So here it is, friday night, and i'm sitting around trying to think of possible ways to make this weekend suck less than the last one did. Surfing the fm band, which I haven't done much of lately, I find out that the peak is being bought out by some hispanic company, and nobody knows what's gonna happen to the station until monday morning. Lots of listeners calling in all concerned/pissed off/flaming Rover/kissing Rover's ass, ya know. The typical variety of people from the "us" community. lol. (funny (to me anyway) because every race except caucasion generally almost always gets referred to by the media as "the $ethnic_variety community")

Maybe it's a majority thing. You have "The Linux Community", but how often do people talk about "The Windows Community"? Nah. Anyway...

Music, the tapestry which weaves through our lives. Funny how I can hear a song from ten years ago and suddenly all these memories from that time period are brought to the forefront. Which is why I never sell my cds, even ones I haven't listened to for years. Beyond the sampled sound waves themselves is stored a piece of my life. History as a pile of shiny cylinders, pits and flats. Does all my consciousness really reside in my brain, or is a small portion of it transferred into the mysterious medium? Or perhaps the other way around.

Impossibly high stock valuations. So take startup company, any company. Say Amazon.com. They figure out, or manage to be the first to really "get" some super-duper way of doing business, and they do it well. Steadily build a loyal customer base, word spreads, they go IPO.

Now, Wall Street is as lightly crazy place. We all agree on this, right? Investors, with their black suits, ties cutting off the circulation of blood to their brains, and a shitload of money they need to do something with. A few catch the scent of blood, and suddlenly, every lemming in the herd is chasing after the dot com phenomenon. They don't know really what it is they're investing in; after all, it isn't the business itself that matters anyway, it's the fact that the stock is on the rise. The market caps go insane. Far beyond what any reasonable revenue stream could ever justify.

Meanwhile, back in startup land, the programmers are scratching their heads, and the PHB's are trying to figure out how in the hell they can keep the momentum alive long enough so that the day traders don't start getting suspicious and take a dump in favor of greener, more hype-filled pastures.

In their desperation to push things to the max, the marketing wizards (See also: riffraff) decide to roll out a series of really bad, bad tv commercials, featuring chiors of middle-aged doofuses who could improve if they got lesson or two from the Spice Girls. Then there's those ones with the nondescript morons in yellow t-shirts against a white background, parading around in some sort of homoerotic display of hand holding, while the narrator with the strange accent insults your intelligence almost as much as Dealin Doug would on a bad hair day. You know the ones I'm talking about.

Of course, the ads don't work. Not just because silicon valley doods don't know the first thing about making a tv commercial, but because they've forgotten what made them successful in the first place. It's the customer, stupid.

So the marketers weren't able to get us what we needed. What next? Ahah! Bring in the IP lawyers. Patent this, patent that, patent Dr. Seuss's big white cat. (Yeah, yeah, it's way too late at night. And in case anyone's wondering, no, I have not consumed any alcoholic beverages within the past 24 hours. There goes that explanation for this strange bunch of crap.)

<voice style="Paulina imitating Xena; gutteral">Sue 'em all. Sue 'em all!</voice>

Hence, the ravaging beast of terror.

Oh, that was so profound.

So, has this infusion of caffeine a few hours hence diluted the blood, turned the brain into a giddy pile of goo? Made it dangerous to the point that these fingers should not even be let near a keyboard? Would I be engaging in something resembling a fest or stakeout on this night?

I think not. But in eight days, at which time I expect my brain to be fully phased into syncing with my eyes at a rate of 72 hertz. At that time, such an event shall commence. In theory.

And this has been the most ridiculous stream of garbage to be placed on this web page in quite some time. Oh well, at least it's not as bad as threads. Yet.