Blogger Insider is over.

For many reasons that have been detailed here before, the program was just becoming too much of a hassle to the point where I was putting in too much work and getting too much crap to keep it going. Sorry to those who enjoyed it, but several bad apples ruined the bunch. If you want a full explanation, you can go to the now-defunct project's page.

In less than one month from now, I will be on the East Coast again. It's been four and a half months since I left, and this will probably be the second-to-last time I will go there for a while. Given that my next trip Eastward will be to pack up my parents' belongings and haul them to Tucson, this will probably be the last time that I will spend any real amount of time in the town that I grew up in and the last time ever in the house that I called home for almost 14 years.

I wonder how much I've changed over the past few months. Definitely, those who knew me from back East have told me that I sound happier and people here who've known me for a long time have told me that I look and act much happier as well. But now I'm faced with the stark reality of cutting all ties. With my parents moving out of Connecticut, I have no real reason to go back to the East Coast, save visiting friends (some of whom plan to come to California to visit me and are also thinking about moving here) and/or school reunions.

I wonder -- after 2002 is over -- when the next time I'll see Boston will be. A city that I called home for almost 8 years. When I'll see Connecticut again, a state that I called home for 17 years. And New York City, the place I was born and always felt a connection to, though even that seems to be slipping away. I always knew that I'd have a "home" wherever my parents were and that I could visit them anytime I wanted, but I had real roots in that pre-fab raised ranch in Connecticut and their new house in Tucson will be just that -- a house in Tucson that they happen to inhabit, and not the old familiar stomping grounds that I grew up in. Their moving is like pulling up the last stake for me. I have no more East Coast connections except for my past, and even that is fading into obscurity as I carve out a new life for myself in Los Angeles. But I just don't feel like L.A. is my home yet, I haven't been here long enough even though I've fallen into routine and I've kind of established myself here.

In a metaphorical sense, I almost feel homeless.

I usually don't do this, because I don't like slamming people who come here, but this time, it's just got to be done. I am infuriated.

A comment was left on a previous entry that says: America was founded upon Christianity. Remember how the Pilgrims left Europe because they were facing religious persecution? Excuse me? America was not founded on Christianity! America was founded upon escape from religious persecution and the freedom to practice whatever the hell you feel like practicing. The Puritans didn't come here to start a land of their own religion, they came here in order to practice their religion without being shut down by the government or thrown in jail. And might I remind you that the Puritans were not the only people who came here? They were just the first to establish a permanent settlement. Many, many others help found this country -- including Jews, who were also escaping religious persecution, so does that mean that this country is also founded upon Judaism?

It is that kind of attitude that completely gets to me. Yes, the Puritans were Christians, but even they recognized the need for religious freedom and -- as far as I know -- did not actively attempt to convert anyone to their beliefs. In addition, if the Founding Fathers felt that Christianity was the way to go and that our country should be founded on it, you'd think they'd have left freedom of religion out of the Constitution -- or they might not have even written the Constitution and just based our laws on the Bible.

There is no way in hell that our country was founded on the basis of Christianity. Our country was founded as an escape for people who wanted to be free of persecution, be it religion-based, tax-based or government-based. The people who came to America came to start over in the "Land of the Free," as we've called it for so many years, in order to be in a culture where they didn't feel an overriding pressure to convert to any kind of religion or way of thinking simply because it was crushingly prevalent or the government told them to.

It is this kind of Christian arrogance that gets to me. Admittedly, not all Christians are like this, but there definitely are some -- those who believe that it is their duty to go out and spread the Word and bring everyone into the fold and scream hellfire and damnation at those who aren't. Yes, Christianity is the most prevalent religion in the world. Maybe it's because way back, 1000 years ago, the Crusades killed off so many people of other religions that they became even more dominant. (And on a side note, here's something else I don't understand. One of the Ten Commandments that the Christians claim to hold so dear is "Thou shalt not kill." So how can they justify the Crusades? "Oh, well, killing in the name of God is okay." Well, I know of a group of guys who were also killing in the name of God, except they used a few Boeing 767s, so should we forgive them? Oh wait, they were killing in the name of another God...) Maybe if Hitler hadn't wiped out so many Jews in World War II, Judaism would be a more dominant force -- if you imagine how many future generations of children also died with those 6 million, that's a lot of people.

Yes, our country was founded by Christians. That does not mean it was founded on Christianity. The Puritans came here to practice their religion in freedom. Just because they were Christians doesn't mean that they founded the country on Christianity. Most of the original settlers of this land were also English, so does that mean that this country was founded on an English way of life? So how come we're not imitating that anymore?

