December 2003 - Retrospective
RayzRealm (c) December, 2003


[Dec 07][Dec 14][Dec 20][Dec 26]
[Dec 27][Dec 31]

Sunday December 7

I usually take stock of the year during December. In the grand scheme of things, I have not really accomplished much during my 56 years on the planet. I never did write the great American novel, a piece of music that would go on to be a standard, never invented that world changing doo-dad, never became an actor, porn star, rock musician, world renowned writer. All in all, my life has been mostly lived as a stealth citizen, a random face in the crowd. The closest I have ever some to my 15 minutes of fame has been through my earlier writings on a number of computer BBS systems, usenet news groups, and of course my 8 year long experiment that refuses pass silently (yet) into the night, "Bijugous Area51". Time flies; December 16th will mark 8 years that my site has been online.

This past year (2003) has been a particularly nasty one, for health, social, spiritual and other reasons. It seems strange that each December I try to assure myself, 'next year will be better, it has to be, and when next year comes and goes, it winds up worse than the one before it.And with at least 5 more years of George WA, who knows how bad things will get for those of us among the unwashed masses; the mind boggles!

I have been very very busy at work, which is good. I'm also fortunate that I still enjoy my work and where I work a lot. I have never been one to watch a TV show or movie with a gay (poop) theme. I find them boring and aggravating. Someone left a video tape with a bunch of "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" episodes on the movie shelf at work. I've been watching them, and so far find them entertaining, but one show is enough in one sitting. Let's set the "Fay Five" loose on the White House and Bush staff; this country is in serious need of a make over.

I've stated that I hate "Reality TV" shows, which anything but reality. They;re nothing more than a bunch of pretty young men and women who get to show off their bodies and bad attitudes while dissing each other out of the running. At least the fashion victims on Queer Eye don't have to eat bull testicles, sleep in coffins filled with scorpions and cock roaches, or run through military firing ranges with big targets painted on their backs. I'd like to apply for a job as a producer and writer for one of these shows. They'd get a real run for their money. Lets see....have them run a timed route through Baghdad at 2am, dressed in a pink tutu and feather boa, draped in an American flag, singing the national anthem as loud as they can while waving sparklers. If they survive and go on to round 2, the second stunt is timed, giving a blow job to a male porn star with a 12 inch dick. Whoever gets him off in the least time, moves on to round 3. It will be interesting to see how male contestants fare here, unless they're regular viewers of "Queer Eye" Hmmm, round three, how can I make this one a toughie? I have a lot of ideas here, but since Bigboote's Area51 is a Christian family site, I'll keep mum!

I either don't have a life, am bored or am becoming brain dead like the rest of America, but I also watched "The Simple Life". I identify with the farm family in the show, and like seeing spoiled rich snots embarrassed and humiliated.

Today I find myself hating life, life in New England in particular. We got hit with a 3 day blizzard just in time for the weekend. I hate Winter, snow being the worst part of it. The town I live in got 30 inches of snow with drifts to 6 feet. I tried shoveling this morning but chest pains sent me inside after an hour. I wish I knew more people and had a network when I need help. The plows have banked a rock solid 6 foot wall against the driveway, so it may be May until I can get out, but I don't think work would appreciate it.

Sigh, my downstairs neighbors are in China until some time in January, so I'm alone on this. And no, my landlord does not cover snow removal, that's up to the tenant to worry about. This is probably the work of the Bush cartel, aiming the military's weather warfare weapons at the Northeast, since many of us do not vote repugnican.

My neighbor's wife is still here until tomorrow, her husband has already left, but she and I struggled through shoveling until a small army of Asian kids showed up, armed with shovels. They made relatively short work of the driveway barricade, thank God! I pray that we don't get another whopper like this until after my neighbors return from China. Hmmm, maybe I'll move to China, probably better chances of finding a job there if (heaven forbid) I ever lose my job.

Although I have not felt much like writing, I have added a book mark here and there to news items, journals and articles that tickled my fancy. Today ends with a long list of junk food for thought.

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Sunday December 14

Sigh! another Nor'easter is hitting us tonight; 3 feet of snow last week and the estimates are from 6 to 24 more inches, depending on what track the storm takes. Winter is about a week away, and already I'm sick of it! There is also word that another Nor'easter could hit us later this week. My bones tell me that this is gonna be a brutal Winter.

