The last time I watched any amount of MTV was when they actually played music videos. This was probably sometime around 1989. I understand that the network now resembles other television networks with vapid sitcoms and uninspired reality shows that appeal to the lowest common denominator of single-wide dwelling morons.

Well, now MTV has put their entire library of music videos on the web. You just search for what you want and play it. No waiting all weekend for Duran Duran, Rick Astley, or Laura Brannigan to come on. Um. Yeah, okay. Well, without further adieu, here's cutie-pie Sara Evans from 1998...

Let me just apologize in advance for the destruction, possible loss of life, and all-out misery that Gustav is going to cause to poor people of Louisiana and the eastern-most coastal parts of Texas. I hate that y'all are going to have to go through this again so soon after Rita and big-K. But for those of you elsewhere who know what it means to be in a multi-year drought, well... you can begin to understand how we might get a little excited about the prospect of getting our lakes, tanks, and ponds topped off. It appears that when Gustav shows up, he'll be a mere tropical depression, but if we can get some cooler temperatures and a few inches of badly needed rain, it'll end our depression.

Just wondering at this point how far inland Gustav will go before the prevailing western weather patters force him to poop out and get pushed back to the east. If he stalls out in East Texas we may end up getting a real soaking next weekend.

I noticed today that the cicadas have been especially noisy this weekend. So here's your opportunity, folks...

Soft-shelled Cicadas

Ingredients:
1 cup Worcestershire sauce
60 fresh cicadas (the sooner you can get them as they come out of the ground, the better)
4 eggs
3 cups flour (season with salt and pepper, if desired)
1 cup corn oil (salted butter will do as well)

Directions:
1. Marinate the cicadas alive in the Worcestershire sauce for several hours
2. Dip them into the beaten egg and roll in the flour
3. Saute until golden brown
4. Enjoy

Before you get all grossed out, remember that our ancestors consumed insects as a large part of their diet. Humans have been eating insects much longer than we've been eating beef filets. Insects have more protein (pound for pound) than larger animals like cows and they are lower in fat You help the environment by reducing their population (don't worry, insects can quickly replace their numbers unlike our world fish population). There's many more reasons to eat bugs, I just have to think of them. There are plenty of insect recipes on the web... that's where I found the cicada recipe. There's also a great grasshopper taco recipe out there.

Today is Bug Day in Japan, a time for people to reflect on the insect world and all it does for the rest of the ecosystem. I suspect that most of us think of insects as pests, but without these important animals life on Earth would quickly become unsustainable. Not only do they serve an important role in the lower part of the food chain, they are awful interesting to study because they are so, um "un-vertebrate." Insects are so different from us it's almost like studying an alien life form. Biologist E. O. Wilson has a lot to say about invertebrates in general, but for me, his chart below tells it all: bugs rule the Earth!

credit: E.O. Wilson and the Xerces Society

I wonder if the Discovery Channel is doing anything to recognize Mushi no Hi today?

I tried to use Kuler this morning and I discovered that I don't have the mac-intel flash player installed on my iMac. No problema, the Kuler page asked me if I wanted to install it. Things like these, whether on the Mac or a PC, are a snap... just click and go.

Or so I thought.

After a few seconds I got a window that described the install process of Abobe Flash Player. When the number of files left to be installed got down to just two remaining, suddenly I get an error...

Error Creating File. 1008:5,-500 Access denied error

What the heck? This is not supposed to happen on the 'Superior Platform.' So I went directly to Adobe's website and downloaded the installation files to my Mac. -- Go to www.adobe.com and there's a link to get the Flash Player on the home page, it takes you to another page where you pick the type of computer you have and then it downloads the file (if you choose to save it, I did).

I downloaded the file, which turned out to be a zip file titled 'install_flash_player_osx_ub.dmg.zip' So, I double-clicked it and the DMG file extracted. I double-clicked the DMG file and got a nice window with a pretty red icon in it titled 'Install Flash Player 9 UB' I double-clicked it and the same install process started again.

