Happy Fourteenth Birthday. I hope it's a good one, and I hope you have a wonderful year.

This story needs no explanation or punchline from me.

I know it's called "dentaphobia" but first of all, that should translate as "fear of teeth". I'm not afraid of teeth, my own or anyone else's.

And come to that, I'm not actually afraid of dentists. Most dentists that I've known have been perfectly fine people. Upon meeting a dentist I don't get all scared and run off or anything. They're not generally scary.

What I'm actually afraid of is having someone poke around my mouth with sharp metal objects. Personally, I think this is an entirely reasonable fear. It's not irrational to be afraid of something like that. I'd be afraid of, say, torturers, too, if they had sharp pointy objects with which they were going to poke around in my mouth.

So what we need is a word that means "fear of people poking sharp metallic objects in your mouth" because the current word just doesn't fit the bill...

I've known about the Dharma the Cat site for a while. I have an interest in all sorts of things, and a while back I did some research on Buddhism (not just on the web, but also reading a few books because, hey, any excuse to buy a book, y'know?). Anyway, today my best friend recommend the site to me again (she's not a Buddhist, but she's been studying Buddhism). Go visit. Even if you're not Buddhistly inclined, the comic is pretty entertaining.

A small note about this odd category. It's for message-in-a-bottle type notes, for things I want to say just to get them off my chest, for obscure and strange messages that would be recognizable only by me (and maybe the person I'm writing about, but even then, they may not guess and are highly unlike to ever read them).

So if you look at the category page and wonder what the heck (or stronger terms), that's what it's about. If it makes no sense to you, or you have no idea who/what I'm on about, that's just what is supposed to happen.

Got a spam in my filter today that had the title "Fit in your Bikini!"

My gosh, they're not just spammers, they're miracle workers! Not only will they get me a bikini (I don't think they exist in my size, and why on earth should they?), they'll make me fit into it! Wow!

But the next spam made me feel even better. It was entitled, "You're Approved."

Well, isn't that nice. They don't even know that I'll soon be fitting into a bikini, either, so they must just approve of me as a person. Gosh. Stuff like that makes you all warm inside, doesn't it?

It's nice when spammers care enough about you to let you know. And I care enough to report them to the originating ISP, their upstream provider, an the host of whatever website they're spamvertising.

I rarely link to threads on discussion boards. In fact, in the two years I've been blogging, I can only think of maybe two occasions when I have done, and that was because I wanted to rant about the topic and needed some background information to do that.

This thread at the Cyber Crew board is an exception. I found it quite amusing, and thought some other people might, as well.

The Creativity Filter looks great, doesn't it?-

If I were a Shakespearean character, I'd be Katerina the Shew. Well, at one time I would have been.

These days, I'm more like Beatrice, who isn't so much a shrew as she is cynical and sarcastic. At least until she meets the love of her life (awwwww), who is also cynical and sarcastic.

Why can't I find an online personality quiz to see "which shakespearean character are you"? I did have a look... If you know of one, let me know. I'd be interested in seeing it.

Apparently, a plaster bust of Elvis Presley wept "miracle" tears on the 25th anniversary of this death.

Posting this, I'm trying to think of an amusing punchline but, in fact, I can't. All I can think of to say is, "Uhmmm..... okaaaayyy....."

My best friend just sent me an email saying how she was going to get herself in trouble by emailing me from work, because I crack her up so much. Then I got another email from a friend who liked the previous joke I posted. And, hey, why quit when you're on a roll?

A priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, and and a lawyer carrying a duck all walk into a bar. The bartender looks at them suspiciously and finally says, "What is this, a joke?"

I've been living in Australia for over three years now. I've managed to pick up most of the dialect, and I even use some of it, although my speech is still distinctively American and so is my accent.

In the time I've been here, I've had to learn new words to describe the things I want. I'm not talking about pronunciation, although that can be confusing enough (you say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to, let's call the whole thing off...). I mean actual words and phrases that are really quite different. It can be frustrating at times.

Here are just a few that immediately come to mind:

Then there are the phrases that I just find odd. Like someone says they'll see you "Tuesday week," which means "a week from Tuesday." Or the phrase "fall pregnant" instead of "become pregnant" or "get pregnant". I always find that one pretty amusing. Like you were just walking along and you tripped and WHOOPS! You're pregnant!

And on the subject of pregnancy is the weird use of the phrase "pregnant to" instead of "pregnant by". In other words, I was "pregnant to Andrew".

