Repeated Expletives:

AWPC: Dead of Winter

2012-01-27T09:04:00.000-08:00

Him (standing amongst the green growing plants along the side of the road in Seattle in December): Why do they call it 'the Dead of Winter' anyway? Yeah, it's cold, but it's not like everything is dead.

Me: You're just lucky to have always lived in places where it doesn't snow much, and a some of the trees keep their leaves. Seattle is easy.

Him: Oh, yeah, was it more appropriately 'The Dead of Winter' where you used to live?

Me: Well, in Minnesota, it was definitely 'The Dead of Winter', and they meant it. ...In New Mexico, it was more like 'Dead of Winter' then 'Dead of Spring', 'Dead of Summer' and 'Dead of Fall' all in a row.

Double Death-Defying Day

2012-01-10T14:55:00.000-08:00

On Monday, I was nearly run over by a truck and ended up in the Emergency Room. But surprisingly, not in that order.

At 2 AM Monday morning, I awoke with massive abdominal pain. The only time I'd ever felt worse pain in my life was during recovery from major surgery about 8 years ago. Given the intensity, I thought for sure my appendix was about to rupture. So I woke up my wife and we headed down to the ER.

After a several hours of blood tests and CT scans, they ruled out all the possible causes that would have required cutting me open to solve. The diagnosis they finally landed on is just a case of Epiploic Appendigitis (that "g" is not a typo). Horribly painful to be sure, but it's self-limiting and I should recover in 5 to 10 days.

Cranky but relieved, I headed for home, certain that I'd just dodged the only bullet of the day.

As my wife and I were crossing the street near the hospital, a jerk in a big truck ran a red light and nearly plowed us over. Due to my illness, I really couldn't run or jump. So I just shoved my wife towards safety. Thankfully, she had the same instinct and grabbed my arm and pulled me towards safety. It was all kind of a blur, with each of us feeling our quick thinking had just saved the other (and so I guess we were both right). The truck slammed on its breaks and stopped several feet past the crosswalk where we just were, passing within a foot of me in the process.

A guy in another vehicle waiting at the stoplight shouted out to us "today's your lucky day!" He didn't know the half of it.

Rick Santorum

2012-01-03T18:13:00.000-08:00

Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum
You know what to do.

Save the Internet!

2011-11-16T08:19:00.000-08:00

It's American Censorship Day. In honor of this holiday, I intended to [DELETED] a [DELETED] with a [FNORD] on my [DELETED].

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Today, the government decides on whether or not there will even be an internet in the future. I strongly encourage all Americans to take a few moments today to email or call their Senators and Representatives and complain about SOPA and the Protect IP Act, two pieces of legislation that, if passed, will cripple the internet. Say goodbye to your social networks, your fan forums, and blogs even remotely like this one. If these laws pass, the RIAA will shut this site down because someone once posted the lyrics to "Freebird" in our comments. There won't even be space left on the net for hyperbole, over-reactions, or blatant misrepresentations of fact like my last sentence, because the technology industry will be too busy closing portals as it retreats from the lawsuits brought against them by the so-called entertainment industry. Seriously, Hollywood and big music are trying to take your internet away. The laws they are trying to pass will chill and censor online creativity and expression, while mostly failing to actually stop piracy. They are pushing for restrictive internet laws in the US that would mirror those that exist in regimes like China and Iran. Today is the day. Please take a few minutes to call or write your law-makers while it's still morning. Thank you.

Right Under My Nose

2011-11-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Last night, my wife and I walked over to Greenwood Optical to pick up our new glasses. We get about 2 doors down, and there's this woman in front of us, standing just outside the doorway of the the Tobacco shop and some place called Kumon. When we first notice her, there's this guy in light blue either standing next to her or stepping towards her. Not sure exactly what the relationship is, if any. If there'd been a bus stop there, they could have just been both waiting for a bus, but since there's no stop there, it feels more like they're hanging out together. Between them is a large canvas or leather bag, a light tan in color, and I don't know which of them it belongs to.

He says something to her, I wasn't paying too much attention at that point, and didn't yet have context to worry. Her response is a pretty loud "no", and he stomps off. She keeps loudly talking, and whatever it was she was saying, I note a male pronoun ("he" or "him", I don't recall which) that sounds like it's said with contempt. The guy stomps off, as I said, and he dips in from the street as though he's going to go in to the same optical shop we're about to enter.

The guy is trouble, I could tell that. He was stomping around all pissed and determined, clearly knew where he was going. He seemed to be up to no good. The woman seemed upset by him, and was now talking about him on her cell phone - or maybe had been talking on her cell phone in the first place? - and I was starting to worry that he was going to do something violent to her. This concern is magnified when he suddenly turns around from the recessed doorway of the optical shop, still moving quickly. He's got his bicycle, which was parked out of the rain right there in the recessed stoop of the business, and he's heading back towards (us and) the woman.

He seems to still be very angry, but also absorbed in his own little world. As though he was completely unaware of my wife and I coming up behind him, and his anger turns to surprise when he swings around the bike and suddenly we're right there in front of him. This mix of surprise, panic, guilt and anger on his face, and I start seriously worrying that he's about to attack the woman. Maybe it's his "van dyke" hipster goatee and short black ponytail, they along with his head-to-toe light blue clothing makes him look a little like a comic book super-villain.

So as my wife heads into the store, I linger an extra couple seconds at the doorway looking intently at the guy. Still in a huff, he heads towards the woman, then hops on his bike. He speeds past the woman, riding perilously close between her and her bag - but doesn't hit her. I wait till he's a good 20 feet past her, and then breathe a sigh of relief that he decided to leave instead of start something. She seems safe now, so I head inside with a sense of pride that our arrival at that moment, and my staring daggers at the guy, may have just prevented violence.

We try on our new glasses to make sure they fit. We're not the only ones in the store, there's several employees and another customer. The other customer is wearing those obnoxious spandex biking clothes, but I think nothing of it because this is Seattle, and every 8th person is wearing body-hugging bicycle clothing. Yep, I think nothing about it until the guy goes to pay for his glasses, and says "I left my wallet on my bike".

Oh, shit! I just saw guilty-looking supervillain ride a bike off the stoop of the shop we're in!

We all rush out the front door (well, except my wife, because one of the employees is at that moment holding both of her sets of glasses). The thief is long gone, but I know which way he went so the bike's actual owner and one of the employees head off down the block looking for him.

The woman is still standing around, having a very animated somewhat emotional conversation on her cellphone. I step over and ask her about the guy she was talking to.
"What?" she says, probably not having heard me well over her cellphone.
"Did a guy just ride by on a bike?"
"What?" again. Hmm.
"When my wife and I walked past you just a couple minutes ago, there was guy with a ponytail talking to you."
"I think he just wanted a cigarette or something, I wasn't really paying attention to him."
"Crap. He just stole somebody's bike."
She reflexively picks up her big tan bag, clearly identifying her as just an unrelated innocent and clueless person, who is suddenly concerned that a thief was closer to her over-sized gym-bag of a purse than she was.

I walk back to the stoop of the optical shop and talk with one of the employees. The woman finishes up her phone call and comes over to ask what happened, and what I was talking about. A couple minutes of fruitless conversation - she seems genuinely clueless about what just happened right in front of her, and not evasive or guilty at all.

My wife and I get our glasses, and wait around for a while, but the police are in no hurry as it's not an emergency. One of the employees and the customer whose bike was stolen drive around the neighborhood for a while trying to spot his bike. The store was closing soon, so we had one of the employees write down our descriptions of what happened and include our phone numbers for the police. Maybe I'll get a call today - but since there's not much chance of catching the guy the cops might not follow up at all.

It's so frustrating to me. I picked up on there being a problem. I was aware, positioned and willing to intervene. I was totally going to be the good Samaritan who actually makes a difference, and not just the asshole self-absorbed bystander who does nothing. It's the same instincts that helped me catch cheaters back when I was a Magic: The Gathering judge - I feel I've got a good nose for when people are up to something. Except I misread the situation, and was watching out for the wrong crime. I thought I'd successfully prevented an assault when I was actually standing there like an idiot glaring at the criminal as he stole a bike from right under my nose.

Guess I really do need new glasses.

AWPC: Can't find her own vulva

2011-10-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

My wife is teleworking today, and a few minutes in to her work day, she got a call from her boss. In general, I try hard not to listen in to her work conversations, but there are certain words and phrases just capture the imagination. Case in point:

No, I can see her vulva, too. I'm looking, and there are five vulvas here. She's just not looking far enough down.
[pause - presumably the person on the phone said something]
I could put all the vulvas together, if that's what she'd like.
[pause]
I could even put hers on top, if that would make it easier for her to find her vulva. Tell her I'm putting her vulva on top of the others.

But what about the dice?

2011-10-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

For Rolfe. I still don't understand how people who limped through high school's basic math classes can suddenly find number crunching an appealing hobby when there are no shiny dice involved.

AWPC

2011-10-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

I believe it has been said that if one is going to defecate than one should defecate. If one is not going to defecate than one should vacate the defecation receptacle.

You mean Shit or get off the pot.

Something like that.

Anarcho-tastic

2011-10-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly four years since I posted about anarchist singer/songwriter, Pat the Bunny. He has been off the junk for over a year and is back with better songwriting than ever and a talented group of musicians to form a new band, Ramshackle Glory.

&amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://ramshackleglory.bandcamp.com/album/live-the-dream"&amp;amp;amp;gt;Live the dream by Ramshackle Glory&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;
Buy their music and spread the word.

Talking with Myself

2011-10-04T22:40:00.000-07:00

I have a dream where I suggest to coworkers that rather than purchasing two security gates we can fill one doorway with cabinets. This means we only have to buy one gate and we get more storage space in our locker room. So I tell people at work about this epiphany and they love it. We did exactly that with great results.

I have a dream where I am telling someone that smoke inhalation scars lung tissue. I accidentally inhale smoke from burning plastic while trying to do a quick tack weld to a splash guard frame. I develop a nasty cough with lots of phlegm as though my lungs have been scarred and are trying to heal.

I have a dream where a coworker tells me he couldn't complete a project and I would have to do it. I go into work and that coworker has left me a note stating he couldn't complete the project and I would have to finish it.

I have a dream where I am learning to play the accordion. So I start shopping around and get myself an accordion. How could I not? While I harbor suspicions that my subconscious is fucking with me on this one, I am giving it an honest effort.

Dreams of R'lyeh

2011-09-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

My wife sometimes talks in her sleep. Usually just a few mumbled words, but sometimes long strings of words that don't go together in any coherent fashion. The only time these statements are ever actual sentences, they're almost always some variation on "you need to wake up", even though she's the one whose asleep. If she seems distressed I will indeed wake her up, and she always says she was having a weird dream, sometimes a nightmare. After a moment we go back to sleep and often have a good laugh about it in the morning. It's been going on for years and it's no big deal.

Last night, she says something or other that wakes me up. I'm not sure what the first statement was, as I was asleep for half of it, and what little I heard sounded like just random words in no particular order. I look over and see she's asleep, with a really serene and peaceful look on her face. I decide I'll just let it go, since she clearly wasn't having a nightmare. About thirty seconds later, still asleep, she speaks a full (but short) sentence. As she intones these words, she continues to look as though the dream that inspired her speech was relaxing and pleasant:

"I am Cthulhu."

I kid you not, that's what she said, with a big sleepy smile on her pale unconscious face. While we did indeed have a good laugh about it this morning, I find that I cannot shake the fear that either she or I might actually be a Lovecraftian protagonist who refuses to draw the obvious but mind-shattering conclusion until it is too late. To nip that fear in the bud, I assure you I'll be checking her very thoroughly for gills, tentacles and mysterious yellow glyphs as soon as she gets home from work.

