thought to why that'd popped into my head. I'm watching Metal Mania as I type this, and GUESS WHOSE VIDEO JUST CAME ON? Coincidence? Not a chance.
Back to the post: I think it's very possible that time DOESN'T exist, that, as I've said before, what we perceive as the march of time might be no more than the equivalent of a cosmic DVD being played... perhaps over and over. The idea that we may be getting something more than precognitive flashes from the future seems obvious now that Jax pointed it out; since the future already exists, how could its energy, which must be ENORMOUS, NOT ever affect us? Does that explain deja vu, maybe? Are our subconscious minds filled with images from the future that haven't made the leap to precognition (aka conscious recognition)? When you think about it, how COULD it be that ALL the energy we receive from the future makes it with perfect efficiency into precognitive flashes? That's another whole new idea, which is AWESOME after the long spiritual dry spell!! So the new question is; what else from the future is lurking in the basements of our brains? Is there any way to access it directly?
Would we REALLY want to?
Well... probably not, as we're not designed to operate with that knowledge, but... still, imagine it!! Why do you suppose we even HAVE the ability to EVER perceive any portion of the future when we can't control it and can rarely USE the information we receive? Evolution doesn't develop sophisticated abilities for us that don't benefit us, so... did we USED to have this ability in usable form, and as we relied more on our ability to think it atrophied, like the appendix? Or, is precognition a side effect of the sort of low-grade telepathic abilities that would have conferred a clear survival advantage to primitive humans? OR, is it just the result of our connection to karma?
Would someone who was deeply psychic be stuck wading through impressions from the past, present and future, having to mostly guess which was which? Scott Adams tells the story in his book "The Dilbert Future" of a self-proclaimed psychic that he tried to prove WASN'T psychic by drawing cards from a tarot deck and having her guess them:
"In all, I picked five cards, and she missed all five. Amazingly, the five cards she described were the five I picked, just out of order. I had been careful to keep them all close to my chest to remove any possibility that she was somehow peeking. And we were alone in my house, so no accomplices were involved. I asked her why she guessed the cards out of order, and she explained that she can't distinguish between the near past and the near future. They are not relevant concepts to her. In her reality, the past and the present exist at the same time."
http://s6.invisionfree.com/Gods_Debris/ar/t161.htm
Could the cards have been marked? Of course. Would someone trying to fake out a skeptic decide to deliberately "guess" the cards in the wrong order and hope he'd buy the "all time is the same" idea? That's pushing it, but it's marginally possible; still, I wish I could meet that particular lady myself and ask her about her worldview.
There's a great deal of new stuff for me to think about, and hopefully some new ideas will come out of it. I'd been fretting a few days ago about how long it'd been since I made any spiritual progress, and clearly I did the right thing by visiting Jax's blog; thanks for the kick-start, Jax!!
When Blogger rolled out their new system, my sidebar dropped to the bottom of the page; if you saw it like that, sorry for having it look so bad and be a pain to get to everything. I hadn't changed ANYTHING on my blog that day, so I knew that nothing I'D done had caused it; the downside of that was that it gave me no clue as to what to do to fix it. Luckily for me, a tech god on a forum for Blogger issues found the problem; my Webring code is currently not playing nice with Blogger (if you're one of the other folks having sidebar issues, by all means try removing the code for any webrings you've got from your template and see if that helps).
The blog of the lovely person who helped me is here
http://phydeaux3.blogspot.com/
and if you're interested in tech stuff, especially the new Blogger changes, go pay them a visit-tell 'em Omni sent you. :-)
My new hero used something I'd never heard of to determine the culprit in my sidebar train wreck; "Firefox DOM inspector"... which it turns out that my husband HAS and never thought to use to help me, grrrrrrrrrr. I've never seen this marvelous application in action, but apparently it can tell you what each bit of code for a page is doing; in my case, it revealed that the Webring script was opening tables but not closing all of them, and one of them was "trapping" the sidebar. I don't know whether this happened because Webring recently messed something up, and the timing matching the release of Blogger beta is just a big coincidence, or if the alteration to Blogger made it vulnerable to a pre-existing Webring issue; the unpleasant memory of how the last big change Blogger made allowed several of the scripts in my sidebar to ignore the right-justify command in some browser/operating system combos (see my post of 7-12-05) even makes me wonder if it's possible that Blogger is MAKING the Webring script malfunction... it doesn't really matter, though, as Webring's code HAS to be able to work on Blogger, so they're the ones who're gonna be stuck trying to fix things.
