I Bet You Don't Care What I Think!

A Field Guide For Recognizing Modern Fascists

2009-09-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

This is the best piece of thinking I have ever read about the defining features of Fascism. Read it.

Before anyone accuses me of posting some Bush-slandering propaganda hack job tailored to villifying American conservatives, I would like to point out that the piece was published in 1995.

A Flu For All Swine

2009-04-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

I have finally decided that the swine flu is not, in fact, the zombie apocalypse everyone who has ever played a video game has been hoping for.

I now believe that the Swine Flu is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's final revenge upon the filthy, teeming mass of humanity that so disappointed him in life. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, from one kind of swine to another.

The virus was obviously bred in pigs at the Owl Farm beginning in late 2000. I feel confident that the avian portion of the virus will be found to have originated not with chickens but instead with peafowl. The Judas-pigs were distributed to all attendees of his funeral, to be released in many places at strange intervals. The delay between the funeral and the outbreak has been to give this cadre time to prepare their own defences and build up an immunity to the disease through living closely with their pigs. Expect the tide of chaos and madness to rise sporadicly, with no real warning and leaving nothing but strange rumors of men releasing live pigs in shopping malls and grocery stores.

In the end humanity will be much, if not totally, closer to Dr. Thompson's ideal. The depopulation will allow all of the survivors enough space and resources to live the kind of wild and depraved life the good Dr. most approved of, and no one will care what kind of drugs you want to do.

I sure hope you didn't care what I think...

2008-10-15T21:03:00.000-07:00

... because I haven't been sharing it for over a year. Feel free to sue me, or otherwise complain. I assure you I will take it Very Seriously, in much the same way that most companies take things Very Seriously, i.e. by seriously not caring very much.

I have no intention of catching everyone up with my life over the past year. In fact, right now I just want to post a link:

Pwned!!!-
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/10/matt_taibbi_and_byron_york_but.html

I am going to start trying to post again. This will depend largely on whether or not I think of anything worth writing down.

House Obtained

2007-08-11T07:20:00.001-07:00

We seem to have nailed down a nice place in Ravenna/Greenlake. It has 2 bathrooms! None of you will understand how much of a coup this is just look at the housing ads for Seattle on Craigslist. For some reason nobody in Seattle prior to about 1980 has ever needed more than one bathroom in a house, regardless of how many bedrooms they have. You can find places just outside of Seattle (generally built after 1980) that have multiple bathrooms, but not actually IN Seattle.
It also has a nice fenced yard and is close to the best video store ever (Scarecrow Video. Look it up). I'm pretty happy with it.

In celebration of my good fortune, I give you a cartoon kind of making fun of Andy, though probably not on purpose: Link

We Walked Out Of The Woods, But Then Immediately Entered Another Set Of Woods

2007-08-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

So as of yesterday we were totally sure that we had a house. Mar had met with the landlord, who had wanted her to sign the lease and give a deposit check right there (which she hadn't told Marla when setting up said meeting). Mar didn't have the checkbook with her, so she said she would overnight the check today along with a signed lease. So lo and behold today Mar opens the envelope with the lease to find that none of the info is filled in, it's just a generic blank lease with no addresses or names or whatnot. So Mar calls the prospective landlord and says "Hi, I was going to sign the lease and send it with the check and I noticed that it's all blank, so I need you to tell me if I should fill it in or do you want to fax a lease that you've filled out? It also occured to me that I could just put our deposit directly into your bank account if you wanted (the landlord had made a big deal about how she preferred the rent to be done via electronic bank transfer). Call and let me know what to do, I'll be available until 6:00 but have to teach class from then till 8:00." She left this message at 11:00 am.

So what does the landlord do?

She calls at 7:00, like a chickenshit, and leaves a message telling Marla that it had gotten "too complicated" and to go find somehwhere else to live.

In what way is asking someone to respond to basically 2 questions "too complicated"?

?!

Crap.

2007-07-31T16:58:00.000-07:00

Our landlord just notified us that we have to move by October because he is going to sell the house.
Fuck.
I hate moving.
And we're broke, but only for the exact period during which we will be looking for/putting deposits on/moving into a new place. One month after we move we will be fine financially, but from now till mid-October we were just going to squeek by. Fucking wonderful.
Oh, and we just had to buy a new car for Marla, so not only do we not have the best credit scores in the world, we also just took on a new car payment, which any landlord will be able to see when they run our credit.

Have I mentioned that I hate moving?
At least this time we can wait until the end of the worst of the summer heat.
Fuck.

Go With Your Gut

2007-07-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

In the wake of Secretary Chertoff's pronouncement that his gut told him America would be attacked by terrorists this summer, Wired's Threat Level blog presents this gut-based Security Advisory System. Just as useless as the old, but with added flavor.

In other Homeland Security news, I also present to you the "Jam Band Fan or Taliban" blog, which presents pictures of bearded men and challenges you to determine if they are dangerous Islamists or filthy filthy hippies. Now imagine trying to do the same while screening passengers at an airport.

