Only 2 days to go: vote for the 2001 Kenny of the Year here. Well, I just finished making the Booty-Shaking Master-Mix for the NYE party at Keechy La Beef's. Booties will be shook, I promise you that. Dwelling further on this whole copy-protection thing, I have to say that if the numbskulls at the record companies make it so that I can't burn a mix CD out of music that I own, I am going to have to poop in a bag and mail it to them. I'll admit that I'm not 100% legal. Of the 15-odd songs on the aforementioned Booty-Shaking Master-Mix, I own 13 of them. The other two, by Rednexx and The Shamen, I got off Kazaa. Do I feel bad about that? Not really. No one should have to buy a record by Rednexx or The Shamen. Believe me. These two outfits managed to make one entertaining single apiece, and that's it, and that's...OK. They should get compensated for coming up with their entertaining single, but not by making records buyers pony up $15 for a whole album. The Feds pay wheat farmers not to grow wheat. Maybe the E.U. should pay Rednexx and The Shamen to not make whole records. In case you were wondering:

I am 39% evil.

Are you evil?

This is old news, but I'm finally getting around to posting it here, just because it is such a classic example of corporate underthinking. Basically, this guy had a Web site dedicated to cheesy corporate anthems. KPMG, the Big 5 accountancy and consultancy had a cheesy corporate anthem which the guy put on his site with a link back to theirs. Some KPMG chucklehead then sends the anthem-hoster the equivalent of a cease-and-desist, telling him that he can't link to their public Web site without KPMG's permission, because (get this) KPMG has an internal policy that says he can't. The anthem-hoster was kind enough to explain to KPMG that they were missing the point of the Web. Fantastic.

This whole thing made KPMG look like they forgot to bring a chromosome or two to the gene pool party, and the corporate anthem site ended up getting so much traffic the media files had to be taken off. Plus, the world gained the Jungle Remix, Hard Rock Remix, and Teutonic Mastermix of KPMG's silly song. Who says the Internet doesn't boost productivity? If you have a moment, why not visit KPMG right now? Merry Christmas Eve to anyone who doesn't have anything better to do than read Mister Crunchy. She Who Must Be Obeyed and I caught The Lord of the Rings last night, and it was pretty good. It looked amazing and it wasn't boring. It didn't blow me away. The totally fake-looking computer-generated troll should hook up with the totally fake-looking computer-generated troll from HP and the Snoreceror's Stone. They'd make a lovely fake-looking couple.

My favorite part was when Bilbo gave his sword to Frodo, explaining that "it was forged by Elves" and SWMBO leaned over to me and added "in a hollow tree." 25 years ago, this movie would have been a religious experience for me, immune to Keebler jokes. CD-burners and Internet downloads have prompted the geniuses at Universal Music to place copy protection on all their new CD releases. The good news is no more copying. The bad news is that the protected discs won't play on Macs, DVD players, or CD-compatible game consoles.

This may be the first high-profile use of the radical new marketing strategy where a firm responds to increased competition by making its products less desirable. A little reverse-psychology action, which is certain to work every bit as well as it does on my kids.

Me: "Whatever you do, Sophie, don't eat that broccoli."
Soph: "OK! I love you, Daddy." The Friday Five: (a viral meme. yeah, yeah, I know it's Saturday...)

1. What is the weirdest thing you've ever eaten? Warthog. It tasted nothing like chicken.

2. Name one (material) thing you can't live without. The TiVo. Sorry for the product plug, but at this time of year, having all the commercial-free public TV kids' shows recorded spares us a LOT of static.

3. Name something you've always wanted to do but didn't have time for. The $10,000 Buy-In No-Limit Holdem tournament at the World Series of Poker. I not only lack the time, but also the wish to lose $10,000 in twenty minutes.

