Sunday, January 25, 2004 - Urban legends debunked by Chickenhead. One time during a concert, Alice Cooper cut open his own abdomen, pulled out his intestines, and totally jumped rope with them.After the pet rock fad of the 1970s, thousands of New York mothers flushed the unwanted pets down the toilet and they made their way to the sewers and just kind of sat there, at the bottom, slowly eroding.This buddy of mine who works in San Francisco knows this guy who worked for a DotCom company that wrote a business plan, broke even, cut costs, and is on the road to profitability.If there’s an emergency on Death Row, like no electricity or something, some states have pits of hungry tigers as backup.
Monday, January 26, 2004 - Lopburi’s 16th annual Chinese Banquet for Monkeys was held at the Phra Prang, Sam Yod and Pra Karn buddhist shrines. The festival was started in 1989 by a local businessman who believes the monkeys were behind his family’s good fortune. It is estimated over 4,000 monkeys live in the town and organizers say most of them come to the feast. On the 300 foot long feast table, nine courses, including hors d’oeuvres, sunflower salad, rainbow jelly, hengjia eggs and fried rice, are displayed. The monkeys were also given soda to drink. Pepsi is preferred over Coca Cola. I’m surprised the folks over at marketing dropped the ball on this one. The simian taste test! Get your stinkin’ paws off my damn dirty Pepsi!
Tuesday, January 27, 2004 - Leap Year Oscars. Best Picture nominations are Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Mystic River, Lost in Translation, and Seabiscuit. Four of the five have Best Director nominations as well with Peter Jackson, Peter Weir, Clint Eastwood, and Sofia Coppola. Gary Ross lost out to Fernando Meirelles for Bra Cidade de Deus, or, The City of God. “Has the Academy gone mad?” said the Brazilian director, adding it was hard to believe a film made in Brazilian streets, back alleys and slums could be nominated in so many categories. The film is set in a Rio de Janeiro slum, “the one neighborhood in Rio that God never visits,” but Oscar might.

Wednesday, January 28, 2004 - Error Message Haiku.The website you seek cannot be located, but countless more exist.Chaos reigns within. Reflect, repent, and reboot. Order shall return.Your file was so big. It might be very useful. But now it is gone.Program aborting: You ask far too much.Out of memory. You wish to hold the whole sky, but you never will.You step in the stream, but the water has moved on. This page is not here.Stay the patient course. Of little worth is your ire. The network is down.A crash reduces your expensive computer to a simple stone.Screen. Mind. Both are blank.John Kenneth Galbraith agrees “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.”
Thursday, January 29, 2004 - When Hollywood Video has their 4 used videos for $20 sale, I get to see a lot of films I’ve missed, and if I like ‘em, I keep ‘em, and if I don’t like ‘em, I’ve saved 4 clams over the theater price which is fool’s logic, I know. Zoolander is a splendid example but a far cry from a splendid film. I like both Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, but they are comedians in the same vein as Bill Murray. They play funny men, not funny characters. Mike Myers in Austin Powers plays funny characters. Will Ferrell is another who plays funny characters, but as an eccentric fashion model Dr. No, his performance is restrained. Zoolander didn’t suffer from being over the top. It suffered from not being enough over the top.
Friday, January 30, 2004 - My best buddy passes along various words of the day, hoping I will one day be literate. One such word is the adjective rimose, meaning crazed or covered with cracks. See, right off the bat, I go crazed as in crazy? Nope. I look up crazed and discover it also means to become covered with fine cracks. What reads like RIM-ohs is actually pronounced RYE-moe-sss and means crazed. Not content to leave it at that, they go on to describe rimose as a mellifluous word as in flowing with sweetness or honey, smooth and sweet. Ah, then my crazed hands sounds rough, but my rimose hands sounds smooth. “You can tell old man Johnson is an ardent gardener by those rimose hands of his.”
Saturday, January 31, 2004 - Physicists have discovered a new element named Administratium. It has no protons or electrons, however, it does have one neutron, 15 assistant neutrons, 70 vice assistant neutrons, and 161 assistant vice neutrons. These 247 particles are held together in a nucleus by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons. Though Administratium is inert, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to the scientists, a minute amount of Administratium can cause certain chemical reactions to take over four weeks to complete. Without Administratium, these reactions occur in less than a second.