So if you never hear from me again, assume I've been devoured by my wife.

If you never hear from her again, assume the whole point of us moving to Seattle a few years ago was so that she'd be closer to the Stygian depths of the sea whose sepulchral siren song nightly serenades the secret squamous stirrings of her sinister soul, and that she has gone thither to join the batrachian voices of the mirky deep once her inhuman and indescribable transformation was complete.

E equals Coastline Paradox

2011-09-23T10:51:00.000-07:00

Time to spin up the old FTL drive, put a fresh coat of paint on your time machine, and get your texting fingers ready at the buttons of your subspace ansible or tachyonic antitelephone. There are time-travellers among us, right now. There are already human colonies on other planets, too. Say goodbye to cause-and-effect, because the speed of light is no longer a barrier!

Seems the good folks at CERN, when not too busy blowing up the Earth of countless parallel dimensions*, have found the time to prove Einstein wrong about a little thing called Relativity.

Particles found to break speed of light
Finding could overturn laws of physics

An international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light -- a finding that could overturn one of Einstein's long-accepted fundamental laws of the universe.

Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the researchers, told Reuters that measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.

"We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing," he said. "We now want colleagues to check them independently."

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein's 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a "cosmic constant" and that nothing in the universe can travel faster.

The article simplifies the details a bit, since relativity does make allowances for hypothetical tachyonic particles that can move faster than light, provided they always move faster than light and are impossible to slow down, and might possibly have to be massless (or even have negative mass). Basically, the standard model of physics breaks everything down into three categories: objects with mass which can only travel slower than light, objects without mass which can only travel at the speed of light, and objects that probably don't exist (but which if they did exist would constantly move faster than light and appear to be in multiple places at once). It's all about the mass, really, as the fundamental equations behind relativity just require infinite energy to accellerate anything with mass up to the speed of light. So unless your big booty is made up of exotic matter that repels gravity and zips around the cosmos in two directions at once, you ain't never going anywhere near lightspeed.

But now it turns out the neutrino, a known particle which definitely has mass (though very very little per neutrino) breaks those basic rules, bringing everything else into doubt.

Unless of course it turns out the real problem is something to do with an incredibly tiny error in our maps or the grid of global positioning satellites that tell us how far away CERN is from San Grasso. The article doesn't indicate whether or not they actually shined a beam of light to compare it against. It'd be a real shame if the biggest news in science in our lifetime turned out to be nothing more than instrument malfunction or the coastline paradox. We are, after all, talking about 60 nanoseconds shaved off a 500-mile trip.

But if they're not somehow wrong, then this is the big one. If neutrinos can move faster than light, it's a whole new ballgame.

*: Why I'm no longer afraid the LHC is going to destroy us all when it gets to full power (1.21 Gigawatts, 55MPH) . I mean, aside from the fact that it hasn't yet, which is also pretty good evidence.

I came to terms with the LHC thanks to Schroedinger's Cat. I'm sure we all know the experiment, where the cat is put in the box, along with a lethal mechanism that can only be triggered by radioactive decay, and the result is that the cat is simultaneously alive and dead at the same time, and the waveform doesn't resolve into one state or the other until you open the box and observe it. Provided the cat is wearing a blindfold, because otherwise it might, you know, observe whether or not it died. Which, when you think about it, you can probably observe that you're alive even in a blindfold. In fact, odds are good the cat can only observe that it's alive. If it's not alive, then it's not observing that fact, which means there's no one to observe the quantum waveform so it's not dead in the first place. (Though I am thinking vampire kittens in an undead quantum superposition that die if they look at themselves would actually be a great plot device for a really stupid B-movie somebody ought to make.)

After going around in circles for a while, the mind puzzles of the cat in a box settled down into the notion of Quantum Immortality. The idea that you will live forever, but only in your own universe, which is but one out of an infinite number of parallel universes (the Many Worlds Interpretation). Everyone else resides in universes where you do eventually die (but they don't). We are all The Highlander, we just don't figure it out till we hit 150 or so and start setting what are longevity records in our own little universe. So take care of that body, because you're gonna be in it for a very long time. (Not to mention, you'll need it to be in good shape when The Kurgen shows up to challenge your geriatric self to a duel.)

Which brings me back to the LHC. Pretty much all the doomsday scenarios involving the LHC were in fact doomsday scenarios, not just inconvenience scenarios. Everybody buys it, as the earth turns into a quivering lump of steaming strange matter, breaks apart into a cloud of debris, or collapses into a black hole under the mass of the infinite matter from the future falling through the LHC's gaping time portal. In each of these scenarios, we all die. Which means there'd be nobody left to observe that we died, so therefore we're back to the position where we're not dead, or simultaneously dead and alive at the same time (a state you can avoid by simply unplugging your TV set). That in turn means that the LHC can't go wrong, because the negative consequences would kill us all, and my consciousness by definition only exists in a universe where I am alive. That the LHC was largely an all-or-nothing apocalypse ensured it could only end happily.

I should be a lot more afraid of experiments (unlike the LHC) that only have the potential to ravage half the earth, or could release a plague that could kill everyone but me.... heck, maybe it's not that we're all The Highlander, maybe we're all I Am Legend. That would really suck. So, barring the slim possibility of the Earth being overrun by blindfolded vampire kittens and I am the only human left to open the canned food for them (a scenario I dread, but refuse to take seriously), I long ago overcame my fears of the LHC.

Updating Old Socialist Propaganda to Make Appeal to Today's Youth

2011-09-21T07:18:00.001-07:00

Battleship Potemkin of Dune and the Planet of the Apes. Next summer's blockbuster in eye-popping, jaw-dropping 3D!

You Can Always Count on Negativity

2011-08-29T22:46:00.000-07:00

Your Horoscopes - Week Of August 23, 2011 | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

Libra

Your pessimism and negativity are usually misplaced, but they'll be perfectly appropriate when your elevator plunges into the flames Thursday.

What a hoax! I bet it only falls a couple of floors before the emergency devices kick in. These things are always wrong.

Not Tom Jones!

2011-08-28T18:57:00.000-07:00

BBC News - Sir Tom Jones in Monaco hospital after health scare.

If we lose Tom Jones it will be the single biggest hit to men getting laid since the '98 Sinatra incident.

Own Up: An AWPC

2011-08-23T21:24:00.000-07:00

If you fuck up, own it. Passing the buck makes you look like an idiot. And then we sit in the shop having conversations about it rather than jumping in and trying to fix what you broke.

Jake: We all make mistakes. Some are quite prone to it. The rest of us mess up despite ourselves.

At least I got an old man to laugh. If you think making someone smile is priceless, then the fuck up today shouldn't trouble our investors.

Religious Upbringing

2011-08-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

With my parents in town for Krys's graduation (which was extremely fantastic for them to coordinate for) I had a conversation on the back porch with my dad. He was concerned about my sister becoming ultra-religious and rearing two children.

I told him, "Don't worry. I turned out fine."

To which he replied, "We weren't that bad."

So I recalled my childhood experiences as I saw them. We went to church two or three times a week, at least Wednesday and Sunday. My summers were spent with my grandparents who were custodians for a church, so I was there. Every summer included Vacation Bible School for a few weeks. They spent a few years as leaders of the church youth group so I always got dragged along. They held Bible studies at home. Sunday evenings we played Christian board games or Christian card games. They bought me Christian children's book with read-along tapes. We always said grace before dinner and on the weekends we said grace at lunch as well. They would have me say my prayers before bed.

"Dad, when I tell people how I was brought up, they think I lived with the Flanders!"

I have to admit it felt nice to finally get it out in the open. I think they forgot just how religious they were while raising me. It affected me.

Yet I can still say compared to most people I know, I had an idyllic childhood. Socially fucked, but quite stable and nice. They tempered all of that religious zealotry with just as much emphasis on the pursuit of knowledge. That and good old fashioned eat-what-you-kill pragmatism.

Except cats.

Kennedy Tapes

2011-08-10T07:46:00.000-07:00

Some long-secret recordings have surfaced in the past 48 hours, interview tapes made by Jackie Kennedy (and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr) a few months after her husband's assassination. In them, she (allegedly) accused LBJ and a group of Texas businessmen of ordering the hit on JFK.

The tapes (supposedly) also include her talking about some affairs she had to get back at JFK for his affairs. So, naturally, the story is being picked up by various right-wing outlets that want to tarnish the image/memory of JFK to solidify their own political goals. At the same time, it notably isn't getting coverage in left-leaning media sources that don't want to point out Democrats would necessarily have been involved in such a conspiracy. Lots of muck-raking on one side, and an unfortunate silence from the other. The top four links spit up by a search engine were all pretty disgustingly slanted.

Not that it'd be any better if it were slanted the other way. It's just the conspiracy theorist inside me is very saddened that every article names one or more of her lovers, but none of them name any of the rich Texan businessmen that allegedly pulled the trigger. Get your priorities straight, people!

The best link I've found is the Daily Mail over in the UK: The article is still pretty trashy, but it's a lot better than anything else I've found on the net.

In a sad but predictable turn of events, ABC (currently in possession of the tapes) has this to say about them:

"The tabloid reports about the content of the tapes are totally erroneous. ABC News isn't releasing any content from those tapes until mid-September at which point it will be clear how off base these reports are. The actual content of the tapes provide unique and important insight into our recent past from one of the most fascinating and influential First Ladies in American history."

I stomached right-wing propaganda sites for that? Man, do I feel foolish/abused...

Not an AWPC

2011-08-02T20:35:00.000-07:00

It would be awesome to have actual political discourse with coworkers. All I get is talking head rehash.

Hell, I'd feel better about Talking Heads rehash.

2011-07-11T09:37:00.001-07:00

Her: So what kind of timeline are we looking at?

Me: Look at it this way, wouldn't this make a great Christmas present?

AWPC: Priorities

2011-07-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

It was determined that we need to work this weekend to get a machine rebuilt and back to operational status.

Him: Since I know I have to come in tomorrow I am definitely having a few beers tonight.

Jake: Not me. It's black tar heroin or nothing! I'm going to go home and shoot up and fly high. If you're going to do it, do it right!

2011-07-02T13:46:00.001-07:00

I've been shaved by drunken Jesus!

2011-07-01T21:51:00.000-07:00

First firework of the season just went off.

2011-06-25T11:46:00.001-07:00

Mobile blogging test post. Please panic. Thank you.

AWPC: Food

2011-06-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

I took a loaf of banana bread with chocolate chips into work.

Them: Did you make it?

Me: No. My wife did.

Them: That's okay then.

What the fuck? I had this exact same dialogue with three different people. I'm a great baker. Don't know what the hell their problem is.

AWPC: Religion

2011-06-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

We had a barbecue at work today to celebrate getting record levels of product out the door. So what happens?

Him: Hey. Jake went for the hot dog.

Me: Of course. It's Friday.

Him: What does that have to do with it?

Me: According to the Pentabarf a person in the early days of their illumination is to go off on a Friday and joyously partake of a hot dog to remonstrate against the popular paganisms of the day.

Him: Wow. How do you remember all that?

Pukey: When it comes to religion, Jake doesn't fuck around.

The Lawsuit Locker

2011-06-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

Copyright is a complicated issue, and I often find myself conflicted about it.

On the one hand, as a former movie theatre manager, I totally get the conservative argument that films cost a lot of money to produce, and that piracy threatens to reduce the incentive for studios and theaters. Since I like to watch movies (and listen to music, and play games, and read books, and etc), I spend money on them.

On the other hand, as a fan of sci-fi, I dream of a utopian golden era where civilization is enriched by the free sharing of ideas. And I look at the technology we have, and realize that optimistic dream could be true today if not for stodgy rich people desperately clutching at all the money they can grab.

