Rob Lifford

I water-skied today. Yeah, it’s late November, but the weather’s been beautiful all week and Mike realized it was probably our last chance for 2003, so he and Shannon hauled me out to Decker Lake in east Austin and we had a go. It was really windy, so the water was ludicrously rough. I managed to get pammeled by waves within seconds of standing up each time — my behind-the-boat skills are not what they used to be (circa 1991 — holy crap do I feel old). Mike did great, though, taking at least one decent run each with a wakeboard, slalom ski, and a surfboard. Despite my subpar performance, it was a nice afternoon and a great reminder or my pyschotic high school days on Long Island Sound, where I’m pretty sure I’ve also water-skied as late as November. Here’s to past glories and glorious presents, too.

Need a bluegrass fix. May go to see The Greencards and Two High String Band tonight.

News from Fort Worth tonight: Texas Man Chokes to Death on Marijuana. No doubt we’ll be seeing him in the Darwin Awards.

Tonight I looked at the traffic logs for this site for the first time in many, many months and was absolutely shocked to see I’d had between 600 to 800 unique visitors per month for about the past six months. I don’t know nearly that many people, and I’ve done nothing to publicize this blog. It made no sense.

Until I looked at the stats a little more closely. Hmmm… the average visitor stayed less than 30 seconds. Is my site that ugly? Is my writing that awful? My self-esteem plummeted like a broker from a high Wall Street window on Black Friday.

And then I looked at the stats even more closely. Hmmm… I’m getting most of this traffic from Google and Yahoo. And what search string is bringing them here from the search engines?

“thai69.”

See, after we went to Thailand, I built a photo gallery on the site with over 70 pictures… each on its own page… so one of the pages’ filenames is thai69.html, and you can probably guess how it’s gone from there…

Porn-hungry Asian fetishists (or, to be fair, perhaps just porn-hungry Aisans) are searching Google and Yahoo (which gets its search results through Google) and my page is coming up at the top of the list. That’s right:

THIS SITE includes the #1 GOOGLE/YAHOO search ranking for “THAI69.” Woo-hoo!

And a bunch of those pornhounds are just clicking on through to see this image.

Titillating, huh?

Come on, now, does this really surprise anyone?

(Michael Jackson Faces Arrest on Charges of Child Molesting @ NY Times.com)

<run-on sentence>I wish I had cable and Daria was still on so I could watch Daria watching her TV and that TV show Sick Sad World in Daria’s fictional universe would come on because that’s all I can really think about right now.</run-on sentence>

Remember that great voice on Daria’s TV? “Next… on Sick Sad World…”

That weird title is just a way of saying that my boundless urge to tinker with websites has resulted in a Lazy Fingers site redesign. I still haven’t tested in all browsers or got the FormMail script running properly, but I thought it looked OK and just went ahead and put it online.

Now that the band has a new site, I’m hoping it serves as an incentive for me to get my ass in gear and actually book some gigs again. Oh yeah, and find a bass player, maybe even another picker or two…

I was getting a haircut today and it became apparent to me that I was the only guy in the place who wasn’t getting a “bald fade.” This is getting out of hand, people. I’ve had enough. This post is the kickoff of my new public outreach campaign. The bald fade’s time in American fashion history is OVER. Mark my words, I shall not rest until every man, woman, and child in this great land of ours knows and understands that this hairstyle is acceptable if and only if you are:

• an active or retired military or law enforcement officer
• an NBA all-star
• an established professional — I said professional, not aspiring — hip-hop artist

A few years from now, we’ll speak of the bald fade the way we speak of the mullet today. Trust me. You don’t want to be captured forever in your high school yearbook or prom photo with a BALD FADE, fer chrissakes, do you, kids? Right?