There's a reason for my absence here the past several days. Jonathan and I are in Florence, and I'm now blogging from the public library. We're about to go to Trowbridge's to grab some lunch in a bit. We're down here in the general Deep South for a visit, for a wedding, and to find a place to live. More on that later.

I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I'm addicted to Hot Chicks with Douchebags, but let me explain. The writing is often clever and hilarious, and there's actually quite a bit of revealing cultural commentary. For example, DB1 offers this explanation of the douchebag phenomenon:

At its essence, if I were to attempt to make a generalized definition, douchebaggery is simply about the affected performative role-playing of the peacocking male in an utterly false and constructed way. It is about the adoption of cultural signifiers of "the stud" as an attempt to woo the female by inverting attraction, by making the male douchebag perform as the object of the female's gaze -- to feminize himself. This attempt at gender inversion, an almost mythic reinvention, allows the male to become the object of attraction through invocation of the tropes of gender masquerade. In this way, the male douchifies himself in the hopes of hiding his true self. Douchitude is the mask, the role being played, which hides the douche from his true reality in hopes of, well, getting jiggy with the hot.

I'd actually love to be in a room where Judith Butler is sitting in front of a computer analyzing these images in a think-aloud protocol way.

Plus, a commenter in this post claims that douchebaggery is about the hyperreal, as DB1 had pointed out that the three guys in the post actually looked more like drawn cartoons than people.

• I just installed a one-gig RAM card in my iBook. Much needed.
• I used to love this show!
  
• Jonathan and I are going out of town tomorrow for a little over a week, so blogging may be light, if I have a blog at all, that is.

Still having a boatload of trouble with my site and hosting service. I just put my site back up, but it looks like the server is overloaded again, and I bet they're going to yank it again in the next hour or so. I am going to resolve this matter, even if it means doing something drastic, like moving to TypePad and then figuring out where to go from there with regard to my archives.

Can any CSS gurus help? WHAT is that annoying line right across my blog, under the banner image, partially obscured by the bottom of the banner image? I'd look it up in Firebug, but I can't seem to select just that line and the area right around it. And I've gone over and over the CSS code and can't find the problem there. I've gone into the code and put "border = 0;" every time there was a border, and that didn't fix it. Anyone have an answer?

Edited to add: I changed a few settings for the padding/margins, and now it looks a little better, even though the line is still there. At least it's not a broken line now, not unless you click on the permalink for a post, anyway.

Hopefully it will work now that I've upgraded to 5.1...that is, if my site is still even up by then.

Stats for my host's server:

Server Load 2.16 (4 cpus)
Memory Used 44.5 %

That's including my site AND the other sites sharing space on that server, and I hope there are lots of these.

I'm now using Drupal 5.1 and waiting to see if my hosting service will yank me again. I also deleted all seven of my subdomains, so my resource usage ought to decrease at least a little. Hopefully I'll be okay for a while. I'm working on the theme issue; I know it looks ugly right now, and I hate it as much as you do.

I know it sounds harsh, but it's nothing personal: