eBay sellers hidden profit source?

Jon, my virtual landlord, has had a love-hate relationship with eBay for a while. This morning, the "love" phase seemed short and under-used:

Bought a magazine yesterday. Four bucks. Seemed like a good deal. Auction notes that out-of-USA losers should ask for an invoice to get their shipping rate. Thinking that shipping would be, oh, I don't know, another four bucks or so, I figured what the hell, and use the Get Reamed Up The Ass Now button to buy the thing.

Shipping?

Twelve bucks.

Frig.

Thinking that this was, perhaps, a one-time thing — just a spot of bad luck — I looked around today for another book that I would like to have. Found the book. Brand-new reprint of a rather old book for twenty bucks. Again, a decent deal. Shipping to Canada? Twenty. Two. Dollars. So, no book for me.

No wonder there's a recession, the dumb wankers.

Speaking of wankers: I took at look at the new Schwarz plane book and thought "what the hell." So I started the online ordering process. Shipping to Canada for the book and a set of DVDs (on a topic that shall remain nameless)? Thirty. Two. Dollars. Cap-and-trade this, wood-boy. I did not proceed with the order.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

Humph.

I've found some eBay sellers like this: they seem to feel that the extra labour of filling in a customs sticker requires them to make a profit of 2-3 times the actual cost of shipping. After getting burned that way once, I've always been careful to check shipping costs before bidding.

When I requested Jon's permission to use his email on the blog, he replied with this:

I guess so. What I sent is not nearly as memorable as the first draft, though. I originally had something in there about how, after Obama nationalizes their health care, I hope the eBayers all get scrofula and schistosomiasis and itch for the rest of their lives; but then I looked up scrofula and schistosomiasis to confirm the spelling and decided that wishing those on anyone, no matter how much they distend my rectum with their take-it-up-the-ass shipping rates (Rectum?! Damn near killed him!), was just a bit over the top.

How addicted to the internet are you?

Lore Sjoberg provides you with an easy checklist to discover how bad your addiction may be:

If the ancient Egyptians had the internet, there would have been 11 plagues in Exodus, with “unreliable DSL” tucked in between the frogs and the lice.

It’s a pain when your DSL goes down, but the bright side is that it gives you a chance to rate yourself on the Internet Dependency Scale. Just compare your actions to those listed below and you’ll know what sort of pathetic digital symbiont you really are.

Stage 1 Internet Dependency

Immediate reaction: Check the wires, see if you can steal a neighbor’s Wi-Fi, then get up and do something else.

What you do while waiting for the connection to come back: Read a book, watch a movie, go for a walk. Is this a trick question?

If it doesn’t come back in an hour: Call your service provider, then go back to whatever you were doing.

Tall photographer/Swedish girl gang mashup

Trust The Register to be on top of shocking stories like the "tattooed Swedish devil girls who jumped a cyclist":

Well, by an amazing coincidence, El Reg had its roving snapper on the streets of Örebro on 8 July, and although he was able to capture the action, his images were subsequently lost - for reasons which will become evident.

We did, however, get in touch with the Great Satan of Mountain View which, by an even more astounding coincidence, happened to have an Orwellian black Opel prowling the leafy suburbs of the Swedish town on that very day.

Google eventually agreed to provide its original uncensored Street View images of the assault, which we have forwarded to the appropriate authorities in the hope the merciless vixen attack pack might be brought to justice.

With bonus linkage to yesterday's photography story.

Political mashup cartoon

Tweeting California

Gerard Vanderleun sent this tweet last night, which ideally captures the destiny of California:

"The salvation of Calif. will be partition. The south gets Hollywood and Tiajuana. The North: All the water and marijuana."

Update: Bonus USA twitterage from Ghost of a Flea:

"My American cousins: Congratulations on cap-and-trade. You are now to the left of Canada."
"WAY to the left of Canada.

Movie review of the year

It's not a movie I was ever likely to see, so it took a really amazing review to catch my attention:

Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.

Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review — except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.

[. . .]

Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.

[. . .]

Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.

To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.

Cars, again

Cruise gets "Coshed"

One of the most brilliantly snide movie reviews I've ever read:

Valkyrie: Well, the son of a bitch did it. He found a way to make you cheer for Hitler.

Full list of mini-reviews here.

It's finally here: Duke Nukem Forever

For the humour-impaired . . . Duke Nukem Forever is the Flying Dutchman of game design. It was supposedly "in development" for over a decade with absolutely nothing to show for all the time and money put into the project. You might consider it the anti-Gold Standard for software development.

A glimpse of the near future

Over at Wired, they're previewing artifacts from the near future, like the "Curiously Smart" Altoids from 2017:

QotD: Coyote vs Roadrunner

If I had time for retweet theater, I'd use this: "Breathes there a man who, against his better judgment and prior experience, has not attempted to adjust a lawn sprinkler while it's running?" (exactly 140 characters, too!) Yet we try, over and over again, thinking we will outrun the sprinkler, or avoid a spritz in the puss. This is why men identify with the Coyote, not the Roadrunner. And well we should; a canine's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's an ACME catalog for? The Coyote paid sales tax on those items, I'd wager; the Roadrunner paid no taxes for the highways he used.

At least the coyote tried to solve a problem with technology instead of running around all day like an idiot.

James Lileks, Bleat, 2009-05-29

Scary, scary stuff

For all the talk about President Barack Obama's historic first 100 days in office, too little attention has been paid to what could happen next...

Now, from the horror masters behind The Auto Bailout, The Stimulus Package, and White House Poetry Night, comes a story of true terror...

128 Days Later: It Can Always Get Worse.

Candid Royal Camera

"It's good to be the, er, Prince."

Baloo's "Great American Show"

P.J. O'Rourke's retrospective buzzkill

If you read P.J. O'Rourke's well known paean to the joys of teenage insanity (aka "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink"), you probably want to stop after reading Part 1 of Sobering Up Behind the Wheel:

"Part 1" above was published in the National Lampoon in 1978 or '79 when I was half my age. To not despise yourself when you were a twerp of 31 requires a more philosophical mind than this old fart possesses. The more so when that twerp was right. And he — that is, I — was right, especially about getting married, having a family, the mortgage, the liver, and the Country Squire (or, as it turned out, the SUV). Of course I didn't marry the teenage lovely in the tube top.

(Gosh, tube tops . . . As Alzheimer's creeps upon me, please God, let that be the last memory I lose.) True love and common sense intervened to make sure that I gained a beautiful spouse who can read and write and stuff and who does not want to drive from Boston to Mexico without stopping at several Ritz-Carltons. The other reason I didn't wed the teenage lovely in the tube top was that she didn't exist. I mean, she existed. I saw her every day on the summer streets of New York. But she didn't see me. I was dweeby, Brooks Brothers-clad, and invisible to her ilk. And so I have remained these thirty years. All for the best, I suppose.

xkcd's latest Firefly riff

Click to see the whole comic

News bulletin from a universe just next door

Damian Penny (who still seems to be managing to stay away from blogging) sent along this link from a dimension where Sarah Palin was elected President last November:

The first 100 days of the Palin presidency, according to a consensus of media commentators, have proven a near disaster. Perhaps it was Palin's scant two years' experience in a major government position that has eroded her gravitas, or maybe it was her flirty reliance on looks and informal chit-chat. In any case, the press has had a field day, and it is hard to see how President Palin can ever recover from the Quayle/potatoe syndrome. Here is a roundup of this week's pundit mockery.

LET THEM EAT MOOSE
"Ted Stevens may have gotten off," wrote Bob Herbert in the New York Times, "but he taught our Sarah something first — like using $100-a-pound beef for her state dinners. And what’s this $50 mil for her inauguration gala? Since when do you fly in your favorite pizza-maker from across the country on our dime? Or send the presidential 747 for a spin over the Big Apple for a third-of-a-million-dollar joyride? Does Palin think she's still in Alaska and has to have everything flown in from the South 48 by jumbo jet?"

WASILLA CHIC
Also in the Times, Gail Collins weighed in on the already-tired yokelism of the new commander in chief. "What we're getting is Wasilla chic. That's what we're getting. She arrives in the Oval Office, and first thing sends back Blair's gift of the Churchill bust as if it's a once-worn Penney's outfit. Then she gives the Brits some unwatchable DVDs as a booby prize — as if she idled the old Yukon and ran into Target's sale aisle. Did Sarah send Bristol into Wal-Mart back in Anchorage for that 'engraved' iPod for the queen? And what's this don't-bow-to-the-queen stuff, but curtsy for a Saudi sheik? Maybe that explains why she brags to Stephanopoulos about her 'Muslim faith.' So far, the best things going for her are Todd's biceps.”

As Damian says, "Americans sure dodged a bullet by not electing that Palin idiot, didn't they?"

QotD: The down side of emigration

It is always better to stay where you are and face the music. Even if the music in question is the tinkling of your broken sitting room window or the screams of other prisoners in the showers or the gristly, gooey sound of your fingernails coming out.

The fact of the matter is this: every single person who ever moves to another country — with the exception of America where you go to grow — is a failure. Seriously, no one has ever woken up and said: "I am completely happy. I have a lovely family, many friends, a great job and plenty of savings. So I shall move to Australia."

It's always the other way around. "My wife has left me. My children don't want to know. The divorce cost a bundle and I don't have any mates. So I shall move to Oz." That's why they call us whingeing poms. Because the poms they get do nothing else.

Jeremy Clarkson, "Stand still, wimp - only failures run off to be expats", The Times, 2009-03-29

Dogs and their diet

James Lileks covers some local politics in Minnesota, sliding over into the dietary interests of canines (s'okay, there is a common point):

This week in lawmaking: Our elected reps spent an hour debating a requirement to post signs warning consumers that cocoa mulch is poisonous for dogs. Like a knucklebone eaten by a Pekinese, it passed, narrowly. In case the House wraps up early and still feels frisky, here are some other things dogs eat:

The meatless skeleton of a chicken dragged from the garbage in the dead of the night.

The federal tax code, if dipped in gravy.

You, if it comes to that, and you're not in a position to argue.

And so on. Dog's mouths are nature's version of Amazon's One-Click: Me Want/Me Have. Many years ago my dog harked up a straight pin an inch and a half long. I stared at the mess in amazement — are you auditioning to be a circus sword swallower? A pin? Branching out into the metal food group now? He was saved by the wisdom of his stomach, which serves as the closest thing to a conscience a dog will ever get.

Old car articles, revisited

P.J. O'Rourke has a new book coming out called Driving Like Crazy. Andrew Wheeler offers his initial review:

The most debilitating disease that can strike an aging writer isn't cancer or alcoholism or writer's block — no matter how many writers each of those has felled over the years — but the insatiable desire to argue with and correct his own younger self, the urge to redo and fix all of the things he now thinks he did wrong the first time through. That urge led Wordsworth around in circles, endlessly bulking up The Prelude while avoiding work on the much longer work it was supposed to be a prelude to. It led Asimov and Heinlein and many others to tie up loose ends — much better left loose — in earlier works, and countless others to clean up and rewrite and expurgate books that suddenly didn't look as exciting and vibrant as they had when they were written.

And now the same fever has struck P.J. O'Rourke; Driving Like Crazy is a collection of his writings on cars — mostly from the early 1980s — rewritten and reorganized and stuck together to resemble a book with a single narrative . . . which, of course, it can't be. He was smart enough to know that he couldn't touch his classic essay "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink" — which leads off this book, after the new, depressive introduction, "The End of the American Car" — but he throws in a new piece on essentially the same subject immediately after it to take a few jabs at his younger self, and, more subtly, to point out to the reader that the younger O'Rourke is not to be trusted and wasn't having nearly as much fun as he said he was.

In spite of the caveats, I'll almost certainly end up buying this one . . . although I have found the earlier P.J. O'Rourke books to be more entertaining reading than the more recent ones (Holidays in Hell and Parliament of Whores are both excellent).

Good news for Yankee fans

According to this report, the Yankees are reducing ticket prices:

Slashed Ticket Prices Allow Lesser Nobility To Attend Yankees Games
Dukes, barons, viscounts, and earls are applauding the Yankees' recent decision to cut prices on dugout and foul-line field-level seats in half, from as much as $2,500 per game down to an amount the minor houses consider far more reasonable.
"Naturally I am quite pleased to attend my very first Yankees game, a spectacle that my merely adequate standing had until now denied me," said His Lordship the Duke-Chancellor of Arkengarth-upon-Settle, who often listens to Yankees games on satellite radio while tending to his 683-square-mile estate in Wales. "Until now, I have had to satisfy my sporting curiosity in less costly arenas, often hosting three-day fox hunts or airplane races upon the grounds of our family estate. But by mortgaging only half my landholdings, I am finally able to see the Yankees play the Red Sox." [. . .]
Her Britannic Majesty the Queen of England Elizabeth II, Duchess of Lancaster and of Normandy, Lord High Commander of the United Kingdom and Defender of the Faith, has not held Yankees tickets since the spring of 1982, when they were sold to pay for the Falklands War.

I like this "blog"

Ken Olsen sent a link to "this" blog. I'm "happy" to "share" it with "you":

The cost of keeping pets

Jeremy Clarkson knows something about the hidden costs of keeping pets:

As Mr Darling and Mr Brown continue to ruin the economy, people are having to ponder on what they can no longer afford. And many, according to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Animals, have decided the family pet must go. Apparently 30 animals a day are being abandoned at the moment. Almost 60% up on last year. [. . .]

There is no doubt that some pets are extremely expensive to run. My labradoodle requires a professional shampoo and blow-dry after every rain shower. My golden lab is kept alive with nothing but cash. And the electricity bill for the fox-zapping fence that rings my chickens’ enclosure means that every egg they produce costs roughly £1m.

And then we get to the horses. I have spoken to my wife about turning them into glue but she maintains they are not luxury items at all, and that the only reason she burns the various equine bills is because they are too trivial and small to file away and keep.

Hmmm. They have sweet itch constantly and as a result are always draped in yashmaks that must cost £800,000 each. Plus they need new shoes every two days, and a visit from the psychiatrist every time they see a paper bag in a hedge. And that’s before we get to the fact that their absolute favourite food is the wooden post-and-rail fence that keeps them in the paddock. In a single night, they can eat about 500 yards of it. And fencing is unbelievably expensive to replace.

To stop them doing this, I have painted the new sections with a virulent chilli oil, but it turns out that what they like even more than wooden fencing is wooden fencing smothered in chillies.

I would estimate that the cost of keeping the horses where they belong, preventing Brer Fox from eating the hens, running a lab to hatch the eggs, blow-drying the dogs and retrieving the sheep that ramblers like to chase into the sea at my holiday cottage is about £4 billion a year. I definitely spend more of my earnings on animals than on my cars. Far more.

New technology for diagnosing flu

Craig Zeni sent along these two new sites, which can help you self-diagnose if you suspect you may be coming down with some form of flu: http://doihavepigflu.com/ and http://doihaveswineflu.org/.

Snark of the week

By way of a link from Radley Balko, the most snarky comment thread you're likely to find this week:

[From the posting by P.Z. Myers] Words fail me. What is a doctorate in homeopathic medicine? A blank piece of paper taped to your wall?

[Anonymous]: No, a doctorate in homeopathic medicine would be a blank piece of paper soaked in a 1:10,000,000 tincture made from the ink of an actual doctor's diploma.

[CJO]: It's in a 6-foot tall stack of blank diploma-sized parchment leaves. Damned if anyone can find it, but it's in there somewhere, trust me.

[W. Kevin Vicklund]: Take a doctoral degree, copy at 1% "darkness", copy the copy at 1%, etc. for a total of 100 copies. The final one is the one taped to the wall.

[JDStackpole]: You heard about the homeopathy patient who died from an overdose?
...
...
He skipped taking his meds one day.

QotD: The office

Not many people lie on their deathbeds wishing that they had spent more time in the office. Ah, the office: the mournful gloaming under the fluorescent strips, the monotonous swish of the photocopier, the "ping" as e-mails arrive from bullying bosses, work-shy colleagues, and backstabbing rivals. Much of it is little better than spam. In fact, spam is a blessed release: a missive from another world, sent by a transparent crook and wasting no more than a second or two. Real e-mail also comes from time-wasting criminals, but takes a lot more effort to deal with.

Tim Harford, The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World, 2008

QotD: Events

It was a Friday afternoon. Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere, 1996, 1997.

Cataclysmic feedback loop barely avoided

Over at The Register, Lester Haines reports on a near-disaster:

[. . .] following the first spot of what we have dubbed a "surveillance feedback loop", we received further examples of the watchers being watched by the watchers who in turn find themselves being watched on Street View.

Our initial plan was to pin these incidents to a new Web 0.2 mashup, but no sooner had we connected the first test shot back on itself using a Street View link to create a self-referring closed reciprocal photographic image bounce, than someone from the Vulture Central particle physics lab ran screaming to the server room and hit the very big red button which closes down all third-party apps.

The reason, we gather, is that by plugging a surveillance feedback loop into the internet, it's possible for the logic resonance to grow at an exponential rate to such a degree that it becomes self-aware within twenty minutes and rips apart the very fabric of time and space in a desperate attempt to escape into a dimension where Google doesn't own absolutely everything.

H/T to Craig Zeni for the link.

I LOL'd

With all xkcd comics, make sure you mouse-over the image for the alt-text commentary (or if your browser doesn't show alt-text . . . "They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioural easter eggs is a fair retaliation").

QotD: Weird Al honoured

Apparently SNL has just bestowed upon me the highest honor imaginable — my name has become a metaphor for masturbation. So proud.

Weird Al Yankovic, Twitter, 2009-04-12 01:46

Email users by their choice of provider

PC World's Thomas Wailgum diagnoses the kind of webmail user you are by your choice of service:

@mac.com
An Apple Fanboy to the extreme, you have either an elegantly-designed tattoo of Steve Jobs on your body or an iPod pocket sewn into all of your clothing.

Typical user: Usually found in the hippest non-chain coffee shop, typing on a US$3,000-precision-aluminum-unibody-enclosed MacBook Pro, white earbuds in proper position and iPhone 3G at the ready. And if Apple invented a laptop with a cumbersome wheel instead of a keyboard, you'd buy it. Fact.

QotD: Australia's Anti-Tourist Board

You probably know most of the cane toad story already because my country of origin, in order to ensure that its high standard of living should not be threatened by a population of excessive size, has a kind of anti-tourist board dedicated to making Australia look less attractive than it might be in the eyes of the world. After World War II, the anti-tourist board spread stories through overseas outlets about Australia's teeming range of poisonous spiders and snakes.

There were stories of the red-back spider that hides under the toilet seat to avoid publicity, and the taipan snake that was so poisonous it could kill a man on a horse after killing the horse, and would do both these things unprovoked, because it liked publicity. The anti-tourist board was scarcely obliged to exaggerate.

Australian spiders and snakes are really like that. So you're a prospective migrant and you're afraid of getting bitten a little bit? What are you, a man or a mouse? If you're a mouse, you've got no business going near a taipan anyway.

More recently, the anti-tourist board positioned its enormous influence behind a film called Australia, which was plainly designed to put immigrants off going to Australia by presenting, at enormous length, a prospect of a country where nothing happened except a 150,000 cattle moving slowly across the parched landscape, each beast pausing for an individual close-up at any moment when the director thought the pace was too hectic. But the most reliable weapon in the armoury of the Australian anti-tourist board has always been the story of the cane toad.

Clive James, "Raising cane", BBC News Magazine, 2009-04-10

When auto designers do drugs

See some of the least successful efforts of automotive design at the Peterson Automotive Museum:

1974 Highway Aircraft Corp. Fascination
Paul M. Lewis founded Highway Aircraft in 1962 with the dream of building "the economical, safe, smog-free, modernistic, quiet, easy-to-handle, easy-to-park car millions of people want." He built five of these instead.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

I liked the Fascination, but I was perhaps more impressed by the Amphicar 770, which somehow achieved the impossible: an amphibious car with Lucas electrical systems (Lucas was a British manufacturer with an enviable reputation):

• The Lucas motto: "Get home before dark."
• Lucas is the patent holder for the short circuit.
• Lucas - Inventor of the first intermittent wiper.
• Lucas - Inventor of the self-dimming headlamp.
• The three position Lucas switch - Dim, Flicker and Off.
• Q: Why do the British drink warm beer? A: Because Lucas makes their refrigerators

The perfect gift for your friends with the aluminum headgear

Dave Slater suggests that these would be appropriate gifts:

Now wouldn't you feel like a twerp if you happened to get abducted by aliens . . . and don't have a way of finding your way home afterwards?