And I got the same Error Creating File. 1008:5,-500 Access denied error again. Grrrrr!

Time to Google, which is almost always helpful, and is the sole reason that I am detailing all of this out: for the benefit of the next victim.

Luke and Ali at assertTrue had already solved the problem and put it on their blog. The problem was that the steps they took were not super-detail-documented and there's no way a Mac-noob would successfully work his or her way through their steps, so below are the steps with a little bit more documentation*:

1. Download the Player installer to your computer from abobe.com. A link is on the Adobe home page.
2. Double Click the downloaded file (it is a zip file) to extract the DMG file
3. Double Click the DMG file to mount the disk image
4. Open up a terminal window (it can be found in your Applications folder inside the Utilities folder. The app is called 'Terminal')
5. A terminal window will open up, it will be a mostly empty window with something like this at the top...
   

   Last login: Thu May 15 05:53:13 on ttys000
   bugs-bunnys-computer:~ bugsbunny$

6. Execute the following commands by typing them in after the "$" symbol on each line:
   

   cd /Volumes (then press the enter key)
   cd 'Adobe Flash Player 9' (then press the enter key. Note that you have to use single quote marks here because the name of the folder contains spaces
   cd 'Install Flash Player 9 UB.app' (press enter, ditto on the single quotes)
   cd Contents (press enter)
   cd MacOS (press enter)
   [NOTE on the CD, Change Directory, commands above. If any of them don't work, type 'ls' (that's ell-ess, not one-ess, kind of like an abbreviation for 'list') without the single quotes and press enter to see a listing of the files and you can see how something is spelled. This is UNIX, so you have to type everything precisely, upper and lowercase counts).
   
   continue by typing in the following line...
   sudo './Install Flash Player 9 UB' (sudo basically means: run the following command as the built-in administrator, not as me, bugs bunny. Again, use the single quotes.)
   Type in your administrative password when prompted and press the enter key

7. Now, the same stinking installer program will run again, but this time it won't give you the error when it gets down to the last two files to install.

* I've since found another solution for this same problem on Larry Gordon's blog, Psyrendust

I work at a law firm and when I test the software I make or modify I use ficticious client and matter names. I regularly use the "Acme Corporation" as my test client and for each matter, I use one of their famous products from those classic Road Runner cartoons. I have to go by memory, so I end up using a few over and over such as the Acme Jet Propelled Pogo Stick, the Acme Bat-Man's Outfit, and the Acme Do-It-Yourself Tornado Kit. The problem was I just could not recall the plethora of other fine product offerings from Acme.

Well, prayers have been answered. Thanks to the painstaking work of GP Markham we now have an online database of every product ever offered for sale (and immediate delivery) by the best general store that ever came out of the American Southwest. Wal-Mart could learn a thing or two from Acme.

So, if you're in need of Deydrated Boulders, Earthquake Pills, or a Giant Rubber Band, go get it here: http://home.nc.rr.com/tuco/looney/acme/acme.html

Just got back from the theater. Speed Racer was everything that my over-hyped imagination was expecting and more. Way more. Oh sure, the cynical side of me had already drafted a working tirade of verbal abuse in the case of a poor adaptation... a Hulk, Batman, or Flintstones if you will. Still, I dared to dream that this would be everything and a huge bag of popcorn and those Wachowski brothers did not disappoint. I don't think I've walked out of the theater wanting to see the movie again, immediately, since The Empire Strikes Back. Two enthusiastic thumbs and a couple of big toes way, way up.!

Son #2 and I both agreed that, as good as Ironman was, Speed Racer was better. Next week: Speed Racer again, then Indiana Jones the week after. I thought Hollywood was on the ropes but this year is certainly shaping up to be a memorable one.

So, you're looking at my stuff and you're thinking to yourself "Man! That looks so simple, I think I could do that." Well... you're RIGHT! You can do that. In fact I want you to do that right now. Yes, now. If you are at work, I want you to walk over to your printer or copier and liberate all of the paper inside of it. While you are at it grab a couple of #2s and a few Sharpie markers. Now you're all set. Well, almost. You still need an instructor! Someone to show you what and how to do all this art stuff. That's where Bert and Bettie and the following two books come into the picture. Don't argue with me, don't ask for anyone else's opinion just BUY THESE TWO BOOKS. If you are just starting out drawing and you can't take a Drawing I class at your local community college, or even if you want to supplement your Drawing I lectures and exercises, these books will take you from zero to 30 miles per hour. Check 'em. Buy 'em.

Notice I said that these books will take you from zero to 30. If you've been drawing already, you may find these books a little basic, but indulge me, buy the books and work through the exercises anyway. This is foundational stuff and you'll thank me later if you force yourself to do a little "retraining."

I thought that I would lose most of my garden at first. A few days after I planted, the jalapenos started to turn yellow and the tomatoes just shriveled up like they were not getting any water. They were. Well patience endures, here's what I had for dinner tonight....

I only grew the spinach in the garden, not the other stuff. After I picked it, I spotted some dandelion plants nearby and I added some leaves. This was okay because my lawn is, er "organic" because I do not use any fertilizers or pesticides except the occasional spot treatment for fire ants. Anyway, I added some baby carrots and walnuts (wished I had some feta) and then rained some raspberry vinigarette over it. Tasty.

Disclaimer: I'm a closet peacenik, so there.

Anyway, I was sitting back the other day contemplating the arrival of my economic stimulus check. When we get these suckers, I guess it is our partiotic duty to go out and blow them on material stuff of some kind in order to put the "stimulus" into economic stimulus. Since I'm married and have three kids, I understand that I'll be getting back something like 2,100 clams. Personally, I'm going to use it to partially pay for a wrought iron fence around my swimming pool. Now that I have neighbors on all sides of my house and each of them has small children, this seems the prudent thing to do.

So, as I thought about all the wonderful gadgets I could buy with this sweet moolah, my thoughts turned to the cost of the war. It sort of went like this: "Gee, if our government can afford to give our family back $2,100 of the (roughly) $7,500 I paid in taxes then I guess they really never needed that money in the first place. But wait, isn't there a war going on? I mean we have to pay for Humvees, and bullets, and those really cool UAVs we're using to catch people planting IEDs, right? That just HAS to be putting a crimp on the national budget, right?

So far, the war in Iraq has cost about $600 Billion dollars. As of March, the President has asked Congress to authorize another $200 Billion and this web site tells us that we're currently spending about $341 million per day. Well millions mean nothing to me, but as a taxpayer I wondered what my "share" of this is. I divided this by the (rounded off) 300 million or so people in the United States and found out it comes to $1.13 a day per person. Hmmmm.

Okay, so that's $1.13 for me but I have to factor in my wife and three kids, so $5.65 a day, or $170 a month. Hold it a second. This is starting to add up. If I were paying the government "my share" of the Iraq war for my family, the IRS would have to withhold $170 in addition to my regular withholding every month.

Except they're not doing this. The Congress is just paying for this by increasing the national debt. It's like you and me deciding to start charging another $170 a month on our credit cards. And with a recession going on!

So, I'm getting $2,100 back from the government next month, which is almost exactly the cost of the Iraq war for a year.

Interesting.

I'm still gonna spend it, but interesting.

A package just arrived from Amazon containing these...

I picked them up at the bargain-basement price of 15 clams each (regularly 38) at our favorite online book and DVD retailer.

Now I don't know about you, but I grew up on this stuff and I grew up on it after it was already about 10 years old. You see Gilligan's Island premiered three months after I was born in 1964, but the show only became new to me when my family and I returned to the States from Germany in the early 70's. We didn't get Gilligan in Germany, not even on the German stations, but by 1974 and the few years beyond that Gilligan's Island was synonymous with "after school snack." The day went like this: get up, go to school, come home, watch two episodes of Gilligan's Island, then play, eat dinner, play, go to bed. I recall asking my Mom at one point why she couldn't bake a coconut cream pie like Mary Ann did.