In general, this results in me supporting independent productions and alternative distribution channels as much as I can. Put the money in the hands of the artists, and not in the hands of some corporate suit. I buy direct from the artists, jump on the Humble Indy Bundle bandwagon, etc.

When I read articles like this one at CNN, I find whatever little sympathy I might have had for the rich bastards and their incentive system just boils away:

Voltage Pictures, the studio behind 2009's The Hurt Locker, is suing almost 25,000 BitTorrent users who allegedly illegally downloaded the flick. That came just weeks after 23,000 were sued for downloading The Expendables, produced by Nu Image.
...
"The lawyers are just doing their jobs," he said. "Somebody stole our property and we are trying to get it back." The representative declined further comment.

That statement from a Voltage representative is just a little bit misleading, methinks. What exactly is the stolen property that they are trying to get back? It's certainly not the physical copies of the films in question. No one is deprived of watching, enjoying, or collecting these films legally because they've been "stolen" by someone else. There's no empty vault or warehouse at Voltage, no one who came home to find that his shelves were ransacked by a burglar (at least not in this court case). What's been "stolen"? What does this executive at Voltage think he owns, that has been wrongly taken from him?

Sadly, what he thinks he owns is the money in other people's wallets. Money he himself has never held, but which he has convinced himself somehow belongs to him. You not buying from him = you stealing from him (in his mind). He's somehow certain that you would have spent that money with his company, and since he believes that to be true, he's decided to take you to court over it. That seems pretty fucking presumptive to me.

He's assuming that instead of passing on his movie, if you couldn't download it for free you automatically would have bought it. That instead of buying it at the thrift store, or borrowing it from a friend, or paying 99 cents to rent it somewhere, you would have, in his mind, spent $25 for the Blue-Ray version at some store. The store takes a cut, the supply network takes a cut, and maybe if he's really lucky, his company pockets $12 on the sale. Of course realistically those 25,000 "thieves" would have included at least 15,000 (and probably a lot more) who passed, borrowed, rented, bought it on deep discount, etc, so at the very most one could maybe argue that each of those downloaders "owes" him $5. And honestly, that figure seems wildly generous and optimistic to me.

So how much is his company asking for? Tens of thousands of dollars per person. Talk about punitive damages! But he'll settle for a quick two grand if you want to roll over out of court. What a dick. It seems to me that this is not about protecting their property, or their rights, it's about making a quick buck.

As TorrentFreak, the first blog to report on the Locker case, points out: If only 10,000 of the alleged infringers pay a $2,000 settlement, it would net $20 million for Voltage and USCG. In comparison, The Hurt Locker grossed $17 million at the U.S. box office.

Brevity

2011-06-07T18:17:00.001-07:00

Some college students left beer in my fridge.

Darth Vader's Birth Certificate

2011-05-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

I just discovered a really funny, and kinda disturbing, website, done up to look like a news site. It's a little like The Onion, except narrower, geekier, and perhaps a little creepier. Good art. Very professional, and well worth reading for myriad laughs.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says

CORUSCANT — Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

In a late-night appearance in the East Room of the Imperial Palace, Lord Vader declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that agents of the Imperial Army and stormtroopers of the 501st Legion had finally cornered Kenobi, one of the leaders of the Jedi rebellion, who had eluded the Empire for nearly two decades. Imperial officials said Kenobi resisted and was cut down by Lord Vader's own lightsaber. He was later dumped out of an airlock.
...
Lord Vader has denied requests to present photographs of the body, describing them as "too gruesome" for the general public.

As you can see, it puts an interesting reflection on the recent death of Bin Laden. It's a little eerie just how easy it is to picture the Empire spinning Kenobi's death till it looks just like the recent news in our own world. And the site goes on from there making further parallels, going so far as to host several pages of fake/in-character comments from the public about Imperial politics, Vader's birth certificate, the lack of body, the various Star Wars tragedies being an inside job, etc. Really funny.

US Police Increasingly Peeping at E-mail, Instant Messages

2011-05-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a section of a disturbing little article I just read...

US Police Increasingly Peeping at E-mail, Instant Messages
Soghoian found through his research that law enforcement agencies requested more than 30,000 wiretaps between 1987 and 2009. But the scale of requests for stored communications appears to be much greater. Citing a New York Times story from 2006, Soghoian wrote that AOL was receiving 1,000 requests per month.
In 2009, Facebook told the news magazine Newsweek that it received 10 to 20 requests from police per day. Sprint received so many requests from law enforcement for mobile-phone location information that it overwhelmed its 110-person electronic surveillance team. It then set up a Web interface to give police direct access to users' location data, which was used more than 8 million times in one year [emphasis mine], Soghoian wrote, citing a U.S. Court of Appeals judge.
Those sample figures indicate the real total number of requests is likely much, much higher, since U.S. law does not require reporting and companies are reluctant to voluntarily release the data.
"The reason for this widespread secrecy appears to be a fear that such information may scare users and give them reason to fear that their private information is not safe," Soghoian wrote.

Newsflash for you: Your private information is not safe. It's not really even private anymore.

Oddio

2011-05-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

When the mic went on my old headset, I upgraded to a USB mic and some nice mid-grade Sony headphones. The headphones really don't do anything to improve the quality of sound on internet porn. I'm sure upgrading to a hi-def monitor would also prove futile.

AWPC (kinda): I really like your bush. It makes me smile every day.

2011-05-10T07:36:00.000-07:00

I don't have a workplace, so I can't really make Actual Work Place Conversation posts like Jake does. The closest thing I have to a workplace, they don't talk about anything but LEGO.

A few times I've considered just randomly accosting people on the streets within inane questions, or posing as a time-traveler in public, in hopes of being able to come up with something worth posting here.

The other day, though, I did manage to overhear a very bizarre snippet of conversation while about town, and I didn't even have to accost anyone to provoke it. Just surreal enough to mention here. I heard several sentences before and after it, but I assure you they gave no clues to any context or logic that would explain this.

Stranger #1: "I really like your bush. It makes me smile every day."

Stranger #2: "Well, you can't please everyone."

From the dialog, I can only assume one of them was Moses, the other was either God or a hooker.

Netflix Jumps The Shark

2011-05-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

So I'm at the Thrift Store the other day, and they have the second season of Alias on DVD. It's at a good price, but not a great price. Off the top of my head, I couldn't recall if I liked the second season. I remember the first season was brilliant, and the third season was painfully bad. But I couldn't remember when it started getting stupid. Rather than risk throwing money away on something I might regret buying, I decide to check my netflix ratings for the second season when I get home, and should it prove to be a worthy season, I'll swing back and pick it up.

Get home, log in to netflix, and attempt to look it up. I expected to see the five seasons rated individually. Instead, to my surprise and horror, they've consolidated all five seasons into one entry. They applied my rating from the first season to all that followed. I'm 100% certain I gave Season 3 a single miserable star, but now it's merged with Seasons 1, 2, 4 and 5, and the whole lot are rated with five stars. A quick glance about the site shows me that they've done similar mergings for nearly all TV series.

Honestly, I've been hoping that someday Netflix would allow further differentiation of ratings within a series, and instead they've reduced it. I've repeatedly wished over the years that they'd allow me to rate per disc or per episode of a show, and not have to generalize about entire seasons at once. Then when a new disk shows up, you could skip the episodes that all of fandom gave a one star rating. Just imagine how cool it would be to look at a list of all theTrek episodes, and be able to separate the dozen groundbreaking and mindbending sci-fi classics from the crappy Romulan Yahr invasion plotlines and the hundreds of mindless holodeck episodes just by how many stars the public gave each individual episode. That would be sweet... and so very very useful.

Instead, they've pushed the other way, making us give a single rating to an entire series. Given that the "jump the shark" phenomenon is so pervasive in series programming that there's even a catchy turn of phrase to describe it, it seems ridiculous that netflix would pretend it doesn't happen. Of all the series I've ever watched from beginning to end, only a precious handful didn't suffer from some sort of dip in quality after a certain point.

How could this simple truth escape Netflix, a company whose entire focus is on not just renting films but on compiling your ratings of them and using those ratings to suggest what other films you'll like. And they take the same amount of money from you regardless of how many films you watch in a month, so there's no conflicting financial incentive for them to make you watch crap. Giving you good recommendations and good customer service is in their obvious best interests. Failing to warn you that your new favorite show turns to crap after the star leaves in season four does them no good. What are they thinking?

Now I have to redo all my TV series ratings. Shall I rate Alias based on the taut and byzantine first season, the painfully predictable third season, or the regurgitated fifth? How do I reflect that The IT Crowd starts dry and slow for its first 5 or 6 episodes, but is worth muddling through for the incapacitatingly funny second season? Is there a way to note that LOST season 5 ends with one of the crowning moments of awesome in TV history, but season 6 ends with a let-down? How do you draw the hard lines where Ritchie Cunningham joins the army, the Great Gazoo lands in Bedrock, or when Sherman T. Potter replaces Henry Blake? More importantly, how can I trust a Netflix rating on a TV show ever again? Every series is now a potential mine field.

I'm a little annoyed at this, so I decided to send them a complaint email. Maybe it wasn't too late to reverse this change. I knew it would be hard to rally the Netflix fan base this time, because there's no longer any sort of netflix community. They eliminated all the social networking tools from the site a few years back, so you can't readily contact other netflix customers. I have no delusions about being a great leader or organizer, so I figured if I could at least send an email complaint to netflix itself, I'd be doing my part.

Complain once, and move on. Such complaints could actually work if enough people took part, because such complaints worked last time.

That was a couple years back, when they almost eliminated the "profiles" feature. The profiles function is what allows you to maintain multiple queues on one account, useful if the various members of your household have different tastes. They tried then to merge all the profiles into the main accounts, but backed off from it when the customer base rose up in complaint against the notion. Nobody wanted to have to re-rate hundreds of films, or have their account suddenly start recommending for the whole household a muddied mix of slasher films and Dora the Explorer.

So, I'd just drop a quick email and...

You ever try to email Netflix? It's impossible. Not just a little tricky, but completely impossible. It's amazing that a so thoroughly online company can have completely forsaken email and text-based communication. As it turns out, ever since shortly after the whole "profiles" rebellion, they've eliminated all incoming public email addresses. They replaced them with a 24-hour phone center. Which would be okay, I guess, if I didn't have spasmodic dysphonia and a pay-by-the-minute cellphone plan. So I searched a little online, because I figured they probably at least needed an email address for deaf people to contact them. As it turns out, no, the deaf community is up in arms about Netflix eliminating email, not training call center staff on how to take relay calls, and even not putting captions on most streaming content (including most films that have captions on the DVD).

What was I just saying about "good customer service" being "in their obvious best interests"? Netflix clearly doesn't agree.

As much as I despise assassinations...

2011-05-02T07:16:00.000-07:00

It feels really weird to be happy about the death of a human being, even one so obviously evil. I must admit I feel a little safer, knowing that Osama bin Laden is no longer out there, even though logically the odds of being harmed by terrorism are extremely slim. There's a relief one feels, that is disproportionate to actual degree of change in the world this one violent act brings. That sense of catharsis must no doubt be far more pronounced in those that were closer to the tragedies of 9/11, and those more patriotic (or fearful) than myself.

Morally and intellectually, I despise and repudiate our nation's policy of assassination. It undermines the ideals by which a right and just nation should operate, and specifically stands in bitter contrast against against the principles of the Constitution of our nation in particular. I believe in due process, the right to a fair trial, the right to face one's accusers, and I am even opposed to the death penalty.

The case in favor of the death of Bin Laden is about as strong as such a case can be made, in the absence of a proper trial. He publicly took credit for the September 11th attacks, which is probably the only evidence that matters. He has been "public enemy no. 1" for a decade, the living justification for unjust wars. His continued survival over the years has no doubt emboldened those who seek to inflict harm and terror upon the world (regardless of which organizations or nations they belong to). Any trial that might have come from his capture was unlikely to bring any heightened level of justice, but would only serve as spectacle or even provocation for further extremism. As much as a man can be said to deserve to die, he did. As much as justice can be done in such a case, it has been.

I remain steadfast in my opposition to assassination, violence, war, murder, terrorism, totalitarianism, and tyranny; At the same time I take comfort and security in knowing that Bin Laden was captured, killed, and buried at sea in rapid succession. I am hopeful that this dark accomplishment might help restore sanity to a nation (and a world) that has been far too eager to sacrifice it's principles and freedom in the often unbalanced pursuit of safety. It's time to move on.

Lucifer Furnaces

2011-04-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

In a company history lesson I learned that Lucifer Furnaces was the first heat treat furnace the company had. I really want to steal the plaque off the front door. I think Lucifer would approve.

TÝR - Hold The Heathen Hammer High

2011-04-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

Not big in to heavy metal, nor neo-paganism, nor shirtless men, but this made me giddy nonetheless.

What to do in the year 2042?

2011-04-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine sent me a link to an amusing timeline of the future (at XKCD). It's a window into what the future is "supposed" to be like, as predicted by Google searches starting with "in the year".

So, it's really clear to me what I'm gonna be doing in the years 2050, and 2069. Really no doubt in either of those years. The less said the better.

But what to do in the year 2042?

2042 has no news! It looks likely to be the only boring year before the 2070s, and if I live to the 2070s, I'll be so damn happy to have made it that far I won't mind boredom. 2042, on the other hand, is something many of us can expect to live to see. If you don't want 2042 to be a let down, you should start thinking ahead now.

So, perhaps as a group, we should brainstorm. What would you like to be doing in the year 2042?

I figure by that time I'll be in recovery at the LEGO addicts halfway house. Most of my money will go to repurchasing my entire music and movie collections in 7th and 5th formats I've felt compelled to buy into. I imagine I'll do something stupid and Hitchhikers themed, just because it is '42. When that gets boring, I may just get around to building the Time Machine I've always wanted, or I may just wimp out yet again and leave the machine project to yet another future self. But beyond that, I don't have any real plans for 2042. My calendar is largely open.

Please Repeat the Expletive

2011-04-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Censorship ruined this news story. Instead of taking a moment to educate the unenlightened, they just block out some letters.

‘Jou ma se’ is on everyone’s lips - South Africa News

The advocate who swore at a judge in court could literally eat his words if he wanted to – by placing an order for a “jou ma se burger” at a city restaurant.

Advocate Nehemiah Ballem is still under investigation by the Cape Bar Council after he told Judge Lee Bozalek: “Jou ma se p***, f*** you.”

What the fuck is that? I've got a pretty good idea what 'f*** you' means. I also feel fairly certain that the individual under investigation didn't pronounce it that way. You are a news organization. Quote the fucker properly!

But what are we to do with 'Jou ma se p***'? Since I don't know Afrikaans I can't even make a guess at the dirty word.

Urban Dictionary to the rescue. The online resource is unedited, has no peer review process, doesn't require any form of citations, has hordes of vastly inaccurate information, and just happens to be the best resource at hand for the given task.

Jou ma se POES, for those who care. Your mother's cunt. A fine foreign profanity, I must say. I still can't use it in casual conversation since I don't know the pronunciation. Just another failure of Urban Dictionary. Not nearly as big as the failure of the Cape Argus to properly quote someone.

Tilting at windmills

2011-04-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

Sadly accurate comic via Union of Concerned Scientists.

PCAE threatened (again)

2011-04-07T16:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some details,

For anyone wanting to look at H.R. 1078 here’s the link.
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bin/bldbill.php?bill=H1078.0.html&session=ls87

And the guy who authored it.
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/members.asp?leg_id=12262

News:
http://goldenvalley.patch.com/articles/golden-valleys-perpich-center-to-become-charter-school

Summary: To take effect July 2011. PCAE made into charter school, cutting off residential program... not sure about PDR yet...

My response...

Anger.
Throws something.
This hasn't been voted on yet, there is time to change this.
Gee, I wonder if this is like a red herring or somesuch. Perhaps, someone forgot to go shopping before the potlock and said, "ooh here, we'll throw PCAE on the barby so it looks like I contributed to the meaningful debate that needs to take place over the MN budget."
Insert meaningful repeated expletives here.
I will post more when I know more.

Map of Tasmania

2011-04-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

Not that I thought this was brilliant... but sometimes you've got to spread this kind of thing around. Given the content, this is the proper forum for said spreading.

Amanda Palmer & The Young Punx - "Map of Tasmania" Music Video from Amanda Palmer on Vimeo.

Movin' On Up

2011-04-05T00:45:00.000-07:00

Got word today that I finally got the promotion I've been gunning for. In two weeks time I will officially be a Craftsman level 2 Maintenance Machinist. This is a major step up and makes me giddy.

All Those Turkeys!

2011-03-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

Right around the 4 minute mark this guy sounds eerily like a certain "Science Nerd" from a certain art school video project.

Beatlemania

2011-03-16T16:56:00.000-07:00

Recent Beatles-related thoughts, several of which came "this close" to being posts on their own, but none of them ever quite came together...

Cirque du Soliel's Beatles Love was the highlight of last month's Vegas trip. Lavish costuming and performance, incredible sound-scape. It kicked Blue Man and Zumanity's asses. The show also caused me to become aware of a number of details in the music, and lives, of the fab four that I'd overlooked before. We had expensive seats right down in the middle of the theatre-in-the-round, but they were worth every penny.

I've been on a real Beatles kick ever since the Vegas trip. Actually, it goes back further than that. Last year we took a vacation to visit friends in Chicago, and spent a couple nights playing Rock Band and Beatles Rock Band. Somewhere in the midst of focusing intently on the bass riff in Hey Bulldog, a switch flipped in my head, and I've had Beatles on the Brain ever since. The Love show just cemented this path. Lately I decided to round out my collection, picking up the very uneven Anthology albums and a few early albums that I was previously lacking. Even scored a copy of Let It Be (the movie) at ComicCon.

Speaking of Love... the album developed for the Cirque show continues to amaze me. It's an album of remixes, medleys, and mash-ups of the Beatles, by the Beatles. Made from original Beatles recordings, and then remixed by their former producer George Martin. A few of the tracks are arguably "un-necessary", but on the whole the album is mind-blowing. My favorite 3 minutes out of the 90 starts with the opening chord of Hard Day's Night over the drum solo from The End which then folds into the guitars and lyrics of Get Back backed up by the orchestral swells from A Day In The Life. That rolls seamlessly into the main lyrics of Glass Onion supported by individual sounds and instrumentation plucked from Hello Goodbye, Strawberry Fields, Eleanor Rigby, Things We Said Today and Penny Lane. *shudder* Love is beautiful, breath-taking madness, and the best tracks are when it embraces that madness fully.

If mash-ups like that are your cup of tea, it may be worth a few minutes to download the "Everday Chemistry" album at www.thebeatlesneverbrokeup.com. Every song is a blend of tunes from the fab formerly four's solo careers, mixed together into something new. As if an album fell through from a parallel world where they didn't break up, and bounced ideas off each other for an extra decade or so. Not near as polished (or jaw-dropping) as Love (in fact, I'd start with the second track), but it's pretty catchy for a free download. As a quick trip through the mis-matched drivel on YouTube can show you, a really good mash-up takes a lot of finesse. You can't just grab two songs at random and play them simultaneously in hopes they'll meet in the middle.

Meeting in the middle. It's kinda fun how things like this bounce around in your brain and all the world zeroes in. Seems like everywhere I go lately, there's Beatles music playing. I'm in this little Lennon-McCartney microcosm.

Yesterday there were half a dozen high school kids on the bus talking about how much they love the Beatles, how they are so much better than all the crappy pop music of today. Synchronicity aside, it gave me some fleeting hope that maybe the younger generation isn't doomed. Once the thought passed through my head though, I felt really old.

About a week ago, I actually got into a Beatles vs Elvis argument. I didn't realize such arguments actually still happen. Or ever did. I thought they were just a myth, a thing that didn't ring true enough to make the final cut of Pulp Fiction. I mean, to me the answer is obvious, but as Jake is fond of saying "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves"... whatever the heck that means. Arguing Beatles vs Elvis made me feel old, but not as old as the guy I was arguing with. :)

Double Standards

2011-03-09T17:38:00.000-08:00

It amazes me that the same conservatives who are so against WikiLeaks can simultaneously be in favor of right-wing undercover operations such as posing as a charity to lure folks at NPR into saying something stupid in front of a hidden camera.

I mean, logic would dictate that if you're against whistle-blowing because it's somehow dangerous or wrong, you'd also be against going undercover in search of whistles to blow. I mean, unless you were a big fucking hypocrite that just didn't want your own group's secrets exposed, and couldn't give a damn about anyone else.

Oh well, the information is out there, and the public has a right to know about it, says non-hypocrite I.

Just the same, I think it's a shame that folks at NPR are losing their jobs (and NPR might lose its gov't funding) just because someone spoke (amongst what they thought to be like-minded individuals) two facts we all know to be true:

the teabaggers are freakin' crazy, and
most Americans are uneducated idiots.

Three or so Deadly Sins

2011-03-09T00:57:00.000-08:00

Seven Deadly Sins

2011-03-02T01:22:00.000-08:00

What an appropriate topic for my first exhibition in way too long.

I have three paintings in the show.

The Abominable Sin Man

2011-02-20T13:36:00.000-08:00

Man Tattoos Leviticus 18:22 That Forbids Homosexuality On His Arm, But Leviticus 19:28 Forbids Tattoos

A lot of people live in complete denial of the fact that two guys doing it doggy style is not an abomination. Nor is it an abomination for one to stand and the other to kneel and give a blow job or a rim job. Nor for them to do it in a pool or shower. Nor countless other positions. Just as long as they don't lie down.

Read that way it sounds more like a condemnation of casual man on man relations. Have all the homosexual sex you want, just don't share a bed.

Sounds like Jehovah is a closet case. He'd make a great Republican Senator. Perhaps He could hang out in airport bathrooms tapping His feet and meet other closet cases. Perhaps He'd meet someone so in denial that they'd get a tattoo as a reminder that thousands of years ago a sheep shagger talked to a total flamer who helped him develop a social engineering guide.

Fucking groupie.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's okay to lie to women, but never lie to guys. Perhaps G to the O to the D originated "Bros before Ho's".

Or maybe, just maybe, it's an antiquated text written thousands of years ago by Middle Eastern nomads and has little to no meaning in the present apart from being an anthropological curiosity.

Maybe.

Picasso x2

2011-02-14T10:04:00.000-08:00

In the past two months I've been lucky enough to see a huge number of paintings by Pablo Picasso in person, at two different exhibits. Learned a lot about the artist, his art, his lovers, and myself in the process.

The first, at the Seattle Art Museum in January, was a very extensive Picasso retrospective, covering all the many styles and eras of his work, his many affairs, etc. It was really informative, and seeing his work in a chronological and stylistic context like that really illuminated the artistic process. Truly one of the great geniuses of the 20th Century.

Cool Quote: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”

Favorite Painting: ~~Cybermen vs Goya~~ Massacre in Korea wikipedia link

The second exhibit, which I saw Friday, was much smaller and more intimate, and only a couple pieces were Picassos, but there were also several Picasso-influenced works by Roy Lichtenstein, etc. This was an exhibit at the Bellagio hotel & casino in Las Vegas. With a mixture of pride and embarrassment I must confirm what you've no doubt already suspected about me: I am the sort of nerd who goes to the city of sluts and slots, but spends his time there ogling cubism. Maybe I should see a doctor about that.

