My brother Al turns 35 today. Happy birthday!

I turn 35 on Wednesday and was thinking there was some milestone here that I couldn’t remember. Then it occured to me: I can now legally be president. Woohoo!

I just signed up for Earthlink high-speed access, deciding to exercise this wonderful idea of competition. Overall, I’m pleased with things, but one thing is surprising: the amount of spam I have in my recently-created mailbox.

This account was newly created, not shared with anyone, not posted at any site on the Internet. Details of it never left Earthlink’s network, as far as I can tell. I never even logged into the account to check email. Yet, there are about ten spam messages in my inbox!

It seems the spammers have someone working on the inside, or some other way of detecting accounts as they are created. My old RoadRunner account stayed relatively quiet for the whole time I had it. I’m glad I operate my own mailserver, where I can control what mail gets through…

This has been sitting around my inbox for a few weeks. Thought I’d post it in light of yesterday’s Iowa caucus.
—
DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbra Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead.
You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don’t know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don’t milk them because you cannot touch any creature’s private parts.
Then you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can’t figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best-looking cow.

NEW YORK CORPORATION
You have fifteen million cows.
You have to choose which one will be the leader of the herd, so you pick some fat cow from Arkansas

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows
Most are illegal
Arnold likes the ones with the big tits

Kewl discovery of the day: WKNC now streams in MP3 format. There are two choices for listening, low-bitrate and medium-bitrate. The high-bitrate stream is limited to the kollege kiddies, unfortunately.

Then again, I COULD just bring in my portable stereo and tune in that way, but that’s just too low-tech for me.

mt.net was offline this afternoon for some much-needed hardware upgrades. It’s now on a peppier platform, capable of withstanding the relentless assault of mt.net readers. 🙂

I made the switch last night from RoadRunner to Earthlink. All it took was a phone call. The Time Warner tech did everything while I waited. My cable modem rebooted and in two minutes I was an Earthlink customer. Didn’t even have to get a new DHCP address.

Now I’ll enjoy $30/month for six months of Internet service and then $41 afterwards. Plus, Earthlink is public hotspot-friendly.

One of the fun things about the Internet and hypertext links is that often you can follow a trail from one place and discover something interesting in a completely different place. I often get “lost” on the Net just this way: finding something even more interesting when I get where I thought I wanted to be.

I did a meatspace version of getting link-lost when I went to the library the other night. I didn’t find the book I was looking for on the shelf. Rather than browse the whole shelf or go home empty-handed, I checked the table for books to be reshelved. That’s where I found a copy of Return To Midway, by Robert Ballard, the underwater explorer who found the Titanic.

It’s a fascinating story of high-tech exploration and World War II naval history. And owing to National Geographic co-sponsoring the expedition, the book is filled with brilliant photographs.

During my sailing days, my ship came close enough to Midway Island to see it light up the Pacific horizon. Knowing it lurked just below the horizon gave it an aura of mystery to me. It was one of the places I would have loved to have visited on my Pacific deployments.

The fate of the Imperial Japanese Empire was decided here in twenty hellish minutes. The recounting of this battle – one of the greatest sea battles ever fought – is a captivating walk back in time.

I had another lucid dream (or LD) this morning, breaking a slump of sorts. I think I had already hit the ol’ snooze bar once before it began. Seems when I sleep on the “shallow” side, I tend to remember my dreams more. I think that’s why the LDs show up more often at that time.

The LDs I’ve had have hardly ever compared to the intensity of my very first one. I think my emotion and excitement helped make that first one special. My recent LDs have not been all that exciting, actually. Typically, I’ll be drifting through a dream where I’m back on my ship. Since I’m quite sure I’m no longer in the Navy, it is easy for me to recognize that I’m in a dream. At that point, things will get more vivid and I’ll try to derail whatever might have been going on up to that point.

I think what would help me in my LD explorations would be to decide beforehand what the hell I want to do in them. When I happen to recognize I’m dreaming, I come up short in knowing how I want to direct them. With no ideas to guide me, I tend to fall back into dreaming. Boooorrrrring.