Today we have answers to the reader question from May 26, 1998, which was, quote, "Corks: good or bad." No, you're not missing anything. I never asked for a second round of answers. But this morning I checked my email and found a trio of innocently casual answers in my mailbox. It's all Darien's doing of course. He all but confessed when I sent him accusatory email, to which he responded, "Who, little ol' me? -innocent stare-" That's good enough for me.

The answers, which I'm posting in spite of the fact that they are somewhat late, follow:

• From "Darien": "Corks, as in the kind that come in wine bottles, are definitely bad. They require special tools to remove, never come out properly, and make a mess all over everything when they do. Corkboards also make a mess all over everything but are a significant improvement over poking pushpins and thumbtacks into your walls (especially if your walls, like mine, are cinderblocks), so they rate a little bit higher than corks themselves. Corx, on the other hand, is a board game that definitely rates as a good thing. Except that I suck at it. But that makes me lousy, not the game."

• From "Minamoon": "I think corks are bad. This is mainly because they're a pain in the neck to get out of bottles, and they're really not good for anything else. Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if you didn't have to have a whole separate instrument to remove a cork from a bottle without getting a million little cork shreds in whatever liquid it is you're trying to get to."

• From Chris: "Corks are basically good. If you're lost, without food or transportation, in the desert, and there aren't any stones to suck on, you can take the cork out of a water keg and suck on that. The barrel is useful only for entertaining yourself. Try pouring some of the contents out onto the sand. You'll notice that the sand is now pretty. Make designs. Then blow in the barrel. It makes a different pitch if you let out more water. This does not work if the barrel has a tap. Your best bet then is to abandon the extra weight and try to find Desert Pete.

  "If you're throwing a fancy party and want to loosen everybody up, uncork some wine. Pin magnets on one side of the corks and tape a blown-up picture of your mother-in-law to the refrigerator. See who can stick the cork on her nose blindfolded.

  "Corkboards are very handy. If you turn them around so the wood side is out, you can nail notices to them. 'Cork' is fun to say. When men in white coats come and start asking you questions, start saying it over and over. When I did it, they were so amazed at my eloquence and sense of humor they gave me my own apartment, rent free. The food's not bad and my walls are soft, soft, soft."

What a weekend! On Friday afternoon, our server was broken into by hackers, taking the site offline until late Saturday and some of the CGI-driven web sites until just this morning. Things should be working all right now, though.

Among the symptoms of the crash was a loss of information posted to the site during the day Friday, which included Friday's journal entry. So here it is, repeated:

John K. sends more Song-A-Second entries:

• Come Sail Away, by Styx: "I'm tripping on a boat. Unless it's a spaceship. I haven't decided."

• The Day the Music Died, by Don McLean: "A bunch of musicians got killed, and then everything went to hell."

• Baby One More Time, by Britney Spears: "I miss you. I will gyrate wildly for you. Please come back and beat me."

Today I shifted something around that may disappoint some of you: Book-A-Minute and Movie-A-Minute no longer have strict monthly update rates in place, which means gives me more freedom to update them when I actually have something to update with. It probably means they'll be updated less often, on average, but it also means I'll be able to update when I actually have something to update with. Too often, the last few Book-A-Minute updates consisted of material I had to pump out at the last minute, because, honestly, Dave and I are pretty burnt out writing those things, and that's not the greatest way to get quality results anyway. I thought it was better to trade off quantity for quality.

That makes Computer Stupidities the last RinkWorks feature with a regular, predictable update rate. I suspect it will stay that way. That particular site is tedious to update, but it doesn't take me very long, it requires no forced creative input from me, and it's second to The Dialectizer in terms of popularity -- so it behooves me and the site in general to keep that one going as predictably as possible.

In spite of that, I'm also trying not to lose sight of what I set out to make RinkWorks in the first place: an entertainment web site that I do for me first and my readers a very close second. (Yet RinkWorks is not as self-oriented as that statement may make it seem, because what keeps me happy is keeping you folks happy -- so in that sense, you're not second at all.) The point, here, is that if I start doing too many things with the site that I don't enjoy doing, I'm going to get burnt out fast, and quality and quantity are both going to go down the tubes.

Hence, as started happening some time ago, the older RinkWorks sites that I've lost some interest in and/or become burnt out on, are receiving less and less attention, and more and more attention will be focus on entirely new RinkWorks features.

Enough with that. The results to the R.I.N.K.W.O.R.K.S. contest (see below), will be announced later today in the RinkWorks Message Forum. I received a bunch of fantastic entries, so don't forget to check it out.

It's a big day for RinkWorks! The new humor featurette, How To Be Romantic, was released this morning. It's a feature with two sources of inspiration: the obvious one is the previous humor featurette How To Be Funny. The other source of inspiration was a post by a regular to the RinkWorks Message Forum, who asked for ideas on how to propose. In response to that question, I began writing a comic reply -- and it sort of took a life of its own. That reply consisted, for the most part, of the first three paragraphs of How To Be Romantic's "How To Propose" section. Before posting the reply, however, I reconsidered, saved the text, and used it as the seed for this new featurette. Here's a link to the original post.

The second item of interest is the official RinkWorks contest that begins today. Look in the Message Forum for the details. This was a spur of the moment action on my part. I thought of a good acronym for "R.I.N.K." and then wondered what others might come up with.

Things went a little haywire in the RinkWorks Message Forum today (and still are). Somehow, the "all messages" page got corrupted. The "all messages" page is an important one, because the changes to the message index are made there first, and the segmented index pages are constructed based on the contents of the "all messages" page.

So the "all messages" page got corrupted, and that meant future attempts to post messages hung when it came time to list the new message in the segmented index pages. The result is that as of right now, several new messages are only listed in the "all messages" and "recent messages" pages. Unfortunately I won't be able to correct the problem until tonight, so posting to the forum has been disabled until I can do that.

Ah, the joys of being a webmaster!

More Song-A-Second entries from "scArA":

• Come To Daddy, by Aphex Twin (revision): "I would like to own your soul for nutritive consumption. Please return to your father."
• (She Was A) Hotel Detective, They Might Be Giants: "Linda Tripp, tonight on, 'Before They Were Stars.'"

And some form Doug S.:

• Lovefool, by the Cardigans: "I'm codependent and Swedish."
• King of Spain, by Moxy Fruvous: "Abdicate, and you too can work in food service."
• Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba: "I can drink you under the table, you stupid capitalist."
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople), mostly known via They Might Be Giants: "Renaming things sells records."

Over the weekend, my family and I picked a truckload of apples, headed over to my grandparents' house, and put an antique apple cider press (from 1824!) to work. We ended up with 49 gallons of apple cider, and let me say, that stuff is good.

"scArA" revitalizes the Song-A-Second thread that appeared in this journal on October 24th, 1998, and November 4, 1998. He submitted the following ultra-condensations:

Song themes:

• "(censored censored censored)"
• "[Blank] sucks."

Songs:

• Macarena, by Los Del Rio and the Bayside Boys: "Listen closely and we'll teach you how to take a perfectly good song and turn it into an annoying dance craze."
• Hooverville, from Annie: "Herbert Hoover really, really, really sucks."
• Strange Kind of Woman, by Deep Purple: "So she's a prostitute. I love her."
• Popcorn, by Hot Butter: "Popcorn poppers and synthesizers are popular right now. Isn't there some way we can have a hit single with that?"
• Come to Daddy, by Aphex Twin: "This one's so easy, I'm not even going to bother condensing it."
• One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces, by Ben Folds Five: "This song's irony was lost in the process of becoming famous with Brick."
• Ventolin, by Aphex Twin: "I'm having an asthma attack."
• (God Must Have Spent) A Little More Time On You, by N'Sync: "Mommy!"

Further submissions are welcome.