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For the person who has been waiting patiently for pictures from the birthday party, the best of the lot are uploaded to my flickr. The entire set (less the totally horrific stuff that I had to delete immediately) is still on my computer. If you really want all of the sucky ones that I didn't upload to flickr, let me know and I'll burn you a CD.

( Picture-laden discussion follows. )

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Today I cleaned out a garbage bag of things I do not need or want from the book room. I'm reasonably sure that not all of them were *my* things but they have been in my book room since December, 1996 and therefore are more than ten years missing and thus may be freely thrown away.

( And then what happened? )

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On my flist, sara_merry99 has been watching bull riding.  I don't know what (if anything) they do to the bulls, but I've kind of fallen out of watching bucking horses because, basically, they get them to buck by poking them with a hotshot.  (A hotshot is pretty much a livestock-taser.)  Some stellarly incriminating video (Best watched with the sound off, unfortunately.  The voice over is annoying as all hell.) is on youtube.  The most incriminating stuff, to my mind, is what you get when they *don't* shock the horses... like when there was an injunction against same at the 2007 high school rodeo national finals. Part One and Part Two

The same animal-rights organization tries to make similar claims for the niceness of rodeo bulls.  I dunno if I find that as convincing as the videos of horses, clearly unhappy, just standing in the chutes instead of exploding forth bucking wildly like is more usual in a rodeo setting.

The bull video makes the claim that bulls are not "vicious killers".  I don't know about that.  I do know that bulls are not wild animals.  They're livestock.  They get dipped for ticks.  They get vaccinated for assorted stuff.  They get dewormed.  Their horns get filed to flat ends (they would be pointy if left to grow their own way). They get loaded on trailers and unloaded and so forth.  They're HANDLED, for fuck's sake, and they've seen humans before.  The reason that rodeo bulls are not trying to kill or stomp or bite people outside of the fence (as is shown in the bull video) is that they are livestock and they understand fences.  No, asshats, they are not wild animals.  Doesn't mean that they aren't killers.

My friend's uncle was badly gored by his bull, whom he had cared for and fed and dealt with on an ongoing basis.  He didn't try to ride the bull or to make it buck or anything like that, but the bull nearly killed him anyway.  Bulls may not be trusted.

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The last time I installed Linux, it was on a RedHat Cd for work purposes.  I never got a GUI working, I never had a mouse or sound or anything other than a machine with a network interface suitable for 300 day (and up) uptimes running things like RADIUS, named, apache, qmail, and so forth. I didn't use it for, y'know, personal stuff. Now, I have a laptop with an embarrassing amount of free hard drive space (over 200 gig).

It being a lazy Sunday, too cold (and raw) to go out, I decided I would look into putting linux on my laptop so that I could have a dual-boot system with XP and Ubuntu, which has a cute name and a pretty logo.  (How did you choose your *n*x distro? I was totally scientific about it.  Cute name, pretty logo. What the linux world clearly needs is the Hello Kitty distro, sponsored by Sanrio...)

( For the love of God, Montresor, why!? )