The Internet Has Run Out Of Space

2011-02-03T13:02:00.000-08:00

From CNN:

The internet has (kind of) run out of space
(CNN) -- On Thursday, the internet as we know it ran out of space.

The article goes on to say that starting tomorrow, whenever you post anything online, an equal number of words will be deleted from a random website you've never visited. Problem solved.

To Insure POOR Service

2011-01-31T11:28:00.000-08:00

To start with, don't make a reservation for your group of 9, and don't check the restaurant in advance to see if they even have a table large enough for 9 gamer-sized individuals.
Trickle in by singles and twos across a 20+ minute window.
Don't tell the wait staff how large your group is, and make sure you neglect to mention to them when the last of your party has finally arrived.
While half the party still hasn't arrived, have one person walk over to the take-out counter and order there, instead of at the table. Don't mention to the rest of the group that you've done so. This way the wait-staff thinks you'll all eventually do the same, and your group of friends won't realize there's any confusion or reason for the delay.
When you get handed a menu, loudly make jokes about the part where it says the restaurant practices Halal (Islamic Dietary Law), and especially mock where it says "all the meats on our pizzas are slaughtered by hand by Muslims, unlike our inferior competitors who use cheap prepackaged ingredients."
Repeat such jokes frequently, especially any time the waiter is standing right behind you.
Sit silently and spinelessly when you know you should instead be telling your friend to shut up.

Bloody Irritating Assholes

2011-01-26T11:23:00.000-08:00

Jehovah's Witnesses stopped by today. I had asked them nicely last time.

JW: Hi, we were in the neighborhood talking to people about the Bible today...

Jake: It's fiction.

JW: Well, I can respect that...

Jake: Have you two read the Bible? I mean actually read it cover to cover.

JW: Well, I'd say we've studied it quite a bit.

Jake: I grew up in a Christian community surrounded by people who said they'd read it cover to cover. So I read it. And that's why I say it's fiction. Let me ask you something. If you've got mildew in your house, what do you do?

JW: You... would... clean it I guess.

Jake: It's in your Bible.

JW: I can't say...

Jake: Leviticus

JW's look at each other and shrug

Jake: You call the priest. He examines the spot and everybody has to leave the house for a week. If it's still there, you tear out the mildew section and rebuild it with clean materials. If after that you've still got mildew, you destroy the house. THAT'S the Word of God. And that is all I have for you today.

I shut the door.

Godwin's Law and Fox

2011-01-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

Not that any of our readers are likely to be the types to take Fox News at their word... but I still found this dismantling of Fox hipocrisy and BS (by Jon Stewart) to be particularly amusing.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

24 Hour Nazi Party People

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>

The Daily Show on Facebook

There's plenty of other politically-themed things I've been tempted to blog about lately, but they'd all come across as bitter and cynical and paranoid bordering on alarmist, seeing as how I've largely transformed into a bitter paranoid cynic in my ~~old~~ ~~middle~~ not-quite-middle age.

Fuck a Duck

2011-01-11T00:57:00.000-08:00

Dear God,

I know we don't talk much, what with you being a total asshole (judging by the company you keep) and me not believing in you. Despite all that I wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for ignoring the prayers of all those fair weather Oregonian sports fans and handing the victory to whatever squad they were up against in whatever athletic event they were competing in. Now not only do I not have to listen to play-by-play reminiscing all night at work tomorrow, I can use this as further evidence that you don't exist.

Sincerely,
Happy Dude

PS: This in no way means you are off the hook for that tropical paradise you stole from a former incarnation of myself. That was a total dick move and you know it!

Surgical Procedure

2011-01-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

The surgical removal of a cephalopod from your anus is professionally known as a "Procto-octopectomy". Just thought our readership would find that useful. Go on about your business. We don't judge - we merely educate.

F*ck this post

2011-01-06T13:35:00.000-08:00

If people find it less offensive when I type f*ck, why does nobody care if I type duck? Shouldn't they find it at least 75% offensive?

Or does it make more sense to compare it to scr*w?

Maybe f*rn*c*t**n?

Organ Donor

2010-12-22T12:36:00.001-08:00

In response to Swede Tranny's feed from a couple of days ago, this is why!

Goodbye Cruel Internets

2010-12-21T14:45:00.000-08:00

The FCC's new "net neutrality" rules are pretty much giving corporations the right to piss away, chop up, compartmentalize, and overcharge for the internet we all know and love.

FCC approves controversial ‘Net Neutrality’ regulations
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/fcc-controversial-net-neutrality-rules/
...
Supporters of "Net Neutrality" have been disappointed by the proposed rules, saying they heavily favor the industry they are supposed to regulate.

I'd be all angry about it, except pretty much every company I do business with on the net has engaged in the big corporatist war against wikileaks. Amazon, Comcast and Paypal I expected to do the devil's dirty work, but Apple? Man, that sucks. I don't want to have to return my Mac and iPod in protest.

Apple attacks WikiLeaks, yanks iPhone app from app store
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/apple-attacks-wikileaks-yanks-iphone-app-app-store/

Only a few days after its release, the unofficial WikiLeaks iPhone application has been removed from Apple's App Store.

At this rate, I'll have personally boycotted every business and site on the net long before my ISP can take advantage of the new net non-neutrality rules to hose my internet access.

Prison Comparisons

2010-12-08T15:20:00.000-08:00

Because, lately, movies and TV seem more plausible than the events of the real world...

Prisons in Sweden, according to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo trilogy: You're kept in a small room, but otherwise it's a cake walk. You get reading material, and can access your laptop. You get to wear whatever you like, even if that involves about 18 different piercings and your hair up in a 'hawk. You don't have a cell-mate.

Prisons in London, according to The Tutors: What's that moving under the pile of straw I've got for a bed? Big freakin' rats. This place will drive you insane.

Prisons in the US, according to... just about every prison-based movie or TV show ever made: The guards and crooked sheriff or warden beat you up, and the prisoners rape you. You're sprayed down with a hose, and they routinely search you for anything contraband, except for cigarettes. Your nazi cellmate tattoos a swastika on your ass. Then one day you get shivved, and die.

Given the alternatives, I can only assume that Julian Assange really doesn't like Pickled Herring.

Obama Caves Again

2010-12-07T18:39:00.000-08:00

EDIT: Man, when I get fired up, the hyperbole just gushes forth. If it's not obvious, nothing here is quite as bad as I made it sound. Quite. But I'm still voting for Jake in 2012.

Start digging the bomb shelters again, 'cause Obama just handed the '12 White House to the fucking nut job that thinks she's here to nuke the Russkies* in accordance with God's will. I swear this guy desperately doesn't want to serve a second term - why the hell did he campaign the first time, anyway?

Obama is cementing his place on the list with Pierce, Van Buren, Adams (both of them), Polk, Buchanen, Hayes, Harrison, Taft, Hoover, Carter and Bush I. A single term will suit him just fine.

The latest bit of capitulation on his part is reaching across the isle to give rich people money. $700 Billion dollars to rich people, to be precise.

He could have stood his ground, stuck to his principles, and made a big stink about how the GOP was causing all our taxes to go up by insisting on fillibustering to keep tax breaks for millionaires from running out. Hell, I'd have gladly coughed up the $3,000 the "average American family" was going to have to pay in taxes, just to see a Democratic leader actually find their fucking spine. But instead, he caves, which allows the Republicans to claim that their strength and leadership saved us all thousands. Just hand the election away again, why don't you?

Let me remind you of his previous position regarding the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, back in 2007. It goes something like the first 9 seconds of this video:

Whatever happened to that brilliant idealist who was going to clean house and fix the system? I loved that man. He sure gave some rousing speeches. He was all full of charisma and genius. I wonder where he went? In his place is the guy who says crap like this (while knuckling under to the teabaggers)...

Obama: GOP threatened ‘collateral damage’ if wealthy didn’t get tax cuts

"I've said before that I felt that the middle-class tax cuts were being held hostage to the high-end tax cuts," President Obama said. "I think it's tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers -- unless the hostage gets harmed. Then, people will question the wisdom of that strategy."
"In this case, the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed," he said.

Jesus Husein Christ, Mr. Obama, everyone who's ever watched an action-adventure movie or a single episode of 24 knows that "the President of the United States DOES NOT negotiate with terrorists and hostage takers". As you keep waving that damn metaphor in one hand, and the white flag in the other, take a moment to think about what you've just done.

Could you send a worse message, Mr President? You just:

Looked like a wimp and a coward. You drew people's attention to the Hollywood-driven trope of what the President of the United States is supposed to be, and then ran screaming from it like a bullied 12-year old would.
In the process, reminded us that you are an effete elite liberal milquetoast brainiac who spends his time reading books instead of watching movies like a real American. You announced to the world: "Remember when you thought I was hip and cool (and young)? Yeah, I'm not really that guy. I'm his much-nerdier (and older) father."
Capitulated to, and thus emboldened, the tea-bag radical Right. You conceded the initiative to all those clueless junior Palin-clone congressmen your party lost the elections to last month. Apparently, you've forgotten that they are not reasonable. Given up ground to them will not ingratiate them to you, it will not earn you brownie points, or get them to reach across the isle. That is the whole point of why the Michelle Bachman's and Christine O'Donnel's of the world are so fucking scary - because they are idealogical nutjobs with a failure to understand cause and effect or basic human decency.
Sent a message to the fucking terrorists that you actually are willing to negotiate with them, all they have to do is threaten to kill more Americans. You've encouraged them to imperil us. ...Or, at least, that's how idiots like (me and) Fox News are going to choose to interpret that sound bite. For an eloquent, educated, intelligent man, you sure are good at giving your enemies ridiculous quotes than can repeat out of context.

Every one of those perception issues is going to cost this country, it's people, and your administration. Every one of those points is going to undermine your ability to get re-elected. Your entire first two years has been all about back-pedaling and making concessions, and it's gotten us nowhere.

Just as none of us noticed when you gave us our Stimulus bonus in the form of $16 a paycheck break instead of a lump sum check we would have had to take to the bank, virtually no one in America will notice when they don't pay an unexpected $3,000 dollars more come April 15th.You have gained nothing by caving.

The sad thing is, the President (assuming he's not secretly the scum-sucking money-serving scum-bag that I don't think he is) clearly imagines that by bending over backwards like this he's actually preserving his principles and doing what's right. He thinks he's being mature, realistic, and centrist. He thinks that in doing so, he's making the next two years a little better.

I ask you, Mr. President, What hurts America more, taking $3,000 out of our pockets, or getting us all Killed by Palin sometime in early 2013**? As much as I like my money, I value not being nuked just a little more. So why are you giving up the game to the other side, when the correct is so damn obvious.

The right play here would have been to hold your ground and refuse to buckle. Then the tax-breaks for everyone would have expired. The new Congress reconvenes in January shortly before your State of the Union Address, in which you could have drawn attention to the fact that unless Congress gets it's ass in gear, we'd all have significant tax increases. That (plus their own greed) would motivate them to put the breaks back in, and if they proceeded to put in the cuts for the richest again, you'd have yet another opportunity to repeatedly point out that they were doing so specifically to benefit the rich. You could hold on to your principles there, and rest assured that the damn Republicans would have no choice but to fix it pronto, or else they'd be the ones standing to loose an election over it.

About the only way the Democrats could get my vote back would be with a Kucinich-McDermott ticket. That's particular pipe dream has about the same odds as the DNC mastering the ancient art of necromancy to raise FDR and Wellstone from the grave for 2012.

I'm voting Jake in 2012. Jake, I'm counting on you to hold me to that.

