It’s been awhile I hope that nothing conspiratorial has befallen him, and that instead he is lying on a beach somewhere that takes only American Express.

Some interesting, albeit scary thoughts on taxing drivers are being researched here in backwoodsy Oregon. Well, looked into, at leat. The ideas derive from an increase in fuel-efficient cars (not sure where they’re seeing them?!) which is causing a decrease in gas tax revenues…so they want to track mileage. To do so, they’d use techniques such as GPS and other little black boxes that need to be installed into cars. Besides the obvious privacy issues, which About it All has probably already covered, there are some interesting possibilities here.

I couldn’t think of a better title for this post, pointing you to a quicky, must-read article, the content of which I’m not going to spoil for you. Just read it. And thank you Utterly Boring.

Just thought of something…with all this WMD talk and the fact that they’re not being found. It doesn’t even matter, because I didn’t agree with the war to begin with (though with the fairly moderate stance that if you can get the UN to be down with it, I’ll go along ;), so the fact that the WMD’s don’t even exist when their words explicitly stated that a) they exist, b) they know where they are, and c) they’ll turn up quickly and easily should be evidence of shady motives to the rest of America.

The phrase dot-com long ago began to sound, similar to ‘milk’ said a few dozen times consecutively, amorphous and lacking in true meaning. Whenever I heard the subphrase I would expect a punchline, even in a Merrill Lynch ad or coming from some VP. Coming from my own mouth, the word would make me double-take with the surprised look of a young dog farting. While the dot-com ookiness will be with me for awhile, remembered like a rough tequila night, it’s coming under control, new terms like ROI and TCO have risen to teh challenge, racing towards meaninglessness, and my dot-com fits are less and less frequent.

You know bad shit’s going down because the funny blogs are really funny. Check out defective yeti’s and Izzle Pfaff’s recent observations. Must have something to do with 4000 billion deficit we’re exacerbating with the taxcuts. Makes me feel funny too.

$90,000/year for 1,000 years. That’s what it would take to gross what recent high schooler LeBron James will be pulling in over the next five years in his Nike endorsement. Put on top of that his salary and other endorsements, and this kid is pretty much guaranteed 1/10 of a billion dollars before he’s 25. Straight from crib to MTV Cribs. For playing basketball and having his picture taken. The fun part is that he’s never even played a professional game.

I’m upgrading the blog software. It’s a significant version change, so I need to rebuild the template and links and stuff. Bear with me, the words themselves should work out just fine. Update: all looks well, the template is sloppy but functioning. props to the fellas at WordPress for picking up the work on b2 and getting these fixes out. Now I just hope that random sec. holes haven’t made me one of the net’s larger Qu@ke 3 m1rr0rz

Overall, it was a fantastic time. By game six, I was exhausted. My legs had grown heavy like McFly. Muscles all over my body were sore. The pulled hamstring had bruised up nicely. My kicks had lost their accuracy, and when I executed a sliding tackle I was happier staying on the ground. But I got up and played. Just like the rest of the team. Sluggish, maybe. Tired and sore yes. We gave it the last bit we had, and walked off the field having lost, but with our heads held as high as our necks would hold them.

The Oregon Classic soccer tournament was this weekend, so three days of exhausting fun in the sun (despite the meteorologist predictions) were lined up for poor injured me. I played anyway, despite my better judgement. It started Saturday: I’m not gonna play at all today. Then why’d I’d suit up? So I could jump in the first game and play some ball. After that game, which I played about half of, I played the entirety of the remaining five games in the tournament. Two games Saturday, three Sunday, and one on Monday. Ibuprofen was my friend, though I’m cold turkey today to assess where I’m at.

I hadn’t played in a soccer tournament since high school. What fun it was! Total immersion, it was like a vacation without going anywhere. Generally we’d have about two hours between games, during which we’d watch other games, eat tacos, refluidate, and have a beer or two. Every now and then someone would heckle a referee for no apparent reason. The team was put together by my friend Ben, and consisted of players from three different area pickup games, so a lot of us didn’t know each other at all. It kinda showed, especially in our first game, but we improved dramatically after that, and actually place 4th (of eight teams) in the 3rd division.