Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

As I sit here, mini-waffles (and a few little graham crackers) are being consumed, stories have been read, itchy butts have been cleaned, and all is well. More »

I have a feeling I know who’s going to adopt this tiny morsel of a kitty… I think it’s that shaggy guy in the mirror! More »

Meet the new meat…

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A little update from the plague house: my diagnosis was a nasty sinus infection …plus strep throat. This basically translates to “get the toddler and anyone else who isn’t a cat way the hell away from me.” The “alpha site” has turned out to be the in-laws’ place, so I’m sitting here with Olivia and Oberon, with occasional visits from the dog during bad weather. Supposedly we get a break from that weather over the next week – a pity I don’t feel like getting back out there and tackling the lawn (on the other hand, when I still have no appetite and my body temperature fluctuates between freezing and a brain-boiling near-104-degree fever, I’m not sure how trying to mow could actually significantly increase my physical discomfort).

For some reason I’m totally jonesing for Dr. Pepper right now. Not sugar free, not caffiene free, just good old Dr. Pepper, that same stuff that’s two molecular bonds away from being antifreeze. It’s the only thing that tastes “right” to me right now.

I really miss my kid, but I understand he’s having a blast at his grandparents’ place, and can already call all of their kitties by name (and they have twice as many kitties as we do here, and many more doggies!). He’s being a little angel over there. But I’ll be more than happy to have him back over here.

I completely skipped one week’s worth of update on theLogBook this week because I’ve been going around and hack-proofing – to the best of my ability – the various Wordpress installs that make up the site. I’ve really about had it up to here with the explots and script hacks – I keep my WP isntalls up to date, but sometimes it just seems to have the security coverage of a mesh shirt from the ’70s. Wordpress is becoming common/popular enough to be the de facto hack magnet – a position shared by phpBB and Windows/Internet Explorer. I’m not sure I’m crazy about that. I spent most of last night un-junking Phil’s 365 Films A Year blog after getting a Google warning about it via e-mail, and most of that “most of last night” was trying to unbreak the damage I did trying to fix it. :embarrassed: (Sorry, Phil.)

I’ll see if I can get it back in gear for an update on time this week. It seems like any time I put my foot down and say “this is the month where theLogBook.com is going to start kicking ass again” is precisely when it manages to avoid happening at all costs.

Back to the doctor’s office: my wife got us both in for appointments at a new doctor’s office, and apparently we’ve both been thinking the same thing without discussing it: we need a new “doctor of record.” With no disrespect intended toward the doctor we have been seeing for the past 2-3 years, because it’s someone who has put in their time over the years, but it seemed increasingly as though our old doctor was more interested in the golf course of late. Appointments were hard to get, and sometimes, it seemed, only begrudgingly given. This is why I’d been avoiding seeing that doctor for the past year-and-a-half and going instead to a walk-in clinic where one of the staff doctors is one of my best friends from elementary school (!). So finally it seems that we’re looking at this place as the new home base for medical needs…which suits me just fine, because the nurses are just hellaciously cute. Even the one who gave me shots in my butt, including one with a huge needle that was left in for so long that I thought she was drilling for core samples of ancient Antarctic ass-tundra or something. (But I kid – I’m sure having to stick needles in my fat butt was hardly the highlight of her day.)

Anyway, I’m on a whole cocktail of meds right now, including, for the first time in my life, an inhaler. I’m feeling kind of woozy, but a little bit better. I found out very early on that taking all of the meds right on top of each other was a very bad idea – we’re talking hearing-the-soundtrack-from-Heavy-Metal-inside-your-brain, effed-up bad idea. (And no, it didn’t work like “cheesing” on that South Park episode, else I’d be taking the meds like that all the time!)

That’s all I have to report. I have to go break up a fight between the only other two living creatures in the house. Bye bye.

This explains how my head feels:

I’ve got a hellaciously nasty “machine gun cough” that kicks in at random, even if I’m asleep, and keeps going until I can get control, or until I start to black out.  Either way, my head hurts like hell afterward.  Evan spent several nights over at his grandparents’ house (being a perfectly behaved angel if their reports are to be believed) because my wife and I both have this and it is not pleasant.  I’m going to the doctor tomorrow to get this looked out – we’ll see what it is, if there’s a cure, or if they’re just going to put me down because it’s the humane thing to do.

I hate feeling like this.  Ugh.

I dragged little E to the pediatrician today, where we learned he’s got a garden-variety cold that’s being made that much more miserable by an ear infection. So no Trekking for me this weekend, barring some unusual incident where I’m able to step into an alternate timeline where the boy’s healthy enough to leave with his grandparents so we can go to a movie.

