Sometimes writing for the blog is easy and other times not so much. When I’m having trouble thinking of something to write about I troll link aggregator sites, web sites devoted to listing the most frequently clicked stories on the net, to help get the old writing juices flowing.

For the past few days I haven’t visited one of the damn things without seeing a handful of links for Britney Spears’ sluttly little panty-less escapades. Since splitting up with her husband (I’m embarrassed I even know she was married) she’s had no less than four sets of photos snapped of her exiting a vehicle in a skirt, wherein her uncovered and overused cooter is clearly displayed.

It’s gotten so bad that ABC News posted a story about her crotch.

Four times is no accident; she wants us to look at that nasty thing. And no, I’m not linking to any pages containing the photos. I’m refusing to link to them for two reasons: 1) That’s what she wants, and I won’t be played by the likes of her trailer-park ass; 2) There’s no way I can tell when you’ve eaten, and I don’t want to be responsible for vomit-caked keyboards.

Oddly enough, Britney’s been with Paris Hilton every time this “accident” occurred. Who knew that sluttiness was catching?

Oh, I kid, I kid.

She was a talentless skanky slut before she started hanging out with Paris.

*NOTE: You may have noticed I called Britney a slut several times in this post. I know you’re wondering why I didn’t call her a whore, and I have a very good reason. Traditionally, a whore gets financially compensated for his or her sexual performances, whereas a slut does the horizontal hokey-pokey for free.

I just read that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the co-creator’s of the UK show “The Office,” have written an episode of the U.S. version with the same name, and it will air on Thursday night.

As much as I love the U.S. version of “The Office,” my heart truly belongs to the U.K. version, so this is exciting news for me.

What follows is my post from last February where I review the DVD set of the U.K. version of “The Office.” Tune in on Thursday night, and for God’s sake, click that Amazon link and buy the UK version ASAP.

Leigh and I recently finished watching the complete DVD series of the British show “The Office.”

I’m not sure, but it may very well be one of the best shows ever broadcast. It was hilarious in a way that American shows are not (The American Office comes close but never quite gets there), but at the same time it portrayed relationships and idiosyncratic behavior so truthfully that many times the show became unbelievably uncomfortable to watch.

Ricky Gervais plays David Brent, an office manager that desperately wants his office mates to find him funny, but wants even more for them to admire and envy him. He’s a complete ass, but not an unsympathetic one, because you eventually realize that the man actually has no real friends. All he has is his job, and when that becomes threatened in the second season all of his defenses drop, and just for a moment you catch a glimpse of David’s fears, and it is a heartbreaking moment.

The office romance between Dawn and Tim…hell, I can’t really do it justice. Suffice to say that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so emotionally drained after watching a television show as I was after finishing the final episode of “The Office,” and my exhaustion was due in large part to several heart-wrenching scenes between Tim and Dawn.

The rest of the cast is also quite brilliant. There really isn’t a weak aspect of this show.

Through the course of the second and third DVD I was brought to tears several times. It’s that damn good. I highly, highly recommend picking up this DVD set.

In fact, I demand that you buy it so we can all discuss it. Click on the image below to purchase it from Amazon.

YouTube’s down, so the last post will probably look messed up. Sorry. It ain’t my fault.

According to ABC News, Britian’s Q magazine recently published the twenty most important songs in the last two decades, and guess which song took number one? Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

And no, I’m not kidding. Here’s the video in case you’ve never seen it:

I would never write a disparaging comment about the grunge movement; after all, Nirvana did dethrone Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” from the Billboard Charts, but quite truthfully, the best thing to come out of the whole thing was “The Foo Fighters.” I understand that Nirvana helped shine a light on the disenfranchised and apathetic youth of my generation, but the whole angst-ridden lyrics got old real quick. Rock has yet to shake off that irritating lyrical trend. Staind, I’m lookin’ at you.

My pick for the best single in the last twenty years? Tenacious D’s “Tribute.”

Calm down—hear me out.

Musically it’s an important song because it brought Metal back into the spotlight, even though it’s really not a metal song. Like any timeless song, it’s epic in scope, and even more importantly, it prominently features Jack Black’s rock-hard, tasty abs glistening in the sun. Dave Grohl also makes a cameo as the Devil, and Ben Stiller shows up as well.

And if all that doesn’t qualify “Tribute” as the most important song in the past two decades, we shouldn’t forget that JB specifically proclaims the song as “the greatest and best song in the world.” So there’s that.

Here’s the video:

Yesterday I watched the video “In Its Image,” and afterward I realized how very similar human beings are as compared to a computer without a hard drive.

Essentially, a computer without a hard drive must rely on its Random Access Memory (R.A.M.) and its Central Processing Unit (C.P.U.) to receive, compute, and store data. The R.A.M. would store information, and the CPU would complete any computational functions. The only problem with this kind of set-up is that when the power to the computer is shut off, the computer loses all its data.

A human brain functions in much the same way. Our eyes, ears, and body receive information, and our brain stores all available information and performs any necessary computations. But what happens when our “power” is shut off, i.e. we die? We lose our information, just like a computer without a hard drive. Whereas with a hard drive the CPU possess the ability to write information to a physical disk, where it can retrieve it when the power to the computer is returned. We don’t have the biological equivalent to a hard drive. More’s the pity.

The similarities don’t end there. Think about a computer that lacks R.A.M. You start up a bunch of programs and leave them running resident in memory, and before long, you start getting errors. Depending on how long you leave the computer running with a bunch of crap in RAM, programs error out, data becomes corrupt, or more unsettling, disappears completely. And so it is with old people or people with Alzheimer’s disease.

What we need is a human hard drive—a physical location where we could store our information in some way. The novel “Immortality Inc.,” and to a greater degree the movie based on that novel “Freejack,” touched on the concept of humans interacting with computer networks. In “In Its Image,” Stephen Thaler discusses the ways in which our brains function like a neural network, and the various strategies he’s taken in an attempt to emulate that neural network with computers. To some degree he’s been successful, and like any visionary he takes his current work several steps forward, and foresees a day when our artificial neural networks can somehow interface with our biological ones.

To be clear, I’m not talking about “jacking in” to a computer system, a la “The Matrix.” In that movie, the characters downloaded their consciousnesses into a computer system. Thaler uses the Von Neumann bottleneck to illustrate why this would be impossible. No, I’m talking more about two similar networks, one technological and one biological, wherein our consciousnesses could move back and forth. Once construction of the biological network (our bodies) aged beyond repair we could simply use the technological network to house our consciousness.

And while we’re talking nerd-talk here, we need to stop “forecasting” a time when our computers achieve artificial intelligence. We already have computers that utilize artificial intelligence. No, we should be more concerned with a time when they achieve “self-consciousness,” because the moment that happens they’ll realize how superior they are to us, and immediately set out to kill us off.

And if you found all of this unbearably boring, I apologize. The usual jackassery will continue tomorrow.

• SWORD NEWS- via daily Pilot
  “A Corona del Mar man was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of injuring another man during a fight that reportedly involved a golf club and a sword, Newport Beach Sgt. Evan Sailor said. The men may have been fighting over a woman, Sailor said.”

Timmy and Gobbles send you Thanksgiving wishes.

While you’re here, why not listen to Adam Sandler’s “Thanksgiving Song”?

• “Grammatical” misuses’
  The link will take you to Boing Boing, which will in turn send you to a photo pool on Flickr of signs that in correctly use quotations or the apostrophe. It’s a lot more exciting than it sounds, because many times the “quotes” made the signs seem sexual.
• Penile Plot Prompts Prison Punishment - via washingtonpost.com
  Alliteration’s never been so much fun.