Footnotes:
*: Whom she can see from her front porch, don't ya know.
**: Remember, the church she attends teaches that it's God's plan that the Apocalypse will happen in our lifetimes, and Alaska will serve as a refuge for the least evil of those who are left behind after the Rapture. I'd be surprised if she waits 10 minutes from be sworn in till the missiles are in the air.

Cell phone exposure linked to bad behavior in kids

2010-12-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

Recently, I took the plunge and got a cellphone. I probably won't answer it, either. The main point and purpose of me getting a cellphone was so that I would stop feeling smugly superior whenever I read articles like this one:

Cell phone exposure linked to bad behavior in kids: study

PARIS — Pregnant mothers in Denmark who regularly used mobile phones were more likely to have children with behavioral problems, according to a study released Tuesday.
The risk was higher when the kids themselves began using cell phones at a very early age, researchers reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
...

The researchers found that kids who had been exposed to mobile phones both before and after birth were 50 percent more likely to have behavioral problems.

The publishers have already announced they'll be following up that report with a sequel entitled "Cell phone exposure linked to bad behavior in kids, teens, adults, and pretty much everyone." The publishing date is set for 20 years from today, though as I understand it they've already begun collecting data to support the hypothesis.

WikiLeaks!

2010-12-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

It's a fun and light-hearted little word. Say it loudly, quickly, letting your voice rise a bit. WikiLeaks is a hit at parties!

But while the US propaganda outlets are questioning the validity of the site, calling it unpatriotic, and playing up the fact that it's founder has a fresh warrant out for his arrest over possible SEX CRIMES!, European news sources have bothered to read the embassy cables.

The Madrid Cables—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

These cables reveal a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations...

The cables also reflect an absolutely extraordinary rapport between the Madrid embassy and Spanish prosecutors, who repeatedly appear to be doing the embassy’s bidding...

Over the last several years, the Embassy of the United States in Madrid wielded powerful resources in an extraordinary effort to impede or terminate pending criminal investigations in Spain which involved American political and military figures assumed to have been involved in incidents of torture in Guantánamo, violations of the laws of war in Iraq or kidnappings in connection with the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program...

The cables show that the embassy was briefed in detail about the pending cases, receiving information that was not publicly accessible and would have been known only to the prosecutors and the magistrates handling the cases...

These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded this mandate, however, and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors. Their disclosure has created deep concern about the independence of judges in Spain and the manipulation of the entire criminal justice system by a foreign power.

Bunch of no good pig fuckers. How dare Spain get pissed off at an over-reaching foreign proxy-imperialist nation dictating its domestic political processes.

Airport Security

2010-12-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

If I were a pedophile (or just sexual predator in general), I'd apply for a job at the TSA. Getting paid money for groping folks all day long, that'd be sweet. For a sick fucking perv.

If I were a terrorist, I'd be thrilled with the long lines at the Airports. It used to be that to use a bomb to kill hundreds of Americans and disrupt transportation, you had to smuggle the bomb through airport security. Now that the TSA and DHS's "safety" procedures have lengthened the time you spend in lines at the airport, and conveniently packed more Americans per square foot into the kill zone, you could just detonate a bomb inside the airport itself. Psychopaths and religious extremists alike must be very encouraged at the potential to blow up people in lines outside the security checkpoint.

But alas, I am neither a terrorist nor a molester, so instead of being happy I find myself angry and critical of our government.

I'm a cancer survivor, so it wouldn't be particularly smart or safe for me to go through backscatter x-ray scanners if I can reasonably avoid doing so.

I'm also a sexual abuse survivor, so I probably wouldn't want to opt-out of the scans and have to get an invasive pat-down of my genitals (to make sure I hadn't wired my penis to explode).

I guess I'll just have to opt out of flying all together. Wow. Thanks, TSA and DHS, I feel safer already!

Creepy Conspiracy Revelations

2010-11-29T14:02:00.000-08:00

A few interesting headlines and conspiratorial developments of late, all three of which came to my attention this morning as I read over my favorite news collection service, RAWstory.com

#1: All Our Diplomats Are Spies
International online whistleblowers WikiLeaks released a huge chunk of State Department documents. The documents include a troubling set of directives encouraging US diplomats to covertly gather DNA samples, fingerprints, passwords and credit card numbers of other nation's diplomats. Basically, turning a very large number of US diplomats into spies.

In response, the gov't is looking in to criminal charges against WikiLeaks, and some in Congress are calling for WikiLeaks to be classified as a "Foreign Terrorist Organization" which would allow for severe penalties to any US citizen that offers them "material support" of any kind. That's a Constitutionally-alarming proposal, as it would empower the government to take strong actions against any US citizen that made any sort of donation or information sharing with the organization.
Links:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/clinton-ordered-diplomats-spy-un/
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/wikileaks-chief/

#2: Saudi Arabia Funds Al-Qaeda
Anyone remember that part in Fahrenheit 9/11 where Michael Moore repeatedly draws connections between the Bushes and Saudis? Wherein he made the case that Saudi Arabia was likely behind al Qaeda's plots against us, but that because of business connections and friendships, the US Intelligence and Propaganda machines have politely looked away? I remember the political pundits and White House apologists saying it was patently false and unfair to make such connections. We were repeatedly told this was not a war about oil, and the Saudi's were definitely not getting any special treatment just because they happen to be rich.

This weekend, in the stack of State Department documents in this weekend's WikiLeaks release, comes this little gem in the New York Times:

"Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda."

It would appear that Michael Moore may have gotten it right. Our government knows the Saudis are the main source of revenue to "the enemy", but yet we're not taking any major actions against Saudi Arabia. Seems like maybe all that activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, and just over the border into Pakistan is a little misguided. As the saying goes, "follow the money!" Bombing poor people doesn't make us safer, it simply makes the rich richer. Bombing the rich? Well, the US hasn't given that a fair try since at least the 1940s.

Or, better yet, we could just immediately stop dropping bombs on other countries.

Links:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/shocker-admits-saudi-donors-chief-financiers-al-qaeda-leaked-cable/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?_r=1&hp

#3: Court Orders CIA To Come Clean About Mind-Control Implants
On an unrelated, but none-the-less conspiratorially-creepy-as-hell, there's a lawsuit currently going on where several military veterans are suing the CIA for implanting electrodes in their head for the purpose of remote control of their brain function and human behavior. If I'm reading the article right, the CIA is not denying having conducted such surgery, but is offering as it's defense that it only did this to prisoners, mental patients, and elderly shut-ins, not active duty military personnel. Isn't that creepy? A judge has just recently ruled that the CIA must provide the court with it's records concerning experiments conducted on thousands of soldiers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Links:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/cia-allegedly-implanted-electrodes-brains-unsuspecting-soldiers/
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/11/17/31924.htm
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/11/cia_brain_experiments_pursued.html

LHC Discovers God Particle

2010-11-22T13:25:00.000-08:00

According to the Daily Squib...

The Higgs Boson apparently manifested in the Large Hadron Collider yesterday evening at 3.52 pm CET.

What follows the discovery of the 'God Particle' is of particular interest.

"God has informed us that he doesn't believe in Richard Dawkins, and he actually doesn't like him much either...

There was this big bang, then a puff of yellow smoke. We then smelled some burning. At first we thought we'd burned out another circuit but when we looked at the screen we saw the incredible words: 'DAWKINS IS A DICK. LOVE GOD'"

I suppose one could say he is a Dick, but he prefers to go by Richard.

2 cigars lit with $100 bills per day

2010-11-19T11:45:00.000-08:00

This video from the floor of congress shows us what the rich will be doing with the big Republican-sponsored tax cuts for the rich, and then one modest proposal of what we could do instead with that same amount of money.

Shadyac yer yap

2010-11-16T17:42:00.000-08:00

Interesting article about how a man is attempting to make penance for inflicting "Liar, Liar", "The Nutty Professor", and "Evan Almighty" on the world.

Source: LA Times Worth a quick read.

Tom Shadyac: Life begins after you give away your Hollywood toys
“I had a woman at my production company whose job was to find people in need that we could help — people whose houses had burned down, kids in a blind children’s center,” he told me last week, sitting in his cozy trailer overlooking the gorgeous California coastline. “But I didn’t realize that even though I was giving my money away, my own life was a very poor reflection of who I thought I was. I thought I was taking care of others, but I was really only taking care of me.”

He laughs. “I couldn’t decry the gap between the rich and the poor and actually be the gap between the rich and the poor. As Mr. Gandhi says, you have to be the change you wish to see in the world.”

I'm all for this, and think more rich people should give up everything they own.

When a door closes open a window...

2010-11-15T13:00:00.001-08:00

...to let the smoke out. California failed to legalize pot. Oregon, this is your opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a prime money-making venture.

Son of a Bitch President

2010-11-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

On former President ~~Bitch~~ Bush who just won't fucking go away...

Their kind make Nixon look decent.

A Small Fraction of a Man

We are all children of this bastard fool now. The least he can do is stay in the shadows where he belongs, while we toil and sweat to repair what he wrought.

I'm so conflicted. After years of trying to erase the revisionist memory of the Reagan years do I dare to admit that Reagan's Vice President's son was even worse?

It's far, far easier to just label the entire party as a cancer. I just hate to disparage cancer like that.

This just in from Transexual Scandinavia

2010-11-12T18:15:00.000-08:00

Swede Transvestite has pulled his high-heeled caulk boots and satin trimmed flannel shirt out of the closet and is back in a more convenient form: 140 characters or less.

Drop Dead File Sharing

2010-11-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

“Dead Drops” preview at Aram Bartholl – Blog

I am ‘injecting’ USB flash drives into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. You are invited to go to these places (so far 5 in NYC) to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data.

Spelling mistake courtesy of the original author. That aside, this is an intriguing project. A great example of how file sharing will occur regardless of how giant corporations feel about it. From photo-copied books to mix tapes to torrents and beyond, the information will find a way to free itself.

A suggestion to those who would use this; bring a damn cable!

Photo by Aram Bartholl, CC license which is like free but with giving credit where it's due.

Science vs. Religion

2010-11-09T12:27:00.000-08:00

What I really like about this was recognizing similar experiences. I too have gazed up at the Milky Way while far removed from light pollution and marveled not at God's creation, but at the sheer immensity of the Universe itself. It makes me feel utterly insignificant. Yet here I am, a part of all of this.

The Future Is Now

2010-11-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

A website after my own heart - by way of miniature robots rampaging through the blood stream. CNB labs dot com appears to be a start-up company called "Chicago Nanobionics Labs", but their most recent blog post is titled "Nanobionics - Dooming the World? We think not."

Now I must admit the barely-restrained luddite deep within me has all sorts of kneejerk reactions to this, but I gotta say there's something pretty awesome about reading that work is being done on fighting cancer with nanites. I went under the knife and radiation a few years back, and I find the idea of miniature robots sailing through my veins just slightly less frightening than either of the main treatments I did undergo. Is it possible to be a luddite and a transhumanist at the same time? 'Cause given the choice between chemo and nano, I'd choose to be a robot farm every time.

Alas, there'll be no personal-nano-invasion in my immediate future, as the only clinical trial they have going on is for people with no history of neural or skin disorders. Maybe there'll be a second round later where they pump robots into freaks like me.

Here we go again

2010-11-03T00:02:00.000-07:00

Well I did it. I went into the voting booth for the first time in the better part of a decade to participate in the fiction that it matters whom we choose to fuck us in the ass. Not that I'm under amy illusion that I was casting a vote for even one winning candidate. Suffice it to say that I wrote in the same name for most of the positions. Not my own, of course. No fucking way I'd trust myself in any position of authority, but I wrote in someone that I trust would slack off in a manner that makes the DMV look like a Japanese factory.