I honestly wonder what people did all those years ago before Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft and all those other mood-altering drugs were invented. Given that they soothe things like social anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, it certainly makes things easier for people to interact these days. Which begs the question: did these disorders exist before our generation, or did the pressures of modern-day life invent these "diseases" (for lack of a better term)?

It's not that I doubt people have these problems. Some people really do have chemical imbalances, mild as they may be, which put them slightly off-kilter from the rest of us. I just feel like doctors are raining drugs down on the general population, and it makes me wonder what people did even thirty or forty years ago without these drugs. What did people do before we had the pharmaceutical solutions?

It's not that I seriously minded saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school. At that age, I really didn't know any better. It was just a few seconds out of my day where I stood up, recited something from rote memory and then got on with my life. But now the Pledge has been ruled unconstitutional because of the fact that it talks about being "one country under God." I was too young at the time to realize the implications of those two words, I suppose.

I wrote on Michele's blog that I didn't object to Christians celebrating their holidays. I believe that everyone should have the ability to celebrate their holidays. What I object to is the fact that at every job I've had, I got Christmas -- a religious holiday based on Christian beliefs -- off whether or not I like it, and I had to use vacation time if I wanted to go to Temple for the Jewish High Holy Days.

Like it or not, support it or not, this country is heavily populated by Christians who have inextricably woven many aspects of their religion into popular American culture. Things that are taken for granted -- "one nation under God," for example -- take on a different color when you consider a few questions: which God in particular are we all under? And what about the atheists and agnostics? I object to the fact that there are many aspects of our culture where religious significance is imposed on others who either may not subscribe to that particular flavor of religion or may not subscribe to any religious beliefs at all, especially in some situations that do not require or necessitate it.

I'm not a fan of any rabid religious people because most of them inexorably try to convert others. Some of us just don't want to be saved, y'know? I've heard more than once that I'm going to spend eternity in the fiery pits of Hell because I don't recognize Jesus Christ as the Savior of All Humankind. Well, forgive me for being a bit of a realist, but when it comes to most things, I prefer the analytical scientific explanation and I can't really accept something that I don't have proof of. This "God" that you speak of, can you show me anything that this Supreme Being has done recently that would prove its existence?

And no, the existence of Anna Kournikova does not prove the existence of a Supreme Being.

I commented a few days ago about my hit rate going down (it's actually increased slightly again since then). And combined with that, I told a co-worker today that I'd banned Google from crawling my site. She asked me why, and I really had no decent answer. I replied that I was sick of people coming to this site simply because they were searching for naked pictures of the Olsen twins and so forth, but she countered with the fact that they might come here and then stay because they found something worth reading (I doubt it, but you never know).

She said that she'd been found by former classmates and such who had Googled her, and I realize that now, when I put my own name into Google, I come up a few times -- but mostly in references on other people's websites. There are tons of other people out there with my name that dominate the search. Yet somehow there have been a few people who have found this site recently by searching for me specifically. And it makes me wonder how many people out there really do want to find me out of idle curiosity.

So I consider re-opening my site to search engines. I have mixed feelings about it, but I'm open to ideas. And I also wonder why Coors Light's marketing people are so fixated on twins.

So there's two items that kind of disturbed me in today's paper.

1. President Moron is talking about extending death benefits to same-sex partners of "lifesavers" (e.g.: policemen, firemen). Great. I have no problems with that. But I thought that death benefits went to whoever you named on the little form. I've had to fill out those forms at each job I've worked at, and they've never told me "there's people you can't name." I could probably pick some random person living in Peoria out of the phone book and name them my beneficiary if I wanted to. So why the big distinction about allowing them to name their same-sex partners? The big deal would be if he'd finally allow same-sex marriages, so they automatically be entitled to spousal death benefits because there would be a legally binding arrangement in place.

2. WorldCom -- which I own stock in, unfortunately -- suddenly discovered an almost $4 billion accounting error in their books. Analysts are saying if they go under, it'll be the largest bankruptcy ever, even surpassing Enron. Adelphia Communications, the sixth-largest cable company in the country, filed for bankruptcy yesterday after they disclosed that they inflated their subscriber numbers by around 50,000. Everyone seems to be going bust and it all seems related to creative math. You'd think that since they have auditors and accounting companies that they pay millions of dollars to keep track of this sort of thing, they'd be able to keep an accurate tab on things before suddenly -- and very quickly, I might add -- imploding. Don't even get me started on the ethics and morals of the accountants and the companies deliberating lying about these things. Pardon my naïveté and/or morals, but something tells me that in business, you can't make up numbers or eventually it'll catch up to you and you'll end up bankrupting a lot of people along with your company.

