Well, it’s arrived: Today is my thirty sixth eighth annual twenty ninth birthday. Sadly, my beloved Red Sox did not deliver with a pre-birthday win. However, with a 13.5 game lead over the reviled Yankees, I can’t complain too much. And if they’d really like to get me a present, I suppose a three game sweep of the Empire this weekend would suffice.

So far, there’s no clear winner in the birthday poll. Personally, I was hoping that the majority would vote to buy me the Monkey That Picks Winning Lottery Numbers. I figure that with enough lottery winnings, all of the other options, from Swimming Pools Filled With Cocaine to Laser-Toting Sharks, are within my reach. Mad scrilla makes the world go ‘round, baby.

Tomorrow night, I’ll be celebrating in style, catching a concert by THE GREATEST BAND IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE, playing at THE GREATEST BAR IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. I speak, obviously, of the one and only Captured! By Robots, at the one and only Funhouse. Death metal performed by wisecracking animatronic puppets! Who’s with me?

And in completely unrelated news: The Decider In Chief just signed a presidential directive giving himself total control of the gubmint in the event of an Islamocommunofascist attack or hurricane or impending Democratic presidency. Time to start learning to the words to “O Canada,” bitches!

In Las Vegas, able-bodied tourists are renting mobility scooters meant for the disabled… in order to avoid the pain and hardship of actually walking.

Dear Denizens of the Evil Monkey Planet, please invade Earth and subjugate humanity with all deliberate speed. Humans have proven conclusively that we are clearly unfit to run this planet.

Since switching my laptop from Windows to Ubuntu, I’ve managed to find Open Source replacements for all of the applications I regularly used with Windows… except one. My copy of Photoshop 7.0 has served my image editing needs admirably over the years. I would certainly not claim to have strong Photoshop kung fu (I don’t know how to glue people’s heads onto other people’s bodies, or graft lines of cocaine onto George Bush’s face) but I use it all the time to sharpen, crop, and fix the colors on my digital photos. I’ve gotten comfortable with it, and I really didn’t want to switch.

It appears, however, that I may have to. While there are ways to make Photoshop work with Ubuntu, the directions seem inordinately complicated (and are written for much newer versions of the software than mine, in any case.) So right now, I’m hunting around for alternatives.

Over the weekend, I tried editing some pictures with The Gimp, an open source photo editor that comes pre-installed with Ubuntu. I didn’t like the results, though. The pictures seemed significantly grainier than those edited in Photoshop, even after sharpening. The brightness/contrast and color saturation features didn’t seem to work as well, either.

If anyone out there has used both Gimp and Photoshop, would you consider Gimp an acceptable replacement? Can you recommend other photo editors for Linux that might do a better job? Or, alternatively, is there a relatively painless way to make Photoshop work on Ubuntu?

(And speaking of photos, here’s a few from our trip to Mount St. Helens this past weekend. The mountain itself was completely invisible due to fog and clouds, but the effects of its 1980 eruption are still evident all over the landscape.)

UPDATE: Not exactly sure how I missed this one, but the Snarky Penguin has been raving about a new flavor of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Studio. Hmmm, I wonder if a distro aimed specifically at multimedia junkies might have some nifty photo editing apps? Maybe I’ll just find out…

Gasworks is the type of public park that could only exist in Seattle. This site on the shore of Lake Union, which used to be a gasification plant, was purchased by the city in 1962 and turned into a public park… and in true quirky Seattle fashion, the rusting gas towers and pipes were incorporated into the design.

With our time in Seattle running short, we skipped out of work early on Thursday afternoon and went to the park.

I suppose it’s just indicative of the dreary, authoritarian, secrecy-obsessed times we live in: less than a week after finding out about Microsoft’s efforts to crush all innovation in the software industry by suing the Open Source movement out of existence, I learn that there is a movement afoot to throttle access to artistic works by excessively extending copyright. Bills to extend copyright are already pending in Great Britain, and on our side of the pond, no less than an authority than the Paper of Record is editorializing in favor of extending American artistic copyrights – forever.

A pox on all their houses. Curses and fulminations upon money-grubbing whores and corporate swine who want to reduce all artistic, cultural, and technological progress to a dollar figure. How far have we sunk when this slavish dedication to “the market” and “free enterprise” leads some shitheads to believe that it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to monopolize access to an idea, in perpetuity?

But maybe, just maybe, the backlash against the privatization of information and information access has begun. A bipartisan bill currently working its way through the Maine state legislature would make my home state the first in the nation to legally enforce net neutrality. As the concept of protecting net neutrality gains widespread notice, more public figures are taking up the banner, most notably Al Gore.

(You know, it’s a damn shame that this Al Gore didn’t run for President in 2000. If he had, he would’ve won by a landslide, and the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush Presidency never would’ve happened…)

STRESS: That confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s basic desire to choke the living shit out of some asshole who desperately needs it.

People, I’m pissed. So many things in this world piss me off that any attempt to list them all would use up all the computing power currently in existence for the next fifty piscillion years and create a stack of paper that would reach to Uranus and back at twice the speed of light. And that’s on a good day.