Anyway, I got to thinking that I actually look forward to having a bunch of tea-baggers in office if for no other reason than sheer entertainment value. However, as an anarchist I do have sympathy with the anti-government zeitgeist. Not that I think these bigoted fuckwits will do anything to actually fight the bloated corporate police state, like ending the "War on (insert noun here)" or stopping transfer payments to corporations and wealthy retirees. We've heard this same line of bullshit before in '80 and '94, and they were spreading our asscheeks before we even left the voting booth then.

Fuck 'em. They've pissed me off already. The old king is dead! Death to the new king!

Halloween Impropriety

2010-10-27T02:26:00.000-07:00

It seems incredibly racist for work to put up a poster featuring what appears to be someone in a white sheet to tell us about the Halloween "Spook-tacular".

See the spring of the grandfather clock unwinding.

2010-10-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that today is 10/20, 2010, and felt it deserved a posting of some sort. So here's a video of I Palindrome I:

You know, I can't say that I'd ever completely understood the narrative of that song before. Despite having had a recording in my collection for years, I'd never really parsed that the main character in the song kills his mother for the inheritance money, and is then later killed by his own children for the inheritance money. I knew it had some morbid imagery, but I hadn't really thought through the subtext of it. Very cool.

Stupid For Senate

2010-10-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

This debate video is bizarre. There's this total fucking idiot who's running for Senate in Delaware on the Republican / Tea Party ticket, and she's completely hung up on her imaginary world where there is no Separation of Church & State. The Democrat she's debating against correctly points out that the First Amendment says the government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" and she spends the next several minutes repeatedly asking him "does it say that in the First Amendment?" as though she doesn't believe him. I'm just plain shocked that someone that unfamiliar with the First Amendment could possibly be considered politically competent enough for a major party to endorse her. There are two different parts in the video (2m55s and 7m30s) where the audience laughs at her ridiculous claims.

If you want to get shivers running down your spine at just how fucked our future is if the Tea Baggers win big this election, watch this video. Christine O'Donnell is terrifyingly ignorant.

NSFW: Yarn Porn

2010-10-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

The Blindness of the Woods.

Right.

Um.

How to describe this?

Story based Swedish porn involving a blind girl (made of yarn), a lumber jack (also made of yarn), and a bear (very fuzzy).

I'm not forcing you to watch this. If you go to their website or watch the embedded video it is completely by your own choosing. It's not like it is scarring or anything. You'll just have to live the rest of your life knowing that you watched yarn porn. I now have and I feel confident when I say that I will almost certainly never seek out similar productions. Nothing wrong with it, just not for me.

Aren't you just a little curious about what a porn involving people dressed in full yarn body suits looks like?

The Blindness of the Woods - Watch more funny videos here

Pulp Sci-Fi Casting

2010-09-29T01:07:00.000-07:00

An interesting experiment.

For my break time reading enjoyment I decided to pick up an old favorite of mine, Robert Heinlein's Number of the Beast. It is pulpy, trashy, libertarian, and still a fun read despite the first three descriptors.

I'm trying something I have never done before with a book. Normally I visualize characters based on the descriptions in the text. I've read this one a few times. This time I decided to 'cast' the main roles with known actors.

We start with Zeb, the classic hero who is strong, agile, and very smart. Nate Fillion (Mal in the excellent albeit short-lived Firefly series) seemed a natural. He's also managing to steal the show thus far. Not an easy task considering the rest of the line-up.

His dancing partner and soon to be wife Deety is played by a twenty-something Liz Taylor. Time travel is one of the themes of the book. Since the movie is being directed and produced in my head, time travel has afforded me the perfect actress to fill the role of a wasp waisted young gal with teats that are emotional barometers. Did I mention she is also a genius and proficient in karate? My perfect Liz Taylor has picked up those qualities for the 'film'.

Deety's father, Jake, is a brilliant if not eccentric scientist who has just invented a device that allows people to travel through time and space (and multiple universes). Mid-career William Shatner is doing a fine job in this role. It is also adding a very distinct flavor to the dialog. So is Fillion, but come on, it's Shatner!

Finally we have the best friend of Jake's deceased wife, surrogate mother to Deety, university socialite, and, this is made quite explicit in the book, small breasted Hilda who marries Jake at the same time Zeb and Deety get hitched. She is smart but pretends not to be. She is tough but pretends not to be. She is rich but she pretends to be less rich than she actually is. She has made a hobby of chasing men only to fall madly in love with Jake the moment she finds out his daughter is getting married. Something like that. Madonna was suggested to me and I think she could pull it off, but I went with Susan Sarandon. Her boobs are way too big to be an accurate portrayal, but that is often how movies go. Besides, her voice is perfect!

All of the characters are athletic, tough, genius libertarians who like to spend as much time as possible naked. They are also all extremely rich independent of each other. Then they form one big happy family that is even richer. The men are virile and the women are fertile. And rich. And really, really smart. In other words the characters are pure pulp fantasy worthy of B-grade cinema, but I gave it an A-list cast.

Try reading one of your favorite books with a cast of known actors in mind. It is bringing new fun to an old stand-by.

God's Busty Daughter

2010-09-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

New Evidence Suggests God Also Had Incredibly Busty Daughter | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

In a discovery that biblical scholars say could alter our most fundamental understanding of Christianity, recently unearthed manuscripts suggest that in addition to His Son, Jesus Christ, God also had a daughter with absolutely humongous breasts.

Tammi of Nazareth!

Obama Sucks

2010-09-25T14:55:00.000-07:00

He is well into his term and has shown what kind of President he is. Compared to what we've had since at least 1981* I can honestly say...

Reagan: Really Sucked!
Bush Sr: Super Sucked!
Clinton: Sucked and was sucked!
The War Criminal: SO sucked!

I think my above assessment of the current administration is damn near a glowing review. But he still sucks.

*I really wasn't paying any attention to politics prior to that. Sometimes I think I would do well to return to that state of ignorant bliss.

The Professionals

2010-09-24T14:53:00.000-07:00

Watched The Professionals. Decent western. Story builds well and the characters are solid with subtleties. Not going to tell everyone they have to watch it. Like I said, decent. If you enjoy westerns you will probably like it.

But in a history of cinema where script writers often screw things up, this one has ending dialogue that rivals the perfection of Casablanca with perfect delivery by Lee Marvin as Rico.

J.W. Grant: You bastard!
Rico: Yes, Sir. In my case an accident of birth. But you, Sir, you're a self-made man.

Elmo Like Cleavage

2010-09-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

Sesame street has pulled this segment with Katy Perry and Elmo because of cleavage. While Ms. Perry has yet to comment, Elmo was quoted as saying, "This type of censorship inherent in system. Elmo love boobies as much as Elmo's fans do. No ban boobies!" He then let out a cute giggle.

Rumors persist that during a game of hide-and-seek Elmo had tried to 'hide' under Ms. Perry's skirt.

Elmo certainly seems a bit flustered at the start of this video. Perhaps exposing him to celebrity cleavage wasn't such a good idea.

Trickle Down Economics

2010-09-22T14:51:00.000-07:00

For trickle down economics to actually work the working class needs to reach up and punch some holes in the proverbial bucket.

Super Rich W(h)ine Party

2010-09-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

I think we can all feel this man's pain.

We are the Super Rich

The rhetoric in Washington about taxes is about millionaires and the super rich, but the relevant dividing line between millionaires and the middle class is pegged at family income of $250,000. (I’m not a math professor, but last time I checked $250,000 is less than $1 million.) That makes me super rich and subject to a big tax hike if the president has his way.

This guy considers himself middle class and an ordinary working American. His current tax bill as a percentage of income is actually similar to my own, he pays about 1/3 of his income. How is he ever going to make ends meet if the government takes, oh, let's say 1/2 of his income? That means he would only have 10x as much money as I manage to survive on. How ever will his family survive?

I can feel his pain. It is tough to scrape by with an annual income of between $30k-$300k per year. There are people like Johnny Depp who have homes in LA, the South of France, and a private island in the Bahamas as well as a private yacht that is larger than many people's homes. It's just not fair that one extremely talented and handsome actor beloved by millions should have all that (and the tax burden that comes with it) while us ordinary folks can barely keep ourselves in a charming but rundown rental or...

Our next biggest expense, like most people, is our mortgage. Homes near our work in Chicago aren’t cheap and we do not have friends who were willing to help us finance the deal. We chose to invest in the University community and renovate and old property, but we did so at an inopportune time.

Damn those free market economics that make such investments risky ventures! And damn President Obama for proposing a tax hike on the upper-upper-middle class that gets in the way of those free market economics!

If our taxes rise significantly, as they seem likely to, we can cut back on some things. The (legal) immigrant from Mexico who owns the lawn service we employ will suffer, as will the (legal) immigrant from Poland who cleans our house a few times a month. We can cancel our cell phones and some cable channels, as well as take our daughter from her art class at the community art center, but these are only a few hundred dollars per month in total.

Tragedy! How are we supposed to afford people to do things we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves? Are we expected to live like the people we pay to do those things? Then what the hell is the point of being a natural born US citizen? Where is the justice? Where is the privilege?

Okay, I'm all sarcasmed out. Time for me to crawl back into my lower-lower-middle class hole and stop belittling the plight of the hard working upper-upper-middle class.

Pirates Forever!

2010-09-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

Yo ho
All Together
Hoist the colors high!

Heave Ho
Thieves and Beggars
Never shall we die!

To Name It

2010-09-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

When performing an exorcism you must first name the demon. By naming it (with its true name) you first gain control of it, then destroy it.

That said, I've named my current art style Post Psychedelic Abstract Expressionism.

Some former art movements upon naming their movement released manifestos. I'm going to skip that for now.

AWPC: Depression

2010-09-16T14:24:00.000-07:00

For seven months I worked in Plant 1, the older portion of our factory. Not only is it dark and dirty, but all of the machines are dark and dirty and old so in constant need from years of neglect. Most of the Plant 1 operators also seem run down, dirty, probably neglected as well. To make matters worse, I was working the graveyard shift at the time. Another person and I were discussing the Plant 1 phenomenon when this gem popped up.

Me: Working in Plant 1 was so depressing. It nearly turned me into an alcoholic.

Them: At least you had something to look forward to.

It's a pleasant surprise when someone else at work is quick witted.

Acting against ACTA

2010-09-14T08:39:00.000-07:00

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is ostensibly supposed to cut down on illegal pirating of copyrighted materials. It's full of ridiculous baggage and demands, but the most alarming provision is the "three strikes and you're out" rule, where if someone is accused (not convicted) of three or more acts of copyright infringement, the international body can have that person banned from the internet for life.

That's pretty sick. I don't think I could live without the internet. Admittedly, it'd make me slightly more productive, but a lot more isolated and miserable in the process.

Read more at www.anti-acta.com. The most level-headed report I've read on it was here. He makes it sound a little less dire, but is still rightly concerned about it.

ACTA has been worked on, largely in secret (but with several big leaks), for the past two or three years, and unless people speak up against it on a large scale, it's likely to be completed and signed in the remaining months of 2010.

Here's an amusing video on the subject, by someone who's very good at angry ranting:

This one's less amusing, and a bit calmer:

International protests are planned for Sept 18 and Nov 5. There's a online petition to Stop ACTA. Annoying letters to various government personages and media editors probably wouldn't hurt either, if you've got a few minutes to spare to help ensure the internet doesn't go away any time soon.

Bad American Remakes

2010-09-10T02:17:00.001-07:00

Someone here pointed out a fantastic Scandinavian film and went into detail about how Hollywood would fuck it up. I watched the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It was incredible. (The YouTube trailer is crap.)

Another good recent Scandinavian film was Let the Right One In. For those who have seen it, prepare to be mortified by the Hollywood remake.

From what I see in this trailer, me thinks Mr. Bergstrom's prophecy of what a bad US version might look like may have been a bit conservative. Let's hope they leave that one alone.