QotD: Paranormal phenomena in Science Fiction

Most folks who read my science fiction novels probably notice that, unlike Star Trek, Star Wars, or Babylon 5 (to name three examples), I never write about phenomena like telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition. There are reasons for this. Chief among them is that psychic doings make bad writing entirely too easy. Paint yourself into a corner, plotwise? Then have your hero teleport out of it.

Another is that science fiction deals in real possibilities, based on our understanding of the universe, and the way science has let us learn and do more every century. I write about starships because I have reason to believe we'll have them someday. I also think faster-than-light travel will be possible, perhaps even time travel. The most fantastic thing I write about is the possibility that someday we might be free — yeah, I know it's a stretch, but the possibility is there, nonetheless.

However psychic phenomena are an altogether different kettle of gagh. Very early in my life, I realized that, if such power actually existed, there wouldn't be a single politician or religious leader on this planet left alive and standing above his charred and smoking shoetops.

L. Neil Smith, "Zenna", Libertarian Enterprise, 2009-04-06

The horrific consequences of failing to pay your taxes

Rednecks for drug legalization

Best April Fool pranks?

Jesse Walker asks Hit & Run readers for their favourite April Fool's Day pranks:

FrBunny
In college I staged a serious 04/01 sit-down with my boyfriend of three weeks to tell him I was post-op.

My ego has never recovered from the fact that he seemed to believe it without much convincing...

Pro Libertate
ThinkGeek has some funny fake products today, including Squeez Bacon (bacon in a bottle from Sweden), an ice dagger mold, a Tauntaun sleeping bag with a light saber zipper, and a wristband that shocks you when you speak certain buzz words.

Warren
NPR started a great one this morning. They reported that the Justice Department is seeking to toss out the conviction of former senator Ted Stevens. Ted "series of tubes" "bridge to nowhere" Stevens lost re-election after being convicted of corruption.

It looks like most of the big news outlets have bit on this one. Ha ha ha ha

Oh wait...

Matt
Here in Boston, they were talking on the radio about the new "10 and 2" law, which means a $100 ticket for anyone caught driving without both hands on the wheel. This being Massachusetts, I actually thought it could be true.

SugarFree
You know some jerk congressman heard that and thinks it sounds like a good idea. The radio guy should get sued by anyone fined after it becomes a law.

Unfortunately, the comment thread went off the rails after that post.

Update: Of course, the new Gmail Autopilot™ is full of win.

The Guardian accepts the future, moves towards it

You can call the old Grauniad a lot of things, but old-fashioned is no longer appropriate — they're converting to Twitter:

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

• Newspaper to be available only on messaging service
• Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters

They're twitterating their entire archive, too:

1927
OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise *sigh*

1940
W Churchill giving speech NOW - "we shall fight on the beaches ... we shall never surrender" check YouTube later for the rest

1961
Listening 2 new band "The Beatles"

1989
Berlin Wall falls! Majority view of Twitterers = it's a historic moment! What do you think??? Have your say

You'd have to admit that it really does capture the essence of Guardian coverage, wouldn't you?

Decoding the publishing world

Tomas Christensen provides a Rosetta Stone for determining exactly what is meant by certain key terms used in the publishing world:

ANTHOLOGY: An artifact that has been superseded by stacks of velo-bound photocopied pages, usually unnumbered and with text cut off at the edges, known as CLASS READERS.

AUTHOR: A large class of individuals (approximately three times as numerous as readers) serving a promotional function in book marketing or providing make-work for editorial interns.

AUTHOR BIO: A piece of creative writing whose length varies inversely with the attractiveness of the person depicted in the AUTHOR PHOTO.

AUTHOR PHOTO: Pictorial fiction. Authors always choose photos that emphasize that quality in which they feel most deficient.

AUTHOR TOUR: A hazing ritual intended to make authors compliant to their publishers.

H/T to Lois McMaster Bujold.

Coping

Rachel Manteuffel recounts her unsettling discovery that, even at 21, she still hadn't quite finished growing:

Puberty is such a strange thing to happen to people. Up to that point, you've been growing your whole life, but in a reasonable, measured way — you can do more things each year, but you're still the kid with the high voice. You're figuring out what books and TV shows you like, what makes you laugh that doesn't make your mom or your best friend laugh. And then your body changes completely. It's not what you remember, and it has nothing to do with you, really. It's like meeting your roommate on the first day of summer camp: Aaand this will be your body! You guys are going to have so much fun together!

And mostly, you do. But meanwhile, you're an introspective kid whose body suddenly starts screaming SEX at innocent passersby. You conceal your agents of fascination in any way you can — or you get tired of hiding and flaunt. And you start noticing that the guys you know are suddenly smelling really good. The breasts, though, get involved physically around Step 28 in the mating dance. Because at this tenuous moment in your development, Step 4 makes you blush uncontrollably, and you aren't likely to need your breasts in that capacity for quite some time, but there they are, waving like a red cape in a pasture full of bulls. They're your trump card but hardly a secret.

Meanwhile, they're still there, attached to you, as you go about your mundane life. Exercise affects them the way the tyrannosaurus affected the glass of water in "Jurassic Park." Sports bras are a maddening false promise: Above a cup size B, they are all marked for "low-impact" exercise, as if, for a woman above a B, there were any such thing. Breasts move if they want. They are extravagant, unserious things, largely parasitic, except for their application to certain steps of the survival of the human race. Otherwise, their main activity is to florp.

However, Rachel managed to cope:

Adolescence requires rebellion, and, if you happen to have large breasts, you might as well rebel against the Hooters-waitress cliche you are apparently destined to become. So I did, vowing that what's going on above my shoulders would forever and always be just as interesting as those things below. I would take intellectual charge of them — observe them anthropologically. Make up witty comebacks to "Are those real?" (I have never been asked, but if I am, I am ready. I will say, "No, you made them up.") Sure, some people will still call you "The Man Show" behind your back, and occasionally a guy will rollerblade into a tree in your presence. That could be coincidental.

But what I realized is that my reaction to puberty — fury — drove me further inside my head, which subsequently became a wild place, headquarters for my internal resistance movement.

I would dress strategically, which is to say, demurely, except at those times when I would not. In other words, I would always be in charge. I would not be soft. I would not bounce. I wouldn't lean an inch forward to get what I wanted. My lack of physical subtlety would be balanced by thoughts I determined to make impenetrable. I am not easy, in any sense.

Stare all you want; you'll have no idea what's going on in my head. Because if you're staring, I am probably thinking that I could smother you and make it look like an accident.

Harsh? I know. But with a rack like this, you can't be a doormat.

H/T to John Scalzi for the link.

QotD: The 60's Generation

Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next." I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.

We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything — which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes — we wore them. Weird beards — we grew them. Weird words and phrases — we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

P.J. O'Rourke, "Fairness, Idealism and other atrocities: Commencement advice you're unlikely to hear elsewhere", L.A. Times, 2008-05-04

Funny Baa-studs

H/T to "Deep Freeze" Dave Slater.

What's The Onion been up to lately?

Jon, my virtual landlord, clearly has been spending a lot of time over at The Onion, from which he recommended the following items:

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work

Jon said "Hey, I have one of these!"

Jon also said "I am pertty sure that [this is a] Section 13 violation in Canada:"

In The Know: Are Reality Shows Setting Unrealistic Standards For Skanks?

QotD: Cereal-ity

No wonder this Irish trickster-spirit always reacted to the sight of children by saying "they're after me Lucky Charms." They had a history, going back to the very first encounter [. . .] I always sided with the Trix rabbit, too. It made no sense that he was denied Trix. Why? Some international convention, perhaps? Interpol has expressed its concern that the rabbit might have Trix. Great lesson for kids: you may be small, weak beings with few legal rights, but at least you’re not the rabbit. Laugh at him! Smack the bowl from his paws! It’s okay.

Lucky Charms was, and is, my favorite non-grown-up cereal. I don’t care if it’s compacted grain nodules studded with sucrose-dusted styrofoam; I love it. Whenever my parents knew I was coming home for the weekend, my Mom would always have a box of Lucky Charms in the cupboard. I still buy it when it’s on sale. The rest of the childhood cereals I’ve left behind, including King Vitamin — that stuff was like eating a mouthful of jagged metal. You brushed your teeth after that, and when you spat it was like a a boxer gobbing in the bucket after six haymakers to the jaw.

James Lileks, "Evening Commercial Break: Yellow Moons", Bleat, 2009-03-06

How do you say "gaffe" in Russian?

Tom Kelley sent me this link on an unfortunate translation error which may further degrade US/Russian relations:

After promising to "push the reset button" on relations with Moscow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to present Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a light-hearted gift at their talks here Friday night to symbolize the Obama administration’s desire for a new beginning in the relationship.

It didn’t quite work out as she planned.

She handed him a palm-sized box wrapped with a bow. Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift — a red plastic button on a black base with a Russian word "peregruzka" printed on top.

"We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" Clinton said as reporters, allowed in to observe the first few minutes of the meeting, watched.

"You got it wrong," Lavrov said, to Clinton's clear surprise. Instead of "reset," he said the word on the box meant "overcharge."

I'm guessing that there'll be a vacancy in the State Department's translation bureau by Monday morning.

Whole thing here.

USMC expands recruiting guidelines

The United States Marine Corps may have quietly changed their guidelines for recruiting to allow older recruits to join . . . or they've had some database normalization issues lately:

Still a couple of weeks away from retirement, Opal Blackwell Walker already has received another job offer.

The 79-year-old Crestview woman says the Marines has expressed interest.

Last Monday, recruiters from New Jersey sent a letter to Walker by Federal Express.

"I had to sign for it. It was sent priority overnight," she said.

The letter from the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Recruiting Command asked Walker if she thought she had the stuff to be a Marine.

"It says 'Dear Opal, Do you think you have what it takes to be a Marine? Are you prepared for one of the most demanding challenges you will ever face?' " said Walker.

"The fact is, if you have the fortitude, confidence and will to improve yourself, then the Marine Corps may be right for you," she continued.

"This just floored me," Walker said. "I thought, ‘well it's some kind of joke. Somebody's trying to play a joke on me.' "

The Crestview resident hasn't contacted local recruiters yet.

Social networking sites

A Completely Unscientific (Yet Accurate) Look at Social Sites:

Yep. Seems pretty accurate to me. H/T to John Scalzi.

Sending the Veep some lovin'

"Here's to you, Mr. Plagiarizing, Gaffe-Prone, Hair-Plug-Wearing Vice President."

A different kind of agony aunt

Don Childers indulges in a bit of "Dear Babby":

Dear Babby,

A dear friend of mine has been married to the same worthless lout forever. She's miserable in the relationship, and of course that means I hear all the messy details.

To begin with, he doesn't work, so he takes half of every paycheck, right off the top. He gives some of it back to her to help with the kids and such, but most simply gets spent for this and that. When she asks where it went, he just gives her some lame excuse and holds out his hand for more.

He also doesn't leave her much privacy. She knows that sometimes he listens in to her telephone conversations and reads her email and mail. There are some places she's not allowed to go at all, and he insists on inspecting her before she goes to some others. [. . .]

Read the whole thing.

Ask your economist if Stimulis is right for you

The trials of a military musician

A friend of mine, formerly in the Canadian Forces, recounted some of the fun and games of being a musician in the military:

There were a couple of times where the powers that be wanted us to play outside in the cold. Like -15 to -20 C. So we took all took our horns with us /in/ the bus and made sure they were very warm. As soon as you get out into the sub-sub temps, the warm air in the horn condenses and the horn the freezes solid instantly. No more playing outside.

At those temperatures (much colder than it was in Washington for the inauguration) brass mouth pieces will suck the warmth out of your lips very quickly. Lots of us had mouthpieces with plastic rims. Much easier to play in the winter. Small brass instruments weren't too much of a problem in the cold cause the players' hands would be warm enough to keep the valves from freezing. "Hot Shots" or some other such hand warmers as hunters use could be wrapped around the valves to keep them from freezing as well. Trombone slides were brutal, because they act just like the cooling tubes in a radiator. We used to use rubbing alcohol generously to aid in keeping slides moving.

In the military we couldn't keep our mouthpieces in our pockets because there was no prescribed movement for "pocketing mouthpieces". Fiddling with pockets wasn't one of the approved stances (such as "attention" or "at ease").

We were doing a Change of Command Parade for the Airborne Regiment. Outside, in January at -20C. Horns were all frozen solid before we even got to the parade square. Even split a drum head or two.

When we arrived at the parade, we all had our greatcoats on and were all bundled up as toasty as can be. Then the boss saw that the Airborne weren't wearing greatcoats, so he had us take ours off. Of course, none of us were wearing warmer clothes under our uniforms. The Airborne were prepared, and of course, had several layers of warmer clothes under their dress uniforms. So our boss, who was not the most confident guy in the world, had us move off the parade square into the lobby of a barracks facing the parade square, and had us play from in there with the doors propped open. Not professional, and very embarrassing for the band. We were standing behind a row of Cougars when they did a "feu de joie" where they basically do a 21-gun salute with their cannons. Very loud in the frigid air. Concussion from the guns made the doors to the lobby close. The boss was outside the doors trying desperately to get into the building, but he was wearing his leather oxfords and slipping and sliding all over the place while the guns kept going off...

Ok, well, perhaps you had to be there. But seriously think about it. Freezing cold. The boss was flapping wildly around on the ice outside of the building...

Well, you get the idea.

Apple doesn't approve of "Wobble"

According to The Register, Apple is unhappy with the marketing of the iPhone application "Wobble":

Apple has ordered the developer of the iPhone Wobble application to remove the words "boobs" and "booty" from his publicity, despite selling more than 20,000 copies of the epically pointless app.

Jon Atherton took a call from a "nice fellow in developer relations" at Apple who told him those two words are not acceptable promotional terms and must be removed. However, a quick search of iTunes reveals 161 titles with the word "boobs" and more than we could be bothered to count featuring the word "booty", though interestingly "Bulgarian airbags" doesn’t get a single hit.

When questioned about the disparity between music tracks and applications, the Apple rep told Jon that he was only calling to discuss the Appstore and couldn't comment on iTunes policy.

The video in question (safe for work, mostly):

Bud Light Ad Parody

H/T to Dave Slater.

The Mom Song

H/T to Maarten Vis for the link.

The return of the revenge of the Interior Desecrators

James Lileks has reposted the original Interior Desecrators site:

Tired of your dated, hippie-crap wallpaper? Here's how to get it off for nothing! Invite over a really straight friend. Slip some LSD in her drink. Put on a 45 of "White Rabbit" and set it to play over and over and over again. Just when your friend starts to trip, say "This is what the inside of Jerry Garcia's prostate looks like." Then leave the room and lock the door.

Come back in an hour, and she'll have scraped all the wallpaper off with her fingernails! Works better than messy solutions or steamers, and the blood washes right off.

Or it blends in with the furniture!

Invest wisely

Michael Pinkus offers some sage financial advice in these tough times:

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.00. With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1000.00. With WorldCom, you would have had less than $5.00 left. If you had purchased $1000 of Delta Air Lines stock you would have $49.00 left. On the other hand, if you had purchased $1,000.00 worth of wine one year ago, drank all the wine, then turned in the bottles for the LCBO recycling REFUND, you would have had $214.00. Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.

Amusing, but I suspect that the quality of wine you could buy that would return $214 in bottle deposits would more than counteract any pleasure you might feel in being so economical. (20 cents deposit per bottle, so over a thousand bottles . . . retailing for less than a dollar per bottle! Your liver would never forgive you.) I suspect a decimal place got moved in the original calculation . . . perhaps after a few too many under-a-dollar bottles of wine?

QotD: Why men don't like spas

Then there's the overwhelming feeling of disappointment and pointlessness that comes when you get a masseur who doesn't work your soft bits hard enough. You know this from the very first touch when his/her pressure is akin to a tentative stroke of a friend's new puppy. Great, you think. Now I am going to have to lie here for the next hour, with no trousers on, basted like a Christmas turkey, bloody Enya simpering away in my ear, while some failed hairdresser rhythmically tickles away at my flabby parts as if petting a consumptive hamster.

[. . .]

Why don't men know how to spa? Well, we feel awkward, adiposal and clumsy. We feel vaguely absurd, incongruous and, frankly, rather appalled that we have surrendered to that chink in our masculinity that is required to get us through the door of one of these establishments.

If we sign up for treatment at a mixed facility, the experience is never anything less than sweat-inducingly humiliating. The girls on the reception desk appear to be making fun of us as we fill in the health questionnaire, the throwaway sandals are at least four sizes too small, and the gown is comically short in the leg and arm. We don't have the nous to say exactly what we want because we don't want to appear overly expert in such arrant girliness.

It is almost impossible to make things pleasurable for any man who isn't a spoilt, self-serving, over-indulgent Premier League footballer. The environment is skewed towards the type of narcissism that makes most men squirm. We simply do not know the form, and to cover our arses (quite literally, in those shorty gowns), we start to act like nervy, cowed saps, doing as we are told and never asking any questions.

We certainly can't relax. If it's a massage that we are in for, we are concentrating so intently on not farting or entering a state of visible arousal that our bodies tense up like England footballers during a semi-final penalty shootout. That is bad enough if the person doing the massage is a woman. If it's a man's fingers on us, the tension is trebled.

Simon Mills, "Why real men don't like spas: Ill-fitting gowns, whale songs and lavender candles... no wonder many men struggle with the spa experience", TimesOnline, 2009-01-24

Corrupt and lightweight

H/T to Craig Zeni.

DARPA's contribution to a better world

The Register takes the time to poke fun at both the new Obama administration and DARPA:

As we're all now fully aware, the world officially became a lovelier place* on 20 January when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th prez of the US of A — a heartwarming ceremony at which he promised sunlit meadows in which children might gaily gambol, just as soon as he'd dealt with this pesky global economic apocalypse.

Obama also laid out his multicultural agenda, describing America as "shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this earth", and expressing his hope that "the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve".

This obviously rang a bell down at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), previously described by El Reg as "the legendary Pentagon barmy-boffinry bureau", and which recently suggested to the president it could fix the US economy.

Of course, DARPA's activities under president #43 — including laser energy cannons, invulnerable killbots and other high-tech dispensers of death are not exactly what's required to bring peace and prosperity to even the humblest African village.

Cue, then, the quite sensational rainbow stealth aircraft, caught here (or here on Google Earth) uncloaking over Tangier island in Chesapeake Bay:

Update: Comment thread enabled.

Advertising's final frontier

Gregg Easterbrook discerns a trend, based on the announcement that the New York Times will accept advertising on the front page for the first time in its 158th year:

WASHINGTON (January 20, 2022). Speaking at the White House Presented by Gazprom, Eli Manning, the CVS 46th President, said today the United States would begin to accept advertising on fighter planes, naval vessels and Air Force One.

"Just think, the next time I fly to an international conference to be jeered, your company's name and logo could be right next to the stars-and-bars on Air Force One," Manning said. "Call me in my sales office and I personally will handle your order." As for ads on the sides of military aircraft and warships, President Manning said that none of the generals in the Lockheed Martin Air Force have objected, nor have admirals for the Cunard Navy 'N' Caribbean Fun Line.

U.S. government agencies and officials began to accept advertising in 2016, the final year of the Boysenberry Diet Pepsi Barack Obama Administration, after the federal deficit exceeded the Citibank Gross Domestic Product. "The bailouts of Lexus, Tiffany and the Harvard endowment were bad enough," said a White House source who asked to be identified only as someone who finds it easy and convenient to buy office products from Staples. "Unlimited direct federal subsidies for country clubs, yachts and private jets was, in retrospect, a misjudgment," the source continued. "But the bankers told us they would refuse to lend unless they had free country club memberships. We had to do it, no one under any circumstances is allowed to question a banker!"