Some Aussie phrases are pretty good, though. Like "down the gurgler" for "down the toilet". But Cool Australian Phrases is probably a topic for another mini-essay on another day, I think. As for me, I normally use some "cool" Aussie phrases and words if I like them, and I use Australian names for things if I must (such as asking for paracetemol in the chemist, since they probably won't know what acetominophen is). When I'm tired or distracted, I still use the American dialect, though, and some things I just plain refuse to say, like "pusher" instead of "stroller" (you know, a little chair with wheels that you put a baby in).

Thankfully, Andrew can translate when necessary. He's bi-dialectic.

Q: What do you call a fish with no eyes?

A: A fsh.

Woohoo! The new Taxiride CD is out and I've got a copy of it. Mmmmm, vocal harmonies and guitar driven melodies with thoughtful (or at least not totally stupid) lyrics...

Don't be afraid to be
Feeling so bad you see
It won't be long 'til you get back home
Dream what you wanna be
Feel it so easily
Don't be afraid to fly, just let go
With the sunlight in your eyes

I'm quite put out at the moment. I'm not going to go into it, but suffice it to say that some people really need to get over themselves and pull the stick out of their arse long enough to realize that just because they were offended by something doesn't mean it was offensive.

No one can GIVE offence. YOU have to take it.

I love Australian pocket change. See, they don't have one cent pieces (everything is rounded up or down to the nearest five cents) but they do have one and two dollar coins. So you don't end up with a pocket full of almost worthless coins and sometimes you can eat a decent meal with just "pocket change".

You are 44% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

My best friend and I have this running joke about who's going to hell and who isn't. She grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and later converted to Roman Catholicism (lately, she's been studying Buddhism). Well, we got into a conversation once about how her grandmother seemed to have this rulebook somewhere that indicated who was going to hell and who wasn't and it sort of turned into this joke about having a "flow chart" for it. You know "Have you done Thing X?" and it flows to Yes or No and if No it goes to "Have you repented?" and so forth.

So now we have this joke about how one or the other of us is going to go to hell for something or other because whatever it is MUST be on the flow chart. (Yes, I'll probably go to hell for making fun of the Easy to Read Damnation Chart for All Occasions™ but I'll repent in leisure, as the saying goes).

Given my fondness for jokes about going to hell (and people who insist on telling you you're going there), imagine my delight to find that I could order my very own Get Out of Hell Free cards!

I may very wel order some of these. Seriously. I'm sure Lori would love to have a few to go along with her Jesus Action Figure (and I swear to you, I am not making that up; it's a real toy and Lori honestly really has one).

Here's a bit of trivia that may surprise you. Macadamia nuts are native to Australia, and are named after one of the early governors, a man named MacAdam.

Because they're grown extensively (and expensively) in Hawaii, I had always thought they were Hawaiian and the name was some exotic Polynesian word, but no. I was surprised to learn the truth.

These lovely treats still grow wild in parts of Australia, believe it or not.

So there you go, the origin of the Macadamia nut and its name.

Recently got into a little disagreement on Usenet with an Australian from Queensland who had a big chip on his shoulder about Americans. This is in a HUMOR newsgroup, I want you to know, and I was honestly being silly. I joked that Australians drive on the wrong side of the road, and this bloke took it as a personal affront (although what sort of emotional investment he had in driving on the left I can't imagine). He made a bunch of very stupid assumptions and presumptions about my comment and went off on a big rant about it.

Fact is, I DO find it weird to drive on the wrong side of the road and the wrong side of the car and I won't apologize for that. It's disorienting. I drove for some twenty years on the right, like the majority of people in the world do, and now I have to sort of re-learn all my driving habits to avoid doing dumb things like turning on the windshield wiper when I go to make a turn, because not only is the steering wheel on the right, so is the turn signal, exactly opposite a left-hand drive car.

However, this Queensland bloke was on a high horse of some sort and decided I was this horrible imperialist who had never set foot outside the United States (I corrected him on that one) and that I was asserting some sort of "the American way is the only right way" thing. He was an idiot, basically, because if he'd bothered to read the previous entries in the same thread, he would have seen me say that I live in Australia. Several people came to my defence and I clarified for him what the situation was (I was moderately polite about it, as well, and only implied he was stupid a couple of times).

But the whole discussion did make me curious, so I decided to find out just how many nations in the world DO still drive on the left. I had thought it was limited to islands (New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Great Britain, etc.), but it seems it's more common than I thought (although still the minority option).

