Not a team player!

Grrrr! Arrgh! Hear me roar!

Sorry, I have to vent for a moment.

So I'm working on this mod for a game. Mainly, the project is mostly code and game design, with a little bit of pixel art on the side. The code is challenging, and I had to get things running and bug-free before I could release. So I started with and focused on what was the hard stuff to me, and then I just hammered out some quick and dirty placeholder artwork for the graphics as an after-thought. There'd be plenty of time to spruce that up later. After all, I've never had a programming course, but I've been to art school.

Problem is, my placeholders look good enough to be someone without an art background's best efforts... yet not not nearly as good as the final art of the main game without mods.

So based on that initial release, I've now got people crawling out of the woodwork offering to do my graphics for me and asking to collaborate, because my code is strong, my game design stronger, but my art sucks. It's like almost flattering, yet humiliating at the same time.

I AM SO PISSED! Grrrr! Arrgh! Hear me roar! Again.

I mean seriously, someone redid half my place holders and sent their versions to me unsolicited so I could replace my crap with his beautiful art. I didn't ask to collaborate with him, and even though his work is great, this project is my baby. But now I'm stuck where I either have to use his contribution, or top it.
Plus, among the things he sent his version of was one of the two graphics in the mod that I _didn't_ consider a placeholder. The bar has been raised and the little thing I was doing for fun is now like a freaking exam.


Grrr, whine, etc. I am not a team player, I am a tempermental auteur!

And now I've shared my shame with a wider audience. Cause if you can't humble yourself, who can you humble?

Double Standards

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.

2 cigars lit with $100 bills per day

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

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.

Tax Cuts

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..."

incompetent racist militant self-important hick pigs

The latest on the stupidity in AZ:

Via Raw and the AP:

Arizona sheriff not relenting after court ruling

...
Arpaio, a 78-year-old ex-federal drug agent who fashions himself as a modern-day John Wayne, launched his latest sweep Thursday afternoon, sending about 200 sheriff's deputies and trained volunteers out across metro Phoenix to look for traffic violators who may be here illegally.

Deputy Bob Dalton and volunteer Heath Kowacz spotted a driver with a cracked windshield in a poor Phoenix neighborhood near a busy freeway. Dalton triggered the red and blue police lights and pulled over 28-year-old Alfredo Salas, who was born in Mexico but has lived in Phoenix with a resident alien card since 1993.

Dalton gave him a warning after Salas produced his license and registration and told him to get the windshield fixed.

Salas, a married father of two who installs granite, told The Associated Press that he was treated well but he wondered whether he was pulled over because his truck is a Ford Lobo.

"It's a Mexican truck so I don't know if they saw that and said, 'I wonder if he has papers or not,'" Salas said. "If that's the case, it kind of gets me upset."

Sixty percent of the nearly 1,000 people arrested in the sweeps since early 2008 have been illegal immigrants. Thursday's dragnet led to four arrests, but it wasn't clear if any of them were illegal immigrants.

I'm not sure which part of this to be more outraged about:

• Should I be more upset about the Sheriff Department's thinly-veiled racism and racial profiling?
• Or should I be incensed that this "John Wayne" Sheriff is going ahead with this despite the court knocking down key provisions of the new law?
  
• Or should I just be most angry at their gross incompetence and squandering of public money?

I mean seriously, you put 200 agents out on the streets for a day, after having been bolstered and empowered by a controversial new law, and yet make only 4 arrests?

If you're gonna be a racist militant self-important hick pig, you should at least try to be good at what you do. These guys are just wanna-be racist militant self-important hick pigs. Just racist militant self-important hick pig poseurs. Employing 50 racist militant self-important hick pigs per arrest? Pretty fuckin' sad, if you ask me.

...or maybe they've been overestimating the immigration problem in their state.

309,775,732 friends, 854,000 enemies

I want to take a moment to salute the reporters over at the Washington Post. As a tax-paying, freedom-loving American, I thank you for your hard work and bravery. You've ruffled a few feathers in Washington, and 9,999 other locations.

This is an era where shining a light on things that ought to be transparent in the first place is more than a little nerve-wracking. It's an era where comedian John Stewart is usually (and sadly) the only one asking the hard questions. So to see someone write a huge report on the 854,000 Americans who have Top Secret Clearance, and what they are working on, is pretty refreshing.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.
One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

The article, and its many interactive charts and maps, are worth at least 10 minutes of everyone's time, and most of us nerdly or paranoid types could justify burning much more time pouring through the 16 page main article and the amazing web of hyperlinks in the charts. Pop over to the Washington Post and take a look at the report. It's an accounting of which agencies and companies are doing what in the name of National Security. 1,271 Government Organizations and 1,931 Private Companies work together at 10,000 locations to publish 50,000 intelligence reports a year. It's too much for anyone to hope to be on top of it all, and we keep growing it bigger and making it more redundant. Yet despite all those Republicans and Tea Partiers harping about oversized government, they never seem to want to trim a few security agencies out of the mix.

854,000 people. If all the folks with Top Secret Clearance were gathered together in an empty part of the map to found a new city all by themselves, they would be the 12th-largest city in the U.S. It would be smaller than Detroit, but bigger than San Francisco.

I'll leave off with one of the amusing observations of the article:

Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."

Phoenix vs Helsinki

If you live in Finland, you have a legal right to high-speed broadband internet access at an affordable price. The government in Helsinki believes that, like electricity and water, you just can't live a normal modern life without the internet. In fact, they consider it a right, on line with the freedom of speech. source

If you live in Arizona, forget about the internet, you've got more important things to worry about. Your right to electricity, water, and gas is in question. There's a guy running for office in Phoenix whose platform is that he'll cut off basic utility service to anyone that can't prove they're a U.S. citizen. source

"I'm sure there will be criticism about human-rights violations," Wong said, according to the New York Daily News. "Is power or natural gas or any type of utility we regulate, is that a right that people have? It is not a right. It is a service."

My thoughts on what Arizona should do to humanely thin out the illegals they are so obsessed with: Charter a few planes to Helsinki. Offer free one-way air-transit to Finland. Problem solved. Given the choice between living in a hellishly-hot desert (surrounded by hateful facist nutjobs that callously toy around with cutting off people's basic utilities based on their ethnicity or birthplace), or instead living in a beautiful coastal city with guaranteed broadband, which would you choose? I expect a large percentage of the illegals were actually trying to move closer to Finland anyway, and Arizona just got in the way.

My Soda Pop Snobbery

I'm not a huge soda drinker, but when I do buy a soda, it's likely to be something offbeat. I like trying out new flavors. The last two times I bought soda were both Watermelon Cream, the time before that was a Cucumber soda. (Before that was just a Cherry Coke - but, hey, I was at a movie theatre, so gimme a break.)

• Oogavé-brand Watermelon Cream is amazing - probably the best soda I've ever had. As the name implies, it's like a Cream soda with Watermelon overtones. Instead of Corn Syrup or even cane sugar, the Oogavé brand uses agave nectar. The result is smooth. Compared to it, other soda feels watered down. I don't mean that Oogavé is sickeningly sweet - it's about the same amount of sweetness as most sodas - it just has more body. It feels different in your mouth.They actually talk about that a little at the Oogave website, it's not just something crazy I imagined. I can't possibly recommend their Watermelon Cream too much, anyone who likes soda will probably get a kick out of it.
  
  
• Dry-brand Cucumber soda, on the other hand, is a unique experience that I really enjoyed, but is probably not for everyone. I really like the Dry sodas, but the first time I tried one it was a shock. They're not sugary at all, and have a very... well, dry flavor that's a tiny bit like a flavored mineral water. Dry is to cola, what fine wine is to budwieser. It's soda for connoisseurs with refined palettes, if you'll forgive a little snobbery on my part. Within the brand, the Cucumber is probably my favorite, followed closely by the Rhubarb soda. The Cucumber is this rich, multi-layered flavor. You swish it around, and the flavor changes as it hits all the different taste receptors scattered across your tongue and the corners of your mouth. The Rhubarb soda takes me back to my childhood, and munching on stalks of fresh rhubarb in my grandparent's backyard. Some of their other flavors are, to be honest, a little too weird for me (lemongrass? juniper berry? kumquat?), but my wife loves their Lavender soda. Dry Soda website.

I pick both of those up at my local market here in Seattle, but according to their websites, both companies are available in most of the country.

It's probably a good thing I don't live in L.A.. If I were within a reasonable distance of Galco's Soda Pop Stop, I'd definitely be a regular customer, and probably work through his 500 flavors of soda in just a few dizzy sugar-rush-fueled months. I saw this video today about the store, and thought it was awesome. (It's a 13 minute interview about obscure soda pops, so perhaps it's not for everyone, but I found it really enlightening.)



