While doing my nightly ritual of reading the DailyKos I came across this gem of a website Things Younger than McCain.

It is genius! I can’t wait to read this daily. I’m sure there are tons of things older than McCain. A few of my favorites the slinky, spam and AARP.

Happy reading!

Kables and his special lady friend gave me a book for my birthday which shows you how well they know me. The book was “Geek Love” by Katherine Dunn and it was the first book in a few months that made me look forward to climbing into bed or waiting at the doctor’s office. Thoroughly loved it. No exaggeration. I was hooked immediately.

But then I finished it and that sad lonely lost feeling came that I get when I’ve finished a great book and don’t have it to look forward to. It’s like a friend has moved away and I desperately need to find someone new to spend my Friday nights with. (Note: I’m not kidding that Friday nights are my book nights. At least I’ve always loved reserving Fridays for myself. No social activities, just curling up at home.)

So needless to say I was thrilled when a co-worker of mine sent me to this site. Not only will it provide me great ideas for what I should read next, but it also will warn me about what not to read, thus the name of the site: What not to read.

Added bonus: if you click on “buy it now” it takes you to the Queen Anne Books website which made me smile proudly that instead of the usual link to Amazon (especially knowing he could have gotten Amazon Associate credit by doing that) he sent us to a local bookstore in my very own city. Yes, MY city. In case you didn’t know. We’re married. Me and Seattle. But that’s old news.

IMPORTANT ADDITION: A friend of mine runs a non-profit school for autistic kids and this weekend if you mentioned them (APL) at the Pacific Place Barnes and Noble when you buy books this weekend (April 11-13) they will get a cut of the proceeds. So I marched down there tonight with my list of new books pulled from the site and proceeded to make a huge contribution to the school. Sigh. I love books. I don’t really need an excuse to spend too much money on books, but I do need one to spend it at B&N. Ick.

Okay. I’m done. Now go buy some books.

Best. Blog. EVER.

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb.

Some of my personal favorites:

(link via Tannhauser, aka Grand Poobah Barabas Maximus)

Also, Stuff White People Like (link via MaxLibris) and Monk-e-Mail (link via…um…shit, I forgot. Wicked sorreh.)

The following is a short list of useful tools, that just might help you be more productive while blogging, working, and playing. The best part is that all of these tools are free for the taking:

Programs:

• GIMP - If you don’t absolutely require Photoshop, this image editor is for you
• FastStone ImageViewer - Great for image file conversion
• UnFREEz - Create GIF animations

Web-Based Utilities:

• GuerrillaMail - Get an anonymous short-term email account
• TinyURL - Convert any convoluted URL into something “tiny”
• YouSendIt - Send any file (up to 100MB) over the Internet without using email

Palm Programs:

• Converter - Fantastic measurement converter
• ChemTable - Periodic Table handy for those chemistry questions
• CryptoPad - Encrypt any files on your Palm Pilot

For the complete list, please refer to my blog, @ the Library!

Alright.  I admit it.  All these years of killing brain cells has finally caught up with me.  Only instead of the frying egg sensation, I think it was more of a pouring of thick black gooeyness over my brain and now, at 31, I have to try and think through the La Brea tar pit that is my brain.

I’ve stumbled upon a brain power test where you run through a couple exercises and it tells you the actual performance age of your brain. The hardest part is the fact it combines images with words and I guess that pulls at two different sides of your brain.  Apparently I have a river of black tar blocking the connection between the two.  The first time I did it I discovered my brain was 65.  Oh my fracking god.

Try for yourself and let me know what you are.  Today with a little more coffee, better sleep, and some more familiarity with the test, I scored an age of 39.  Getting closer.

Yup, Hats of Meat is exactly what it sounds like. Be sure to check out the brisket yamulke, or the Canadian bacon ski hat.

Here’s a Happy Birthday shout out to our very own DM. Have a spectacular day and weekend. Make lots of trouble. 

Also, since I didn’t get my act together and don’t have a present for you, here’s a fun little website I’ve been enjoying lately.

It’s a cassette generator made by the same people who brought us the ever popular church sign generator. The possibilities are endless.

