JamesSavik

There's an old joke that says that it wasn't radium or polonium that killed Marie Curie (aka Madam Curie): it was a decades old fruitcake that had been gifted and regifted around the world.

All my best to Jan- a great editor and an even better guy. James

I used to keep on around the shop to drive nails with in case I mislaid my hammer.

I have a recipe for fruitcake that removes the candied cherries and stuff that makes it suck. Oh yeah.. I add choclate chips too. However it is no longer a fruitcake. It is more properly called a nutcake which is, IMHO, much better than ordinary fruitcake and entirely appropriate for me to make.

marauding orcs start laying waste... Yeah, that always livenes things up.

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!" Excellent quote from Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb BTW- what do shrinks know? They talk to crazy people all day. Just tell her to STFU and give you her best drugs. That's how I put mine in her place.

It just ain't the age of Aquarius anymore.

I drove a 1979 280Z for 4 years. It was the one and only stick I ever drove. Preparing for it I played a lot of a driving video game in an arcade with a 5 speed overdrive just like the Z car. I guess you can call it cheating. I prefer to think of it as learning in a simulator rather than inflicting that experience on my car and the public. No problems with the stick. The car was ~7 years old when I got it. It was more of a mechanical hobby than reliable ride.

The best comedian ever: Sam Kinnison. They used to call him the heavy metal of comedy. His routines were characterized by intense, angry rants and punctuated by his trademark scream. Kinnison was close to Rodney Dangerfield, Rosanne and Chris Rock. He often appeared in a supporting role in his friends work. Sam died in a car crash in April 1992- way too soon. A putz like Will Ferrell seems to stink forever like a pot of bad clams. Go figure. You kids too young to have seen Sam live out to look him up. Sam's Site After seeing real comdey, you'll want to feed Will Ferrell to the angry raccoon too.

I have been a hard-core geek for a very long time. I put my first computer together from a heathKIT. It had a cassette tape drive, 4 K of RAM and only spoke Z-80 assembler. I can use a soldering iron like a ninja blade. I was on the net when it had three nodes and the one domain was dot MIL. In 1987 I wrote a letter to Trent Lott and told him that Gore's NREN bill was worthwhile and he would look good supporting it. In 1988 Mississippi's big four unies got their first internet feeds. I can write FORTRAN, assembler, Pascal, Delphi, C, C++, a little Java and COBOL (but only at gunpoint). I speak IOS like a second language. I can terminate copper or fiber cable in the dark in parts of buildings that you don't want to know about. I've done everything in the business and done it successfully and now that I don't want to work regular, I've got more consulting business than God could keep up with. I don't do 1337 because those of us that actually are elite don't have to tell anybody. Only pygmy pricked little internut troll poser boyz that couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel do that crap. All 1337 really stands for is gomer and the idiots who use it are too stupid to know.

Methinks we are kindred misanthropic spirits. w00t was today's urban dictionary word of the day. Huzzah!? What are you in the British navy???

Last year I was forced to watch the movie Elf by my knieces. I managed not to claw my eyes out but only barely. There was one bright spot in the movie: when the racoon jumped on Will Ferrell's dumb ass. I could have watched THAT for hours. Raccoon eats Will Ferrell

LOL... a wide stance. Last frame should be exchange of handcuffs.

I hate Will Ferrell. His brand of idiot humor just grates on my nerves. I can't really think of anything he has done that isn't idiotic. He should be neutered so it won't spread.

Yeah, well, that's amazing. Celebrities often annoy me. Especially when they come out and feel compelled to act like a f*ck-up. These people often confirm bigots worst opinions of gay people by their behavior when it has nothing to do with being gay and everything to do with being a putz. Just don't be a putz and we won't have a problem Jodie. Welcome to the club.

Same here. One of the really nighmarish things about HIV is the possibility of having it without knowing and infecting someone you care about (assuming that you care about your sex partners- something that is not a given except in people with character-like most folks on this board). If I found out that I had given it to someone, it would destroy me.

I imagine Seth as a cross between a skater and a country boy. Sure he wears a cap and drives a little truck, but when he takes it off, his hair is long in a skater-cut and hangs over his eyes. What do you think? Character description is not nearly as important as how the reader imagines the character...

My favorites are The Quarry and Tales from the Quarry but all of his stuff is great. Sudden Storm is great but it will make you cry.

It is one thing to have a choice: to know that someone is infected and have the option of safe sex or walking away. Unfortunately, this is the exception and not the rule. Unless you are very careful, or even if you are very careful, you could be have sex with someone who is HIV+ and is either unaware or in denial.

Is Driver inching out of retirement? I sure hope so. Anything We Want, Chap. 1

My McFavorite is the number 5 breakfast combo: Sausage & biscuit, hash brown substitute large coke for coffee. I'm allergic to eggs which makes breakfast difficult.

When AIDS first appeared, here in Mississippi peoples attitudes were, like every social trend, it won't come here for another twenty years. Unfortunately for a lost generation, they were dead wrong. People started dying in 85. By 1990 the numbers were actually alarming. In 82 & 83, the HIV virus hadn't even been isolated yet. It acted like a virus but science had never dealt with a retro-virus before. CDC nor anyone else in the medical community knew enough about HIV/AIDS to state anything definitive about it. It appeared to be a virus. It appeared to be sexually transmitted. It appeared to have a long incubation period before the immune system collapsed. It appeared that those who were infected were contagious from four to ten years before before they got sick. However- at the time no one actually had the smoking gun. Various entities had pieces of the puzzle but bureaucratic rivalries and wrangling by Nobel prize hungry scientists kept many of these institutions from working together or even sharing data. No one in the various health bureaucracies would risk their reputation by making recommendations or issuing guidelines. In 1984 I worked with an all volunteer team at the University of Southern Mississippi to create a mathematical model of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The results were frightening. Given a geometric growth rate and an average seven year contagious latency period, our model showed that by the 1990s, infections with HIV/AIDS would be in the 10's of millions in the United States alone. We had difficulty publishing our findings. Many journals wanted nothing to do with AIDS, some commented that it was alarmist while others accused us of fear mongering. I left USM in June of 1984 and the results were finally published by a European Infectious Diseases Journal in early 1985. Worse yet, opportunists like Pat Robinson and Jerry Falwell were preaching that HIV/AIDS was the righteous wrath of an angry God inflicted on homosexuals who had no one to blame but themselves. Culturally AIDS could not have happened at a worse time. The sexual liberation of the sixties came full circle in the seventies. Gay people were more accepted than at anytime before. Record numbers of people were leaving the closet with no intention of ever going back. Part of that liberation was a permissiveness about sex that by todays standards is shocking. Every big city (and even some smaller ones) had gay bars, caf

Yes- unfortunately I've known a number of people who have passed away from AIDs. Rather than address this here, I'm going to blog about it.

Every author has an agenda. A measure of that author's craft is how well he disguises it and allows the reader to figure it out on their own without the author resorting to removing their shoe and banging on the lectern.

I like playing in the mud with my trucks. It's a good thing too because trucks and mud are the only things we have in abundance in the Federal Republic of Dixie.