Since I don’t know how often I’ll have access to the internet while I’m out, this will be part 1 of x, x being an indeterminate number as of this moment. The University Chorale is out touring in Illinois and Indiana this week, so I get the week off and get to pay for it the rest of the semester. In some ways it’s a great deal - I get a “travel scholarship” which means I don’t miss any work pay. I don’t have to take off from work, which means that there are zero downsides…except the fact that I need to make up all sorts of reading and stuff when I get back. And before you ask, no, one doesn’t do homework on Tour. One either sleeps or socializes, or whatever, but definitely not homework. It’s tradition.

We left Friday night and stayed at a hotel in Lexington, KY. Good times - staying up in the breakfast room until 1a, then sleeping in until 11. Got back on the road and ended up in Joliet, IL for dinner. Stayed over at a family’s house last night, then had “monkey bread” upon waking this morning. I don’t know what “monkey bread” is - looked a little like cinnamon rolls minus the frosting and heavy on the other sugary toppings - but it was sinfully delicious. We had three good services today: two in Joliet at Ridgewood Baptist Church in the morning, and one at Bethel Baptist Churh in Schaumburg this evening. Now I’m wiped out but looking forward to the rest of the week. Highlights include a classical concert at First Baptist Church in Rockford (home of Scott Aniol and Kara Ministries) tomorrow night, a service in South Bend, Indiana, and another service at Burge Terrace in Indianapolis, IN. Readers in those areas are encouraged to look me up at those churches and say hey.

From the Soehn’s basement in Inverness, IL, peace out.

My frustration with Windows-based products is growing ever stronger. First there’s Microsoft with their “Please use our broken piece of junk .NET software to validate your copy of Windows before downloading anything besides text from our websites…and did we mention that if you have Firefox installed you probably won’t be able to get the validator to work at all? Just our way of saying ‘thank you!’ for encouraging free thought and open-source software…which we also support provided someone pays us for it” routine. Such was my experience with IE 7 beta 2 last night - wouldn’t even think of installing without validating. Once it validated, it failed to install, anyway, so I fail to see the point of validating Windows if the program requiring validation doesn’t install in the first place.

Then there’s Corel. Oh, how I loathe Corel. I’d choose M$ Office over CorelSuite any day of the week, holidays included. Office (Outlook excluded) may be the only good thing to come from Microsoft. But I digress - I’m still loathing Corel. Why? They bought out JASC, makers of Paint Shop Pro, or (as I call it) “Photoshop for the rest of us.” PSP 8 is a snappy program. I never tried PSP 9, because 8 did everything I wanted and then some. So this afternoon I’m looking to do a quick sketch on the computer I’m working on, and I see Paint Shop Pro isn’t installed. No on-line network installer, either. So I just blithely go to http://www.jasc.com, thinking to download the latest trial.

Ha. I end up on Corel’s site, where they’re pushing Corel Paint Shop Pro X. I’m hesitant, but I hit the download button anyway. I’m required to register, which I do. Then I receive a serial number to activate my demo. (Why???) I download the 100mb file at speeds approaching 4 mb/s and run the installer. I’m prompted for my serial number. No problem, copy & paste from the email, right?

Those of you familiar with the way monolithic software companies do business are probably like those people sitting in the theaters watching a horror movie. You’re the kind of people who, when the main character starts slowly moving towards the basement steps, you start screaming, “NO! DON’T GO IN THERE, YOU FOOL! YOU’RE GONNA DIE!!!!!” You’re thinking along the right lines - this software isn’t going to install. And you’re right. The copy & paste method didn’t work - Corel couldn’t validate my demo serial number. (Hint: if you made a demo version that expired itself after 30 days, you wouldn’t need serial numbers!) So, no online support, no other indication of why the provided serial didn’t work. Just a button that says “call Corel.” So I click the button and get their tech support number. I now quote:

“Our offices are closed today for a special activity.”

On a Wednesday. Right in the middle of the week. This legacy monolithic company decides to close its doors to its customers slam in the middle of the week, for no good reason whatsoever…which leaves me stuck without a graphics program for a while.

My other beef is that none of the Linux graphics packages are particularly intuitive, and I don’t feel like learning a new program right now. And since Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto #3 in d minor just ended to raucous applause, I’m going back to my desk where I have PSP installed. Bye.

