Category: General

the continuing adventures of the fake steve jobs

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

for whatever reason, my favorite new blog (which i’ve written about before), is down and out.

the fake steve jobs assures us that he will return, but in the meantime if you missed out on the fun, you can look at the google cache of the old site.

the fake steve says about all this:

Dudes, I had no idea this blog was getting read so widely. I’m being held in captivity during the WWDC — scary story of rendition etc., which will be my firt new post. Anyway, I will relaunch soon, not sure where yet. Will keep you friggin informed. Like, with a post here or whatever. And FYI this is NOT an Apple publicity stunt. You really don’t think they have that much sense of humor, do you?
Cheers–
Fake Steve.

of course, he gets even more publicity now, because everyone puts on their tinfoil hats and starts spouting conspiracy theories involving apple legal.

whatever. come back soon, fake steve jobs.

and on a side note, i’ll be camping in the deep dark woods for the rest of the week–ricketts glen, in pennsylvania. and will therefore not be blogging until next monday at least.

i know you are crushed.

kansans regain common sense

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opponents of evolution have lost their majority on the kansas state board of education.

well, thank god. who, no doubt, also believes in evolution, because she let it evolve after she set the big bang in motion, or whatever. so now schoolchildren in kansas will hopefully at least have a clue about what the scientific method entails.

and the subhead of this post is “but kentuckians lose theirs”. their common sense, that is.

it’s in kentucky, you know. the new creation museum. where you can see exhibits depicting dinosaurs co-existing with adam and eve, and other anachronistic anomalies.

thanks to this article and the efforts of this museum, i now know that all fossils on earth are a result of the great flood described in genesis.

who knew? screw that carbon dating stuff, right?

art, and more art

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i’m seeing the wedding singer, broadway musical version, tonight. as their homepage shouts at me, “i love the ’80s!!! so i’ll adore this show!!!!!” i’m sure.

the tickets were free. who knows. i might be surprised. kevin cahoon, my favorite hedwig, is in it, so at least i can enjoy watching him, i hope.

but, having seen a bit of it on the tonys award show, i’m not hopeful. but it’s something to do.

and, given the 100 degree heat in new york today, we thought we’d see a movie beforehand, to kill time and beat the heat. so we’re seeing clerks ii at 5:00.

now that i’m excited about. i love kevin smith. chasing amy is one of my all-time favorite movies. and jay and silent bob are the best.

snoochie boochies! i can hardly wait.

more quick takes

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fidel castro just might be on his last legs. too bad we have such nitwits in the executive branch of government, who if castro exits stage left will no doubt botch a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. bush, of course, is feeling fine. thanks, karma.

floyd landis, we hardly knew ye. according to the ny times, the testosterone in landis’s blood sample is not natural, but synthetic. game over? looks like it. always get natural testosterone, injected naturally. i swear by it–it works wonders for me.

mel gibson swears he is not a bigot, even though he also swears that jews are the source of all wars in the world today. is gibson a bigot? is the pope catholic? appropriate questions, those.

thanks everyone. i’ll be here all night. don’t forget to tip your waitress.

chihuly and other more natural wonders

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chihuly was amazing to see on saturday.

i’d never been to the new york botanical garden, even though it’s fifteen minutes on a bus away. so worth the trip to stop and smell the roses. literally. the rockefeller rose garden was in full bloom, and man were those roses fragrant.

and the glassy chihuly things were a spectral wonder. i liked the ones that were in context the best–they had little ones that were hiding in plain sight, blending in with the vegetal surroundings and looking like martian versions of plant life. but the big showpieces were cool as well.

and late lunch afterwards at mike’s deli on arthur avenue. we had an enormous gorgeous antipasto platter, served on a pizza peel. $20 for $50 worth of food and enjoyment–we were the envy of everyone around us, all of whom were ooohing and aaahing. stupidly, i didn’t take a cell phone picture.

i guess i’ll have to go back. just for you, i will. the sacrifices i make.

so i’ve been jamie howard of floral city. of citrus high school.

