Here's the Mrs and myself all dressed up as David Bowie (she as the Let's Dance Bowie, I as the Ziggy Stardust version), on our way out the door for a Halloween party last night.

The face makeup, painted nails, big thick wig, vinyl pants and fur boa made for a busy night. I spent most of it making sure I didn't accidentally touch my face (even though I was sweating like a fiend) lest I ruin all my wife's lovely cosmetic work. And, since we overestimated the average 25-35 year old's familiarity with how Ziggy Stardust dressed, I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that I really wasn't dressed as a transvesite hooker - well, not directly, anyway.

My wife looked sharp, though.

Giblets is not satifsfied. Giblets wants vengeance.

Apparently there's not even enough troops available to put together a decent campaign commercial, and Bush's people have had to start cloning soldiers (the Photoshop way).

Come on guys, at least take the time to shade one of the clone's skin a bit, or break the groups up a bit, or something. That kind of hackery wouldn't even pass on the Photoshop Phriday boards.

Today I did what I couldn't do yesterday; I bent over and accepted 451 spam emails in the past 24 hours - a plurality of them offering me a free G5 Macintosh computer.

In a piece about the miseries of air travel, Skot at Izzle pfaff gives us this little gem:

"One of the leveling effects of any kind of downward technological creep is a certain dismay in the fact that while you--the regular joe--suddenly get to enjoy the benefits of [whatever], you also suddenly realize that all of the other regular joes get to enjoy it too. This leads to resentment in that what you expected to be kind of cool and thrilling--a big-screen TV, a hotsy computer--is just that, but it's diluted by the fact that the dickhead over there in thongs gets to enjoy it too. It's orthogonal to misery loves company; think more like self-indulgence hates competition."

Self-indulgence hates competition. An aphorism I can relate to, pathetically.

It is now 4:35pm. Since 10:00pm last night, I have received 280 spam emails, and I will not be surprised if I hit 400 for the day. This happens every day.

I can't close the email accounts that get the most junk mail because they are business-related - and so I can't put 'good sender' filters on them because I don't know who my customers are ahead of time. I do have automated filters set up to catch stuff, and they do a pretty good job. But because the filtering often mistakes good mail for bad, I still have to scan through the junk to make sure I'm not missing anything important. False positives pretty much defeat the point of having a filter at all. I can only sigh and sift through the endless drug and porn emails to try to find good messages.

Someone needs to come up with a new solution; email is fundamentally broken.

Update: 5:00pm, 300 junk emails.

Stay tuned for the exciting final tally!

Update: 10:00pm, 374 junk emails! While I fell short of my 400 prediction, having a reason to mark the arrival of each spam as a step towards a goal, instead of simply feeling helpless disgust as they pile up did make the evening a little more fun.

And since I typed that last paragraph, 9 more have arrived. Grand total: 383. The polls are now closed.

Maybe we could get rid of the Electoral College system and replace it with one where we all vote for the law firm representing the candidate of our choice. The firm with the most votes gets to bring its voter fraud cases before the state Supreme Courts, and the losing firms have to defend.

...and he wants you to vote. He tells you why in his video for Mosh. Doubt that'll get much time on MTV.

via Pandagon