I saw one of those chrome car decorations today, the one with a big fish labeled "TRUTH" devouring a Darwin Fish.

So let me get this straight: the bigger, more fit creature was preying upon the smaller, weaker one? Sounds a hell of a lot like Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory to me.

I can't draw very well, which is why I do most of my "art" with 3D software. But that doesn't stop me from trying.

I drew this tonight; the idea has been percolating ever since I read Wil Wheaton's opinion on the premiere of Enterprise.

Well, now I know what it's like to be a video-game store owner and deal with the sort of people who rent videogames, thanks to Acts of Gord. But he really needs to add a sound clip of himself speaking, because when I read his transcripts of conversations with customers, the voice my head assigns to his lines sounds suspiciously like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.

And speaking of clueless people, I generally don't have to deal with them at work, unless I'm answering the phone. I took this call today:

Me: <Business Name>.

Caller: Hello, may I speak to Janice, please?

Me: I'm sorry, there's nobody by that name employed here.

Caller: Is this Thompson Insurance?

Me: No, Ma'am, this is <Business Name>.

Caller: You're not an insurance company?

Me: No, Ma'am, we're a court reporting agency. [Now, having just read a number of pages on Acts of Gord, what I wanted to add was "That's why we have 'Reporting' in our name and not 'Insurance'." But since I'm not the owner of the business, I opted to be businesslike.]

Caller: Oh, I must have dialed the wrong number.

Me: That's quite all right, Ma'am.

That wouldn't have been so bad. But less than five seconds after I'd hung up the phone, it rang again.

Me: <Business Name>.

Caller: Is Janice there?

Me: No, Ma'am, this is <Business Name>.

Caller: Oh, I'm sorry, I must have hit "redial" by mistake.

Me: That's quite all right, Ma'am.

Sometimes I hate the fact that I was raised to be polite. Otherwise I would have inquired about how one could mistake pressing a single button for pressing seven. Ah, well. At least Gord puts stupid people in their places.

My inner robot is Roy Batty.

(Roy Batty was the replicant in Blade Runner played by Rutger Hauer.)

Speaking of Rutger Hauer, my wife recently picked up Ladyhawke for me on DVD. Such an entertaining film. Such an awful soundtrack. I mean, I've got nothing against the Alan Parsons Project -- I actually went to see them play live -- but that was not by any stretch of the imagination an appropriate choice of music. Perhaps someday, if we're lucky, they'll release a special edition with an entirely new score.

"Quite frankly, sir, I talk to God all the time. And no offense, but He never mentioned you."

I'd like to see the government come down hard on all the advertisers who are trying to take advantage of this newfound fervor for the American flag by loading up their ads with images of said Stars & Stripes. It is, after all, a blatant violation of Federal law:

36 USC 10 § 176 (Respect for flag):

(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.

(Emphasis and italics mine.) But who am I kidding? It'll never happen.

And a third person tests positive for Anthrax.

It's awful in any case, but at least they all worked in the same building. If they were people who had no connection to each other, then I'd be worried.

Preliminary testing at federal labs on the anthrax that killed Stevens has found a possible match to a strain connected to an Iowa lab, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

Now that has disturbing implications.

And an NBC worker in New York has tested positive for Anthrax. Not inhaled, this time, but transmitted cutaneously.

Wheeeeee.

The office building next door to mine was evacuated this morning. I don't know why yet.

I was browsing around on Disturbing Search Requests, looking at the pages of people who found odd things in their referrer logs, when I came upon one page wherein the author expressed the opinion that the democratic nations of the world coming together to fight terrorism "is the sound of the 'one world government' taking a huge step forward."

Now, I have never shared -- nor, quite frankly, understood -- the fear many Americans seem to have of a United Earth. Perhaps that's because my formative years were spent immersed in science fiction, where it's almost a foregone conclusion that humans will eventually see themselves as one people (though it usually requires hostile contact with an alien race to make them do so).

Not that "one world government" would get rid of the petty hatreds and prejudices that plague our planet. America is theoretically one nation, yet many Southerners cling to a hatred of the North, despite the fact that the Civil War ended well over a century ago. (Strangely, although the francophones tried to rip Canada asunder, it didn't end in bloodshed like it did in America. Perhaps the Canadians are simply more civilized.) And don't even get me started on the mutual unthinking animosity between the Right and the Left, or the hatred between the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland.

No, there will be no "one world government" in our lifetime. Humans still cherish their hatred too dearly, whether it be based on accident of geographical location, or of language, or of skin color, or of religion, or of political philosophy. There can be no unity until such things no longer matter; in America, they were put aside for a scant handful of days after September 11, 2001 -- but once the shock of the attack dulled, the old hatreds reestablished themselves all too quickly.

The only thing that could possibly bring about a One World Government right now would be a fleet of alien warships massing in our skies.

And even then, we might just be screwed up enough to destroy ourselves instead of uniting.

Somebody just tried ten times in a row to access a nonexistent page on my server. You'd think after the first couple of times they got my 404 page, they'd get the idea that perhaps the page they were looking for wasn't there.

Maybe I'll recode my 404 page to start getting more and more insulting when something like that happens.

I had to pick something up from FedEx. As I stood at the counter, waiting for the person helping me to return from the back room with my package, another employee came out from behind the counter, walked over to two large boxes stacked against the wall, and called out, "Whose boxes are these? Anybody see who left these? Anyone?"

When nobody responded, he shrugged, picked them up (whereupon half the people in the room flinched as though expecting them to explode), and he walked into the back room with them. Thudthud. Quite a contrast to last week, when they evacuated a whole building because a briefcase had been left unattended in the lobby.

On an unrelated note, I bought a bag of candy corn yesterday. It tasted like Play-Doh. I assumed it was just a stale batch, but I just ate a freshly baked chocolate-chocolate-chip cookie. It, too, tasted of Play-Doh. I don't even want to know why I seem to remember what Play-Doh tastes like.

Good thing I've learned how to turn a laugh into a cough. Comes in handy at work when I read things like this.

There's a guy in the office right now, talking to my boss. He's doing a security clearance interview about one of my former cow-orkers. He showed a badge, but I was too far away to see it clearly; about all I could tell was that it was gold, and had a horizontal strip of blue enamel on it.

Some of the questions he's asking:

• When did he work for you?
• When did you first meet him?
• How long did he work for you?
• Was he a good worker?
• What kind of business is this?
• What did he do here?
• Was he full-time? Part-time?
• Would you recommend him for a position of trust in the government?
• When he worked for you, where did he live?
• Did he live in a house or a condo?
• Was that in town or on the outskirts of town?
• Was he married?
• Did he have any children?
• Was he living with his wife?
• What hobbies did he have?
• How often did he play golf?
• Do you know where he's living now?
• When was the last time you had any contact with him?
• What did that contact involve?

I don't know what I expected a security clearance interview to be like, but that definitely didn't fit my expectations.

I can't check mail. For the past week, I have literally had to call in a minimum of once per day to ask my ISP to restart the pop3 server, because it keeps rejecting connections.

They keep claiming that "We'll keep an eye on it" and "I'm going to escalate this ticket so the level 2 technicians can find out what's causing it", but the problem occurs more and more frequently. Today, I've had to telnet in to my shell account, cat the raw mail files, copy the messages out of my telnet buffer, and paste them into my email program so I can reply to them.

This is no way to run a railroad. Fortunately, it's an ISP, not a railroad. But I would eventually like to be able to check my mail normally.

My wife and I have a couple of favorite restaurants. One is Der Schnitzelhaus, a German restaurant owned and operated by a man who looks like Dr. Bricker from The Love Boat. Not that his looks have anything to do with the food, of course.

We can't eat there very often, otherwise we'd both be morbidly obese. We do eat there for special occasions. Saturday night, we went with some friends to celebrate Oktoberfest, which doubled (for us) as an anniversary dinner.

One year of wedded bliss. Doesn't seem anywhere near that long, yet at the same time it feels like we've always been married.

So many changes in that time. Looking through the wedding pictures, they're thrown into sharp relief: These people are divorced. This group of coworkers no longer work together. This couple had a baby. This bridesmaid had not yet visibly crossed over into clinical insanity. Nobody there feared anthrax (except possibly the person who fears to urinate during a thunderstorm, lest electricity travel up the stream of urine and electrocute him).

Despite the changes in our lives, the important things have remained the same: I love Karen with all my heart. She doesn't mind my idiosyncracies. We make each other laugh. At the end of the day, it's worth coming home.

One year.

Working as I do in a court reporting office, it's fairly common for my cow-orkers to come across terms with which they're not familiar (usually medical or scientific words). Since deposition transcripts have to be "true and accurate" accounts of everything that was said in the reporter's presence, the usual response to such a situation is to ask the proper spelling of someone who stands a good chance of knowing it.

It was with much astonishment, therefore, that I regarded a Web page that my wife was looking at. It is a page of sewing trims, upon which item 141A is described as having an "I Can't-a-Leaf" pattern.

I'd assume they meant "Acanthus leaf", but thanks to Felix Unger, I know what happens when one assumes.

That headline jumped out at me from McNewspaper as I passed the newsbox. Perhaps I read too many comic books as a child, because my immediate interpretation of the headline involved things like X-ray vision, the ability to fly and punch through brick walls, and so on.

But the actual meaning is much more frightening.

Perhaps it wouldn't seem as frightening if Bush hadn't created the very fascist-sounding post of "Director of Homeland Security". (What's wrong with "Domestic"? Do we have to use a word that calls up images of brown shirts and jackboots?)

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again: September 11th was our Reichstag Fire. It gives the power-hungry would-be despots all the excuse they need to begin curtailing our freedoms, to open wide the eye of Big Brother and subject us to closer scrutiny from behind the façade of "protecting" us.

And apropos of nothing, it's purple mountains majesty. If the people of this country must start fervently singing patriotic songs, the least they could do is learn the words correctly. And maybe even learn all of the words; the national anthem has four verses, but when was the last time anyone even heard the second? Harrumph!

Something is seriously wrong with my metabolism.

Every year, Tampa has something called "Guavaween", which is pretty much "Mardi Gras Lite". This year, my friend Sev and I reprised our costumes as Jay and Silent Bob. In order to loosen up enough to be Jay, I drank about half a bottle of B&B (a mixture of cognac and brandy which most of my friends charitably describe as "gasoline").

Nothing. No buzz. Not even a tingling in my lips.

Some hard lemonade: No effect whatsoever. An entire liter of beer: about thirty minutes of an extremely mild buzz.

Still, at least many people actually knew Jay's name this year. (Last year, it was "Hey! It's Silent Bob! And... that other guy!" This year, although there were a few of those, there were a lot more of "Hey! It's Jay and Silent Bob!" And three "Joe and Silent Bob"s. The best was the cop explaining to his partners who we were supposed to be. He was obviously a fan of Kevin Smith's movies. His partners were entirely clueless.

It is now 3:40 AM, and I must sleep.

I got bored with the old blog design, so I did a little playing around.

It looks okay in Opera and Internet Exploiter, but looks like utter crap under Nutscrape 4. Then again, so did the old design.

Another reason to avoid flying: the top of the front "page" of a United Airlines emergency instruction card.

According to an article in today's paper, "Florida's lawmakers couldn't reach agreement Tuesday on how to fight terrorists or stimulate the economy, but they made sure Floridians can buy patriotic license plates."

Oh, but Floridians love their license plates! We've got "Save the Manatee" plates. We've got "Protect the Florida Panther" plates. We've got plates for the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Orlando Magic, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Buccaneers. We've got plates for USF, FSU and U of F. There's a plate for the Olympics, and one for the Special Olympics. There's a pro-life plate (but none for pro-choice). There are plates for the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and even the Marine Corps. We've got plates for education, plates for the arts, plates for the Challenger that blew itself apart. Some people think it's great, but I don't exaggerate when I say we have more plates than the nation has states!

And those are just the specialty plates! We've also got green letters superimposed on an orange Florida, orange letters over a green Florida, and a plate with what I think is supposed to be an orange, but looks more like the Georgia Peach.

And now -- aren't we lucky? -- we'll have two more! We don't have a plan to pull us out of this recession or lure back the tourists, but by God, we can at least have our choice of patriotic license plates!

Smegging morons.