Speaking from the CNN/ESPN/BBC/Nigerian State Television White House Press Room, framed by adverts for toothpaste, pizza delivery and drive-through colonoscopies, President Manning strongly denied critics' claims the United States is for sale. "We cannot be for sale, the Beijing Investment Trust already owns 51 percent of our preferred stock," Manning said. Negotiations are ongoing to find new investors willing to inject funds into the Capital One United States Treasury and Payday Loan Service, in hopes that Treasury bills will be raised back above junk-bond status. "Until that happens, you can still use your Treasury bills for discounts at Quiznos," President Manning reassured Americans.

In other news, Lands End First Lady Abby Manning lit the national Christmas tree, signaling the festive start of the 2022 Christmas season.

QotD: Bad SF/Fantasy Writing

[Responding to the question "what turns you off in SF/Fantasy reading:] Egregiously bad science. Backgrounds that don't hang together (vampirism should not be ancient, secret and prone to spreading like a virgin field plague. If starship navigators are rare and die after a dozen trips, there should not be a large population of tramp starships. Ideally, one should not equal two and the standard method of landing a spaceship should not be the crash-landing).

The number one thing that turns me off is when it becomes clear that the author considers most humans a waste of valuable meat. See Bova's Titan where it's clear most of the humans in the Saturn system have no productive value, despite being a collection of scientists annoying enough to have been sent almost 10 AU from home, or David Marusek's Mind Over Ship, which includes this little rant:

"So who needs people? People are so much dead weight. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing . . ."

James D. Nicoll, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2009-01-17

Star Wars, sorta

Joe Nicolosi asks his friend Amanda (who's never watched a whole episode of Star Wars) to recount the story. Here's nearly four minutes you won't get back:

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it) from Joe Nicolosi on Vimeo.

Turning TV Scifi to Movie dreck

John Scalzi risks everything to point out that it's a rare TV show that can survive the transition to the big screen. In particular, he enrages one particularly enthusiastic fan-base:

Speaking of fans, I've just marked myself for death among the "Browncoats" for suggesting that Serenity, based on the TV series Firefly, might somehow have been a miserable failure. The Browncoats love their favorite series with a passionate fervor that is usually reserved only for religious icons or the Green Bay Packers, and will not brook the idea that the series and the movie based on it were popular flops, even though the show didn't last a single full season and the movie had a terrible $10 million opening weekend. "Well, Fox didn't know what to do with the series!" they'll exclaim. "Universal didn't market the movie correctly! It did great on DVD!" Yes, yes. I know, Browncoats. Come here, have a hug. Would you like a tissue? No, that's okay, you can keep it.

Lesson: It's great to have loud, passionate fans of a series, but they're only worth $10 million in opening weekend box office. Also, making a movie out of a TV series no one but hardcore fans saw? Not a recipe for popular success.

Scalzi'll need bodyguards for the next few SF conventions he attends. Real ones, not just guys in Star Trek security costumes. Browncoats aim to misbehave.

QotD: Next leader of North Korea

Tyrannical dictator, action star (Team America: World Police), and opera theorist Kim Jong Il has reportedly named number-three son his successor to lead the world's worst country. As of press time, it was not immediately clear what the twentysomething Kim Jong Un had done to warrant such punishment.

Nick Gillespie, "Change North Koreans Can Believe In", Hit and Run, 2008-01-15

Fark.com headline of the year (so far)

Source article here. Fark thread here.

Martin The Mess: Hmmm...I sort of follow this area of research as an interested amateur (why certain physical features and character traits are considered sexually attractive, and the hormones and genes linked to them), and I can recall a couple other hormones and genes supposedly discovered to be responsible for all these traits. Couple that with the whole "Hey, if we call this the Marilyn Monroe gene, do you think we can get mainstream press coverage" tone of the piece, and the ridiculously named expert "Dr. Frances Quirk", I'm getting a strong whiff of shenanigans off this article. On the other hand, Professor Quirk does indeed seem to be a faculty member at the college in question, according to a quick web search.

Remember a few months ago when Jessica Alba's publicist had a story planted that claimed that scientists had calculated the most perfectly desirable waist-to-hip ratio for a woman, and it exactly matched Jessica Alba's, making her the scientifically-certifiable hottest woman alive?

DaSwankOne: In other news: Rich guys like to have sex with hot and horny girls, giving more attractive women the chance to "trade up" if they want to.

Son of Thunder: Damn! Is there any way we can petition to get this stuff added to the water supply like fluoride?

Not so fast. TFA also says that the hormone is associated with dissatisfaction with their current partner and a tendency toward upwardly-mobile serial monogamy. Fark is already a haven for bitter chronically-rejected beta males, so I doubt that widespread distribution of this hormone would be so great an idea.

(But, y'know, that doesn't include ME or anything. Alpha all the way. I'd explain more but I gotta be at the gym in 26 minutes.)

A Firefox review

Jon, my virtual landlord, had to troubleshoot some problems with Firefox the other day. This is the non-confidential part of the summary:

Just a note to let you know that I have installed the latest version of WebWorks Publisher and have created some test output. The Firefox problem with the "initial" links in the Index is still present — clicking on a letter at the top of the Index pane does not jump to the corresponding section in the Index.

It works in IE 7.0.5730.13, Chrome 1.0.154.36, Opera 9.25, and Opera 9.63 (but with some display issues due to how Opera interprets table cell backgrounds). I also tried it on Linux (Knoppix) and found that it works on Konqueror 3.5.5 and Iceweasel 2.0.0.1.

My analysis: IE, Chrome, Opera, Konqueror, and Iceweasel are fine browsers, crafted with care and an impressive commitment to professionlism and compatibility. Firefox is a fetid swamp of bugginess, plagued with poor code written by guys who probably have trouble finding their way home at the end of the day. Actually, that last part most likely is not true; they have no problem finding their way home at night because they have never left home; they still live in their mother's basement, where they spend their time writing sloppy code. One can imagine their pathetic simpering as they chortle to themselves with every release: "Ha ha ha! Look what I am going to do to thothe WebWorkth Publisther utherths!"

If he'd included a reference to shit waffles, he'd be getting a call from Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw about intellectual property infringement.

Dvorak's hate note to the spreadsheet

You think you dislike Microsoft Excel or some other spreadsheet package? You probably still think more highly of it than noted curmudgeon John Dvorak does:

2009 marks the 30-year anniversary of the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet program. And society as a whole has deteriorated ever since its invention. It was the spreadsheet that triggered the PC revolution, with VisiCalc the original culprit. Can anyone say that we've actually benefited from its invention? Look around: I think we've suffered.

For one thing, the spreadsheet created the "what if" society. Instead of moving forward and progressing normally, the what-if society questions each and every move we make. It second-guesses everything. Because of the spreadsheet we've been forced to "do the numbers" whenever possible; once the numbers are in the spreadsheet, the what-if process can begin.

In fact, the spreadsheet has resulted in the rise of the once-lowly accountant/bean counter to a position of influence — and often the executive suite. How often in years past — the pre-spreadsheet era, that is — did an accountant take over a company? When and why did the CFO become a title? These people, at best, were once known as comptrollers.

The spreadsheet became a sword, and the accountants knew how to wield it.

QotD: Marketing Obama

On that historic evening in November, as Barack Obama definitively made passé the notion that we cannot, the president-elect’s acceptance speech signified a triumph not just for his campaign but for motivational wall décor. Like a Successories catalog made flesh, Obama invoked burning beacons, long roads, steep climbs, and new dawns. He was lofty, he was declamatory, he was as aesthetically challenging as a majestic golf course on a crisp autumn morning. And yet his well-worn rhetoric managed to move multitudes. Could it be that all those corny corporate psalms to Character and Service, the ones hanging in regional sales offices and telemarketing call centers across the nation, have touched us more deeply than we realized?

Greg Beato, "The Successories President: The posterized secret of Obama's success?", Reason, 2009-01-13

Lileks quests for glasses

As I'll be soon shopping for new glasses, I have sympathy with James in his never-ending quest for something that doesn't look too dorky:

This prescription was never right, and had to be changed several times. It's the nature of the diagnosis: it's up to me to tell me if the prescription is right. Better? Worse? Better? Slightly better? Incrementally better? I don't know! You have the fargin' shingle on the wall, you tell me! The first prescription was weaker than my previous one, and I couldn't quite understand why I would want weaker glasses. Obviously I'm not walking up to strange women and telling them their lingerie tags are crimped up, and that must be uncomfortable. I don't have super-vision. Can't see through walls. Garrison Keillor's logic, yes, but a mole with an eyepatch could do that.

But they stepped me down, and I wandered around in a fog and a haze for a week before I went back, pointed to the sign on the wall that said I was guaranteed satisfaction, and asked for a different prescription. Whereupon they guided my hand to the actual position of the sign; I was pointing at the bathroom door. Which only made my point stronger.

I was never happy with the final results, and got my money back. Went three stores down in the very same mall, tried another place, got "hipper" glasses, and they were just as bad. Or so I recall. At that point I'd just given up.

Scott Brown: depressing tour guide

Scott Brown takes us on a guided tour of the near future:

It's a typical morning in 2011: I start my day by bumming a few joules off a pal's bicycle generator to power up my BlackBerry and surf over to FoodTube, where starving viewers like myself salivate over clips of the "carbo-rati" noshing on hoarded snacks. (I try not to read the comments: "omg she is such a ho for eating that Combo!" "shup azz! u go girl! eat dat Combo!") One stray click and I'm rickrolled, prankishly diverted to the now-familiar footage of Rick Astley being devoured by a pack of London cannibals.

I decide to use my remaining juice to log onto Facebook, which has been looking frightfully gaunt since the Identity Panic of '09. (Friends? Who can afford friends now anyway?) Millions of "Favorite Albert Brooks Movies" lists and "Hero Abilities" requests were decimated, and we were left scrambling for whatever chums were left on Orkut. (This was before the Linden dollar crashed and Second Life avatars started jumping out of windows—and not flying.) I'd check my email, but browser-based email is a thing of the past: Vagabond freeconomic refugees now communicate by personal ad, and sex acts are routinely traded for, say, maki rolls and Pilates classes. (Craigslist, it turns out, is largely unaffected by the Awesome Depression.)

Dejected, I head downtown, a busted Guitar Hero ax slung over my shoulder. On the corner, a pack of surly former programmers dressed in surplus CES hoodies are warming their carpals around a single dingy Dell. I give them a wide berth. Farther on, a ramshackle Cubeville has sprung up in the parking lot of a burned-out Ikea. Delirious drones sit at cardboard desks and pretend they still have office jobs to complain about, tapping out "IMs" on their "keyboards"—old pizza boxes.

A modern update to Strunk & White

Just when you thought it was all randomly generated, we now discover that those entertaining offers of erectile dysfunction drugs, pornography, and free electronic devices actually do follow a formal style guide:

Elementary Rules of Usage

1. Form the possessive of nouns by adding 's, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything.

My wifesd*porcupine hot pix for u.

11. A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.

Upon receiving this couppon, the free iPOds will greet you!

The introductory phrase modifies you, not iPOds; therefore, it is necessary to recast the sentence.

Upon receiving this couppon, you will be greeted by the free iPOds!

Or, better still (see Rule 14).

This couppon entitles you to greetings from the free iPOds!

H/T to Stewart Dean.

Travel Tips for Visitors to Britain

Giles Coren offers some useful hints for visitors to Britain:

1 Do not pay full price. When shopping in Britain, bear in mind that the price marked is only a guide, it is always best to haggle.

Prices in Harrods, for example, may look ridiculously cheap to you, but locals cannot afford to pay even this much and if you pay more you will make life harder for them in the end. Do not damage their frail local economy with your powerful rupees.

2 When speaking to staff in shops, hotels and restaurants do not expect them to be solicitous, kind or helpful. What do you think they are, your bleeding butler? Effing nerve. What did your last servant die of?

3 If you do decide to make some purchases, do not forget that Savile Row suits and shirts from Jermyn Street may seem incredibly good value and look great with a tan when you're in that holiday frame of mind, but all that ethnic tat can look pretty ridiculous when you get it home.

4 Never ask a salesperson for help finding an item in your size or preferred colour - they will merely stare at you blankly as if you are an escaped lunatic and then tell you that everyfink is out on the floor. If you absolutely insist that they go and check the stockroom they will walk round a random corner, count to 30 and then go on a tea break.

5 Do not expect to find a full range of products in shops. Most shops in Britain are in receivership and merely flogging off old stock before being boarded up.

[. . .]

7 Take a good supply of colourful pens with you to give to the children who will flock around you asking for presents. And if you want to be really popular then give them knives, British children treasure these more than anything.

To confirm all of your suspicions about "abstract art"

Aelita Andre is having her work included in an abstract art exhibit at the Brunswick Street Gallery. This would not be particularly newsworthy, except that it came to light that Aelita is 22 months old:

Back in October, Fitzroy commercial gallery director Mark Jamieson was asked by a Russian-born photographer whose work he represented to consider the work of another artist. Nikka Kalashnikova showed Jamieson some abstract paintings by an artist called Aelita Andre; Mr Jamieson liked what he saw and agreed to include it in a group show, alongside work by Kalashnikova and Julia Palenov (also a Russian) at his Brunswick Street Gallery later this month.

Mr Jamieson then started to promote the show, printing glossy invitations and placing ads in reputable magazines Art Almanac and Art Collector, in which the abstract work was featured. Only then did he discover a crucial fact about the new artist: Aelita Andre was Nikka Kalashnikova's daughter, and she was then just 22 months old. She turns two tomorrow.

"I was shocked and, to be honest, a little embarrassed," Mr Jamieson said of his response to the revelation.

He thought hard about whether or not to proceed, and talked it over with his colleagues. "And then I thought, 'Well, we'll give it a go'."

Mr Jamieson says the Brunswick Street Gallery has a policy of supporting emerging artists, though that policy doesn't usually extend to artists quite so young. He stands by his decision to show the work but concedes some people will think the gallery is doing the wrong thing.

To be fair, Mr Jamieson deserves some credit: if he genuinely believes that the art is of professional quality, it should qualify to be shown with other abstract art pieces. I'm hardly a fan of that style of art myself, so I'm indulging in a little quiet amusement, but if someone is willing to pay (their own) good money for it, great. I'd be much less amused if it was a public institution putting taxpayers' money on the line, of course.

Update, 12 January: Very much related:

A controversy recently erupted in Sweden over an article published by the philosopher, Roger Scruton, in a magazine called Axess. He argued in it that Western art no longer had any spiritual, let alone religious, content; indeed, it had become afraid of the beautiful, from which it shied away as a horse from a hurdle too high for it. The result was a terrible impoverishment of our art.

The same magazine had published, shortly before, an article about Islamic art in which the author said that such art was inseparable from the religious ideas and beliefs that it embodied. This passed without remark: no one wrote in angrily to say, 'So much the worse for Islamic art.'

Professor Scruton's suggestion that western art had become impoverished as a result of its radical repudiation of anything transcendent in human existence in favour of the fleeting present moment, however, exasperated and infuriated the professional art critics of Sweden — as, indeed, it would have done the art critics of any western country. They reacted with the fury of the justly accused: for it is the professional caste of cognoscenti who have consistently applauded the trivialisation of art and its relegation to the status of financial speculation at best, and a game for children showing off to the adults at worst.

Belated 2008 retrospective, in song

H/T to "IllCentral".

It's funny because it's true

The writer's craft: sex scenes

Sailor Jim discusses the difficulty of writing about the penis in sex scenes (caution: NSFW):

"There are some literary subjects that have become total clichés and attempting to describe an erect penis is one.

"I am writing a sex scene and my hero is now crossing the room while fully erect. So, basically, his stiff dick is bobbing lik e a demented conductors baton as he crosses the room . . . however, one cannot simply write, 'He crossed the room, his stiff dick bobbing like . . .' and so forth. Well, one could if one was writing that sort of scene (and one was half plastered), but this one cannot.

"To write anything referring to his 'turgid manhood' is also somewhat tacky. Hell, just the term 'manhood' to describe the penis strikes me as idiotic. A dick is no more one's 'manhood' than a hymen is one's 'maidenhood.' 'He strutted across the bedroom, his hard manhood pointing the way' sounds somewhat he owns a badly named seeing-eye dog. 'Sit, Hard Manhood . . . good boy.'

Al's gift to Toronto

Steve McIntyre pulls out the old story of how Al Gore saved Christmas for Toronto back in 2006, when it looked like snow was a thing of the past:

Nobody knew what do. Except for one little girl. (Hey, it's a story.) She wrote to a famous ju-ju man in the South asking him to come north and cast a magic spell and make the snow return.

The ju-ju man heard the plea of the little girl. He quickly decided that the situation was far worse than even the little girl thought. This needed his most powerful magic and, so in 2007, he visited Toronto not just once, not just twice but three times.

The magic worked! Soon Toronto was covered up in winter snow. The ju-ju man could only save part of the 2007 winter, but by 2008, his magic was in full force. Yesterday's snow made 2008 snowfall the highest since 1883, with a few days still on the clock.

And we owe it all to Al, the southern weather wizard!

H/T to Tom Kelley for the link.

For you is no iBoobs

As reported at The Register, iPhone and iPod users will have to struggle on without this little application:

An application that allows iPhone users to wobble a pair of breasts has been rejected by Apple's application store, denying iPhone geeks the nearest thing to sex they'll get this holiday season.

The application was rejected on the grounds of "objectionable content", though with the caveat: "If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that iBoobs does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so." Though it's hard to see how that wouldn't detract from the core proposition:

The app was developed by Mystic Game Development, and we have to accept the possibility that it was done just to demonstrate their character animation middleware - in which case we can only congratulate them on a job well done.

Everyone's getting in on the action

H/T to Reason Hit and Run.

QotD: The extra-traditional holiday season

Almost every civiliztion in human history has had a midwinter holiday — a time when somebody finally said, "I'm sick of this lousy, miserable, depressing weather, let's light some candles, maybe even a bonfire, roast something large, get drunk, and sing and dance!" — and the earliest such holiday that my research has disclosed so far is Zagmuk.

Zagmuk commemorates the triumph of the Babylonian god-king Marduk over the Forces of Chaos (so I guess Marduk was an early incarnation of Maxwell Smart). I suppose that it's possible — no, it's absolutely inevitable — that earlier people, perhaps Homo neanderthalensis, or at least the inhabitants of 8000-year-old Catalhoyuk, beat the old Babylonians to this idea, but for now, what we've got is Marduk and Zagmuk.

So, in whatever manner you choose to celebrate it, a very Happy Zagmuk to you and yours, from me and mine. And because those ancient Babylonians apparently drank beer and wine, we hoist a bowl to you! Like Marduk, may we all overcome the Forces of Chaos in the year to come!

L. Neil Smith, "A Message From The Publisher", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-12-21

QotD: Perfume

Most people don't realize just how intensely personal scent is. It interacts with the chemicals in your skin, so perfume that smells divine on one person (or in the bottle) can smell horrid on another. I have a friend who swears by the Philosophy line of scents, which make me smell like I've been ripening for decades in a nursing home.

Megan McArdle, "Holiday Gift Guide: Girl Stuff", Asymmetrical Information, 2008-12-17

Swift environmental action to save trees . . .

. . . er, oops:

Green campaigners called police after discovering an illegal logging site in a nature reserve — only to find the culprits were a gang of beavers. Environmentalists found 20 neatly stacked tree trunks and others marked with notches for felling at a beauty-spot in Subkowy, northern Poland.

[. . .]

A police spokesman said: "The campaigners are feeling pretty stupid. There's nothing more natural than a beaver."

H/T to Radley Balko, who writes that "they may have violated some wetlands regulations, too."

QotD: Modern Culture

Global imagination, like global climate, seems to have cycles — natural, man-made, or whatever. Sometimes what people imagine for the future is bogged down in the literal — call it "blogged" for short. The last thousand years of the Roman Empire, for example, were no great shakes. The Romans had all the engineering necessary to start an industrial revolution. But they preferred to have toga parties and let slaves do all the work.