Don't Burn Some Books!

2010-09-10T01:41:00.000-07:00

No need to worry, folks. The Dove World Outreach Center has called off their Quran burning event upon learning that New York Muslims have caved to pressure to move their community center away from the proposed site near the former World Trade Center site.

The usual suspects at the Westboro "God Hates Fags" Baptist Church will do the Quran burning instead.

Burn Some Books!

2010-09-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

I am not going to link to any of the stupid news stories pertaining to the stupid event being planned by a stupid, stupid man. I'm just proud that one of my own friends made our readers aware of this long before the current media frenzy. Took 'em long enough.

Not about the news story. No. Not directly. This is about surprising self discovery.

I am okay with burning the Quran. Or the Bible. Throw Dianetics and the I Ching on a fire for all I care. Burn the "holy book" of any religion that holds sway over a sufficient number of people to be considered a cultural entity. Which means I am also unopposed to burning copies of the Star Wars films since there is a growing number of people identifying as Jedis.

Burning a Bible (or Quran) is like burning a flag. It is a way to show your disapproval of a dominant paradigm. Many of my countrymen get mad when they watch protests in the Middle East where US flags are burned. If you want to get them extremely pissed off, show them clips of US protesters torching Old Glory. Yikes!

Same goes for the holy books. A bunch of ignorant evangelical nut jobs in Florida publicly burning a Quran means nothing compared to one rebellious kid in Iran secretly burning a copy. Iranians may make a lot of noise about those 'damned American pig-dogs'. If the Iranian kid was caught in the act, they would tear him to pieces with their bare hands and possibly stone the entire family for good measure!

So go ahead and burn a Bible or a Quran. I suggest that you have a reason for it and that the reason is not born of ignorance. Holy books are symbols of huge cultures. Sometimes to get the attention of these cultures you have to do something drastic like destroying that which they hold sacred. Don't sweat it. They'll print more.

I do not, have not, and can say with near absolute certainty* will never condone the burning of texts for the purposes of suppressing and/or destroying the information contained within. Such as when the United States government rounded up the works of revolutionary psychologist Wilhelm Reich and threw them in a garbage incinerator. That sort of book burning is WRONG! It is the willful destruction of information that another finds objectionable. Information genocide. There are books out there lost forever because someone was offended by the contents. Whole authors wiped from the literary landscape. Despicable!

If we need to have a blanket law that protects the Quran and the Bible from being burned in order to protect all other literary works, I would support such a thing. We could still burn a Bible in protest. Making it illegal makes it all the more powerful when someone does decide to light one up.

Besides, there are plenty of other symbols we can crap all over when we get mad at an entire culture.**

* I have to allow for the possibility. I can't believe I presently find myself in favor of any form of book burning. Shocks the shit out of me. Hopefully I've made my reasoning clear. I have heard good arguments in favor of burning every known copy of Atlas Shrugged. For that reason I have chosen not to read it. Seems like a superior solution to burning.

** Rev. Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center and organizer of the International Burn a Quran Day is an ignorant and hateful little man who does not have the wherewithal to be burning anything in protest. I'm not even certain he should be allowed near matches in the first place. The sentence above is not meant to encourage him to organize a 'Wipe your ass with an image of Muhammad' day***. Personal opinion of course.

*** I am in favor of thoughtful blasphemy. It is a personal hobby as well.

Steampunk Watches

2010-09-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

Small Korean studio that makes custom watches. Marrianne's Handcrafted Watch Studio. I guess "Made in Korea" doesn't always mean "Cheap Crap".

I seem to be fascinated with steampunk right now. I have no desire to 'become' a steampunk. Lots of goggles and nifty hats. I think hanging with a bunch of steampunks would be as exciting as hanging with a bunch of goths, ie., pretty, pretentious, personal tendencies towards violent outbursts. I find steel to have much better properties than brass. Neither here nor there about Zeppelins. It is an interesting aesthetic, though. What are we really looking at? It's cyberpunk 125 years too soon. And cyberpunk, while a kick-ass RPG, didn't offer anything beyond aesthetic. Nothing but fluff. These full fledged subcultures seem to me like prepackaged non-conformity for the uncreative. Except for the few creative individuals who help define them. At least they can make their mark within such subcultures and hopefully earn enough doing it to avoid all of the other crappy job choices available in this world. My 2 brass cogs worth.

Suing Arizona

2010-09-03T07:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update on everyone's favorite wacky racist Arizona sheriff. He's getting sued by the Federal Government:

The lawsuit calls Arpaio and his office's defiance "unprecedented," and said the federal government has been trying since March 2009 to get officials to comply with its probe of alleged discrimination, unconstitutional searches and seizures, and having English-only policies in his jails that discriminate against people with limited English skills.
...
In a separate investigation, a federal grand jury in Phoenix is examining allegations that Arpaio has abused his powers with actions such as intimidating county workers by showing up at their homes at nights and on weekends.

Kinda warms the heart, don't you think?

Read more about the lawsuits here.

Republicans Funded by Terrorists

2010-08-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

In this masterfully done bit from the Daily Show we learn that FOX News is reporting that the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque' is linked to terrorism because it receives funding from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a man linked to the funding of extremist mosques and suspected terrorist organizations. Alwaleed bin Talal also happens to be part owner of FOX News. Second largest owner, in fact, behind Rupert Murdoch. So FOX News is funded by a sponsor of terrorism according to their OWN DAMN NEWS SHOW! Accept you have to put the links together yourself or watch John Stewart do it for you.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Parent Company Trap

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Combine that with FOX News donating $1 Million To Republican Governors Association to get Republican Governors elected.

That means the Republicans either have to refuse that $1 Million or they are receiving money from the terrorists. Republicans are funded by terrorists!*

Might I suggest that Alwaleed bin Talal has been funding a terror campaign against the United States using FOX as his main weapon and now adding Republican Governors to his arsenal?

* Which makes them terrorists.

First Endorsement

2010-08-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

My dad has been endorsed by the Sierra Club.

ROTH 28A House Rep

Just thought I'd share.

Anarcists

2010-08-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

The members of local anarcho-syndicalist coffee shop The Red & Black Cafe kicked out a cop. They felt a cop made their other customers uncomfortable and decided to ask him to leave. As business owners they have that right. Probably not the smartest thing they have ever done.

When the local news media decided to run with the story, the Red & Black collective held a train wreck news conference. I support them for standing up for their beliefs. The cops stand together as a whole in support of their own when accused of brutality and wrongful shootings. Bars ban gang 'colors' for similar circumstances. If the police officer had entered while not wearing his gang colors, to these folks a symbol of violence, they would not have asked him to leave. But their news conference, meant to clarify their stance and justify their actions, made them look bad. Let this be a lesson for all high schoolers to pay attention during speech class. Yes, you will need this skill later in life.

The hate mail started pouring in. What would any self respecting anarchist collective do in this situation? Get Yer Red & Black Hate Mail Spokecards! Now YOU can purchase laminated copies of ridiculous statements made by imbeciles.

I used to receive similar hate mail. Wish I would have thought to sell it. Best of luck to the anarcists on their latest capitalist venture.

Personal Sensory Experiences

2010-08-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

I get back from vacation and start to contemplate a conflicting situation.

If I continue to ignore the news like I did for most of my vacation, I will certainly feel happier. The practice of creating catchy, sensationalist headlines has lead to a media toxic shock.

Ignoring the news disconnects me from world events. Really bad things are happening. I should know about them. I should know about how our government is using Google Earth to enforce property laws, wide scale voter fraud in South Carolina, Obama speaking out in favor of freedom of religion and mosques, 9/11 rescue and clean-up workers getting media attention for telling Obama to speak out in favor of the proposed health bill that affects them, media outlets remaining quiet about how the President has in fact been vocal in his support including chastising Republicans for stalling the bill. If I want to have a well informed opinion I need to be well informed. Any idiot can have opinions about things they know nothing about, and all too often they voice them quite loudly.

What to do? Enjoy a world of sensory experiences where things remain largely positive or dive into the global experience via news sources?

What I really should do is combine the two. Enjoy globally through personal sensory experiences.

Tax Cuts

2010-08-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

CNN shed little diamond-encrusted platinum tears today on behalf of those supposedly unfairly disadvantaged, the US citizens who make about $250,000 a year. Boo-hoo, it's so hard to be them, especially now that the Bush tax cut package is expiring.

These are individuals whose household income might bring them into the top tax bracket of $250,000 a year but who, with two parents working, might still find themselves struggling to stay in the stability of the upper-middle class in the expensive urban areas where they often work.
Much of the anger about the scheduled sunset of the Bush tax cuts for the increase in top-bracket taxes comes from this productive group of Americans.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? I almost felt sympathy, because not only is it expensive to live in suburbia, it's also just generally boring and tacky there.

Then I popped over to the Washington Post, and looked at this chart comparing the expiring tax cuts and the ones Obama is trying to replace them with:

The Bush tax plan vs. the Obama tax plan in one chart

In case that's too small to read, the $200,000 to $500,000 yearly income line sees a change in tax burden of $409 a year. Those "poor" "disadvantaged" working Americans making 250,000 a year are going to be paying extra taxes of about one tenth of a percentage point of their yearly wages. The equivalent, if you were making say $50,000 a year, would be having to pay an extra $81 in taxes. Don't get me wrong, I too would prefer to have an extra $80, but even if were going to be out by $400 at my families current income level, it wouldn't be enough of a hardship on me or mine to justify column inches at CNN. Whatever little sympathy I might have had for those who make several hundred thousand a year melted away when I saw that chart. As it melted and flowed, it took my respect for CNN with it.

That Washington Post chart is awesome by the way. It makes it very clear who the Bush tax plan helped, with it's clear delineation that once you hit millionaire, your tax cut jumps to 6 times it's previous size. "Thanks for joining the Club, here's your $85,000 door prize..."

Staggering Evidence of Voter Fraud in the US

2010-08-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

This is a really under-reported story from earlier this summer. It documents obvious evidence that the Primaries in South Carolina were rigged and stolen. It should have made repeated national headlines, but I just heard about it today despite being 2 months old.

In South Carolina, the majority of votes are placed on electronic voting machines at the polling stations. Machines that have no transparency or safeguards, so you can't be certain that your vote was tabulated or reported accurately. As near as I can tell, that's why Alvin Greene won the Democratic primary.

Greene is unemployed but somehow came up with the $10,440 filing fee to get on the Primary ballot. He's currently indicted on two criminal counts - one a felony - and was arrested for them both 6 months before the Primary. His master plan to save the South Carolina economy is to create jobs by making and selling action figures of himself. As I understand it, he had no TV ads, no website, he neither scheduled nor attended any campaign rallies, did no fund raising nor any campaigning of any recognizable sort. He had no political background at all.

Watch this downright bizarre interview where Keith Olbermann asks Alvin Greene about how he campaigned:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

His chief opponent in the primary was a four-time State legislator who did lots of campaigning.

Despite those many handicaps, Alvin Greene won the Primary by a landslide victory at the polls - with the electronic voting machines in some precincts reporting more votes for Green than total ballots cast! In most precincts in South Carolina, the only paper trail left after an election is the absentee ballots. Traditionally, absentee ballots tend to have similar results ratios as polling-place ballots. However, in this case, Greene got only 16% of the absentee ballot vote, but got 59% of the non-traceable, non-verifiable electronic votes at the polls.

Read more about his ridiculous logic-defying win at:
The BRAD BLOG
RAWstory
mainstream media's feeble attempt at pretending they care whether or not an election is stolen by their secret masters

The best case scenario seems to be one of State-wide election-machine error, and the more chilling yet more likely scenario seems to be systematic fraud and rigging of an election. Right here in the USA, not in some rinky-dink third-world banana republic.