I took a ride to Costco yesterday as I was out of a number of items, but also wanted to pick up a copy of Norton System Works. The free trial of Norton that came with my PC expired a few weeks ago. I found out after installing Norton Anti virus that my old copy was disabled by a trojan horse that probably go installed in a very suspicious po pup that spawned when I clicked on a web site link. My entire screen was filled with a black background, with the green Matrix code scrolling on it. Control-Alt-Delete did nothing, and I could not even power down the system, except by pulling the plug. It changed my RCN dialup number to a 1-900 number, which took a lot of hacking to get rid of. Norton 2004 basically told me I had fallen victim to an incurable back door trojan, that was tracking all of my keystrokes (no wonder my system is running so slow) and creating a back door to whoever was behind this hack of cyber-terrorism.

It looks like I'll have to wipe the disk clean and reload from scratch. I scanned all of the files I have stored on my F and G partitions; all files are clean, so I backed them up to a CDROM. This pale horse also has fucked with my keyboard, replacing a instances of D with XDXD and all Q's with QXD's. Each time I enter one of these characters, I have to back space an correct, which is another reason I have not written much.

I went into Windoze explorer and scanned various folders; the SYSTEM32 folder being where all the infected files are living. This heinous infection also installed a number of databases, what cannot be deleted "in use by another user" and not even sysadmin login works. What I like to do to either the pimply faced geeks or 3rd world scam artists who created these programs. I will temporally put on a radical Islamic hat here, "cut off their hands and shove them up their asses, cut off their penises and sew them in their mouths, have them be anally gang raped by a thousand hardened criminals, cut out their hearts and feed them to hungry rabid dogs, and finally run through the streets with their flaming heads on poles, singing praises to Allah!"

Whew! there! but I'm not angry.

I saw a couple of heart warming sights this week, twice this week during my commute the traffic slowed to a crawl, both times a Ford Expedition's ass end was sticking up from over the embankment, angry driver pacing back and forth on their cell phones (no Biffie, you are not invincible, learn to drive that barge before you venture out on the roads). Then on Thursday I came to an intersection where 6 roads converge, to be faced by a collision of 3 SUV's, a Ford Explorer, Cadillac and Mercedes Benz; tsk tsk!

I have put up a trial version for what may replace the current Bigboote's Area51. The URL is located on the main page of my site.

I woke up today and turned on the radio, "the wicked witch has been captured", A scruffy and hung over looking Saddam is now in custody. This will assure a total unanimous vote for Bush in 2004. My hunch is that this has all been another of Bushco's ops, carefully planned and timed to boost his ratings. I'm currently reading Paul Krugman's, "The Great Unraveling" and highly recommend it!

Here's some cheap starchy find food for you to chew on that I found during my weekly news runs.

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Saturday December 20

Last night I replaced the old version of Bigboote's Area51 with the new (hopefully flashier) pages. As much as I do not like frames, using them was the best way to get the effect I wanted. The few people who have commented on the new design like it better. My friend Bob (who I miss a lot) who is living way up in Maine (A'Yup) told me via e-mail that he felt it looked much better and polished.

I did manage to rid my PC of that nasty Trojan horse with a little help from a network security guru at work; a couple of registry hacks, some files deleted and it was gone (for now).

I took a ride into Boston this morning after making some adjustments to some of my pages, so that they display properly in Opera as well as Explorer. It's such a joyous holiday season, everyone seemed to have such heart warming scowls on their faces. Bush's America is such a joyful (for the filthy rich) place.

I went into a Banana Republic store in Copley Place. There once was a time when Banana Republic sold cheap clothing, but now, like everywhere else it's mostly over priced, sterile looking uniforms. It's all made in 3rd world sweat shops, so merchandise should be about 50% cheaper than marked. The companies would still make a tidy profit.

I dropped in at the Living Center to have lunch and found out they are having a Christmas dinner on Thursday. I didn't have anywhere to go, so signed up on the dinner list. I stopped celebrating the holidays a few years ago for a number of reasons, mostly not having anyone to share them with.

I don't have much more to say today, but am noticing a much higher percentage of vehicles on the road are SUV's. Yes Virginia, the country, and world have gone quite insane. Here's this week's crop of news, to help spread some holiday cheer.