The Chinese had gunpowder but failed to arm their troops with guns. They possessed the compass but didn't go much of anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.

And here we are in 2008. Name an avant-garde painter. Nope, dead. Nope, dead. Yep, Julian Schnabel is what I came up with too. But it's been a quarter of a century since he was pasting busted plates on canvas. He's making movies now. And movies are famously not any good anymore. Name a great living composer. Say "Andrew Lloyd Webber" and I'll force you to sit through Cats and Starlight Express back-to-back. Theater is revivals and revivals of revivals and stuff like musicals made out of old Kellogg's Rice Krispies commercials, with Nathan Lane as "Snap." More modern poetry is written than read. Modern architecture leaks and the builders left their plumb bobs at home. The most prominent contemporary art form is one that is completely unimaginative (or is supposed to be): the memoir.

To top it all off, we have just experienced perhaps the greatest technological advance in the history of humans. And what are we using the Internet for? To sell one another 8-track tapes on eBay and tell complete strangers on Facebook the location of all our tattoos. And, apparently, to tell ourselves what to do with the groceries we just bought.

P.J. O'Rourke, "Future Schlock", The Atlantic, 2008-12

SF books as they should have been titled

Eric Oppen sent these links to one of my mailing lists. They're too good not to share (if you don't read SF or Fantasy, this may not make as much sense to you, though):

MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits

MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits, Part Two

MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits, Part The Last

Some of these are flat-out brilliant:

Childhood memories

James Lileks casts his mind back to childhood, where mothers could cause incandescent levels of embarassment to their sons:

When I was growing up Jane Russell was the old lady in the bra ad. It lifts and separates! It's an 18-hour bra! These were mysterious concepts. What happened after 18 hours? Did it burst into flames? Did it drop and smush? Even the word PLAYTEX was strange, like some sort of moist clay-like plastic.

Bras are very unnerving to boys of a certain age. A trip to the department store often meant some red-faced time in Bra Land with Mom, looking up at acres of bras hanging like scalps from some strange war only adults knew about.

Bailing out Detroit

Jon sent me a link to Iowahawk's latest car ad:

All new for 2012, the Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition is the mandatory American car so advanced it took $100 billion and an entire Congress to design it. We started with same reliable 7-way hybrid ethanol-biodeisel-electric-clean coal-wind-solar-pedal power plant behind the base model Pelosi, but packed it with extra oomph and the sassy styling pizazz that tells the world that 1974 Detroit is back again — with a vengeance.

We've subsidized the features you want and taxed away the rest. With its advanced Al Gore-designed V-3 under the hood pumping out 22.5 thumping, carbon-neutral ponies of Detroit muscle, you'll never be late for the Disco or the Day Labor Shelter. Engage the pedal drive or strap on the optional jumbo mizzenmast, and the GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition easily exceeds 2016 CAFE mileage standards. At an estimated 268 MPG, that's a savings of nearly $1800 per week in fuel cost over the 2011 Pelosi.

Even with increased performance we didn't skimp on safety. With 11-point passenger racing harnesses, 15-way airbags, and mandatory hockey helmet, you'll have the security knowing that you could survive a 45 MPH collision even if the GTxi SS/Rt were capable of that kind of illegal speed.

Which reminded me of Chip Bok's comic from last week:

QotD: Shooting Zombies

Seriously, man. I'm doing them a favor. They're zombies, after all. It's not like they have rich internal lives. The time for book clubs and PBS has passed for them, you know? And anyway, there's something oddly soothing about going to a high place with a scoped rifle and picking off their shambling asses. I wouldn't say it's a zen thing (it seems inadvisable to use the word "zen" with anything involving firearms), but it does get you into a contemplative frame of mind. At least until the zombies figure out where you are and swarm you. But until then: Bliss. I can't think of anything better.

Oh wait, I can: If they were Nazi zombies. Yes.

John Scalzi, "Man, If Blowing the Heads Off of Zombies With a Scoped Rifle is Wrong, I Don’t Ever Want to Be Right", Whatever, 2008-11-19

Opinion polling, explained

Newspaper readers

So what do we call the sodding island, anyway?

Believe it or not, I'm all in favour of not offending people (unintentionally). I try to avoid terms which I know have caused offense, wherever possible. Given that, I still don't quite know how to respond to this, however:

The word 'British' can be as offensive as 'negro' and 'half-caste', according to a race relations body.

The publicly-funded organisation's views have been adopted by Caerphilly council in South Wales for a leaflet advising staff on how to deal with the public.

In a section on what words or phrases not to use to avoid causing offence, the leaflet solemnly informs the council's 9,000 workers: 'The idea of "British" implies a false sense of unity — many Scots, Welsh and Irish resist being called British and the land denoted by the term contains a wide variety of cultures, languages and religions.'

Many Canadians object to being called "American" by ignorant Brits. Er, I mean "subjects of the United Kingdom". Er, oh, that offends people who don't recognize the crown . . . how about "inhabitants of the British Isles", oh, that won't do . . . perhaps "the north-western European island that isn't Ireland"?

So, we have a bit of a nomenclature issue:

• They can't be called "British", because that offends the Welsh, the Scots, the Rom, the Manx, the Faroese, the Shetlanders, the Lapps, the Bangladeshis, the Jamaicans, the Nepalese, the Fijians, and the Irish.

Supplementarily, you can't call it "Great" Britain, because that implies that other countries are not great, and that's offensive.

• Calling 'em "English" is right out: that's a good fight-starter in pubs across both major islands. Even the ones born in England seem to avoid the term.
• If they're Scottish, you can call 'em "Scots", but not "Scotch" (which is a whisky . . . not a "whiskey").
• If they're from Wales, you can call 'em "Welch" or "Welsh", unless they object (it's sometimes difficult to tell if they're objecting or if there's been a sudden shortage of vowels and they've been forced to double-up on "f" and "l" to compensate).
• If they're Irish, you're usually safe referring to them as "Irish".
• Nobody will put up with being called "United Kingdomers".

I ended up asking around in the office and only got two answers. Co-workers of Welsh and Polish ancestry agreed that the only way to refer to the "Island formerly known as Great Britain" was "Sharia Island".

A tough act to follow

Election lists, Scalzi style

John Scalzi is busy posting election lists. Here's number 3: Things Sarah Palin Has Shot Or Would Shoot From a Helicopter:

1. Wolves
2. Coyotes
3. Arctic foxes
4. Deer
5. Giraffes
6. Tortoises
7. Dolphins
8. Salmon
9. Katie Couric
10. That son of a bitch that divorced her sister
11. Kittens
12. Whoever made that Photoshopped picture of her in a bikini, holding a rifle
. . .

And don't miss People/Things I Would Vote For President Before I Would Vote For John McCain. Bob Barr made number 2!

QotD: Motorbikes

What I'm trying to say here is that, yes, bikes and cars are both forms of transport, but they have nothing in common. Imagining that you can ride a bike because you can drive a car is like imagining you can swallow-dive off a 90ft cliff because you can play table tennis.

However, many people are making the switch because they imagine that having a small motorcycle will be cheap. It isn't. Sure, the 125cc Vespa I tried can be bought for £3,499, but then you will need a helmet (£300), a jacket (£500), some Freddie Mercury trousers (£100), shoes (£130), a pair of Kevlar gloves (£90), a coffin (£1,000), a headstone (£750), a cremation (£380) and flowers in the church (£200).

In other words, your small 125cc motorcycle, which has no boot, no electric windows, no stereo and no bloody heater even, will end up costing more than a Volkswagen Golf. That said, a bike is much cheaper to run than a car. In fact, it takes only half a litre of fuel to get from your house to the scene of your first fatal accident. Which means that the lifetime cost of running your new bike is just 50p.

Jeremy Clarkson, "Vespa GTV Navy 125", TimesOnline, 2008-10-19

Posted by Nicholas at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)

The "Tate" of the union address

An interview with meaningful impact. Brilliant delivery.

Episode 3: Policy Warrior

"Worried about the viability of Social Security? Unless you're already collecting it, you should be! Follow the animated adventures of Sonny, exactly the sort of youth who is set to get screwed by a system designed during The Great Depression, when workers were plenty and retirees rare. In Epsiode 3, "Policy Warrior," Sonny, John McCain, and Barack Obama compete in various game show contest and learn that a few tweaks aren't going to save anybody's retirement account."

Planning an escape to Canada?

Brilliant, just brilliant.

H/T to Diogenes Borealis (by way of SDA).

Advice for photo editors

Megan McArdle links to this helpful post providing guidance to photo editors on how best to select images to accompany various levels of market droop.

T-shirt politics

Ronald Bailey links to Teach the Controversy, for those of you who love to get your disputes right out in front of you:

'Big Science' is always suppressing The Truth with their blatant pro-evolution anti-wacko agenda: from the fact that UFOs built the pyramids to the reality of creationism and fact the universe is "Turtles All The Way Down". It is time to fight back and urge schools to Teach The Controversy with these intelligently designed t-shirts.

Weird Al: cultural pioneer

Weird Al Yankovic is far from being "thoroughly disposable":

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Yankovic's first music video, "Ricky," in which he reimagined Toni Basil's "Mickey" as an ode to I Love Lucy. The clip introduced the world to an accordion-playing spaz with a coif like Rick James and a voice like an urgent goose. Though many people at the time considered Yankovic to be thoroughly disposable — just another Reagan-era fad, like parachute pants or the Contras — he never went away. In fact, Yankovic had his biggest hit just two years ago, when he reworked Chamillionaire's rap hit "Ridin'" as the geek-pride anthem "White & Nerdy" ("X-Men comics, you know I collect 'em / The pens in my pocket, I must protect 'em"). The song was Yankovic's first track to break the Billboard Top 10.

But Yankovic isn't just popular. He is also the unlikely forefather of the infectious, hyperlinked, quasi-referential comedy that's become the lingua franca of the Web. Yankovic's influence can be seen in the slow-jam pinings of Obama Girl, the cross-cultural pairings that turn Yoda and SpongeBob SquarePants into hardcore rappers, and in the nimble hands of that couch potato who farts out "Bohemian Rhapsody" with his palms (1.8 million YouTube views and counting). You can even detect traces of his style in the perfectly metered wordplay of "Lazy Sunday," the 2005 Saturday Night Live short that earned YouTube — and viral humor — its first barrage of mainstream attention. "Ever since I was old enough to listen to music, I've been listening to Weird Al," says 30-year-old "Sunday" cocreator Andy Samberg. "For my generation, he's a huge influence."

QotD: Bush Administration: Special Victims Unit

I guess fighting one elective war isn't enough for the Bush administration. Or the Senate. Or the media.

But it's pretty clear that the White House, helped by a codependent Congress and media, has yet again manufactured a consensus for massive intervention. The last time they managed to pull this off, of course, the United States invaded Iraq. And that has worked out so well that they've decided to start a brand extension or spin-off series: Intervening massively into the economy. The bailout package as Bush Administration: Special Victims Unit.

Think about it and the parallels are disturbing: a high-ranking, respectable, above-the-fray cabinet member working the ropes to achieve bipartisan cooperation; a pliable Congress where appeals to patriotism always trump appeals to principle (sadly, those two things are almost always construed as oppositional); and a media that is fueling the fire (the dread MSM's role in spreading the Bush admin case for war has been pretty well-documented; in terms of the bailout, the most hysterical champions for intervention have been in the print and TV press). Time magazine's next cover story, I learned watching Morning Joe this AM on MSNBC, is actually an essay on "The New Hard Times" and compares our current day to those of The Great Depression. Ominous parallel or coincidence: In the Depression, people formed lines for free soup; today, people form lines to . . . buy iPhones?

Nick Gillespie, "The Iraq War, but This Time as Economic Pearl Harbor", Hit and Run, 2008-10-02

P.J. O'Rourke on mortality

I'd wondered why there hadn't been much sign of P.J. O'Rourke during the U.S. election marathon, especially given how much raw material for political humour was being produced this year. Apparently he's had a bit of a health scare:

I looked death in the face. All right, I didn't. I glimpsed him in a crowd. I've been diagnosed with cancer, of a very treatable kind. I'm told I have a 95% chance of survival. Come to think of it — as a drinking, smoking, saturated-fat hound — my chance of survival has been improved by cancer.

I still cursed God, as we all do when we get bad news and pain. Not even the most faith-impaired among us shouts: "Damn quantum mechanics!" "Damn organic chemistry!" "Damn chaos and coincidence!"

I believe in God. God created the world. Obviously pain had to be included in God's plan. Otherwise we'd never learn that our actions have consequences. Our cave-person ancestors, finding fire warm, would conclude that curling up to sleep in the middle of the flames would be even warmer. Cave bears would dine on roast ancestor, and we'd never get any bad news and pain because we wouldn't be here.

But God, Sir, in Your manner of teaching us about life's consequential nature, isn't death a bit . . . um . . . extreme, pedagogically speaking? I know the lesson that we're studying is difficult. But dying is more homework than I was counting on. Also, it kind of messes up my vacation planning. Can we talk after class? Maybe if I did something for extra credit?

Bumper stickers of the future

More here.

QotD: Cruise ships

I have never been on a cruise ship, but I'm intrigued by the concept. I enjoy travel, but I'm not so sure I enjoy traveling. My favorite travel generally involves sitting around somewhere new and reading, and generally there's an awful lot of fuss and bother required just to be able to sit and read among majestic glaciers or ancient Mayan ruins.

So you can see why the cruise ship model compels. It's not so much going places as going to a single place, and then that place goes places. It is travel without movement, a Zen koan with a seafood buffet.

Lore Sjöberg, "Silliest Cruises for Seafaring Geeks", Wired, 2008-09-24

Amusing "Cease and Desist" notice

John Scalzi links to this NSFW cease-and-desist notice that may or may not be actually from Ann & Nancy Wilson to John McCain:

Cease and Desist, You Old Fart

Dear John McCain,

When we first learned your campaign was using our admittedly awesome 1977 classic "Barracuda" to introduce your terrifying joke of a running mate, we tried to be civil. As we wrote in our press release, "The Republican campaign did not ask for permission, nor would they have been granted that permission. We have asked the Republican campaign publicly not to use our music."

It gets a bit, um, earthier from that point onwards.

"Bad move on my part" says Krugman

Radley Balko links to this highly entertaining little moment from an "Intelligence Squared US debate on state-provided healthcare:

PAUL KRUGMAN
And private insurance? That's the thing, I — Actually, can I just — I wanted to ask a question. And —

JOHN DONVAN [MODERATOR]
Please — please do —

PAUL KRUGMAN
— and I wanted to ask, actually two questions, to the audience. First, how many Canadians, would Canadians in the room please raise your hands. [ONE PERSON APPLAUDS, LAUGHTER]

JOHN DONVAN
We have about seven hands going up —

PAUL KRUGMAN
Okay, not as many as I thought. Okay, of those of you who are not on the panel who are Canadians, how many of you think you have a terrible health care system. [PAUSE] One, two —

JOHN DONVAN
We see — almost all of the same hands going up. [LAUGHTER]

PAUL KRUGMAN
Bad move on my part. [APPLAUSE]

A blast from the (distant) past

John Scalzi digs through the digital vault to come up with a post from ten years back, a tribute to Wiarton Willie:

To tell you the truth, the most disturbing thing is not that the groundhog died — certainly this animal earned his eternal rest — but that his handlers couldn't think of anything better to do but tell a festival crowd that he had croaked. Those kids in the crowd will be forever traumatized. Groundhog Day will no longer be a happy time, but a constant reminder of death and mortality in the bleak midwinter. 10 years from now, I expect that Wiarton, Canada will become the new North American epicenter of dark, gothic teenage poetry.

Lying frozen in the snow
The groundhog soul resides far below
Gone to a place of doom and gray
Now winter will always stay.
Die Groundhog Die!
Mommy and Daddy Lied!

But wait, there's more:

Now, on to the groundhog Wiarton Willie, who, as you know from yesterday’s entry, died before Groundhog Day and whose body was photographed lying in state in a dinky little pine coffin. Or was it? Now news comes from the sordid little burg of Wiarton, Canada, that the rodent corpse in the coffin was not Wiarton Willie at all, but a stuffed stand-in. The real Willie was apparently found so decomposed that the gelatinous remains were unsuitable for public display. So the town elders found a stuffed groundhog that just happened to be lying around (apparently the body of a previous "Wiarton Willie," who was no doubt poisoned by the current, and now rotting, Willie in an unseemly palace coup), plopped it into that Barbie coffin, and presented the remains to a horrified public. Here's the groundhog you’ve all been waiting for! And he's dead! Winter for the next ten years!

The people of Wiarton meant well, I'm sure. But I'm having serious doubts as to their combined mental capacity. First off, the real Willy was found in a state of advanced decomposition, which means he had been dead for weeks. Weeks. How could that happen? This rodent is the cornerstone of Wiarton's entire tourism economy for the month of February, and no one bothers to check on him from time to time? Did they just stick him in a cage after last Groundhog Day and then forget to feed him? Every kid in the world had a hamster they forgot to feed, but you’re usually, like, five at the time. These were actual adults. They say he was hibernating when he died. Sure he was. I used that excuse about the hamster.

A fisking! A fisking!

James Lileks indulges in a bit of fisking:

Anything in the Sarah-Palin-is-the-fifth-horsewoman-of-the-apocalypse-and-hence-rides-sidesaddle department? Well, there's this from the New Yorker:

There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. . .

Where was I? Ah, ye: I hate Élites. Which is why, whenever I am having brain surgery, or eye surgery, which is sometimes necessary due to all my non-blinking, I always hire some random Regular guy, with shaking hands if possible, who is also a drunk, scared of the sight of blood, and harbors a secret dislike for me.

Sigh. Well, let's turn that around. I need a plumber, so naturally I call up a professor who specializes in Roman aqueducts, because what I really need when the faucet is broken is someone who can place it in the context of the ancients' understanding of fluid dynamics and potable-water storage systems.

The term "elitist" does not mean a smart person with an area of expertise. It means a person who occupies a narrow stratum of society, usually academic — although people in think-tanks who view the world through steepled fingers qualify as well — whose Olympian perspective is usually predicated on a set of assumptions about people tinged with equal parts indulgent condescension and faint amusement, as an anthropologist might bring to the study of a Cargo Cult. It also confuses proximity to the Washington Monument with access to truth.

Television will never be the same

Gregg Easterbrook outlines the new TV shows to premiere on the TMQ channel this fall:

"Detective Wormhole." A police officer from a mirror universe is teleported to New York City and must search for a scientist who is about to destroy the Earth by turning on a super-advanced atom smasher. Running joke: In his reality, New Yorkers are incredibly polite.

"Incomprehensible." Ten people of diverse backgrounds awake to find themselves on a beautiful island guarded by the Loch Ness monster. They locate a series of mysterious prophecies warning of the destruction of humanity. A stranger appears in their midst without explanation. Beneath the island are stairs leading to a cavern full of Mayan ruins. A rescue plane circles above the island, sending radio messages in an unknown language. Gradually they discover they are acquiring superpowers. They find an extremely strong power generator that appears to be of extraterrestrial design. Five figures dressed in white robes walk out of the water and refuse to speak. A room of scientific experiments is found, many in progress, as if the scientists had just left the room. They come across a table set for an elaborate feast. One day a child holding a lamp appears ...

"CSI: Park Service." Someone didn't take out the trash. Jimmy Smits and Jenna Elfman will stop at nothing until they find out who.

[. . .]

"How Low Can You Go?" Television network executives compete to win a big promotion by coming up with the most exploitive reality series. Weekly reality show-within-a-show is the highlight. In the pilot, Tom green-lights "Tenement," in which volunteers are locked in an abandoned apartment building full of famished rats. Stephanie backs "Platinum," in which attractive women have 24 hours to see who can make the most money as high-class call girls.

[. . .]

