So when we stopped for gas along Highway 18 in some forgotten town in Wisconsin and saw Big Daddy’s BBQ pulled up next door, there was no question but that we’d be sampling Big Daddy’s wares. And honestly, I have not had a brisket sandwich that good outside of Texas. The meat was moist and tender and flaked apart easily, a sure sign that time was taken to prepare it correctly. The sauce (they had two kinds – hot and mild, and I opted for the hot) was piquant and savory with just a touch of sweetness.

If you ever find yourself passing by Big Daddy’s on Highway 18, turn right back around and get you some grub. It’s worth a stop.

(I wouldn’t necessarily recommend holing up in the Lawn Motel, though. That could be taking dodgy to whole new levels.)

And then, after a particularly satisfying session using GIMP to draw maps for a wedding invitation, I decided to research portable apps once again to see what other gems I could add to the drive, and I found something so amazingly spectacular that there’s a gaping hole in my head where it blew my mind:

LiberKey.

LiberKey is a complete suite of over 200 fully portable file management, audio, video, office, security, network, internet, graphics, etc. etc. etc. applications that fit onto a tidy 2gb USB thumb drive, with the added advantage of having a handy taskbar menu that groups all of the apps into their respective categories and subcategories for ease of use. You can easily add or remove apps from the suite and from the menu to suit your own needs, and the whole package goes along with you wherever you go.

Very nice.

And completely free.

If you feel like digging through over TWO THOUSAND apps on the way to greatness, try the Lupo Pen Suite, which seems to have a better interface but, like the Robin Williams character in search of coffee in the film Moscow on the Hudson, I cannot put myself through having to choose from among that many options!

In the interest of full disclosure, you’ll find that you cannot go wrong with PortableApps.com, which also has a lovely taskbar menu.

Okay, not really. The “film festival,” a collection of exploitation films from the 1930s, came to my lap courtesy the internets, so unlike an actual film festival there was no hoopla, no judging, no celebrities or auteurs, no madding crowds… just a marathon of vintage crap. And bonus – it was completely free!

The films are all available on what could possibly be the most awesome site ever created for those of us with a decidedly nostalgic bent: The Internet Archive. Scoot on over to the Moving Images section and be prepared as a rift forms in the space-time continuum and The Past spills out all over your Now.

My personal film festival was an exploration of exploitation, delving into such sensitive topics as drug addiction, sexual perversion, and insanity:

• Maniac (1934)
• The Cocaine Fiends (1935)
• Slaves in Bondage (1937)
• Assassin of Youth (1937)
• Sex Madness (1938)

Interspersed among these five feature films were short films on bus safety (with ghosts!), television advertising from the 1950s and 60s, and rural civil defense television spots from 1965.

The internet: Making my lap happy since 1984.

And it was a terrible, terrible tale, to be sure – a man went to a nursing home and shot up a bunch of people, killing 8 of them (the oldest being a 98-year old woman which, come on! This lady lived through two World Wars, Russian, Mexican, Chinese, Spanish, Greek, and Cuban Revolutions and Civil Wars – plus a number of other skirmishes – a Great Depression, the discovery of Pluto as a planet and its subsequent dismissal, major floods and earthquakes and hurricanes… hell, when she was born, her life expectancy was 54 years, and she made it to 98 only to be shot to death in some crappy nursing home by some miserable prick? Fuck.)

But also terrible (although not as terrible as the actual events, okay, fine, I get that, get off my fucking back!) was the way the event was spoken of and written about.

The thing started out:

At 10 a.m. Sunday morning, while many residents in Carthage, N.C., were sitting quietly in church, police say 45-year-old Robert Stewart entered a local nursing home armed with multiple guns, stalking from room to room and shooting several residents, even those bound to wheelchairs.

Nice lead… but what does church have to do with it? Why not write, “…while many residents in Carthage, N.C., were happily preparing tasty nutritious Kellogg’s® Pop-Tarts® toaster pastries – Made for Fun!™ – police say blah blah blah…?” If you’re going to insert product placement, make it something that can pay the bills! Are you bringing up church as a stark contrast just to bring home what a bad man this was? Or are you merely emphasizing how God let these people down? I don’t know… but don’t do it.

Then there’s the political posturing. We all know it was a bad thing that happened… bad and senseless and stupid. This politician going on “Hello, Today!” (or whatever dumb morning news show it was) clearly just wanted his share of face time:

“He came in with a shotgun, a rifle and a couple other kinds of weapons and he just went around shooting people, people in wheelchairs and this type of thing,” Sen. Harris Blake of the North Carolina State Assembly said. “This could not be any more barbaric.”