For you uber-geeks out there, I’ve got a new way you can keep up with my semi-coherent ramblings: AvantGo. Palm users know what I’m talking about - what may possibly be the best way to get internet content onto a non-wifi PDA. AvantGo (site) has a new feature out in beta - an RSS reader. I already use it for my in-house comics feeds in the morning. Now I found that I can create a button that lets you add my RSS feed to your AvantGo account with one click. Pretty sweet. The button’s on the left sidebar in the Meta section; alternatively you can click here to get it. Enjoy!

From time to time hymn texts hit me in a particularly special way. I’ve got a rare treat - two that I’d like to share in one day. First off is what Chorale did to kick off the Friday evangelistic meeting - a text entitled “I Could Not Do Without Thee” by Francis R. Havergal written in May of 1873:

I could not do without Thee
O Savior of the lost,
Whose precious blood redeemed me
At such tremendous cost.
Thy righteousness, thy pardon
Thy precious blood, must be
My only hope and comfort,
My glory and my plea.

I could not do without Thee,
I cannot stand alone,
I have no strength or goodness,
No wisdom of my own;
But Thou, beloved Savior,
Art all in all to me,
And weakness will be power
If leaning hard on Thee.

I could not do without Thee,
O Jesus, Savior dear;
E’en when my eyes are holden,
I know that Thou art near.
How dreary and how lonely
This changeful life would be,
Without the sweet communion,
The secret rest with Thee!

I could not do without Thee,
For years are fleeting fast,
And soon in solemn oneness
The river must be passed;
But Thou wilt never leave me,
And though the waves roll high,
I know Thou wilt be near me,
And whisper, “It is I.”

Not sure why, specifically, this text hit me like it did…could have been the fact that after singing it twenty times through one is forced to pay attention to the words to project the meaning well. But nonetheless the text is a very emotionally charged work, emphasising our need for complete reliance on God.

The other one is from about 100 years earlier and was written by the Englishman William Cowper (that’s “Cooper” for all you folks who haven’t heard his name before). It’s called “Sometimes a Light Surprises.” Yes, title sounds dorky. But the words are great, especially the second stanza:

Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord, Who rises with healing in His wings:
When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.

In holy contemplation we sweetly then pursue
The theme of God’s salvation, and find it ever new.
Set free from present sorrow, we cheerfully can say,
Let the unknown tomorrow bring with it what it may.

It can bring with it nothing but He will bear us through;
Who gives the lilies clothing will clothe His people, too;
Beneath the spreading heavens, no creature but is fed;
And He Who feeds the ravens will give His children bread.

Though vine nor fig tree neither their wonted fruit should bear,
Though all the field should wither, nor flocks nor herds be there;
Yet God the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice,
For while in Him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.

Haven’t heard a decent hymn tune for this…but Craig Courtney’s choral setting is second to none. It gently bounces along in a refreshing, spritely sort of way. (For you music people, he alternates between 3/4 and 6/8 meters every other measure, and there are little triplet sixteenth notes springing up everywhere.) Not very congregation-oriented, but it’ll sound great when we sing it on campus sometime in the next month or two.

Hope these do something for you.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011700893.html

After reading this op-ed in the Washington Post this evening, I’m starting to think that the world would be stupid not to reduce Iran to radioactive grit. This, my friends, is what happens when you extend your way of thinking onto foreign cultures. At the moment there’s not much we can do to keep Iran from going from a camel-oriented nation with a few cheap Russian knock-off missiles to a camel-oriented nation with nuclear-tipped cheap Russian knock-off missiles.

Granted, if they actually are simply refining uranium for their power plants (and if “naive” isn’t in the dictionary) then no one has anything to worry about. 70 million Iranians can now get indoor lighting and all that cool stuff cheaper. But if they are running a weapons program, then that whole part of the world could quite literally explode. Who do you think Iran’s going to threaten? Oh, I’m still optimistic enough to think they’d never actually shoot one off, because then they would become radioactive grit when the rest of the world responded. But you gotta think Israel’s going to get a little nervous. The concept of “dirty bombs” or other suitcase-style nukes is probably a thing of the past in the US, a Cold War-era fear that no longer is relevant. But there are plenty of other nice targets in the area if they decide to get ambitious.