P.S.- The word of the day, apparently, is "presents".

The End Is Nigh, Beware The Nerdocalypse

2007-07-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

This is an article by Charles Stross (one of my favorite science fiction authors these days) about the practicality of one day recording every moment of every person's experience, indexing it, and making it searchable. As he says, it's like having Google for your memory.

So my question is, how will this effect behavior? Personally I think that it will lead to the effective demise of embarassment, and a lot of seriously paranoid practices in government.

In any case, I can't wait to get my memory prosthesis.

It will make uploading my consciousness in order to become an effectively immortal weakly superhuman distributed intelligence a lot less traumatic.

Memes Are Lame and So Am I

2007-07-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

I was tagged so here's the currently endemic Book Meme with the nearest book here next to my computer:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences of that book (and these instructions) on your own along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it's too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).
6. Tag five people.

From Essentials of Human Anatomy & Physiology:

"However, some skin neoplasms are malignant, or cancerous, and they tend to invade other body areas. Indeed, skin cancer is the single most common type of cancer in humans. One in five Americans now develops skin cancer at some point in his or her life. The cause of most skin cancers is not known, but the most important risk factor is overexposure to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. Frequent irritation of the skin by infections, chemicals, or physical trauma also seems to be a predisposing factor."

I'm not reading it (lest people think I'm smarter than I am), it's one of the textbooks Marla is teaching from this quarter. I tag no one. If you think it looks fun, have at it.

You Always Know The Perfect Gift To Give

2007-06-22T19:28:00.000-07:00

So I've been playing around with Pandora radio today. It's an internet radio service that basically takes a song or an artist from you as a starting point and makes you your own personal radio station of stuff like that. You give everything that comes up a thumbs-up or down and thus the algorithm knows what direction to go in with the playlist. It also puts up some relatively discreet ads, presumably more or less pegged to what sort of stuff you're listening to. E.g., I made a stream built off of old Snoop Dogg and started getting ads for the BET Music Awards.

So the first stream I made was built off of Morphine. What ads pop up after a little while?

Razor blades.

I love you little algorithm.

Weirdometer

2007-06-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

Did you know that the weight of a can of soda is 13.7568 average human eyeballs? Now you do.

Want to know how how many flaccid penises there are in a Golden Gate Bridge?

Behold the Weirdconverter.

I hope they add more stuff to it soon.

Ask Mr. Owl

2007-06-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

Q: If a man is driving an Acura, but is over 55 years old and has a child in the car, is he still as likely to be a douchebag as he would be if he were 21 years old or younger and by himself or riding with a friend?

A: Yes.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid (as usual)

2007-05-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

From Wellington Grey

Ding Dong The Witch is Dead

2007-05-15T20:30:00.000-07:00

Jerry Falwell has died.

Obviously God has struck him down for failing to eliminate all of the faggots, uppity women, civil libertarians, secularists, and scientists (particularly biologists).

We can only hope that his organization falls apart without him at the helm.

This is Major Tom To Ground Control

2007-04-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

Well, the whole Linux thing is working out pretty well. I'm very happy with it and it definitely runs better and faster than XP on this computer. Problems so far:

-Had problems with connecting to the internet wirelessly. I ended up having to buy a new wireless card that was supported (grand total $20.00). The connection is still a little dodgy when I first boot up, but I think that's because of our home network

- Had to re-install (probably because I fucked something up on a deep and fundamental level without realizing it while trying to get my wireless card to work), but the second install is working great.

- I'm having some trouble getting my iPod set up, but I just started messing with that today and have confidence that I'll be able to figure out what the hell is wrong.

Nice Things About Linux:

-It's real easy to get new software. As in "there are piles of software that you can download by clicking a checkbox".

-Fixing problems is not easy, but it is sort of empowering. It's pretty awesome being able to just look up troubleshooting guides that actually work.

-I've always had problems with Windows and multitasking. If I have several major applications running, the computer went schizo when I tried to switch back and forth or (god forbid) close one of them. So far I have not had any of these problems with Linux.

-Nothing has attempted to surreptitiously make itself my default anything, nor has anything installed itself on my system tray in a sneaky manner.

-Ubuntu is automatically set up with two desktops that you can switch back and forth, so you can have a desktop for working and a desktop that's full of all your music players and IM programs (btw, I have IM programs again thanks to GAIM. Just hit me up as diemos3211 on AIM or MSN, haven't gotten a Yahoo one going yet) and crap, for instance.

- Free. As in Beer.

All We Have To Lose Are Our Chains

2007-04-14T22:01:00.000-07:00

I'm taking the plunge and installing Ubuntu Linux to use as my everyday OS. I'll let you know how it goes and whether or not I really like it better, and whether or not I think other people will like it better. I will try not to become an insufferable evangelist in any case.