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Friday December 26

"Peace on Earth, good will toward men". Tell the BFEE to take a hike, leave the rest of us "non billionaires" to live in peace and harmony.

It looks like I'll leave Area51 As-Is for a while. I've gotten a lot more feedback than usual, and it's all been very positive. Yeah! I like the new layout myself. There is still a bit of work to do before I get my site where I want it, but it will be minor.

Whew! I have been very busy all week at at work, mostly end of year projects and a couple of major ones to think about for 2004 business needs. One of the blessings I must count, was taking the job that I now have and ignoring all the recommendations to hold out for something that would pay 2 to 3 times what the company offered me 5 years ago. I was never driven by greed (Ma and Dad raised me to have scruples and to be thankful for what I have), and knew that the High-Tech, "boom" of the late 90's to when Resident Smirk stole the office of Grand Exalted Poobah of the Free World, was all smoke and mirrors. For some reason, I knew from the start of the financial feeding frenzy, that it was all Voodoo, and no, I never had any money invested in the stock market, I never had any money, period!

Well anyway, I'm still working at a small private company that's been around for over 100 years, and with any luck, they'll survive (I hope anyway) the Bush years, or as the BFEE likes to call it, "The New American Century." As an added bonus I enjoy my work and find it rewarding, plus my employer "still" has excellent benefits, considering the current state of the economy. So this is one blessing I must still count.

Most people filtered out of the office around 11AM on Wednesday. Getting home was utter madness, since a lot of other companies let their people go early for Christmas Eve. Any place that sold anything was packed. A store could just sell bed pans, walkers and adult diapers, and it would have been packed. I stopped at the supermarket to pick up some essentials, then headed home to do laundry before visiting Paul's family, who had invited me over for Christmas Eve.

It's amazing how quiet an peaceful the streets are on Christmas Eve, everything is bathed in a sense of calm. All of the stores are closed and there was hardly anyone out and about on the streets. I was in bed by 9PM.

I woke up at 5AM on Christmas morning to take my meds, put coffee on and surfed the web until 8AM, when I made a brief drive by visit to visit Mama in the nursing home. I left before 10AM and headed into Boston, which was as quiet as a tomb. If only Boston were this easy to find a parking space in, it was like everyone left town, and I could take my pick from thousands of "free on holidays" spots. I had come into town for a reason, last week I found out the Living Center was having a Christmas dinner, and since I didn't have anyone to spend the holiday with, this would be much better than last year, when I ate Christmas dinner at Boston Market. I walked through Copley Place and the Prudential Plaza to get out of the rain, not even Au Bon Pain was open, but $tarbuck was. I passed on getting coffee at $tarbucks, sat on an indoor bench and called Doug in Chicago. We talked for over an hour about the usual stuff, the BFEE and state of the country.

Copley place looks a lot different when all the rich yuppies and musty old money are not there, it was almost totally deserted, except for some elderly people, homeless and crazies who wandered around talking to voices that were not there. I felt like I had been inserted into a scene from "Jacob's Ladder", everything felt weird and surreal. I bid Doug farewell, making my way back to the Living Center. I have to say they really put on a very nice meal. I had the choice of game hen, beef tenderloin or a vegan meal. I got the beef tenderloin, which was superb! (no this is not the center's normal bill of fare).

After dinner, I walked through a deserted South End, returning home to take a nap. I've reached a point in my life where Christmas is just another day. Yeah I know, it's sad, but I was able to pretty much block out all of the holiday hype this year. As I stated on the entry page of Bigboote's Area51, "KILL YOUR TELEVISION!"

Today I caught the 77 bus into Harvard Square, which was fairly quiet. It was cold and very raw today, a good day for book browsing and window shopping. I browsed around in Staples (computer stuff) and spotted a really nice feature packed Fuji 3.2 mega pixel digital camera for $279. I asked one of the sales people for some more information and the guy was very helpful, plus he gave me little hint, "if you're not in a big hurry to buy, hold off until later in January. The price will probably drop another $50-80."

Boston and Cambridge probably have 3 public bathrooms between then. Nature called, so I made my way to one of the only public loo's in Cambridge. I'm not usually one for reading graffiti, but Boston, Cambridge and Somerville have some of the most interesting scrawlings on the bathroom walls. I found one stall entry interesting, more of an essay than graffiti. I actually jotted down the statement.