Economically, though, they’ve got a bigger ace - their oil. Iran’s a cash cow - just sit back and let the money flow in. The rest of the civilized world’s over a barrel…literally. No one’s going to go for a first-strike to cool Iran off as long as they’re drinking Iran’s oil. It’s the large-scale equivalent of biting the hand that feeds you. China and Russia probably couldn’t be happier right now, because the only country in any sort of position to do anything about Iran (besides just yak, which it seems the EU has decided is all that’s necessary) is their number one competitor on the global market…who relies heavily on Middle East oil.

North Korea toned down the rhetoric once they’d gotten enough media attention to let the rest of the world know they were still an organized (sort of) country. Maybe Iran will do the same. Maybe the French will do something about them. They’ve got nukes, right?

Yeah. Speaking of being busy. I don’t think I actually had a weekend this week. So reading assignments went unread, and listening assignments turned into experiments on the effects of background string quartets on work. (Result: maybe it was just that particular string quartet [Beethoven’s in E minor, op. 59, no. 2] but it’s a bad genre for working.) However, one perk of grad school is that there are no longer quiz grades handed out for reading on time. Which means I can skip the reading assignments until I actually have the cash to buy the books. (Why is it that the cost of textbooks rises proportionally with the cost of education and inversely to the amount of income?)

On the list update side of things, we’ve got an addition to report - Zack Walters, currently sitting out and making money (lots of it, if I read right) has had a site for a while, I just never knew about it. Or something. Anyway, his site, Grounded Reality, reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon wherein Calvin, assigned to write a book report on dinosaurs (”All I have to do is write all I know about dinosaurs! For once, I’m guaranteed a good grade!”) builds a thinking cap out of a metal colander. He attaches wires to it, “to keep [his] ideas grounded in reality.” While Hobbes remarks that it’s a little late for that, Calvin proceeds to announce his intention to build a transformer for the Atomic Cerebral Enhance-o-Tron. All that to say - if you look real hard, you’ll find some stuff on Zack’s site that’s grounded in reality.

Finally, what’s with Massachusetts? Why on earth do they keep putting Ted Kennedy in front of the nation? Even most liberal democrats think the man’s off his rocker. I mean, when some of the most liberal papers start complaining about how he’s turning Alito’s hearings into a personal smear campaign for his own enjoyment, there’s a problem. Dave Barry suggests it’s genetic, or perhaps something in the air. A few quotes:

regarding the election of George Washington:

The leading contender in the first presedential election race was George Washington, who waged a campaign based on heavy exposure in media such as coins, stamps, and famous oil paintings. This shrewd strategy carried him to a landslide victory in which he carried every state except Massachusetts, which voted for George McGovern.

regarding the 1972 election:

He [Nixon] got a lot of help from the Democrats, who, continuing the tradition they established in 1968 of appearing to be incapable of operating an electric blanket, let alone the country, nominated George McGovern, who had exhibited a wide-ranging appeal to a broad cross section of nearly fourteen voters. The result was that in the 1972 election Nixon carried all the states and every major planet except Massachusetts.

regarding US Foreign policy in the Reagan era:

Look closely at Central America, and try to imagine what would happen if this vital region were to fall into Communist hands. What would happen is a lot of Communists would be stung repeatedly by vicious tropical insects the size of mature hamsters. We cannot afford to have this happen. We cannot afford to have a horde of Communists down there becoming so cranky and welt-covered that eventually, just for an excuse to get out of the jungle, they foment a revolution in Mexico, which means you’d have Communist guerrilla troops right next to Texas. I doubt if they could take Texas by force. Texas has the largest fleet of armed pickup trucks of any major power, and any invading guerrilla army would be shot and run over repeatedly before it got half a mile, especially if it invaded on a Saturday night. So the Communists would have to use a psychological approach. They’d win the Texans over by such ploys as holding barbecues, wearing big hats and promising to extend the football season. Once Texas went Communist, Oklahoma would follow quickly, followed by Nebraska, followed by whatever state is next to Nebraska, and so on until the entire nation had turned Communist except Massachusetts, which is already very left-wing and consequently would turn Republican.

