Kiiip and I went out to see Paul this weekend and I shall now comment on that: I thought the movie was pretty good. It does not stand up in my head with Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, but it amused me and that’s what matters.

Haiku!

Suppose the bears come
and we’re all unprepared.
What will we do then?

Here’s a thing: I don’t like mayonnaise. I do love cucumber sandwiches and wraps. I don’t know how to make a cucumber sandwich without mayo. It’s a complicated problem. What else do people use to make sandwiches? Butter? No way. Mustard? I do like mustard, but I don’t think it’d work with cucumber. Just the act of putting the mayo on the bread (or tortilla usually) is unappealing to me and I always end up with bits of it on my fingers. Usually if I get food on my fingers while preparing it, I can like it off, but with mayo it is just annoying.

Why am I ranting about mayonnaise? Because I ate a cucumber wrap while writing this, that’s why. Now the Internet knows.

I just went roughly two days without the Internet being allowed into my home. Seems I did not have enough money in the bank when the provider tried to take the money out of the bank. A couple times. Like since January. So they cut me off. But it is all taken care of now, so I am back online and I will start making sure that I am keeping more money in my bank account, I think.

It’s weird how if I were to go away for a weekend or something I would not notice the lack of Internet. I mean, it’s only two days. That is really not very long. But when I am in my home and I am having nothing better to do and I have had several days of way-too-long shifts at work this week, when that happens, I notice the lack of Internet. After all. It’s Two Whole Days! That’s forever!

I’m pretty much all caught up on what I missed. I’ve two episodes of each of the Daily Show and Colbert that I am about to watch. And I had to clear about 900 spam comments from the site here. I suppose that could have been worse considering that I’ve had that many turn up in a matter of hours sometimes.

So, going back as far as the old Geocities site, I have been linking to this one site where clicking on these icons they’ve got is supposed to help raise some money for some worthy causes. Apparently a bit of money actually does go to those causes, so I keep clicking. I think there was only three or four causes back when I started, but just the other day I noticed a new one, for helping homeless veterans. It seems like with this new edition it is as good a time as any to comment on something which has been bothering me for a while.

When you click on a cause’s icon it, as with any website in this day and age, shows how many people have “liked” it on Facebook. Each cause apparently having its own Facebook page, they each have their own numbers of “likers” and the numbers for each cause goes as follows:

Hunger: 67,871
Breast Cancer: 409,396
Animals: 368,019
Veterans: 4,765
Child Health: 24,292
Literacy: 24,626
Rainforest: 36,122

Okay, Breast Cancer is winning. I am not really surprised by that. For some reason breast cancer “awareness” has been a thing people have been concerned with for forever. Obviously I’m not pro-breast cancer or even cancer in general, but I’m going to complain about raising “awareness” for things that probably nobody is unaware of at this point. But here’s the thing: Apparently it worked. Almost half a million Facebookers bothered to like that page on the site (which actually sends money toward mammograms rather than just raising awareness, for the record). I mean, excepting the Animals one, the other causes don’t add up that high combines. People are aware.

Veterans comes in last place, but hey, it’s only a few days old. Next to last? Child Health and Literacy. I really would have thought that a lot of the people who would bother “liking” the page for Animals would also “like” the Children one. They’re both cute, aren’t they? And, just from my point of view, I would think that improving the health and literacy of our children would go a long way towards not only fighting breast cancer, but a lot of other problems by raising a generation well equipped to deal with them. I say we get some “Raise Better Kids Awareness” campaigns going maybe and try our hands at making a difference at it.

Of course, in reality it is entirely likely that people who “liked” the pages on Facebook just “liked” one as a means of “liking” the group, or even just “liked” one because somebody sent them a link and they’ve never even bothered going to the page. Basically, it isn’t a highly scientific way of me getting my informations, but hey, I’m just brainstorming here. Lemme alone.

Last year I accidentally started a tradition I will continue this year. To cut down on how much I spend on books, I will only put in one order online for books a year and that occasion will occur when John Swartzwelder puts out his newest novel. Well, it turns out that this time is coming soon because I am now seeing the announcement that “The Fifty Foot Detective” a new Frank Burly novel, is due out sometime this Spring. The absurd and gloriously stupid adventures of Frank Burly are good, but now that I’ve ties it to my only book-ordering event of the year, it will be like a holiday. I am already trying to make a list of books to order so that on the very day the Fifty Foot Detective hits Amazon, I am going to declare it National Bookorderin’ Day in the Nation of PDR.

In less happy news, I feel like I should also mention that Dwayne McDuffie died this week. He was the first comic writer I ever sent an email to with this magic Internet thing and he was nice enough to answer it and everything. It’s a shame he died so young, while he was still contributing so much because now we’ll never know what else he may have given to comics and animation.

For years now I’ve done the bulk of my watching television at the Comedy Network website. Home to the Daily Show and Colbert (because in Canada we’re not allowed to watch those shows on their actual websites). For years the Comedy Network website has been pretty crappy.

The video system had always been sub-YouTube in quality. I spent as much time with buffering and waiting for the clips to load as I actually did watching. Even if I were to pause the clip and walk away from the computer for a while it would only load up a minute ahead of where I was paused and just stop. If I let it load for an hour while I did other things, I’d would come back to a minute’s worth of a clip and then more waiting. And at least twice a day the clips would just give up and kick me out of the video thing and would not only stop loading the clip, it would also lose the place where it was. Combine this with the problems my computer has anyway, it made watching my stories unnecessarily large.

Well today I woke up to find a new type of clip viewer on the site. And today, no long waits and stuff. I guess I have to thank the Comedy Network. If you’re going to force me to watch the shows on your site instead of those of the actual people whose shows I want to see, I’m glad you seem to actually be making it easier for me.