Until their code is corrected, I'll have their big banner messing up my layout a little from where I stuck it at the end of the sidebar (all hell would break loose if I just left the code out of my template), but I've given them a full report, so hopefully that last issue will be handled soon; in the meantime, at least my blog looks almost normal again.
As scary as it was to see my layout fall apart, it pales beside what all too many other bloggers have endured because of Blogger beta; while desperately seeking a solution to my own problem, I encountered a slew of people whose blogs have vanished, or frozen, or locked them out, or rejected their customizations, or lost all their comments. If you're thinking about migrating your blog to beta in the near future, DON'T; *I* won't be changing over until they hold a gun to my head, believe me.
Epiphany #1 came from reading a ridiculous post about how our leaders need to essentially act like saints rather than like human beings with power (I'm not saying that it's ridiculous to WISH we could have that, but that it's ridiculous to seriously suggest that it's possible in the real world). The thought that came into my head was, "I wouldn't WANT leaders who appeared to be acting like saints, because that'd mean that they were up to such huge wrongdoings that even in their arrogance they felt the need to cover up very thoroughly, and, worse, that they had the ABILITY to totally hide their evil deeds, which'd make them more terrifying than any totalitarian lunatic ever created"; this made me stop and think, because it was a new idea for me. Then it hit me; this is another part of why most people instinctively dislike and distrust the virtuous, and disdain to accept them as friends or romantic partners when common sense would indicate that they're the folks they SHOULD be seeking out and valuing above all others... because we subconsciously suspect that they're plotting mischief (or worse) beneath a false veneer of goodness, that they're the worst kind of baddies and are trying, not just to do us an ill turn, but to TRICK us, which we hate more than almost anything. Like with so many other counter-intuitive aspects of human nature, there's a reason behind this warped thinking; sociopaths, con artists and other evil types will often pretend to be paragons of virtue in order to deceive people long enough to do them harm, and by shunning those who seem "too virtuous" we avoid that... but at what cost, both to the truly virtuous and to the quality of people we accept into our lives?
Epiphany #2 came courtesy of my friend Jax, whose insightful blog is here
http://butchjax.wordpress.com/
In her post called "Thoughts on future and past life friends"
http://butchjax.wordpress.com/2006/08/14/thoughts-on-future-and-past-life-friends/
this jumped out at me:
"Because time does not exist, looking into the future is no different than looking into the past, because it's all happening at the same instant of now. Therefore, those we have strong connections with aren't past life friends, but future life friends. Maybe that connection is telling us that they will be with us in the future!"
Time is one of my heaviest issues: quantum physics shows us that time does NOT exist like we think it does, and some theoretical physicists believe it doesn't exist at all... neurobiologists have discovered that much of our perception of time is created for us by our brains (see my post of 6-4-06), contrary to what the laws of physics say is going on... the existence of precognition proves that the future already exists, to some degree and in some form; I've posted about all these things, but I'd never made the leap that Jax did, that we could be "connected" to people (and presumably also to objects, energies, etc) in the FUTURE as well as in the past and present.
News flash!! This afternoon, it occurred to me out of the blue that, although I've probably watched 1000 hours of metal videos on VH1 Classic since I discovered it 7 months ago, I've never seen them show anything by Lizzy Borden; I wondered briefly why that would be, since, although it's a very minor band, MTV DID show them a handful of times on the Headbangers Ball and thus has them in the vault (they own VH1), but gave no thought to why that'd popped into my head. I'm watching Metal Mania as I type this, and GUESS WHOSE VIDEO JUST CAME ON? Coincidence? Not a chance.
Back to the post: I think it's very possible that time DOESN'T exist, that, as I've said before, what we perceive as the march of time might be no more than the equivalent of a cosmic DVD being played... perhaps over and over. The idea that we may be getting something more than precognitive flashes from the future seems obvious now that Jax pointed it out; since the future already exists, how could its energy, which must be ENORMOUS, NOT ever affect us? Does that explain deja vu, maybe? Are our subconscious minds filled with images from the future that haven't made the leap to precognition (aka conscious recognition)? When you think about it, how COULD it be that ALL the energy we receive from the future makes it with perfect efficiency into precognitive flashes? That's another whole new idea, which is AWESOME after the long spiritual dry spell!! So the new question is; what else from the future is lurking in the basements of our brains? Is there any way to access it directly?
Would we REALLY want to?
Well... probably not, as we're not designed to operate with that knowledge, but... still, imagine it!! Why do you suppose we even HAVE the ability to EVER perceive any portion of the future when we can't control it and can rarely USE the information we receive? Evolution doesn't develop sophisticated abilities for us that don't benefit us, so... did we USED to have this ability in usable form, and as we relied more on our ability to think it atrophied, like the appendix? Or, is precognition a side effect of the sort of low-grade telepathic abilities that would have conferred a clear survival advantage to primitive humans? OR, is it just the result of our connection to karma?
Would someone who was deeply psychic be stuck wading through impressions from the past, present and future, having to mostly guess which was which? Scott Adams tells the story in his book "The Dilbert Future" of a self-proclaimed psychic that he tried to prove WASN'T psychic by drawing cards from a tarot deck and having her guess them:
"In all, I picked five cards, and she missed all five. Amazingly, the five cards she described were the five I picked, just out of order. I had been careful to keep them all close to my chest to remove any possibility that she was somehow peeking. And we were alone in my house, so no accomplices were involved. I asked her why she guessed the cards out of order, and she explained that she can't distinguish between the near past and the near future. They are not relevant concepts to her. In her reality, the past and the present exist at the same time."
http://s6.invisionfree.com/Gods_Debris/ar/t161.htm
Could the cards have been marked? Of course. Would someone trying to fake out a skeptic decide to deliberately "guess" the cards in the wrong order and hope he'd buy the "all time is the same" idea? That's pushing it, but it's marginally possible; still, I wish I could meet that particular lady myself and ask her about her worldview.
There's a great deal of new stuff for me to think about, and hopefully some new ideas will come out of it. I'd been fretting a few days ago about how long it'd been since I made any spiritual progress, and clearly I did the right thing by visiting Jax's blog; thanks for the kick-start, Jax!!
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
When it rains it pours
I don't even know where to start... I have bursitis in all 4 major joints (which means that the little sacs that cushion said joints periodically become inflamed and start imitating red-hot coals), and over the past few days I've had minor flares in 1 hip, a steady throb in the other (severe enough to give me a limp), and now my left shoulder is so bad that the arm is almost entirely useless... I cringe to contemplate what it'd feel like if I wasn't so full of ibuprofen that I rattle when I move. I'm used to having stuff hurt, so I'm philosophical about it; at least my RIGHT shoulder isn't affected (yet).
Adding to my stress is that I'm in the midst of being a "stand-by prospective juror"; this means that I'm on call for 5 business days, and have to keep phoning the courthouse for instructions until I've either gone in or been told that I'm excused... you can imagine what that's done to my schedule, since I don't know from one day to the next what I'll be doing when. I've gotten through the 1st 3 days without being summoned, and according to their website the only groups that've had to report for selection so far have much lower #'s than MY group (which is near the high end of all the groups involved), so, assuming they go in numerical order (which they may not, as this is the gov't after all), I've got a good shot at not having to drag myself out there, but anything could happen.
The oddest thing about all this is that this stand-by deal is totally new to me and everyone I've spoken to who lives in my area... what did they do, INVENT this new setup for some specific trial that they expect to be problematic juror-wise, or is it maybe a test of a new idea that might or might not eventually be officially adopted?
Here's the real killer from the past few days; my laptop developed a serious hardware issue and will be away getting repaired for most likely about 2 weeks... !! This leaves me with my husband's much older laptop, from which he removed most of the memory ages ago for reasons he naturally can no longer recall (same with the location and condition of said memory), which I can only have a couple of windows open at a time on (a dozen is typical for me normally), and then have to restart constantly. No matter how clever I get about cycling through sites, I've still had to put most of my stuff up on the desktop in my study, so I can no longer eat or watch TV in a contiguous fashion; I have to keep running back and forth between computers, trying to keep track of everything in my head and cursing a blue streak under my breath.