"If you love your country. If you TRULY love your country and your fellow man, we must all work full time to remove Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their entire regime from power as soon as possible. If Bush gets reelected, we are all surely doomed to perdition. Stop the madness NOW! spread the word! Get out and vote! The future for the majority of humanity hangs in the balance. These men are EVIL. They belong behind bars, not behind desks. Stay awake! Stay alert!"

I've been seeing more and more graffiti like this around town. I can't remember when I've seen people so strongly opposed to our leaders; well with the exception of Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr, who...hmmm...all happened to be repugnicans joined at the hip.

I browsed Harvard Book Store, the Harvard Coop and Newbury Comics, but didn't spend a cent. The neuropathy in my feet has been acting up something fierce, as has the prostate urinary condition, so I stopped at Johnny's Luncheonette for an early dinner, catching a bus back home

I'm off until January 5. My company gave us two 4 day weekends this year, so only using 3 vacation days, I get a week and a half off. That's all for now, time for another nap

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Saturday December 27

M'thinks this will be a "remove module containing brain and relax sort of vacation. I was in bed at 9PM last night, curled up reading chapters from Paul Krugman's, "The Great Unraveling" and Steve Brouwer's, "Robbing Us Blind". One of these days I will dedicate a journal to books in the Area51 library and movies from the Screening room.

"Fun things to do with Windoze media player" time. I discovered a few sites where you can download 10 to 60 second porno clips for free. Why watch a boring 90 minute smut film when you can cobble together an endless loop of the best parts. Everyone knows that a lot of guys who rent/buy smut films probably wear the oxide off one of two clips from the movies, and ignore the rest. And actually these are better, no disco music or dubbed in "oh baby oh baby", just the natural naughty noises with no filler. OK now! everyone point your browsers to www enuff of that for now, this is a family site.

I took a ride into Boston this morning to spend the VISA gift card I got from my employer for making it to the 5 year milestone last week. As usual the first stop was Au Bon Pain after easily finding a parking spot in the South End (this is creepy, two days running with no trouble finding a parking spot). I stopped at Barnes and Noble to browse and pick up a gift card for Noel and Ellen (two avid book lovers). I had hemmed and hawed about what to get them, and decided a Barnes and Noble card was better than getting them something they might not use.

I headed up to Virgin and Newbury Comics to browse and listen to music. I really liked the new Dido CD, then remembered I already have it...duh! I basked in the evil as I strolled along Newbury Street (Satan's fave shopping district), playground of the rich and "wanna be" rich. Newbury Street is Boston's answer to Rodeo Drive. From there I had a late lunch at "Dick's Last Resort". I was hungry an wanted something in a large portion that was cheap, so Dick's was the place to stop. I got the Chickie chicken an noodles, a nice tasty feed bag sized portion of grilled chicken, mushrooms, spinach and broccoli tossed with penne in oil and parmesan....yum!

I headed back into the Plaza to browse the stores, Benetton, Aberzombie and other gen-x hot spots all had walls decorated with huge blown up black and white photos of 20 something models, all carrying pouty looks, 1/2 nekkid and wirey in a muscular sort of way, but they all remind me of the photos of Nazi concentration camp prisoners. They all look pissed off and emaciated. I needed a new Winter jacket. All I have is a 25 year old regulation leather Navy bomber jacket (made in the good ole US of A), an urban bomber, rather snazzy looking motorcycle jacket and ski parka; all sort of old. A lot of my sweaters and sweat shirts are overdue for recycling, so there will be a trip to the Salvation Army collection box soon to drop stuff off.

I stopped at the Gap and hit pay dirt. I got a nice warm dark khaki snorkel jacket, 2 nice sweaters and two pairs of low rise button fly chords for $125, less than half price of what they were a couple of weeks ago. The jacket was $129 a few weeks ago, but I got it for $49.95, which goes to show you what sort of markup clothing carries. I took the balance remaining on my gift card in cash.

