Hmmm...: in the world of highways and streets the environment has evolved to suit the metal inhabitants.

I


'm very upset that no one sent me email yesterday praising me for my strategic use of the infamous <BLINK> tag. Those of you using Microsoft Internet Voyeur don't know what you missed. This brings up yet again the arrogance of Bill Gates, who, with the design of his web browser, is effectively saying "OUR CUSTOMERS need to be shielded from evil web designers who use the <BLINK> tag." It's a subtle form of censorship, only a little less egregious than KinderSurf and RomperWeb. For those of you suspecting I'm being even slightly serious in this paragraph, I'm not. And you'll never see me render an emotion wordlessly with ASCII text.

I


  drove back to Staunton today to hand deliver a huge paper to my father. It's a paper about the biology of a rich ecological area known as Blowing Springs, which is near VA route 39 in western Virginia.

My father says that in the chicken nursing home that is the front porch, the hen gets much better nutrition than elderly humans get in human nursing homes.

The senile hen who resides in the dog cage on the front porch is looking very healthy these days. Her feathers are blindingly white and perfectly groomed. She sings happy little chicken songs to all who pass by. Roosters come to visit her, standing around outside her cage and shitting all over the porch. My father says that in the chicken nursing home that is the front porch, the hen gets much better nutrition than elderly humans get in human nursing homes. He listed her diet: whole wheat bread, fresh salad greens from the garden, scraps of meat, leftover rice, catfood, and every morning, a dish of warm grits.

I napped several hours in the bunk in my Shaque. I sleep very well there. I wish I could set the Shaque up in the backyard of the Observatory Avenue house; I'm sure I could rent it for $300/month.

When I woke up, Josh Furr, my redneck friend, was out at the picnic table in the backyard. He had a dictionary at the ready and appeared to be writing stuff down. According to my father, Josh has entered into a hyper-paranoid phase and fears that someone is going to kill him very soon. So he has been working on composing a work in the time-honoured redneck literary genré known as "the last will and testament." Josh originally wanted to leave everything to my brother Don, but since this would jeopardize Don's continued collection of Supplemental Security Income, he will instead leave all his worldly possessions to my mother, Hoagie. The document he's composed so far is not legally valid because he had no witnesses.

Her 20-something retarded boyfriend (whom she met while working at a group home for the retarded in Waynesboro) was recently hauled off to a mental institution.

While we're on the subject of redneck friends-of-the-family, I should mention that another redneck visitor came calling this evening. This was Mary, my mother's 60-something former coworker. She's fallen on hard times; her 20-something retarded boyfriend (whom she met while working at a group home for the retarded in Waynesboro) was recently hauled off to a mental institution. Mary finds my mother an amusing diversion from her woes; they both dressed up in bee suits and went off to tend some hives on the edge of the woods on Muellers' Mountain.

I played around with an old 20 Megabyte MFM Hard Drive, which I successfully formatted on the extensively-customized 12 MHz V-20 based PC-XT compatible that dominates a table in the Shaque.

B


ack in Charlottesville, I bought a pile of used CDs from Plan 9. They were:
• Tool's 1996 album ÆNIMA for $8
• The Psychedelic Furs 1989 album Book of Days for $3
• Megadeth's 1992 album Countdown to Extinction for $4 and
• FUEL, a compilation of songs from seven bands in the music scene of Athens, Georgia for $2

ÆNIMA is suitably disturbing as usual for Tool, not so much for the music itself as for the cover art. Eyeballs swim in a faux-holographic sea on the front. Another eye on the back stares out through two different pupils. Inside, elongated babies sprout wings and fly. You can change the cover to several different scenes that are animated by the micro-prisms etched into the surface of the jeweled case. Stuff like this impresses me and makes me want to find value in the music. But I haven't really given it a good listen yet.

I liked the Psychedelic Furs from the very first time I heard them played on the WWWV in the early 80s. Fast forward to 1997: the Furs are credited with being proto-alternative while WWWV trys to shake its stigma as a classic rock station. Go figure. Book of Days starts out with a rather weak song called "Shine," but it builds from there throughout the album and I'm enjoying it. They actually have a pretty strongly goth sound. It's in the singing partly, but it's also in the rythym, which is very mechanical.

And all those skulls in the album art make me think of awkward teenagers in white tennis shoes, not the grim reaper.

There was a time when I thought Megadeth was considerably cooler than I think they are now. This album is so flawlessly clean that it makes me think, "these guys are really just a bunch of dorks." The guitar is fairly non-threatening and rather talented in keeping with the classic rock tradition. I've heard much scarier stuff from AC/DC. The album hums along fairly rapidly, but it's also monotonous, considering it's all locked in 4/4 meter. And how about the lyrics? Mustaine is trying to growl like a tough guy, but he sounds just a little too intellectual. And all those skulls in the album art make me think of awkward teenagers in white tennis shoes, not the grim reaper. But I do like some of the songs. "Symphony of Destruction" and "Countdown to Extinction" (as well as having the opportunity to make fun of Megadeth on the internet) justify the $4.

As you can see, the low prices had me feeling experimental. I had no idea what to expect from FUEL, for example. But at $2, I was willing to just try it out. Two bands on the album that I liked immediately were Five-Eight and Magneto. The former has a non-commercial "REM with an edge" sound, and the latter uses a nicely foreboding interplay between bass and guitar and they use peculiar rythyms.

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I slept again in 22 Elliewood.

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I


t should come as no surprise that lately I've been pondering what exactly goes on within the "minds" of skinheads and other mildly-retarded adult bullies. I'm thinking that the tendency to lash out violently is tied to incompletely-developed verbal skills and a heightened awareness of personal failings. Always feeling inferiour to others, the skinhead needs to prove himself in the only way he stands a chance: with violence. Skinheads usually pick easy targets for their violence so that there is little chance they will be proven inferiour in the only field in which they know they excel.

The violence of skinheads is a major irritant to me, but the main reason I'd prefer not to hang out with them is more related to the fact that none of them has even a modicum of a sense of humour. They're always in someones face asserting things, never for a moment wishing to engage in debate, never once cracking a smile. They know that rhetoric is not their strong point. Complex rhetorical techniques such as irony and logic are far beyond them.

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