…I learned on a spontaneous 2600-mile weekend road trip to Boston. Things like:

– Thou Shalt Not Take The Words Of The Oracle Of Mapquest As Gospel, For Verily They Do Lie From Time To Time, Just To Keep You On Your Toes

– After 1,000 miles in the car, nobody wants to hear your Agent Smith impersonation.

– New Jersey has a smell that lingers.

– If you see six police cars in your rearview mirror, lights blazing and sirens screaming, closing fast behind you, just pull over and let them by. Even if you were speeding, they’re not interested in you. Seriously. In the grand scheme of things, you’re just not that important.

– When you’re debating the pros and cons of a very long drive to pay an unexpected visit to someone, don’t forget to account for the fact that you’re going to arrive at your destination smelling like armpit. Please, for the love of God, think of the children!

– Yes, you do need to pee. You only think you don’t.

– No matter how full your baggage is, there’s always room for a 7.62-caliber bullet. And a 7.62-caliber bullet is always an appropriate housewarming gift. Especially if you have a whole lot of ’em lying around as a result of the last party. Just sayin’.

– Police officers are social creatures. Wherever you see one, there are a lot more you don’t see. Kind of like spiders and cockroaches.

– Think of the coolest thing you can imagine, and the second-coolest thing you can imagine. Now picture the second-coolest thing balancing on top of the coolest thing. ladytabitha is cooler than that.

– Experiences are more rewarding than possessions.

And finally, the #1 thing I learned on a spontaneous 2600-mile weekend road trip to Boston:

– Life rewards courage.

In completely unrelated news, I returned to discover a form from the Post Office saying that the package I sent to ame_chan was destroyed in transit, oops, so sorry, and that if I liked, they’d be happy to try to locate the contents, which might be in their damaged parcels facility in St. Paul, MN, but then again, might have been eaten by a goat. Sorry about that! I’ll try again tomorrow…

Shelly will be using this trip to learn to drive a manual transmission. Wheee!

We’re drivin’ to Boston to visit ladytabitha…be back sometime Monday morning!

I’m planning to get a personalized license tag for my car. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while.

I have a number of different tags I’d like to get, but I don’t know which one I like best. So, in the spirit of All Hail Discordia, I figure–what better way to express something personal than to follow the advice of a mob of people on the Internet?

So, here we go:
(Note that I may simply ignore what y’all have to say…just sayin’.)

anklesnake sat me down and made me watch my first episode of Red Dwarf last night.

My word. What a…peculiar show.

“You mean I can be your honey bunches o’ love and your bitch?”

Because you can never have enough truth.

You know the drill; for each f the following things, your job is to answer the simple question, “Is this cool or does this suck?” Let’s go!

I don’t know anyone who’s never heard or told dead baby jokes (crude, very simple jokes designed to evoke an emotional reaction of disgust along the lines of “What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies? You can’t unload bowling balls with a pitchfork!”). I told them myself when I was young; they seem to be a staple of American culture.

Or rather, that part of American culture that’s between, say, ten years of age and fourteen years of age. When you get above a certain age, dead baby jokes abruptly cease to be a part of your social landscape.

Over the last several days, ladytabitha has been sharing very creepy pictures of spiders with me. I know that the links she’s sending me will take me to creepy pictures of spiders; I’m not especially fond of spiders; yet I look at them anyway.

But I didn’t come here to talk about dead baby jokes or spiders. I came here to talk about the nature of reality.

To some extent, everyone constructs an illusion about the world we live in. We all like to feel safe, secure, and protected, and the reality is that none of these things is ever really true; a drunk driver, a careless mechanical engineer, or a religious extremist with heaven on his mind can intrude into our lives without warning at any moment, no matter where we may be.

It’s impossible for a person who is constantly in fear to function. So we build a set of emotional defenses, or construct an illusion of safety, that protects us emotionally; this illusion serves us because the fact is, the odds of a sudden and guesome death in a stadium collapse or at the hands of a terrorist, while not zero, are extremely small.

But we’re still fascinated by those things that frighten, disgust, or shock us.

That fascination takes many forms. When we’re young and unsophisticated, we tell dead baby jokes–which, crude as they are, are a mechanism for probing that simultaneous fascination and disgust. When we’re older, we watch Nightmare on Elm Street. As we become still more sphisticated, we read about Nazi atrocities and turn Stephen King into a cultural phenomenon.

Is it genetic? Is it hard-wired into us? I think it is.

The world is not always a pleasant placel there’s plenty within it that’s gruesome and horrifying. That fascination, I think, is an evolutionary adaptation; we’re fascinated by what’s repulsive because we live in a world where these things exist, and we need an emotional mechanism to deal with them. Without that compelling fascination, we would simply seek to avoid these things–stripping us of the tools to handle them when they happen.

So we tell dead baby jokes, and look at spiders, and read Stephen King, and develop a sort of gallows humor about it all. In the end, laughing at the Void does help protect us from it.

NEW ORLEANS — It’s a groundbreaking court decision that legal experts say will affect everyone: Police officers in Louisiana no longer need a search or arrest warrant to conduct a brief search of your home or business.

Full story here.

Is it my imagination, or do we take one step toward totalitarianism with each passing day?

So much going on in my life right now, and I don’t really have the time or energy to document it, so just a quick drive-by…

– I downloaded all of Red Hat over the past few days–took two days even on cable. (Teir server is slow.) Now I just need a new hard drive for one of my ‘pooters and I can start porting Onyx over to Linux. Hey, even Linux geeks like kinky sex!

– Every time I’m online these days, someone IMs me with “a/s/l?” It’s getting really, really annoying. I mean every time. Where are these people finding my screen name??

– I skipped going in to the office on Friday because it was such a beyootiful day out I couldn’t bear the thought of being at the office working on Web pages for building control companies. So what did I do instead? Sat in fornt of my computer at home and played video games. *sigh* At least lightgatherer came over yesterday and played with me…which was good, as I missed a LAN party I’d been looking forward to. 🙁

– ladytabitha keeps emailing me links to the creepiest pictures of spiders on the Net. That’s a lot of creep, boyz n girls. I used to think the Internet was the world’s largest repository of anonymous slandering and pr0n; now I know better. It’s the world’s largest repository of anonymous slandering, pr0n, and creepy pictures of spiders. I’m going to have a phobia by the time she’s done.

– And speaking of which… ladytabitha == all kinds of crunchy goodness. Now with 37% more spider bits!

– Secret Window is a very good, if creepy and somewhat nasty, bit of moviemaking. Who knew Johnny Depp could act?

– PolyTampa today. That is all.

– [Edit] Edited this entry a half-dozen times already to fix typing mistakes…grr.