Should I be so blasé about tornadoes? Perhaps not, but any inclinations toward reasonability that I might have are generally blown away (pardon the bad pun) by the ignorance and histrionics of the local weather forecasters.

Don't get me wrong. I have the utmost respect for tornadoes. I remember the one that touched my parents' house when I was a child. A house a mile away was blown to bits, but all it did to our house was delicately lift the cap off of the chimney and set it down in the yard. I've seen tornadoes ravage my home state, seen friends' houses destroyed, spent time frantically calling friends to find out if they and their families were okay.But I only get upset or worried when there's a need to get upset or worried.

This snippet of text, taken from a satirical column in the Huntsville Times, sums our one of our local weather forecasters up well:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The Fourth Amendment is not so often quoted as the fighting words of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

but it is, in its own way, as strong as the First.

Earlier today, I joked with Jeff that I should post an entry of rants. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.

Let's see.

• First, to Knology, our cable provider. Due to shoddy service and a general run-around over the past few days, we're on the verge of 1) switching cable modem providers 2) demanding a refund for all the service we didn't get this month. Our service has been out for part of every day for the past week. My apologies to those of you who attempted to access domesticat on Friday afternoon. I was halfway through major changes on the site, and had uploaded files but not rebuilt them with greymatter—and then our connection conked out for about five hours.

Today's adventure: braised ribs for dinner, right?

Wrong. We got to go to Rosie's.

Believe it or not, the Pyrex pan that I was using in the oven to braise the ribs….exploded in the oven. I kid you not: exploded. Jess took pictures, but she hasn't uploaded them yet. (I'll post them here when she does.)I can't believe the damned pan exploded in the oven. I'd put it in there not five minutes before, and wandered to the computer room to check email. I heard a *pffft*—sounded like the liquid was boiling over—so I went into the kitchen to check.

Tonight's Bubonic Mouse™ award goes to Colortyme—and, by proxy, every other rent-to-own shop in northeast Alabama with nasty guilt-tripping ads.

The first thing I heard in my car this morning was a spiel about how you should placate your family this holiday season. For your wife, buy her a bedroom suite to keep her quiet. For your children, a Playstation 2 to stop their whining.

Then it finished with the following jingle:"It's not what you thought.
It's what you bought."

I'm sitting here at my desk, looking totally busy, with Fatboy Slim's "Kalifornia" humming in my ears. I'm pondering lunch—I'm supposed to meet someone for lunch today but I don't know if it's going to work out or not.

I'm a bit disgruntled—one of my new favorite sites (kuro5hin.org) got nailed by some dumb-ass 3l337 skript k!dd3z, and as a result they've taken the site down. Sigh. I really liked kuro5hin.org—it was like Slashdot, but without a lot of the crap, and it was a lot more focused on geek life and culture instead of just 'Open Source Rooolz!'

(Sorry. I like Linux. I even have a penguin cap. But I'm not as rabid about it as some people I know. I agree that it's a good OS, and that micro$quish has major flaws, but I do graphic design professionally. The Gimp, the image editor for linux, just isn't robust enough yet for my uses.)