This morning when I sat down to work on the PC, instead of my user logon screen, I found the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD). We've all seen it. It's Bill Gates' incidious way of secretly controlling the lives of countless millions and reminding us all that we have absolutely no control of our own destiny. It's a little wake-up call that Bill Gates is indeed the one in charge of the coming of the apocalypse. He rows the boat of the damned down the river Styx. It's fatal error #666.
No matter what I tried to do, the operating system would not load. Instead I got one of the most frightening messages from the underworld of startup screens -- " ... could not load. The following file is missing or corrupt. C: WINDOWS SYSTEM32 CONFIG". Aw shit! Fuck me runnin'!
Since I can not run anywhere, any time soon because I'm still forced to hobble about the house aimlessly with my handy-fucking-dandy walker, the first thing I did was to call into the other room to High Priestess, who had just been online minutes earlier. She had the night off and had headed toward the bedroom to search out that illusive commodity in our house called sleep. Trying not to show any fear, panic or anger, I nevertheless asked, "Honey, what were you doing online earlier"?
High Priestess hadn't installed anything new or even opened any email attachments. Nothing spectacular or telling there. What to do, what to do? It was very early in the morning or late at night, depending upon your perspective. It was nonetheless before dawn.
I broke down and called the DELL tech support number. A nice woman in central India finally answered and I explained my problem. After using the re-install CD to boot up and about an hour of CHKDSK /R running, my performance in "Meet Bill Gates" was finally over.
So, here's the moral of the story: Stop procrastinating and make back ups of your files.
Oh yeah, baby. There's nothing like a close call to motivate one to action. I've seen a vision of the end of the world prophesied of in Revelations and had an epiphany. Even though I had been awake for almost 20 hours, I spent about 6 more hours organizing my files and burning CD-Rs today.
Really, all I did was envision the house engulfed in flames and decided what I would run in there to save from destruction. After people and pets, most victims say one irreplaceable thing is their photographs. I have hundreds of digital pix on the hard drive that almost became toast.
I organized and tightly packed seven CD-Rs with over nine thousand unique and irreplaceable files. And before you even think it -- no, it wasn't all porn.
Very early this morning, I thought up the term "web litter" and appropriately, I applied it to myself. Today, I did a Google search of my long-used alias, John Furie Zacharias. I was shocked and awed to find that about a quarter of the search results Google displayed are actually my own, spread over nearly a dozen domains and ironically, some are the top search results above any friggin' reference to Clive Barker's novel. The number one search result was for this very blog, Thunderstorms in the Imajica. Heh. Now, that just rocks.
Searching for my nickname wasn't the original reason I went to Google. When I get extremely bored and I have way too much time on my hands, which has been the norm for me lately, I amuse myself by plugging in friends' names and seeing just what will spew forth from the bowels of the web like some high speed green viscous vomit on a catholic priest's face.
Before I could wipe the acidic bile from my own eyes, I found a very bizarre female world called "Melicious". Now, I've been told that many people who read my blog entries rarely follow the handy-fucking-dandy links that I painstakingly MacGyver into them. But sometimes, if you don't friggin' follow the links, you'll never get the punchline. You'll just sit there, dumbfounded, void of any sense of humor, with sunken, pitifully blank uncomprehending eyes and most typically drooling on your keyboard, as you assuredly are doing right now.
Here are a half-dozen chicks named Melicious. See if you can discern any similarities with the one we lovingly call our own. Wipe the spittle from your chin and explore these Melicious sites! As an incentive, you may discover that most of them are hotties in their own right.
Finally, I had to add this New Jersey teenager to this bacchanal because she owns and uses www.melicious.net. It's nicely designed, but may likely be a neglected web site. Somewhere in her about me section, she says, "I am a proud fat chick who loves Sublime and any Classic Rock". Kinda funny, eh? Maybe she just might hand over her domain name for a super-sized gift certificate for Omaha Steaks. Anyway, let's just hope she'll mature into a woman worthy of the name Melicious. Werd.
Since I live in central Florida, I get inundated with Space Coast stories in my local TV news broadcasts like Detroit's WXYZ continually whoring itself out for the auto industry. I haven't cared much about automobiles since I put chrome wheels and 60's on my first car, which sadly was a two-toned brown and white, four door, 1974 Chevy Nova. I'm immune to new model year car dealer hype as I can't afford one, now, or in the next foreseeable geological era. Modifying older cars doesn't interest me very much as I really am to the point where I am so lame that I take my truck into the shop to simply get an oil change and filter. But space vehicles do spark my imagination.
As of an hour ago, NASA and JPL report that "the little vehicle that could", named Spirit by the nauseatingly patriotic little russian orphan girl, has landed safely on Mars and is sending back its first images from the planet's surface. Here's the official news flash:
NASA's Mars Exploration Spirit is sending back its first images from the surface of Mars. More images will be available shortly. NASA's Deep Space Network received a signal confirming that Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is alive after rolling to a stop on the surface of Mars.(Updated - Jan 4. 12 am PST)
So, that's pretty cool, I guess.
Checking out the lay of the land on Mars is a first step. What do you think we humans will be doing on Mars in, say, 50 years? Think about it for a minute. I sarcastically envision a domed surburbia complete with a Wal-Mars Super Store.
Life on Mars has captured our specie's attention for a long time. There have been over a hundred movies made with a martian theme. It seems the very first film about Mars was over 80 friggin' years ago, when Aelita: Queen of Mars hit the cinema. It only cost a nickel, or a ruble, to buy a movie ticket back then, but Aelita was probably more about a guy's amazonian BDSM martian mistress sexual fantasy than space travel.
More realistically speaking, I think daily life on Mars 50 years from now will most likely resemble the work that is currently taking place in Antartica. We have been there since 1956 and I haven't heard news of a new Starbucks opening up there yet.
I started Thunderstorms in the Imajica on the afternoon of August 31st, 2003 about two weeks before my mother died. She was the only parent I ever knew. I had been taking care of her, rather than having her stored in a nursing home for her last days, for about the previous two years. Any entries on this archive calendar previous to August are menu item entries that I backdated to keep them out of the chronological flow.
