2001-07-17 - 2:04 a.m.

Grave Dancers

Been a while since I wrote. Let's see if I can recap.

Saturday was the event of the summer, Liralyn's third birthday party. Alas, she got a little too excited about the whole thing and turned into a pumpkin halfway through. We spent the middle half hour of the party throwing stones into the pond while she calmed down. Still, she liked her gifts a lot, and Julie's parents finally met mine. Everybody went away happy. (Except me; I had high hopes that Kim would strangle one of my kin folk. Alas, Kim persists in being who she is, rather than who I want her to be. A failing, I might add, shared by every single one of you.)

Anyway, I spent Sat night just sitting around watching TV and finishing _Day by Day_. Sunday I did maintenance on my full-auto paintball gun (not a trivial task, if done thoroughly) and then went over to Julie's. We tried to watch some of the new dinosaur programming on the Discovery channel, but it was too adult for Liralyn. She can intellectually handle the idea that T Rex was a big dinosaur that ate other dinosaurs, but watching it is rather different.

Token musing: With Laissez Firearm gone, a few people have come out of the woodwork in the groups he posted on to talk about what a jerk he was and how glad they are that he's gone. The same thing happened (is still happening) with Gharlane. I despise those people. It's not that they're defaming the dead- I'm cool with that. It's that these particular dead were very articulate posters who effectively silenced much of their opposition while they were alive to post back. If Usenet were made of fistfights instead of flame wars, it would be a decrepit and scrawny Richard Simmons dancing on Arnold Schwartzenneger's grave yelling "Who's throwing punches now, fat boy?"

I have a huge list of people whose graves I long to dance on. I tell you this, though: All those people have a pretty good idea who they are, and none of them have ever cowed me. If anyone does ever manage the feat, I hope I'll give credit where it's due and continue to be cowed after they're gone. Silencing someone through sheer force of personality is a credible achievement and should be respected.

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