My car's in the shop this morning so I have to bike to work today. They seem overly interested in tracking down this small squeaking noise I mentioned, and not interested enough in the fact that I said I wanted them to check out the entire car because she's been idling too low and I just drove across the country so she probably needs a little tune-up.

I dreamed last night that during my visit to New England (which will be taking place next month), it was 20 degrees and snowing. Even though it was the middle of July. I suppose my subconscious mind has labeled the Northeast as The Place Where It Snows And Is Cold, and L.A. is considered Land of Warmth.

In a social sense, I suppose that Los Angeles is losing its sheen, but -- as was explained to me last night by one of my best friends who is a native -- this particular view comes with the territory of moving here and not growing up here. Despite the fact that L.A. has the highest concentration of Beautiful People in the country, I do not consider myself one of them. I'm not ugly nor am I hideous to look at -- I consider myself to have average/above average looks -- but I still believe that one of these days, the Beauty Police will haul my ass off to the county line and tell me that I am not allowed here anymore.

It's not a matter of needing plastic surgery or anything, it's just the way I perceive myself as compared to all the models and actors running around out here. How am I supposed to compete with that? It's like being bombarded with all those magazines that tell us how we should look, except it's real life and it's round-the-clock and it's everywhere. It's enough to give an East Coaster a serious self-image complex.

It's amazing what a little publicity will do. How we've come to deify people just because they're well-known.

I've read Dear Abby and Ann Landers for years. Not really because I thought they had anything of merit to say, but because I'm a bit of a voyeur and these people who write in freely display their lives and their issues for all of us to read. But, to tell you the truth, I'd really begun to dislike Ann and Abby a long time ago. They were just so... smarmy. Condescending. Righteous. They were from another generation of thinking, and it showed in their advice. Yet people still took their dictates as if they were gospel, simply because they were in the paper and therefore it must be true.

We care more about the divorces and public spats that take place on the front pages of our entertainment magazines than we do about those happening around us every day. I read somewhere that a woman is murdered every 3 minutes or so in this country, yet some football-player-turned-actor kills his ex and it becomes a riveting drama that captivates the entire nation to the point where we were glued to our TVs for every second of the courtroom proceedings, and we still talk about it five years later and it's still embedded in popular culture. Children are molested daily and people protest when a sex offender moves into a residential neighborhood, yet some R&B singer records a song blaming his sexual exploits with young women on the fact that he's famous and we forgive him, turning that recording into the most-requested song on a major metropolitan radio station only 90 minutes after its first exposure.

Look around you. Life is real. It's happening here & now. It's not taking place on some TV screen or in a movie theatre, as nice an escape as those might be. Don't make your stars into idols and don't exempt them from the morals and behaviors that we mostly try to conform to. Everyone should be accountable, and everyone should be measured by the same yardstick.

I've started dreaming about work. To the point where I feel like I'm not getting enough rest because I'm not waking up refreshed, even when I don't have to set an alarm. I'm not sure if that's a good thing that work has become so important to me that even my subconscious deals with it, or if it's a bad thing because it means there's a possibility that it's consuming my life.

I'm again having those thoughts about ending Blogger Insider. For a number of reasons. I've been keeping the project going for selfish reasons -- namely, the fact that it keeps my hit count up and I like seeing people come to my site, but if they're only coming to the Blogger Insider page and not actually reading my blog, then why bother? My hit rate's already declining and I haven't even cancelled the project. Also, there's been a lot of complaints about negligent partners and you know how I feel about putting in all this work every round that seems to be useless, especially when people e-mail me and whine and complain about it -- hey, I have no control over what someone else does so what makes you think that complaining to me is going to make a difference? In addition, I've been getting a lot of people who want to join, but when I go to their blogs, their blogs consist mostly of either quizzes, one-line entries or content that doesn't seem conducive to exchanging thoughtful questions (translation: either they sound like they were written by an 11-year-old or they actually were written by an 11-year-old). Quite frankly, the project was not meant as a way for people to generate filler for their blogs, and I don't want people to use it as such especially when they can discard it so quickly & easily when they're done with it without even telling me. So rather than impose my own subjective restrictions on membership (which would probably be unfair), I'm thinking of just ending it altogether.

