No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Random thoughts for today

Today is Boxing Day in Britain and its former colonies, and St. Stephen's Day in Catholic countries. And of course in Northern Ireland no-one can agree on what to call it, and arguments used to get quite heated in the past. I think the name "Boxing Day" comes from some tradition of the English monarch handing out charity on the day after Christmas.

On Christmas Day of course there is also the tradition of the queen of England addressing her subjects. Back in the day when I was active on the usenet group soc.culture.celtic, some English wanker would always try to start a holy war by posting the entire transcript of Lizzie's vapid vaporings to the newsgroup. It never worked, though. We regulars would just dissect the speech and interject rude comments, MST3K style.

Here in the US, December 26 is just another day. It seems cold to have to go into work the day after Christmas. My wife certainly wasn't happy about it. It doesn't make much difference to me, being gainfully unemployed. Or rather, self-employed without the bother of having any customers yet. I was laid off a few months ago, and decided the time was right to go into business for myself rather than continuing to go through the job-hunting cattle call. In the software industry, the older and more experienced you get, the harder it is to get hired, and the more likely you are to be stuck in a rut as a code monkey.

Anyway, I've developed a prototype of a software product, and a friend with contacts in Silicon Valley has already shown it to some engineers and managers at a large company, who have expressed interest (in a non-committal way, of course). Oh well, I'll keep my fingers crossed. Which makes it hard to type, though.

Some other deep thoughts:

• Can God, universal butt-kicker, kick his own butt?
• Who the hell is this Amy Winehouse person? Yesterday nobody had heard of her, today you can't open a newspaper or spend thirty seconds surfing the web without coming across her ridiculous Tammy-Faye-Bakker face and hair. It used to be that musicians had to spend a few years showing the public that they had some actual talent, before they could move between the initial phase of total obscurity and the final stage of being famous for public meltdowns, self-destructive tantrums and embarrassing brushes with the law rather than for their music. Now it seems the intermediate stage can be skipped over completely. Sort of like the US going from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization.
• In France they eat frog's legs. What do they do with the rest of the frog? If you went over to France, would you see a lot of frogs going around in little wheelchairs?

Anyway, hope you survived Christmas without too many casualties, despite the warmongering of those Jeezus-hatin' librulls. Peace to you and yours, and best wishes for the New Year!