4. What outrageous thing do you wish you had the nerve to do? Start my own cult.

5. How do you plan to spend your weekend? Wrapping, Lord of the Schwings, More wrapping. We all have our traditions that remind us of the holidays when we were kids, and there's nothing that takes me back to Christmases past like receiving the first Christmas Spam of the season. It wasn't really the particular Holiday Form Letter itself that made the occasion special, as much as the great howls of derision, mostly from my father, about "people who don't care about you enough to write a real letter, but who want to brag about all the stuff they bought, places they vacationed, and especially the awards their kids got anyway." And every year, my dad would vow that some day he was going to send out a Christmas letter of his own to all the relatives and family friends, announcing that I was in jail and that my sister had VD. Well, my dad spooled off his mortal coil before he could fulfill his oft-repeated Christmas vow. So I dedicate this special holiday offering to my dad, Dick, the patron saint of this site and nudist tax-resisting gardeners everywhere. Yeah, I futzed with the layout. Idle hands are The Devil's shrimp forks. Lemme know if you care one way or the other. Thing I learned yesterday: With regard to screwing on the cap of the toothpaste tube, I am unable to distinguish between the force required to prevent my youngest from eating toothpaste and the force required to prevent my wife from brushing her teeth. Thing I learned yesterday: a sufficient number of 10-year-old tap dancers sounds like buckets of ball-bearings being poured down a flight of marble stairs. Al Franken was great on Conan O'Brien last night. To paraphrase: 2,800 sorties, 50,000 tons of munitions and we've done a total of $39 worth of damage. Rebuilding after the war will involve the U.S. helping the Afghanis put all the rocks and dirt back where they were before the bombing started. If you haven't read Franken's Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, you should. It's pretty funny.

But seriously forks, this piece, though ragingly hawkish, offers an interesting perspective on where our "terrorism problem" originates. I can't say I'm comfortable with the proposed solution (invade Syria) but it makes for interesting thinking. Has Uncle Crunchy got a tune for you. I'm only a casual listener to hip hop and hillbilly music, but somehow you put them together and it's just absolutely beautiful. Get yourself a fat pipe and check out The Gourds' cover of Snoop Doggy Dogg's Gin and Juice. This site has everything you need: Snoop's version, The Gourds' version, and perhaps best of all, a Quicktime movie of Mr. Doggy Dogg singing along to The Gourds' version. I heard this for the first time a few hours ago and I'm still grinning. Enjoy!

(I guess this has been out for awhile, but I've only just heard it. Thanks to Joemo for the tip.) [the following replaces a long, angry, and highly profane rant about 9-11 and the subsequent LIFO depletion of our defense inventories]

To be sane in a mad time
is bad for the brain, worse
for the heart.

-from The Mad Farmer's Manifesto, First Amendment by Wendell Berry.

Now here is a very fine use of Microsoft productivity tools. The moral of the story is: be careful giving lousy service to MBAs, cuz they might just bust out a copy of Powerpoint and go medieval on your ass. (Looks like they took the prezzie down at the author's request. There are a couple funny emails from the Doubletree there, though.) Check it out: it's The Matrix, come to life on a very small scale. An autonomous robot that devours living flesh to make its own power. Gahd help us all when this thing loses its taste for slugs. I knew minivans were Satan's troop carriers, and now I can prove it. Entry Number One on the Big List of Lousy Things to Do on a Monday Night: Have your hand slammed in a minivan door!

Guy who slammed door on my hand: You should let Randy look at that. (Randy is a doctor.)

Me: Thanks, but I'm just going to hold it and curse real loud for a few more seconds.

