Emptybottle.org

Any advice gratefully accepted… comments.

After puking up a hairball about how little value I place in links without commentary, I exercise my right to be annoyingly inconsistent : I have nothing more to say about this.
Update : Or this – “If there were to be a war on the Korean peninsula, we would win but at a horrendous cost. It would be a classic pyrrhic victory. We could devastate North Korea, but we would lose hundreds of thousands of South Korean and Japanese allies in the first few days.”

New! Improved! Less taste, more filling! I’ve decided to flag meta-posts (ie stuff that’s not about life in Korea) with a nice colorful box, and a pretty dashed line, ’cause I’m nothing if not flavour-of-the-moment. Starting now. Offer may be terminated without notice. Void where prohibited by good sense.

Let me know…and thanks. comments.

The usual commenty place.

Shrouded in the mists of history…

Totally unrelated post-script so that this becomes a post about Korea and thus I am not breaking my ‘rules’ : I saw a large ‘cherry-picker’, I think they’re called, today on the street. You know, those big-ass trucks with the extendable arm, at the end of which is a little pulpit for someone to stand in while rescuing a kitty or something. It made me laugh out loud – emblazoned proudly on the side was the name : it was a Hyundai PutzMeister.
I may be way off, but I think that means something quite rude in Yiddish.
Beedfack?

Heh. I didn’t make the finalist list at the bloggies awards thing. Ah well, the soup pot’s only been boiling for about 5 months. Nonetheless, I wonder if I didn’t make the shortlist :
a) ’cause I suck
b) ’cause I said I’d rip the heart out of anyone who voted for me
c) ’cause I say the word ‘f–k’ a lot, in a consistently gratuitous f–king manner
d) ’cause I blow
e) some combination of the above
Despite the fact that I kinda think awards for blogging are a bit ridiculous, I feel a tiny shiver of disappointment, originating somewhere down near my butt. And, well, that’s a pretty scary place. How easy it is to get sucked in, huh? Even for a cantankerous auto-exile like me.
Regardless, congratulations go to all who are on the shortlists, and especially to Lia, who is the Queen of the Left Shore, in my books.
I suck!

This post never happened. You tell anyone about it, I’ll have to kill you.
(I have this thought at the moment that weblogs are a stupid f–king idea. That link propagation, which most folks seem to think as the primary function of a weblog, particularly when presented sans commentary, tends to be worthless circle-jerking.
It’s all about voice, about words, dammit, and in this I’m very much ready to snort whatever powder is blowing into drifts at the foot of rageboy and his kin. Simple linking to what someone else has said is purely lame – rat-push-button-get-electrical-stimulus stuff. It’s the evil detritus at the bottom of the blog waterpipe net.folk have been puffing on for the last couple of years. Give me one well-written rant, one single viewpoint that is informed from hard-won experience rather than obsessively reading thirdhand comments on secondhand reports from old-media talentless hacks. Or talented hacks. I don’t f–king discriminate.
Realizing, of course, that the sh-t I type here is read, if at all, by a few old friends, a few new, a few net aquaintances, a few google-nauts and a tiny handful of interested parties. It’s not like this semi-inebriated screed matters.
And that’s the point, innit? Shouting out the words, and hoping to find a few that will gather around your mental hearthfire, a few who are, if not entranced by your words, at least willing to listen. For me, it’s a digital analogue of my wanderings around the planet for the last 15 years, In Search of An Audience. f–k that for a bad joke, really.
In my geographic wanderings, I was in search of the perfect bar as much as anything else, and as I do tend to preach a bit when I’m in my cups, sometimes people would gather around for reasons that didn’t include pelting me with rocks and garbage. So is it now as it was then : I’m glad the folks that come back here regularly derive some pleasure from what I have to say, but the reality is I’m doing it more for me than I am for you. And lately I’m starting to feel a need to remember what the hell I was saying, and the technology is available to do it.
What I find it hard to understand is what the hell people are thinking who post.more.links.over.and.over.again.every.day with little or no hint of what they actually think about the things they link to…
Of course, I don’t propose to claim these half-formed ideas as my own. This sort of deflationary thing has been said before, by others, and better. I’m in a mood at the moment, is all. This rant here just kind of popped out of the old mental cloaca as I was doing a beery weblog-tour this evening, and since I’m still logged into blogger, I figured I’d just start typing. This kind of contrarian bullsh-t probably ain’t gonna help my chances in this bloggies thing, and that’s precisely why I’m posting it.
Hello, I love you, vote for me and I’ll rip your heart out.
No, not really. But stranger things have happened.)
Thank you for your cooperation.
Please do not comment. It’ll burst my self-involved bubble. No, seriously.

Yikes. If the referrer doodad is telling me the truth, it would seem that someone has nominated me for a bloggie. Shucks. For the second time in a week, my thanks go out to some mystery net.niceperson.
*tugs at cowlick, kicks pebble.
At least I think ‘thanks’ is appropriate. I’m not really sure if more traffic would be a good thing or not. Ah well : whatever is, is good.

Wow. It would appear that an unknown benefactor has paid for me to be ad-free. This was totally unexpected. Thanks so much to whoever it was – please email me!

I literally don’t know what to say. That rarely happens to me. Thanks again. And thanks too for doing what I should have done months ago – give Ev some money. I promise to try to make this thing worth reading.
Khamsa habnida…

This is a very blog thing to post, but I’m amused enormously to discover, thanks to my referrer logs, regardless of my enormous arrogance, that this wee blog is ranked Googly-4rth for the phrase Massive Inferiority Complex. Zoinks.
Update : Thanks, Lia! I think…

Technical note : Reblogger seems to have nuked all comments made so far, *again*, so it’s probably not worth leaving your two cents at the moment. Send me mail if you feel a burning need to tell me I’m an idiot.

Blog overlap :
I had a dream last night where This Mystery Guy™ held up a slab of meat that looked pretty much like a rump-roast in my face. It was quite a lovely cut of meat, but it was shot through with these deep purple threads (“…Smoooo—oke on the water, fire in the sky…”), which weren’t really alarming at all, but weren’t completely nice. Sez he to me : “This is your liver. It’s not well,” or something along those lines.
Well, in the dream, I examined this hunk of meat closely, and realized that it was indeed a rump roast rather than some f–king hippy-dream-representation of my ‘inner health’, and kicked his ass. My Liver is a big, misshapen bubbly fat-encrusted abomination that keeps functioning through sheer power of will, not a rump-roast with polite little black threads of icky-ness running through it.
I reckon that dream was actually about the fact that I can’t buy a decent freakin’ steak in this country.

Crap. Reblogger has lost all comments made so far. This means you, G! Please repost if you care to…thanks. It’ll help with the eventual book and incredible fame that comes as a result.