Ah, well. It’s not a bad state, really…except that around Boston drivers violate not only the traffic laws but also the laws of physics. But that doesn’t speak of their politics. And since I’ve pretty much forgotten why I started saying this, let me sign off now before I write something embarrassing.

…I want to post these two bloggers who have been patiently waiting for the better part of a month to have their names included. Big apologies for not getting them up sooner.

First up is Josh and Annie Hill, who run The Hill Family blog. Also to report is Ben Hayward, current student, who runs the Crazy Fun Place. My guess is, it’s crazy fun.

I was contacted this afternoon about a church ministry opportunity for next year (the caller didn’t know I wouldn’t be graduated by then). Since it is for the next year, and I’ll be in school still, the idea pretty much fell flat. It’s unfortunate - the opportunity to run a church and Christian school IT department, as well as teach some music on the side, would have been interesting, though not necessarily what I was planning on doing. Besides, it was in SC…and I don’t want to set down roots anywhere where the daytime high in the middle of January is 70. Seriously. It’s supposed to get to 70 or 71 tomorrow. WHAT KIND OF WINTER DO YOU PEOPLE THINK THIS IS?!?!? I haven’t ranted against Greenville in a while…okay, a month, but that was while I was still ranting at the greater southeastern US. But this absolutely wretched weather has me on an “I hate Greenville!!” kick again, and I don’t see it ending anytime soon. Of course, I’ll be in Florida this weekend, and I’m not entirely certain I even want to look at the forecast.

FOXSports.com - COLLEGE FOOTBALL- Virginia Tech kicks Vick off team

Nice to see that there are some places where integrity is still practiced. VT kicked Marcus Vick (QB, younger brother of Atlanta Falcons QB Michael Vick) off the team, record and talent notwithstanding, for being a complete jerk on and off the field. Granted, this usually doesn’t happen in the pro world (with the nice exception of the Vikings fiasco all year) but it’s nice to see that Vick’s learning things outside the classroom, too.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/05/robertson.sharon/

I’ve about had it with Pat Robertson, and any Christian who’s not one of these xenophobic isolationist NWO-sniffing paranoids should, too. The man goes on record saying that killing a foreign head of state wouldn’t be too bad. Then he says God would be perfectly justified in wiping an entire town off the map for taking God out of the public school textbooks. Now he’s saying God’s “smiting” Ariel Sharon (PM of Israel, if you’ve been living in Togo for a while…though I have had people from Togo log onto this site) for dividing God’s land.

Robertson has gone from bad to worse to, IMO, blasphemous. The bad was the comment about the Argentinian PM, whom everyone’s more or less forgotten about by now. Worse was his presumption that God would take retribution for being excluded from the schools of a dot on the map in Middle Of Nowhere, PA. Blasphemous is his arrogance for making up quotes from God and presuming to speak not for God, but as God. Listen to the quote:

“He was dividing God’s land, and I would say, ‘Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America.’”

“God says, ‘This land belongs to me, and you’d better leave it alone.’”

This is my paraphrase, for better clarity of this guy’s thought process: “If I were God, I’d be angry for this man dividing my land. And hey, if I were God and I were angry, I’d sure enough do something about it, like maybe afflict the guy responsible with some disease. And wouldn’t you know it? God and I must be on the same page, because here Sharon’s been afflicted! Who’d've thunk it?”

Friends and relatives of mine know I like giving the benefit of the doubt, but I gotta say he’s not leaving much room for that. I feel like a heathen even trying to justify this, but the only thing I can see that might possibly be an excuse is that, at 75, Robertson is simply senile. And I hope for his sake’s he truly has lost his mind, because to say intentionally what he’s saying puts him in a very dangerous position. Who knows…maybe God will smite him. (Note sarcasm in last statement.)

Seriously, if you still watch The 700 Club, I suggest you stop. If you listen to this madman on the radio, I suggest you stop. He’s gone waaaaay overboard theologically if he presumes to speak as God would speak, and that makes any of his teaching suspect and dangerous. Besides, if we all ignore him, maybe he’ll go away. It works for other monsters…

For your viewing pleasure, I quote Bill Watterson for this picture: “The story of my life, as seen from childhood.”

