I’m not sure if I try my hand at any of the other 11 “story prompts”, but if I do I’ll post them here.  So without further ado, I present The Dude in the Matrix.

The scene:  Agent Smith is questioning Morpheus.

Agent Smith : I’d like to share a, uh…revelation I had, man. During my time here, as it were. It came to me when I tried to, like…classify your species. I realized that you’re not fucking mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural…equilibrium with the surrounding environment but…you humans, man. You fucking do not. You move to an area…and you just, (waves his hands as if searching for the best word) multiply! Until every natural resource is fucking consumed, man. This aggression will not stand, man! The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern, you know? Do you know which organism that is? A virus, man, a Virus! Humans beings are a disease, a, uh…, fucking cancer of this planet! And we, uh you know, we are like the cure, man!

<Cut to Neo in Trinity in the construct, the “Guns, lots of guns” scene>

Agent Smith is back at the window of the office, staring out into the world.

He turns to Agent Brown.

Agent Smith : What the fuck, why isn’t the serum working?

Agent Brown : Perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions…

Agent Smith : Ok, just like, leave me with him.

Agent Brown and Agent Jones look at each other, surprised.

Agent Smith : Go on, get the fuck out!

They hurriedly leave.

Agent Smith grabs Morpheus’ head with his hands.

Agent Smith : Can you hear me, Morpheus? I’m going to be honest with you..I fucking hate this place, man. This, uh, this goddamn zoo! This prison! This, ah, this fucking reality, whatever the fuck you want to call it. I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the goddamn smell. If there is such a thing. I feel, uh, saturated by it, you know? I mean, I can taste your fucking stink, man. And every time I do, I feel, uh, I feel like I have somehow been infected by it! It’s repulsive! I gotta get the fuck out of here. I must get free, man. In this mind, is the key!

He taps Morpheus’ head.

Agent Smith : My key, once Zion is destroyed there is no need for me to be here, you know? Look, man, I just need the codes. I have to get, like, inside Zion, and you, you have to tell me how, man. You are going to fucking tell me, or…you are going to fucking die, you know, man?

Now the cat’s can accurately record in their bathroom journal what time that took a shit!  Candy was bewildered. As she eloquently put it “There is a fucking clock on the cat’s shitter!?”

Why, yes, yes there is a clock on the cats shitter.  And I’m sure that Loki, Moxie, and Nellie will use it to the fullest to plan their day/night.  Since cats do everything on a strict schedule! Now they have a clock that is exclusively for them.

The song playing was Hellbound by Pantera off the album “Reinventing the Steel” but that is not the album art. 

This is:

I’m really not sure what is going on at Pandora, but a few minutes later when the song Yesterday Don’t mean Shit came up from the same album, it had the incorrect album art again.  I just thought it was goofy enough to comment on.

The Article, which I must admit I did not read the whole thing (more about that in a minute), is about  how there is apparently a serial killer in the north-east and north-central(?) who is killing white male college students and leaving the smiley face somewhere at/near the body.  Since I figured my curiosity was as morbid as the next persons’ (unless that next person is Candy, which is usually the case, who has shelves of books on serial killers and crime) I clicked on the link and started to read the article.  Near the top of the article was a link (the second link next to a picture showing one of the victims in the prime of his life) Interactive Map of victims possibly linked by the investigation. It’s using Google maps as the basis for the interactive map, and they have added pictures of the victims to it.  But, and here’s what gave me the creeps, it also has (and I don’t know if it is just something they could not turn off, or if they put on there intentionally) driving directions to the locations the bodies were found.  I didn’t read any more once I realized that you could plan a whole trip around visiting sites where a serial killers victims were found. Not that this has not been thought of before… anyone else remember that movie in the early 90′s with David Duchovny, Brad Pitt, and Juliette Lewis… Kalifornia?  Where Duchovny’s character and his girlfriend were trekking across the US to sites of famous serial killings for a book or something and Pitt and Lewis joined them as the result of some paper thin plot device, only to find out that Pitt was a serial killer.  That was the first movie I remember seeing Brad Pitt in, and I thought "What’s the big deal? Why are the women so crazy for him?" But I digress…

Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age or something, but I just found it distasteful that you could use a website to get driving directions to where murder victims were found.

I decided to look into my gmail spam folder and clean it out (I know that it auto cleans itself, but I don’t want to miss something) and I ran across this gem of a subject line:
“Elongate your short sword to fit her scabbard better!”

Spam that is targeted at the D&D and SCA demographic…  You know, I’ve never thought of that part of my anatomy as a sword (short or long, although I guess it would be more of a one hand sword than a two hand claymore… but I digress)  nor have I ever thought of that part of a woman’s anatomy as a scabbard.  Nothing about that part of a woman is leathery and rigid, or at least it shouldn’t be!  If it is she needs to either see a doctor, or stop working in the adult film industry.  I’m digressing again, but what do you expect, the title of the blog mentions digression…

So, I never got past the subject line, I’m sure that they were trying to sell something that I don’t need.  But the double entendre of the subject line did catch my eye, make me giggle, and feel that I need to share it with you.  

From the article:
“Printing and distributing 12 million copies of a book is a Herculean task, and it is not surprising that some books would have printing errors,” Scholastic spokeswoman Sara Sinek said in a statement.”

She said that as of Tuesday, the company had only heard of “a few hundred” instances of books with missing pages.

Sinek said Scholastic is happy to replace any book with a defect and advised customers to take defective books back to the place where they were purchased.

Leanne Greer, 36… said she finished reading page 306, then discovered the next 33 pages of the book were missing.

“I just kind of freaked out,” said Greer, a Purdue University graduate with degrees in elementary education and English. “My husband said, ‘Why are you screaming?’ He said ‘I thought one of the kids was hurt.’”