“Could not be any more barbaric?” Seriously? What if he had doused them in kerosene and lit them on fire, or hacked them to bits with a claw hammer? That’s more barbaric. We don’t need some stupid politician to reiterate that it was terrible, and we certainly don’t need hyperbole when the actual event was already bad enough.

And since the political players can’t all jump on the Exaggeration Bandwagon, the police chief went the opposite way with:

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to put into words what has happened here,” Carthage Police chief Chris McKenzie told “Good Morning America” today.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to put into words…?” Excuse me, Alan Alda, but the article you’re quoted in is words telling us what happened there. Just read that out loud. (You can sound out the big words.) And what about the police report? Wasn’t there a police report? You damned well had better be able to put it into words for the police report – pictograms are totally unacceptable. I watch Law & Order (and its many bastard children), and I know how important that police report is going to be in the appeal process. Damn it, man! Get a grip!

And, of course, no tragedy is complete without the district attorney’s office weighing in:

“He acted nothing short of a heroic day today,” Moore County district attorney Maureen Kruger said Sunday.

Unfortunately, she was another one who has trouble putting things into words.

Why can’t the news just report the news, and leave the interpretation to us? Why, during every tragedy, do church and God and faith have to rear their ugly heads? When will people stop dramatizing things that are already packed chock full o’ drama? Save the wailing and gnashing of teeth, do your job, and leave the limelight for the stars of stage and screen to entertain us – they’re much better at it than you smarmy politicians.

Also, if your life sucks – really, really sucks, or you just imagine it does in your twisted, selfish, addled brain – try just turning the gun on yourself and leave the old ladies alone. The Reaper will be here for them soon enough without your help.

You fucking twat nozzle.

A few months back we became aware of this taco truck that seemingly suddenly appeared in the neighborhood. Tempted by memories of the tacos I had enjoyed… enjoyed? No, jonesed after would be more appropriate… at the makeshift stand that appeared each night on the sidewalk outside the Goodyear garage in Irapuato, Gto. Mexico when I lived there in 2001, I finally made a trip one lunchtime to the taco truck. (That it had chosen to park outside the Ace Hardware only served to enhance my anticipation.)

Johnny K and I bellied up to the screened windows on the side of the stainless steel behemoth and each ordered three barbacoa tacos, with the works: onion, cilantro, shredded cabbage, avocado, and a deep red spicy hot salsa.

One bite, and I was instantly transported back to the streets of Mexico. (In my mind, anyway. Physical instantaneous teleportation is AT LEAST a couple of years away. Damned scientists are wasting their time on other stuff, I guess.) These are the most authentic, delicious tacos I’ve found north of the Mason-Dixon… and, they’re only a buck and change each! Just like in Mexico!

The only mistake we made was ordering three. These things are so huge, two will more than fill you up.

Since those glorious days, the Taco Truck has moved from outside the hardware store to outside an auto parts store, the cost of a taco has been raised two bits, and they don’t seem to have the barbacoa anymore. But none of that matters. It’s still easy to get to, it’s still one of the cheapest meals in town, and the al pastor and carnitas are just as delicious as the barbacoa.

And two tacos are still more than enough.

I think I need a nap.

The groundwork had been laid – I found the ring a few weeks earlier, having spent an entire night going from jewelry store to jewelry store looking at princess cut diamond rings with baguettes adorning the band, only to go out again the following day and actually purchase something completely different. I had also spent a good hour on the phone with her father on the prior Monday asking for her hand (because I roll old-fashioned like that), so I had the ring, I had the parents’ approval, I had practiced the harmonica… all I had left to do was to ask the question.

So we drove up to Madison, laughing and chatting and talking nonsense – our usual modus operandi. We found the Maharaja and had a delicious meal… although my own appetite was a little stunted because my mind was elsewhere as I fingered the harmonica and the ring box in my coat pocket throughout the meal.

After lunch, we went over to the nearby mall because Kortney wanted to look at some clothes for an upcoming business trip. (And I really needed a poo. Nerves + Indian food + too much Guinness the night before!) At the mall, we passed by a Zales jeweler – except we didn’t pass by, we went in. For the first time EVER, she decided she wanted to try on some rings! Panic! The sales lady was already busy with another couple, so I mentioned that maybe it would be better to go back some other time… we could continue shopping. We could head to State Street. We could leave now… but then the sales lady came over.

Kortney had already identified several rings that had piqued her interest, and the sales lady accomodated by removing these various rings from the glass case so she could try them on. Meanwhile, I stood by awkwardly and uncomfortably clutching the ring in my coat pocket, hoping that she wouldn’t fall in love with something completely different than I had already purchased. Most of the rings she was shown were completely different. Eep!