The guy inherited his father's corner grocery store. One day, while negociating with Pepsi over pricing, he realized he couldn't compete with the big chain stores down the street, and told Pepsi to take a hike. Instead, he brought in 25 different weird little microbrewed soda lines. Then he started getting customers who were coming in because his store was the only place in town that carried their new favorite drink. Let's face it, the modern marketplace doesn't favor the corner grocery store - but being the place with the crazy sodas was a niche he could adapt to. The guy stopped carrying other groceries, and just became the obscure soda specialist.

Worst bailout proposal yet

As bad as the idea of giving more money to corporate robber barons is, there's still the possibility for these bailouts to get even worse.

"As recently as last week, Democrats in Congress were discussing the wrinkles of a proposed bailout for struggling newspapers like the Times.
...

Business Week suggested wiping out newspapers' debt or subsidizing news digitization through a government-run purchasing program backed by Amazon's Kindle."

As if the major media weren't already a tool of the power elite, now we're talking about having the government pay off their debts. You think maybe they'd be unlikely to ever criticize said government again? Why not establish a new cabinet-level position called the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, while we're at it?

Never mind, I should quit my bitching. I'm 8 years late and several trillion dollars short. The major media is already beholden to the evil secret masters of the corporate state. More bribes from (or for) the power structure won't have an impact on their non-existent journalistic integrity. Instead, it's obvious that there's only one real problem with this plan, or at least only one real problem that John Q. Public will give a rat's ass about:

"But really, would you want to be forced into buying a Kindle just so a poorly managed daily paper on the other side of the country can continue to pay it's gossip columnist and Ann Coulter's syndication fee? I don't."

Perish the thought. That would be a real freakin' tragedy.

I'm not to worried about it, though. The Federal Government couldn't manage to get the majority of us to redeem coupons for free converter boxes on our all-important television sets by the time the first deadline for that came and went. How the hell does anyone think they can motivate us to all buy some kinda fancified readin' doohickey?


(quotes from Raw)

McCain manor up for auction

13 bedrooms, 10 fireplaces, 3 bars around the pool. See for yourself (again, no embed code). This is one they're selling. Probably not big enough for rolling around in all that cash they no doubt pulled out of the banks before the market went belly up.

I bid a dollar. I'd go higher, but if I owned a place like that, I'd probably be foolish enough to host a LARP again. That's not healthy.

That Man's Family (some people just shouldn't have children)

• Prescott Bush was a Military Intelligence Officer during WWI. He wrote letters home talking of his daring heroic exploits, and the medals he received for such. Turned out later, he hadn't actually won any medals or performed said deeds. He claimed he'd been joking, and didn't expect his family to tell anyone he was a hero.
  
• His name came up in congressional testimony about The Business Plot in 1934. Smedley Butler alleged that Bush was one of several businessmen planning to replace the US President with a Fascist dictatorship.
  
• The assets of one of Bush's companies, UBC, were frozen under the Trading With The Enemy Act in 1942.
• Despite those allegations and entanglements, he served as a US Senator in the 50s and 60s.
• His son, George Herbert Walker Bush, was Director of the CIA, and later Vice President and then President of the United States.
• George H.W. Bush claims to have not been connected to the CIA prior to his sudden appointment as Director. Despite such claims, there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence linking him to the Bay of Pigs.
  
• There's also an FBI memo (released via FOIA) that says he was briefed by the FBI in '63 regarding the then recent JFK assassination.
• Ross Perot claimed that the reason he dropped out of the election in 1992 was because of being blackmailed by George H.W. Bush, who had digitally altered photos that would ruin Perot's daughter's impending wedding.
  
• Some versions of that story tell it that George H.W. Bush (as Vice President) was actively impeding Perot's efforts at locating and rescuing P.O.W.'s still in Vietnam, and that Bush's interference was the cause of Perot running against him in the first place.
• Niel Bush was a key figure in the Savings & Loan scandal of the 80s.
• Niel Bush had dinner plans with his good friend Scott Hinckley on March 30th, 1981. This is important because that same day Scott's brother John Hinckley Jr shot President Reagan. Had Reagan died, Niel's father, George, would have become President 8 years early.
• Jeb Bush was Governor of Florida, where he exerted his influence in a battle over the interpretation of ballots, which resulted in the Supreme Court declaring his brother (George Dubya Bush) President.
• George Dubya Bush was President during 9/11 and related death of 3,000 Americans,
• the trillion dollar War in Iraq and resultant death of 4,000 more Americans,
  
• Hurricane Katrina and it's embarrassing absentee government aftermath,
  
• the collapse of the US Housing Market,
  
• the collapse of the US financial sector,
  
• torture at Guantanamo,
  
• extraordinary rendition,
  
• the politicization of the Justice Department,
  
• a nationwide average of over $4 a gallon in gas,
  
• the erosion of the Constitution and our civil liberties,
  
• and outright voter fraud in Ohio that is now finally getting it's day in court.
  