Next up is a commercial. When my car dies, I hope this vehicle is available. I also hope my car doesn’t die until this technology is available. Reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons as a kid.
http://www.scifi.com//downloads/movies_br/transformer.mov

If you have a chance, you should get the feature production of Pirates of Penzance, a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. A friend rented the VHS recording from the library a few days ago. It uses the original Broadway cast (don’t let that fool you - this was Broadway in the 70s), including Kevin Kline as the Pirate King, Angela Lansbury (!) as Ruth, and Rex Smith as Frederic. Having heard the original cast recording, watching the same voices actually perform the story was an absolute riot. Of course, just about any G&S operetta is funny, because they poke fun at both themselves and the English upper crust in general, at a time when doing so was fairly dangerous.

So, enjoy these little tidbits of time-wasting minutiae. They certainly served their purpose with me.

:edit: I’m looking at my recent comments and found that people were commenting on, well, nothing. It was then that I realized this post had no title. I wasn’t aware Wordpress allowed me to do that. And Austin, you can keep your upgrade comments to yourself - it’ll get done sometime!

This is the first full calendar year that this site has been active. We went online in October of 2004 (at this address; there was an earlier incarnation), but 2005 marked the first full January-December year that the site’s been online. In that time we’ve seen a lot: controversies, opinions, hearty laughs and more than a few introspective posts. I personally have seen my style shift with the times, which I once thought was bad. Now I know - give the people what they want.

It’s nice to know that I’m making people chuckle around the globe (more on that in a moment) and that more and more people are coming to this site every day. As I look at the traffic report for 2005, I notice that my number of visitors for January was 551. That number increased every month (except May and July, which decreased less than 100 visitors from the previous months) until December hit with close to six times that number, for 3,297 visitors. The total number of unique visitors (that is, people coming for the first time) for 2005 came to 16,551. Overall this site received 381,177 hits, well more than I expected.

As expected, nearly all my hits came from the United States - 330,735 of them. But that leaves over fifty thousand hits NOT from the US. According to my stats, runners-up include the European Union, Canada, Australia, Germany, China, Mexico, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Brazil, France, Colombia, Hong Kong, Italy, Thailand, Vietnam, UAE (United Arab Emirates), Portugal, Poland, Israel, Turkey, Singapore, South Africa, Belgium, Switzerland, Argentina, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Romania, the Philippines, Hungary, the Russian Federation, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Greece, New Zealand, and Costa Rica, And that’s only about 75% - the ones listed are the ones with over 100 hits to their domain name. I was surprised to see China, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia on there. Good to know that I’m not blacklisted in those countries.

Seems a lot of you read my stuff just through RSS - that’s far and away the most commonly viewed page. I’d encourage those of you in Sage, Pluck, or Thunderbird to hop on over to the real deal every now and then - there’s more content available than just what you read in the feed. On the browser side, I must confess that IE edged out Firefox users…by 40,000 hits. That’s not saying 40,000 more people use IE, just that they perhaps visit more often. In other oddities, I got two hits from people using WebTV. Gather the family ’round - it’s time for mounty’s corner!

Far and away the most refferals this site has seen (where do my visits come from if they don’t type me straight into the address bar?) Sharper Iron. The competition’s not even close - SI has 2,072 referrals with the runner-up (BlogJones) coming in at 372. Tracking where new traffic comes in from is pretty difficult, but on the other hand I’m getting a chunk of traffic from them either way. Props to Jason Janz, Greg Linscott, and Austin Matzko for getting that blogroll up and running and delivering me the additional traffic.

I’m not planning on listing searches, because most of them have already been listed before. Though I do want to point out that someone got here 20 times last year with the phrase “north carolina they what started breakfast treat/soda/ mini sport.” I have absolutely no clue what this is supposed to be or why it turns up my site. But it’s kinda funny, and I’m sure that you folks in readerland can come up with some appropriately witty comment to put after it. As for me, it’s a humorless, rainy, cold Monday afternoon; and what’s worse, it’s 3 in the afternoon, which is my absolute worst time of any day. 3p on a cold, wet, and windy Monday following a long weekend vacation is quite possibly the worst Monday that can be endured, and consequently I have zero wit today. I leave it to you to poke fun at that search.

Thanks to all my readers/fans/supporters/detractors/would-be assassins for reading my stuff. I trust you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing. And even if you don’t, I’ll keep writing anyway.

