I got pretty bored yesterday, and decided to slum it around Usenet for a while.

I love Usenet. With the exception of the microsoft.* groups, it's basically the insane asylum of the internet. I almost like to think of it as the internet's basement - it's where you would keep your sociopathic cousin if you had one. You'd occasionally send scraps of meat down, and he'd occasionally send something up, like somebody's leg or something (it's best not to ask a lot of questions in cases like this - just put the leg in the trash and pretend like it never happened). You're just guaranteed to encounter a vintage of human that is unlike anything allowed to roam free above ground.

However, alt.ufo.reports is a whole different ball game. It's kind of sad, really - It's a place where perfectly sane-ish people sometimes wander to say the most perfectly silly things.

I don't want to sound like a know-it-all, but there are some things on this planet that do not defy explanation, no matter how badly we would like them to.

Take this summation of one person's posts, for example (totally reworded from the original - her post was spread out over about 10 different messages, and I don't know why):

We were driving along the road when we saw an airplane hovering. It was low to the ground. I thought it was going to crash. I turned my eyes back to the road and drove on. When I looked back, it was gone - vanished. Isn't that weird? It was also weird because none of the people in the neighborhood we were driving through seemed to care. They were acting like nothing at all had happened. Also, this happened near an airport. Is there anybody out there who can help me figure out what happened?

To help out, someone posted the following:

Sorry, oops, dammit.  I would say you saw a UFO disguised as a plane!  It was probably abducting someone! But of course I don't really know what the hell is going on up there but it's as good a guess as any.  If you dig around the internet you will find plenty of reports of planes doing strange things.

As good a guess as any? AS GOOD A GUESS AS ANY?

What about this guess: The airplane, as they often bloody-well do, was landing at the airport by which our observer was driving. It was gone when our little friend returned to the scene of the incident simply because it was on the bloody-stinking tarmac. The neighbors didn't care because they live near an airport, and they're pretty bloody-well used to the bloody-novel idea of bloody airplanes landing on a bloody-bollocking runway.

Sorry about all the limey swearing in there. I just lose my temper when it comes to this sort of thing. It's bad enough that the initial post was soaked to the gills with stupidity - I don't think anybody needed to have the second post, which was just a parasite living inside of the gills of the first post, posted.

I'd go on with more posts, but I'm tired. I spent the afternoon/evening with my friend, Felix, moving out of our old music rehearsal space and into a new one. The new one is great: Spacious, well-lit, right in downtown. There are only a couple problems. We're subletting from a drummer who is currently on tour as a dancer for Playgirl, and we need to ask him if we can take down the Poison/Led Zeppelin posters. Also, things aren't going to be quite perfect until we figure out if the vomit smell is coming from the couch or the carpet. Either way, one thing's probably going to have to go, and the other is going to have to be thoroughly disinfected.

Yup. So that's what I have to look forward to. Count your lucky stars if you've never had to sublet from a grown man who keeps nude photos of himself on the walls of his rehearsal space. It's just not something you need.

Trust me.