the land of ilk and money

DEAR VOX,
GO FUCK YOURSELF.  I THOUGHT I'D NEVER POST HERE AGAIN BUT I CAN'T SIT IDLE AND LET YOUR MISERABLE TRANSGRESSIONS GO UNDISCUSSED.  I FIGURED I COULD BE CONTENT JUST LURKING, TAKING IN THE SCENERY AND READING WHAT PEOPLE IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD HAD TO SHARE.  SO I TRIED TO DO JUST THAT AND YOU STUPID FUCKS WENT AND RUINED THAT FOR ME TOO.  I VIEWED THREE(3) PAGES IN THE COURSE OF MY VISIT.  3.  NOT 15.  BUT YOU'VE TAKEN IT UPON YOURSELVES, PERHAPS WITH THE HELP OF SITE CATALYST, TO DISABLE MY BACK BUTTON AND SOMEHOW RING UP 15 PAGES IN MY BROWSER HISTORY. 

I'M NOT SURE IF YOU'RE LOOKING TO GAME THE INVESTMENT COMMUNITY OR JUST RUIN THE VISITOR EXPERIENCE BUT I WISH YOU GOOD LUCK IN YOUR ENDEAVOR.  AND GOOD RIDDANCE.  FUCK YOU IN YOUR FUCKING FACE YOU FUCKTARDS. 

How do you eat your pizza:  folded, flat or with a fork and knife?
Submitted by danimass.

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Windows, Mac, Linux - What's your preference and why?
Submitted by ramblingsbymark.

very likely the worst QOTD ever.  i don't want to hear this question answered in real life and i'd actively work to keep my distance from the person making the inquiry.  seriously, i'd really like to see a job posting from sixapart for a new QOTD writer|selector.  this is pathetic. 

in the spirit of lemonade, i shall now regale you with a short story about my first exposure to computers.  the father of the family across the street owned a TV(and related junk) repair shop* and was handy with electronics.  'round about 1980-81, i reckon, the dad came home with a COMPUTERIZERING BOX that garnered much attention.  strangely enough, this new toy didn't come in a set of boxes with foam peanuts or bubble wrap to play with, he just pulled it out of the back of his truck and carried it inside.  the case still had smudge marks on the outside.  he had ordered the component parts and built this thing himself.  it was an APPLE ][.  by today's standards it was woefully inadequate.  it had no storage and anything you wanted it to do had to be written to memory and used while it was still on.  we all sat around the black and white monitor and marvelled at the POWER of basic programs. 

] 10 PRINT "YOUR MOM WEARS GRANNY PANTIES!" 
] 20 GOTO 10 
] RUN 

then the older brother decided that he had had enough with us doofuses and took over the box for 3 days.  he spent hours plotting graphing locations on the screen and wouldn't let us(his younger brother and i) get anywhere near it.  he had to tape a handwritten sign to the screen enumerating the horrible deaths you would be subject to if you turned the box off. after 2½ days he finally revealed his masterpiece - a full screen graphical rendering of a 20 × 20 pixel apple with the words APPLE ][ underneath.  again, the sign returned to the screen at night so his work could stay there for about a week.  he spent far more time admiring it than anyone else but i do recall being pretty impressed(and also a little slighted since, obviously, if we had been able to access the machine we could've done it too).  anyway, a few months later a 5¼" disc drive showed up and then we were able to play games.  wizardry was a huge hit for a while and i basically thought that was what computers were for  "I 9" ! 

anyway, in review, FUCK THE QUESTION OF THE DAY.  GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS.

 

*do these even exist anymore??  i get the feeling that TVs have become another engineering obsolescent item.  you either get a broken TV repaired|replaced via warranty or you just realize your penis is smaller than your neighbor who brays about his 83982935" diamond encrusted negative ionic clustering reality experience tube television and you go out to COSTCO and buy a new one.

What's your dream career? 
Submitted by Something.

supreme high oracle of the known earth

my daily duties would involve pontificating over flagons of kopi luwak coffee.  i would travel the world, much like caine but far more luxuriously, absorbing wisdom from the common man and demonstrating untold munificence.  i would possess nothing but be entitled to use|consume anything i desired.  my complete and unbridled freedom would lift me to another plane of human existence and even my simplest action would ameliorate the foibles of anyone graced with my presence.   a living, breathing amalgamation of the spiritual discipline of ghandi, the mental focus of a navy seal, and the healing touch of the divine shaman all the while commanding the riches of kuwaiti royalty to fund my largesse and share my glory with the unwashed masses.  this is a job for which i would bound out of bed every day.

