Just when I thought I understood how this stuff worked, I bought a bunch of shares in “Busy mom blog”, and the price went down. I really need to read that Motley Fools book that’s been propping up the end of the coffee table …

I don’t know what to think about this. Evidentally, Starbucks feels that it is a violation of their copyright if you take a picture in any Starbucks store. This strikes me as so utterly absurd, I’m almost inclined to drive right down to the Starbucks in Lexington and snap a few pictures.

Because the BlogShares thing has become rather fun of late (now that I suddenly made $100K over the last 24 hours!) I started looking for wine blogs too. There’s not very many of them, but some of them are *really* good.

Here’s a few:

TiZWine Daily Tipple
Meg’s Food and Wine Page
Dandelion Wine (not actually about wine, but the title of one of my favorite books, so worth mentioning
Alien Wine Connoisseur (also seems not to be actually wine-related)
Wine Blog
New wine for new wineskins (OK, not wine-related at all)
A pure haze of wine and cocaine (huh?)
Ken’s Wine Blog
Wine, Women, and Song
Wine Trends

And, finally, as I mentioned before, Alec Saunders appears to make occasional wine-based posts.

So, having done all that, perhaps I should actually add the wine-based ones to some kind of blogroll so that I can actually read them occasionally.

Somehow, I feel like I’m avoiding work …

I’ve been interested in seeing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so I was looking around on the web. It appears that not only is it a comic book, but it’s also a television show. Having seen none of the above, I’m not sure if they are in any way connected.

The commentary here seems to infer that the comic and the movie are connected, but that the tv show is not.

Having spent a little more time playing with Blogshares, I have made over 60K in the last 24 hours (gee, I wish that was real money) and also discovered Dionysus. Unfortunately, I can’t read a word of it. Pity, that.

Mr Hibbity Gibbity thinks that Piglet is gay. My daughter, on the other hand, seems to think that Piglet is a girl, and I suppose that there is very little evidence to the contrary, except for the whole moving in with Pooh thing, which would thus be rendered somewhat inappropriate for a kids story.

On the way back to the office after the LPLUG meeting, I was about the 3rd car on the scene after the storm brought down a BIG tree on top of a passing Buick. It landed on the hood, and the car had climbed up on on branch, where it was stuck. So I spent 30-45 minutes pulling branches out of the road, directing traffic, and generally getting soaked to the bone as we waited for the police to arive and take over.

Although the Buick was damaged – a small crack in the hood – I think that if he had been 3 or 4 feet further on when it fell, it could easily have gone through the windshield or roof, and been much more serious. We hooked up a chain to the car, and dragged it off of the tree branch, and he drove away just fine.

Next, we hooked the chain to the various huge bits of the tree, and dragged them out of the way so that traffic could get past. When the policeman eventually did arrive, there was really nothing for him to do, since the road was clear, and the damaged vehicle had long since left.

I would have taken some pictures, but unfortunately left my camera at home. It would have been nice to have a machete with me, too.

Ken is unabashedly pimping his blog to inflate his value on blogshares. Do people do this in the real stock market? I can’t say I really understand either one. Anyways, his strategy seems to be rather successful so far, where as mine … isn’t.

Nearly 10 years after buying the movie, I just finished watching Gettysburg. I think I made it most of the way through the first of two tapes, back when I bought it. As with many movies, I was not able to complete watching it because the co-watcher lost interest.

So, anyways, this evening I saw the rest of it.

It is hard for my mind to grasp that kind of slaughter. 53,000 men died in that battle. Many of them knew men on the other side.

In a time when a handful of casualties is considered a heavy blow, it is hard to grasp a 50% casualty rate.

CNN.com – Climber recounts decision to amputate arm – May. 8, 2003

I suppose it’s a measure of my weirdness that as I read about this guy amputating his own arm with a blunt knife, what keeps coming to mind was, well, at least I always carry at least one, and usually two, sharp knives, when I go climbing solo.

I simply can’t imagine the kind of fortitude necessary to perform an operation like this on oneself. But I guess, after 3 days, that one can do extreme things.