It’s about this cold, detached, online “connection” thing. Does it really bring people together or does it just make us think so? A friend of mine—yes, someone whom I know in real life—recently posted his addendum to one of those bulletin surveys making its way through myspace (which, by the way, is a messy, clunky, slow website, but I digress), and the bulletin asked people to semi-anonymously reveal how many of their “friends” they had actually met in real life. Only one of those people had actually met all of his friends. All 121 of them. Now I can’t say how close he is to these people but I can speculate on the fact that 79 of the 80 people on that bulletin had not actually ever been in the same room as a fair amount of the people on their lists. And I mean brick and mortar room, not chat room.

So Pope Benedict XVI unwinds listening to an iPod, huh? Okay Catholics, make my AAPL stock rise. 🙂

I received 33 e-mail spams yesterday. Three of them the mail filter missed, and the other 30 were automatically placed in the Junk Mail folder. My thought is, if you’re going to send me unsolicited buik e-mail, at least use something halfway resembling grammar. I don’t respond well to phrases like, “Me and Dre had sat with himsrqfkov kicked it and had a chat with him.” Also, if spellings like “0ffffer,” “0nlllline,” L000king,” and “clllickk,” are supposed to get past the mail filter and trick me into believing in your product, it ain’t working.

Web sites that play sound with them. Either audio files or MIDI files. They give you no warning and frequently play loud and/or obnoxious sounds. And they usually have nothing to do with the content of the offending page(s). Frequently I catch myself asking, “where the hell did that sound come from?” Obnoxious web designers out there, do me this favor: save the sounds for multimedia files. Or at least let us turn them off. Or at least give us warning. Or at the very least, try to use good sounds that contribute to the web page (is that even possible?).

CAR SALESMAN
(to a customer inepecting an SUV)
Yeah, the whole Bronco line is being discontinued. We’re trying to get rid of that whole fugitive-on-the-run image. This baby is called the Escape.

It was a lot of fun. I only got to shake their hands and present them with a copy of the movie, but it was a good experience nonetheless. They seem like nice people. And they support biodiesel. That Darryl Hannah, she’s a smart one. She’s well-versed in the facts on biodiesel. It’s too bad that we didn’t get her to appear in the doc or at least narrate. But it is what it is and I wouldn’t change it one bit. All of the crew worked so hard and did a great job.

It has come to my attention that… Doesn’t an opening line like that carry a certain weight with it? I mean, when has someone ever started a positive note with “it has come to my attention?” “It has come to my attention that someone has been donating money to the Save the Children Fund?” “It has come to my attention that the weather in Los Angeles is constantly mild?” “It has come to my attention that Santa Claus is coming to town?” Isn’t that rather like saying, “I regret to inform you that your baby boy is healthy and alert?” Good potential for comic misunderstanding.

It’s good to be [the title]. Even driving in Denver is so much more relaxed. You can actually get somewhere around here on surface streets - there isn’t a traffic light every two blocks. And the snow is nice. But the cold is not, especially when your house thermostat is set to 64 degrees and your room is on the top floor.

I can’t say as of right now I’m particularly looking forward to returning to Los Angeles. I don’t have school, I don’t have a job, so I don’t have too much to do. But perhaps in a couple weeks I’ll be ready to leave Denver.