And if you'd like to know more (such as where the whole preference for certain sides of the road originated and which nations drive on the left and which the right), I highly recommend Which Side of the Road Do They Drive On?. Very interesting. Or at least, I found it so.

Now I have to get back to trying to force my American imperialsm on the rest of the world. Heaven knows I'm monoculturalistic and I think no one else in the world does anything right (unless it's the American way, whatever that is).

Here's the email message in it's entirety:

we can I get the bikini with the cherrys

UPDATE: I shared this with Andrew and he pointed out that Shoshanna Lonstein is a swimsuit designer and she's at shoshanna.com, so that probably explains the bikini reference. But how they ended up at my domain (which has a definite theme of calla lilies) thinking it was the same as Shoshanna Lonstein's site is pretty much anybody's guess.

British Monument Adorned with Giant Condom.

I love the Pillsbury Doughboy. This one is particularly amusing.

I hope it's not true that the Department of Justice is forwarding incoming Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Preventions System) calls to "America's Most Wanted". I guess I understand the point and purpose of the TIPS program (tell the government if you think your neighbors are terrorists), but I think it's potentially open to abuse.

But having "America's Most Wanted" taking calls for the FBI? What's that about? It's got to be a mistake... Doesn't it?

This is old news, but for some time now, expired domains have been hot property for pornmongers and other sleazes who swoop in and register the name to take advantage of the many sites linking to the old domain. The more highly linked the domain, the more valuable it is, so take a care and don't let your domains expire.

This has happened to people I know and to people I've only heard about. It's happened to major amusement parks, to children's sites, to many Christian ministry sites, to designers, you name it.

Now it appears to have happened to a chess organization.

Just in case you haven't found this site on your own, here's a link to Annoyances.org. What is it? Well, it's an amazingly helpful website that deals with how to alter, fix, and change all those things about Windws (just about all versions) that you and a lot of other people find really annoying.

75 Years of Band-Aid is a surprisingly entertaining website.

And a bit of trivia... The jingle I quoted in the title of this post was written by Barry Manilow. Yes, really.

Oh, and on the topic of Band-Aids, have you tried those Advanced Healing gizmos they make? Very interesting. Sort of forms an artificial blister over the wound. It's actually kinda cool.

Okay, so I'm interested in Band-Aids. There are worse things.

I encountred someone who was knowingly doing something illegal (and suggesting that others do, as well). When it was pointed out to him that he was breaking the law, he gave a big sob story about running a non-profit organization and that he HAD to do this illegal stuff, and there was a bunch of stuff about serious illnesses and catastrophic health issues and yadda yadda yadda. Basically, it was "I've been victimized, so poor little me, I can justify any unethical or immoral or illegal thing I do."

Well. I had a big think about this. And I thought about how to approach it. I actually had a rant written, but I deleted it to think about it some more. Eventually I settled on this.

For any and every time I used the fact that I've been victimized to justify immoral, illegal, or unethical choices, I am genuinely sorry. I can't apologize for the stuff I did unknowingly (temper tantrums, etc.). But for everything I ever did and later said, "It's okay to do that because I have [any of a host of perfectly real health issues]," I am truly sorry. How irritating that is, and how wrong it is. If I knowlingly chose or choose to do something unethical, immoral, or illegal, it is because I made or make the CHOICE to do it, not because I've been victimized. True, my state of mind has influenced me very badly in the past, but that's no excuse. I have used the fact that I've been victimized as justification for my own bad behavior, and I'm sorry, and I'm ashamed to have used my pain, my illnesses, and my disorders to somehow "excuse" my bad behavior.

I do sometimes make bad choices. I have been known to choose to do things I know are unethical or immoral. I am very, very far from perfect. I will probably go right on doing things that I later regret, because I'm human and human beings are like that. Try as we might, we never quite live up to our own standards. But I'm not ever going to pretend that it's "okay" because of any illness or other problem I have or have had. It's not okay. It is what it is: Me making decisions that may or may not be smart, correct, or clever. My victimization is totally beside the point.

Got a spam today that had the heading "HERE ARE THE FINANCIAL SPECS YOU REQUESTED". Uhm, sure. I didn't even open it, just clicked to report it through Spamcop.

My question here, though, is... do they REALLY think that's gonna work? That I'm going to fall for them telling me I "requested" some sort of "financial specs" and that, having fallen for the clever subject line, I'll then actually want to do business with spammers?

You know, there are two things that I think characterizes spammers. The first is they're sleazy and care not one bit that they're wasting everyone's resources and pissing people off. The second is that they're apparently very stupid.