I've been a regular visitor to Raising Cane's for many years now. For those of you out of town, Raising Cane's is a fast food place that sells nothing but fried chicken strips. No burgers, no salads, no dark meat, no options for crispy or spicy or anything like that. Just chicken. In a styrofoam box or on a bun. Take it or leave it.

I sure would like to do more posts that just regurgitate email. It isn't that I'm too lazy to make up new stuff. It's just that it hurts less when the asinine nonsense in this space isn't a product of my own brain. I want everyone to resolve to take the time to email me something amusing next week.

I caught just a minute of the Jim Rome show yesterday, and he had listeners emailing sports-related haikus. It didn't sound too challenging, so I thought I would make up some about my local sports life.

As a basketball fan. the main thing that I haven't figured out is how much to heckle the opposition at a woman's basketball game. This is an important question for me this year, because the LSU men's team just is not that good, and the Hornets are downright godawful.

People need some fucking manners. Here are some workplace stories about when they don't have them.

I've been begged by this guy before. He's usually after fifty cents or a couple of bucks. Fairly friendly. I wonder why I can remember people who beg from me three times in a year, but I can't remember to take out the garbage on Thursdays. Tonight, he wanted a ride to Tom drive. It was real close, so what the heck.

My own quote file was once one of my favorite pages on the site. I've shamefully neglected it while bringing up other content. It's one of the few pages that still has very sloppy formatting, and it even got accidentally omitted from the menu on the left when I rewrote that code. I just added a new quote, but that's the first one in a while.

And now that the obligatory seasonal good cheer is out of the way, let's continue to make fun of my coworkers. Oh yes, it didn't take long after my last post to get an email with the other groups who had to take those photos. I was too just busy cooking and herding people through my house to cut out images and make up captions. Let us proceed....

In the interest of job security, I don't normally use this forum to make fun of my employer too much. But once in a while, the satire gods throw you such a beautiful opportunity, you can't pass it up. You see, some genius at work had the bright idea for each different team to take a picture, to format that into some sort of Christmas greeting PDF file, and to send those out to the clients that this particular team supports. As my emailed response to these put it, "let the ridicule begin..."

I woke up yesterday morning at around 5:00. I'm not sure why I was up so early, but I was fresh and ready to start the day. I went out to the living room where the gas fire still warmed the air. I watched most of Sports Center and a little bit of the news on CNN. Then I took a shower and went to work early. It was a normal start to a day that would end very abnormally.

Sometimes, when I have half a thought but not a full one, I'll jot down a little note. Sometimes they turn in to a real idea. Once in a while, I start writing about it, and the idea flows into a whole post. On the other hand, I have a whole page of half-thoughts that went nowhere. Here is a collection of some half-thoughts that have no chance of becoming a whole post on their own merit.

When I decided that I wanted to write a web log, it was just the because I wanted to write. Sure, I could have kept a private journal, and I even tried to do that a time or two. But as much as I like to read, I don't really like to read my own writing. I know that doesn't make much sense, but that's the way it is. The idea of writing pages of stuff into a journal that no one would ever read seemed rather silly to me.