Well, it’s over. 2005 is gone, and 2006 is here. Not much has changed. Really. For all the pomp and circumstance surrounding the holiday, there’s really nothing to show for it, except a killer headache for some people. In the spirit of giving headaches, for one reason or another, I present to you…December ‘05 stats.

Hits: 23,932

Most Viewed;
Ice Reflections - 168

Browsers:
Internet Explorer 6 - 7856 (57%)
Mozilla - 4911 (35%)
Netscape 4 - 993 (7%)
Other - 105 (1%)

Top Referrer: SI Blogroll (199)

Searches:

• mounty’s face - Yeah? What about my face?
• THE FULL MOUNTY - First, the rules around here are NO SHOUTING!!!! Yes…we must all give this place the full mounty…
• makeshift earplugs - that story still makes me laugh.
• analyze christ lag in todesbanden - You analyze it!
• may the good lord bless and keep you midi - John Rutter meets Jubilant Sykes. Oy.
• hyles seven sure steps to success - Might not want to go fishing in that pond…
• THE CALL RALPH VAUGHN WILLIAMS MIDI - STOP SHOUTING!!!
• WWW.MOUNT GILEAD BAPTIST CHURCH - WHAT DID I JUST SAY?!?!?
• airplane vertical height at 30 miles out - As opposed to…horizontal height, maybe?
• seige of budapest - Don’t think “budapest” and “seige” ever showed up in any post so far…
• grrrowl chicken dance - I don’t know what the “chicken dance” is, but I do a mean Dirty Bird.
• Christmas lights short when it rains - Here’s a tip: don’t leave the bare wires exposed. The things people google…Ben Franklin is spinning in his grave now.
• blenheim ginger ale t-shirt - I’d buy one.
• joel osteen kicked off airplane - I laughed hard here, too. “Now, you may be saying to yourself, ‘I’m falling five miles to the ground!’ But I’m here to tell you, you just have to think positive about the whole thing. Maybe you won’t splat all over the ground when you hit! Besides, isn’t it a pretty view on the way down?”
• who is the louisana governor - Why don’t you just goo…never mind.
• beneath the fathers heaven lyrics!! BY BROOKLYN TABERNACLE - Lyrics!! BY BROOKLYN TABERNACLE!! NO SHOUTING!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Mr Mounty England Music - Mr. Mounty now, huh? “Dude…Mr. Mounty is my _father_!” (to quote a kids movie)
• ein mounty in chicago cd - Mr. Mounty from England, now Herr Mounty from Germany. I get around, don’t I?
• terrell owens humor ebay; terrell owens ebay joke - I put these two together because they’re about the same. Besides, why buy humor from eBay?
• moose mounty - Don’t tell anyone, but I keep a pet moose in my room.
• create person esword works - Create person. Esword works. Might have trouble with the first one, but I definitely agree with you on the second.
• cumberbunds proper placement - in the trash.
• I always wanted to have my wacky search posted on Mounty’s monthly stats - And now it is. Does that give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside? Careful - that might be the three burritos you downed at lunch.
• firefox composer evil antichrist - There is no good way to make any one of these terms relate to any other, except maybe the last two.
• When will Mounty find a lady?; Why doesn’t Mounty have a girl? - Another set of two searches. I’m curious everytime these things come up. Do people think my blog knows more about me than I do? I mean, why are you asking my site? And, if you get an answer, let me know - there might be more my site knows than just my future.
• elephants regarding religion - non sequitur - from the Latin, meaning “it does not follow”; “not in sequence.” Or, in this case, “searcher is on speed.”
• network without domine password hacking - For you non-tech people, the domine password was what Linux systems used in the 16th century, before the invention of root.
• lyrics “all of this has happened before” - Sounds like some quote from some tv show or movie…”All of this has happened before…all of this will happen again…” Stink. Where was that from? Got it - one site says that Peter Pan starts out that way. Apparently the creators of the new Battlestar Galactica series have a sense of humor, because my googling turned up a whole bunch of quotes to that effect from a BSG episode, too.

Stay tuned for the mother of all stats - the combined and expanded 2005 Calendar Year Stats, where you find out just how many countries visit this page (a lot) and get to take guesses as to why my bandwidth usage tripled overnight. All this and more…on the next MOUNTY’S CORNER!!! (I’m still allowed to shout.)