Woo hoo! Are we having fun yet? Caught Ocean's Eleven with She Who Must Be Obeyed over the weekend. We liked it. Very enjoyable. Much more enjoyable than, oh, for instance, Harry Potter and The Snoreceror's Stone. One thing I am unable to figure out: Why did Carl Reiner's character have to do the thing with the briefcase? Couldn't he have just given that stuff to the bendy acrobat dude? If you've figured this out or have a theory, please post me a comment. There's a slightly more involved gauge of your political stance at The Political Compass. I was (once again) diagnosed as a slightly left-leaning libertarian. The thing that strikes me about both of these tests is that they plot the political landscape on the same two axes: authoritarian vs. libertarian and free vs. controlled markets, or to put it another way, freedom vs. government control of one's personal life and freedom vs. government control of one's economic life. A third axis, and one that was often used in my home when I was a kid, is the degree to which we like our country meddling in the affairs of other countries. I don't know if that's relevant or not these days, or if it's easily derived from the other two axes. I'm pretty sure my folks believed you could tell everything you needed to know by whether someone supported the war in Vietnam or not. It doesn't seem as clear cut now. Do peoples' opinions of our bombing of Afghanistan necessarily define them one way or another on the "freedom" axes? Take The World's Smallest Political Quiz. Report your results back here in a comment if you feel like it. Your Humble Host found himself on the border of Libertarian and Left-Liberal on their nifty grid. Sounds about right. Now available for your perusal: the New Personal Values of Mr. Charles Jablow. Mister Crunchy is now available in Swedish! Pay close attention, fair reader, for I am about to issue a challenge that will shake the computer hardware industry to its very foundation. Intel (the giant monopoly which will eventually create computers so advanced that they won't like us very much) has come up with a new way to make transistors. These "TeraHertz" transistors can cycle on and off ONE TRILLION times per second, and believe-you-me that is a great deal of cycling. Much more than we used to have. Various industry pundits and corporate lackeys have posited that this event heralds the following allegedly important things: 1) Real-time voice and face recognition, 2) Ever-smaller electronic gizmos, and 3) Improved battery life. They've also pointed out that it would take a person of average switch-flipping skill more than 15,000 years to turn a light switch on and off one trillion times. Finally, it's said that the Real Importance of this discovery is that it will enable us to keep up with Moore's Law, which basically states that if you get enough face lifts, you can play James Bond well into your eighties. Or something.

You misguided dumbasses. First of all, real-time voice and face recognition is already a feature of most humans. So what. Second, I will never be able to find my cell phone again. Third, I am too damn big to use a laptop in a coach airplane seat, the seats are getting smaller, and I'm never flying again anyway, so who cares about the battery life issue. Fourth, screw Roger Moore and the horse he rode in on. I don't care. Lastly, I don't want to switch the lights off and on one trillion times. My daughters do, but I don't.

The proverbial forest is being missed here in favor of a meager stand of shabby trees. Locust or ginkgo, maybe. The computer age has thus far yielded nothing of Real Interest. It has enabled many things which are either "Cool," like email and instant messaging, or "Pretty Cool," such as eBay, TiVo, and unlimited access to free porn for adolescent boys. Mostly, it makes all the things we used to do (without large beige humming boxes) a little faster and more convenient. But the benefits have been on the margins. I could have sent you this in a letter. To borrow a phrase from my buddy Rahhb, it's Creeping Meatballism. Incrementalism. The Big Problems are still here. Famine, war, disease, illiteracy, and Celine Dion still have the run of the place, and it does not appear that anyone making computers is too concerned.

Ah, but wait! Our computers are about to go A Whole Lot Faster. Assuming we'll be able to find them (remember, they'll be quite small), that certainly should amount to something sooner or later. I've heard that success is just a matter of dialing back your expectations, so I'm going to dial mine waaaaay back and let's see what this industry can deliver.

Here is my challenge: Within my lifetime, and without unreasonable expense, I would like to own a personal computer that is so inconceivably advanced, so blindingly fast, and so cleverly designed that when I flip the power switch...it actually turns on. Right away. Like a flashlight. Like the Atari I had as a kid. Like Tickle Me Elmo. To whoever built my current computer: I'd be pleased if you were the one to build this amazing fantasy computer I'm describing. Just in case you're concerned, this unprecedented new machine does not need to show me any of the messages my current PC displays during its 3-minute journey from silence, through chunking and beeping, and finally to restrained whirring. I don't need to know that someone named "Soundblaster" has done anything. You don't need to show me a big blue banner reminding me whose operating system I'm using...I didn't have a choice, so I can pretty well keep it straight in my head. You very especially do not need to count quickly to 131,072. I have mastered counting in its many forms. SO, with all that stuff it doesn't have to do, I'll just flip the switch and my PC will snap to life.

Got it? Wow me. Apologies for the 3 day drought of posts, but somehow the juices just weren't flowing. They still aren't, really, so I'll just offer the following as penance and go catch some Zs. If you want to take a little groovy mini-trip, spend a few minutes with dubselector 5 at www.infinitewheel.com. They've got 5 more dubselectors and lots of other silly interactive thingies. You probably want a speedy connection if you're going to try these.

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