"Dexter and the Housewives." Cutting-edge situation comedy about a serial killer who tortures ditzy women to death in their over-decorated suburban homes. Zany, madcap action as the hero uses power drills and rotary saws on his helpless victims in extremely graphic scenes, all the while engaged in hilarious misadventures with a roster of wacky, zany friends. USA Today gushes, "Combines 'Hostel' and 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.'"

QotD: Pundit Googasm

Last week, Google released a web browser called Chrome, and the online tech media had a powerful Googasm. We were long overdue for another climax like this, having been lightly stimulated with half-baked Google web products in the four years since GMail was released.

Every time the media fires off its gravy so violently, it highlights how little some of the supposed "experts" actually know about computers. Case in point: People saying that Google Chrome is an operating system designed to compete head-to-head with Microsoft Windows. [. . .]

Users aren't going to decide which computer to buy based on which browser comes pre-installed, and even if they do, I'm going to guess that they will choose Internet Explorer (or - as it is known commonly in user parlance - "the blue internet that opens my web sites").

Ted Dziuba, "Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility: It's a f***ing web browser", The Register, 2008-09-08

QotD: Stiletto heels

Someone once pointed out how brave and foolish was the first man to eat an oyster. And we celebrate the genius of Jenner for inventing vaccination, yet we never consider the idiotic heroism of the small lad who said, yes, of course you can slit my arm open with a knife and insert a cowpox scab into the gaping wound just to see what'll happen. So, we may venerate the master shoemaker Roger Vivier for the invention of the stiletto (named appropriately after the Italian knife favoured by assassins), but the first woman who slid her toes into these tortuous things is a martyr whose name is known only to God.

Setting aside the agony, which is not unlike having your toes forced into a blunt pencil sharpener, it's astonishing how difficult walking with anything close to elegance is. I caused much hilarity clopping around the kitchen like a bow-legged pantomime dame with third-degree piles. "Point your toes," the Blonde kept saying. I felt like a cross between a Tchaikovsky cygnet and a lipizzaner. What is so inexplicable about stilettos is not why women wear them, but why they ever wear them twice.

A.A. Gill, "When a man wears heels", TimesOnline, 2008-09-07

Profile of Bob Barr, Onion-style

The Onion includes a "profile" of Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr:

Views:
Pretty much the same as Ron Paul's, but without the avuncular charm

Issues:
(1995–2007) Trying to control the faith, sexuality, reproduction, drug use, and national allegiance of every single American.
(2007–) Aw, Fuck it.

Looks Like:
Effeminate maître d'

Role In Clinton Impeachment:
Finger-pointer

Average Time To Summarize Libertarian Philosophy To Stranger:
4 hours, 16 minutes

As President, He Pledges To:
Use his platform to apologize for things he supported as a Republican

H/T to Radley Balko.

QotD: Faith and Science

I'm also given to understand that the rules of science begin to bend and even break at the extremes of the universe's scale. Down where everything is subatomic-sized, things tend to be a bit random with mesons, leptons, quarks, brilligs, slithy toves, etc., subjected to Strong Force, Weak Force, Force of Habit, and so on. Meanwhile, in the farthest reaches of outer space, matter, antimatter, dark matter, and whatsamatter are tripping over string theory and falling into black holes. God is not like that. He's famously there in the details, and He is the big picture.

In one way, however, faith in science does come easier than faith in God — if fear is any gauge of how real we believe a thing is. To judge by human behavior, people are not trembling before the Almighty much. But many of those same people are scared silly by science. They are frightened by a climate stuck in the microwave of technological advances, frightened by genetic modifications that may — who knows? — cross cabbages with kings and produce a Prince Charles, and naturally they are frightened by the clouds of mushrooms being grown in the science cellars of Iran and North Korea.

P.J. O'Rourke, "On God", Search Magazine, 2007-03

I had wondered about that . . .

Jon (my virtual landlord) sent me a link to a visual explanation of how they came up with the Beijing Olympic logo.

Rickrolling in "Doom"

H/T to Victor for the link.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Possibly the best television representation of the parliamentary form of government. On second thought, strike the "possibly" from the previous sentence.

H/T to Andrew L. at The Latecomer.

QotD: Worldcon

I don't know why anyone else goes to Worldcon, but I go to see many of my friends who aren't otherwise in the same place at the same time and have a big ol' ball staying up late and saying terrible, hilarious things. What sort of hilarious things? Well, let me just say this: The moment that I, Ian McDonald, Paolo Bacagalupi and Blake Charlton tried to sell an anthology to Lou Anders at Pyr Books by saying "Two words, Lou: Unicorn Bukkake" was not actually the most disturbingly, howlingly funny moment of the con.

(Also, if you don’t know what "bukkake" means, for God's sake don't look it up. Especially at work. For serious, man.)

John Scalzi, "Denvention 3: An (Oh, Probably Not) Brief Recap", Whatever, 2008-08-11

The irony meter overloads

I don't think there's any better way to describe this story than the submitter of the Fark link: Former Luftwaffe pilot flies to British city to say sorry for bombing it during the war - then decides he's going to dive-bomb it for old times sake.

A former Luftwaffe pilot who carried out 120 bombing raids on England has escaped unharmed after a plane crash near the city he once targeted for destruction.

Willi Schludecker, 88 — a survivor of nine wartime air crashes — was a passenger in a four-man Mooney M20T when the engine failed soon after take-off at Marshfield in Wiltshire.

Experienced pilot Richard Flohr-Swann was forced to make an emergency landing.

Update: Totally unrelated, except that it was linked from the first story . . . British women who've decided to live in the past:

Joanne Massey, 35, lives in a recreation of a 1950s home in Stafford with her husband Kevin, 42, who works as a graphics application designer. Joanne is a housewife. She says:

I love nothing better than fastening my pinny round my waist and baking a cake for Kevin in my 1950s kitchen.

I put on some lovely Frank Sinatra music and am completely lost in my own little fantasy world. In our marriage, I am very much a lady and Kevin is the breadwinner and my protector.

We've been married for 13 years and we're extremely happy because we both know our roles. There is none of the battling for equality that I see in so many marriages today.

What's wrong with wanting to be adored and spoiled? If I see a hat I like, I say 'Oh, we can't afford that' and Kevin says: 'You have it, I'll treat you.'

I don't even put petrol in our Ford Anglia car, which is 43 years old, because I think that is so unladylike. I ask Kevin to do it.

Well, whatever works for them, I guess, although it must be tough to find someone who shares exactly your own flavour of anachronism (without cheating and using something that wasn't invented in the 1950's . . .).

QotD: Literary Tattoos

Inspired by the Telegraph, John Stoehr believes a trend for literary tattoos is underway.

Some of them, like this one, a long passage from Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, are very impressive — and they suggest a kind of depth of character, a kind of cultural sensibility, that one doesn't normally associate with those who want to adorn their bodies with indelible ink.

Which says more about his preconceptions than it does about ink enthusiasts. As for me, the letters "John" and "3:16" tattooed across the knuckles are sufficient literary allusion to get the point across.

Nick Packwood, "Literary Tattoos", Ghost of a Flea, 2008-08-04

Random pictures

Elizabeth and I had to get out of the house yesterday, as Victor was hosting an anime gathering for several friends. We drove up to Huntsville, where we discovered that as long as you disguise it as "art", you can get away with selling bird-torturing equipment:

In another store, I found an item that I had to take a picture of for Jon:

Explanation here.

Denial of temporal reality

James Lileks forces me to confront the ugly reality . . . it actually has been a long time:

I thought the video for "Brothers in Arms" was done by the same director; it had a hand-drawn style. Turns out the director did do a Dire Straits vid — but it was the "Money for Nothing" video, the one that really made everyone who had cable feel as if they were living in the future. Computer graphics and lyrics that referenced the medium itself: Marshall McLuhan would have approved.

Wonderful things were done in the few years between the rise of videos and the rule of computers; "Money for Nothing" was the Steamboat Willie of its time, I suppose.

Wikipedia says it best:

"The song's lyrics are written from the point of view of a blue-collar worker watching music videos and commenting on what he sees. To achieve the effect of such a layman making such casual everyday commentary, Dire Straits' lead singer and songwriter Mark Knopfler used a vocal style known as Sprechstimme."

By which I mean, Wikipedia’s anal tone and self-serious community has managed to suck the juice out of that plum, too.

Has it been a while? It’s almost been a quarter century.

Just gaze upon it, O Ye Boomers, and Despair: there are 24 year-olds out there right now drinking Starbucks and texting friends and using iPhone GPS to arrange dinner plans who were zygotes when this video came out. This video was an oldie on MTV when next month’s Playboy centerfold was born. To them this looks like a 1935 movie looks to someone born in '59.

Apparently the Irish translation of "Cuil" is "Trainwreck"

I'm almost starting to feel sorry for the folks at Cuil. First it was the less-than-stellar grand opening, then the snarky commentary from folks who tried the service but were unimpressed, and now it turns out that their name is uncool:

Seeing as how new search engine Cuil.com is, well, a search engine, its founders might have known that people could easily check online the company's claim that the word "cuil" means "knowledge" in Irish. Because, in fact, it doesn't.

Members of an online Irish language forum have been discussing the word and the company's claims of its definition. They say the word is most often translated to mean "corner" or "nook," but has sometimes been used for "hazel," as in the nut.

An online Irish language dictionary defines cúil as "rear." Another uses cuil to describe various kinds of flies. So while the word, or versions of it with and without accent marks, can mean a few different things, most Irish language enthusiasts say it doesn't mean anything like knowledge, despite Cuil.com's claims.

QotD: The new voting screens

I'm tellin' ya, they're gonna change the electronic voting screens to say, "Click here to accept Barack Obama's Friend Request" so that these dim-witted youth voters can figure out how to cast their ballots for Obama. It'll be like ballots in Spanish. You will soon be able to request your ballot in electronic youth-speak (l337).

"aero", Comment at Hot Air, 2008-07-29

Another modern artist under-appreciated by the powers-that-be

From a review of a recent work by Zeus Scalzi:

Zeus Scalzi has quickly established himself as a young master of the paper form, rending and shredding fibers as a way to comment on the fraying of the fibers of life, and how each of us, in the end, is wiped away by the progress of events; indeed, our expulsion and removal is necessary for the continued health of the whole, to allow space for new generations. Gazing upon the work, one can appreciate this new and vital metaphor for the inevitable pinching off of our continuity with the community, after the community has, with animal efficiency, extracted all that is valuable from us. Truly, a difficult work best contemplated through solitary effort, perhaps after a fine meal with companions.

Barack Obama's love affair . . . with the media

Steve Chapman tries to understand the complaints coming from the McCain team about excessive worship of Barack Obama:

I came into the office the other day, wearing an "Obama 2008" cap, a "Yes We Can" button, a "Team Obama" T-shirt, carrying an "Obama for Change" tote bag filled with Obama bumper stickers, made a stop at the Obama altar in the newsroom, strewed some rose petals, chanted a few hosannas, lit a votive candle and had a sudden thought: Is the news media's love affair with Barack Obama getting out of hand?

John McCain and his campaign staffers have a sneaking suspicion it is. They put out a video with footage of journalists acting gooey about the Democratic candidate, to the strains of "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You." According to the campaign, "The media is in love with Barack Obama." McCain's people say that like it's a bad thing.

That'd be an "oops"

The Telegraph reports that a New Hampshire newspaper had an unusually embarassing typo: the newspaper's own name:

This Monday readers of New Hampshire's Valley News were surprised to see the paper's name spelled "Valley Newss" on the front page masthead.

The following day the newspaper, which covers the Upper Valley area straddling New Hampshire and Vermont, published an "Editor's Note" acknowledging the error.

"Readers may have noticed that the Valley News misspelled its own name on yesterday’s front page," it read.

"Given that we routinely call on other institutions to hold themselves accountable for the mistakes, let us say for the record: We sure feel silly."

I'd actually expected the report to be about the Manchester Guardian, which was notorious for editing problems many years ago (hence the occasional nickname "The Grauniad").

Holy gristle resolves religious question

If you can't trust the BBC, then who can you trust?

What looks like the Arabic word for God and the name of the prophet Muhammad were discovered in pieces of beef by a diner in Birnin Kebbi.

He was about to eat it, when he suddenly noticed the words in the gristle, the restaurant owner said.

A search of the kitchen's meat revealed three more pieces which bore the names.

The meat was boiled and then fried before being served, owner Kabiru Haliru told newspaper Weekly Trust.

"When the writings were discovered there were some Islamic scholars who come and eat here and they all commented that it was a sign to show that Islam is the only true religion for mankind," he said.

The restaurant has kept the pieces of meat for visitors to see.

And to think that other religions have miracles involving flaming topiary, resurrecting the dead, great floods, and other such over-the-top demonstrations, when all you needed to to do was to inscribe your own name in gristle . . .

H/T to John Parry for the link.

QotD: Batman = Richie Rich

I was thinking about the upcoming Batman movie, and I suddenly realized: Batman and Richie Rich are basically the same character.

They both have butlers (Alfred, Cadbury), they both have sidekicks (Robin, Dollar), they both dress in ridiculous outfits (bat costume, short pants with bow tie) and they both have adventures in which problems are solved by the appropriate use of incredibly expensive material possessions.

The main difference is that Richie Rich's parents weren't shot to death in a filthy alleyway right in front of him, but tell me that wouldn't have improved Richie's back story.

Lore Sjöberg, Grading Batman's Gear", Wired, 2008-07-15

Definitely the iPhone

H/T to Bob Kopman, who liked Craig's link so much that he had to top it.

Definitely not the iPhone

H/T to Craig Nodwell.

The weirdest music video you'll see this week

I tried to post this yesterday, and spent what seemed like hours getting the same server error instead of the "Rebuilding . . ." message.

By way of Hit and Run (where Jesse Walker labelled it "When I Hear the Word 'Gorbachev,' I Think, 'Zombies! Zeppelins! Cleavage!'"), comes a music video Tom Stern did for a Russian band called ANJ.

New record price . . . for pot

Rising prices are being reported everywhere . . . even in the drug trade:

During a routine traffic stop in Ohio, police discovered over 100 pounds of the most valuable marijuana ever documented:

Police curbed the gray, four-door Mercury Grand Marquis Ruci was driving after he allegedly committed a lane violation, the highway patrol statement indicated. A specially trained, narcotics-detecting dog was brought to the scene, and its reaction to the car signaled the presence of drugs, the statement said.

A search of the vehicle yielded 104 pounds of hydroponically-grown marijuana stuffed inside eight black plastic trash bags. Police said the marijuana had an estimated street sale value of more than $4.7 million. [Naperville Sun]

This is really an incredible discovery and I'm surprised it hasn't generated more attention. At $4.7 million for 104 pounds, we're talking about an ounce that's worth $2824.51! That just blows away everything listed at High Times's market quotes section, where ounces of high-grade marijuana in Ohio last month were listed at $400. It also overwhelms the STRIDE data collected by drug enforcement officers showing that U.S. marijuana prices averaged around $200 per ounce as of 2003.

So far, I haven't heard of anyone smoking this new type of marijuana, but that's probably because the police took it all.

Don't worry though: it's the usual middle-man markup by both the police and the media. Regular users shouldn't find this particular kind of sticker shock next time they are in the market.

James Lileks on old fogey music

James Lileks unloads his bile on Deborah Harry:

As for "Blondie," the song was "Tide is High," which I loathe, right up to and including Debbie Harry's yips at the end. Some people said that the song marked the End of New Wave, but for heaven's sake New Wave ended with the first Blondie song. Okay? New York "downtown" ethos meets pseudo-Moroder synths, uses square-headed frontperson for sex appeal, that's it for New Wave. Don't talk to me about this. I'm still bitter.

Not really. Although I do matter when these things mattered a great deal, and how we had to come up with new genres to describe every deviation from the style of the times, since it was the style that nurtured our souls and gave our lives meaning. We are living in an era when New Jersey garage rockers are successfully using the raw, nervy Kinks style and adding post-Beatles sensibility to create an entirely new style, which is as impossible to dance to as its antecedents! Actually, to tell the truth I did think the term "post-Beatles" today, and in the correct sense of "stealing specific chords and/or harmonies." I was driving around Lake Harriet shooting a video for buzz.mn — a big summer-long project about all the lakes, released sometime early in September — and "It's a Livin' Thing" came on the radio. Electric Light Orchestra.

There's always that moment of shame when you find yourself liking a song from a group that has long passed out of favor and into the realm of ignored bands good for a punch line, but not if you're talking to anyone under 20.

How to deal with racist comments

H/T to Tim Blair

"Mr. Hubris? Call from Mr. Nemesis on line two."

There aren't enough shades of ironic to cover this one:

Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers has admitted that a laptop containing financial and personal details of thousands of staff, suppliers and contributors has been stolen.

After months of criticising "criminally careless" government departments for losing confidential records, the company has been forced to send out an embarrassing letter telling journalists they may now be at risk of identity theft, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.

There's a silver lining to all this — they can re-use all the headlines like this one:

Hard to disagree, isn't it?

The pinnacle of USB technology

The USB wine tap:

Come to Canada . . . and freeze your butt off!

Philip Delves Broughton glances across the Atlantic to Canada — and sneers:

Despite banging its own drum for decades, calling on the world to gather on its shores, Canada still looks like one of those poor young girls at a trade show, thrusting flyers at disinterested passers-by.

It is the big, earnest, empty restaurant which can't understand why the scrappier joint next door is hopping. People just do not want to go.

[. . .]

Culturally, Canada does not hold a candle to Britain. Its museums and orchestras are resoundingly second tier, though it may have an edge in country music festivals.

This is, after all, the home of Shania Twain, whose full-throated warblings make Dolly Parton sound sophisticated.

In the dramatic arts, Canada's greatest recent contribution - unless you include Jim Carrey and Pamela Anderson — is the incomprehensible, semi-nude contortion act of Cirque du Soleil. And as for its newspapers, they are lifeless and hobbled by the provincialism which divides the country.

[. . .]

Sure, Canada has been through a food revolution similar to Britain's, but still the way to a Canadian's heart is not through fancy Newfoundland oysters, but with 'poutine' — chips smothered with cheese curds and gravy. It makes a chip butty look like the healthy option.

[. . .]

Ah yes, hockey. If you thought British sport was becoming crude and violent, try watching two teams of toothless brutes sliding around on ice and pausing every few minutes to beat the daylights out of each other. It makes the Premiership look like synchronised swimming.

However bad Britain may seem, trust me, moving to Canada is not the answer. Why not try somewhere more appealing. Siberia, for example.

"It's a fair cop, guv."

It's easy to understand why civilized, educated people would not want to come out to the colonies. Why, the servant problem alone is enough to drive you mad! And the weather is terrible, unlike the perfect weather we have at home. And worse, you're likely at any moment to be overrun by Cousin Jonathan and his fascist hordes. Better stay at home, where the loving eyes of the surveillance cameras can keep a better eye on you.

Coming soon . . .

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Establishing what "community standards" really means

Katherine Mangu-Ward reports on a cool way of discovering what a given "community" might really be willing to allow, instead of what they say they believe . . . technology to the rescue:

A lawyer in a current obscenity case in Florida has adopted an unusual approach to finding out what the community is really up to — checking out what they're googling. The findings:

Except for brief periods near Thanksgiving, searches for "orgy" consistently outrank attempts to find information about "apple pie" in Florida . The rest of the year, orgy searches are closer in frequency to what might be expected to be a common activity in Florida, "surfing."

We always suspected the much-ballyhooed "community" wasn't quite as wholesome as its reputation suggests. Looks like we were right — our neighbors have been googling orgies all along.

As H.L. Mencken once wrote, "Evil is that which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."

Messages to the stars

Lore Sjöberg takes it upon himself to grade the various attempts to communicate with extra-terrestrial intelligences:

The Pioneer Plaques

These are identical, gold-plated plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature a picture of the solar system, a picture of the probes and a pictorial representation of the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Ring any bells? No? Well, it also has a picture of a naked man and woman on it. Ah, yes. Now you remember.

