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falling over itself in a rush
Wednesday, June 26 2002I don't know if there is anything quite as terrifying as an American Congress falling over itself in a rush to amend our constitution, particularly to preserve a line added to the Pledge of Allegiance under the gun of McCarthyism. Then again, what does it matter? The constitution is now routinely regarded by the executive branch with the sort of disdain that led one infamous historical figure to describe a signed agreement as "a scrap of paper."
The day was hot and humid, though never particularly sunny owing to the continual presence of constipated thunderstorms. I use the term "constipated" because the storms rumbled and farted for hours but dropped almost no rain whatsoever.On Ray's recommendation, Gretchen and I watched the 1974 movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore on videotape tonight. I was so struck by the naturalness of the acting and rich textures of seemingly random details-of-action that it was difficult not to slip into the delusion that it had been made by a brilliant group of film students in the 1990s.When Gretchen and I were watching American Idol, I came to a realization: though a disproportionate number of the 30 people picked by the judges are black, the subset of those being elected by viewer votes are disproportionately white. Obviously this reflects the whiteness of the audience, who (as in all other things American) seem to be slightly more concerned about the race of the people they vote for than their manifest talents. Indeed, on tonight's episode, we even saw the value of duplicating the look of a Backstreet Boy, evidently still a useful trick in appealing to the viewers in Nebraska who haven't yet heard that the Backstreet Boys are back on the street. In AJ's case, the pencil-thin lines of facial hair clearly counted for more than his talent. As for Gretchen's favorite, Justin, I kept being distracted by the light reflecting from the thin ridge of cartilage remaining in the aftermath of his nose job. Though not entirely white, Justin was nonetheless white enough to come in at number one.
Tonight I downloaded Mozilla 1.0, the new open source web browser. I have to say I am extremely impressed with its behavior so far. It seems to render pages at least as fast as Internet Explorer on my machine, and (better yet) it launches pop-up windows without any of the usual IE delays (a real problem when browsing the web these days).
On a somewhat related note, when I browse the web these days in search of links to things mentioned in my writing, I do my best to provide links to sites having real content and a minimum of advertising (particularly pop-ups). Sometimes my success is greater than other times. As I've mentioned before, usually my best results in Google come when I throw some word like "treacle," "vapid," or "banal" in with my searches. Similar methods can be used to vastly improve the quality of your porn search results.
On and off throughout the day, I applied what might be the "finishing touches" to the painting I'd begun at Gretchen's parents' cabin in Maryland.[REDACTED]
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