Stickybuffalo.com

“Hello. You have reached www.stickybuffalo.com. I’m sorry, but no one is available to rant or navel-gaze right now; please call again when our web host is functional. If you would like to leave a mesage, just wait for the beeeeeee—”

Aaaaand we’re back.

Some things which have drifted through the haze of anxiety and despondency which passes for my mind, the past several days:

Maybe it was just a fluke, but recently it seemed like I was suddenly seeing the word “bodega,” all over the place. And I wondered, what’s the deal. Coincidence? Or is there some secret English-language committee which recently decided that words like “shop,” “store,” and “market” just weren’t quite adequate for the niche to which they then assigned the (I’m guessing) loaner word, “bodega?” (Or maybe some celebrity recently used it on Twitter, that might explain it also.)

I saw something about her today, so I guess it isn’t a complete fade-out, but I almost just about found myself capable of intellectually conceiving the idea of feeling a little bit sorry for Sarah Palin. I mean, the woman desperately wants attention, and… doesn’t it already seem like the whole Palin phenomenon is so long ago, now? It’s like she was some strange and obscure cartoon from the early ’90s which one can almost think about nostalgically, already.

I see these commercials for this stuff, “Five Hour Energy,” and maybe (as per usual) it’s just me, but what the fuck? First of all, the packaging just makes it look highly sketchy, particularly with the tiny little bottles suggesting serreptitious use. And then there’s the premise of the TV ads. “Five Hour Energy is great because unlike coffee you don’t have to make anything;” I don’t even drink coffee but is a life in which you can’t spare five or ten minutes in the morning really one you even want? And then another ad, which shows all these people popping back this iffy looking substance and then going back to being productive little toilers; “thanks to Five Hour Energy I can keep schlepping this wheelbarrow full of rocks for hours yet!” The vision of life being sold by this ad campaign is just deeply saddening.

This may be one of the coolest, most “get the fuck out” things I’ve read in weeks, perhaps months. And yet, as appalling as the admission may be, I couldn’t even see a headline for a story about this without instantly thinking to myself “that’s no moon…” And I haven’t even watched Star Wars for going on 10 years, probably. I’m horrible.

Finally, it looks like the Big XII (minus II) is flirting with disintegration for a second summer in a row, courtesy of Tejas A&M this time. We’ll see what happens—nothing is still a strong possibility—but honestly right now I’m just about to the point of saying “get it the fuck over with.” Maybe Iowa State just doesn’t have a natural home in a “marquee conference” as defined by football-audience-dollar-value. If not, well, 1) it seems inevitable that “sorting” will sooner or later eject us and ) maybe we’ll be better off for it. Let the idiot Texans and other such cultureless hordes have their moneyball conference, and let’s go find ourselves some other colleges still loosely in contact with reality.

After three months of pretty much constant toil, your correspondent actually feels a little bit ahead of the game, at least in a near-term context. An opportune time, then, for a week in France; after all, best go now before plane tickets and non-dollar currencies get even more expensive, non?

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves while I’m away.

(Also, if the SB server feels like having another of its week-long outages…? Today would be a perfect time to start!)

I don’t know what day, exactly, stickybuffalo was “born.” I remember having lunch with the blog’s founder at Rock Bottom Brewery, in West Des Moines, while he explained the origins of this curious domain name he’d acquired and his plans to launch a blog. But I wasn’t an active participant, then, so I don’t recall a specific “launch date.”

I’ve got an e-mail dated February 14, 2001, announcing the blog (and it’s amusing to count the number of recipients in the en clair list of addressees still using @iastate.edu accounts at that point). But maybe the blog was up and running a little while before then; I don’t know. In any event, I think we’ve reached the point of being, as they say, “close enough for government work.”

So, happy tenth birthday, stickybuffalo:

At this point, I’ll turn things over to any lurking oldtimers who may wish to make a few remarks.

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