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Maria got her board scores back yesterday. She did better than she had hoped, which is better than most of the country! Maria is awesome!

It’s Plug Starshift Crisis Day!

Now I feel like I have to follow that title with a Girlsareprettyesque story about how your family life is weird and conclusions are disappointing.

Read Starshift Crisis! Seriously, why aren’t you reading it? You have the choice to read Kristofer Straub’s punchlines on a daily basis and you’re not! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!

Hotmail is telling me that there are no messages in any folder of my (nine-year-old) account. Intriguing!

Update 1540 hrs: Oh, they’re back. Boredom.

I’m learning Perl. Nobody ever told me that PHP’s syntax was essentially Perl’s!

I gave blood today without getting sick! WHOO!

I’m not sure what I did differently today, other than standing up slowly and eating and drinking double the normal amount at the canteen table.

Is anybody else just fucking creeped out by the American Apparel “Meet Melissa” ads? I’ve seen them a lot on the Onion and a few times on IndieClick affiliates, I’m not sure where else. The ad is a picture of a pretty girl with dark hair in a white t-shirt, smiling under a badly lit shower and looking kind of nervous. The ad has a rollover sidebar. Expanded, it reads:

Meet Melissa. She won an unofficial wet T-shirt contest held at the American Apparel apartment in Montreal. Her prize for winning was a travel mug from McGill University, and the satisfaction of a job well done.

Melissa is wearing our new ultralight Sheer Jersey T-Shirt, AKA “The Summer Shirt,” available at our stores and online.”

Let’s translate that.

Meet Melissa No Last Name. We had a party at a company apartment, then piled on the peer pressure and alcohol until we got some girls to pose under a shower. We thought this one was hot, so we’re going to put her face and upper chest on a few billion pageviews. We didn’t pay her shit!

We’re reasonably sure Melissa’s over 18, but hey, no last name and no pay means no paper trail, right? P.S. Go to our site and you don’t even have to look at her face, just her hands over her breasts splashed real big on the front page.”

For a company that’s trying to build a rep as progressive (“Sweatshop Free, Brand Free Clothes”), they sure come off like fratboy assholes there.

Update 1453 hrs: Ashleigh linked me to an enlightening Business Week article.

Wheeler came to visit us. It was fun! We played a whole lot of video games and some board games and ate high-quality vegetarian foodstuffs. He stayed with Lisa and Scott three nights and me and Maria for two, and did not hold me responsible for making him trudge all over Bardstown Road in the heat. Wheeler is, to quote Sumana, a good houseguest and a friend.

Lisa, Wheeler and I constitute three fifths of our weekly instant-messenger-based Nobilis game. Normally we play from our disparate locations in Louisville, Louisville, New Mexico, Georgia and Connecticut; this time the aforementioned three of us were all in my apartment at different computers, which was a neat if odd kind of synthesis. It’s easier to Laugh Out Loud at a joke when there are other people doing the same within earshot.