"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone.... but they've always worked for me."

Hunter S. Thompson's death kind of fucked me up for a couple of days.

I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a sophomore in high school. I was old enough to get it, and young/impressionable enough that it really made an impact on me. Not that I went out and did a crapload of illegal substances (well, not immediately), but the storytelling style was a slap in the face- I had no idea that a story could be told in that manner and actually work. It was like reading the journal of a psychopath.

And it was funny. God, was HST funny. And bitter, and angry, and all of the other qualities that help full-bore wackaloons produce Great Art. For evidence of this, read Thompson's obituary of his longtime nemesis Richard Nixon. J. is visiting from North Florida for the weekend, and I read it out loud to her last night... we were both shaking with laughter.

The only thing that inexplicably cheered me up: finding out that HST wanted his remains "shot out of a cannon" at his funeral. Wow.

/geek

A funny spoof from aethereal FORGE (creator of the unbelieveably awesome Ninja Burger): d20 Yahtzee.

This interview with songwriter Tom Waits is magnificent.

My friend January (girlfriend of the non-capitolizing [sic] Theron, little sister to my brother John's girlfriend Jenn) is a long-suffering barista, and has started a joint blog with a friend detailing her woes: We Make Your Coffee

Tone's birthday was a couple of days ago. In honor of the occasion, go visit his collaborative fiction/humor site Clusterstruck; the most recent post is pretty funny.

Christophine, a friend from MonkeyFilter, has applied her Photoshop chops to a picture of me.

The Bone-a Lisa

Right-wing goofball David Horowitz has launched discoverthenetwork.org, which purports to unveil and identify "the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it."

Historian Howard Zinn once wrote, "If I found that the FBI did not have any dossier on me, it would have been tremendously embarrasing and I wouldn't have been able to face my friends." In that spirit, journalist/longtime activist Chris Clarke copes with his chagrin at being left off of Horowitz's Illuminati-esque list (despite serving as Publications Director for the listed organization Earth Island Institute) by coming up with many, many reasons why he should in fact have made the cut. Read about his resume of sedition here.

A Valentine for geeks

In A.D. 2101, love was beginning...

there are all sorts of people on the internets (theron is one, but not alone by any means) who have adopted the lack of capitalization as a stylistic choice in their writing. i'm not really certain what the appeal is... a certain breezy informality is conveyed by this aesthetic, but it's occasionally challenging to read. particularly when i've been drinking.

therefore, i would like to call upon all of the denizens of teh intar-web to take a deep breath and unleash the power of SHIFT.

As an addendum to the MySpace post below... interest in my profile has apparently relaxed. I'm still at a respectable 1048 views, but the hits aren't increasing with the same rapidity that existed at the time of the previous post. I must have been on some weird "hot new people" page or the like. Now that I'm an "old" person (who may or may not still be "hot"), I'll probably accumulate page views at the same rate as everyone else I know, i.e. at a glacial pace.

One cool thing to come out of the whole MySpace deal is meeting an English chap ("chap" sounds so much more appropriate than "dude" after the word "English") named Lee who holds some sort of journalist-y job, and just started a blog. From the inaugural post:

Basically, I blame two people. The first is one of my best, best, bestest friends, and the second is a brand new internet friend who I’ve never met and I who I feel like I’m stalking in my own casual, uncommitted way: Lizzie and The Bone. Sounds like a Burt Reynolds film. But isn’t. But maybe should be... a faux-70’s trucking comedy with an evolutionary biology/choral music theme. The surprise box office smash of the summer – I mean, if the kids don’t want to see a bunch of orang-utans singing the Carmina Burana from the back of an eighteen wheeler hauling ass through the Arizona desert, then I have truly lost touch with the morays of youth.

He's got a good voice, and I'll no doubt check in with some frequency.

If you want to see the MySpace profile that caused the previously mentioned sensation, go here.

Obligatory Politics Post

Even conservatives are beginning to use the f-word. [Via MeFi]

No, not that one (after all, Cheney's used it on the floor of Congress). This one.

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Joe at American Leftist has a nice summation of the Venezuela issue.

I've been a horrible, horrible blogger lately. I'm so sorry.

I have actually been spending a lot of time on the time sink known as MySpace. Funny story: I'm on there as "Bone." I have a really good photograph in my profile, well-written text to go along with it, and of course a nickname that is actually quite innocent but has a whiff of prurience.

My profile has been up for a week-and-a-half. Number of "profile views" as of this moment: 993.

Which is a lot, it seems.

An informal query of online and real-life friends who also have MySpace accounts reveals that after several months most of them have not elicited that much interest in their MySpace avatars. Theron is brilliant and funny and has been on there for a number of months, and is sitting at around 300 views. Martin (from Monkeyfilter; I linked his blog a couple of posts down) is 17 years old (and hence is MySpace's target audience) and is at around the same number. Space Kitty (also initially met through MoFi) is a very attractive woman and yet doesn't have too many more views than Theron or Martin.

It's all very flattering. Along with the attention has come some very, um, direct email though. For each message from a cool, edgy person, there has been another one with some sort of graphic proposition. If I were at a place in my life where hooking up were a really interesting prospect I would be completely psyched. I'm not though, so I'm about 1/3 psyched and flattered, 1/3 indifferent and 1/3 disconcerted.