So my e-mail isn't working. The nice people at Roadrunner insist the problem is on my end.

Right. Two different e-mail readers both suddenly become unable to access my account. Bullshit. I've changed nothing, I tell you - nothing. I'm talking to a supervisor when I get home tonight.

[Postscript: I downloaded Microsoft Outlook, and it checks my mail just fine. Conspiracy, I tell you! Conspiracy!]

The other day Sonya and I were riding along in my truck when she spotted one of those "Nice People Swallow" bumper stickers.

"What is the big deal with that?" she demanded from me, "why is it such an issue?"

While I don't know why it's so important for guys to get girls to swallow, I do know what would make it more palatable for girls: if, instead of one mouth-filling squirt, what if guys did their business in a slow, dripping kind of way over, say, five minutes or so. No girl would complain then, right?

So, the British press have their panties in a knot about the way the Americans acted at the Ryder Cup. What, you don't know what I'm talking about?

I didn't know about it either 'til I saw something at cnn.com the other day. For those of you (like me) who don't follow golf, the Ryder Cup is an (annual? bi-annual? semi-annual?) golf match between American and European players. Apparently, whenever this thing was, the Americans came back from a huge deficit and won. Like all come-from-behind winners, they jumped up and down, rolled around on the grass, and hugged each other. The British press has called this deplorable and ugly. I mean, they're really, really upset.

Hey, English readers! I know you exist - is your entire country upset about this thing?

Here's the thing: every sportswriter in England is pissed off about the way the Americans behaved. They're making it out to be a really big deal. Yet here in the States, the average person doesn't give a fuck. Really. I watch SportsCenter and all, but I had no idea about this until well after the fact - when the English press started complaining. More than that, the average American doesn't care about the Ryder Cup. I certainly don't. I think it's funny that the English press is enraged after "their" loss while Joe Sixpack doesn't even know there was anything to fuss about, much less that there is fussing going on.

I graduated high school from a small private school. It went from kindergarten to seniors, right? Now, when I was a senior I had no idea of who the sixth graders were. After I graduated, though, I found out that all the kids in the sixth grade followed the goings-on of the senior class and knew what we were doing as a group better than the senior class itself.

England, though...you know, they had an Empire, they've got royalty, London is perhaps the hippest city on the planet, and yet the country feels they have to play the role of geeky-kid-with-braces, cast against the valedictorian quarterback that is the United States. Nobody's making them be that way, you know. They're doing it on their own.

Sonya got paid last night. After a frugal weekend, we immediately went out and dropped a hundred bucks on dinner and a trip to Wherehouse. It's incredible; we're such consumers.

Gosh, nothing's going on in real life...how about we talk journals? Yeah!

If you're not interested in the sordid world of online journals, you can pretty much hit the showers, cowboy. Might I recommend you visit my archives and possibly read some porn?

Okay, can I make a confession first? I've never - and still don't - care for The Mighty Kymm. Gosh, I feel like such a heathen just saying that. I mean, everywhere you go, journal-wise, people talk about how Kymm got them started keeping a journal, or how she's such a sweet person, or how she got their cat out of a tree or saved their kid when the kid fell down a well - shit like that. Now I do look at her page every once in a while, and she seems like a nice person and all, but her diary leaves me totally unimpressed. I just don't get all the fuss.

No doubt someone will try to explain it to me, now.

Now if those folks over at the Diarist Awards want to give out some medals, they should give one to Siobhan for this entry - it smacked me in the gut like a fucking fist. I'm quite ambivalent about the whole journal community, but I'll do what it takes to get Siobhan nominated for this one.

And in my humble (yet self-righteously correct) opinion, some of the best - and funniest - work happening on the web is done by Jamie Zawinski, uberprogrammer and San Francisco countercultural icon. Mind you, it's not a journal in the strictest sense of the word - something amusing or interesting happens, he writes about it. He's probably updated six, seven times this year. I swear, though, it's high quality stuff.

Hell, let's just dump out my bookmarks and see what falls out.

• Bad Hair Days - The problem with a lot of daily journals is that their fucking daily. As Tommy Callahan once said, "you want me to shit in a box and label it guaranteed, I'll do it for you. I got spare time." Hell, I could sneeze on a piece of paper, scan it, and post it every day. You can really tell some folks are struggling to write daily.

  Hell, some of us struggle to write a few times a week.

  Not Beth, though. Every day (or damned near) she cranks out an entertainingly grumpy missive to the world. She's a cool chick.

• Humidity & Hebephrenia - Meredith is cool. And southern. I'd totally hang out with her.
• jellyfish - I cannot say enough good things about Siobhan. She's a turn-of-the-century Holly Golightly, constantly bemused at the whir and buzz of New York. Her friends, family, lovers and roommate tickle the hell out of me.

  But every once in a while she whacks you in the chest with the proverbial baseball bat. See the above example.

• like you give a rat's ass - Deb seems like a cool chick, too. She's had a baby recently, too, but instead of her page becoming a shrine to the offspring, as all too often happens, throughout the pregnancy and after she's shown a healthy dose of dubious cynicism in the face of parenthood. I like it.
• The nature of life in reality - My homegirl, Jen. She's getting the hang of this journal thing. While she's had some trouble with making regualr updates, she's really starting to flex her storytelling muscles. One to watch.
• Scratch that Itch - Tracy is an old school writer, and she seems to lead an interesting life. I approve.
• sometimes deb - Deb is an ambiguous diarist, really. She hasn't updated in over a month. But her stuff - when it arrives - is really good. And she lives in Austin, which makes her cool by default. And I think she's cute.
• Squirrel Bait - Meghan, my favorite Tennessee writer (besides myself). She's ambivalent about the whole thing, too, but she's damned funny.
• Words - True, Scott is Canadian, but I can overlook that 'cause he's so good.

And while neither of these two are updating anymore, I still like to read Scab and sugar & preserve. Kim because she's so good and Wil because he lays all that pain out for the world to see. Still worth reading almost a year later, both of them.

And tell me this: why aren't there any journals in Memphis besides mine? Everyone in Tennessee is either in Murphreesboro (I don't even know where Murphreesboro is) or Nashville. All the diarists in Memphis are junior high kids or shrill, dogmatic and unpleasant. Or both.

I rule this town!

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