At long last she had finished trying on the rings and we left the store. I obviously didn’t hide my discomfort very well because on the way out she asked me if I was mad or upset that she tried on the rings, and I think she began to worry that perhaps she would never get a ring from me… little did she know…

We finally left the mall and got into the car to head over to State Street. We parked in the parking garage I use whenever I go to Madison, and as we were going down the stairs to the street, I took out my harmonica and absentmindedly – and prematurely – blew a note or two. I had intended to keep it in my pocket until we got somewhere more appropriate, but no – I blew it. Literally, and figuratively.

Kortney heard the harmonica and said, “You should play the harmonica as we walk down the street!” Okay… this could work… I could just play a few little tunes on the way over to State Street, or down to the lake, or…

But no. Since I had been practicing the damned tune all morning, it was right there in the front of my mind, and it was all I could think to play – so we were walking across a crappy, run down private parking lot behind an out-of-business restaurant, singing the song we had sung together so many times before, me playing the harmonica and her dancing around, and when we got to the part that goes:

All I want is you, will you be my bride?
Take me by the hand and stand by my side,
All I want is you, will you stay with me?
Hold me in your arms and sway me like a sea

I took her arm, got down on one knee, and held up the ring.

Her reaction was one of disbelief – she said, “Are you kidding me?” followed by “Holy…!” and “Oh my…!” and various other things I couldn’t quite make out because she was completely caught off guard, trying to make sense of it, crying…

She was a little confused because she took my uncomfortableness at Zales to mean I maybe didn’t want to get her a ring, and then she couldn’t quite make out how I bought a ring when she was there with me the whole time… so where did the ring come from?!

Finally I stood up and hugged her and laughed and said, “You know… It’s a ‘yes or no’ question!”

And she said, “Yes.”

While it would be extremely naive of me to think that the days of being taken over by GHoST61 and others of his ilk are finished, I certainly feel a lot safer now. I finally ditched IXWebhosting, my former hosting partner, in favor of Dreamhost, and things are already moving a lot faster, smoother, and just plain better.

One of the major gripes I had with IXWebhosting was the way they kept moving files and folders and changing permissions, locking me out of access to my own files while allowing Turkish scum (and their whole ilky lot) to invade. My site was trashed and rebuilt more times than I care to count… it was home to phishing scams, malevolent viruses, hackers and uberhackers and scams of all sorts. It was a cesspool. A filthy, stinking, cesspool.

But those days are hopefully behind me. IX has been banished, and the site has found greener pastures. The only casualty in all of this was the Gallery, which was irreparably damaged in the transfer, but that’s okay. It was top heavy, laden with overcomplicated code and just plain a great big pain in the ass. And anyway, that’s what Flickr is for.

So, yeah. That’s that.

It is GHoST61, an apparently well-known hacker, who enjoys depositing a false index page into other peoples’ websites like a steaming hunk of cyberstool. I learned of this attack from my pal, Johnny K, whose own site was also attacked. Fortunately I was able to restore mine – at least for now – but something seems to have gone drastically wrong over at strangeattitude.

I can’t understand why people have to channel their creative energies through such destructive channels. It takes a lot of time and effort and creativity and yes, even love, to build a website and fill it with content, even if all you ever use it for is to bitch about this and that or to cover yourself in glory. And then some jackass has to come along and bring it down? For what? So the three people who actually stop by here can’t look at the pumpkin video?

Well, GHoST61, I managed to get this crappy little site running again. The whole world can now see my robotic pumpkin in action, and they can learn how to make a caipirinha, and they can read about what a good time the pig roast was. I know, I know… it’s anarchy! Run for your homes! Hide the women!

And while you’re at it, could you PLEASE just leave this site the hell alone?

Thanks. Jerk.

EDIT: Apparently this GHoST61 is from Turkey, and the taking over of lame websites is to let the world know that he/she/they has/have a problem with war in general and George W. Bush in particular. This site was hacked in a much more elaborate fashion than was mine, and all of GHoST61′s gripes are clearly enumerated below. Plus, bonus! You get to listen to that sick wailing the whole time you read. Seriously, dude, that’s never going to be a breakaway pop hit.

Well, guess what GHoST61? I don’t much care for war, either, and as for GW, well, I voted against him twice and against his clones this third time, so how about you cut me some slack and take your protest somewhere that it might do some good? The only Turkey I want to have anything to do with for the rest of this year is the delicious golden brown turkey I’ll be eating on Thanksgiving.

Even so, it was sufficiently awesome that it took home the Great Pumpkin award.

And here it is, in action:

And a longer version, with different music (final edit pending):

Even so, it was sufficiently awesome that it took home the Great Pumpkin award.

And here it is, in action:

Automatonic Pumpkin Moving Picture Show