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Over the weekend my wife and I went to the music store to buy an electric guitar for my son. He’s been taking lessons with a rented instrument for several weeks and seems to be serious about learning so we felt is was time for a bigger commitment and some long-term investment. My son’s teacher gave my wife guidelines on what and where to buy and I was brought along, as usual, to do the driving and heavy lifting because we needed to buy an amp as well.

After we arrived at the store and secured some help, my wife told the clerk, “We’re looking to buy a Squier or a Mexican.” Now I grew up near the barrio of a small Southern California town and saying you wanted to buy a Mexican there could get the gringo beaten right out of you. But stupid me — my wife was referring to a Fender Stratocaster, a favorite guitar of no-names like Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Eric Clapton.

Squier is the brand Fender uses to label its Stratocasters made in various parts of Asia. These Strats are lesser quality but much cheaper than the Standard Stratocaster. And much to my surprise, the Standard model, although made in America, is assembled in Mexico. Hence the name. The Mexican Stratocaster is more expensive than the flimsier Squier models but it looks, feels, and sounds to me like its more expensive deluxe and custom-built cousins.

So we bought my son a black Mexican Stratocaster with a rosewood fingerboard, plus a good little Fender practice amp. And now he’s learning “Layla.” That’s my boy!

Last night Steve Dagley told me on iChat, “that blog entry is getting a little stale d00d.” Other than his questionable spelling of “dude,” he was unfortunately correct about the freshness of this website. Hey, I’m lame and easily distracted. And those silly dated entries will nail you every time.

So I’ll get back to typing for all of you wanting to know how my wife’s heart is doing now or whether my dogs have thrown up again. And, not to keep you in suspense, the short answers are “fine” and “no.” Thanks for asking.

Why does it sometimes say “Can’t Parse Blogroll” or “Can’t Open Blogroll” below the “Commotion Elsewhere” heading of the sidebar on my front page? Occasionally, like just a few minutes ago, blogrolling.com temporarily goes offline or otherwise absent without leave. If you went to their site during my outage you would have seen this, and only this, message on their site, “Blogrolling is experiencing unusually high load and cannot process your request at this time.” Which is bad since they supply the OPML file I parse using PHP into my handy little blogroll.

Now I like the blogrolling.com service because it’s easy to maintain your links and you get handy metadata for many of them, like when a blog was last updated. There are other benefits too. I even paid for the service. But lately it’s been either slow on the response causing my site to stall loading, or it fades in and out like an underfunded public radio station causing these strange error messages. I may have to go back to manually maintaining by blogroll, as Maciej suggested, or moving the blogrolling.com-based feed off to a “Links” page. Ugh.

Apparently AMC is now showing “The Usual Suspects” in its viewing rotation of classic movies. I certainly agree that the film is a classic, achieving that status for me the same year it debuted in the theater. Dave Hyatt and I both watch it regularly and can, against the wishes of many others, recite entire passages from the script. You could say that watching it is almost a religious experience for us.

Which is why I’m disturbed how AMC has profaned this film by censoring its more vulgar dialogue. Now AMC wasn’t the first television venue to do this but they make a big deal about film preservation, and it’s both ironic and sad that they’re unable to show “The Usual Suspects” and other films in their original form.

This film needs its vulgarity the same way the Mona Lisa needs her smile. It’s part of the artwork. I only caught a fragment of AMC’s version but soon turned it off when I heard Chazz Palminteri as Agent Kujan ask, “Who is Keyser Soze?” This is because Kevin Spacey as Verbal Kent responded, “Ahhh nuts!” Ahhh nuts? I can’t imagine how the lineup scene was censored, if they showed it at all. Thankfully I have it intact on DVD.

How did I miss NetNewsWire 1.0.4 released a week ago today? Obviously I wasn’t using the previous version regularly or I would have noticed the announcement in either my subscription to Brent Simmons’ weblog or the Ranchero news feed. And it’s not like I don’t have inessential.com in my blogroll too. Duh.

Apparently I’ve been way too busy during the last week to notice what’s going on around me. Which is something my wife would claim happens all the time.

Anyway, Brent is using the Web Kit now to improve the rendering of descriptions, which is way cool, but it looks like he may not be using it for an embedded browser until version 1.1. Which is a pity since Shrook (using the Web Kit) and Beaver (on that other platform) already have such a preview feature.