d i z t o p i a

Why I Haven't Posted Much in the Last Three Weeks

Shortish version of the story is here. More details to come later, individually and severally, after you (ALL of you) meet me at the bar. For obvious reasons, I likely won't post here next week at all, but I'll try to get back on the beam sometime thereafter. Have a lovely weekend. Support your troops.

Picking Up Beautiful Girl Has Never Been Easier

It's true! Just click the ad to the right if you don't believe me. Seriously tacky, but I figure all these Austrian net pervs looking for Olsen porn might as well pay the rent. Since Google Adsense rejected diztopia on the basis of too much potty mouth, I'm left with "ExpoActive," who must be seriously strapped for outlets if they're appealing to bottom feeders like yours truly. But they're going to be good to me, I can feel it. At $0.25 a click, I'm only 400 clicks away from my first check. It's gonna be a gold mine. Or maybe that's just the pheromones talking.

Welcome to Our New Non-Irish Minty Green Freshness

No really, I've been tinkering with this design change for about a week, and I had zero cognizance of the looming commemoration of the famous snake evictor. I wasn't even going to launch it till Friday, but then realized it was too perfect not to take advantage of this "holiday" as some would call it. So happy St. Patrick's Day to all you potato-eatin' micks anyway. I'll be swilling green-tinted crap American beer with the rest of my culturally insensitive countrymen tonight. Speaking of which, I speak of which from experience: you can get massively cheap beer by the keg if you hit the liquor stores after midnight of St. Patrick's Day, as they're looking to unload that green beer fast. I once saved a dying party singlehandedly with a $25 keg of green Coors Lite. If you can call that "saving" anything. Sure, half the keg was still there the next day, and the only thing worse than rancid beer mung by morning light is GREEN rancid beer mung, but I say again: $25.  God it was awful, but when it's that cheap, you have a moral obligation to ingest as much as possible.

Er, anyway, feel free to weigh in on this slick new look. And remember: green like healthy green tea, green like heaps of cash rolling in, green like the envy of other bloggers with lesser template-managin' skeelz. But not, intentionally, green like the Irish.

The End of Year Zero

When diztopia was born
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for passionate Christs
And new cream puffs in town
There were Spring Street smackdowns
And the new Hamburglar was scorned
When diztopia was born

When diztopia grew
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for Olsen Twins slime
And Photoshopping Iraq
Though drag queens carjack
Some preferred the juxtaposed view
When diztopia grew

When diztopia matured
It was a very good year
It was a very good year for INXS's "last gasp" 
And lazy photo-pair jokes
By way of monkeys galore, and downsized Cokes
And the donut drink post, many link-whores were lured
When diztopia matured

But now I'm phoning it in
With link dumps and bile
And I use this blog as an excuse not to toil
Cheap shots are my niche
And I still like to bitch
I guess it's actually quite clear
It wasn't such a good year

But thanks for listening here. cheers. beers? shmears!

What's Another Word For "Hiatus"

Diztopia will degenerate into an irregular posting schedule for the next few weeks, as I try to cobble together various projects and enforce a (three-year-old) New Year's resolution to get back to work on the novel. Or perhaps I'll just spend more time gazing out the window and sighing. Or gently stroking my desk and sighing. Or perhaps sighing and then hunting down and remonstrating with this person (subscription or enduring a Salon "ultramercial" required) for using the phrase "skew athwart the mainstream." Athwart! The mainstream! Why, it's almost sufficient to tumesce my dudgeon high enough to post on this and only this topic. She even puts her name in all lower case and is a Berkeley PhD candidate studying "sociable media." GRRRRRAARRRRR! NO! No! Serenity. Serenity now. Never mind. It's all going to be fine. I'm going to relax in a hot serotonin bath and forget about all this. There will definitely be at least a link dump a week, and occasional tirades otherwise. In the meantime, visit the fine folks to the left if you require replacement stimulants.

Welcome Back

In certain circumstances, an object's basic qualities will be thrown into stark relief if they particularly contrast with its environment. So as I'm listening to Andre 3000 on my iPod while walking through the Bronx, I'm wondering if it's possible for me to be any more of a twinkie white boy. The answer is: no.

