So it’s been almost a week since I got the conchs done. There was some swelling and it hurt like a bitch every time I banged on my ear or caught one of them with my finger. The barbell in the lower hole is pretty long so it doesn’t look completely goofy until I get the CBRs in but that means it gets knocked around more than if it was short. Last night was the first time I could even come close to sleeping on it. And today was the first day I could move the lower barbell without it feeling like I was getting it pierced again.

No pain no gain, right? It’ll all be worth it once I get the rings in but I’d definitely advise against getting inner conchs on both sides at the same time unless you can sleep on your back for a week or so though.

Fetch, don’t you think?

Once upon a time, I would have run down a herd of school children for the opportunity to have Tara Reid ignore me. She was like the queen of party whores. Then she went to a plastic surgeon (why? why? oh, the humanity!) whose name, I think, is Dr. Demento. Now she could be the poster child for why not to get plastic surgery.

So I was pondering that saying the other day and went back and read the whole speech from Hamlet. It’s Polonius talking to his son Laertes on the occasion of his departure to foreign lands

Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for.
There ... my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg’d comrade.  Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!

	-- William Shakespeare

Several of the lines struck me as really good advice.

“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; …” When the shit hits the fan if you have chosen wisely your friends are all you have. You let them drift away from you at your own peril.

“Give every man thy ear,  but few thy voice; …”  The world would be a better place if more people took this advice.

“And above all: To thine own self be true… ” If I had followed this my life would have been happier.

Last night I finally got around to getting my inner conches done. I got 2 done in my right ear with 14ga barbells for now. Johnson & Tasha came with me to take pictures and we rolled into Warlock’s about 9. There were 2 girls there getting navel rings (at least one was, I guess I’m not sure about the other one) and another girl getting a lobe piercing in front of me. I filled out the forms, ID, yada yada legal stuff. Autumn brought me in and we test fitted some rings then she put all the stuff in [the thing she still doesn't call an autoclave but I can never remember the name of]. I’m starting with barbells and will switch out to CBRs once the piercings are fully healed.

As usual, the actual piercings were pretty anti-climactic. Breath in, breath out,  needle through, jewelry in. She did the bottom first then the top. I will say that cartiledge is clearly tougher than  whatever earlobes are made out of. Autumn had to push pretty hard and where mine are is probably the thickest part of the conch.  As far as I know there wasn’t any blood. There definitely wasn’t any popping sound. There was pain but it was bearable — for the first I’d give it a 2/10 and the 2nd was probably a 2.5/10. As a comparison, I’d say the lobes piercings were 0.5/10 for the first 2 and maybe a 1/10 for the third one. There was a dull ache out of the top one for a while but nothing an ibuprofen didn’t take care of.

I went to bed a couple hours later and did sleep on my right side some during the night by putting the pillow above my ear. I did bang them a couple times during the night and that’ll wake you up. This morning there’s still a little ache from the top one but I can touch them (lightly) without it hurting. I cleaned them this morning and it didn’t make me cry like a little girl or anything.

Here are pictures. I’ll like them better once I get the rings in.

This is after she’d done the first one

And this is from this morning. Looking good so far…

Let me start by saying that radio sucking in the Triangle is nothing new. I’ve always heard how great WQDR was back in the day but they’d already switched to a country format when we got here.

WRDU was supposed to be the hot station in town but frankly they sounded like the top station in every city I’d ever lived in and my musical tastes are more, ummmm, eclectic. So I listened to 96.1 (known at the time as Y96) which at the time was playing Alternative. In 1994, while we were at First Night they switched call signs to WKIX and their format to country and became KIX96.1

It’s weird getting out of the car hanging out for a few hours and getting back in the car and having a country station on. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with the radio and then figured out what had happened.

Then there was another long period of radio sucking in the Triangle because the only thing left was 106.1 WRDU. This was supposedly the golden age of RDU but for me those for years represented everything that was wrong with Triangle radio. I mean, seriously, how the fuck many time a day do you need to hear Freebird or Stairway to Heaven.

Then in February 1998, 96.1 was raised from the dead as WBBB and played serious hardcore music: NIN, Manson, Tool (Tool on commercial radio, who ever heard of such a thing?) For me, the best of Triangle radio happened between 1998 and 2006. For whatever reason, in 2006 they decided to switch to the format either already vacated by RDU or about to be. Earlier this year, I knew WBBB’s death was complete when everybody started pissing all over themselves about Bob the Blade coming back. Here’s the thing, though, Bob the Blade was a fucking loser when he was at RDU and could have stayed in whatever hole he slunk off to when he left RDU.