Why? Because it's fun. I got the idea from Michele, who is cooler than all hell (yes, that was supposed to rhyme). She put "Michele is" into Google and hit search. I put "Keith is" into Google for me, but mine are considerably less interesting than hers. Here's what I got (my occasional comments in italics, all else taken directly from Google without alteration):

- Keith is the real acoustic blues king!
- Keith is the Male Sex God! I'm not making this up, nor is that from my own site.
- President Keith is going to burst your bubble!
- Keith is (probably correctly) convinced that about half of the rappers on this planet are “tryin’ to copy my sh**"
- Keith is still listening...
- Keith is dedicated to giving you this arsenal to take home with you.
- Keith is a former Powerlifting and Olympic lifting champion, with an impressive athletic resume in football, track and wrestling. Daaaaaaaamn, I wish that was me.
- Keith is lucky that his wife, Marsha, is also a big Elvis fan.
- Keith is not a man playing a guitar, he IS a guitar.
- Keith is a Parts Manager and Sharon is an Accountant. Put me out of my misery now, please...
- Keith is holding his beat-up 1970 Martin D-35 guitar in classic Palookaville style. Must have something to do with me being a guitar.
- Keith is more like a 3D commando. Watch out while I go conquer that fourth dimension.
- Keith is a bright and energetic young girl living on the Indiana frontier in the mid-1800s. Say what???
- Keith is jumping around the audience like an ape.
- Keith is always hangin' out with some cool people and the pictures prove it! Damn straight.
- Keith is always the center of attraction. Yeah! More!
- Keith is nothing else if not stimulating, and Keith may be downright challenging or irritating at times. Believe it or not, they're talking about someone else but this has actually been said about me.
- Keith is pissed at his record label.
- Keith is the only deaf skater in Madison, Alabama.
- Keith is my darling. Awwwww...
- Keith is a singularity in the space/time continuum. Just as long as I'm not a naked singularity.
- Keith is the best pro barefooter in the world.
- Keith is having a great time playing at Joey Ramone's Christmas party in New York City on Wednesday.
- Keith is located on the Dukes Highway (8), 240 km. east of Adelaide.
- Keith is proving to be one of Belize's worst natural disasters of this century. Watch out, El Salvador! Here I come!
- Keith is working very hard to see to it that no more of you idiots get tied to a bed and starved to death.

This could go on for a while... but I think I'll just head off to sleep.

We can put men on the moon. We can make supercomputers that can calculate things men never would ever dream to be able to think of. We can harness the power of the atom to provide electricity and creature comforts for us all. But we can't make a damn PC that does what it's supposed to.

It's 8:40PM on a Friday night, and I'm back at work because my damn computer didn't upload the file for my company's website correctly, so I had to come back in and do it again. I'm lucky that I noticed it early on in the weekend and also that I live so close to work, otherwise I'd be seriously pissed. I suppose it's a good thing because it gets me out of the apartment and I'm going to go to the gym from here, but I am really starting to get fed up with this infernal machine. There's not much that our computer guys can do about it, since they've already replaced my machine once.

Our MIS department must think I'm either Really Stupid And Computer Illiterate (which I'm not, I'm actually really computer literate) or that I'm just Destroyer Of Machines. But if this goes on much longer, I may actually destroy this machine. Bring me the head of Bill Gates!

I admit it, my life is full of guilty pleasures. One of them is "Weird Al" Yankovic, which is why I placed an advance order with Amazon.com when I found out that his film UHF was coming out on DVD. As I watch this film tonight for the first time in a few years, I can honestly say that it is one of dumbest movies I've ever seen -- yet I can't help but laugh my ass off. I think my two favorite parts of the film are the sketches for "Gandhi II: The Revenge" and "Conan the Librarian." What it does say to me is that I've still retained some stupidity and appreciation of that stupidity from my youth. I've often said that I'm not growing up, my toys are just getting more expensive. And I guess I still have those devil-may-care moments every now & then, the impish kind of screw-with-the-world attitude that keeps everyone else on their toes and amuses me. It makes me feel better about growing older because it makes me feel like I won't end up culturally like my parents, who seem to have been born at the age of 45 -- I still can't believe it that my father has all of his Beatles records and that both of my parents actually used to listen to rock music religiously since neither of them have listened to anything more rousing or cutting-edge than show tunes in the past 20 years. I'll be the cool dad who listens to rock 'n' roll and enjoys stupid films and knows "what the 411 is" -- if they still even have directory assistance by the time I'm a father.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I consider satire to be the highest form of humor because you actually have to know the material being made fun of in order to really get the joke, and they're usually ripping on something old, timeless and famous. During the scene in Zoolander when Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson were jumping up and down and hooting and making ape noises at the iMac, I was the only person in the entire theatre laughing -- probably because I was the only one who'd seen 2001: A Space Odyssey and understood the reference. That's probably one of the reasons why I think Weird Al is brilliant in his own way, most likely because I know most of the stuff he's making fun of. Of course, there's something to be said for slapstick humor...

