This is my pride and joy. My sweet half-rack that I currently have in my kitchen:

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A poem about candy

Sweet chalkful bliss fills my mouth
And teeth grind each one to powder.
Momentarily dry, but quickly fills
With wet, craving even more.
Take another, light blue like faded paint
Trying to disguise itself
As something different. Burst!
Same disintegrating demise, the taste
Is different, but only lingers shortly
Until it is consumed into oblivion.
A yellow one with a chipped corner
Begging to be let go,
Suffering enough from imperfection.
Ending the pain, quickly
Like the first two. Sickly red
Taken from the dwindling row
And ended with a dissimilar taste.
Another blue, followed by a white,
Taken together to form a cloudy sky
Of sweet paradise’s sun-light.
One by one they fell into darkness,
Voices, I can still hear every time
I stroll past their friends, lined up,
Tight in plastic, where life is just fine.

It’s that time of year again and watching those Christmas themed TV shows and movies is inevitable. But here are some suggestions to make your holiday a little more enjoyable.

I suggest:

1. A Christmas Story - This movie has so many funny scenes. I particularly like scene where Ralph’s father gets the leg lamp(I want one of those!). The narration by the “Adult” Ralph is also very hilarious.
   

   Mother: All right. Now, are you ready to tell me where you heard that word?
   Adult Ralph narrating: Now, I had heard that word at least ten times a day from my old man. He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master. But, I chickened out and said the first name that came to mind.
   Ralph: Schwartz!

2. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation - One of my favorite Chevey Chase movies. One of the funniest scenes in the movie is where Clark Griswald goes into a rant after not receiving an expected bonus from his boss. Here is that wonderful rant:
   

   Hey! If any of you are looking for any last-minute gift ideas for me. I have one. I’d like Frank Shirley, my boss, right here tonight.

   I want him brought from his happy holiday slumber over there on Melody Lane with all the other rich people and I want him brought right here, with a big ribbon on his head, and I want to look him straight in the eye and I want to tell him what a

   cheap, lying,
   no-good, rotten,
   four-flushing, low-life,
   snake-licking, dirt-eating,
   inbred, overstuffed,
   ignorant, blood-sucking,
   dog-kissing, brainless,
   dickless, hopeless,
   heartless, fat-ass,
   bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped,
   worm-headed sack of monkey shit he is!

   Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where’s the Tylenol?

3. Nightmare Before Christmas - A very fun animated movie by Tim Burton. I really enjoyed the style of animation and the original and interesting story. The movie is about the mayor of Halloween, Jack, taking over Christmas from Santa.
   

   Jack Skellington: Sally! I need your help most of all.
   Sally: You certainly do, Jack. I’ve had the most horrible vision!
   Jack Skellington: That’s wonderful!

Yeah, I know it is only a list of 3 movies, but I need to get some sleep.

Who needs IPv6 for more IP addresses when you can just arbitrarily increase the ranges. When we enter the wonderful world of syndicated television anything is possible. I was watching an episode of Smallville from season 3 titled “Delete”, and in this episode the characters are being hypnotized to kill Chloe by mysterious email messages. During one of the scenes they try to find out where the emails are coming from by tracing the IP. When the computer screen is shown you can see the IP address and netmask, and both are invalid. The IP address is 134.541.168.170 and the netmask is 266.266.266.0. I think it is interesting that they choose that particular subnet mask because the pattern is similar to the common 255.255.255.0 netmask. At first glance most people wouldn’t notice this, but the geekiness in me made me rewind and pause. So now that I am done rambling and after providing not a single ounce of useful information, I present the screen captures:

A graphical front-end for whois

IP address and subnet-mask

Grey swamp
Covering everything.
Canopy enclosed me
Into a world where the
Creatures talked and ruled
Massive tyrannical civilizations.
Running, smelling of sweat & blood,
Trail of thick gravy that’s sour with rot.
A mere human born onto a place where they
Are unwelcome. Bound and tortured, a daily routine.
Running to my salvation, enough noise to wake more demons.
Legs giving in to the whisper of cracked acorns. Flowing over pebbles,
Water sounding much closer, many feet crunching and breaking from behind.
Two exhausted arms digging at sickly-silver ferns and mosses. Crunchity, Crunchity,
Too close. Head first into the creek. World distorted with the broken surface.
Deep, and getting deeper. Pain is gone. Light piercing the canopy
Trees part while the fallen rise to their place in eternity.
Water replaces air as the last bubbles surface
Wetness overcomes every inch of flesh,
Gone. All delicates of the body
Dissolve. Gills, scales, fins,
All there. I swim home.

Another interesting poem from the Neil Bittner vault.

On the wall
Up above, raising my head to see her
Beauty. Golden sun shining with intensity
Only a brilliant-blonde head of hair can sustain.

Hearts pounding and spreading, filling emptiness with
Emotions that will never be formed. To know those
Jeweled lips, so intimately, so distant from my own.

Two grand unblinking eyes, looking through my exterior
Into dimensions of the human soul. Lives too different
To be melded into the perfect symbiosis.

Breasts piercing the blackness of her blouse, low-cut
And void but for the shimmering around her neck. Skin,
far too complex, but not overseen by the sun.

I saw her every day, and words never flowed from her.
Syllables of my thoughts knew her to be more
Than a person without her spoken words would know.

She never knew I knew she smiled at my back, or blew out
Little kisses when I was trapped in a dream. I knew
She always Inspected, Stared, Examined
From her picture on the wall.

Albuquerque

Flat and dusty, piercing the desert
With a silhouette against the falling sun.

Thriving and thrashing, vegetation grew
Despite the deficit of moisture.

The Holiday Inn where pillows are all so
Fluffy. With mints of grandeur

Laying atop the place of sleep.
Melts smoothly in your mouth.

Weasels sold in dozens, at traps
To the unsuspecting family tourists.

Tributes to their alien encounters,
Blinding, believing to the naïve.

Radiation where the sun lingers on earth
Where the atom was exploited.

Endless air like warm root-beer fills you
After a fresh shave, ready to depart.

I decided I’m going to start posting some stuff I’ve written. The first one is called Growing a Poem and it is a poem about writing a poem.

Growing a Poem

Small, pending life in the palm of your hand.
Dark warm earth is parted and consumes
Everything into darkness where one must wait.

Moist love imbues growth and formation
Into life. Soon the flat surface of the world
Is broken and the elevating sun is seen.

Time gives way to expansion: Roots
Dig deeper and deeper into the unknown,
And Flora becoming open with the sun.

Picking tiny black beetles, their hunger
Destroying confidence. Enriching the
Raw consciousness to ensue more

Life. Continual pruning and reshaping assure
Death will be asleep. Your creation from birth
Inspiring others to grow one of their own.

I set up a new server, and neilbittner.com is the first site to be hosted on it.

The server is a Compaq Prolient dual PIII with 1gb of memory.
I will be hosting a few other sites as well. When they get set up I will post them here

While cleaning out his attic my brother found an enormous bees nest. It’s about 12 times bigger than a normal basketball sized nest!

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