by far the coolest entry in my elfwood guestbook thing is this, responding to picture of miyamoto musashi. this is makoto ito.

Musashi is strong fighter and artists on Japan.
His picture is one of the best artists in Japan.
And I think he was left-handed.
He was painted faces faced left to right!
If he was drafted at major-league baseball, he would be play like Ichiro.

well, after a short lapse, the wonderful people at powweb now have my respect and good feelings again. not only have they fully explained what went wrong (corrupted data on one of their hard drives), but they have appologized profusely, given me a detailed explination of what went wrong, and - most coolest - given us six more months free of charge. they rock. so if YOU'RE thinking about buying some webspace, but it from them. they're good people. and while you're at it, put in our domain (benspants.com) as the refferer. it'll help us out. so it's a win-win situation. anyway, everyone go see "the tuxedo." and, if you have money, please donate it to us to help make movies. we need it.

well, others may disagree, but i enjoyed "the tuxedo." jackie chan's just a barrel of fun. yes, it did have a joke in it (acutally, a few jokes) that ubertopher found phsycially painful, but whatever else is said about it, at least it wasn't as bad as "the one."

check this out. sent to us by you-know-who. oh good lord it's funny.
and no, i don't know what's up with the site. powweb will soon be recieveing an irate e-mail from yours truely.

i should have posted this a long time ago, back when i was told about it. but better late than never. and please, don't ask me WHAT the hell it is. your guess is as good as mine.

oh, and on a completly unrelated note, if anyone's thinking of buying me a christmas present, may i sugest this. PLEASE.

just uploaded some new pictures, courtesy of ru. or whatever. anyway, they're not linked to on the pictures page yet, but you can find them here, here, here, here (should look familiar), and of course here. most of them are on the large size, so those of you with slow modems, BEWARE. i tried to download them on a 28.8 once, and ended up taping women's soccer. don't let it happen to you. use protection.

here you go, buddy. stake not included.

if i were to say "life sure is funny sometimes," it would come off as cliche (i know there's suposed to be the thing over the e, but i'm too lazy), contrived and boring. sadly, it is also somewhat apt.
whereas i used to daily bemoan my very existance, now just about every day kicks freakin ASS, and i've almost always got somthing to be happy about. i don't mean to toot my own horn, or anything, but it's been a LOOONG time since i've felt like this for any length of time, and i just want to share me happiness with everyone else. :)
anway, today has been interesting. school was meh, but i DID go jogging for the first time in a while (go me!), and then went to rehersal. even though i did pretty much nothing, it was still fun, and afterwards we had pizza and pop, followed by singing songs while alex played on the piano. great fun. then i came home and started watche resident evil. so far, it scares the SHIT out of me, pansy that i am. however, the CROWNING MOMEMENT of my day, the coup de grace (or however you spell it, i took german, not french) if you will, was finding a song that i've been looking for for some time. that song was "alway forever" by donna lewis. laugh if you will, but i LOVE that song. and i've been searching for it for so long. so very long. and now it is MINE. ALL MINE.
i roxor.

while we wait for me to find a "normal" picture of brodie, here's one of chief. yes, it's acutally normal. he looks like this most of the time.

if anyone was wondering why the site seemed to be down this weekend, apparently our host (powweb) was moving to some new servers.

ahh....
here we are, finally. everything's not perfect just yet (the guestbook and archive links still lead nowhere, and not everyone has a profile), but it's still looking pretty good, and we've finally got our webspace. long live us.

whew.
ok, we finally purchased our webspace. in the next few short days, our new incarnation should be up at http://www.benspants.com, at which point this page - ricketty old monster that it is - will come down. i will, of course, post a link to our new home as well, but the intelligent among you should have already made the shorter, cooler address your home page. anyway, look foreward to a new, far more spectacular ben's pant, comming soon.

p.s. a girl we know was complaining about her profile was missing. given that she's one of the two or so people who acutally visits this site on a regular basis, i thought it might be a good idea to remedy the situation. so consider it remedied.

well boo-fuckin-YAH. the much talked-about moving of this glorious site to a better location is scheduled to happen THIS SUNDAY. at least, this sunday we plan to purchase the websapce on which will be hosting our...stuff. it will be TRULY triumphant. when it comes up, the new site will be at http://www.benspants.com. there's nothing there yet, of course, but there will be soon. VERY SOON. SO VERY SOON. so stay tuned.

oh, and one more thing; it was brought to my attention by a good friend that "chez" (shay) is a word for "house." thus, "chez benja" would refer to my house. brilliant. still no world on whether or not it is acutally french.

ah yes, but you see, bordie was refering to the "chez" that's pronouced "shay", and is - at least as far as i can tell - used in the names of fancy resturants. it's probably french. whereas MY chez (and i assure you, he's MINE) derives his moniker from the film and/or book, "one flew over the cukoo's nest", which has a character named chezwick.
to summarize:
chez (shay) = fancy french something
chez (chez) = friend from coast, and character from book about crazy people.

as for school, all my classes kick ass (goverment would kick slightly MORE ass if i had even ONE friend in it), at least they have so far (two days). that's enough for now, because i can't think straight.