Well, no more. I’ve had enough of all this dumbshittery. It’s time to start hittin’ back. It’s time to deliver a bitch slap to the universe and all the asshelmets in it.

In other words, it’s time for a

PRAYER ASSAULT!!!

(Image via those magnificent bastards at America’s best political blog, Liberals Must Die!)

That felt goooooood. How you like me now? Yeah, I thought so. From now on, that’s how it is. Anyone or anything who pisses me off will be meeting the business end of a Prayer Assault, P-Rob style. Jam it in and break off the handle!

These are witchy times for Microsoft. Windows Vista, which was years in development, is an underwhelming, ridiculously expensive, resource-hogging, bug-ridden, crash-prone lump of crap. Internet Explorer is still losing market share to Mozilla. Ubuntu, the current star of the Linux universe, is getting rave reviews, and will soon be available pre-installed on new Dell PC’s. Hell, A-List library bloggers are even making videos to guide laymen through Ubuntu installs and conversions.

So, faced with all this evidence of widespread consumer discontent, one would think that the Redmond Politburo would take this opportunity to do some soul-searching, listen to their users, and make major changes to the way they develop and market their software, right?

Nah, who am I kidding? This is Microsoft we’re talking about. They’re just going to try and sue the free software industry out of existence.

But now there’s a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it’s being cast by Microsoft.The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google, Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore.

As time goes by, it’s getting harder and harder to reconcile the sense of pride and accomplishment I feel for my time at the Gates Foundation Library Program with my profound loathing for the company that funded it. I keep telling myself that we did something good and worthwhile, and reminding myself of the millions of people nationwide who, through our efforts, have access to computers and the internet through their local library. Does the fact that our good works were funded by a ruthless, monopolistic, innovation-killing corporate juggernaut cheapen the accomplishment?

Damned if I know.

As part of my ongoing quest to get my own website blocked by our internet filter, thus ensuring that I will never be able to blog from work again, I offer the following headline:

Yes, it’s come to this. Our Preznit is now so staggeringly popular that two companies are fighting over the right to sell buttplugs in his likeness.

This may be the first time in George W. Bush’s entire life that his head will be up someone’s ass other than his own.

Thanks! You’ve been great! Be sure to tip your server…

Wolcott turns a phrase like few others, so it’s worth quoting him at length:

The ashy clouds over Mordor have parted, my friends. It was only a year or so ago that the Permanent Republican Majority seemed not only a grim possibility, but a stark near-inevitability. Karl Rove’s master plan seemed to have a mortal lock on the political future. So downbeat was the daily news and so dispiriting the performance of the Democrats in 2004 that I had internalized liberalism’s permanent underdog status, consoling myself that at least I lived in a liberal city in a liberal state and had plenty of company in the commisseration ward. But I also took heart in Emerson’s insight that everything looks permanent until it’s secret is known; that invisible cracks form deep in even the sturdiest structures and over time will not be denied. But “over time” can be a long time. Decades, even. And so much would not survive that long a wait.

The wait was shorter than I could have ever hoped and dreamed, and with far more dramatic consequences. I would go through the entire list, but consider: Tom DeLay-gone; George Allen-gone; Rick Santorum-gone; John Bolton-gone; Donald Rumsfeld-gone. It’s been clear since the midterm elections that the Bush administration and the Republican Party never anticipated (anymore than I did) that the Republicans would lose both houses of Congress. They assumed-and why wouldn’t they?-that they would have two unassailable years to pack the government agencies and the courts with their cronies and gerrymander the Democrats into crippled, ineffectual archipelagos. Two years for Bush to walk tall in the roving spotlight and stage-manage his triumphant stroll into his legacy, a two-term titan with a permanent Republican majority to Reaganize his memory. Two years for Rove to gloat in his desaturated fats of his own genius.

Instead, there’s a shitstorm brewing, the flags are beginning to snap on the flagpoles, and karma is about to pay a nasty housecall.

Ever since making the decision to move back to Maine, I’ve been wondering what the hell to do about employment once I get there. Maine is a small, rural, fairly poor state, and the public libraries don’t pay very well. Moreover, since the house is in Portland, I’m necessarily limited to towns within a reasonable commuting distance, further limiting my options. To be blunt, I can’t afford to be picky; I’ve sent a resume in for practically every posting that appears on the state library job site.

One of those jobs was for a school librarian in a posh private school quite close to home. I sent in a resume, had an initial phone interview with the head librarian, and waited to hear back about whether or not I had made the cut for a second interview. It was indicated to me that I would be hearing from them within a few days.

So I waited. And waited. And waited. And waited…

Finally, after having sent a couple of unanswered emails to the director requesting an update, I heard back from the head librarian: they had already brought in the interviewees for the second round, done the interviews, decided on a candidate, and offered them the job. In fact, the winner had started their new job the previous week. The head librarian was embarrassed that no one in administration had sent me my rejection letter, and apologized profusely. And sure enough, the letter arrived two days later.

Big deal, right? People get turned down for jobs all the time, and employers are sometimes lax about getting back to job candidates, especially those who didn’t make the cut anyway. So what?

One small problem: THEY MAILED THE REJECTION LETTER TO MY CURRENT PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT.