Oh, and by the way, the idea of betting on terrorism is thoroughly reprehensible. How does this stuff happen? I mean the whole freedom fries thing was bad enough, but this? Someone thought they had a good idea here? And that it was worth $8 million in funding? AARGH! It pains me.

Thank you, Senator Wyden, for having so much common sense about this.

Here's a hypothetical situation that seems to have been overlooked: people keep betting that some political figure will be assasinated. Therefore, a whole bunch of people suddenly have a financial stake in the assasination of a person, who was previously walking around the planet with maybe some people who want him/her dead, but people didn't necessarily have a lot of cash riding on it. Do you see how this is a bad idea? (Not that you didn't before, but, Jesus, I can't believe how crazy people are these days, and how stupid our elected officials continue to be.)

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I went to see Spellbound yesterday. What an excellent movie! It's a documentary that follows eight kids through the national spelling bee, and it's fabulous. It is the most suspenseful movie I've ever seen in my life -- I kept finding myself mouthing the letters to the words when the kids got stuck, and wondering how it is that the parents refrained. Seriously, I know a movie about a spelling bee sounds pretty boring, but it wasn't at all.

Today, I leave for Chico, CA. We're having a dad's-side-of-the-family reunion. It's predicted to be a mere 109° in Chico today (thereby reminding me once again why I moved), so I'll be spending a lot of time indoors. Later in the week, I'll head to Lake Shasta for my mom's big 50th birthday party.

TTFN!

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On Friday, I was driving down Sandy Blvd. where they were doing some road construction. A sign said that the right lane would end, but a bus was in the way so I couldn't see exactly where it ended. The bus finally pulled over, and I realized I was about 3/4 of a block away from where I'd need to merge. I stopped and put on my blinker.

In the car next to me was an angry, angry man. He almost rear-ended the minivan in front of him to ensure that I would not be able to squeeze into the left lane in front of him -- his front fender was about four inches from the rear bumper of the minivan. His windows were down, and so were mine, so I started to tell him that if he actually succeeded in hitting the minivan, he would completely eliminate my chances of getting in front of him, but he spoke more loudly than I did and drowned me out:

"You should have read the signs two blocks back!" he bellowed.

At first, I was shocked and a little pissed off. What a jerk! Then, I was delighted, for I remembered that I had my digital camera. I clapped my hands together like a first grade teacher and said, "Let's take his picture!"

Matthew, who was watching from the passenger seat this whole time, turned out to be quite the intrepid photographer. Also, digial zoom rules.

Without further ado, here is the big huge jerk who yelled at me on Friday:

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Because it's friday, I dedicate this song to you.

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"Jane, I need you to do this for me."

This is a sentence you might hear in a movie, as someone leans over a speaker phone. It wouldn't be entirely out of place in the mall, or in a salon. You might overhear someone in a restaurant at a nearby table saying it. "Jane, I need you to do this for me."

It's a sentence you wouldn't even notice or think twice about if you heard it on the bus, as a fellow passenger talked to themselves, or to a puppet or into a headset attached to their mobile phone.

It is not, however, a sentence you expect to hear from a nine-year-old kid talking into a walkie talkie and chasing another kid down the sidewalk. A nine-year-old barefoot kid, who had orchestrated a master plan to capture the other kid. I've no idea what game they were playing, but the other kid could clearly outrun him. On the other hand, he had something else up his sleeve.

"Jane," he panted into the walkie talkie, "I need you to do this for me."

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Have you seen A Mighty Wind yet? You really should. I mean, if you like that sort of movie. It's great. It's better than great. It's clever and funny and believable and everything I wanted it to be. It's not a fast-action kind of movie, so don't go in expecting the plot to advance at lightning speed. In fact, it's pretty slowly paced with lots of awkward pauses and the like. In a really good way.

Of course, if you're looking for action, you can't go wrong with Pirates of the Carribean. Everybody I've talked to who has seen it loved Pirates of the Carribean. And everybody inevitably mentions how good Johnny Depp is.

Whatever you do, don't go see Down With Love. I went to see it because it was really hot, the price was $3, and I don't have air conditioning. In such a situation, it's better than sitting around and sweating, but that's about it. It wasn't based on Pillow Talk any more than The Bourne Identity was based on the book. Also, Down With Love sucked. And the plot twist just made both main characters look like creepy psychotic stalkers. Yuck.

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I'm not sure if this is interesting to any of you or not, but here's my basic plan:

• The new and improved site will be written using PHP.
• I will not use tables for layout, so I'll have to rely on my wits CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
• All style/layout changes will be made to the live site. This means that between page views, you might see some things look pretty horrible, or you might just see them move over 2 pixels. (Or, I might be doing my real job, and you might not see any change at all.)
• The very next thing I intend to do is implement a comments system so that you can tell me how horrible things look in your browsers.
• All blog entries will not be about the redesign. In fact, after this, I plan to go back to blogging as usual, but the look of the site will be changing around the content. You already suffered enough with the whole bacteria on toilet thing. I might put a little sidebar with updates/thoughts on the whole redesign, though.

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Hi. I'm starting over. From scratch.

You see, I've been tired of the design and architecture of this site for a long time. Of course, I haven't actually gotten around to designing anything better, so I thought I'd remove all design entirely. This will provide me with the necessary motivation to actually do something about it.

Also, I can add little style changes every day. I will start with nothing and add little bits of things every now and again and eventually end up with either a constantly changing site, or a design I'm actually happy with. This is kind of an experiment on my part, so it might require some patience on your part. We'll see how it goes.

The old stuff is still around, but it probably looks totally wonky, and some of the links might not work. I'll get around to fixing it eventually.

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