While I’m waiting though, I wanted to give a hearty recommendation to a blog called My Star Trek Scrapbook, run by a fellow named Frederick who I’d swear is kind of like my slightly older self from an alternate timeline – think of him as Earl Prime, maybe: works in the media, has a love for Star Trek, and has occasionally-mentioned step-parent-from-hell issues. Anyone else a little bit spooked out by this yet? Anyway, his blog concentrates on news clippings, merchandise and other minutiae from the “lost years” between the original Star Trek’s syndicated success and the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And even though there hasn’t quite been the ten-year wait between the last Trek to hit our screens and the latest movie, there are some definite similarities at play. His captions and mini-articles are a joy to read, and really recapture what it was like to be excited about Trek’s return in 1979, as well as what it was like to be a Trek fan during that strange period during which the show had never been more popular or more ingrained in pop culture, and yet wasn’t being currently produced. The merchandise is curiously barely-related to Trek – i.e. disc guns with a picture of Kirk and Spock on the box, and other curiosities from the age when reprints of the old Gold Key comics were manna from heaven. The current spate of Burger King ads with “the Kling” cheerfully put me in mind of this period of Trek history – the studio wasn’t being so precious about whether or not it was pissing off the entrenched fan base, and maybe that was a good thing. Frederick is one of the few random folks I’ve stumbled across on the ‘net where I think, after reading his blog for a bit, “Man, I’d like to meet this guy, because he sounds just like me.” If you have even the slightest interest in Star Trek, check his blog out. Be prepared to spend hours there gawking and stuff and going “Oh. My. God. I remember that!”

I also wanted to give a shout-out to my friend Anthony, with whom I worked for many years in the teevee nooz trenches, and now has his own blog where he can be as opinionated as he likes without worrying about it violating some vaguely-worded clause in the employee handbook (like me, Anthony is also a refugee from the teevee nooz wars, and I think he’s discovering, as I’ve done over the past two years, that it’s nicer on the outside). His observations are funny as hell, and yet he can be pretty topical too, and doesn’t hew to either extreme of the political spectrum. It’s refreshing, funny, and makes you think too. Not bad reading at all.

Okay, that’s all the plugging-other-people’s-blogs I’ll do for now – I’m just gonna sit here and cry in my Dr. Pepper, which is swirling slowly in a plastic Star Trek cup from Burger King which, for the record, I plan to display next to my vintage 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture happy meals.

In the meantime, I’m preparing for a gap of – in all likelihood – weeks before I get to see the movie, because I’m also developing a runny nose and a scratchy throat since little E is wallowing all over me – he wants me to hold him, or hold his hand, or let him sit in my lap. I’m sure I’m getting quite an exposure to what he’s got, and I have a feeling that all the Zicam I’m talking isn’t going to make a dent in that. Maybe we need to page Dr. McCoy…

I know, everyone reading this is wondering what I thought of the new Star Trek movie…well, I think it’ll be great if I even get to see it this weekend. Evan’s come down with something (yet again) that includes a really nasty hacking cough (again), so our chances of making it to the theater anytime soon just kinda dropped to roughly nil for this weekend. I’m really worried about the little guy – the cough just sounds nasty. I’m more worried about him than I am about missing the movie.

Dave recently asked what I thought of the Star Trek: Countdown comic miniseries – it’s kinda cool. It’s kinda like your last familiar exit before you enter completely unknown territory. I’ll probably do a book review later this month, though it’s been a long-standing not-quite-a-policy-but-more-of-a-tendency here at theLogBook to wait until there’s a trade paperback (a.k.a. TPB, FYI) to do a comic review. This one, though, may be worth making the exception.

Much of my day Thursday, aside from trying to entertain a sick toddler, consisted of trying to get a media center PC installed in the living room for my wife in time for Mother’s Day. Before you go rolling your eyes and saying “How romantic” with sarcasm dripping from every syllable, keep in mind that she’s a fellow geek – and one who has been without a computer to call her own since shortly before Evan was born. This machine has full DVR capabilities, and replaces the CD player, DVD player and VCR that were sitting there (though the VCR is still present as a less-complicated means of channel-surfing). By cobbling the thing together from bits and pieces, I’ve also augured this unlikely machine in for a landing for under $300. There are still a few bugs to be ironed out – namely a stubborn wireless keyboard that seems to hate me – but it may actually be online for the weekend. Considering that it’s looking like a miserably rainy weekend, maybe that’s good timing.

One thing I’ve done with the new box – and every other PC in the house – is ditch Internet Explorer. I don’t have anything against open source software, but for a few years now the smug evangelizing going on from the Firefox crowd has put me off of checking that particular browser out. I’m finding that this might just have been my loss. I’m still not crazy about the grass-roots PR – it reminds me of the South Park episode where a cloud of “smug” was generated by hybrid cars – but I’m impressed with the browser. I’ve added a handful of security add-ons, and I’m well pleased – with just a few add-ons, it’s a damned handy diagnostic tool for someone whose website is under near-constant attack. Not that I’m gonna name any names there. I wish there was a way to remap CTRL+A to open bookmarks, as I have years of deeply-ingrained hotkey sequences burned into my head that are completely thrown off by CTRL+B. Hopefully before long I’ll resume the whole punching-stuff-in-like-a-concert-pianist routine.

Hopefully Evan will be back to his happy old self soon too. He’s been learning at least a word a day, and is rapidly approaching the point where you can have a whole conversation with him about important topics like dinner, kitties, doggy, and bed (nap is a very dirty word, FYI). Once we can talk about poop…well, you know what comes after that.

Remember “Alien Nation“, where all of the aliens had the names of famous dead people? Maybe this gem from my inbox this morning is kinda like that.

If you’re interested in showing up as a first page result for more search terms on google and yahoo, reply back with all addresses you’re looking to promote and the best number to contact you with details.

Sincerely,

Victor Hugo

Wow, Victor, that’s quite a generous offer. I suppose that you’re saying that if I took you up on that, I might be… well… less miserable?