Thursday, June 15, 2000

Valley Talk: The Dumbest Dot-Com

aye, i suppose that in an odd way, it could be an honour to be viewed as the 'dumbest dot-com'. and while we're using the phrase 'dot com', i've noticed some horrid mistakes lately. namely, the use of the phrase 'dot.com'. now, all things considered, if the 'dot' is already there, there's no need for the '.', then, is there? sure, i may be nitpicky and somewhat of a pedant, but if you're going to do it, then do it right, dammit!!
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/15/2000 9:34:10 PM

Tuesday, June 13, 2000

Police find cannabis at Buckingham Palace

okay, even i can see the potential jokes stemming from this incident. do yourself a favour and think of all the possible jokes and their punchlines, then interrupt your friends with them the next time you're at the bar ... that way, you can keep your edge on the advances in the joketelling industry! huzzah!
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/13/2000 10:49:16 PM

Saturday, June 10, 2000

do yourself a favour and check out the 5k winners ... feel free to thank me later. as for the immediate moment, sleep seems to be a very attractive course of action.
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/10/2000 10:53:16 PM

do yourself a favour and check out the 5k winners -- you'll enjoy yourself. or, at the very least, i know i did.
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/10/2000 10:44:52 PM

i'm $965 richer today than i was last week ... or yesterday, for that matter. God bless ebay.

and up with blogger, too!!

(you can tell by my cheeriness that it's the weekend, no?)
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/10/2000 11:59:18 AM

Friday, June 9, 2000

... (quote!)

all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up ignorance again:
but winter's not forever,even snow
melts;and if spring should spoil the game, what then?

(endquote!) ...

- first stanza excerpt from e.e. cummings' poem, "all ignorance toboggans into know"

i've read those lines countless times, yet each time i read them, i find them just as provocative (and evocative, for that matter) as the last. i like to think that despite how we view ourselves, we're almost always in a state of childness in some form or another, and we start in ignorance from our very emergence -- this is the blissful ignorance which the phrase touts, as far as i'm concerned. we keep trudging insistently up that hill of ignorance to toboggan down again, deep into the wintry valley of temporary understanding ... i think of the feeling i used to get after just tobogganing down the hill; that fresh feeling of excitement and accomplishment that has never seemed to arrive to me again in any other situation. it's a wonderful feeling, yet just as the children climb back up the hill, we trudge up there, and stand on the top upon our arrival, standing a little straighter than we did only minutes ago, and feeling quite proud. proud that you managed to scale the hill of ignorance (as strange as it seems), and you look around and swear that you could see your house from here, were you only a little taller.

then spring. what then? without the snow, the toboggan loses its function (and charm, too) ... but perhaps, such is death. the wintry life of scaling and sliding is over; you've moved on to allow a new time of regrowth and refertilization ... the time for hurtling down a snowy hill on a thin sheet of plastic (or, if you were like me when i was a kid, your rear) towards that wonderfully rejuvenating sensation of understanding, despite its wondrous temporance, is over. winter will arrive, as it always has and does ...

what the hell am i on about ... ?
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/9/2000 9:48:04 PM

planning on digging a hole through this fine chunk of rock we're all walking around on? do yourself a favour, then ... before you grab your shovel / spoon / thermonuclear digging device, be sure to figure out where you'll end up, when and if you do indeed end up on the other side (so you know what kind of clothes to pack, and what sort of money you need to ask for at the exchange place) ... of course, figuring that out is easier than you think, what with this handy smidgen from ...

jessamyn.com: Journey Through the Center of the Earth! *insert fanfarish music here*
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/9/2000 9:13:28 PM

Thursday, June 8, 2000

i work at an advertising company. now, this is all well and good, with the sales and interpersonal things, and lots of other aspects of the job which i think are just splendiferous, but i can't help but feel oddly out of place. i mean, consider my experience ... i was previously a freelance writer and journalist. all of a sudden, i'm catapulted from this very individualistic, introverted occupation; one of observation, of wry wit and sleepless nights poring over the final manuscript, into this job, of tall office buildings, phone calls, and regular work hours. in moments like these, when i slow down slightly, i try and reflect upon how the hell i got here ... and i realize that it's all a blur, as though i've chased too much advil with even more alcohol. the problem is: i don't use either of them.
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/8/2000 9:11:45 PM

ye gads! i've just figured it out! "surreal" is really a contraction ... a Newspeak word, if you will, for "surrogate reality" (which, at this point, is probably what you figure i'm living in.)

although, i have drawn the conclusion that Newspeak (from Orwell's 1984, of course) wasn't really the bad part. all things considered, Newspeak was just a preventative measure to prevent thoughtcrime, which is the real dehumanizing part about the whole thing. if there weren't thoughtcrime, then there would have been no Newspeak. Newspeak was put in place to prevent thoughtcrimes of concepts such as freedom (of the individual) and liberty, as a safeguard against thoughtcrime, just as a set of traffic lights at an intersection is put in place to prevent traffic accidents ...

---

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now."

- from George Orwell's book, 1984
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/8/2000 6:51:52 PM

well, work's busy. damn busy. and today, in the midst of my work-a-day fervour (yes, the British spelling), one of our clients came in and gave me free stuff ... to her, i say, "God bless you!" It's little things like somebody giving you a little something that cause you to stop in the middle of your rushing and preoccupation, and smell the proverbial roses ... and on a completely different note ...

with a tip o' the hat to the mastercard folks (and Matt, too.)
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/8/2000 6:25:43 PM

Tuesday, June 6, 2000

always intriguing, frequently amusing ... aye, it's jessamyn.com. i first caught wind of her site from a blurb in Wired magazine several years ago (probably much more than several, really), and i've been stopping by frequently ever since. it's where i was first introduced to the literary genius of Donald Barthelme, come to think of it ...

oh yeah, and i always find soulbath.com to be rather entertaining in a post-modern chic kind of way.
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/6/2000 11:35:33 PM

i recently happened upon a charming little take on today's all-together-too-sterile word processing software: WordPerhect -- check it out; you'll thank me later. i see in it a protest against the driving control that word processing software has in our everyday language. imagine that! our fundamental linguistics being slowly morphed and influenced by the software which we have written for ourselves ... if i weren't so damn tired, i'd laugh at the whole thing.
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/6/2000 11:18:39 PM

well, i would have set something like this up earlier, but the server (yes, crosswinds) hadn't fixed their ftp for a while, but apparently it's working now; i'm not getting 530 errors trying to log on. maybe i'm pushing my luck just giving this a shot, but hey ... there's always plenty of other free bandwidth spots, right??
dave muskeyn, D.D. 6/6/2000 10:59:05 PM