Random Thoughts - No, I'm Not Dead Edition

Hard as it may be to believe, I'm still rewriting/editing/proofing/formatting. The good news: Director's Cut is DONE. (Except for the cover and the blurby-stuff. The cover is designed, but not made. And the blurby stuff will entail a six-pack and some free time.) I'm doing more surgery on Darker By Degree, having realized that there's a meandering chapter (Chapter 17, I'm looking at you) that is not pulling its weight and needs to be taken outside and slapped around a bit. Running Red is sitting in the corner looking dejected and wondering why I can't stick to a simple timetable. Funny thing is, having a third of the people in my house off in the wilds of Virginia fending off mutant spiders and hillbilly cannibals has not really given me any more usable time. I'm forming a study to committee to get to the bottom of that. (As an aside, the S/O informs me that in Meridian, Mississippi, there is a Long John Silvers/A&W root beer joint. This means you can get to-go clam strips and an A&W root beer float in the SAME LOCATION. This makes me excited for reasons I can't articulate. He found it humorous because in one of our pointless conversations before the great adventure I remarked that if I were going to open a fast-food franchise, it would be a Long John Silver's/A&W combo, not realizing that one actually existed.)

On the hockey front, congratulation to the Bruins for crushing Vancouver last night. I hate the Canucks. (If you know anything about Avalanche fans, you'll understand why.) The Canucks have become a whiny cheap-shot team, much like Detroit. The proof of this is the sore-loser Vancouver riots.  You run a cheap-shot team, you get cheap-shot fans. Suck it, Vancouver. Karma is a harsh mistress.  On the upside for me, today hockey season starts all over, which means that the Avalanche are officially undefeated this season. YAY! (I am working out my issues from last season, when Peter Forsberg BROKE MY HEART. Of course, I don't blame Forsberg, I still blame Pierre Lacroix. Because there is nothing that Pierre Lacroix can do to convince me he's not a pin-headed idiot.) And now that Foote has retired, who will be captain? Sources say Liles, Statsney, Hejduk or Duchene, but I want Christ Stewart.

Now that I've bored you all with hockey talk, an awesomely weird, disorienting, occasionally inexplicably terrifying link. It is called simply Internet K-Hole: Pictures. And that's what is is: pictures. Just random pictures and ephemera, like a truck carrying old photo albums turned over on the Information Superhighway. There's no context, no providence, no rhyme-or-reason (although sometimes there are runs of themes, like pregnant women or goths holding cats, and rolls of film that obviously came from the same camera at the same time, like an awkward tweener showing off all her NKOTB memorablia.) Mostly it's snapshots -- the kind with the white borders, the kind you'd take on vacation or a school trip, drunken parties, college dorms -- but there's other stuff too, old pulp paperback covers, concert ticket stubs, screenshots that you'd take of your favorite celebrities off the TV in the days before we had a computer stronger than a Tandy. WARNING - it it not safe for work or anyone too young to drive an automobile legally. There's a fair amount of nudity and creepy still porn randomly scattered in between pictures of Gramma's b-day cake and random mug shots from the '50s. (And more distrubing than the porn is the '80s hair. Oh, the '80s hair.)

But that's part of what makes it compelling: the sheer, gritty, randomness of it, like an allsorts bag assembled by a being from another planet. I found it obsessively fascinating. Trying to deconstruct it is fruitless.