Afroman Redux

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The aforementioned Afroman, Mississippi hip-hop legend, has a hit on his hands with “Because I Got High.” Of course, loyal Heathen knew about him several weeks ago, but the single is climbing the charts in the wake of its inclusion on the Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back soundtrack. It’s a charming ditty with lyrics like

I messed up my entire life because I got high
I lost my kids and wife because I got high
now I’m sleeping on the sidewalk and I know why
because I got high, because I got high, because I got high.

Of course, the next step is a video, presumably one clearly documenting the dangers of the nefarious weed named in the title. Nevertheless, the goons at MTV are insisting on — you guessed it — changes to avoid explicit references to or images of (right again!) smoking pot.

This from the network that gave us Jackass?

Dept. of Conflicting Loyalties

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I love the South. I really do. For all its flaws and problems, it is my home. Its rhythms and cadences resonate with me in ways I can’t completely explain. Which I suppose is why I’m so pissed off by the behavior of the ignorant slack-jawed yokels among us.

Like, for example, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, the “Ten-Commandments” judge. Moore has, in his infinite wisdom (and arrogance), decided to commission and deploy a 2.5 ton Ten Commandments sculpture/monument for the state courthouse in Montgomery — all without checking with anyone else. Great move, Roy. Way to go.

Most of the discourse I expect about this development will trivialize and marginalize the South as a region, painting us all with a wide brush. Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press, though, manages to highlight the absurdity of this (via MSNBC) without resorting to such tactics.

Yet Another Reason to Love The Well

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I’m not sure how we ended up talking about Liberace. But this post was the funniest thing I’ve read in weeks. The Well is a 16-year-old online community. It predates the wide availability of the Internet, which means it’s ancient by net standards. I won’t say it’s for everyone, but I certainly enjoy it.

Topic 476 [popcult]:  Come out, come out!
#234 of 235: well-coiffed and surrounded by finger-pointing attorneys (vard) 
Thu Aug  2 '01 (18:48)    11 lines

When I was a very little girl I was terrified of Liberace.

My mother used to carry around a photo of him from a magazine, folded up
in her purse, and if I misbehaved in public she would threaten to take it
out and make me look at him.

It always worked.

HEY KIDS!

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I’ve made a change to the site to reduce (i.e., eliminate) my dependency on somebody else’s (i.e., Blogger, who still don’t have a business plan) servers and software.

Miscellaneous Heathen now runs Noah Grey’s Greymatter system. This probably doesn’t matter to anybody except the geeks among you (and you know who you are (and so do I (HDANCN?))), but does have one obvious effect: the default page is now two entries long.

If you haven’t come around in a bit, wander over to the archives and check out the old Blogger file for July. There’s some neat stuff. But, then again, I think all this stuff is neat.

“You are doing fine. You are doing all right…”

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Literary giant Eudora Welty died today in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. She was 92. Her literary career includes a Pulitzer Prize (in 1973, for The Optimist’s Daughter) as well as the National Book Critics Award, the American Book Award, several O. Henry awards, and the Medal of Freedom (presented to her by fellow Southerner Jimmy Carter in 1980).

The headline for this entry comes from a fan letter of sorts sent to Welty in 1943. At the time, her work was gathering mixed reviews, largely (I’ll wager) because she was writing over the critics’ heads. After William Faulkner had a chance to read “The Robber Bridegroom,” he took it upon himself to send along some encouragement. Doing all right, indeed.

Umm, Right.

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I don’t think the advertisement referenced here necessarily communicates exactly what Microsoft wants us to think about Office XP. Maybe things are just different in Germany. (Link updated to point to the Register after MS removed the ad from their own servers.)

The Best Legal Ruling Ever

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At least in terms of comedy. Check this out. By the way, it’s authentic — my brother found it in Westlaw. Moral: Judges can pretty much say any damn thing they want, which sorta puts [former Microsoft antitrust trial judge] Thomas Penfold Jackson’s comments into perspective.

Dept. of Time Sinks

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Today, I present a double threat: the fiendishly addictive Snood, and the best damn online golf game you’ve ever seen. Enjoy.

Update/Warning:: It has been pointed out to me that Snood for Windows actually installs something else, too, without giving you the option to skip it. This is bad, bad, bad behavior, and there’s no justification for it. Additionally, it has been suggetsed that Snood makes unauthorized use of your Internet connection, though I have not yet verified this claim. Exercise caution.

Dialog with the Snood author has been pretty fruitless except that he’s given me a link to a Gator-free version of Snood. Both links here are now to that version.

I love this country.

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Remember that stripper/runner who was cut from the Cal State-Fullerton cross country team because of her job choice? They’ve reinstated her, based largely on the fact that they were about to be sued into oblivion. My favorite part of the story is this sentence:

Meanwhile, Rios continues to dance part-time at Anaheim’s Flamingo Club, a nude juice bar where she earns money to pursue her studies in kinesiology.

I can’t decide if this reminds me more of Thomas Pynchon or Carl Hiaasen.

Script Kiddies, meet the Pro

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Ubergeek Steve Gibson — of Gibson Research, publishers of one of the coolest pieces of software ever, the original SpinRight — was the victim of a distributed denial of service attack recently (in the vernacular, he “got DDOS’d”). This annoyed him, so he started digging.

While his actions in no way protect him from what the true hardcore hacking community could do (a fact he acknowledges completely), his account makes for pretty compelling reading even if you’ve only got a vague notion of how the Internet works (actually, his site includes some basic information on that, too). From a technical standpoint, it’s also pretty damned impressive.