I’m glad he got acquitted. As I’ve repeatedly told everyone who would listen: you don’t deserve to get convicted just because a fifteen-year-old liar says you gave him a handjob. And when you try a case, you don’t put in fingerprint evidence about a porn magazine from which the prints weren’t lifted until after the kid handled it during grand jury proceedings — unless you are woefully incompetent.
Flushing the Koran
The recent flap about alleged Koran-flushing is such a load of crap, no double-entendre intended. Everyone knows that our noble fighting forces would never be so irresponsible as to flush a book down a toilet, because doing so would surely choke the toilet.
Airline travel now worse than ever
That’s right folks. Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get worse — airline travel in economy class now sucks more than ever, I have just determined after a round trip between Newark, New Jersey and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The seats have continued to get smaller and the rows closer together, while I have remained essentially the same size since 1983. The guy in front of you leans his seat back, and you can barely read your reading material, unless you like holding the text up to your nose.
With truly endemic obesity in the USA, most adults simply don’t fit in these little containers any more. Now there is an unwritten law that holds that the more corpulent passenger takes possession of the arm rest, which in any case is marginally adequate for a single, normal-sized human arm.
As a captive audience you are treated to movies that are not only mindless and annoying, but also violent. I would have raised serious hell if I had had my two year old daughter with me, because her mother and I have decided that she has decades ahead of her in which to see people being beaten, shot and otherwise abused on film and television; she does not need to start yet. It is outrageous that some no-mind in charge of programming the in-flight entertainment for Continental should take it upon (her|him)self to override our decision.
Oh by the way. The seats in the last row on some aircraft do not recline. Maybe this is common knowledge to savvy travelers and I’m a bumpkin. Wouldn’t it nevertheless be nice if the airline’s website would warn you about that when you’re making your seat selection? I had to find out the hard way on the way to PR and sit upright in my tiny seat for four hours.
Then they come around with “food.” On the outbound trip I asked them if they had any lethal injections, which they didn’t, so I said I’d pass. On the return trip they had “Philedalphia Cheesesteaks” for us sorry rabble. I didn’t have the chutzpah to ask them if they had any non-red-meat alternative. Out of sheer hunger and boredom, I submitted to the humiliation of eating it.
I did find useful a psychological trick that I’ve developed for such situations: assume you have died and gone to hell to suffer eternally. Then you will be pleasantly and genuinely surprised to hear the voice announce your initial descent to earth.
Open letter to Bill Maher
Hey Bill. Bill! You listening? Good. Just a few seconds of your time, please.
The show is great and I love it. Now, here’s my suggestion. If you want some other smart witty progressive women on your show, I would suggest:
- Katha Pollitt
- Barbara Ehrenreich
- Naomi Klein
Imagine how they would crush that mendacious, venomous facsist friend of yours Ann Coulter. Bwa ha ha ha!
OK that’s it bro. Didn’t I promise I’d keep it short?
Grasping the full meaning of cards
;)
You had to be there. But you would never be, unless you were a member of small elite that has been playing cards together for some 25 years. In our world, Cards is more than just cards. It is the rarest of delicacies; a fine wine that keeps improving with age; a profoundly gratifying, almost ritualistic event. We are a group of 40-something middle class white males that likes to get together once or twice a year and stay up late talking shit, getting fucked up, and… yes, playing some cards. Anybody who has a problem with that can kiss our ass.
Email rots the brain worse than weed does
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Email Worse Than Marijuana For Intelligence? | | from the as-an-evergreen-state-graduate-i'm-unqualified-to-commen| | posted by Zonk on Friday April 22, @20:35 (The Internet) | | http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/22/2146251 | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ wallykeyster writes "The Guardian is reporting that a recent study at King's College indicates that the [0]average IQ loss of email users was 10 points (or six points more than cannabis users). Details on [1]The Register as well. The Register has a related story about how [2]computers make kids dumb and an apparent "problem-solving deficit disorder" observed in children who use computers. I thought it was television that rotted your brain?" Discuss this story at: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/04/22/2146251 Links: 0. http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1465973,00.html 1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/22/email_destroys_iq/ 2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/21/how_dumb_kids/
I suppose it’s not ironic that I picked up this priceless Slashdot tidbit via email, and that I am now wasting my time with this pointless blog entry.