i was jim howard of flagler college. of st. augustine. of nease high school. of einstein’s. of gainesville. of vanguard high school. of herff jones. of deerfield beach.

this weekend made me remember how glad i am to be jamie howard of new york city.

chihuly tomorrow

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off to see chihuly tomorrow.

what, you may ask, is a chihuly? you may not be asking, because you may be more cultured than i am. but, before i got free tickets to the chihuly exhibit at the new york botanical garden through work, i had never heard of him.

shows you what i know. don’t listen to me, that’s my advice.

but now the dude is everywhere–all over new york there’s outdoor advertising, tv programs, newspaper articles, you name it. the guy must have an amazing press agent.

he, apparently, sculpts in glass. well, actually, he probably sculpts in a studio. he sculpts using glass as his medium. better?

so tomorrow i shall be off to view glassy things amongst the blooming plants. i’ll try to remember to let you know how it went.

and on a completely unrelated subject, i think i have a new epitaph for myself.

don’t you have your epitaph written yet? you’d better get on it.

anyway, my old epitaph was “sit on my grave and picnic”, inspired by picnicking on jim morrison’s grave in pere la chaise cemetery in paris when i was younger, until the gendarmes chased me away. my new epitaph?

“he knew his place. and he never went there.”

it popped in my head yesterday, and it hasn’t left yet, unlike most things. i didn’t think it applied to me, but kirk says it does, so there you are.

say it ain’t so, floyd

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are you telling me that i can’t even trust a mennonite now?

apparently floyd landis, the tour de france winner, has flunked a drug test administered after stage 17.

i saw his mother interviewed on tv. she was a charming mennonite woman, full of stories about his childhood in pennsylvania dutch country, and was so proud of him.

i hope for her sake this is a false positive test. she deserves better than having barry freaking bonds for a son.

update: the ap story was updated to include a quote from his mother:

Arlene Landis, his mother, said Thursday that she wouldn’t blame her son if he was taking medication to treat the pain in his injured hip, but “if it’s something worse than that, then he doesn’t deserve to win.” “I didn’t talk to him since that hit the fan, but I’m keeping things even keel until I know what the facts are,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Farmersville, Pa. “I know that this is a temptation to every rider but I’m not going to jump to conclusions … It disappoints me.”

now there’s a classy woman.

hey, floyd. call your mother. she deserves a call.

update #2: he called his mom. from the updated article:

Efforts to reach Landis were not immediately successful. But Arlene Landis said her son called Thursday from Europe and told her he had not done anything wrong.”He said, ‘There’s no way,'” she said in an interview with The Associated Press at her home in Farmersville, Pa. “I really believe him. I don’t think he did anything wrong.”

from what i’ve read, this may be a tempest in a teapot, caused by his approved use of cortisone for his degenerating hip.

i sure hope so.

fork in philly

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kirk and i ate at fork (306 market street) in philadelphia on our recent long weekend getaway. it came recommended highly by philadelphia magazine in their “best 50 restaurants” issue, and a few egullet people liked it as well, so we said what the heck, and tried it.

not too happy.

for a restaurant that purports to be destination dining, there’s a lot wrong here. i’ll try to stick to criticism of my own meal, since i only had bites of kirk’s food, but i think he was even less happy than i was.

i started with ceviche. ceviche is supposed to be raw fish marinated in a citrus-based liquid that “cooks” it. what i got was pretty much sashimi in sauce. it wasn’t marinated long enough to have the flavor of the marinade penetrate. and one of the items was a raw oyster, which i’m pretty sure isn’t ceviche. to top it off, it was served slightly warmer than room temperature, which is not how i want my ceviche. at least room temperature, please. did it sit under the heat lamp? warm raw fish. ugh.

my main course was ahi tuna with vegetables. the vegetables (potato, fresh sliced heirloom tomato, slightly cooked fennel, and probably more i can’t remember) were nice in a very light and flavorful sauce, and the ahi was top-grade. the menu description mentioned cayenne, but boy did i get the cayenne. the ahi tuna was rolled in it, it got everywhere, and totally obliterated the subtlety of the rest of the dish. once i cut the outside of the tuna off, things got better, but i ended up with a little pile of uneaten tuna, which i should not have had.

dessert for me was a cheese platter. there was a nice selection of various cheeses–i like starting with mild, soft cheese and moving toward more pungent and aromatic cheeses, which is how it should be done. there was nothing great on the mild end, but i ended up choosing robiola bosina (a creamy soft cow’s cheese) for the mild end, a blu de moncensio (mildly salty cow’s blue) for the next one, and époisses for the last cheese. époisses is a very very pungent cheese–so pungent that it ruins your taste buds for anything that comes after it. but it is wonderful, in all its barnyard-tasting glory.

but you aren’t eating anything after that, at least not anything that you want to know what it tastes like.

and accompanying my cheese course was a card, listing all the cheeses and noting the ones i selected. a nice touch, if a bit expected at this level of dining. customarily, your choices are checked off, or numbered in the order in which they should be eaten. and the cheese should be arranged in order on the plate as well, from mild to pungent. my cheese was out of order.

someone moved my cheese.

and, worse, they numbered it époisses #1, robiola bosina #2, blu de moncensio #3. wow. i barely know what i’m doing on this level of dining, and i’m the first to admit i’m not a supertaster. but i know not to eat my époisses first.

and, to top it off, we had wonderful service until the waiter inexplicably stopped waiting on us just after the desserts were served. some giggly manager type came over and told us that she’d be our server from then on, except that she had to give tours of the space to some clients, but if we needed anything we should just yell.

ok then. it would have been nice if the waiter had come over himself and told us this, rather than just abruptly disappearing. and the weirdest thing was, he prepped our check and then was just hanging around the place–we saw him around for the next half-hour.

espresso at the end…giggly manager/waiter chick told us it was “on the house”, but i know that she was just too damn lazy to redo the check.

i know this all sounds a bit pretentious, and whiny. but kirk and i are not demanding diners–we’ve both spent too much time working in restaurants to be annoying when eating in one. having worked in restaurants, we have reasonable but exacting expectations, based on the level of restaurant we are in. although we don’t dine out at that level very often, we do occasionally, and we know what should happen, and what kind of food and service we should get.

and we didn’t get it, although we did get a big $200 restaurant check added to the amex, minus two cups of espresso. it’s just disappointing that, for one of the few times we splurge like this, things went so horribly wrong.

my advice to fork?

—trust your ingredients. all the ingredients were top-notch quality. don’t feel like you have to drown them in more and more spices and geegaws and thingys. i’ll let kirk tell you about the fleur-de-sel on the chocolate cake in the comments, by way of further explanation.

—train your waiters. i was the world’s worst waiter, and even i knew that you didn’t leave until your last table left the restaurant. the unannounced departure of the waiter was inexcusable, even if we had been a difficult table, which we weren’t.

—sweat the details. on this level, you present the cheese correctly. the waiter stays. the crumbs get swept. the ceviche isn’t really warm. i don’t ask for anything–you anticipate it. i don’t get told to “yell if i need anything”.

loved philly. hated this restaurant.

wonderful weekend

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back to work today, although the weekend was, as the title says, wonderful. there’s a lot of residual happiness carryover, so it’s been a good day at work. children were the theme of the weekend, to some extent.

not that we had children. or took some with us. or found some there, and brought them home. but our interactions with them.

the first day was at six flags great adventure, in new jersey. as you’d expect, the park was full of kids. and even more than usual probably, because it was inner city camp day or something. there were hundreds of kids running around in matching “camp fill-in-the-blank” t-shirts.

and they were uniformly well-behaved, polite and a joy to be around.

you’d think they’d be going ape-shit, with little to no adult supervision and a park full of mischief to get into. and they had fun, don’t get me wrong. but they said “excuse me” and “please” and “thank you”. and when there was a group that wanted to ride a ride together, they’d ask people if they wanted to go past them in line. and when you let one or two go ahead of you so they could catch up to their group, they’d smile and thank you politely.