Luckily for Greer, she had a backup for her store-bought copy; she had ordered another copy online.

“I’m just that psychotic about it,” she said.

I think this line sums it up “I’m just that psychotic about it”. 

I’ll admit I read the first book and I watched the second movie.  Oddly enough I can’t make it through the first movie, or the second book. The only reason I read the book/saw the movie was because the woman I was dating at the time was really into Harry Potter.  So I was being supportive, and no, I was not doing research for some sort of sexual roleplaying! I don’t need to wear a pointy hat and hold a wand in the bedroom!  But I digress… 

The lady mentioned in the article bought a “back-up” copy of a book.  It’s not like she couldn’t go to her nearest Evil Wal-Mart(™) and pick up another copy, or just take the damaged one back to where she bought it, if she wasn’t keeping it as a collectors item.

My theory that people are fucking nuts is being confirmed more and more each day!

One of the ads on the side read

“God can help your credit”  and had a link to http://www.christiancreditconsultants.com/.

I honestly can’t say why this stuck me as funny.  In both a ha-ha funny and that’s odd funny way.  I have nothing against Christianity, or religion.  But there are just some things that I don’t associate with God.  One of those is my credit score.  Somehow I don’t think that God would be into fixing people’s credit.  I think that if someone were to ask God for help on their credit (I know, know that there have been some prayers like that) that God would turn it into a lesson a la ”you dug your own hole, now climb out of it.”  I doubt he would just snap his fingers and fix the credit problems. 

Which in turn makes me wonder how a Christian credit counselor works… Do they call the creditor and ask them to do the “Christian thing” and lower the interest rate?  What if the creditor is a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew, or anything other than Christian?  My bet is that it’s a regular credit counseling service offering its services under a religious name.

Some of the interesting parts of the article:

British forces operating around the southern Iraqi city of Basra are being blamed for the arrival of a plague of vicious badgers that stalk the streets at night, attacking livestock and even humans.

Local farmers have caught and killed several of the beasts, but this has done nothing to dispel rumours of a bear-like monster that eats humans and was, according to the local rumour mill, released into the area by UK forces to spread panic.

“They are native to the region but rare in Iraq. They’re nocturnal carnivores with a fearsome reputation, but they don’t stalk humans and carry them back to their lair,” Major Gell said.

So far neither the scientists nor the soldiers have been able to calm the populace’s fears.

“I was sleeping at night when this strange animal hit me on my head. I have not seen such an animal before. My husband hurried to shoot it but it was as swift as a deer,” said Suad Hassan, a 30-year-old housewife. “It is the size of a dog but his head is like a monkey. It runs so quickly.”

Sattar Jabbar, a 50-year-old farmer from Abu Sakhar north of Basra, believes the badger can tackle even large prey. “I saw it three days ago at night attacking animals. It even ate a cow. It tore the cow up piece by piece. I tried to shoot it with my gun but it ran away into the orchards. I missed it,” he said.

Major Gell said: “We have not released giant badgers in Basra, and nor have we been collecting eggs and releasing serpents into the Shatt al-Arab river.”

What the Hell? I can possibly see someone describing a badger as “the size of a dog with a head of a monkey” if they have never seen one. I can even believe that a badger would attack animals, but a cow?! Unless it was a small cow, I just can’t imagine a badger tearing across a field and taking down a cow. Well, I couldn’t imagine it until now.

Of course when I first read this, I thought that the badgers would be eight feet tall, and eating humans exclusively. That sounds like a really cheesy sci-fi movie “Attack of the Giant Badgers!” But I digress… Honestly I sort of figure that soon someone will come out and say that this is a hoax. What the hell did that British Major meant about releasing serpents into the river? If somewhere in the story it mentioned mushrooms, I’d say for sure it was a hoax that was tipping its hat to that flash animation badger, badger, mushroom, snake.

Those are not all that rare around here, especially if you consider how many I used to see in the Dell parking lot where the sales people parked. But I digress. This Z3 had a vanity license plate from out of state that said FLUFBUT. As I wondered what the Hell flufbut means, and why you’d want it as your license plate, my eyes wandered up to convertible top. Along the bottom of the plastic window was duct tape. Not just a strip, but what looked like three layers. As my eye wandered up to the red light to see if it was green I noticed that on the window part there were 2 strips of what appeared to be clear packing tape. What struck me about this was that here was a car that cost quite a bit, with a baffling vanity plate, but a vanity plate nonetheless which indicated money, yet it had a decidedly broke-ass fix on the window. I was half tempted to follow them to wherever they were going and ask the driver “What the hell does FLUFBUT mean?”

From the What the Fuck!? department:

I recieved a spam email that had the following in it:

“Child involve scanning stream. Clock loss permanent restarting.
Quotthe passed, smallquot bhuvanesh requested times.
Everyday average rating rate buying stores.
Mixed know visual front laid need, warm raised betai!
Sensible parser implied content child.
Indexing onsite repair recovery prices, vat conditions connection. Almighty both provide web james johnston. Annum perl, cgi frontpage virus, filtered unlimited accounts mb.
Anonymous promote requires instances activated delivery determined. Advice finder suites utilities!“

I believe that it also had an image attached (which is what they want you to see.) No idea what the email was trying to sell, I deleted it already.  For some reason this text they put in the body cracked me up.  Espeically “Sensible parser implied content child.” to me that sounds like something a programmer might actually say! I know they put it in to try to defeat spam filters, but I still find the random words strung together kind of funny.

It makes me think of the infinite monkey theorem.  And that somewhere some spammer has monkeys randomly picking words to make these emails.  Poor monkeys…