The Trouble With Blogging
Who has time for this bullshit?
Why I Don’t Use Microsoft Windows
I got my very own first personal computer from Gateway in 1991. It came with Windows 2.0. Then Windows 3.0 came out and I upgraded. Woohoo!
Years rolled by, my computers morphed into different animals as I replaced and upgraded parts, and eventually I upgraded to… Windows 95! Woohoo!
Like a million other consumers I must have assumed that blue screens of death and other mysterious problems were just part of life. People would write funny haikus and stuff, remember?
Around 1996 I started getting interested in making HTML pages. Then I got interested in writing CGI scripts. Then I got interested in web/database programming. I had a shared web hosting account on a Unixoid system and wanted to simulate that environment, more or less, on my development machine and learn more about all that stuff. Over time, I tried several Linux distros and FreeBSD 4.something. Each time I got a little closer to a fully functioning system, but were problems too difficult for me to surmount, and I gave up and stayed with Windows.
Once upon a time, around 2000, I was doing PHP/MySQL development on the computer I had bought from the now-defunct Quantex Systems. It was running the OS that it came with: Windows 98. I was trying to run a reasonable code editor, a browser or two, a MySQL (database) server and Apache (web server). I had a lot of physical memory, but things just kept crashing, and I naively wondered what was wrong.
There is undoubtedly some precise technical explanation of what was wrong, but the high-level, plain English explanation is simple: Windows 98 was a piece of shit junk consumer operating system that was never intended for serious work of the sort I was attempting. I vowed that someday I would leave this abusive relationship and never go back.
I finally did it about three years ago: got a fully functional Linux running. I don’t do Windows anymore, I extremely rarely crash, I can do everything I need to do, and my wife — who is not technically inclined — can sit down in front of it, browse the web, process words, etc., without knowing or caring whether it’s Linux or Windows or something else.
I am never ever going to buy another PC with Windows on it because there is no reason why I should pay for that crap, and neither should you. I have friends and family who struggle with Windows spyware and viruses and I tell them they don’t have to put up with that if they really don’t want to. Nobody is obligated to put up with Windows anymore. You can get a Mac, or a PC with Linux pre-installed from somebody like Monarch Computer, or even <gasp!/> install it yourself and be happy. I’m serious.
Pope Shmope
I can’t see why so many people are falling all over themselves to praise the Pope. So he preached love and peace — so what? He was the Pope, right? Espousing basic Christian values is his job; doing his job is hardly above and beyond the call.
Let’s see, what else? Lacking the balls and/or the wisdom to break with centuries of fucked up dogma and continuing to discourage condom use among tens of millions of people in impoverished, AIDs-ravaged regions like Africa. Way to go fuckhead.
I say good riddance.
Brian Nichols as Hero
Here’s one of the fucked up things about that Atlanta shooting/escape incident: as I was listening to the accounts of how this guy busted out, I felt a brief, involuntary flicker of admiration for the man’s fearlessness and balls. Which should not be too surprising, if you think about the Hollywood violence-glamourizing cultural conditioning we are subjected to. Aggression is fascinating, let’s face it.
It isn’t hard to rework the screenplay enough to turn Brian into the heroic man of action. Despite his courageous resistance and awesome strength and fighting skills, Good Guy Brian Nichols is abducted by the Bad Guys and taken to Bad Guy Land, where he is framed for some heinous crime and taken to kangaroo court for a show trial. He must do something decisive and dangerous. The Bad Guys, in their arrogance and ineptitude, leave our Hero momentarily in the custody of just one guard — some sadistic female bitch guard at that. The Hero overpowers her and confiscates her weapon, giving her the skull-cracking she deserves in the process. Then he starts dropping bodies of other Bad Guys in the course of his incredibly daring escape, to the thunderous cheers of the movie theatre audience.