What is your earliest memory? 
Submitted by Megan.

yet another weak qotd.  i suppose i ought to submit a few before i continue to deride the ones that show up.

anyway, RTROTQOTDing away here since i cannot distinguish a particular memory as my 'earliest' but i do have many early memories.

the earliest residence i can remember is 1208 adams street in eugene, oregon.  i suspect this was in the range of 2-4 years of age for me.  i recall seeing a motorcycle parked in our driveway, possibly owned by a friend.  recently parked here, the heat and oil worked together to make a swirly rainbow pattern on the chrome exhaust pipe.  i was mesmerized by the rainbow so i decided to touch it and burned a large area on my index finger.  i thought i had done something wrong so i kept my mouth shut despite the searing pain.  i remember having a large blue plastic cube with one open side, some sort of multi-purpose caddy|toy that i used to haul around various stuff...rocks, sand, cars, handfuls of greedily collected grass...at this particular time it was full of water so i managed to determine that this would help me.  i plunged my hand in and felt some relief.  the burn exacerbated the skin and the area swelled with fluid so i had a large blister bubble for a few days.  i remember pressing on the bubble and noting the fluidity and malleability of my own skin.  i think i spent many hours thinking of ways to replicate this on the family cats.  i never touched a rainbow again. 

sometime while living in that same house, my mother had some friends visiting.  they were all crowded in the living room around a small coffee table.  this table was an antique, with an ornate border and a large sheet of blue, mirrored glass.  the adults were all lowering their heads and snorting powder off this surface.  when i asked one of them what it was, they told me it was 'vitamins.'  stupid fucking hippies.

another time my friend aaron and i were in the semi-furnished basement.  the floor was laid with carpet squares epoxyed to the cement floor.  we decided that we were adventurers and began to blaze a path across the expanse of the basement by yanking the carpet squares up.  we probably pulled 30+ of these things up before our activity was discovered.  that's a paddlin'.  i still recall the noise that the tiles made as you pulled them away from the surface.  there was also a wonderful sense of gratification that accompanied the noise, both as part of the advance of our adventure and the actual sensation that reverberated up your arms when the tile separated from it's foam-like base.

other brief memories from this house:

• watching the 1976 olympics from Montreal
• staying up late enought to watch Saturday Night Live when it was brand new
• some kid in my neighborhood stealing my brand-new matchbox car

What do you do to get rid of a cold or flu? 

Submitted by ashenflowers.

i give it to someone else. 

while i'll have to admit i hate most of the qotds they do often scare up old memories so i think i will start my own category, RTROTQOTD - random tangent riffing off the question of the day.

in our first installment, i hearken back to the days of yore when i was just a wee lad, bright-eyed and bushy tailed*, a 21 year-old college student.  during the winter break, i had a lot of free time and spent the days playing basketball and whooping  it up.  one day i was playing hoops at a local school wearing my brand new nike hightops.  in the course of play i came down wrong on my ankle and sprained it rather seriously.  not the first time i had done this but definitely the first time doing so while wearing a PAIR OF CRAP SHOES THAT COST DAMN NEAR $100 AND DID NOTHING MORE THAN LOOK GOOD AND EXPLOIT THIRD WORLD LABOUR despite a design specifically intended to provide ankle support.  to make matters worse, the next day i awoke to find myself, in addition to having my mobility totally compromised, miserably sick.  with Berkeley completely deserted, i sat around feeling sorry for myself for several hours and then tapped my infinite pool of collegiate wisdom until i struck upon the BEST.  IDEA.  EVER.

having seen numerous, "Drink Guinness, it's good for you!" and "Guinness gives you strength!" advertisements, i decided the most logical thing to do would be to get roaring drunk on Guinness.  i'd be ship-shape in no time.  i had my friend drive me to a bar that, at the time, was relatively new and pretty far from campus.  he droppped me there and i proceeded to drink from about 3pm to 2am sitting on a stool at the bar by myself.  i know, suave as a motherfucker.  i ended up passing out facedown at the bar and was rousted by the bartender telling me the bar was closed.  i hobbled out the front door on my clubfoot and realized i now had to get myself home.  Berkeley does not have a lot of taxi traffic at any hour of the day, let alone at 2:15am.  that fact, compounded with my limited college budget and this being the era before everyone and their plumber's daughter's preschool teacher's cosmetologist's pet donkey had a cellphone put me in the mindset that i was going to hitchhike home.  i began to limp along trying to thumb it.  nobody would pick me up and i was being ignored.  i quickly put a stop to that by walking out into the middle of the road and trying to flag cars down.  some poor guy finally picked me up and the minute i sat down in the car, i went on a +50dB tirade about how everybody in Berkeley was a "fucking shitsack!!  DON'T EVEN PICK UP A CRIPPLED GUY!!"  i distinctly recall the look on his face.  fortunately, for him, the ride was a straight shot and only lasted about 5 minutes.  he dropped me off at my front door and while i attempted to string together a coherent sentence he drove off.  i yelled at his disappearing tailights "YOU SIR, ARE THE SAINT OF BERKELEY.  SAINT BERKELEY!!  ALL HAIL SAINT BERKELEY!!"  when i woke up the next day, i was still sick, possibly even more so than previously.  Guinness failed me.