Many people considered this nothing more than interstellar porn. Others objected to the fact that the man is the one waving his hand, presumably to give the woman time to bake the aliens a nice batch of muffins. My objection is that the people depicted have no body hair at all. Aliens are gonna come down and think we're living in symbiosis with our pubes.
Grade: C

The Voyager Record

I love that we sent an LP. It's so delightfully retro! I expect alien life forms to discover it and say, "Clearly, this is the work of a truly groovy civilization. We do not know what to expect when we visit their planet, but we should prepare ourselves for an extremely mellow experience." In actuality, the funkiest track on the album is "Johnny B. Goode," which I think is a poor choice. I mean, I'm not sure how one carries a guitar in a gunnysack, and I was born on this planet.
Grade: B

Just too appropriate for words

So many blogs . . . so little mindspace:

Despairwear

No, this is the least surprising study finding ever

The Journal of Consumer Research goes out of their way to find out if it really is true that men suffer from short-term poor judgement when looking at pretty girls:

Science proves that bikinis turn men into boobs: Sexy images rob male brain of ability to make wise decisions

You may have known this all along, but now it has been demonstrated scientifically: bikinis make men stupid.

This month’s issue of the Journal of Consumer Research features a paper titled “Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience in Intertemporal Choice,” which is a neuroeconomist’s (definition in a moment) way of saying that men don’t make good decisions while checking out pretty girls in bikinis.

It would have been much more surprising if they'd found that men's judgement was not impaired under those circumstances!

Buzzword Bingo

Jon sent me a link to this BBC News article on the most-hated management buzzwords:

Management speak - don't you just hate it? Emphatically yes, judging by readers' responses to writer Lucy Kellaway's campaign against office jargon. Here, we list 50 of the best worst examples.

1. "When I worked for Verizon, I found the phrase going forward to be more sinister than annoying. When used by my boss — sorry, "team leader" — it was understood to mean that the topic of conversation was at an end and not be discussed again."
Nima Nassefat, Vancouver, Canada

2. "My employers (top half of FTSE 100) recently informed staff that we are no longer allowed to use the phrase brain storm because it might have negative connotations associated with fits. We must now take idea showers. I think that says it all really."
Anonymous, England

For those of you daring enough to try playing Buzzword Bingo during meetings, there's a downloadable bingo card linked from the article.

Failure of design

The folks who come up with new designs for things bear a great responsibility. Sometimes, that responsibility is misplaced.

QotD: God games

It's an idea that many people seem to latch on to that if we were created by some kind of God, obviously he did it because he loves us so huggy-muggy much. Never are the holes in this theory more obvious than while playing god games, because it seems that when you place most people in the position of a god and give them responsibility over many tiny lesser beings then their attitude towards them may be less about beloved children and more about target practice.

Sim City Societies may, on the other hand, support the believability of your argument because if being God is this boring then unconditional love is the only reason I can think of for not having slaughtered the whole unstimulating lot of us around the time we were still squeezing our own smallpox boils for nourishment.

Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw, "Zero Punctuation: Sim City Societies", The Escapist, 2008-02-13

Headline of the day

The folks at Fark.com can be a little over-the-top . . . okay, seriously over-the-top, but some of the headlines are literal gems:

Newsday link here, and Fark discussion thread here.

Zero time to blog . . .

. . . late start to the day, early finish as well, followed by a soccer game. No available blocks for blogging, so I'll just leave you with the latest Zero Punctuation episode and head back to the salt mine.

Weight and measurement

At last . . . Sensible Units!

H/T to Craig Zeni.

Sometimes, the mistake is the more accurate version

This was posted last month by Tian at Hanzi Smatter:

With two previous posts about the same incorrect tattoo, one would get the hint this does not mean "courage":

[The characters actually translate as] (n) serious error; gross mistake; big mistake or shortcoming; (punishment in school, etc.) a major demerit.

Yahtzee tries to enjoy a JRPG experience

"And we'd have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those blasted kids!"

Grant McCracken points to a very relevant source of political and anthropological insight — The Onion:

But I think things are a little different in the world of politics. Here, the real sophistication of the under-35 voter means that you really have to watch it, and when you don't, this voter will make you pay.

Hence the article today in The Onion. This captures precisely the sensibility of the under-35 vote quite precisely. (With the proviso that The Onion is necessarily a little more observant and unforgiving.) In this wonderful piece, The Onion nails the Obama camp for its artifice in image building. Look, it says with glee, we see what you're doing. And it's precisely because you appear to think we cannot see the artifice here that we must point it out and make you pay. Play us if you must, but don't play us for fools.

The entire piece is worth reading [. . .] but if I may let me quote my favorite passage.

Obama has reportedly been working tirelessly with his top political strategists to perfect his looking-off-into-the-future pose, which many believe is vital to the success of the Illinois senator's campaign.

When performed correctly, the pose involves Obama standing upright with his back arched and his chest thrust out, his shoulders positioned 1.3 feet apart and opened slightly at a 14-degree angle, and his eyes transfixed on a predetermined point between 500 and 600 yards away. Advisers say this creates the illusion that Obama is looking forward to a bright future, while the downturned corners of his lips indicate that he acknowledges the problems of the present.

Oh, sublime. So much of politics is an exercise is posturing (figurative and here literal) that it is hard to image what politics can look like once the new voter is factored in. In the meantime, we leave it to the likes of The Onion, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart to point out to the would-be emperors that we can see right through that clothing they don't have on.

QotD: Same-sex marriage

We introduced same sex marriage up here after conservatives assured us this would result in wall to wall orgies. This promise was a lie, just like the one about how if we legalized upper body nudity for women in Ontario, Ontario would become a sea of naked boobs despite the climate. And the mosquitos and the blackflies. Conservatives are always promising promiscuity and licentiousness if only we will liberalize our laws and they never deliver.

On the plus side, the initial divorce rate was extremely low for SSM because we didn't think to change the explicitly "one male one female" language in the Divorce Act.

James Nicoll, posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2008-05-26

QotD: Testifying before congress

I was watching the Big Oil execs testifying before Congress. That was my first mistake. If memory serves, there was lesbian mud wrestling over on Channel 137, and on the whole that's less rigged. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz knew the routine: "I can't say that there is evidence that you are manipulating the price, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not."

Had I been in the hapless oil man's expensive shoes, I'd have answered, "Hey, you first. I can't say that there is evidence that you're sleeping with barnyard animals, but I believe that you probably are. So prove to me that you are not. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence and prima facie evidence, lady? Do I have to file a U.N. complaint in Geneva that the House of Representatives is in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?"

But that's why I don't get asked to testify before Congress.

Mark Steyn, "Your car can't run on Congress' hot air", Orange County Register, 2008-05-24

Yahtzee on "Painkiller"

Yahtzee goes back to 2004 for another hilarious (NSFW) review:

The real danger of reducing trade with China

Mark Steyn gets to the biggest danger in any potential reduction of trade between China and the west:

I don't mean the moments when he [Obama] gets carried away and announces that his Administration would "stop the import of all toys from China". As it happens, that's a policy I'm not unsympathetic to. Over 80% of American toys are made in the People's Republic and, while that may well be appropriate given the whiff of totalitarian coerciveness that hangs around Barney the Dinosaur, I can't say I'm entirely comfortable with contracting out US innocence to the butchers of Tiananmen. For one thing, come the Sino-American War, Beijing will have the ultimate fifth column inside the west: the nation's moppets, resentful at having their Elmos and Spongebobs cut off the duration, will be shinning down the drainpipe after dark in ski masks and blowing up power stations to hasten the day of liberation.

Scary stuff.

QotD: Greenery as religion

Since we were here to do things we had not done before, we decided to take in "The Circle of Life," a show about the interconnectedness of man, nature, and anthropomorphic cartoon characters. I hate to be a killjoy grump about these things, but oy, what a load of sanctimonious rubbish. The actual Circle of Life, as applied to animals, consists of birth, killing, consumption, excretion, copulation, and solitary death from small predators in the blood or nasty ones with big teeth. Sometimes there's death by fire, for variety's sake. It takes consciousness on the human level to extract the metaphorical weight in the whole Circle of Life thing, and while I think it's wonderful to appreciate and marvel at the intricate ecosystems of the planet, and tread as lightly as necessary, wordless choirs voicing ecstatic vowels over footage of wildebeest herds does not really equal a High Mass for spiritual impact or depth. All of which I kept to myself, of course. But I felt like the village atheist.

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People's State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth — cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I'm surprised the sap didn't spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie — and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I'm pretty sure we're not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You're welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

At the end Timon and Phoomba decided to open a green resort, and everything's hakuna Montana.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2008-05-20

QotD: Documentation

I have encountered far too many managers who couldn't recognize bad documentation at all. Until the flaws are pointed out to them, or they compare it with good documentation, they are oblivious. That is why there are also far too many people working as technical writers who should be wearing greasepaint and ruffled collars instead. Those of us who are competent should be continually educating our co-workers and managers by pointing out excellent examples of technical communication.

We have a lot of fun commenting on the bad examples, but I think we should be showing off the good ones much more than we do now.

Beth Agnew, posting to the Technical Writing mailing list TECHWR-L, 2008-05-15

Inconceivable!

Hands down, the funniest Day By Day cartoon ever:

.

In praise of gridlock

By way of Samizdata, some political wisdom from a man who calls himself "not just stupid", but a "student of stupidity": P.J. O'Rourke:

It occurs to me that America could wind up with a Democratic president. This scares me. Not because I hate Democrats — although I do, come to think of it — but because a strong Democratic president and a strong Democratic Congress could put an end to partisan bickering in Washington and result in politicians from both parties working together to solve America's problems. And then we're really screwed.

I have been covering politics for 38 years. Trust me: we don't want politics to quit. That's why we need a Republican president — not because Republicans are good but because we need gridlock. I love gridlock. Gridlock means government can't do things.

The two most frightening words in Washington are "bipartisan consensus." Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.

Bipartisan consensus — like the stimulus package that has been delivered to us courtesy of Congress and the president. A $168 billion stimulus package that is supposed to change the trajectory of a $13 trillion economy.

Now, even somebody who flunked high school physics — and I did — can tell you that the energy of $168 billion is not sufficient to budge $13 trillion worth of inertia. It's like trying to use Dennis Kucinich to push Hillary Clinton off the Democratic campaign platform.

Much more here (PDF document).

Yahtzee kinda likes Grand Theft Auto IV

QotD: Sign of the times

Would you find it odd to walk into a place that billed itself variously as an "internet café" and a "cybercafé" in the year 2008, only to be told "Sorry, [we] don't have wireless [internet]?" This happened to me on Sunday and I am still trying to figure out whether I am the crazy one.

Colby Cosh, "This is a sincere question", ColbyCosh.com, 2008-05-13

Like shooting conservative fish in a barrel

Radley Balko posts a link to the most popular 50 pages on Conservapedia under the heading Compensate Much?:

QotD: The origin of the name Canada

"Canada" [. . .] is the ancient Ojibwa word for "kick me"

Kathy Shaidle, "I missed 'Pingu' for this?", Five Feet of Fury, 2008-04-30

Book reviews . . . of DOOM

You know those books you read but would prefer that nobody knew that you read . . . no, not those ones. The worst trash you read. Everyone seems to have some reading vice like that. David Hines knows exactly what you feel:

You think that paragraph alone would make this book awesomely bad, but no. IT GETS MORE SO. Yes, you will be horrified by a lot of this, because Mike Harmon's adventures are by turns awesomely horrific and horrifically awesome; I freely confess that I cannot stop reading these books, because *I have to see what Ringo does next.* I do, however, have a finely-tuned defense mechanism: whenever something trips my circuit breaker, causing me to cringe away from the page, I utter aloud a cry that resets my noggin. You will probably need it yourself, so I provide it here, as a public service: "OH JOHN RINGO NO."

GHOST is Ringo's own admitted Lord King Badfic, his id run wild. By his own account, he was trying to write several books he was actually contracted for, but GHOST kept nudging at him, and finally he just wrote the damn thing to *make it go away* so he could get back to fulfilling his contracts. Ringo locked the spewings of his id away on his hard drive, until he mentioned in passing on an online forum that yeah, he'd written another book, but it was *awful* and would never see the light of day. Naturally, folks were curious, and when Ringo posted a sample, nobody was more surprised than him to find that the response was, more often than not, "Hey, man, I'd buy this."

So his publisher put it out, and the books are now doing pretty well for them. I'm sure this is a pleasant surprise if you're Ringo or his publisher, but it's also got to be a little embarrassing; he's committed the literary equivalent of charging money for folks to watch him roll naked in a pile of dead and smelly fish. And then being begged for encores. As of this writing, I have only the first three books in the series, because dammit, I will buy crap, but I refuse to buy crap in hardcover. That's *expensive.* I mean, I could be spending that money on *guns.*

I've read a few of these, and David is being very precise in his review. Ringo is a very good writer . . . and this series is gut-churningly disturbing. David continues:

I feel about the PALADIN OF SHADOWS series the way that a lot of people feel about ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN: it is so horrifically awful that it becomes TOTALLY FUCKING AWESOME. Unless, of course, you have triggers about some or all of this stuff, in which case my recommendation is TO RUN AS FAR AND AS FAST AS YOU CAN. I will, however, say that GHOST and its sequels are *excellent* for reading out loud to people, particularly friends who are horrified and actively begging you to stop. (And you will be inclined to disregard such pleas, because you will need to share the pain.)

Amusingly, John Ringo himself liked the review.

Medical humour

Ronald Bailey points to some new suggestions for easing the load on doctors and nurses . . . icons to replace medical charts:

Update: Jon sent along this related link: Giant microbe stuffed toys, and this link: 4 Veneral dolls.

The power of prayer

Regular contributor Roger Henry sent this little gem . . .

A Judge's Dilemma

In a small town, a person decided to open up a brothel, which was right opposite to a church. The church & its congregation started a campaign to block the brothel from opening with petitions and prayed daily against his business.

Work progressed. However, when it was almost complete and was about to open a few days later, a lightning bolt struck the brothel and it was burnt to the ground.

The church folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, till the brothel owner sued the church authorities on the grounds that the church, through its congregation & prayers, was ultimately responsible for the destruction of his brothel, either through direct or indirect actions or means.

In its reply to the court, the church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection that their prayers were reasons for the act of God. As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork at the hearing and commented:

"I don't know how I'm going to decide this case, but it appears from the paperwork, we have a brothel owner who believes in the power of prayer and we have an entire church that doesn't."

QotD: Humour

[On the topic of satire and A Modest Proposal]:

It's not that it's harder to detect humour now. It's that having an internet address and the ability to email hundreds of people at once doesn't make you Jonathan Swift.

"Azalais Malfoy", posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list, 2005-06-22

QotD: Offensive Clothing

In the late 1990s era of no-logo vogue, cultural commentators fretted that the once-democratic medium of the T-shirt had been co-opted by corporations, and that T-shirt buyers were concerned only with raising the planet's Hilfiger consciousness and saving the FUBUs. "The slogans on contemporary T-shirts are increasingly meaningless," the novelist and columnist Russell Smith observed in The Globe and Mail in 2000. "Most of them are simply the brand name of the T-shirt itself."

Now that our T-shirts are so blithely outspoken — and deliberately offensive — on every issue from Medicare to Britney Spears, it sometimes seems as if we’d like to ban our way back to a more sartorially decorous era. Ultimately, however, the T-shirt skirmishes that continuously erupt are oddly reassuring. Can the public schools be as out of control as they're often alleged to be if all it takes to get suspended from one is an "I ♥ My Wiener" shirt? Has our public sphere grown as hopelessly coarse as our loudest cultural scrub maids insist if a shirt featuring a faux fishing theme and the phrase "Master Baiter" is enough to make Southwest Airlines ground you?

Shouldn't we take comfort in the fact that so many high school students are ready to fight for their right to champion the unborn, maternal hotties, and whatever else they can think of to test the limits of Tinker v. Des Moines? T-shirts may intrude upon our lives in the public sphere, but they're also our most vivid reminder that free speech is woven into the fabric of our culture.

Greg Beato, "I'm With Stupid: The perennially embattled free speech zone over our chests", Reason, 2008-04

LOLCat religion

I guess it had to happen . . . the LOLCat Bible Translation Project:

¹ Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

² Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

³ At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

⁴ An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.

⁵ An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1

H/T to Elizabeth Holden.

Today's disturbing chocolate suicide

Time travellers reminisce

Radley Balko points to a very amusing site:

" . . . everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?"

QotD: Going Medieval

I go to law school parties with my wife sometimes, and inevitably one of the laywers-in-training will ask me what I do. I tell them I'm a PhD candidate in medieval studies, to which they usually respond with a baffled, "Wow, that's so cool. So, you, like read old books?"

If only they knew. Yesterday I spent an hour and a half at talk hosted by the English department that was nigh unto indistinguishable from an episode of Beavis and Butthead. It involved senior faculty snickering while looking at dirty medieval art and grad students trying to pretend that they were above such things.

Ostensibly, the subject of the talk was "Chaucer and the Relics of Vernacular Religion," but the handouts were mostly dirty pictures like this one, which I took from an online auction house's listing, because Prof. Minnis's photocopies wouldn't scan well:

Carl Pyrdum, "What it's Like to be a Medievalist", Got Medieval, 2006-01-26

Packers say farewell to Brett Favre

GREEN BAY, WI—The Green Bay Packers addressed questions concerning the current status, future plans, and whereabouts of recently retired quarterback Brett Favre by announcing Monday that they had sent him to the country to live on a beautiful farm with a very nice family.

"We know you loved Brett Favre, but he wasn't happy here. He couldn't stay here," Packers general manager Ted Thompson told hundreds of quiet but tear-streaked Packer fans assembled at the televised Lambeau Field press conference. "And he loved you, too — he loved you very much indeed — but he needed to go someplace where he could run and jump and throw his favorite football around. And he couldn't do that here anymore."

"So we took Brett out behind the Don Hutson practice facility last night, and we . . . Coach McCarthy and I, we . . . We gave him one last hug, and we said goodbye to him, and Brett went away forever," Thompson said, his voice breaking several times. "Those loud banging noises you heard were probably the truck backfiring. He went to the farm in a truck, you know."

Pure media hucksterism

I kept thinking this was an out-take from SCTV . . . H/T to Craig Zeni.

QotD: Morris Dancers

Morris dancers, for those of you who don't know, are cute people who dress up in little white suits with green sashes and pork-pie hats with feathers. They tie sleighbells to their feet and they strap long white hankies to their wrists. In any event, there's nothing really alarming about Morris dancers; they're actually quite harmless.

Except that from time to time they will arm themselves with some kind of cudgel or bludgeon or some kind of blunt instrument. And they will gather in a knot or a mob known as a clot, or a team. And they'll gather in kind of a mystic circle and, to the accompaniment of accordion and violin, they will rhythmically and ritualistically hit each other again and again and again, with these sticks.

This is supposed to be some form of British fertility ritual, or some form of entertainment, or something. Anyway, this next song has the sort of knuckle dragging Neanderthal beat that Morris dancers really love to dance to.

Stan Rogers, introducing the song "The Idiot" on the album Home in Halifax.

QotD: The Global Warming Creed

I believe in Gore, the Prophet All-Knowing, the Creator of the Internet, and in Global Warming, his brain-child:

Which was conceived from Global Cooling, born of his lust for power, after he suffered a stolen election and was considered dead politically.

He descended into Obesity.

The third year He rose again from the obscure, He ascended into media prominence, and sits at the right hand of Bono the Annoying, from whence he shall come to sell carbon credits to the suckers with guilty consciences.

I believe in the Mother Gaia, the holy Ecological Church, the communion of Hollywood stars, the forgiveness of consumerism, the recycling of all things, and life so miserable it seems everlasting.

Amen.

Chris Claypoole, "The Global Warming Creed", Libertarian Enterprise, 2008-03-09

Reviews of Playmobil's latest toy

You may have heard that Playmobil, the toy company, recently introduced a toy to help train children to become jackbooted thugs TSA workers. The reviews on Amazon.com are very interesting reading:

You can also read the Fark thread for more frothing-at-the-mouth goodness.

