December 2004

I Am Lazy: What Publishing Date? It's December!

Do you know why I follow the antics of Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich in the papers every day? Secretly, I wish I were he - especially when time comes to publish Evil Robots! This guy is a wannabe Dubya, accept that he's done nothing since being sworn in as Governor. Despite his failure as an executive, he's doing well in the polls because he's got people to blame for his inefficiency. He's got the media AND the General Assembly.

Got caught trying to sell land to a rich friend? Blame the papers! Can't get a slots bill to sign? Not his fault! Damn liberals are all out to get him! And, whenever doing nothing gets boring, he steps in front of a microphone and pretends he's former King Willie Don! I'm willing to bet that half the people who vote for him are actually voting AGAINST the liberal media. No foolin'.

Damn, he's the luckiest do-nothing jack-ass in the country.

Month after month, I gotta squeeze out another batch of articles for the next issue of Evil Robots, and without fail, something gets in the way. First, procrastination, my old friend, turns on the tee-vee. Then laziness, procrast's first cousin, switches the tee-vee to an info-mercial. By the third week of the month I'm full of article titles with no content.

No matter how hard I try, I never have a good excuse for my tardiness or my lateness. That is, until this month!

Last week, for my birthday, my beautiful wife gave me a Rio Karma. It's a 20 GB digital music player, and generally kicks ass. Since getting it, the vast majority of my computer time has been spent copying and uploading CD's onto this baby. Thus far I've managed to put over 1,300 songs onto it, and I'm not halfway through my collection. I do not expect to come close to using all of the gigs of space it has, but who the hell knows?

This Rio Karma guy rocks like socks in a box, as Godzilla would say. It fits snugly in the palm of my hands. Unlike the iPod, I can create tons of new play lists with the handheld unit, so once I have loaded this bad-boy with music; I'll have virtually no need for the desktop software. Cute and practical! No wonder I've been playing with it almost non-stop. Kinda reminds me of being 12 years old, without all the mess.

So here I am, six days after our original publishing date, and we don't have everything we need. Sure, in a perfect world it would be my fault for being late. But since it's a Governor Bobby world, so I choose to blame ERI's lateness on my liberal, freedom-hating wife for buying me such a distracting present. With a little luck, I'll be able to milk this all the way through the Sixth Anniversary issue in May.