Unless you read this.

By far the most efficient way so far to waste your entire day, every day.

Hive mind activate!

I’m sure this is just one of many reports we’ll hear of MySpace leading to trashy quasi-criminal (violating parole… do they even still count that?) activity on the part of morons.

Though this does raise an interesting question: if you’re a 28-year-old woman but you look 12, act eight, and have a 67 IQ, is it really a crime to have sex with a 13-year-old boy? Tennessee says yes, sort of, because they’ll make you serve all of five months of your nine-month sentence against 28 counts of rape and sexual battery, which in my book is about as close as you get to a thumbs up from the government (and what do you want to bet they offered her conjugal visits with the kid?). But then Tennessee has always been at the cultural vanguard.

But now it’s Internet crime. So much more threatening than actual crime. She’ll probably get 50 years. Free Kevin Mitnick! Oh, wait, he’s an Internet security bigwig now.

Burn baby, burn.

And it’s all justified by the phrase “literally kneeing the academic horse’s patoot in the bajoobies.” Ah, bajoobies.

http://www.dansimmons.com/writing_welll/writing.htm

And why was I reading this? Well, because Dan Simmons, whatever his leanings, is a kick-ass author. But tonight, specifically, because my dad sent me this:

http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message.htm

It’s long, it’s jaded and disturbing, but I’m a sucker for an allegory, much less a parable, much less a thinly-veiled (okay, not at all veiled) allegorical parable.

Unfortunately it had the result my dad intended: making me want to go to the gun show. Still, my anarchical core makes me see this as irony.

Believe it or not, I actually use Google pretty frequently to remember what I myself have said in the past. And I’m not talking about just Google Desktop, though I do use that. I’m referring mostly to Google’s site search, which I use against my blog all the time (mostly because Blogger’s support for blog internal navigation is non-existent–which may actually be part of the problem). I even have a Google search box on my blog. It’s right there on the left, if you scroll down. The problem is, it doesn’t work anymore. And it turns out that, with just a few exceptions, all my pre-March 2005 content is no longer indexed. WTF?!

I’m left to wonder if this is a new policy on Google’s part. If they’re somehow trying to get rid of “stale” blog content. Or if I’ve done something to piss them off, if I’ve pushed the wrong buttons and gotten myself listed as a link spam page or something. Maybe I just need to make an XML sitemap or something. What I do know is that this is the first time Google has become suddenly and radically less useful to me.

What’s really interesting is that different search engines now behave very differently when it comes to my blog. Here’s what happens when I do a site search from various services for the title of a blog post from 2/2005:

Only Yahoo and Ask.com find the actual page. Google and A9 (same engine) find a post from March, 2005, that just happens to link to the the post I’m actually searching for (which would seem to indicate that either the spider just arbitrarily stopped at that point or that they’re eliminating my results on purpose). Puzzlingly, Google/A9’s image search picks up images from the page, even though the page itself is not linked. True, this search is composed mostly of stop words, but it is a page title. I wonder what the problem is.

Boy, if anything needed a wiki, it’s Lost. Like most of the Internet, this site is severely compromised at the moment due to April Fools’ garbage–don’t believe anything you read on the home page for the next few days–Google didn’t buy it, all will not be revealed in the next episode–but generally this is a fun resource. Definitely don’t look at it if you aren’t caught up, though, because it’s spoilers on top of spoilers (and spoilers all the way down). If you are caught up, this is your chance to see what all that crap on the blast door was.

Specific to my own interests… the Terry O’Quinn page isn’t great, but then there’s not a lot known about the guy. Naturally the John Locke page is more developed.

http://www.google.com/romance/

What can I possibly say? This is sublimely perfect. Check the date.