Winter Greetings

As we contemplate another 30cm of snow starting later today, I had to agree with Den Lippert, who sent this highly appropriate winter greeting (NSFW):

Something for the nostalgic comrades

An odd link submitted by "Da Wife", with the comment My mom heard the music and immediately recognized it. She heard it way too many times in the old country.

Jesse Walker on D&D

Jesse Walker notes the passing of Gary Gygax, the seminal figure in the fantasy roleplaying phenomena of the 1970's and 80's:

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax has died. It was Gygax, more than anyone else, who turned Tolkien fandom from a premodern pose into a postmodern, participatory phenomenon: Rather than merely reading about hobbits and elves, fantasy fans could enter Middle Earth themselves and create their own adventures. Granted, most of those adventures tended to sound the same. (If you've ever endured a D&Der's detailed account of how he spent his weekend, you'll understand what I mean.) But we knew that from the title, right? On one level it's a liberatory vision, one where anyone can create a world for everyone else to play in. But Gygax gave it a Foucauldian twist: In the end, each of those worlds is still a dungeon.

The comment thread starts off rather well, too:

Episiarch | March 4, 2008, 3:44pm | #
Uh, did you ever play, Jesse? Dungeon crawls were usually the way people got introduced to the game but a campaign could take place absolutely anywhere.

But if you are trying to say that D&D players' minds/imaginations are like filthy damp dungeons, that would be funny.

QotD: "Breeders"

If people choose not to have children, that's their decision. Obviously. You could make the argument that the future needs kids, and plenty of them, especially if you believe there should be an intermediary government entity transferring part of their income to you when you're old. You could make the argument that childless people are doing their part to save the earth, and the earth will be so grateful it will show up at your funeral and sit in the front row sniffling into a handkerchief. The other guests will nudge and point — is that the Earth? I didn't know they were close. I tend to believe we have reached an unusual point in human history when we have to debate the merits of reproducing, but there you go.

I'm not talking about the people who don't want their own kids but love kids anyway, and prefer the Cool Aunt or Cool Uncle role: bless you. I'm not even talking about the people who are indifferent to kids. I'm talking about the people who find some sort of personal identification in a militantly anti-kid stance. ( I suspect a lot of anti-kid people would be offended if you told them they wouldn't be a particularly good parent, because it requires skills they lack; the strenuously anti-kid types often believe that these skills are simply beneath them, and could be mustered if — God forbid — the occasion arose.) Granted, some people aren't parent material, and it's best they not do something they don't want to do.

[. . .]

So I don't judge people who don't want kids, but I can't stand "breeder" and "clones" and "crotchfruit" and all the other terms of derision. It's the worst form of misanthropy, and a curious protestation of ignorance: these people literally do not know what they're talking about, since there's nothing about parenthood you can observe from a distance that compares to the thing itself. Being irritated with poorly-socialized children in a restaurant does not set one up in a moral high chair. Believe me, parents are just as irritated with those people as you are.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2008-03-05

Canadian rednecks

ChuckerCanuck performs a service in identifying the characteristics of Canadian Rednecks:

Often, as we travel the United States, we pass folks who stick their patriotism on their bumpers — the stars and stripes pasted on their cars to advertise their unthinking love of America. For many Canadians, this overt patriotism is decidely foreign. And yet, in my corner of the world, where Liberals win ridings by margins that would make Bashir Assad blush, there is a growing prevelance of people slapping Canadian flag license plates on the front of their vehicles. Canada has rednecks. And to help you identify a Canadian redneck, I have put together a short checklist for your benefit.

H/T to Mark C. at Daimnation for the link.

Go green, young BOFH

Jon, my virtual landlord, sent along this BOFH link:

"So we'll end up with machines which'll slow themselves down at weird and inconvenient times and lose processing power while they ramp up in response to need?"

"No, I'm sure the bloke said you can tune them to only reduce to a certain point and to speed up recovery time. And with virtualisation you can tune them to consolidate virtual servers onto the least number of machines and shut the rest down till they're needed."

"Still sounds like Nancy-Boy boxes," I concur.

"?"

"A REAL computer has ONE speed and the only powersaving it permits is when you pull the power leads out of the back!" I blurt. "In fact, a REAL computer would have a hole in the front to push trees into and an exhaust pipe out the back for the black smoke to come out of."

"AND," the PFY adds. "they run so hot - even on screensaver - that they keep the room nice and toasty when you're not there - saves on heating."

"All that is a thing of the past though." the boss burbles. "The bloke was telling me that using mobile processor technology the..."

"What bloke?" I ask.

"The... um..."

"Mmm?" the PFY says.

"Bloke... from... uh..."

"..."

"...the... green consultancy..."

"So you and the IT Director talk to some yoghurt-eating fruitcake in a hemp suit and sandals and the next thing we know you're planning to replace our high power server environment with a poor imitation of it?"

QotD: Words that don't exist, but should

Straternization: Hanging out socially with people not because you like them, but for their strategic benefits (i.e., helping you get ahead in work, getting you closer to that cute young thing, raising your social status in the lunchroom, etc). Usually doesn't work nearly as well as people hope.

John Scalzi, "Today is International Make Up a Word Day", Whatever, 2008-02-27

Toying with commuters' minds

H/T to "JtMc".

Just to keep you occupied

A real action movie.

H/T to Jenny Sessions for the link.

Happy Valentine's Day

To celebrate, try perusing the offerings from the denizens of Fark, with their renditions of Valentine cards to send to your ex:

Madonna as director

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian sums up in just a few brief words. You can't accuse them of being over-kind:

Well, it had to happen. Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now — fiercely aspirational as ever — she has graduated to being a terrible director. She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock, deathly pale and mewing like maltreated kittens. She is also the producer and co-author of the script. If she'd done the location catering as well, they'd have had a Jonestown situation on their hands.

QotD: The Mind

I recently spent three hyper-stimulated hours at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The Exploratorium is a hands-on museum, with devices and experiments that you usually only find in the proximity of "cool" high school science teachers with missing fingers. Various exhibits involving dry ice, piles of sand and other edu-thrilling materials allow you to observe all sorts of scientific principles. Have you ever spent an afternoon wondering why honeycombs are shaped the way they are? Then it's time you discovered something called television, and the Exploratorium can tell you how it works!

The latest Exploratorium exhibit is called The Mind, and it explores those precious 3 pounds of gray matter that keep our skulls from making a marimba sound when we hit our head on the car door. I learned something I've always suspected: The mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be trusted with even an ounce of responsibility. If you were dating the mind, all your friends would take you aside, and tell you that you can really do better, and being alone isn't all that bad, anyway. If you hired the mind as a babysitter, you would come home to find all but one of your children in critical condition, and the remaining one crowned "King of the Pit."

Lore Sjöberg, "Don't Turn Your Back on Your Brain", Wired, 2008-02-13

QotD: Are Canadians Sexy?

As a people we have two problems. The first I would dub the Tilley Hat phenomenon. No-one looks good in a Tilley hat, but they're damn practical. When you live in a country where you spend eight months a year trying to stay warm and four more warding off mosquitoes you tend to lean toward the practical. Tilley hats and Sears down coats are not sexy.

The other problem arises from another innately Canadian character trait. We're so obsessed with fairness and inclusion we hand out the status of "sexy" the way a special-ed teacher hands out praise. How else to explain Defence Minister Peter MacKay's annual topping of the sexiest parliamentarian list?

Having begun with a hoary old quote, allow me to paraphrase another. The answer to the question of whether Canadians are sexy would appear to be "as sexy as possible under the circumstances."

John Moore, "Canadians - as sexy as possible", National Post, 2008-02-09

QotD: The "Scientific" Method

Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with.
- Steven Guilbeault, Greenpeace 2005, as quoted by Canada Free Press

Afterwards, another activist clarified the remark by stating that of course taller can also be evidence of shortness, richer can mean living in poverty, baboons can mean chairs, giraffes can mean pencils and hello Ms. Robinson, your lacy trousers are well buttered with smoked trout, can you hear what I'm writing with my toaster?

"Samizdata Illuminatus", "The Scientific Method is over-rated", Samizdata, 2008-02-05

First time at Starbucks?

H/T to "Da Wife".

On the subject of "toilet humour" . . .

. . . there's this.

China Dispatch: Using the Squat Toilet

Rule One: Exhaust all other possibilities.

If you are truly in need and condemned to use the squat toilet, comfort yourself with the knowledge that you are several thousand miles from friends and family. No one has to know.

Proceed as follows:

Most stalls do not have toilet paper. This is the best time to realize this. Either take paper from the general dispenser in the bathroom area or preferably bring your own as it will be made of tissue and not plywood carpaccio.

It gets much, much worse.

Link courtesy of "Da Wife", who clearly isn't planning a trip to that part of the world in the near future.

Cheap shots'R'us

Scott Stantis says farewell to Rudy.

QotD: Libertarianism, the scourge of the GOP

Without attempting to untangle the mess of that second graf — seriously, read it again — my question is this: Exactly where and how has libertarianism poisoned "public life"? Certainly not in the modern, Weekly Standard-approved national GOP, which has shot federal spending through the roof, created mammoth new entitlements, rammed through panicky regulatory nightmares, got the feds deep into local education, and lived out the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Of all the many, many things to complain about the party that has run most of the federal government for the past eight years, "dogmatic libertarianism" has to rank somewhere near the proliferation of Esperanto.

It's always flattering that libertarianism — almost uniquely among strains of modern political thought — is constantly challenged to defend itself against its most theoretical extremes.

Matt Welch, " 'The moral vacuity of dogmatic libertarianism is poisonous to public life'", Hit and Run, 2008-01-25

QotD: Bad SF books

[. . .] a lot of SF authors are more interested in the science than the people, so the psychological depth required for good writing is simply missing, whereas romance and mystery authors have to have some minor grasp of psychology, however bad they are. Written by Aspergers for Aspergers.

Rachel Ganz, posting to the Bujold mailing list, 2008-01-20

Comic strip crossovers

A sick, but still kinda touching, tribute to Calvin and Hobbes.

Apropos of the season, I always thought Watterson did a great snowman comic.

Offensensitivity goes wild

I spotted this mindboggler yesterday, but I was too busy with non-blog activities to link to it. James Lileks did me the favour of not only linking, but putting a far more entertaining spin on the story than I could have done:

This story made my eyebrows hoist. A "conservationist, columnist for the Daily Telegraph, and the chairman of the Countryside Restoration Trust" named Robin Page won 2K pounds in a court award for false arrest. It took five years to do so. From the article:

He claims that in order to gain the attention of listeners at the gathering in Frampton-upon-Severn, Glos, he started in a "light-hearted fashion". His opening remark was: "If you are a black, vegetarian, Muslim, asylum-seeking, one-legged lesbian lorry driver, I want the same rights as you."

Naturally, he was arrested for committing a hate crime. It made me think of a Jay Leno remark I heard excerpted on the Hewitt show; Chris Matthews was describing the GOP contenders in terms of the Iraqi political players — these guys are Sunnis, these guys are Shiites, Romney's the Kurd. Leno responded that "Larry Craig was the guy with the sheep." If you wanted to be offended, you could note that this equated homosexuality with bestiality, and cast Arabs as dispositionally zoophilic. Should he be arrested? Charged with inciting the easily incitable, with equating the newly-minted right to play jiggery-pokery in a lav with an aberrant behavior? If it's aberrant , that is. We're probably ten years away from bestiality japes entering the no-go zone. Within five years they'll probably remake "Flipper," and it'll be a hard R. Critics of the movie, if they’re on the right, will be subjected to the usual eye-rolling, because they can’t possibly be objecting to sex with animals; it’s part-and-parcel of their desire to return to the 50s, when Donna Reed was chained to a stove, deprived of footwear, perpetually pregnant and forced to vote for Ike at knifepoint. Oh, sure, you disapprove of sex-positive dolphin movies. Your kind didn't want the nation to see Elvis from the waist down. Doesn't mean the critics will be comfy with Flipper-gets-busy movies, but they have a dread of making common cause with the trogs. So the movie will be criticized on aesthetic grounds. If nothing else, its poor script and pedestrian direction will be a lost opportunity to advance a controversial topic.

QotD: Age and aging

Sometimes I suspect that everyone under the age of 50 or so thinks they need to get a promotion every few years in order to think of themselves as successful just because the characters on Star Trek all did.

It was noticeable that in the early series, pretty much every StarFleet admiral was either corrupt, insane or a traitor. They only seemed to ease off this unusual hiring policy once Kirk, Scotty, et al reached pensionable age.

Stuart Burnfield, posting to the Techwr-L mailing list, 2007-10-24

QotD: But what do you really think, James?

Insert slippery-slope argument here and an acknowledgment that decades on USENET has biased me in favor of crushing potentially destructive practices, exiling their adherents, sowing their homelands with cobalt-60, raising the temperature of their homeworld to one million degrees, detonating their sun and then ramming a galaxy into their home island universe.

James D. Nicoll, in a comment on Whatever, 2008-01-13

Flashman's creator

The Economist's obituary for George MacDonald Fraser includes a fond farewell to his his best-known fictional creation:

Mr Fraser had known him from the start of his career, when he was dragged bragging and hiccupping from the pages of "Tom Brown's Schooldays" and pitchforked out of Rugby; and he had followed him, like some devoted batman, through all his military campaigns, from Afghanistan to South Africa to the Indian wars. He had seen him frozen in a blanket in a corpse-strewn defile on the retreat from Kabul in 1842; almost split neatly in two by a grinning Chinaman in a top-knot while running guns down the Yangtse in 1860; struggling in an Indian swamp, after the great ghat massacre at Cawnpore, with what looked like man-eating crocodiles; and charging, by accident, for the Russian guns at Balaclava. As Flashman accumulated the tinware — the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Medal, the San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth ("richly deserved"), both he and Mr Fraser knew it was sheer terror that propelled him, delirium funkens, plus a large measure of luck. The great hero of Jallalabad was, in fact, "yellow as yesterday's custard". But he always emerged in splendour.

And with women. Every Flashman novel writhed with them, preferably all bum, belly and bust, giggling and bouncing at the prospect of an officer "who had raked and ridden harder than most". After the beauteous Fetnab (who "knew the ninety-seven ways of love . . . though . . . the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed"), came Lola Montez and Cassie and Susie the Bawd; and, finest of all, the Indian princess Lakshmibai, her "splendid golden nakedness" dressed in no more than bangles and a tiny veil. It was a serious disaster that could interrupt the tumbling for any long period of time.

If you didn't have to live through the 1970's

For those of you lucky enough to have skipped the 1970's (the first time around, any way), James Lileks encapsulates (perhaps that should be encrapsulates) the decade that never should have been:

[. . .] a dreadful 70s generic look that screams END OF AMERICAN INFLUENCE AND CONFIDENCE, plus Kojak-style urban decay. If you weren't around during the rise of the generics you might not recall how depressing these products were; yellow cans that said BEER, yellow boxes of gummint cheese, yellow generic cigarettes. You saw a world where retail would consist entirely of a 7-11 store with buzzing fluorescent lights and the stink of incinerated coffee, a fat greasy unshaven clerk looking at you between glances at a yellow-covered magazine whose cover simply said SMUT, shelves and shelves of generic food, CHUDs in the parking lot siphoning gas from your '77 Pacer — she was twenty years on, and parts were hard to find — while you put a few items in the filthy plastic basket. This was our future in 1975. Little did we know that things would turn around, and in a few years we'd all be spending money on gourmet jelly beans. Morning in America!

"Ask your dealer about a new Intercity 125!"

H/T to Craig Zeni.

Vamping it up in your library

A very amusing discussion broke out on the Bujold mailing list, after this gem from Marna Nightingale:

Ok, seriously, can somebody tell me what is up with the Vampires?

I mean, look. They undoubtedly have terrible breath, you'd have to give up garlic, a big church wedding is Right Out, and you really don't ever want to go on a holiday somewhere remote with one. And they don't help with the yardwork. Or the school run.

Presumably they don't mind getting up with the baby, assuming that
a) they have not eated it and
b) they're not out batting about biting the necks of other nubiles,

but surely that's not by itself enough to overcome their other shortcomings as life partners to the extent that my library's romance section has almost entirely taken over by pointy-toothed dudes in penguin suits, is it?

It's contribute your link day . . .

Continuing the trend to reader-suggested links, frequent commenter "Da Wife" sent this one along with the comment "I just had to smirk and shake my head":

Malaysia's Muslim men are suffering sleepless nights and cannot pray properly because their thoughts are distracted by a growing number of women who wear sexy clothes in public, a prominent cleric said.

Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, said he wanted to speak about the "emotional abuse" that men face because it is seldom discussed, the party reported on its Web site Wednesday.

"We always [hear about] the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen," Nik Abdul Aziz said. "Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed."

I'd like to say that I, for one, don't at all object to women wearing "sexy clothes in public", and would encourage as much of that as possible . . .

Toys for little girls

It's a bit late for Christmas, but if you've just got to get a new toy for a little girl with a taste for "Hello Kitty" and serious firearms, here's your solution:

H/T to Raye Johnsen.

Testosterone . . . the source of all humour?

The British Medical Journal's end of year edition follows a long, distinguished record of fooling the BBC and other media outlets with spoof reports like this one:

Men are naturally more comedic than women because of the male hormone testosterone, an expert claims.

Men make more gags than women and their jokes tend to be more aggressive, Professor Sam Shuster, of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, says.

The unicycling doctor observed how the genders reacted to his "amusing" hobby.

Women tended to make encouraging, praising comments, while men jeered. The most aggressive were young men, he told the British Medical Journal.

Previous findings have suggested women and men differ in how they use and appreciate humour.

Women tend to tell fewer jokes than men and male comedians outnumber female ones.

QotD: The key to generating blog comments

The secret to generating a huge number of comments on your blog: Write about Robert Heinlein and fanfic in the same week; each entry is at about 450 comments. By concatenation, this means writing an entry concerning fanfic about Heinlein books would come close to 1000 comments, and that writing erotic fanfic featuring Heinlein and Ayn Rand would generate so many comments that the entire power grid east of the Mississippi would collapse under the load. Given the severity of the weather at the moment, I am loath to do that. We’ll save it for summer.

John Scalzi, "Just In Case You Were Wondering", Whatever, 2007-12-16

A different kind of wine rack

The Wine Rack.

Need a mission statement, fast?

Click here.

At least as good as half the "real" company mission statements I've had to read . . .

H/T to Craig Zeni.

Singapore and the age of de-MILFication

Rogier van Bakel decodes a recent decision by the Singapore bureaucracy:

It's official, because Singapore says so: There's no such thing as an over-45 MILF. When a woman reaches the age of 45, no right-minded Muslim with a dick would say, "Yeah, I'd tap that."

Muslim women under the age of 45 will be barred from making the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca unless accompanied by a close male relative starting next year, news reports said on Monday in Singapore. The Islamic Religious Council of Singapore said it would no longer appeal to Saudi Arabian authorities on behalf of women who wish to make the month-long pilgrimage unaccompanied. "We should respect the laws they have laid down," The Straits Times quoted Minister-in-Charge of Muslim Affairs Yaacob Ibrahim as saying.

QotD: Huckabee's Energy Policy

I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.

Mike Huckabee, as quoted by Jesse Walker in "Energy-Free by 2017!", Hit and Run, 2007-12-12

QotD: The 1960s

The 1960s remain a volatile mixture of sacred birthplace and hallowed battleground, both Jerusalem and Gettysburg for our national politics and culture. The decade's reach is long, its grasp immense, alternately a continuing mystery needing unraveling or an ongoing problem requiring a solution.

As music, art, racial and sexual relations, and citizens' relation to the state all percolated and mutated in that decade, the resulting cultural and political heat weakened certain bridges across cultural divides. Whether the decade's tumult created those divisions or just illuminated them, they are still often read as defining America in our red/blue era. For one example, the '60s legacy led Andrew Sullivan to the mad expediency of declaring that only a Barack Obama presidency can reconcile the dueling meanings of that decade, the era when Baby Boomers' passions and concerns began their long march through all American’s institutions.

Brian Doherty, "Always on Trial for Just Being Born: Revisiting 1960s tumult in art and politics — and seeing what lasts", Reason Online, 2007-12-11

I guess it could be worse . . .

