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Saw this on Boortz.com as pointed out by a friend, a view of the American election as reported in Dutch newspaper.

‘We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election.
On one side, you have a lawyer who is married to a lawyer, and a lawyer who is married to a lawyer.
On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a blonde with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.
Is there a contest here?’

According to naked.dustindiaz.com, April 9th, 2008 has been designated “CSS Naked Day.” For those of you who aren’t web acronym savvy, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet, all the bits and pieces of code that make a website look pretty and properly laid out rather than presenting plain white page with black text and blue underlined links. The idea is that by rendering sites voluntarily without any CSS, the generic and possibly inoperable sites will help promote Web Standards, the rules that Microsoft ignores with every new version of Internet Explorer so webmasters can’t make their website look the same on every browser.

Two words: screw that.

I’m what you might refer to as a “tweaker.” I love learning a new CSS tweak or website trick to make my sites do something or provide functionality beyond the ordinary. If I see something I’d like to make better if I can, I do. New color, new font, new placement, new image, whatever. So why is the promotion of Web Standards rendering hundreds of websites virtually unusable and completely dull? Worse yet, the only people who will actually understand it are the same folks actually participating.

For everyone else out there still inexplicably reading this as if i were coming to a point, here’s your payoff at last:

1. It’s like celebrating airline travel by hitchhiking.
2. It’s like celebrating mobile phones by screaming at one another.
3. It’s like celebrating toilet training by pissing yourself.

Enough with the fake Internet holidays, okay?

I’m fairly sure I haven’t thrown political praise on any particular party or candidate so far, so I post the following image with a clear conscious. Enjoy!

So here’s a few questions. If you (as a currently single person) ask a friend (who also happens to be single) to join you for a swanky holiday work-related gathering, does it count as a date or not? Does it matter if it’s a first date? If it wasn’t defined as a date before being accepted, can it be counted after it’s successfully over? If I declare it was a date without actually telling anyone beforehand and it rolls into another date, does that make me a “relationship ninja?”

In other news, my roommate flipped me off for bothering him with these same stupid questions.

So Hillary Clinton and John McCain came out on top in New Hampshire, the two people I like to call the “danger” candidates. Here’s why.

If Hillary makes the Democratic nomination, it’s going to feel like putting Bill back in the White House (Bill has probably already reserved “First Man” on MySpace). Isn’t that kind of like rewinding the clock 8 years? Didn’t the last two attempts by Ms. Clinton for universal health care die horrible deaths in Congress? Hillary doesn’t feel like hope or progress as much as she does eerily familiar. It doesn’t mean she wouldn’t win, however, depending on who’s she’s up against. With any luck it won’t be…

John McCain has a history, folks. While being a POW (for what, four years?) makes him sound like a promising president, it also screams “Manchurian Candidate.” Assuming he’s not a preprogrammed counter-intelligence agent, the other irrational fear is that he’s going to go post-traumatic stress syndrome the moment he gets the launch codes from the Book of Secrets (it’s real… there’s a movie.)

But what am I worried about? It’s only one primary with more to come. Sleep tight!

Get a new car for your spouse. It’ll be a great trade!

A baby seal walks into a club.

In the great State of Florida, the divorce rate is worse than one out of two marriages ending abruptly, so you must either take a class (consisting of reading a pamphlet in the lobby) or wait extra days between applying for and receiving permission to marry. So there was my future wife and I sitting quietly together reading about the horrors and ruin of divorce (including eternal damnation!), but I finished first and turned in my “test.” The woman behind the counter only then began to fill out the license paperwork.

I supplied my name, current address, and all the usual things used to steal identities, and then she asked me if I was born in Florida. I answered no, so she asked me for my home state. “West Virginia,” I answered.

The woman smiled weakly and glanced down at her sheet. She repeated the question as if she hadn’t heard me correctly, and I answered again. Her eyes darted about the paperwork frantically before she drew a long, air-of-superiority breath and said, “We don’t list geographical regions with the state code, so I’ll just pencil in Virginia, okay?”

At this point I heard my wife suppress a giggle, which was immediately picked up on by the suddenly panicked office worker. As her hand slowly reached under the desk to push the silent emergency “angry redneck alarm,” I calmly asked if there was anyone else to speak to. Withdrawing her hand with angry empowerment, she demanded to know why she was no longer sufficient to handle my business.

“Because West Virginia is an actual state,” I answered.

Apparently the office manager had not only been listening in but finally made a personal appearance to correct the office worker, who had to be shown a list of the two-letter codes for all fifty states before she glared at me as if I’d somehow added this new information to her chart just for spite.

Your tax dollars at work, folks.

Wanna clue as to how twisted MY imagination can be? Pretty much as bizarre as whomever came up with this overseas car commercial. Of course, one can only wonder how many of these things Toyota intends to sell if this is how they view their customer base, but oh well, enjoy.

A friend of mine working for a known internet company received a call from a customer. After their scripted greeting, the caller accused the consultant of not being who he says he was, that he’d asked somebody else and the number he was calling did not belong to that company. Unshaken by the accusation, the consultant jumped onboard and added, “My God! Who have I been taking money from all these years? This is just like that episode of ‘Alias!’ (whispered) What do I do? Who do I call? What if they’re listening right NOW???”

After the caller stopped laughing, the consultant explained that his company had been in business so long that there may be dozens of 1-800 or similar numbers that all route to the same place and that, in the future, to look up the numbers online if he didn’t trust any other source. Then the consultant asked, “After believing the number you had was fake, why would you call it at all?” After a moment of silence, the caller hung up.

(sung to the tune of “Kokomo” by The Beach Boys and with full apologies)

Aruba, jamaica ooo they wanna rake ya
Bermuda, bahamas left us in pajamas
Key largo, montego maybe I will forego
Jamaica

Off the Florida Keys
There’s another hurricane
That’s why we wanna go and get away from it all

Bodies in the sand
Tropical debris slicing up your hand
We’ll be falling in streets
Dodging bullets from all the looting bands
As sand banks overflow

Aruba, jamaica ooo they wanna rake ya
Bermuda, bahamas left us in pajamas
Key largo, montego maybe I will forego

Ooo each archipelago
Storm’ll get there fast
Then it’ll take it slow
That’s why we wanna go
Away from overflow

Season’s at peak, the third to hit this week

We’ll block out the sea
And board up all openings completely
By and for we’ll restore a little electricity

Afternoons like night
Cancelled last minute flights
That worried look in your eye
Can’t help thinking that we’re going to die
From ocean overflow

Aruba, jamaica ooo they wanna rake ya
Bermuda, bahamas left us in pajamas
Key largo, montego maybe I will forego

Ooo each archipelago
Storm’ll get there fast
Then it’ll take it slow
That’s why we wanna go
Away from overflow

Not convinced, when it hasn’t been here since

Anybody knows
A little hut like a bungalow
When the winds start to blow
It won’t survive this at all
Get out of kokomo

Aruba, jamaica ooo they wanna rake ya
Bermuda, bahamas left us in pajamas
Key largo, montego maybe I will forego

Ooo each archipelago
Storm’ll get there fast
Then it’ll take it slow
That’s why we wanna go
Away from overflow

Aruba, jamaica ooo they wanna rake ya
Bermuda, bahamas left us in pajamas
Key largo, montego maybe I will forego

Ooo each archipelago (repeats)

“The Hurricane Song” is Copyright 2004 by Kevin A. Ranson. If you enjoy it, feel free to pass it along or post it anywhere, provided that (1) it is not altered in any way, and (2) this copyright notice is attached. www.ThinkingSkull.com.