don’t tell me kids can’t be well behaved in public anymore. these kids were far better without their parents around than i ever was with my mom right beside me. someone’s doing something right there.

someone’s doing something wrong in mount laurel, new jersey though. after our six flags visit was cut short due to inclement weather (a definite theme for the weekend, unfortunately…), we checked into our hotel and drove to a nearby movie theater (the amc marlton 8) to catch a friday evening showing of “the lady in the water”, which was the best pick of the lot.

theater full of kids, all probably dropped off by their parents in lieu of paying a babysitter. and the kids were a terror. running up and down the aisles, screaming and yelling, talking on their cell phones and to their friends in adjoining seats and aisles. wouldn’t come close to being quiet, even after being shusshed politely and after loudly being told to shut up (that was me. i’m not shy about that sort of thing).

i know i sound like an old fart here, but it’s a public place and i expect, after having paid ten dollars, to be able to concentrate on the movie. i guess i’m spoiled by movie theaters in new york and by going to more expensive imax theaters, where people in general make only appropriate noise.

honestly, i’ve read all about the horror of going to movie theaters these days, and how people just have stopped going and use netflix instead, and i’ve never really experienced it.

now i have.

and the theater staff was useless. some kid not any older than the noisy ones stood there in the front of the theater listening, said nothing to anyone, and left. of course he’s not going to say anything to anyone. he’s a kid, and these are his friends. there needs to be an adult sent in, for adult supervision.

we left, and they did refund my money, though. i’ll give them that. but if i lived in that town, i’d never bother going back. i’m sure there were some kids in there that wanted to listen to the movie, too. i feel sorry for them.

don’t tell me that “they were just being kids”.

so were the kids at six flags.

magical mystery trip

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we’re not taking a big vacation this year. just two small ones. and the first one starts today. in about an hour, actually.

we’re going to philly for a long weekend. actually there’s an intermediate stop along the way, today, and then philly for saturday night.

we have phillies tickets on saturday afternoon, and then a nice dinner in a restaurant i found through a bit of judicious research.

if i’m being vague about the details, it’s because the details are a surprise to kirk, so they’ll be a surprise to you as well. when i tell you about them. if i remember to tell you about them. not that it’s such a big deal, anything i have planned. but any kind of surprise is better than no surprise at all. and later in august, kirk has his surprise weekend planned for me. i know it involves camping, which will be cool, and hiking, which i’ve actually been itching to do a little of.

anyway, it’s off to avis to pick up the car, and then onward and upward. more to come later, maybe monday, but not before then.

sometimes two small things are better than one big thing.

the blog i wish i wrote

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and the blog i wish i’d thought of.

it’s a fake (i’m assuming it’s fake, anyway) blog written by someone who purports to be steve jobs of apple, called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2.

subtitled: “Dude, I invented the friggin iPod, okay? Have you heard of it?”

whoever writes this thing is a genius. it’s laugh-out-loud funny, especially if you know a bit about apple and its history. even if you don’t, it’s still hysterical. and the author has the point-of-view down completely and consistently.

best comedy writing i’ve read in ages. but maybe i’m biased.

quick followups

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earlier i wrote about a guy who thought an onion article on abortion was real, and wrote a scathing blog about it.

he’s interviewed on salon. it’s a great read.

also, i wrote a couple of days ago about the idiocy of the government’s terrorist target list. turns out that, as a further example of the nuttiness, times square is not on the government’s list of targets. read that in this week’s time magazine.

amazing.

now i’m just waiting for someone to pick up on the india/pakistan story. i have a feeling that, although this is being ignored by the media, it might still pop up to haunt us.

i hope i don’t have to follow up on that one.

world war iii?