• Did I miss anything? It turns out I missed these:
• Outright abuse of the line-item veto.
• Record amounts of time on vacation.
• Outright abuse of "executive privilege".
• Enron scandal (involving Bush's buddy Kenneth Lay)
  
• Halliburton profiteering (involving conflicts of interest for Bush's VP Dick Cheney)
  
• Abu-Ghraib prison scandal
• enough High Crimes and Misdemeanors to fill 35 articles of Impeachment
  

How many more generations will this family be allowed to commit acts of evil against the United States and it's populace? When will we finally hold them accountable in a court of law?

TED on morality

WhatSilence clued me in to this video about the evolutionary imperatives behind morality, and how and why different groups of people view morality in different ways.

It's an eye-opening presentation, though I wish he'd pushed the biology angle a little bit further. He mentions that our brains come preprogammed, but doesn't explore to what degree that is. He also doesn't linger long enough on his foreign results - there was a spike in certain moral axis the moderates for some countries, and I'd love to visit that further.

On a related topic, I'd like to pimp PoliticalCompass.org again. Check it out. The site is visually dry, but I strongly recommend you take their test and look at the results graphs once you've done so. I'm located deep in the lower left quadrant of Political Compass's graph, which strongly correlates to where I'd rank on the 5 categories of morality mentioned in the TED video above. I learned a lot about myself at Political Compass, and about the reasons why I get so angry with politics in this country. Without having read it, I'd still be calling myself a Democrat.

Dear Reverend, (Edited)

A lot of people are driving a little bit less this year than they were in previous years. There's a number of reasons why, with some just not wanting to pay $4 a gallon, and others being very concerned about global warming. The extent to which people reduce their driving varies quite widely, too. Some folks drive just a little less than they used to, others take public transit whenever it's feasible to do so, and there's even a few folks who got rid of their cars and bike everywhere.
If you choose to bike/walk/bus most of the time, you'll rarely (perhaps never) be accused of being a hypocrite because you heated your home in the winter. People just kinda recognize that you're reducing your oil dependence in the ways that are comfortable for you, and that it's okay as long as you don't try to force them to match your commitment. They don't really expect you to go cold turkey and stop all fuel/energy consumption completely - 'cause doing so would be almost suicidal in today's world. Instead, we all recognize that it's admirable to at least reduce our carbon footprint, even when we aren't willing or capable of eliminating it entirely. It's not likely anyone would ever suggest your only options should be using 100 gallons of gas day or never using combustion or non-solar electricity at all, with no middle ground being sensible in todays world.

On a similar note:

Some people eat less than they did in previous years. There's a number of reasons why, ranging from just reducing the amount of gunk clogging your arteries, to concerns about the morality of eating animals or even logic concerning the amount of land and water needed to support an omnivorous diet. The extent to which people reduce their consumption varies quite widely. Some folks count their calories but otherwise don't really change their habits, while others eat no red meat or eat only free-range/humanely treated animals, and some folks who go vegan. It's a wide spectrum, with eating healthy at one end, and the somewhat puzzling extreme of breatharianism at the other.
So far, it sounds very parallel to those who drive less.
However, as vegan or vegetarian, you actually have to put up with people you barely know constantly giving you shit about it. I get that all the time, despite it being over 10 years since the last time I tried to convince another human being to match my commitment and stop eating meat. Yet, because I chose to remove meat from my diet, today I had the "pleasure" of being called a hypocrite by a friend because I still eat plants. For some reason, this really smart guy, and close personal friend, didn't stop to consider that some vegetarians may just be trying to reduce their impact on the world. Instead, he mocked vegetarians and implied they are insensitive schmucks for not considering the plight of the vegetable, our silent prey. He even went so far as to say that most people go vegan just because vegetables can't scream, and followed up by saying that since you can't avoid ever killing a microbe, there's just no point in not killing and eating animals.

Funny the way that double standard works, isn't it? :) I'm not mad about it, and an apology is not needed, but it seemed a reality check was in order. Dude, I love ya, but you're way off base on this one.

