Ok so it is actually a drinking hat that' I've purchased at Party America, the greatest party-store without booze on the planet. Actually I think K-D Novelty was the greatest party store without booze on the planet, but they lost that title when their helium tank blew up. Don't worry, only 3 people were maimed and no one was killed. Luckilly for the employees of K-D novelty it was Pentacost and there are simply no shiny paper novelties and plastic noise makers to sell for Pentacost, so the store was abandoned and the sole employee, LaDeena Christiansen, was in the front of the store trying to work out what to do with the mistaken shipment of 200 party sheep. "Party sheep sale" came to mind, but then LaDeena thought that wouldn't sit very well with her bosses Kevin and Donita (thus the K-D in their store's name) since they were upright, church-going folks. Besides, Kevin had his eye on being second counselor for his stake presidency, and there was already the issue of the nudie playing cards that "mistakenly" made their way into the Bishop's son's backpack. When the kid was grilled, he caved, and Kevin got the call. But that Bishop since moved away and Kevin had gotten rid of all the questionable items in the store, except for the edible underwear--I mean come on even married folks had to have a good chuckle once in a while--besides the edible underwear were a close out item from the warehouse and he bought 60 gross of apple flavor alone and whatever he sold them for he made a tidy profit.

So LaDeena was bending down to check and see if there was a packing slip on the boxes when the helium tank blew. The last thing she heard before she fainted was the gentle swoosh of a novelty plastic Xena sword flying directly over her head. Later that day after the fire department left they found the sword stuck in the mail slot by the door. LaDeena didn't suffer any injuries, but those three old guys with greasy trucker hats and bicycles who hang out in the back alley, getting regularly trashed on Listerine, were pretty shaken up. One lost his thumb and the hearing in his left ear. He's set up pretty good now since Kevin and Donita settled his lawsuit out of court. Last I heard he was living in Baja getting regularly trashed on tequila. Kevin didn't get the second counselor position for his stake, but Donita did get called to the Primary Presidency. LaDeena started working at Party America and likes that the corporate management doesn't care if they sell nudie cards or party sheep. It makes it a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out how to make something so dirty seem like good clean fun.

I've been having an email debate with an ISP network admin who thinks it is his sworn duty to stop all spam in the world. It would seem that Comcast, my ISP, mail server has been hacked. All that is fine and dandy, and Comcast needs a good ass kicking, but the system admin guy from the other system is, to put it plainly, an asshole. Basically he is treating me like some moron who knows nothing about the spam issue:

_______

Clint,

Your mail server is spamming.

Best Regards

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Well you have a problem now and its about to get much, much worse.

Best Regards

______

Clint,

YOUR COMCAST MAIL SERVER HAS BEEN HACKED.

If you would just calm down and notify your ISP that they have a misconfiguration of their email server, you would solve the problem. As far as my clients are concern, they have asked to be protected from this problem. SPAM represents 65% of all email traffic. It looks like trojan'd broadband users relaying spam through one of Comcast customer relays

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Clint,

Good for you Clint! Glad you already know how to solve the spam problem. Hopefully, you can invent a solution for spam and hacking one day and show all of the sysadmins around the world how to do their jobs. Care to enlighten us on what your solution is? I'd be happy to post it on the Usenet for you for all to see.

Good luck.

_______

I might note, that I was calm during the whole exchange, and wrote nothing all that incidiery. I had also contacted Comcast (and told him so in the first message.) Anyway, I suppose he didn't like me calling him a high school principal somewhere in the midst of the discussion. High school principals, after all, like the one punishment fits all solutions, don't they?

I went up to UMFA. They have a showing of photographs by Sebastiao Salgado, a Brazilian photographer. I have seen some of his pieces before, published in places like National Geographic. The pieces I recall were all of the Brazilian gold mines. You know the ones--men are covered in mud and working en masse to dig for gold. There are so many striving away that they begin to meld into one massive creature of greed.

Cubs schmubs. Sox schmox. I should just stick with the Brewers and the White Sox. At least one of them has beer going for them and the other has a scandal they will never live down.

I carelessly unpacked my backpack for the conference trip to make room for the portfolios I have to read and took out my CDs. Of course I have not replaced the CDs back into my backpack, and the portfolios remain in the bag as a punishment for not getting them done up in Wyoming. Not having my CDs, however is a draw back since I just had a hankering to hear the Replacements and then Sonic Youth's Dirty. I do have Radio Head in my trusty porta-CD-earplug machine. That will have to do.

So Boston and Chicago are still in it. I haven't watched this much baseball in a long time. The Cubs have a real shot at it. Boston seems just to be limping along. That's too bad since I would prefer to see Boston bludgeon the Yankees.