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i may just be an alarmist. or a fatalist. or a pessimist. or whatever ist you prefer.

but this article about india and pakistan has me thinking.

the article quotes sources in india as saying that pakistani intelligence is responsible for the recent bombings in mumbai that killed over 200 people.

great. just what the world needs. another region of the world destabilized based on probable conflict between islam and non-islam, which is what this comes down to. there’s suddenly an awful lot of this type of thing going on in a lot of different places all at the same time.

was pakistan involved? is india setting up pakistan as a straw man? does it matter? it matters not. what matters is the perception on both sides, and trust me, if this accusation gains a foothold there’s going to be major friction involving islam in yet another area of the world.

to add to the current issues in iraq.

and israel.

and iran.

and any of a host of other areas of the world. throw north korea into the mix as an unrelated wild card, and i’m now suddenly more nervous about an unstable world than i have been in quite a while, and that’s really saying something.

and, to put it mildly, i’m less than confident in our current government’s ability to navigate the tricky waters that may be ahead.

and, to put it bluntly, i’m less than convinced that our government is not the wizard behind the curtain, pulling levers.

i may just be paranoid. it’s hard to tell anymore.

what’s your brazilname?

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

if you played football (soccer for the u.s. crowd) for brazil, what would your name be?

the brazilian football name generator will tell you.

mine is “howeiro”.

this is much easier than figuring out your drag name, which involves remembering your first pet’s name and the street you grew up on, facts that anyone interested in their drag name has long ago repressed.

with this, you just type in your name, which hopefully you remember and can spell, and voila. or, for the illiterates populating the internets, viola. oh how that “viola” business irritates me.

anyway, generate away.

summer of crap

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i used to read more. i used to accomplish more. i used to tinker more. i used to explore more. i used to move more.

now i just watch tv.

it’s an addiction, you know. and boy am i addicted. and, to be honest, i probably don’t watch any more tv than i ever did. in fact, i probably watch less than i did when i lived in florida, where the year-round heat encourages indoor living and the tv is always there. at least in new york, you are forced by circumstance of living to get out and about every now and then. and so, i think maybe i watch less overall television.

but less is still too much. i have the nagging feeling, whenever i watch tv, that i should be accomplishing something constructive.

but i think this feeling comes more in the summer, when there really is nothing on tv but crap. with the exception of baseball, of course–watching baseball is never a waste of time. but the rest of it? at least in the fall, winter, and spring the tv programs are somewhat well-written, entertaining, and intelligent. lost. 24. desperate housewives. you know, scripted television.

the summer, though, is unscripted. and so last night, thanks to the tivo pvr thingy from the cable company, when there was nothing to watch on the 1000 channels we have, kirk and i could have a mini-“cash cab” marathon. followed by an live episode of “so you think you can dance”. because, of course, there was no baseball game due to it being the all-star break.

now don’t get me wrong. i like spending time with kirk, and i like hanging around the house, and i (at least on some level) like the shows we watch or we wouldn’t be watching them.

maybe this has to do with getting older, and feeling your mortality. but time is starting to really fly by for me, and though i enjoy the relaxing time i spend watching tv, there’s still that nagging feeling that i should be spending my time better. and, because i am at heart a very frugal person, it bugs me that i’m paying outrageous sums of money for 1000 tv channels and there’s nothing on worth watching, and i end up watching the same 6 channels all the time, mostly network tv.

maybe i should just unplug the tv altogether. or maybe i should just get an hdtv with a tuner built in, and drop the cable, and get dsl internet access. we hooked kirk’s mom up to dsl, and if she can use it without incident, i know we can.

i’ll think about all this some more tonight, while i watch the “so you think you can dance” results show.

extremely dangerous amish popcorn

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apparently we don’t need to worry about protecting assets like “major business and finance operations or critical national telecommunications hubs” from terrorists.

we do, however need to protect old macdonald’s petting zoo, the sweetwater flea market, the mule day parade in columbia, tennessee and the amish country popcorn factory.

sorry. no link to the amish country popcorn site. for some strange reason, the amish country popcorn people have no website.

anyway, the new york times has a great article about this today (free registration required). apparently, the government keeps a list of possible terror targets.

a list on which the government bases homeland security funding for each city and state.

a list which has, for example, 8,591 possible terror targets for indiana, 50% more than new york’s 5,687. which is why new york’s homeland security funds were cut by more than 40% this year, while hotbeds of terrorist activity like louisville and omaha saw their funding increase dramatically.