It's grrrrrreat to be back after two weeks and change! A glut of idiotic emails to answer, not to mention a pile of packages and mail to process and regurgitate. And did I mention that right before vacation, I went to the emergency room with an 104-degree fever? The virons were having a party in my brain, and they invited all their sticky friends. Diagnosis: flu. Treatment: bed rest and Tylenol. The doctor spoke to me from behind a surgical mask and plastic face shield. At least I was not imprisoned in a bubble and prodded with rubber-sleeved arms. In my confused trip to the ER, I left my cell phone in a cab. And I was expecting a callback on a job prospect that night. So I had to leave the ER and go to a cell phone store, languishing in a crowded line and, I dearly hope, grievously infecting everyone around me.

But I recovered and had a pleasant holiday back at the family estate in a labyrinthine subdivision in darkest Alabama. Ate lots of comfort food. Did a bit of hiking. Saw the relations. Got some pants and sweaters. The usual.

How about that whole tsunami thing? he said, looking up temporarily from his own navel. That is some rough shit.

I have about 99 problems to take care of this month, so my pathetic attempt at a redesign and recalibration will have to wait a while. But I will pick up the pace again on posting, so revel in coming minutes --- minutes, I tell you -- of quality distraction. I had all kinds of great ideas for posts before I took ill and took off, but they are now dated and stale as 2004 itself. Onward into the new annus horribilis. Yes, that's right. I said "annus".

The Life Influenzic

Out sick yesterday -- and really actually sick, not recovering from a hangover or bingeing on crack whores at 11 am. Just spent the day languishing on the couch or bed or terlet, with occasional glugs of Gatorade to maintain my precious electrolyte balance. And of course the one work day I miss is the one day that actual work appears on my desk. At least there's heat. Normally I don't require heat, as I'm hot-natured. I usually burn like a veritable sun of caloric metabolisation, but not recently. Now I find myself freezing, then sweating, then freezing again. A general, achey malaise afflicts my limbs. Two nights of this and I'm turned into a sort of OCD zombie. I perform mindless, repetitive tasks with robotic efficiency, but anything requiring higher brain functions causes the system to overload. Not much else to yammer about today as I'm just trying to get out of here in one piece, or at least several pieces that match. Fend for yerselves!

Confidential to "Google AdSense" for rejecting Diztopia due to "sensitive content": And here I thought you were essentially the LARGEST DEVIANT-PORN ENABLER IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. So sorry that you shan't deign to have your adverts for T-shirts and high-school equivalency degrees disgraced by association with a blog that occasionally says "f*ck." Well, fine. Me and my ten readers will just have to click on ads for herbal Viagra elsewhere. Snobs.

Update Yer Links

www.diztopia.com and diztopia.com are now active. Please for to be updating your bookmarks and permalinks and search engines and porn spam. Thank you!

Master of My Domain

Big changes a-comin' round this ranch. The earth will shake, skies will bleed, dogs will lick themselves ... AND each other. It's all going to go down real street, yo.

Well, really nothing all that dramatic. Just some reorganization, recalibration, and likely redesignization of Diztopia. In fact, as soon as I can get the domain out of the tenebrous clutches of Network Solutions and into more friendly territory -- supposedly by early next week -- you can find this heap of refuse at diztopia.com, which I've actually owned for over a year now but never bothered to implement.

The TypePad mandarins assure me that one should still be able to locate all content at diztopia.typepad.com, but I trust them not. So look at diztopia.com if everything else appears to have vanished. In related news, I was disturbed to learn of distopia.com, since that entity obviously makes me eat its dust, cartoon-wise. But I remain so much sexier, don't you think? Of course, there's also this, which is still online despite being abandoned back when I started this blog. Also this, which is equally dormant. All things considered, I claim mastery not only of my domain but all related homonyms. More later.

Meantime, check out William Georgiades' recent pieces in mediabistro, here and here. He's great at depicting the endless merry-go-round of (often simultaneous) back-stabbing and ass-kissing that is modern publishing, and I'm all too personally familiar with the situations he describes.

Not Even Bothering to Phone It In

Inexcusable, but someone in this massive institution has got the idea that since they pay me to do things, they should start giving me "things" to "do." It's quite oppressive and not even remotely stimulating in any kind of kinky sub-dom way. I intend to complain to the Pope about these wild-eyed Jesuits and their meddlesome botheration. Just because they pay me doesn't mean they OWN me, man.

God, that was lame. I should just come up with a graphical placeholder that indicates I'm too busy for a proper post, and eliminate this forced comedy (generously speaking). But in the meantime, enjoy (via Pornolizer) a beautified version of TMFTML's finale. Or give a similar sheen of brilliance to my own post about the drinkable donuts. Or must anything really ... that kind of sophisticated humor just never gets old. Odd how (absent the obvs and tees) these things always end up sounding like the Peabs.