The MOST nightmarish aspect of this train wreck, though, was preparing the laptop to go in for repairs; since locking my stuff under a password wouldn't stop a technician for 5 seconds if he felt like snooping, my husband copied everything onto a backup hard drive and then deleted it all off the laptop. This shouldn't have been problematic, but sadly his common sense doesn't match his technical expertise:
1) A little while after he was supposedly DONE, I realized that I hadn't verified that he'd accomplished what he said he had, so I checked... and there was my stuff!! The frigging idiot had deleted it, yes, but he hadn't cleared the trash folder; anyone past the age of 10 would know to look there, but they wouldn't even have had to because the machine was still accessing it all as if it'd never been deleted.
2) Showing childish petulance at being found in the wrong rather than regret or embarrassment at making such a gross error, he cleared the trash folder; after he went flouncing away, I figured I'd better take a look just to be safe... and my stuff was still there. When forced to return to the task, still showing no sign of shame but adding belligerence to his sulkiness, he figured out that the process had hung up... but hadn't given an error message, grrrrrrrrr.
3) Finally, his THIRD attempt at deletion actually succeeding in eliminating the files from the laptop; when, a few minutes later, I thought to check and see if my scrapbook, which contains all sorts of sensitive info, had been included in the deletion... guess what. More sullen than ever, my husband deleted it.
4) Never one to learn from his mistakes, he'd failed AGAIN to clear the trash folder.
5) The 1st attempt to clear the trash folder failed AGAIN... and, again, *I* had to catch it-he'd literally shut down the machine to try to prevent me from finding more problems, instead of making every effort himself to be sure everything was truly squared away as he SHOULD have been doing. I'm not making this up; he'd rather have strangers have access to our online bank account passwords and such than be "bothered" and made to keep coming back and delete things.
sigh
Ok, let's switch gears to some entertaining stuff:
"Teenagers who toilet-papered and damaged a home now face felony vandalism charges because of a mother's extraordinary sleuthing."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14122962/
I LOVE this story, both because it shows just how much a victim can do to bring criminals to justice and because for once the little sumbitches didn't get away with vandalism under the guise of "boys will be boys"; every hard-core criminal started out with more minor crimes, and I'm all for making the laws apply to EVERYONE, including groups of teenage boys.
If you're a fan of "Blue Collar Comedy Tour," and if you've ever seen this side-splittingly funny combination of 4 redneck comedians you must be, I've got exciting news; they've made a THIRD one!! (The 2nd one is "Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again," and was released in 2004.) It's called "Blue Collar Comedy Tour: One for the Road"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807745/
and it's showing now on Comedy Central; if you don't get that channel, rent the DVD-you'll be glad you did.
I've found what's probably the most eye-popping animal figurine ever made; it's a ram... and let's just say that it's VERY OBVIOUS that this is a ram and not a ewe... we're talking "how does the poor thing WALK?" kind of obvious:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150001709970
Too bad the seller wants $50 for it, or I'd get it, if just for the shock value.
And speaking of shock value; I'd always known that some people have a 3rd nipple (yes, I 1st learned about it from that Bond movie), and I'd always assumed that those thus afflicted either removed it to keep from looking freaky shirtless or ignored it if it didn't bother them... but it turns out that there's a 3rd category of these folks; those who PIERCE the 3rd nipple. I've found a website with pics of this phenomenon; be aware that it features women as well as men, which means there are bare breasts... if you don't want to see that, don't go to this site:
http://www.bmezine.com/pierce/08-nipple/third001.html
I've also found a gif of a nipple being pierced; I was tempted to include it in this post, but I prefer to remain safe for work and all ages, so if you've got a strong stomach you can see it here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v247/Omniverse/nipple_piercing.gif
Enjoy. :-O
Adding to my stress is that I'm in the midst of being a "stand-by prospective juror"; this means that I'm on call for 5 business days, and have to keep phoning the courthouse for instructions until I've either gone in or been told that I'm excused... you can imagine what that's done to my schedule, since I don't know from one day to the next what I'll be doing when. I've gotten through the 1st 3 days without being summoned, and according to their website the only groups that've had to report for selection so far have much lower #'s than MY group (which is near the high end of all the groups involved), so, assuming they go in numerical order (which they may not, as this is the gov't after all), I've got a good shot at not having to drag myself out there, but anything could happen.
The oddest thing about all this is that this stand-by deal is totally new to me and everyone I've spoken to who lives in my area... what did they do, INVENT this new setup for some specific trial that they expect to be problematic juror-wise, or is it maybe a test of a new idea that might or might not eventually be officially adopted?