the times article quotes the department’s deputy press secretary jarrod agen thusly: “we don’t find it embarrassing. The list is a valuable tool.”

odd statement, jarrod agen, given that you apparently are a valueless tool.

how in the world does the government get away with turning the defense of our country into a pork-barrel feeding frenzy for “1,305 casinos, 163 water parks, 159 cruise ships, 244 jails, 3,773 malls, 718 mortuaries and 571 nursing homes”?

infuriating.

national (league) disgrace

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honestly, i think i’m giving up on watching the all-star game. probably not really. i’m sure i’ll watch next year. but right now, i can’t imagine watching it.

it’s an exercise in frustration.

if you missed last night’s game, the american league won 3-2. the national league had a 2-1 lead, in the ninth inning, with two outs and two strikes on the last hitter. and trevor frigging hoffmann, the vaunted san diego closer, couldn’t get the third strike.

he instead gave up a two-run triple to blow the save and lose the game.

there are multiple issues to discuss here. the first, i guess, is that the issue is less that trevor hoffmann blew the save than phil garner (the national league coach) sent in a closer who relies not on powerful fastballs but on offspeed pitches, and then didn’t send in defensive specialists to back him up. miguel cabrera misplayed what should have been the third out. if scott rolen had been in, like he should have been, the game is over and the national league wins.

next up is the inherent stupidity of giving the winner of the all-star game world series home field advantage. the american league, because it doesn’t play real baseball and instead fields the abomination known as the designated hitter, has a built-in advantage because they have a bigger pool of offensive stars from which to pull. i understand that you can’t have the pitchers hitting in the alternate-year national league-based all-star games–the game is for all of the fans and god forbid a yankees fan should be made to watch a pitcher actually play the game as god intended.

but, given that, the american league is always going to have an advantage, and that is unfair. so give world series home field advantage to the team with the best record.

duh.

finally, i’d like to point out to everyone that, but for the mets players on the national league team, we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all. they provided nearly all of the offense and all of the scoring for the national league. david wright’s home run, and carlos beltran’s double, followed by stealing third, followed by scoring on a wild pitch. and beltran got into scoring position on second base in the bottom of the ninth, against mariano rivera no less, and no one could bring him, the tying run, home.

either wright or beltran would have been the all-star mvp.

should have been.

two outs. two strikes. top of the ninth. one run lead.

aaaaaargh. i’m still fuming.

march together for life

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the onion is a satirical newspaper whose goal is to present satirical content in a straightforward manner, so much so that their articles can be mistaken for real.

mistaken for real, that is, if you are a total idiot who has no concept of what satire is.

which, apparently, is the case with pete, the fellow running “march together for life”, a blog that espouses an anti-abortion perspective. good for him, as long as he isn’t publishing the home addresses of abortion doctors. everyone has an opinion, and with appropriate time-and-place restrictions, everyone should be able to voice their opinions in the forum of their choice.

i’m pro-choice that way, too. blog away, pete.

but realize, too, that the world really will beat a path to your door if you reveal yourself to be a monumental fool. pete, in this case, found an article at the onion site from 1999 entitled “i’m totally psyched about having this abortion”.

and raged about it in his blog, not realizing that the article was satire.

and then tried to justify the lunacy in his follow-up piece.

read the comments. they are priceless. here’s my personal favorite:

“I’m pro life, but sweet Jesus you’re an idiot. For your next post, how about a passionate speech on the need to immediately free Prince Albert from the can?
Boo | 07.08.06 – 12:24 am | # “

when you become so vitriolic and so committed to a cause that you lose your sense of humor when discussing your cause, you run the risk of falling over the precipice of reason into complete illogic and public ridicule. i’ve seen people like this when i worked with animal rights groups.

believe me, idiots like this are on both sides of the political spectrum.

it’s good to bring passion and fervor to your cause.

just don’t forget to bring the humor, perspective, and humility as well.

update: apparently the author removed the comments from the page. they are archived here.