Boviosity!

Happy Aloha-lloween!

OK, first off, sorry the Sirius that comes with my DishNetwork doesn't feature a Halloween music track. We had one last year with Bellsouth, and it was excellent. So it's loud Hawaiian music for mood music in the Jones household.

First group: my little girl (who I had sent out the door not 1 minute earlier with her mom) and the neighbor kids. Excellent use of fake feather boa and sparkly pants to indicate rock stardom. One neighbor girl had a professional-quality witch makeup job, and the other was resplendent in an angel costume.

3 candy bars each!

Second group: the Shy Princess. Lovely girl. Where are her friends?

2 candy bars. Get some friends!

Third group: this is more like it! A devil girl, witch girl, and two princess girls all yucking it up and yelling "Trick or Treat!" as if their candy depended on it. It sure does, girls. It sure does.

3 candy bars.

It's been about 20 minutes since the last group. Disturbing. We have lots of kids in the neighborhood. Maybe they're all going to one of the local church Hall(oween|ellujah) events? Bloody God-botherers!

UPDATE 7:15
One group of two dejected looking girls, one kind of cute in some kind of appliance-box costume that must have looked great in her mind's eye. I didn't ask her what she was.

3 candy bars just to get the candy out of the house.

UPDATE 7:26
Group of about 8 kids featuring a Jones household first: a kid with a cellphone plastered to his ear holding out his bag for candy. (His comment to me was a nice touch, though: "I bet you think I'm too old for this sort of thing, huh?")

Nice bunch, included a couple of little kids. Generic out-of-the-(non-appliance)-box costumes but whatta ya want, Martha Stewart's in jail.

3 candy bars each!

UPDATE 8:28
Hmph. That was it. Kids are home and eating their single piece of candy before bed.

Porphyrogene!

Just a quick post to let y'all know I'm still alive. I've been working on tech week of my play this week - opening night is tomorrow! I've been working on this since the start of the year. I keep saying my next adaptation will not take so many months - but I guess it's inevitable. Gotta give those ideas time to cook.

Atlanta-area readers, come on out!

I'll keep telling it

Joke which I'm still bitter about it tanking even now after almost 30 years since it happened, and which I sometimes tell people about in the hopes that somebody will tell me it's funny, although it doesn't really matter what they think because I will always think it's funny.

I was in a room full of church youth group friends. Our peer Kay walked into the room. Several people all greeted her, in the southern manner, "Hey, Kay." I was about the 6th person she encountered, so I deadpanned, "Hey, Kay. Way may say nay lay."

Man, did nobody ever laugh.

Aber Beklecker Nicht...

In case you missed it like I almost did, a Taranto reader has proposed a new terror alert warning system for John Kerry to consider:

Level 1: Ennui
Level 2: Comme ci, comme ça
Level 3: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
Level 4: Regardez!
Level 5: Zut alors!

As the French would say, I heard the hell outta that. Oh, and, Frank, buddy, I can just hear you reporting a Level 4.

And, just to be utterly gratuitously offensive,

Level 6: Allah Akbar!

One More Time!

OK, I finally found the offending member and have cast it out. Comment away. Please. C'mon, I've been putting musical chum out there for the last couple days - doesn't anybody want to challenge my Yes fan-boydom?

Sorry, I Can't Take It

Unbelievable. 15 comment spams in under 2 hours. I give up. I'm putting blacklist back in and will try to fix the problem after Poe. Sorry.

Holy Freakin' Crap

5 comment spams in the hour since I removed MT-Blacklist. I'll try to weather the storm, but this is insane.

Spammers really are the scum of the earth, aren't they?

Comments Problem - SORTA FIXED

To those of you who have been trying to comment and gotten blocked, thanks for reading, thanks for trying to comment, and thanks for your patience. It's related to something in comment-spam blocking. I'm trying to track down the error and if I can fix it quickly it'll be done before noon on Friday, 10/22/04. If I can't do it quickly it might have to wait until after the run of my play.

UPDATE: I copped a blacklist.txt file from Joanne Jacobs (thanks, Joanne - should I have asked permission?) because it looked like the blacklist was choking on a regex in my blacklist. No joy.

UPDATE: Commenting is on. I removed mt-blacklist for now. I'll chance the breast-enlargement spams for YOU, my reader.

Note the singular.

Stealth Yes Reference

Hello, and welcome to Stealth Yes Reference. Today's stealth Yes reference is from National Review Online (WARNING! Explicit content!):

This is one of those songs from one of those albums that drives non-Yes fans batty.

"Tormato" has been described as a drunken mess. The only part I really can't stand is the baby-talk on Circus of Heaven. But the song "Release Release" is Jon Anderson's bliss in full flight. Needless to say, I love it.

Who Knew?

Hm. According to my XM Radio receiver, which I have no reason to doubt, "Making Plans for Nigel" is not a lesser Men At Work single; it's a somewhat lesser (but not as lesser as if it had been Men At Work) XTC single.

That is all.

Coming Soon to a TV Movie Near You

Scary story for Halloween: Girl Says Bones Belong To Ghost

A Russell County [Georgia] fifth-grader is convinced bones found in her home last weekend belong to a mysterious friend who told her about being chopped up years ago.

Stephanie said a black girl in a white dress started visiting her room when she was about 5 years old. The girl was friendly, but she told Stephanie a horrible story.

"She told me that somebody put her in the floor," Stephanie said. "She said he had a mask on, and that he chopped her up. She didn't know who the person was, because he had a mask on."

Great line from a Sheriff's Lt. on the case:

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to investigate a ghost?" he said Monday.

Read the whole thing; there's a lot more atmosphere and some great quotes from the kid's great-grandmother.

(Link via Romenesko)

I Am Grateful that There Have Been No Air Disasters in Recent Weeks

I am very grateful that there was no air disaster within the last few weeks. I was intrigued by the promos for the new ABC television series, "Lost," which revolves around the survivors of an airliner crash. However, I've been burned before, when TV events such as this were preempted out of sympathy for real-life victims. The most notorious was, of course, the several weeks delay of the debut of Fox's exciting series "24", which takes place in a counter-terrorist unit. Unfortunately, September 11 delayed that for several weeks. And before that, a "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" episode involving a school shooting was tragically delayed by the events at Columbine High School in Colorado. However, there has been no major air disaster since the Russian airliners went down several weeks ago. Fortunately, that was not recent or close to home enough to interfere.

(In case it's not clear, this is a humor posting. This is an article I sent to the Daily Probe which got edited to make it much, much less funny. You be the judge.)