I don't know where Shamus keeps finding computers

My first poll finished last night with the following results:

Does this blog need more Shamus Van Nostrum?

Yes, because I am him and I love myself	7 (17%)
Yes, because I'm not him but I'm not mentally well	0 (0%)
No, he does not interest me	0 (0%)
I don't care/Who's Shamus?	3 (7%)
Don't you have another, more interesting brother you haven't even mentioned?	29 (74%)

I would graph it, but I have an angry computer, plus I'm lazy, a combination which leads to no pretty graphs. If you really need a picture, just close your eyes and think of delicious pie. Now eat the pie. Wait, the pie is not actually pie, it's a big lemon. Now open your eyes. Did you make a sour face? Isn't that a fun trick? Okay, close them again, now the pie is mainly made up of Mysterious Brother X, with a chunk of Shamus and a dash of apathy/confusion.

What have I learned from this experience? Well, first, I need to give a shorter time-line for polls because I really didn't care 3 days into this poll. Second, Shamus is a crafty one. It's lucky that I'm more clever and made an answer so obviously him that he had to reveal his evil plot by choosing it repeatedly. Third, I'm not certain people know what a question mark means, because I think they chose it assuming it was a promise that a more interesting brother exists, but there's every chance that the answer to that question would be a simple "no". That would be a waste of a vote.

To be honest, I don't really know the answer to the winning question. Yes, Mysterious Brother X (MBX) does exist, but is he more interesting? I have no idea, because, already being the most amusing child, I haven't spent a lot of time figuring out 2nd and 3rd place. I mean, as long as I'm around, it really doesn't matter anyways.

The unfortunate problem with blogging about MBX is that he is not fond of me telling all the best stories about him. I think I'm allowed to tell ones that involve both of us though, like how we used to sit in my closet, in the dark, and play farm. Yes, that's right, in the dark, because all we needed was the power of our imagination. I know it sounds odd, but, I've got to say it's a thousand times better than Farmville. It was also safer than playing in the old fridge in our basement, which we also were fond of. It was not a farm though, it was a club house for me, MBX and a stick of butter. I think our club house would have been way more awesome if my mother wasn't always "rescuing" us from it.

I'm not sure I have much more to say about MBX at this point, except for the many many things that would end in total alienation of 50% of my brothers. In general, I try to make a habit of not alienating family, because they're pretty much walking kidney farms. So far, my kidneys seem good, but, from what I hear, you never quite know when a night at the bar will end with kidney theft. If some med students do decide to steal my kidneys, I hope that they at least try to stitch in their initials when they sew me back up. Then I'll have a cool scar and a clue to the "Mystery of the Missing Kidneys". At first, I'll just know it's someone with the initials "JC" or "MF" or "BM", but, over time and through careful study with a tiny mirror, I will realize that they must have been right handed, and that they most likely grew up in the suburbs of Indianapolis. I don't know how I will learn this, but I'm obsessive, so once my kidneys are gone, I'll spend a lot of my time learning about handwriting and such. Eventually we will meet face to face and I'll realize that I still have a number of organs they probably wouldn't mind harvesting, and I'll run away, but not before snapping a picture of them to post on my blog. And all this will not be possible if I don't keep potential replacement kidneys on my good side (cause otherwise, they steal my kidney and I die, so no time for exciting learning and chasing).

Today's happy song is I Got You Under My Skin, sung by Frank Sinatra, mainly because, who knew a song about parasites could be so perky? Especially parasites that have already spread to your heart (deep in the heart, actually), which is rarely, if ever, a good thing. But, despite his obviously inevitable demise, the band keeps playing, and then I forget that he's probably going to die soon and it won't be a fun death. And the forgetting is what makes this a happy song. If I ever get drunk and someone steals my kidney, I'll sing them this song to them as well. We'll probably have a good laugh about it until I pass out from the pain.

If you read this, it's not you, it's someone else

I signed onto Facebook today, and saw that another friend had joined a group with a name like "1 million people before 9th july 2010 and Facebook will stay free". I'm not sure why this frustrates me so much, but it does. Periodically, I've considered just deleting anyone who does fall for such obvious hoaxes, but I haven't taken the plunge yet. I probably shouldn't be judging Facebook friend worthiness by intellect, but it's hard not to.

Seriously, if Facebook was dumb enough to start charging, it would be a blessing, because I'd finally just leave instead of going through the daily, "Should I stay on Facebook and risk having them steal my soul through my keyboard? Oh, but if I don't stay I won't be able to receive pixilated Farmville gifts or know who's suddenly single and probably didn't want it to be broadcast to all their random childhood friends and people they met at parties but somehow hasn't figured out the importance of checking their profile and privacy settings. No soul, but Farmville; soul, but no Farmville. Why must life face me with such horrible decisions?" The whole internal dialogue isn't so bad, but the part where I curl up on the floor in the fetal position for 20 minutes wailing has been seriously cutting into my day.

But, it's irrelevant, Facebook is not giving me that gift any time soon, because charging for Facebook would immediately eliminate the major draw of Facebook: That everyone is there. They charge, people leave, then they have to rename it, "Face-of-people-who-are-stupid-enough-to-pay-for-facebook-while-everyone-else-goes-to-one-of-the-million-free-imitation-sites-that-appeared-the-minute-facebook-started-charging-book". That would be hard to turn into an easily recognizable logo.

There's also no chance that Facebook is giving up on its dream to merge us into a giant cyborg to destroy the world. It begins with pages, it ends with the giant cyborg attacking all the world leaders, except that since they all got on the Facebook bandwagon already, it's really just punching itself in the gut. Why? Because cyborgs always seem like a good idea when you live in a dorm room, and it's hard to let such dreams go when you leave the dorm room with the capability to produce one. And a giant cyborg made up of everyone in the world doing the Macarena would probably be pretty hilarious. Anyways, why would Facebook start charging and risk that Twitter will beat them to it with their giant, noisy bird cyborg? That's right, they wouldn't, because that bird would be pretty annoying.

Speaking of Twitter, I was bored today and thought that maybe I should start trying to tweet again. I'd set up an account the day I started this very blog, but realized that character limits make me actually need to consider what's relevant to my reader, which is a lot of work. I'd rather just rant, limitless and let you carefully dig through it to find glimpses of sanity. So, my only tweet, until today, was, "I can't tweet. Read my blog."

But, I've learned recently that most of my friends are likely illiterate (except for you, whoever you are...you are one of my smart friends. Congratulations!). Well, illiterate or polite, because they keep on telling me that they want to read my blog, they just don't have the time. So, I thought, maybe I'll tweet as well, for all my slow friends (Again, that's not you, because you made it here. You probably shouldn't mention this to the slower ones though. No, I won't give you money to hide it. What kind of person do you think I am? Okay, you're right, you probably know what kind of person I am, because you actually read this blog, and I've dangerously forthright. Please, just let it go so I can end this horribly long fictional conversation. Thank you. Finally.)

The point is, today I returned to Twitter to tweet this "I'm going to try tweeting again, because apparently most people I know don't have the attention span to go past 140 characters." You probably noted that I didn't use the word illiterate, because that might offend them. It's okay here though, because, as I mentioned, they'll never make it this far. And even if they do, they'll probably just furrow their caveman brows in confusion as they try to figure out the long word starting in "i". Then they'll probably go all Space Odyssey 2001 on their computer. Then the baby in space will freak me out and I'll know what it feels like to be them, and I'll feel bad about calling them illiterate, because the confusion sucks.