Conceived above a saloon, delivered into this world by a masked man identified by his heavily sedated mother as Captain Video,
raised by a kindly West Virginian woman, a mild-mannered former reporter with modest delusions of grandeur and no tolerance
of idiots and the intellectually dishonest.
network solutions made me a child pornographer!
The sordid details...
Requiem for a fictional Scotsman
Oh my God! They killed Library!! Those bastards!!!
A Pittsburgher in the Really Big City
At least the rivers freeze in Pittsburgh
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The Carbolic Smoke Ball
Superb satire, and based in Pittsburgh!
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
"No religious Test shall ever be required as a
Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the
United States."
Article VI, U.S. Constitution
Geek of the Week, 7/16/2000
Cruel Site of the Day, 7/15/2000
miscellany
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Saturday, January 01, 2005
Superstition
I have only one superstition in which I believe: hanging or changing a calendar so that it displays a date in the future definitely brings bad luck.
This is, of course, totally irrational and absurd. I learned it from my paternal grandmother, who also warned me about ladders, black cats, spilled salt, opening umbrellas indoors and a number of other harbingers of doom.
Those superstitions are pure bunk. However, the calendar business is for real, and I have irrefutable empirical proof so toe-curling in nature that decorum prevents me from describing it here.
That's why it's such a relief when January 1 comes around. I can finally start making entries in my 2005 Planner Pad. Yeah, I've expanded upon my grandmother's original caveat. Not only is hanging a calendar ahead of time bad luck, but populating a paper organizer ahead of time is akin to cutting the string on the metaphorical sword of Damocles that hangs above all our heads.
That's why my current planner has about 200 to-do items for December 31, 2004. Now I get to transfer them all to a nice new book. Doing so really doesn't accomplish anything, of course, but it gives the illusion of accomplishment. Self-delusion is the perfect- perhaps the only- way to start out a new year.
As for resolutions, I have only one: making it to 2006. I figure if I can pull that one off, everything else will sort of fall into place.
Hope you all have a prosperous New Year. I suspect major changes are coming in 2005. To paraphrase Margo Channing (Bette Davis): "Fasten your seatbelts; it's going to be a bumpy year!"
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Friday, December 31, 2004
Back on the air...
Since Christmas, the missus and I have been fighting off horrendous, flu-ish respiratory infections. Fortunately, a trip to Dr. Larry's and a timely injection of (2S- trans)- Methyl 6, 8-dideoxy- 6- (((1- methyl- 4- propyl- 2- pyrrolidinyl) carbonyl) amino)- 1- thio- D- erythro- alpha- D- galacto- octopyranoside immediately stopped her incipient strep throat in its tracks. But the other symptoms remained, and I spent the majority of the week in bed with the dog and cat. I accomplished none of the grandiose plans I had for my extended holiday vacation, so I'm beginning the year deep in the hole.
We're off to our daughter's today to ring in the New Year with their family, the first time we haven't observed the holiday at our own home in 31 years. We're going to take the dog with us, but we're leaving the cat behind. I think she's a Buddhist, anyway.
To prepare for this momentous breach in family custom, we're taking naps this afternoon. Like Bill Vaughn said, "Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to."
Next year, I think I'm going to follow P.J. O'Rourke's recommendation for observing the holidays: "The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk. This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to."
Better start chugging the NyQuil. Now.
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Copyright © 1987-2024 by Kevin G. Barkes
All rights reserved.
Violators will be prosecuted.
So there.
The kgb@kgb.com e-mail address is now something other than kgb@kgb.com saga.
kgbreport.com used to be kgb.com until December, 2007 when the domain name broker
Trout Zimmer made an offer I couldn't refuse.
Giving up kgb.com and adopting kgbreport.com created a significant problem, however.
I had acquired the kgb.com domain name in 1993,
and had since that time used kgb@kgb.com as my sole e-mail address. How to let people know
that kgb@kgb.com was no longer kgb@kgb.com but
rather kgbarkes@gmail.com which is longer than kgb@kgb.com and more letters to
type than kgb@kgb.com and somehow less aesthetically
pleasing than kgb@kgb.com but actually just as functional as kgb@kgb.com? I sent e-mails from the kgb@kgb.com address to just about
everybody I knew who had used kgb@kgb.com in the past decade and a half but noticed that some people just didn't seem to get the word
about the kgb@kgb.com change. So it occurred to me that if I were generate some literate, valid text in which kgb@kgb.com was repeated
numerous times and posted it on a bunch of different pages- say, a blog indexed by Google- that someone looking for kgb@kgb.com would
notice this paragraph repeated in hundreds of locations, would read it, and figure out that kgb@kgb.com no longer is the kgb@kgb.com
they thought it was. That's the theory, anyway. kgb@kgb.com. Ok, I'm done. Move along. Nothing to see here...
(as a matter of fact, i AM the boss of you.)
It's here!
440 pages, over 11,000 quotations!
Eff the Ineffable, Scrute the Inscrutable
get kgb krap!