I’m an iTunes junkie. Every week they publish a small list of free tunes, one of which is their “featured” freebie, and I download ’em all. Even the stupid “street mix” rap stuff that is 20 minutes of what might as well be called “unlistenable,” at least from my point of view. But maybe someday I’ll want it.

Yesterday I downloaded “The Bad Touch” by Bloodhound Gang. That’s the “do it like they do on the Discovery Channel” song with the feeelthy lyrics. Lyrical genius, I say… “love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket/ like the lost catacombs of Egypt only God knows where we stuck it.” Naturally I can’t listen to it around any other members of my family. I spent 99 cents (well… $1.05 after tax) for something I might get to listen to a dozen times.

Then I found that Daft Punk (or their corporate masters) had finally put their stuff up on iTunes. I almost blew the last $12 or so of my iTunes credit in one spot… and then I realized what I was doing. I was binging. I wasn’t going to be able to listen to all this stuff at once. I would quickly forget about having bought some of it, and might NEVER get around to listening to it, as it got lost in the 3500-song library of stuff I’ve ripped or iTune’d. I still have the new Sting album ($10+ of my $30 iTunes birthday credit) which I haven’t worn the shiny off of yet (okay… according to the playlist count I’ve heard the whole album over a dozen times, and the dance mix of “Send Your Love” over 30 times), and both Vangelis albums I got for my birthday are still shiny, too.

After a little introspection I only bought TWO of the dozen or so Daft Punk tunes I want. I’m listening to one of them right now, and the other one is queued up next. I’ve sorted a bunch of the newest music (new to me, anyway) into a single playlist called “Still Shiny,” and I’m going to auto-repeat that into oblivion as I draw today.

the playlist

I got a five-star-hot masaman curry yesterday with chalain. Between the two of us we ordered enough to bring HOME enough that my HALF of the doggie-bag was two meals’ worth.

I ate those two meals’ worth for breakfast and lunch today.

It’s like this, folks. A pepper EXTRACT (straight-up capsaicin) is going to be hotter on the mouth than any authentic curry can hope to be. I figure that since I can handle the extracts, the curry shouldn’t give me grief. Well, the curry is more of a “slow burn” thing. The pepper bits light a good fire in your mouth, sure. But then they KEEP burning, because your body (well, MY body… YOU are smart enough not to eat this crap) continues to break them down as they pass through.

My stomach has been burning ALL DAY. And my mouth has been saying “that’s good stuff. Let’s have MORE.” I had curry for breakfast, I had curry for lunch, and for dinner I decided maybe I’d better have some nice toast and a glass of gatorade.

Every so often my scripting gives me chills. The words and story-bits just leap out, and it’s frightening and funny at the same time.

I tested the scripts on chalain and he told me that had he been drinking I would have scored a keyboard kill. Sadly, he has long since learned not to drink while I’m trying material out on him.

This story has been very, VERY difficult for me to write. That’s one reason the buffer dropped below 20 and stayed there for six months. Well, hopefully I’m breaking out of that. The story arc has reached a point where all the pieces are in place, and now they’ll start moving… FAST.

I can hardly wait for you guys to read it. I hope you like it as much as I do.

–Howard
p.s. thanks for all the Desktop Background donations. This particular background was a lot of fun to do, but had a really, really steep learning curve under it, all of which ended up being ascended in a marathon session last night. But hey, now I know how to do decent starfields.

The recent storyline at GPF, in which a devout Christian tends to the wounds of a killer, and then sets her free, spawned quite a bit of discussion, much of it slamming the comic and the cartoonist. I was uncomfortable during the story, because it seemed to me that the Christian character was behaving just a little irresponsibly.

Contrast that to this article about the God-fearing woman who put a stop to Brian Nichols’ alleged murderous rampage through Atlanta. This account is simply AMAZING. She never backed away from her principles, and managed to save not only her own life (which she could have done several times, apparently) but also the lives of others. See, she stuck around… and around…. and around… she calmed him down, read to him about finding purpose in his life, and fed him breakfast.

And then, when she finally called 911, he was ready to turn himself in.

It’s not that truth is STRANGER than fiction. It’s that, in this case at least, it’s BETTER on all counts.

–Howard