Now mornings are full of Salt and Demetry the Greek. Salt is a bitch that doesn’t ever do anything but whine. Demtetry seems ok but he still works for a station that sucks. The other day Salt was making fun of the band Hoobastank. Apparently he doesn’t know in it’s better days that’s what BBB played. The’ve stolen a bunch of clips from Homestar Runner that they use on their show without attributing them. In fact, Salt told Demetry the other day he couldn’t do email without the secret phrase (which is a stolen clip from Strong Bad I also find it amusing they use Tool and Hollywood Undead clips on their show but their station never plays either one.

Anyway, most of the time it doesn’t bother me because I have XM in my car but not in my truck so I either have to make sure my ipod is charged of sully myself with the shit that passes for music on 96.1

Or Why This Is the Way It Has to Be

Bits blog on the NY Times discusses flagged revisions on Wikipedia in this post. You know that there are going to be the wailers and gnasher’s of teeth that this is the end of Wikipedia. How could it possibly continue if we require anonymous users to undergo peer review? Well, here’s the problem… we’ve been through this all before. When the Net first became useful, it was pretty much an open system — there were actually anonymous ftp sites that allowed you to upload files without any kind of authentication at all. And all of that stopped when the unwashed masses showed up and started parking their pirated porn or movies or whatever on people’s servers.

Wikipedia is the same way. Open, anonymous editing worked as long as everybody showed restraint and maturity. And if you’ve met a significant number of people in your life you know that’s not likely when you gather together more than 25 people. Here’s the thing – Wikipedia is the de facto standard for encyclopedic information on the web. So much so that Brittanica has announced that it will allow regular human beings to submit articles. It’s the de facto standard because it is timely and for the most part accurate. Timeliness without accuracy does me no good at all. If I can’t trust the information that I find on Wikipedia, I’ll look someplace else. There are plenty of places on the Net already where I can get useless bullshit disguised as fact. If it takes a week to get valid information posted that’s something I can live with. Don’t listen to the anarchists, Jimmy.

Of course the easiest way to continue to get up to the second articles (as well as having your entries appear immediately) is to become a registered user. It’s not painful… I’ve been one for years.

I was talking to a friend at dinner last night and he asked me what the Reign of Terror was that I referred to in one of my other posts. I explained it and realized it was possible that not everybody is as familiar with the French Revolution as I am. So I decided to put a link to the wikipedia article that explains it [NB: This is something I'm constantly missing when I post & I'm hoping to get better at]. Which made me wonder if I should write a post saying that I had edited the previous post. Which led me to wonder about corrections on blogs in general & how to best handle them.

I like to think I’m pretty good at searching the web so imagine my surprise when I could find no web pages that talk about the accepted way to correct an earlier statement or error in a post. It occurs to me that if there isn’t any discussion of how to do that correctly there’s a pretty good chance that people are just editing in place and not mentioning it at all. I know newspaper sites do this because I’ve seen them edit out of existence some factual error on a breaking story with no mention that it was going on.

You may have noticed that I tend to prefer technology to old school and regard people who get their news off dead trees as little better than Amish but it seems to me that having things magically correct themselves without explanation is a little dishonest.

This post isn’t about Framing Hanley but stems from notes I made to myself on my Blackberry before passing out in a drunken stupor in the back seat of the car while Johnson drove home.

You’ll recall that we were in Jacksonville, home of Camp LeJuene. As a result of that, a lot of the people at Hooligan’s were Marines.  My note states “joining the Marines will not make a dork cool”. I’m not sure exactly what caused me to write that but I’ll give you an example of the sort of thing that would have caused me to write it. There were 3 Marines in line in front of us, all under 21, all three combined didn’t break 500lbs.  One of them had this huge cigar that he was “smoking”. I say “smoking” because you can’t make finger quotes in a blog. I suspect he had never seen a grown-up smoke a cigar because it looked a lot like a high school girl giving her first blow job. There was a lot of that going on as I recall. Of course, you’d sort of expect some non-trivial number of the people who are attracted to the Marines in the first place to be compensating for some perceived shortcoming. You know, like how most cops are bullies but too pussy to actually bully people on their own so they become cops and that way people can’t stand up to them.

The other note I made says “ugly girls should not stand with their backs to bright lights”. I think that’s probably self-explanatory.

Ok, Amy Winehouse is supposed to be some huge star but I’ve never heard a single one of her songs. The only thing I know about her is she’s a crackwhore and her (soon to be ex) husband is some sort of musician and he’s in prison.  Here’s yours for today:

I got an email from Autumn, my piercer, today saying that they were closed yesterday because of the snow and she had just gotten in today, they didn’t get the jewelry shipment yet and that she didn’t want me to think she had forgotten about me.

That’s customer service, Tiger Direct. I don’t expect a company the size of Tiger Direct to email me about little stuff like this (although there’s no reason why they couldn’t) but at least treat me like you care if I exist. But this is the sort of thing I was talking about. There are at least 10 piercing studios in Raleigh. Any of them can run a needle through me. Most of them are probably clean. Customer service is what it’s all about. And that’s why I go there.

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