In the glamorous, high-tech, fast-paced world of technical writing, we sometimes run into situations where we have to document around software or hardware problems. It's the sort of thing that marketing might try, in the sense of redefining a bug as a "feature". But it could be much worse, if you're developing custom software for a client:

[The client] would buy new hardware and software, but it had to look and function exactly like the old systems. No touch-screens, no graphics and no cashier-friendly reminders; just a plain old text-based interface with obscure keyboard commands for navigation. After all, they had spent a lot of money developing training programs for these registers and had no intention of simply throwing them out.

The retailer had also invested in a whole host of back-office management and reporting applications. Some were PC-based and some relied on proprietary hardware, but they all interfaced with the old cash registers' proprietary database. And though many of those applications were antiquated as well, the retailer had no desire to retire them. The new software would just have to interface with them. On top of that, the retailer didn't want a "flash cutover" deployment. They wanted a seamless, phased deployment that would allow them to switch over one register at a time, and have it all look the same on the back-end. So, with the latest and greatest technology at their disposal, Dave's team built outdated and mediocre software that functioned and communicated exactly like the old software. It did everything it was supposed to do and it did it right. And therein lay the problem.

Shortly after they delivered the software, the retailer rejected the QA testers' build and sent David's company a list of bugs. But it wasn't a list of bugs that their software had — it was a list of bugs that it didn't have. When the retailer said they wanted the same functions, they apparently meant the same bugs as well.

QotD: Talking to your dog

In the meantime I was outside in the neighborhood calling for a lost dog. It seemed ridiculous: after all these years, now he runs away? I’d gone outside for a small evil cigar; my wife came out to chat, and yes, we Minnesotans stand outside when it’s 14 above and chat, and Jasper came out to stand with us. He went down to drill a yellow hole by the steps, and I thought nothing of it until I realized five minutes had passed. I went around the corner and gave the whistle, the sound I’ve used for so many years, the sound that usually brings the tinkle of a collar and a dog with pricked ears and wide eyes: will there be food? But nothing. I looked in the new snow; no tracks. I checked the side stairs: dog tracks. They went to the street. Ahhh, damn.

Went back inside, put on boots, and tromped around the neighborhood tweeting like a bird. Nothing. Dead silence. Up the block, down, down the hill, wondering if I’d have to head back to the creek; he loves it there. He could have picked up the trace of a squirrel, followed it down to the Falls, tumbled over the icy precipice.

JASPER I shouted. Nothing. I whistled: too-tweet.

Nothing.

I went back to the house to get in the car and drive around. As I came around the corner he came trotting up the steps. He looked at me: what? I looked at him: you dog. His ears went down and he looked away, then looked at me out of the corner of his eyes.

The most important conversations you have with your dog are silent movies.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-12-07

QotD: The Internet

God did not give us the Internet for porn, political fundraising, or pissing off the RIAA. (*)

[. . .]

* Those were Al Gore's contributions. Thank you, Al!

Jesse Walker, "The Rave Museum", Hit and Run, 2007-11-29

QotD: Dogs in Winter

It is cold as Mars’ Arse out there. I’m already tired of it. Not a good sign; it’s like a stitch in your side sixteen yards into a marathon. The fussy idiot wind doesn’t help any either, poking its nose into everything. The dog wants to go out; the dog goes out, rethinks the wisdom of the effort, then barks to be readmitted. A few minutes later he recalls why he wanted to go out, and he walks over to the door and paws the frame once. The door is opened, and a hand is put on his hindquarters to expedite his passage. Once outside, his nose hurts, and he announces a desire for the comforts of civilization. I wonder if there’s anything to be smelled at all when it’s this cold. I wonder if dogs lean into the wind, nostrils wide, and think: I’m blind.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-29

Glowing review

Jon, my virtual landlord, sent me this item with the comment "With a review like this, you've got to get one":

The Squircle could pretentiously be called a convergence device, but it's really just a glorified card reader. Zero internal memory, no screen, a rubbery shell and a peculiar shape aren't the best starting points for an MP3 player.

But play MP3s it does, and to boot it'll jack into your nearest USB cable for all the card reading fun you can wave a stick and an SD card at. For just £15, we felt we should give this little guy a chance.

Design

Find yourself a large lump of black Plasticine and squish it into a flat square shape. Then round off two opposite corners and leave it to go stagnant. The result is a lump of rubbery gunk that resembles half a square, half a circle — hence the name. There are also five large rubbery buttons that require significant pushing and endless patience. It's about as pleasant to use as putting your hand in a trouser press.

[. . .]

Conclusion

This truly is the most horrible excuse for an MP3 player we've ever heard. Don't be surprised if your toddler's first words are, 'Daddy, why does Noddy sound like he hates me?' As an emergency card reader it's not too bad. But perhaps the most redeeming feature is that it'll skim across a lake like no pebble you'll ever find on a beach. Expect even the most woebegone and wretched five-year old to think you're cool as a result.

A suitable alternative would be any MP3 player on CNET.co.uk, along with the cheapest card reader you can find in Argos. You may pay a little more but we guarantee your karma will benefit as a result. The fact that some dog toys cost more should push you in the right direction.

At least now I know what I'll be getting Jon for Christmas this year . . .

QotD: Coffee, slowly

Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress "Gimme a cuppa joe" and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

Mark Steyn, "For What the Thanks", New York Sun, 2007-11-19

Presentations not to be missed

As reported at Hit and Run, some presentations at the American Academy of Religion's annual conference are pretty much mandatory:

The presenters' titles seem almost a parody themselves of academic jargon. [Samuel] Snyder will speak about "Holy Pasta and Authentic Sauce: The Flying Spaghetti Monster's Messy Implications for Theorizing Religion," while Gavin Van Horn's presentation is titled "Noodling around with Religion: Carnival Play, Monstrous Humor, and the Noodly Master."...

But they also insist it's more than a joke.

Indeed, the tale of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its followers cuts to the heart of the one of the thorniest questions in religious studies: What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others?

In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?

Academia, schmackademia

James Lileks takes the governor off his cerebellum and goes for academic tenure:

Mr. Whipple, as I'm sure you’ve heard, has died. He appeared in over 400 commercials as the fellow who tried to impose rules he himself could not follow, and thereby revealed not only the essential hypocrisy of the puritan impulse, but the uselessness of imposing any sort of "standards" on human behavior. That he himself was rebuked for failing to stay his own desire to squeeze, some say, was proof of a Natural Law above Whipple and the society he represented, but this was seen quite correctly by critics as a reflexive sop tossed to the reactionaries, a way of undercutting the existential truths Whipple's failings represented. In a society without meaning or purpose, is there anything more absurd that setting up the petty bourgeois rules that keep people from applying manual pressure to Charmin in a public setting? Here, the reactionaries pounce: Whipple did not oppose squeezing; he merely attempted to establish some sort of public standard. But the personal is the public; how can the act of squeezing be acceptable in the personal realm and transgressive in the public sphere?

[. . .]

Inherent in his command is the assumption that the person has a home, which is a way of preferencing the currently-domiciled and excluding the non-housed, establishing them as an "other" whose desires must be denied, not merely moved behind the fiction of "private" property. If one cannot squeeze at home because one has no home, then the act of squeezing in a grocery store becomes more than personal gratification; it recontextualizes both the act and the concept of property. By squeezing the Charmin in the grocery store, the non-housed asserts a claim to the public realm, not just for herself, but for all.

Hence, of course, the necessity of Whipple's edict, and the threat of banishment that put the steel in his peevish irritation.

Could it be said that the land in which all were free to let their Squeeze Flag Fly was, indeed, a forbidden planet? Obviously; the message was quite clearly by using the robot from the movie with the same name, a move that had the extra effect of suggesting that the working class could be replaced at a whim with machinery:

Of course, there's another message, perhaps aimed at the Inner Party: Whipple himself could be replaced. He may have come to embody the message for the proles, but he was expendable as well. It is rare that the Establishment laid things out with such ruthless clarity; usually the messenger had the unassailable authority of the message itself — right up until the moment when he went down the memory hole — but such was the confidence of the Establishment that Whipple himself could be held up as an object of

THANK YOU, TENURE GRANTED. NEXT

QotD: Higher Education

Flirtin’ with disaster, as Molly Hatchet put it. Flirtin’ with Disaster! Wasn’t that a Molly Hatchet album? Weren’t they a southern-flavor hard-rock band with Frank-Frazetta covers, for no discernible reason? Probably so. Flirtin’ with Disaster! The album gave a motto to all those guys in the dorm my second year, the straight-ahead / good-time / dual-lead-guitar / Allman et al guys who lived in the triple room catty-whompus from ours, and would have kicked our assses on general principle for not being like them, and also for using the term catty-whompus. They loved that stuff. Played it all the time. It sounded like music to hear two hours before you truly and seriously get down the business of throwing up, hunched over the bowl making gargoyle faces. College. The enlightenment just rained down from the skies. No, that was the guy in the room above whizzing out the window.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-19

QotD: The Boomers

If there's one conviction that afflicts the keenest mind as it ages, it's the belief that Things Were Better Then, and Things Are Horrible Now, usually because no one has learned the lessons of your own generation and insisted on experiencing the world for themselves. (Frank Rich provided a neat example of this a few days ago, when he diagnosed Americans as "clinically depressed" and unable to capture the glories of his demographic, which Took It To the Streets, Man. And blew up a few buildings while they were at it, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking into a farmer's coop, stealing his chickens, setting fire to the coop and running off with the eggs, all of which you later misplaced because you were high.)

I'm so used to being lectured by sour Boomers I’ve come to think of them all as the Gratingest Generation.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-13

No matter how you slice it . . .

John Scalzi hardens his heart, girds his loins, takes the bit between his teeth, and . . . visits the Creation Museum:

Here's how to understand the Creation Museum:

First, imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we're not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we're talking colossal load of horseshit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.

And you look at it and you say, "Wow, what a load of horseshit."

But then there's this guy. And this guy loves this load of horseshit. Why? Well, really, who knows? What possesses someone to love a load of horseshit? It's beyond your understanding and possibly you don't actually want to know, even if you could know; maybe it's one of those "on that path lies madness" things. But love it he does, and he's not the only one; the admiration for this particular load of horseshit exists, unaccountably, far and wide. There are advocates for this load of horseshit.

And so this guy who loves this load of horseshit decides that he's going to do something; he's going to give it a home. And not just any home, because as this is no ordinary load of horseshit, so must its home be no ordinary repository for horseshit. And so the fellow builds a temple for his load of horseshit. The finest architects scope this temple's dimensions; the most excellent builders hoist columns around the load of horseshit and cap them with a cunning and elegant dome; and every surface of the temple is clad in fine-grained Italian marble by the most competent masons in a three-state radius. The load of horseshit is surrounded by comfortable seats, the better for people to gaze upon it; docents are hired to expertly describe its history and features; multimedia events are designed to explain its superior nature, relative not only to other loads of horseshit which may compete in loadosity or horseshittery, but to other, completely unrelated things which may or may not be loads of anything, much less loads of horseshit.

The guy who built the temple, satisfied that it truly represents his beloved load of horseshit in the best possible light, then opens the temple to the public, to attract not only the already-established horseshit enthusiasts, but possibly to entice new people to come and gaze on the horseshit, and to, well, who knows, admire its moundyness, or the way it piles just so, to nod in appreciation of the rationalizations for its excellence or to clap in delight and take pictures when an escaping swell of methane causes the load of horseshit to sigh a moist and pungent sigh.

When all of this is done, the fellow turns to you and asks you what you think of it all now, now that this gorgeous edifice has been raised in glory and the masses cluster in celebration.

And you say, "Well, that’s all very nice. But it's still just an enormous load of horseshit."

It just gets better. Read the whole thing.

QotD: SF clichés

These shows owe a lot to "Forbidden Planet," or perhaps vice versa; it was just how people saw the future. A logical extension of their own norms. We do the same, of course, which is why Star Trek: The Next Generation had a sob-sister grief-counselor on the bridge. There weren't any women on 50s sci-fi ships. The captain was hard-boiled, the engineers were laconic and practical, and the enlisted men were whooping rabble who'd get drunk and throw a rock through the window of a deserted alien city. You suspect that the authors of these stories were all WW2 Navy vets.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-08

Employment hurdles for the miseducated

A few screamingly funny examples of actual cover letters received by Killian Advertising:

"Skills: Microst word, excel, and power point. Mulitaks person, public speaking, and surveying.
Professional Associations
Chairwomen of Studnts Teaching Awareness and Responsibility organization Responsible for research of all 10 event topics, coordinating all campus chiarpersons."
[Editor's note: Despite the many and obvious limitations of SpellCheck, isn't it worth at least a try ... for instance, while you Mulitaks with the other chiarpersons?]

"Who's better to spew out incite, than a college senior ... ?"
[Editor's lament: We don't have the "imaginatiation" to make up stuff like this.]

An all-time classic sent in by a CLFH fan from the great state of Michigan, where the cyclical nature of the automotive industry leads to a lot of job switching. It's yet another example of why you can't just rely on spell-check to catch all your errors:

"I am seeking a new position as i have recently been laid."
[We wish her the best of luck in her career.]

"I need real world experience and after reviewing your web site I get the impressing that your company believes in maintain a lax work environment while efficiently meeting the needs of it's customers (right?)."
[We replied to this college senior, on an ill-advised rescue impulse, gently suggesting he get some remedial help with his writing, since he had an error in every single sentence of his three-page letter. His furious four-page reply included some amazing stuff, such as]
"...you should be straight forward and ... simply state that your company is seeking a grammar teacher who lacks creativity but knows how to properly write a letter and knows exactly where to place punctuation. If your company takes such a serious position towards proper grammar then I think you guys are in the wrong profession. I believe even the leader of this country that we live in lacks proper grammar yet he is still our leader. I can assure you that he leaves grammar and punctuation to the proper authorities such as his receptionist or grade school English teacher. ...I am not precisely sure why you choose to take such a stance perhaps because you have nothing better to do, or maybe because you have personal insecurities that seep out and you feel the need to degrade or target others based on stupid little infractions to make yourself feel better, I don't know what the case is ... if I am out of line please let me know but if I recall properly your companies web site is not the most professional site there is. If you guys are trying to project a laid back yet hard working image through your site and request the same from prospective employees then you should not be so prudent about minor infractions such as punctuation and grammar.... (I reread it before sending it and it states my point clearly and unless you lack the mental capacity to make out the meaning without having exact and precisise grammar maybe you should seek a new proffsion, I hear this country lacks alot of grammar school teachers perhaps that would be a better fit for you) In conclusion I have indeed made many mistakes in this e-mail many on purpose and many accidentaly I did not have the time nor the patientce to deal with it I will leave the grammer checking to the professionals such as yourself."
[Editor's note: although his response fascinated us, you can understand why we no longer reply to the Differently Stable.]

And there's more . . . much, much more . . .

QotD: "the autumnal aroma of a burning straw man"

Are you still afraid terrorists will attack the Mall of America?

I was never afraid. I was always concerned. I still am; who wouldn't be? It's a big red target with great symbolic value. It never keeps me from going there, though. Somehow I've avoided the FEAR and PARANOIA and PERMANENT WAR HYSTERIA that we're supposedly fed 24/7. You know how it goes; if you believe there's actually a credible threat from Islamofascists — well, no, that's not the right word, because it's inflammatory, inaccurate, racist, and is used as a code-word for an exterminationist agenda founded in a desire to control all the oil in the Middle East and convert it to Christianity. So call it the Small but Legally Containable Conservative Religion threat, since that reminds us that all religions are equally dangerous when taken to extremes. I mean, Fred Phelps, Catholic priests, Timothy McVeigh, and that little thing called the Crusades. Also the Inquisition and the persecution of Galileo. No one has clean hands here, except for me, because I washed them before I put that clever COEXIST bumpersticker on my car. No, I'm more afraid of the Mall of America itself. You go there in December — not that I do — and see people walking around eating meat and shopping for things they don't need and shouldn't really have because they don't need them, and you can almost hear the planet shriek like the music in that scary movie about the psycho, whatever its name is. I didn't watch it. I don't support movies that promote violence against women. Wasn't she in a shower? Those are so wasteful. I clean myself with a pumice stone and the sharpened edge of a clam shell.

(Sorry; I just enjoy the autumnal aroma of a burning straw man.)

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2007-11-02

The Muppet Matrix

QotD: Political Experiment goes wrong

Political scientists at the Cato Institute announced Monday that they have inadvertently synthesized a previously theoretical form of government known as megalocracy.

"We were attempting to recreate a military junta in a controlled diplomatic setting, and we applied too much external pressure," said head researcher Dr. Adam Stogsdill, a leading expert in highly reactionary ruling systems. "The resultant government has the ruthless qualities of a dictatorship combined with the class solidarity of a plutocracy — it's quite a remarkable find."

Stogsdill explained that megalocracy is extremely unstable and can only exist in idealistic conditions for a few minutes before collapsing into anarchy.

"Political Scientists Discover New Form Of Government", The Onion, 2007-10-30

But what will they play for Cheney Putin?

Perry de Havilland shares a joke with an unknown military music director:

I was watching the Channel 4 news coverage of the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain, when something I saw nearly made me fall off my chair laughing.

So what does the British Army band for the guard of honour strike up as The Man himself steps out of his limo to high-five Her Majesty?

The Darth Vader March from Star Wars (click on 'watch the report' to see for yourself). I kid you not.

Someone somewhere deserves a medal.

It's not news, it's a Drew Curtis interview

Over on Reason Online, Katherine Mangu-Ward interviews the moving force behind fark.com:

In the golden summer of 1997, small-time ISP entrepreneur Drew Curtis bought fark.com when he noticed all of the good four-letter domains were being snapped up.

Until early 1999, fark.com featured a picture of a very brave squirrel and nothing else. Which, as Curtis notes, "some would argue this is better than what we have now." He briefly considered building a database of Indian curry recipes ("I like to cook, mostly because my wife can't"), but decided to go with Plan B, a site mocking the media (and occasionally Floridians) for their stupidity. Fark, he decided, should be the word for "what fills space when mass media runs out of news." Since then, Fark.com has become the go-to "news" site for the bored at work and sick at heart.

Stepping back from the day-to-day inanity/insanity of the news cycle, Curtis tries to figure out guiding principles behind why networks think it's a good idea to give airtime to 9/11 truthers ("Equal Time for Nut Jobs") or why every issue of Cosmo has exactly the same headlines ("Seasonal garbage") in his new book It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News (Gotham).

QotD: Soccer

You can put Beckham on the field. You can put Rinaldo on Beckham's shoulders. You can add nudity, stilts, a roving herd of robotic horses that shoot lasers from their eyes — in a sports-saturated age in which Americans have already set aside most weekends to watch hillbillies drive around in circles and the approximately 493 commercials featuring Peyton Manning for some reason, no one man nor team of men nor ambitious attempt at mass hypnosis will succeed in convincing America to watch a sport in which the most common expression is "nil-nil."

And for the love of Mike don't go telling them how popular soccer is in the rest of the world — that only alienates them further. Americans prefer profoundly American pursuits, like football and obesity.

Scott Feschuk, "Who is Your Vagina Wearing?", Macleans Blogs, 2007-10-17

Missing passages from the Throne Speech

Scott Feschuk goes dumpster diving to find the excised sections of the recent Throne Speech:

Only this blog has the 15 key missing passages from last night’s Speech From the Throne:

1. "Honourable Senators, Members of the House of Commons, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . and whatever Stephane Dion qualifies as now that the Prime Minister has possession of his balls."

2. "Through the Speech from the Throne, the Government shares its vision with Canadians . . . along with a sinister mind-control ray that will make you our willing hypno-slave upon the utterance of the code word, 'Pheasant.'"

[. . .]

9. "Our Government will introduce legislation to place formal limits on the use of the federal spending power. This legislation will allow provinces and territories to opt out with reasonable compensation if they offer compatible programs . . . or are Quebec."

10. "Canadians want a government that is a competent and effective manager of the economy . . . which is bad timing, because obviously we're spending our nuts off over here."