Edit: Which, admittedly, is probably your intent - and I'm probably too close to the issue to see the humor of your broadcast.

via

Court says money discriminates against blind people

Which is actually a big improvement over the way it used to be. In the tumultuous years directly following the Civil War, money used to do far worse things than discriminate. Not that I'm defending current practices - I think money should be ashamed of itself for what it's doing - I'm just glad that we don't see silver certificates marching around in the pointy hoods and burning seeing-eye-dogs in effigy like they used to.

"I don't think we should have to rely on people to tell us what our money is," said Mitch Pomerantz, the council's president.

"Amen" and "Me too!" Not just the Blind portion of our populace should be upset about having to rely on people telling us what our money is worth. No doubt, we're all being lied to. Down with the Federal Reserve!

The government might as well argue that, since handicapped people can crawl on all fours or ask for help from strangers, there's no need to make buildings wheelchair accessible, the court said.

And once you start down that slippery path... the wheelchairs will be sliding down hill on all the slipperiness. Even if you're a sick bastard and have no sympathy for the handicapped, at the very least self-preservation should motivate you to not create situations where wheelchairs can just fall downhill at you without warning.

The appeals court also ruled that the U.S. failed to explain why changing the money would be an undue burden. The Treasury Department has redesigned its currency several times in recent years, and adding features to aid the blind would come at a relatively small cost, the court said.

Other countries have added such features, the court said, and the U.S. never explained what made its situation so unique.

As I understand it, the big problem involves getting enough braille stamps that read "where's george".

Blunt Clarity For The Sarcasm-Impaired

via CNN:

In one, the minister said America had brought the September 11 attacks upon itself. In another, he said Clinton had an advantage over Obama because she is white. He also accused the U.S. government of adopting policies to systematically oppress African-Americans.

I was going to say something bitterly sarcastic here, but I was afraid some dumb-ass would hit this page via google search, miss the irony and feel like I supported their narrow little world view.

Then I realized even the sentence I just wrote could be misinterpreted if you didn't know who the "their narrow little world view" was referring to.

So let's be blunt and clear about a few points, for the benefit of those tuning in by means of random search-engine connectivity....

• This nation's government has done (and continues to do) many great things, but also some really stupid things.
• Many of our self-serving foreign policies and our militaristic stance of self-proclaimed "policeman to the world" encourages resentment or even hatred of the US in certain countries, and thus probably makes it easier for terrorists to recruit.
• Though we've come a long way on the domestic social front, we still have a long way to go. The rifts between various races, genders, religions, and tax brackets are real, and unfortunate.
  
• Our society sadly does favor certain classes. While those who despise Affirmative Action have a legit beef that it's "reverse discrimination", the simple fact remains that it's impact is trivial compared to the numerous daily advantages one automatically gains just by being a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male American Citizen. While my research into this is purely anecdotal, I'd wager that the average white conservative spends more time bitching about Aff Act than they spend being actually disadvantaged by it. If I'm not currently applying for college or a cushy government job, then Affirmative Action isn't inconveniencing me at the moment. If you've never applied for either, you've got nothing to bitch about. On the other hand, less than 1/100th of a percent of my DNA gives me un-asked-for societal boon in nearly every aspect of my life.
  

So, speaking as a fellow WASPMAC*: "Suck it up, whitey!"

Dune Dune Dune Dune

An oldie from the vaults, dusted off, trimmed down a tiny bit, and delivered for your entertainment... (feel free to point and gawk). Behold, the four-minute-cut of The two-minute cut of Dune:


The longer version actually played at a film festival at the Harwood Art Center sometime in the late 90's, a year or two after I moved to Albuquerque. I submitted (on a lark, with no expectations) a tape full of my work, and was floored when they chose one of my projects. What an honor, I thought. I hadn't even really been serious when I dropped it off.

Little did I know, "The Two Minute Dune" (which was what it was titled despite the nearly 7-minute runtime of that first version) was the only comedy selected for the festival. It was also the most "amateur" selection - everything else took itself very seriously. We're talking about a the above playing between "a ten-minute meditation on luxury housing in New Mexico, set to the music of Kenny G" and some other very artsy 16mm film with an actual script, skilled camerawork, and meaningful metaphor.

2-Minute Dune was the dead-center of the festival, placed, no doubt, to serve as an intermission. It was received by near-total silence. Two people somewhere in the back where laughing, but no one else got it. Some 50 other people sitting in shocked muteness. I, and the friends I brought with me, shrunk down in our seats, hoping no one would notice. That seemed perfectly normal to me at the time, but now I think it's not like any of the friends with me were even on camera. Oh well, I'm sure they wouldn't have tried to hide if I hadn't first. If I could have crawled out a trapdoor in the bottom of the auditorium, or snuck out the back without anyone noticing me, I would have.

Frankly, those shocked artistes who did not know what to make of a Sweded Dune deserved exactly what they were being forced to sit through. It's years later, and "Be Kind, Rewind" has proven me to be a pioneering visionary and most of them to be small-minded art-i-phobes.

And now, I get to share it with all of you, and even unleash it upon the world. I love the internet.

Carl tells it like it is - or so I believe.

Highly amusing diatribe from Carl Hiassen. Digital Sextant directed me to it:

In recent weeks, the Board of Education has been swamped by e-mails and letters from religious conservatives who advocate teaching creationism or intelligent design, and who believe evolution should be discussed strictly as a ``theory.''

For those who wish to see Florida standing still, if not sinking, this is a fantastic strategy. In fact, it could be expanded to revise other educational doctrines.

Let's start teaching gravity as a ''theory,'' too. And don't forget the solar system -- what proof do we really have, besides a bunch of fuzzy, fake-looking photos, that Mars really exists?

...

According to The St. Petersburg Times, one speaker compared Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary science, to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, well-known tyrants and mass murderers. Such loony gibberish is actually good for the anti-evolution crusade, providing the best evidence that the human species has not advanced one iota in the last 100,000 years.

The difference between straw man and satire is that one is funny, but the other is coy. Or maybe the other way around. Whatever. I found the above to be amusing and enlightening. Hiassen knew his target audience. He wrote to amuse his fans and piss off his detractors. I know he accomplished the former, and imagine the later was achieved as well.

I believe in Evolution, but I don't think it's honestly comparable to gravity. It's more like black holes, or the big bang, or UFOs. We are surrounded by evidence of evolution, but the evidence is not clear or immediate enough for it to serve as incontravertible proof to those who are inclined to be skeptical of it. I have faith such proof is out there (because I see it on a small scale nearly every day) but we lack the resources and technical know-how to document it on the large scale in a way that can't be questioned. The big E is the most logical conclusion, but mankind does not always prioritize logic above belief. To insist that we do so is a tall order, even in this day and age.

Who told them?

America's most literate cities
Seattle loses the top spot on this year's list of the most well-read cities in the U.S.

Well, that's what happens when you let Albuquerqueans become Seattlites. I note that Minneapolis is 1st, so there's some chance that Albuquerque will recover in my absence. I am the AntiBook. Thanks for outing me, stupid yahoo "news".

ze Benches uv Antoine Delaartiste

Back in '92 / '93 (not sure which) I was walking around campus one day, when I spotted a bench. The campus I was at was for the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, which shared a block with the Minneapolis Art Institute (or maybe that was Mpls Inst of Art, I don't recall the letter order, but I certainly felt like an MIA while there). As you can imagine, that block was packed full of artwork: sculptures everywhere, plus plenty of paintings, drawings, video footage, etc available indoors. But, I digress...

So I stumble across this bench. A very pedestrian (more so than the one pictured above) wooden and brass bench . And there's this little plaque saying the name of the artist who made it, the year of creation, the materials used, etc. Huh? It's a freakin' bench! Not that I've got anything against benches, but none of the other 20 or 30 benches on campus had those little tags. It looked different, but not exceptionally different. Why does this benchmaker get a gallery tag, and the factory workers who made all the others don't? That's not fair. Somebody deserved credit for all those other benches.

So I invented Antoine De La Artiste (sometimes Antoin, or Antwon, and sometimes Delaartiste, D'L'Artist, etc) and I made some little tags. They were parodies of the common gallery tags so commonly found on the MCAD/MIA commons. They'd say things like "Door. Antwon Delartiste. 1992. Wood, varnishe, und ze door-knob metals." I put them on every piece of furniture in my dorm room, every door to my building, every bench on the grounds, all over the damn place. And I started giving tours to my friends: "Und on ze left, you will zee ze famous bench by ze famous artiste, Antoine Delartiste. Note ze craftsmanship. Ze daring. Zis is definitively a stretch outside ze comfort-zone! Und next to it, you will zee ze other famous bench, part of ze series uv benchez..."

If I was to do one today, it'd look something like this:

I claim this internet in the name of D'LaArtiste.