* where "bright-eyed and bushy tailed" = "fat, drunk and stupid"

If you are going to dress up for Halloween, what will you be? Why? 
Submitted by Auweea.

long ago i decided that one does not reveal their halloween costume prior to the day of halloween.  i'm not telling and there you have it.  lest i wrest the title of "cold, black-hearted curmudgeon" from mantid.  i will regale you with the following story that is tangentially related to costumery.

my grandmother went to China in the 80s, she used to travel all over the world like some kind of jetsetter.  i remain deeply jealous to this day.  anyway, she brought back some gifts, one of which was a ridiculous hat.  this is the closest representative image i can find online.

so anyway, i went off to a summer daycamp when i was probably 8-9 years old.  one day they announced that we would be having a "crazy hat" contest the following day, "so everybody bring in your craziest hat and you might win a prize!"  i get home and tell my parents about the contest.  they immediately insisted that i would take the hat.  i take one look at this thing that i would NEVER normally wear under any circumstances(i mean, seriously, i was a boy scout and i enjoyed setting things on fire.  no self-respecting hoodlum would ever wear a hat like that.) and i decide that i will bring it to camp on my own terms.  since i was reasonably ashamed of this hat, i kept it under wraps, hiding it in my shirt all day.  this strange behavior elicited several probing inquiries into the mystery hat.  i deferred and just kept telling people to wait for the contest.  but this one kid wouldn't let the sleeping dog lie and he yanked my shirt around in a feeble attempt to grab the hat.  this is a good time to note that prior to going off to camp, i spent many hours on the couch watching the nascent WWF and really being absorbed with it.  anyway, i COMPLETELY LOST MY SHIT AND WENT BERSERK on this kid.  i absolutely throttled him and finished it off by leaping into the air and coming down on his prone body with both knees.  JIMMY FUCKING "SUPERFLY" SNUKA BIOTCH!!  the counselors all freaked out, rightfully, and immediately segregated me from the rest of camp.  they hauled me away and told me i wouldn't be participating in the contest.  hmmm, you don't say? anyway, i remember sitting on this picnic table bench far away from everyone and looking over to see my "cat hat" sitting in the dirt off to the side.  i was pretty pleased with myself for both humiliating this kid and not having to wear that hat.

 

the end

What was your very first job? 
Submitted by Laurel.

i don't know that my job really had any sort of formal title so i'll go with "the guy who came in over the lunch hour and relieved the security guard at the rodin sculpture garden for 3 hours at the leland j. stanford jr. museum of art so he could go smoke pot in the woods."  i was 14 or 15 and my day usually started with 2+ hours sitting on the couch watching whitesnake and mötley crüe videos.  then, around 10:30a or so, i would motivate, get cleaned up(the 14 or 15 year old version of this), and hike up to the bus stop.  i would ride the bus over to the university and show up around 12p.  i sat at a desk in the gallery just inside the rear doors of the museum that led out to the garden.  i had a TV behind the desk and mostly just sat there for 3 hours.  it was painfully slow and people never really talked to me.  sometimes i would get bored and sprint(for amusement, not fitness) through the galleries.  i always thought it was kind of cool that i was goofing off amongst millions of dollars worth of art and nobody knew. 

down at the other end of the museum they had a full-blown sarcophagus with a mummy inside which was pretty cool.  also, there was a painting that some guy tried to steal by slicing it out of the frame with a razor.  in doing so he managed to cut his hand and ducked behind a large display in order to roll the painting up and hide it on his person as well as tear off part of his shirt and loosely bandage his hand.   there were drops of dried blood on the back of the display which i thought was pretty cool.

i think i made something ridiculous, like $7.50 an hour, which was pretty good for 1985 when the minimum wage was probably $3.25.  so i managed to save some money that summer.  then i went to a party, got drunk and crashed doug burrows' scooter.  i had to pay him $500 to repair the damage so that pretty much wiped out any money i had made in those tedious hours at the desk.

What are 5 things you'd like to accomplish in the next 5 years?

1. get that fucking cat picture off the home page of vox
2. retire
3. retire
4. retire
5. make sweet sweet love to scarlett johansson