I am by no means an expert on the subject of women. As I have said a few times already, my game is in a rebuilding year this year.

Truthfully, I’ve been spending all my free time riding bikes, so my game will probably stay as bad as it ever was well into the fall. Romancing girls and cycling are direct analogs in my life. I’m not a pro at either one, I’ve been known to wear outlandish clothing in the process of both, and yet somehow they’re both lot of fun all the same.

One day around Thanksgiving I will peek my head out of my windowless underground lair, decide that it has gotten too cold to ride comfortably, and then emerge in search of a lady friend with whom to weather the cold months. At which point, of course, all the good ones will be taken, having been snapped up in the spring and summer.

Oh well. At least I save a lot of money on Christmas gifts.

Chatting to girls is among my favorite pastimes, and though it can be a perilous experience, at least I know what not to say some of the time. I’ve never had a girl bite my ear off, for instance, as a gentleman in Nebraska recently did.

I was once bitten on the shoulder, but that was a far weirder situation which I am reluctant to go into at present.

But whatever troubles I have aside, at least some people are finding happiness with one another. Pearl, aged 72 years, and her grandson, Phil, 26, have found each other and are even expecting a baby, though the baby is being carried by a surrogate mother.

It’s nice, really, when a couple find one another like that.

Ugh, seriously… this is one of those situations where I can’t even think of any jokes that are more vile than the reality so I’ll just let your imaginations run wild.

As I have detailed before on this very blogular corner of the Interplops, nerds are a strange breed of people. Their social mores can be had to understand even for me, a recovering former nerd.

Still, as I do have personal experience with nerdism, I feel its my duty to attempt to describe what they’re up to.

Not long ago, someone who works at Apple went out to a bar and left their cell phone behind. This is something nearly all of us have done, I’m sure. The only difference in this case is that the cell phone in question was the newest version of the iPhone. It hadn’t previously been released.

That phone somehow found its way into the hands of some nerds from a web site known as Gizmodo, who then dissected it and photographed the whole process as though it were an Area 51 alien. Rumors circulated that the Gizmodoans paid many thousands of dollars to get their Cheeto-dusty fingers on it.

At this point, one of the stranger nerd subsections, the White Knights, began to cry fowl. They took the helms of their steampunk-styled computing stations, tweeting and blogulating across the land that the Gizmodoans were wrong to purchase stolen property.

A steampunk-type computing machine showing the Interplops

Mind you, this all transpires within the wholly ridiculous relationship that nerds have with Apple in the first place. Here’s a sketch of what that relationship looks like.

1. A new Apple product is rumored
2. Nerds moan about the ports it doesn’t have, or software it doesn’t support. There are cries that it will be an utter failure as a result.
3. Nerds don ironic programming-related tee shirts and emerge from their gross apartments to line up for the thing anyway.
4. The product comes out and is an unprecedented success.

So you see, the Gismodoans had to dissect the phone in order to find out what sort of hardware it had so that they could blogulate about it, thus allowing step 2 to take place. Apple got wind of the post and sent Gizmodo a letter asking for the return of the phone. Gizmodo complied.

The question is whether they violated any laws in order to procure the phone in the first place. That’s a question the police are clearly eager to answer, as they stormed Gizmodoan Jason Chen’s house, kicked in the door, collected some of his computers and left.

So, things just got interesting. You see, the police can’t barge in and take a journalist’s stuff. So all of a sudden, the great question that bloggers have been dying to get someone to pay attention to will be asked: “Are bloggers journalists?”

Of course, a simple look at the definition of the word “journalists” would seem to indicate that they fit the description, but I am no legal expert.

DJs are waiting patiently for the answer to this question so that the question over whether or not they are musicians can finally be answered, even though only Henry Rollins was really asking it.

The rest of this business should be very interesting to behold, and I could wind up finding my habit of standing on the sidewalk and yelling “Extra, extra!” every time I post here finally legitimized.

While I normally avoid the subject of politics, mostly because I think there are already teams of people out there who labor long hours to cover the subject much better than I could, I have seen something this morning that has motivated me to speak out.

Yes, I believe I may have a point, though I must confess to feeling a bit like a circus clown holding a fine leather briefcase.

I rose from my sleeping pallet this morning, shoving aside my sleeping rifle and 80′s era boombox — I sleep best to the soundtrack of “Breakin’ 2 Electric Boogaloo” — and began filtering through the mornings news reports from my team of spies. It was in said reports that I came upon this video:

Apparently Mr. Tim James is running for governor of my home state of Alabama. He wants to stop people from being able to take driver’s license tests in any language other than English.

“This is Alabama,” he says in the video, “We speak English here. If you want to live here, learn it.”

This comes as a shock to me especially because Alabama is where I learned to speak French. I took classes in it starting in fifth or sixth grade as I recall, and then took it all the way through my limited college career.