Over the weekend Kerry, Tim and I were watching an episode of Oprah when she had this segment about the creators of a new 11 part mini-series on the Discovery Channel called Planet Earth. It took them 5 years to record a lot of the stuff, sometimes waiting hours to catch something spectacular. I couldn’t believe the footage that they showed on the Oprah show. There were things that you will probably never see again. The first show starts March 25th at 8pm.

I leave you with a little video of penguins.

Although I am no longer in the political snark business, I still voraciously read political blogs of all sizes and colors from across the ideological spectrum. I feel it’s important to look at current events from all sides, so I try to make an effort to broaden my horizons by seeing what the right wing has to say about the crucial issues of the day.

Ok, that’s not really true. What I actually do is read all the liberal blogs to whose feeds I subscribe… and then, to get the conservative perspective, I read other liberal blogs that specialize in reading right wing blogs and making fun of them. This allows me to keep some sanity, because if I actually had to read the “Nuke Iran,” “Democrats are Traitors,” “Islamofascists are Hiding in Your Closet,” “Teh Gays Will Subvert Your Children,” “Armageddon is Next Tuesday After Lunch” swill emanating from the 30 Percenters at the bitter, bile-filled end of the Bush-worshiping Right, I would go well and truly insane.

My preferred sites in the “We Read The Wingnuts So You Don’t Have To” genre include TBogg, World O’Crap, Happy Furry Puppy Story Time With Norbizness, and my current favorite, Sadly, No! It is through Sadly, No! that I was introduced to the wonders of perhaps the looniest wingnut website on the entire Internets, Alan Keyes’ Renew America. (If you don’t know or have forgotten who the hell Alan Keyes is, here’s a quick refresher.) The beauty of Renew America, and the quality that makes it The Looniest of the Loony, is that unlike other rightie sites, they don’t pluck the cream of the homeschooled, Bob Jones University-educated, DC Conservative Think Tank crop to write their “Why Hilary Clinton is a LesboCommunoFascist” columns. Nope, as far as I can tell, they just walk up to batshit crazy people who mumble to themselves in the streets, and offer them jobs. It’s a veritable Perfect Storm of Dementia.

Don’t believe me? Check out some of their columnists:

• Wes Vernon, who thinks Saddam was behind the Oklahoma City bombing.
• Kaye Grogan, the Amway Saleswoman From Hell.
• Keyes himself (although, for some reason, his columns aren’t published at his own website. Perhaps even he doesn’t want to be too closely associated with these psychopaths?)

But if you want to read the biggest, the baddest, the best, the High Apostle of Right Wing Looniness, Carey Roberts is your man. This is a man who looks - and writes - like a combination of Grampa Simpson and Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character from Saturday Night Live.

“Dear Advertisers, I am disgusted with the way old people are depicted on television. We are not all vibrant, fun loving sex maniacs. Many of us are bitter, resentful individuals who remember the good old days when entertainment was bland and inoffensive.”

Carey Roberts is approximately 133 years old, and is primarily angry that feminists (who are all Communists) have come along and made the wimmin folk all uppity and stuff. Sadly, No! has done yeoman work over the past few years in lampooning Roberts’ caveman rants, but really, it’s almost unnecessary. When Grampa is off his meds and blathering about the Bush administration being overrun with feminist operatives, claiming that we’re losing the war on terror because a generation of men have been “feminized,” or comparing DubYa to a manly man quarterback, satire becomes redundant.

And that, my friends, is why I retired from the political satire game: the sinking realization that, even on my best days, I could never be as funny on purpose as this deranged old fart is every day by accident.

I’ve decided one of the things I love most about our generation is that we really made the internet what it is today. Which is not a cesspool of misinformation and a predator’s haven, because I don’t really believe that is so much our doing as it is the side effect of something being so widely used by all walks of life. Instead I would like to say that we have found ways to do great things with this tool. Whether it is creating a communal resource like Wikipedia which is only as good as the readers who contribute, and damn it’s good, or even a creating a space for up and coming creative minds to share their work for free and find their place and voice in this new social network.

I give you yet another example of what we couldn’t do as successfully without the great minds of our generation using the internet to achieve a goal. Rosa Loves. Enough said.