I have a couple strange neighbors. They wander through my yard and dig at the plants, and one of ‘em was even scratching his ass on the cedar tree!

I didn’t get a pic of the cedar tree scritchin’ action (I was too busy staring in disbelief), but here’s one of them poking around the bird seed that was spilled by squirrels.

Yes, that’s my back yard, yes, that’s my lawn. Ya gotta prollem with it?

The amazing part is how they completely don’t care that there’s a potential predator opening the window to take a picture. I can only assume that this guy lives down by the retaining-pond-turned-city-park at the bottom of the hill.

They run up and down the street sometimes, too, in the middle of the night. Like kids out past midnight raising a ruckus simply because they can. They have a strange cry they emit to each other, and run around some more. And more than once I’ve been awakened by the sound of something in the flowerbed under my window, something making a more sociable sound, a quiet and reassuring nasal croak. The raccoon equivalent of mumbling to yourself, or to someone else, while doing something as menial as digging up plants.

Baby’s Named A Bad, Bad Thing: Catty dissection of posts to internet baby naming bulletin boards.

My favorite thus far:

I am not pregnant yet but thinking about names…I just thought of the name Lourdes Solange. This baby will be 75% latina and 15% european

…and 10% polyester.

Ok, I just simply don’t get it:

From: pqklbprkhu@hotmail.com
Subject: Fuck YOU
Date: May 22, 2004 9:46:52 PM PDT
To: [me]
Reply-To: pqklbprkhu@hotmail.com

if YOU WANNA TO LOST UR MONEY —> INVEST US –>>>

http://www.wecareaboutmoney.[nothin]/

(I changed the ‘nothin’ part.)

Is this supposed to attract me to invest with them? WTF?

Update: Apple’s on it. If you’re using Mac OS X, be sure and use the Software Update utility to get the latest security update.

It turns out there’s a big ol’ Mac OS X security hole. If you put a help: URL in a web page, the web browser will launch Apple’s Help Viewer, which has the ability to run scripts.

The answer is to change or remove the help: URL helper application, meaning, you should get the MoreInternet preference panel, install it, and use it to change the application Mac OS X runs when it encounters URLs that start with help:.

Here’s a less jargony explanation, with easy-to-understand directions, for you mere mortals. It’s not a complicated process.

Hopefully there’ll be a reasonable solution offered by Apple.

I’m test-driving Opera 7.5. It’s pretty fookin’ cool, in terms of RSS feeds and the like, for reading ‘blogs.

It’s got a lot of bloat, in that it does email and so forth, but you’re not required to use those features.

I think the thing I like least about it is that it alternately gives you not enough or too much information about the page you’re downloading. You can type in a URL, and hit return, and it just sits there. The activity lights on the hub are blinking, but it’s not letting on that anything is happening. Then the status bar shows at the bottom of the window with a very detailed view on exactly what’s being downloaded. It yields a jerky feeling to the experience.

The sidebar is better than Mozilla/Netscape, and, like I said.. RSS… Whew! But I’ll stick to NetNewsWire for RSS, since it doesn’t require me to launch a huge lumbering web browser.

Now, if only I could syndicate my Xanga ‘blog…

I have a few nephews of draftable age. I don’t want them drafted to support the fuckup where gullible incompetent assholes in the administration were taken in by a con-man working for Iran.

Send your own kids to die first, Mr. President.

I’ve got this idea for a science fiction-y Gulliver’s Travels social-commentary-disguised-as-fantasy story.

We journey across space to discover a race of humanoids who have no written language. They never seem to say much, especially in groups of more than two or three. They don’t say much to the visiting humans, either.

When they’re alone with only one human, however, it’s discovered that they’re storytellers, but all their stories are about the past. And they’re not fictional stories; they’re made-up histories. History is re-written in the mind of each of these people for each moment they need a history. There are no ‘opinions’ about history, either. It’s like the doublethink in ’1984,’ where you can hold contradictory views and see them as equal, except the histories are never contradictory; the last history you told is as irrelevant as any other part of history, when it comes to telling the new story. There’s no future, either. No one tells stories about the future, only the present and the past, and the present is only discussed in relation to the past. No one plans for anything, and due to some coincidentally-useful plot device, there’s no need for them to, say, plan for planting crops or anything.

I was out driving around, thinking about Asperger’s Syndrome. I was lamenting the fact that there are only two types of role models for AS folks: 1) Super-accomplished freaks like Issac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Einstein, Glenn Gould, etc, and 2) ‘Heroic’ people (usually children) who have overcome their disabilities to shine with glory as a fry cook at McDonalds or something. I have a real problem with the term ‘heroic’ being used in that way.

But the point here is not to bemoan the fact that it’s easier for normals to think of the disabled as ‘heroic’ (or the easy converse, ‘unheroic’), but to point out that one of the things I said when I was talking to myself was this: I’m open to finding a new role model. I’m in virgin territory, as it always must be for someone as strange and magnificent as myself.

So I eventually came back in the house, and via boingboing I find a link to kuro5hin, which has a post about AS by an Aspie. It’s pretty decent. The comments, however, contain the same old crap about people making up syndromes in order to have an excuse for not being able to succeed. This is the exact opposite of what I said I was open to!

However, it linked to this sourceforge project: Garnered Open Asperger Toolkit, the very nascent stages of a collection of assistive technologies for AS/HFA folks.

Bruce Sterling at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park 2-nite, 7pm. Attendance is mandatory for all Cult of Homer initiates, regardless of the last-minute quality of this missive.

Update:

Sterling is charismatic and possessed of what I call the ‘Austin accent,’ which is very subtle. By the time I got to the front of the line for book signage, he was completely exhausted, too.

He’s the kind of guy whose rants are really enjoyable, especially when he’s preaching to the choir as he was tonight. The two things that struck me most were:

He called Osama Bin Laden the ‘Ghandi of Evil.’ He said guns and tanks aren’t any more effective against him than they were when the British wielded them against Ghandi.

He also took a question, about whether he had an opinion about the idea that Bush might pull Bin Laden out of hiding somewhere in order to turn the election. His answer was, yes, he had an opinion, and his opinion was that the existence of such a question, held out as a legitimate question to ask, was evidence of the extreme polarization of our political culture. Essentially, it says more about whoever asks it than it does about Bush or Bin Laden. And he’s completely right.

His pen ran out of ink while signing my book (his pen was exhausted as he was), so I gave him mine, and he wrote ‘My pen died in the trenches of literature!’ in my book.

I just loved this newspaper pic. That’s no longer here.

More pics here