As a sitcom, it still ranks as one of the wackiest things ever conceived for television. The writers managed to work in everything from Cosmonauts to a musical production of Hamlet on this "uncharted" island. I can't wait to try to explain it to my kids tonight... "let's see boys, its just as improbable as LOST, except it's funny and there are more guest stars.

So, this weekend I am going to curl up on my couch with a blanket and become 10 years old again. Good times. Good times.

The habits and proclivities of the video-gamers in my household have been documented here before. However, not all of the gear and games belong to the kids*. I own a Gameboy SP and a swell pink Nintendo DS. For the DS there is a terrific new game out that I think you Brain Age people would enjoy, especially if you are partial to Sudoku. The game is called "Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Click here to play a demo and find out all about the game. I've been playing it for over 3 hours now (since last weekend), the game keeps track of how much time you have put into it, and it is almost perfect as far as I can tell. There's a story line and a mystery to be solved, but along the way you are pelted with a variety of puzzles. Don't be misled by the cartooniness of the cover art and the opening animation, there are some real brain busters here.

To be honest, I was also misled by the cover art and expected the puzzles to be aimed squarely at the Pokemon set, but I soon found myself reaching for pencil and paper to work out the details of some of the thornier ones. I understand that there are a total of nine chapters in the story and 135 or so puzzles so I'm preparing myself for at least another 20 or 25 hours of gameplay. Hmmm, $1 an hour, quite the amusement bargain! Richard says: go get this today, and tell your spouse you'll talk to them again in two weeks.

While we're on the the subject...
Richard's Top 10 List of all-time best Gameboy and DS games for adults like me
(if you own two or more on this list, I guarantee you will like the others)

#1 Electroplankton Not really a game, per se, but an amazing thing. I think you can only get it on eBay now.
#2 Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town I've played every Harvest Moon game in the series that were produced for handhelds and this one tops them all so far (and there's been two released since this one came out). Tip: marry Ann, Karen's a drunk.
#3 Cooking Mama Play it with a glass of wine or two. It's a trip!
#4 Super Mario Advance This game got me hooked on the Gameboy. Well, alright it was my kid's Pokemon game, but this came next! When I think about all the quarters I plunked into Donkey Kong, Pac Man and Galaga in High School and now I could play this as many times as I want, all day, every day, over and over and over.... Pure heaven!
#5 Picross Another puzzle game. Think of a bigger Sudoku board and you make a picture when its done.
#6 Zookeeper Kind of like Bejeweled, but it plays this really cool music that rachets up the pressure and irritates La Señora Dominguez. So that's a bonus.
#7 Contact A strange game. It's a dungeon crawler with a little twist. I haven't finished it, but I keep coming back to it.
#8 Brain Age Every one knows about this one.
#9 Wario Ware Twisted Wario Ware is a must-have for the Wii, but before the Wii there was Wario Ware Twisted for the Gameboy. My only question: what were the developers smoking when they thought of this? Goofy, stupid, and very fun.
#10 New Super Mario Brothers DS This would be higher on my list but someone borrowed this and lost it. I haven't played it in 4 months, and I want to!

* Okay, technically I bought the PS2 to play Katamari Damacy, but I haven't played the PS2 in over a year.

Well, with my lame record so far, I'm not sure that "back" is the proper term. Anyway, I put some new stuff over on the (almost) daily pages section. It was actually my overdue Antithesis Art assignments but who's counting, right?

The kids were still sick today, Mom needed to go back to work and so it was my turn to stay at home and watch over them.

I tried to work too and here's why telecommuting will never work: because people at home will never get anything done. Oh, sure, it's quiet and all and you can concentrate. But it's also quiet and all and your mind can wander. You'll end up thinking about the millions of things you need to do or should have done. It's just not an environment conducive to churning out some work product. At least for me its not. Maybe because of years of working in a cubicle in a noisy room, I need some people hovering over me occasionally throughout the day asking about the status of this or that and inquiring about "just one more enhancement."

So anyway, it'll be good to get back to the office tomorrow... for productivity's sake, but I wonder about these people who own their own company, whether they work at home or in a business. I wonder just how they can stay motivated to do, well, something. Fear of starving, perhaps?

As a caffeine addict and connoisseur, I have taste-tested my way through a small mountain of energy drinks over the years. For taste, Monster is the best with Boo Koos as runner up. The Coca-Cola company needs to go back to work on the taste of Full-Throttle, or better yet... just throttle up a version of Coke. I have avoided the concentrated liquid gels and the pills because, well, I think they'd make me look too much like an addict. Drinking a $2 soft drink hopped up with a bunch of caffeine is one thing, but applying liquid drops under the tongue or popping pills is quite another. What's next? A syringe and needle energy product?

Speaking of starter drugs for the Junior High set, the Mars Candy people now bring us Snickers Charged which is basically a regular Snickers bar with 60mg of caffeine crammed into it. The bars appear to be going for about a buck, which makes this a cheaper fix than a Tall Drip at Starbuck's but only half the caffeine. But if you are hungry AND you need just a little zip, vim, or badda-bing, this may be the thing for you. However, compared with 160mg of caffeine in a Monster the only thing these Snickers Charged bars are going to do is keep me from nodding off in a mid-afternoon staff meeting... but only if the meeting doesn't run too long.

Verdict: Tasty, sugary, nutty, nougatty. A slightly bitter finish (probably from the guarana or the B vitamins) keeps it from achieving gold medal status. Otherwise, a very fine candy bar that should part of any serious caffeine afficionado's pantry. Get a few for the top draw of your desk.

New item in my store: Hillary for president (in so many words) bumper stickers! Click to buy...

Swarms of ducks are flying over the Dallas area heading in a generally northern direction. I guess this means Spring can't be far off. Or... maybe we've had such a mild winter that they never felt the need to keep flying to Mexico and they've been in the area all along. I should get outside more than I do.

I don't like you.

It's no secret that I hate people. I tell people this all the time. And it's gotten worse with age. After all, you are selfish and you are ignorant. You say stupid things without thinking and it hurts other people. You drive too slow in the fast lane, you drive too fast in the fast lane, and you don't use your turn signal. You don't understand how a personal computer works and you shouldn't be using one, but you do anyway and you spread viruses all over the internet. You hate other people for little reason than their skin color. At least I have reasons. Good ones too.

You cut in line. You think the rules don't apply to you. You always blame someone or something else when you do something wrong. It's never your fault. You expect the Government to help you out because you built a house in the wrong place. You hire lawyers and get them involved and that doesn't help one little bit. You throw used batteries in the trash. Your drive SUVs. You drop your unwanted dogs off on my cul-de-sac because you are too lazy to find someone to adopt it or you aren't man enough to shoot it. You don't pay attention to what's going on around you. You are not polite and wouldn't know how to be polite if your life depended on it. You eat junk for food. You watch too much TV and you believe everything that appears on it. You didn't pay attention in High School math class so now you buy lotto tickets. You block the aisle at Wal-Mart with your cart so others can't get by. You talk like the trash that you are by liberally tossing obcenities into your speech as if they were regular adjectives. You think you are smart yet you don't read books. You yell at your kids and your spouse. You don't respect older people just because they've been around longer than you. In fact, you don't respect them for any reason. When you say "How are you doing?" you don't really care to know. You let other people raise your children. You spend your life pursuing money and stuff and all you care about is your stuff. You don't buy cars to get from point A to point B, you buy cars to satisfy your infantile need to show off or compensate for personal shortcomings. You whine a lot. You cheat, you lie, and you steal. And despite all this, you still think you're better than everyone else.