I then travelled to Paris, France, used my knowledge of the language to order a ticket to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower, then came home and have had little reason to speak French since. C’est dommage. Still, I did learn a good bit of it, even if it has now faded nearly entirely from the feckless weasels who comprise my brain.

My home statemate Mr James also uses the phrase “Common Sense” to close his video, even though the original “Common Sense”, written by Thomas Paine, hails America as “composed of influences and peoples from all of Europe”. Are we not still, after all, a melting pot?

I wonder if Mr. James has ever been to another country, and if so, how long he studied their language before he went.

I’m told that English is among the hardest languages to learn. It seems to me that anyone new to Alabama might need to find a way to get around while they’re perfecting their second language skills. Isn’t it better to offer those people a license so that they can legally drive in the meantime?

What if they speak some English but still miss a few key points on the test, thus causing them to be a danger to themselves and others? I’m a native English speaker and I still found it difficult to understand some employees of the Alabama DMV.

Furthermore, I’m not convinced that there is a community of people in any state, let alone Alabama, who are maliciously refusing to learn to speak English. You can tell that I’m indignant about the very suggestion of such, as I’ve trotted out the English word “furthermore”.

I am a proud son of Alabama. Like any region in any part of the world, it has a population of morons and geniuses, of free thinkers and buffoons.

My family lives there even still, and they are good people who love me very much. They do everything they can to take care of me and keep me from being as big an idiot as I would certainly be if left to myself.

Mr. Tim James and his ridiculous video are an embarrassment to me, to my family, and to the state of Alabama as a whole.

He should be ashamed.

There is something inescapably satisfying, as a male, about marking your territory. It just feels good to look at the mark you’ve made, especially if its in a public place, and say “I did that”.

That’s why I’m pioneering a whole new form of graffiti where I affix handmade canvas flags that bear my family’s crest to things. Simply spray painting or slapping a sticker on something is for punks.

Hugh Heffner, a man after whom I model my own life in addition to Frank Sinatra and James Bond, understands this spirit. Although he’s already made an indelible mark on the sexuality of America, when he heard that the famous Hollywood sign was in danger of being encroached upon by developers, he ponied up $900k to help bridge the gap to the $12.5M mark the sign needed to survive… uh, unmolested.

There are rumors that Heff, in his old age, was confused by the “OO” in “Hollywood” and thought he was merely shelling out money for yet another pair of breasts, but the important thing is that the sign is saved.

Actually these goings on have given me a really great idea for some future improvements to the Atlanta area’s famous Stone Mountain.

Apparently the wild urge to mark one’s territory is not limited to the male mind, however, as a woman in Cape Coral, FL was arrested recently for peeing on clothes in Wal-Mart. She was so determined to leave her mark that she left her driver’s license behind as well.

Maybe she thinks she is a cat, but that doesn’t really explain the driver’s license. If the cops were able to distract her with a laser pointer, then we’d know for sure.

Even though I have no formal training in it, I consider myself something of a philosopher. I am perpetually writing and rewriting my philosophy in an attempt to maximize my life enjoyment. Currently this philosophy leans heavily toward avocados and spicy sausage and is written in crayon.

One of the main pillars of my life enjoyment philosophy is to narrow my scope to include only those things that I can have an effect on. I didn’t make that part up, as readers of the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” are already aware, but I have interpreted it to mean that being apprised of world or even national events can be detrimental to life enjoyment.

Similarly, ones enjoyment of spicy sausage can be diminished by understanding what is in it or how it is made.

For this reason, I avoid news in an inverse relationship to how local the news is to me. This means I am simultaneously a gossip hound and woefully ignorant of national goings-on.

However, since I randomly slap my keyboard with either hand every weekday morning, thus turning out this very blog, I occasionally am forced to peruse news items on the Interplops in order to come up with something to prattle on about. I flipped through a few items this morning, and now, thanks to exposure to the news I read, my life enjoyment has plummeted.

The word on the street is that Stephen Hawking, the world’s top nerd, has made some remarks that have gotten journalists all in a flutter. He indicates that humans probably shouldn’t be attempting to signal alien life forms in the same way that the Native Americans should not have welcomed Columbus.

I happen to agree, but that’s not really the sort of conclusion that takes a mind like Hawking’s to reach. In fact, I think pretty much anyone, outside of journalists perhaps, could make the same leap with little trouble.

It is a startling analog of my own life, where things are changing thanks to the friendly couple in apartment one. They’re going around introducing themselves to everyone in the building, as probably any friendly couple would, thus blowing the lid off of the tenants previous habit of barely acknowledging one another. Who can say where this will lead us all? Possibly to ruin!

I even heard them threatening to bake muffins. Muffins!

It is increasingly difficult to maintain my hermit status, but I guess that’s what warm weather and some friendly neighbors will do to a man. Oh well.

I guess it won’t matter much if the aliens blow us all to smithereens soon anyway.

I wonder if they like fresh baked muffins.