Freaky

2007-04-09T19:56:00.000-07:00

So apparently the British Ministry of Defense both reads many of the same books as I do and comes to conclusions about the mid-term future similar to mine.

Now all they need is a section considering contingency plans dealing with technological singularity, how to fight angry middle-class office drones with access to nanotechnological utility fogs and programs detailing how to set up large-scale biodiesel production in the case of oil scarcity and the British military will have entirely caught up with me.

I wonder if the U.S. has a similar program, or if we're too busy trying to kill goats with mind powers and other "In Search Of"-worthy endeavors to think about more likely creepy and quasi fantastical problems.

Deep Thought For Today

2007-04-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

Church youth groups and pedophiles use many of the same techniques to lure children into their clutches.

Whiny Bitches

2007-03-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

Diebold is suing the state of Massachussetts for buying voting machines from a competitor. They aren't alleging that anything corrupt or fraudulent happened, they just think that the Secretary of State for MA "made the wrong choice" and think that the courts should force the state to buy their (crappy) product.

In the meantime, they are trying to get an injunction preventing the state from using their competitor's machines in upcoming local elections.

In other bastards-trying-to-ruin-America news, the Supreme Court heard a case today that, if the Supremes (I like to call them that because it leads me to imagining the highest court in the land in gaudy dresses singing for their dinner) rule for the manufacturer, could lead to manufacturers being able to set retail prices of their goods (i.e. retailers would not be allowed to lower prices for a sale, meaning that you and I could not shop around for a deal).

....and a few minutes ago when I was using the bathroom here at work, someone came in to ask me, while I was clearly in the middle of taking a shit, to unlock a door for them (to an area that he could already get to, but had to walk an extra 10 steps to do so). I don't think I've ever been quite so close to being simultaneously fired and arrested.

If I get through the night without having a fucking rage induced heart attack I will count myself lucky.

It's Just Too Soon To Make Any Calls On The '08 Race

2007-03-14T02:21:00.000-07:00

Remember the vampire guy who was running for governor of Minnesota?

Well, now he's running for the Presidency and apparently he has threatened/promised to impale the current president if elected (amongst many other things).

He has a personal website, a blog, and a Myspace.

Enjoy.

P.S.- Be sure to scroll alllllllllllllllllllll the way to the bottom of his personal site to follow his many fascinating links.

Run For Your Lives!

2007-03-13T02:21:00.000-07:00

Please educate yourselves on the dangers of this incredibly common and hazardous material, and join the fight to ban Dihydrogen Monoxide.

Remember, only you can protect the children.

Fuck Valentine's Day

2007-02-14T22:33:00.000-08:00

It's all a bunch of consumerist sheeple shite.

Instead celebrate a real holiday!

Happy John Frum Day!

FYI

2007-02-07T00:23:00.000-08:00

The Ark of The Covenant is not, as George Lucas would have us believe, in a box in a warehouse in Virginia somewhere. It is in fact in Ethiopia being watched over by a monk whose whole job is to watch the Ark. Or so he says. No one is allowed to look at the Ark but the monk (who appears to go by the title/name of "The Famous Monk") because it would blast them to oblivion to look upon it, so we have to take his word for it.

Anyway, just so you know where it is in case you need it, you can find the exact location in you Lonely Planet guide.

Link.

You May Laugh Now, But Just You Wait...

2007-02-06T19:49:00.000-08:00

My vision of a future with blimps as the air-travel vehicles of choice marches ever closer. While this particular blimp is far from being what I envision, it's a step (in that it is a blimp that people want to build in spite of news footage from the 1930s).

Before you mock me hear me out:

1- LTA (lighter than air) vehicles do not really have to worry about space per se, only weight. With the right sort of materials you could make a commercial transport that's more like a cafe than a Greyhound bus. Sure, it would be waaaay slower but for relatively short distances (like from Seattle to LA) I would totally be willing to trade a few hours for not having my knees jammed up into my face and my shoulders torn off by passing drinks trolleys.

2- Blimps have a lot of surface area, which means that you could load up the top of the vehicle with photovoltaic panels and save massive amounts of fuel (if not run almost entirely without fuel, giving the aircraft an effectively unlimited range).

3- Blimps do not require the use of jet engines. This gives a lot of flexibility in what sort of fuel you can use. You could even put in a hybrid diesel engine so you could use biofuels, making your blimp airline environmentally friendly and capable of survivng Mad-Max scenarios for the end of oil (or even just weathering rising fuel costs). Keep in mind that the low fuel cost will no doubt be reflected in the price of a ticket for consumers.

Downsides:

1- Slow moving blimps will create air-traffic control headaches.

2- Business travellers in particular will probably not like the loss of speed.

More Than Meets The Eye

2007-01-22T20:29:00.000-08:00

This is a very cogent essay making the case that R2D2 and Chewbacca were high-ranking intelligence operatives for the Rebellion and in fact outranked basically everyone but Obi-wan, