Bill's Notes

(From CalTechGirl)

the Prankster (34% dark, 34% spontaneous, 38% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | LIGHT Your humor has an intellectual, even conceptual slant to it. You're not pretentious, but you're not into what some would call 'low humor' either. You'll laugh at a good dirty joke, but you definitely prefer something clever to something moist. You probably like well-thought-out pranks and/or spoofs and it's highly likely you've tried one of these things yourself. In a lot of ways, yours is the most entertaining type of humor because it's smart without being mean-spirited. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Conan O'Brian - Ashton Kutcher

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on dark You scored higher than 99% on spontaneous You scored higher than 99% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

Did you know what an "iliac crest" is?

Give you a hint: The tramp stamp goes right above it.

Cool word, huh?

Fran of Eternity Road says most bloggers are not only bores, but crashing bores.

His criteria: writing talent, opinion originality/depth and discretion.

Jeepers.

Here's Stephen Green of VodkaPundit fame on abortion (yes, I'm half kidding. It's really an essay on writing):

Abortion. I support a woman's right to choose, for whatever reason, right up until the natural viability of the fetus. That's a variable, but generally around the start of the third trimester. After that point, I am still pro-choice, but only if the mother's life or health is endangered. End of rant, end of debate. You will not change my mind, so don't even try. [Emphasis mine.]

Two thoughts:

1. I wouldn't try to reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into.

2. Fair enough. You haven't try to convince anyone that your opinion is right, only that you like your opinion on abortion and aren't changing it.

A friend sent me a link to this guy, who goes by the nom de plume "Mithras."

Mithras has nasty things to say about a bunch of famous bloggers, and then his commenters chime in and talk about how nasty those conservative bloggers are. Those nasty, conservative bloggers! They should just shut up and be like ... I dunno, Mithras?

Plus, I don't consider pro-choice Instapundit conservative. Or pro-choice, post-liberal Dean Esmay of Dean's World a conservative. The rest were conservative, but not deserving of such vilification. But I won't respond in kind, except to say my pal Dean Esmay's a good guy who's heart is in the right place. Even when he's wrong. And Michelle Malkin ... can the attack dogs criticize her without mentioning her anatomy?

A friend of mine and I discussed this morning whether someone can self-identify as a Christian. He and I agreed that God says who's a Christian and who's not. We can only aspire to be Christians and hope God agrees in the fullness of time. Agree? Disagree?

Rescuer 1: So how did the submarine get stuck?

Rescuer 2: It got caught in a fishing net.

Rescuer 1: So why can't they raise the net?

Rescuer 2: Because there's a sub caught in it.

[Editor's Note: We all pray for a safe rescue of the Russian sub caught in the Pacific.]

As of yesterday, we're back to our normal level of blog traffic. So it's just us again, plus some new readers. The return to normality is a good thing, because the normal state of things here is a good thing. The detailed reports that come with PowerBlogs show that readers of IndustrialBlog tend to be smarter, better educated, funnier, better looking, taller and humbler than the readers of most other blogs. I'm not really the sure of the cause of this, but you should all give yourselves a hand.

My March post on boojiness has been linked by Kendall Harmon , USA Today, and Democratic Underground [search for Iris or IndustrialBlog]. Glad to have some new visitors, albeit a mixed bag of readers! Thanks to everyone who's dropping by.

UPDATE: More than 10,000 referrals came in via Yahoo referencing the USA Today link. Thanks, Chris, for the bandwidth!

to my good friend and neighbor, John. Hope you have an even better year this year! Pax Christi.

In his best-ever column, my former roommate tells the story of his sudden fleeing from Pennsylvania. It's here. This blog is quoted regarding the anomie, ennui and skull-numbing boredom that sets in after working at our former workplace. Jim's take on his leaving:

My girlfriend back here was tired of seeing me only once a month. I was tired of driving an hour to travel 14 miles to work. I missed catfish. And I was slowly losing my sanity working as a cubicle slave, reading lawyerese and translating it to human-speak.

Working at a newspaper provides you with all sorts of interesting anecdotes to relate to friends such as, "Some guy showed us his scars today and said he had been tasered 50 gazillion times by the poh-lice because they’re forces of darkness trying to keep him from spreading the Word." Working for a legal publication leaves you with conversation killers such as, "You know, under the additional insured clause of their contract, a widget company can pursue coverage against the insurer of a trucking company it had contracted with to deliver products that were lost by the trucker."

And he concludes with this masterful stroke:

It really hit me that I was home later that evening when I was moving some things out of my car and saw a neighbor walking his dog. The dog hunkered down for a minute. His owner grew impatient and gave a tug on the leash.

"Pinch it off, we gotta go," the owner said.

Home sweet home.

Enjoy newspapering and home, Jim.

Well, maybe. Last Saturday I headed back to Toms River. I haven't been to the Jersey Shore in the summer in years and years and years ... I always go out of season, and make a trip probably about every other year. Seriously, I may not have been back to the Shore in season since 1991.

Anyway, I soon remembered why. Traffic. Traffic. Traffic. Ugh!

But it was fun driving around. Nothing was the same, except the stuff that was the same. A lot of the old neighborhoods seemed run-down. I felt little emotional connection at all to the place, which was good. Usually I felt a negative emotional connection, and this was at least neutral.

Not a lot of remembrances, probably since so much time has passed and everyone I knew long since left Toms River. It's a nice town, but it's so built up and crowded that it bears little resemblance to the sleepy shore community in which I grew up. I'm not complaining, mind you ... I'm just saying. But there was still Del's Farm Market, where my ex's brother worked (and came home complaining about it, too). And there was ..., well, that was about it!

You know what was really weird? The music on the radio, and in the restaurants, and in the bars, was all from the 80s. It was Bee Gees and Cyndi Lauper and other assorted music that should have long since passed into the long good-night.

Oh yeah -- guess what? They put artificial turf on my high school football field (okay, so I did go back but only for a moment). If you can afford artificial turf, you're overtaxing the locals. But what the hell. At least the team wins now! Back in the day, we were pathetic, except the Class of 1980, which won a state championship. My sport was swimming, and the high school swim records were still the same.

My sense after this day of bouncing around down at the Shore: Living in Toms River seemed so long ago and that I'd been through so much since I've left that I was left was left feeling that it happened much more than 20 years ago, but a lifetime or so ago. Suddenly my age didn't seem right -- 41 seemed young compared to how distant the past seemed to me. Usually 41 seems old :)