On to more pressing topics -- the ever-present music rant. Here's where I unload about Kelly Osbourne again. First of all, I can't understand why she had to cover Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach." Her father's the self-proclaimed Fucking Prince Of Darkness! He couldn't have whipped up a nice little ditty for her to record? Second of all, she can't sing worth a damn, which leads those of us in the public not willing to swallow what's being handed to us by the entertainment companies to believe that the studio version of the album was either not done by her or it was so heavily processed to make her sound good. When she cancels all of her live performances on various talk shows and the MTV Movie Awards mysteriously develops sound problems just for her performance, something seems a bit awry. Then she actually performed at a concert for KIIS-FM here in Los Angeles, and I have on pretty good authority that she sucked. A lot. I'm still waiting for the backlash against the Osbournes, when people finally say enough is enough and seeing basically the same episode -- they all swear a lot, Ozzy stumbles around, the kids are brats and scream a lot, Ozzy screams at the kids, Ozzy looks like an idiot because of all the drugs he's done, we all try to understand just what the hell he's saying -- over and over again becomes tiresome to the general public.

"Now, for those of you just joining us, today we're teaching poodles how to fly..."

I took advantage of the fact that my roommate brings home ten tons of free movies from the company he works for, and watched Vanilla Sky tonight. It honestly made me realize a few things about myself and about life in general.

1. Vanity is important to people, in some way, shape or form. Our bodies are taken for granted and there are things about them we greatly appreciate and depend on for our confidence. I get confidence from the fact that I can sing. And I greatly appreciate my hearing, which is something that I took a bit for granted until the past few days when -- due to my own damn fault, of course -- I thought there was a chance that I'd damaged it beyond full recovery (it's slowly returning to normal, thankfully) which is something that seriously worried me. For someone to lose their looks, I could see how it would dramatically alter their life to the point of shattering it. Other factors can lead to similar types of descent into depression, such as insecurities leading someone to find other methods of comfort like food or alcohol.

2. The mind is a very powerful thing, and we really don't understand that much about it. I can easily sit here in my stable mentality and say that I don't understand how people can claim multiple personalities or other mental conditions, but I don't know what it's like. My reality is a reality that only I experience and other people experience their own. They deal with conditions that I hopefully never will, and I can't possibly imagine what they are like -- nor can they imagine what it's like for me.

By the way, the movie's ending didn't quite sit right with me. It reminded me a bit too much of A.I.'s ending, and I felt like it was kind of a cop-out. But the soundtrack kicked ass.

So the L.A. Times is full of wonderful news today, including a story that travelers are going to have to start opening their luggage for inspectors at the airport. The president of the Air Travelers Association says that while people may not want strangers rummaging through their luggage, "they're just going to have to grin and bear it."

Excuse me? Grin and bear it? I'm definitely not grinning, and I will bear nothing and they will like it. As a taxpayer, I'm already shelling out a huge chunk of my paycheck to the same government who purchased all these fancy-shmancy X-ray machines (and coming soon, CT machines as well) that scan my luggage, and the same government that pays the salaries of all those workers running those machines.

What's that? The government says that the people manning the scanning machines don't even have to have a high school diploma? You mean that these machines are actually supposed to work but the damned morons running it are letting things slip by so now I have to shell out more money out of my paycheck to pay the Homeland Security Department so they can hire people to go through my clothes and personal belongings too? You've got to be kidding me! And this is the same government that's telling me to go out and spend money to haul the country out of recession, but I can't do that unless I'm bringing home enough out of my paycheck without the government grabbing it all!

All I can say is, I knew that President Moron was going to run this country into the ground. I just hoped it wouldn't have affected me personally, but once again, my optimism is crushed by the reality of the Peter Principle, which states that people will rise to the highest level of their incompetence. Case in point.