Here's the real killer from the past few days; my laptop developed a serious hardware issue and will be away getting repaired for most likely about 2 weeks... !! This leaves me with my husband's much older laptop, from which he removed most of the memory ages ago for reasons he naturally can no longer recall (same with the location and condition of said memory), which I can only have a couple of windows open at a time on (a dozen is typical for me normally), and then have to restart constantly. No matter how clever I get about cycling through sites, I've still had to put most of my stuff up on the desktop in my study, so I can no longer eat or watch TV in a contiguous fashion; I have to keep running back and forth between computers, trying to keep track of everything in my head and cursing a blue streak under my breath.
The MOST nightmarish aspect of this train wreck, though, was preparing the laptop to go in for repairs; since locking my stuff under a password wouldn't stop a technician for 5 seconds if he felt like snooping, my husband copied everything onto a backup hard drive and then deleted it all off the laptop. This shouldn't have been problematic, but sadly his common sense doesn't match his technical expertise:
1) A little while after he was supposedly DONE, I realized that I hadn't verified that he'd accomplished what he said he had, so I checked... and there was my stuff!! The frigging idiot had deleted it, yes, but he hadn't cleared the trash folder; anyone past the age of 10 would know to look there, but they wouldn't even have had to because the machine was still accessing it all as if it'd never been deleted.
2) Showing childish petulance at being found in the wrong rather than regret or embarrassment at making such a gross error, he cleared the trash folder; after he went flouncing away, I figured I'd better take a look just to be safe... and my stuff was still there. When forced to return to the task, still showing no sign of shame but adding belligerence to his sulkiness, he figured out that the process had hung up... but hadn't given an error message, grrrrrrrrr.
3) Finally, his THIRD attempt at deletion actually succeeding in eliminating the files from the laptop; when, a few minutes later, I thought to check and see if my scrapbook, which contains all sorts of sensitive info, had been included in the deletion... guess what. More sullen than ever, my husband deleted it.
4) Never one to learn from his mistakes, he'd failed AGAIN to clear the trash folder.
5) The 1st attempt to clear the trash folder failed AGAIN... and, again, *I* had to catch it-he'd literally shut down the machine to try to prevent me from finding more problems, instead of making every effort himself to be sure everything was truly squared away as he SHOULD have been doing. I'm not making this up; he'd rather have strangers have access to our online bank account passwords and such than be "bothered" and made to keep coming back and delete things.
sigh
Ok, let's switch gears to some entertaining stuff:
"Teenagers who toilet-papered and damaged a home now face felony vandalism charges because of a mother's extraordinary sleuthing."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14122962/
I LOVE this story, both because it shows just how much a victim can do to bring criminals to justice and because for once the little sumbitches didn't get away with vandalism under the guise of "boys will be boys"; every hard-core criminal started out with more minor crimes, and I'm all for making the laws apply to EVERYONE, including groups of teenage boys.
If you're a fan of "Blue Collar Comedy Tour," and if you've ever seen this side-splittingly funny combination of 4 redneck comedians you must be, I've got exciting news; they've made a THIRD one!! (The 2nd one is "Blue Collar Comedy Tour Rides Again," and was released in 2004.) It's called "Blue Collar Comedy Tour: One for the Road"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0807745/
and it's showing now on Comedy Central; if you don't get that channel, rent the DVD-you'll be glad you did.
I've found what's probably the most eye-popping animal figurine ever made; it's a ram... and let's just say that it's VERY OBVIOUS that this is a ram and not a ewe... we're talking "how does the poor thing WALK?" kind of obvious:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150001709970
Too bad the seller wants $50 for it, or I'd get it, if just for the shock value.
And speaking of shock value; I'd always known that some people have a 3rd nipple (yes, I 1st learned about it from that Bond movie), and I'd always assumed that those thus afflicted either removed it to keep from looking freaky shirtless or ignored it if it didn't bother them... but it turns out that there's a 3rd category of these folks; those who PIERCE the 3rd nipple. I've found a website with pics of this phenomenon; be aware that it features women as well as men, which means there are bare breasts... if you don't want to see that, don't go to this site:
http://www.bmezine.com/pierce/08-nipple/third001.html
I've also found a gif of a nipple being pierced; I was tempted to include it in this post, but I prefer to remain safe for work and all ages, so if you've got a strong stomach you can see it here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v247/Omniverse/nipple_piercing.gif
Enjoy. :-O