You should thank God that I'm not in charge, because I would have done away with the lot of you a long time ago.

I should also thank God that I'm not in charge because I couldn't pass my own criteria for goodness, much less His. I know I'm not supposed to hate you. I know I have to love you. It's a requirement, you see. I must love you because God commands me to. I have to love you and this is awful hard for me to do. It's hard because despite the fact that I haven't met very many individual people that I don't like, I still think that creating man was a bad move on God's part and should go down as one of His greatest mistakes. Well, maybe it would have been better if God just hadn't built in this "free will" thing inside us.

I suppose even if I grudgingly and reluctantly love you that doesn't get me anywhere with God. I have to love you just as much as I love myself. Pick up a Bible and read about it yourself in the books of Matthew and Luke. So, not only do I have to do something that I don't want to do, I have to do it with a genuine heart that is truely in-sync with that. It would be better for me to have a set of rules: do this, don't do that and you'll be good. But it's not about me, is it? Besides, that technique was tried years ago and it didn't work.

So... from now on, I'm going to try to see you as God sees me: so ignorant of your own depravity and so completely undeserving of any consideration that I'm pushed beyond hate to... um, I don't know... what?... compassion and love? God can see more in you than I can and He still loves you, so so should I.

But please, indulge me on this one little thing: start using your stinking turn signal.

Since a lot of the country has been caught up with Obamania, it ocurred to me that the country is quite realistically considering the election of an African-American for the office of President. In other words, for the first time a black man is a mainstream candidate (sorry, Jesse and Al, but you guys were too far out on the tail of the curve to have been electable). This may have been obvious to you, but I haven't given it a lot of thought thus far. Perhaps it's because Obama's political thought is to the right of Hillary Clinton's and so any candidate-other-then-Hillary is welcomed regardless of race (she is a polarizing figure, ain't she?). The remarkable thing to me is that no one is really making a big deal out of race.

But anyway, here is my thought:

1950:

• Black man running for President = shocking and not worthy of anyone's consideration.
• People against a black man running for President because he is black = a normal if not, understandable reaction.

2008:

• Black man running for President = Seems normal if not, expected. No one's really talking about his race.
• People against a black man running for President because he is black = shocking and not worthy of anyone's consideration.

While some people say we have a long way to go until a person of any race or ethnic group can see another person of a different race or ethnic group with eyes unclouded by racism, sometimes it is useful to see how much progress we have made. It kind of restores your faith in people a little bit, doesn't it?

Despite the fact that I cannot read music nor play an instrument of any kind and despite the fact that I cannot sing on key, below is the short list of names I have selected for my punk rock band (starting a band is on my To Do List for 2018):

• Coal
• Prom Dresses for Fat Girls
• The Slugs - just found out it has been taken: www.theslugs.com
• Marian Parker's Fan Club
• The Sandwiches
• Absence of Noise (I used to own absenceOfNoise.com but I'm letting it expire tonight)

Now that there is a small (but quality, it's quality stuff boys and girls) amount of content on this new collaboration website, I want to announce it here. My friend Karl Habegger and I, but mostly Karl, have set up Antithesis Art dot com. One day we were sitting out in the garden eating dirt and worms because we were both bummed out over the lackage of art creation in our lives. We agreed that what we needed was some kind of a deadline to force us to make some art. Well less than two weeks later Karl gets the site up and going.

Here's how it works: every week or two a new topic is posted with a deadline. We each go off and draw/paint/whatever something and post it. Karl posts his on time, and then I post mine several days after the deadline because I am lame.

Anyway, please check it out. And if you happen to be an artist living in Kaufman County, Texas you are invited to join in on the fun. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go off and draw some anthropomorphic kitchen appliances. I'm on a deadline, baby!

This page was beginning to take a long time to load so I put the older stuff, including The History of Toast on Page Two and Page Three. Check it.