Whoever said politicians aren’t witty? A scuffle on the Alabama House floor was preceeded by the following repartee: “You go to hell,” Holmes told White. “You go there, too,” White replied. “Go straight to hell,” Holmes snapped back.

I got notified this morning that I’ve been accepted into the VirginConnect program. No, it’s not a dating service for sexual neophytes. It’s a program by Virgin Entertainment that allows you to “rent-to-own” an internet appliance (the WebPlayer, similar to the i-opener from netpliance) for $50 a year, including unlimited internet access. For the first 10000 people, the first year is free. I don’t have a computer at home, so I signed up. It may be an easy way to write weblog entries without having to lug my work laptop home and back. It may be a fun toy to poke at. It may be a doorstop. We’ll see. I can always send it back if it’s a piece of junk.

This weblog is the number one result when you use the AOL search engine for “apartments athens georgia”. So why couldn’t I sublet when I moved in February and then get stuck paying double rent for two months? Oh… if anyone from University Gardens Apartments is reading this, I’ll pay you that last month’s worth. Really I will. Just not now, and not all at once. If you wouldn’t have rejected every candidate I brought in, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, and you’d be several hundred dollars richer.

The internet is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Today’s case in point: Anita Liberty. A few months ago I taped a fun short movie off of the Independent Film Channel titled Anita Liberty. It was a featured short at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. The main character, Anita, is a New York performance artist/poet who has devoted her entire career to humiliating her ex-boyfriend Mitchell, who left her after a number of years for a woman named Heather. It was full of silly poems with lines like “I was thinking of you today. No… wait… I was wrong. I was thinking of someone else. " Somehow Anita comes across as both lovable and pathetic. Empathetic and laughable. The film was only 18 minutes long, but it made me both laugh at her antics and think about mine (I was a Mitchell to someone else’s Anita in my not-too-distant past, though there was no Heather).

Now, thanks to the internet, I see that there’s much more to the Anita Liberty universe that I knew nothing about. The film was but one of Anita’s products. There are books (of poetry and… uh… self-help). There was an HBO series. There are public appearances. There are recordings. A multi-pronged attack on Mitchell. Anita is really a character superbly created by comedian Suzanne Weber. Now that I know there’s all these other things out there, I’ll look for them.

I’m sorry, Kim. I wasn’t at all meaning to imply you are pathetic, but rather that I’m a heartless bastard. But since I said it in a typically heartless bastardly way, I was easily misunderstood.

My officemates’ band (The Dictatortots) had their first show last night. It was mighty fun, as they’re not a band in the traditional sense. They’ve got bass, electric guitar, small drum kit, cello, keyboards, trumpet, and human beat box. Their music is almost a parody of grunge. There’re MP3’s here if you want to see what I mean – I suggest “Big Car Rotting in my Backyard”. I’d say that they were a Southern version of the great Arizona/New Mexico phantasmagoric heavy metal vaudeville troupe SKUMBAAG, except they’d never heard of SKUMBAAG before. Neither have any but a small, small handful of you, I’d warrant. The show went very well, and odds are good that they’ll become a big hit here in Athens. Weird and freakish musical acts are very popular here in Athens.

An oldie-but-goody: The Canadian Medical Association Journal published an article in 1998 asking which of the two doctors on The Simpsons should Canadian doctors emulate. The answer may suprise you. A followup editorial states that we should not turn to The Simpsons at all, but rather to Star Trek to find a worthy TV doctor rolemodel.

Dark Currents is Blogger-powered serialized gothic fiction. Not gothic in the Tina the Troubled Teenager sense, but gothic in the H. P. Lovecraft sense. At least, that’s how it has started. It’s the first time I’ve seen Blogger used in this way. It’s set in the present, told in a first-person narrative, and incorporates weblogging into the framework of the story itself. It’s fairly new, so you can get caught up in a hurry and then add it to your regular rotation.

Catching up on my reading, I noticed that Evan’s smitten with Anne Sussman too.

If you haven’t read Anne Sussman’s diaryland entries, I urge you to do so. At the risk of making Randy sad, I have to say that Anne’s writing is probably the best of any online journal I’ve read. Besides being laugh out loud funny ("Full, nubile, female college-student nudity (henceforth to be referred to as FNFCSN) . . . was a damn sight more enticing than FNSNEGOWHN (full, not-so-nubile, ex-girlfriend, old withered hag nudity)"), her words have the full range of emotion-induction. I’m finding it hard to describe the effect her writing has on me, which is just one of many reasons why hers is far better than mine.