Did Dom DeLuise go on the atkin’s diet? I swear you’d think it from this video. However, Jim Treacher (a.k.a. Puce), reports that it is not he, but instead a fellow by the name of Andy Merrill. If you don’t know what that little dance-a-thon is about, then check out the Jim Treacher link and learn all about the Star Wars Kid who gained fame a few weeks ago after just about the most embarassing scenario a high school kid could imagine going through.

Go check out this Iranian girl’s blog. She has seen some of the demonstrations. Looks like July 9th is coming early this year.

Back from my exciting adventures in St. Louis. Drove in on Thursday and met up with Pete at the zoo where we saw the new penguin exhibit. Very cool, 45 degrees to be precise. Barbecued in the rain that night then replaced my mom’s kitchen faucet on Friday morning. Friday night was a long one, a drinking extravaganza that lasted from 8pm – noon Saturday.It’s not like I missed any good baseball games or anything. Damned Yankees. Dirty, filthy Yankees. Then I met up with Brian at the Manchester pool, had a good time on the slides, then fell asleep in the sun until 7. The major events I went home for were father’s day and Dave‘s graduation party, and that was going on when I woke up with a fantastic sunburn at the pool. The plan for Dave’s was to head downtown to the Landing after family and friends at his house. I went along but gave my liver a well earned night off. Then I came home today and started digging a hole in my side yard. That was how the weekend went. In spite of having brought my camera with me, I didn’t take any pictures. Happy Father’s Day.

I’m off to St. Louis tomorrow, gonna take a four day vacation and party with the old crew. My pal Dave is having his graduation party on Saturday. So far it’s that, and I’m going to the zoo tomorrow to check out the penguin exhibit. I’m going to take my camera, so there should be some pictures around here come Sunday night. And go Cards tomorrow. Avenge the humilitation of having your nationally televised game dropped by ESPN on account of its being a hideous blowout. It was for a good cause though, as the Astros no-hit the Yankees using six different pitchers. This week, for the first time to my recollection, I rooted for the Cubs and the Astros to win some games.

I rock. I managed to get my wireless network working properly. I had the Netgear router set up so that the LAN worked well, but I couldn’t get out on the internet worth a shit. I could ping servers and run telnet sessions from the cmd prompt, but I could barely browse, meaning that it would take five minutes to bring up a page and half the objects wouldn’t show up. Utterly useless. After three weeks of working on the piece of shit and upgrading the firmware, I gave it one last try today and had no better results. So I packed it up and brought it back to Best Buy to exchange it for the Linksys wireless-B router. Set it up, crossed my fingers and presto, works like a charm. The wireless access works great too, so I am very pleased. Moral of the story: Stay far fucking away from Netgear. Their MR814 router sucks testes and flosses with pubes. That’s a fact, I caught it crawling into my bedroom one night with lust in its beady LEDs.

And if you want to see the stoopid pictures from Pete’s visit I’d posted last night, I moved them here. I’ll be posting more now that this major fucking hassle is out of the way. Consider yourself warned.

Seriously though. I’m stoked about the series starting tomorrow. Cards-Sox, dig? Pujols V. B.G.M.. Should be a treat. The most interesting thing about the series, as it turns out, is pitching. We get Izzy back, Boston gets Martinez back (on a limited schedule). And we get another catcher, although I can’t recall a MAJOR Widger blunder. He lost a few balls, but our pitchers are spoiled by Matheny and Marrero so you can’t blame him. Should be a great series, I’ll see game 3 in the Lou.

Fuck. Call me a bad weblog maintainer. Call me a big fat jerk. Call me anything you want, I probably think up meaner shit about you whenever your around. I’ll post something cool in twenty minutes. Just give me a damned chance to work some photoshop madness. (I apologize to everyone who failed to call me cruel names and lied about the whole meaner shit thing, I really love everyone like a big fat jelly bean).

Sammy Sosa was just ejected for corking his bat. You heard it here first! And here second. My theory is that Dusty Baker made him do it, since it worked out so well for Bonds last season. That’s just a joke.

In honor of New Blog Recognition Day, I’ll thank everyone who ever linked to me in ascending order of freshness.

Attics of My Life by Nick Offerman

Midwest Conservative Journal by Christopher Johnson

Hawspipe by Lawrence Haws

Writer’s Block by Novelist Manquée

Latter Granni by Granni39

Fro:boy by XP

Give War a Chance by Emily Jones

That’s the Shirt I’m Talking About by Foul Mouthed McFoul

One Hand Clapping by Donald Sensing

Hoosier Review by a bunch of people at U. Indiana

It’s my expectation that I’ll be spending the rest of the day updating this list as bloggers flock in from OHP and out straight to blogger to update their blogroll. That or spackling the bathroom.

Wow, Donald Sensing has a link to this blog on his page. I feel like I should straighten up around here. He did this in a generous and pastorly attempt to raise awareness of little or no linked blogs. I’ve been writing this weblog since October 2001 and never sought out readers. If I become famous, it’ll be in spite of, not because of, my political thinking. (I’m a linguist) The basic idea was to keep friends and family appraised of my condition while I am away at graduate school and to keep a record for myself of what I was thinking during the tough times that we’ve been having.

“The king says I am the cause of the world’s problems because of my outfit. Never mind terrorism, government corruption, poverty and disease, it’s me and my pants. I reject that,” said Thob’sile Dlamini.

That’s from this knee slappin’ load of third world silliness via Emily.

What’s that? Europeans doing something cool? Let’s race!

This is the week where I get a whole lot of stuff done. I took the last two weeks off, more or less, although I worked at least a few hours every day. I made a list last night of the things I want to accomplish before the weekend comes. Highest priority is a historical linguistics paper. Those are hard, hard papers to write if you aren’t a historical linguist, and I most definitely amn’t. Hard at least if you don’t know sanskrit or classical mongolian or some other relatively obscure dead language. The best you can hope for is to find an older study and reanalyze their data with whichever modern theory gives you the best results. Not particularly intellectually satisfying, but I don’t figure I have time (or talent) to really study a problem in depth. Like my dad advised me, “Just do it, just get it done!” Number two on the list is to set up the wireless network in my crib. I’ve run into a really weird problem. I have the LAN set up, and can transfer files super fast over it. I can authenticate with my ISP. I can ping servers and run telnet sessions from a DOS prompt on either box. But I can’t browse onto the internet. I’ve spent a lot of time on the tech support lines for Netgear, but they don’t seem to have heard of this problem before. The last one thought that there must be a problem with my browser, even though it works fine when I hook directly to the DSL modem. I don’t have a freaking clue. If I can’t get it up in the next few days, I’m taking it back and getting the LinkSys router. If I can get those two things figured out this week, then I might get to take another week “off” pretty soon.

Updated 3:20 | Upgraded the firmware on the router, and I can now browse out although very, very slowly and unreliably. Had to get back to work and so couldn’t mess around with it too much. Keeping my fingers crossed that at least one thing will get crossed off the list today.