A guy (probably in his mid 40's) and his family were behind me in line and we got to talking. He's an IT consultant an recruiter and we chatted about the sad state of affairs with globalism; greedy Fortune companies giving US employees the Heave-ho, sending jobs to the 3rd world. What he told me actually surprised me. He said he is getting a lot of calls from companies looking for older, more experienced workers in the IT field, that business is actually looking up despite the Bush Cartel and that some companies are repenting of their greedy sins and realizing that shipping white collar jobs off shore to save a few bucks is actually costing them much more. God I hope this is not a fluke, and that we're on the verge of a ground swell of jobs here at home. I've known all along that globalism is a big smoke an mirrors crock of shit! I told him I have two good friends who had to leave the area after being out of high tech jobs for over two years. He gave me a couple of his business cards and asked me to have them give him a call. We talked for almost a half hour until he had to meet his family for lunch. It was an uplifting conversation.

Once again (oh horrors) I'm low on coffee, so made a stop at Trader Joe's to pick up some essentials; coffee, chocolate, cookies and some produce. I stopped at Micro Center to play with the toys. The PC I bought there in May has been replaced by a similar model that's $400 cheaper, with more features; oh well! I played with a display Mac, calling up Bigboote's Area51 in Explorer; yup! I do like the new look a lot better. My last stop was at Panera so I'd have some pastries for breakfast.

Vacation is flying by, it feels like I just got in from work a couple of hours ago. Tonight I'll settle in to do some fine tuning on my web site then settle down to watch "Dream Catcher"

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Wednesday December 31

There that's better! Another reason I have not written was that my keyboard was messed up; keys stopped working or passed crap to the OS. I was getting sick and tired of running texts through spell check and having to correct any words containing D, Q, W or X. I picked up a new Micro$oft keyboard at Staples today, and it will take a bit to get used to since the board has a different feel and layout. I have not bothered to load the 35 meg worth of keyboard software that came on a CD yet. Like everything else those courteous helpful folks in Redmond do, they load the keyboard with all sorts of "lazy man's" one touch goo-gahs that require megs of software to run, My my, lookit all these extra keys! "Start Armageddon", "Find Osama bin Laden", "Impeach George Bush", "Commit Hari Hari", "Kill the neighbor's dog", "Mute wife and kids". I'll have to survive for now with just a functional basic keyboard and load all the goodies later.

Vacation's almost over and I have not done a thing, other than visiting Noel and Ellen on Sunday. I spent a lot of time mentally masturbating, making minor adjustments to the new layout of Bigboote's Area51.

Here we sit on the cusp of a new year. I'll probably be in bed by 9 tonight. I want to be as far away from all the lemmings that pack "First Night" as I can, plus don't have anyone to celebrate with.

Early Monday morning I took the T into Beth Israel hospital in Boston. The urologist scheduled a CT scan of my abdominal and pelvic area in hopes of finding what may be causing me to have this lifelong problem with urinary and prostate infections. I could not eat or drink anything after midnight the night before, so of course woke up carving coffee and danish.

I had to drink about a quart of barium, then after an hour I was lead into the scanner room, where I was injected with radioactive Iodine. The contraption that infused the iodine looked like something out of a science fiction movie, something aliens would use on abductees. The test didn't hurt at all, including having the shunt jabbed in my forearm. The worst part was having to hold my breath a few times for almost two minutes. A mechanical voice would say, "take a deep breath in...let it out...take a deep breath in...let it out...take a deep breath in.....h-o-l-d i-t!" The machine very slowly moved me in an out of the donut, and by the time I was ready to pass out, I was told, "you can breathe!"

After the test I walked over to my doctor's office, since it was also time to have my ongoing quarterly lab work done, which also required that I fast from midnight. After getting the labs done I could have eaten a dead rat, but settled for the next best thing, a cheeseburger at the Wendy's around the corner from the clinic. I'll never fully adjust to the fact that 99% of the people I will deal with in public do not speak English, especially in retail and food service; welcome to Babel. The girl's name who took my order had a name like Vruptep Mugala. I asked her if all their cows were sane, of course greeted by a puzzled look and shrug of here shoulders. I then asked, "have any of the cows in your burgers had to see a psychiatrist or take psych meds?" She didn't get it, but someone behind me did, who broke into laughter. I get serious and told her I'd like a number 1 with a root beer. Wow! that's progress, you don't even have to describe what you want, and if they don't speak a word of English, all you have to do is point to the sign with numbered specials. I passed on making it "biggie sized". Has anyone else ever noticed that the paper wrapped soggy excuse for a burger they hand you, does not bear even the slightest resemblance to the plump juicy, Pavlov dog salivating burger that's shown in the pictures above the counter.

I left Wendy's with a grumbling stomach what wanted some real food. After a brief breeze through Virgin and Newbury Comics, I hopped a #1 cattle car into Harvard Square and had some real food at Johnny's Luncheonette, grilled chicken with beans, rice and broccoli.

When I got home took a ride to Panera and the video store, picking up a previously viewed DVD of Stepehn King's, "Dreamcatcher". The movie was good, not as good as the book, but very few film adaptations ever fully capture a King novel. The movie had just the right amount of "creep factor" in it, to make me look under the bed later. As an added bonus Morgan Freeman was in the film. Freemen is one of my favorite actors. He plays a lot of strange roles and plays them well. Even when he's portraying an evil character, he does it with a quiet grace. In Dreamcatcher he plays a senior military officer, who's gone quite mad from chasing UFO's and aliens for 25 years. This will be added to the permanent movie archive at Chez Bigboote, along with the other King movies I have, Stand By Me, The Stand, Needful Things, Apt Pupil, Shawshank Redemption, Tommyknockers, Maximum Overdrive, Dead Zone and Christine.

I don't know what possessed me, but on Tuesday I took a ride to the Burlington Mall. It was raining, but I didn't want to stay in my apartment all day, so dove into the madness that is always the Mall. it's getting that no matter where you travel in the USA, all malls are exactly alike, 100 plus of the same chain stores that sell nothing, with food courts that sell all of the same "almost real" food. The parking lots are as hazardous as Baghdad at 2AM; old geezers driving land yachts, who can't see over the steering wheel and psychotic soccer moms in need of a Midol fix careening around in mammoth SUV's.

All of the department stores had killer sales; 25-40-50-60% off on clothes, which they still probably make a healthy profit from. It was fine so long as if you wear a 17-18" neck in shirts, XL, XXL, XXXL or Mammoth in sweaters, jerseys and underwear. Pants and jeans were the same, it would be fine if I had a 38-48" waist. I guess that's why the prices were so good, all that was left over were grossly obese remnants.

I hate shopping for clothes; I'm very hard to fit. I have very wide shoulders, a 16" neck and 30" waist. When I ask sales people where the 30" waist pants and jeans are, they usually direct me to the boys department. Bahhh! after 2 hours of battling the unwashed, baby stroller pushing hordes, I managed to squeak out of the parking lot, letting out a long sigh of relief after getting past all the traffic.

Of course I was hungry and every restaurant within belching distance of the mall had 45-80 minute wait lists, so I edged back toward Menotomy by way of Lexington, where I was able to have a relatively quiet (with the exception of the ceaseless whining of yuppie brats) lunch at the Pasta Trough. I don't know what it is about yuppie spawn, but they're always whining and screaming, and mommy/daddy never do anything to quell the racket. I rarely see the kids of working class stiffs carrying on like that in public. They'd probably give the little tyke a bop off the side of the head if they acted up.

Today I hopped the bus into Harvard Square just to get out of the house. I have to refrain from buying any more books until the stack beside my bed and on the coffee table have been read through, but I find it relaxing to browse in book stores without buying anything. My big purchase was a new Micro$oft keyboard for $30. At least now I'll be able to type. When/if I get motivated, I'll open up and try to clean my old keyboard so I'll have a spare.

When I got home today there was a voice mail from the urologist's office notifying me that the CT scan results are back and everything looks quite normal. I don't know whether I should feel relieved or even more concerned. I still don't have a concrete answer or solution to my pelvic/urinary problems....grrrr!

Tonight the odometer rolls over to a new year. I'll bet 2004 will be filled with thrills, chills, tales from the political crypt and all sorts of scurrilous antics from those in power. I have a hunch that the BFEE will stage another 9-11 or pull Osama from a hat just in time for our beloved resident's reelection. Mark my word, "resistance is futile, we will all be assimilated."

Have a safe new year, drive safe and stay sober. I'll be back next year....which is tomorrow. I can hardly wait to power up my PC tomorrow morning so that Windoze can tell me it's a new year the high point of my entire holiday season.

This concludes December 2003

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Shalom, Ray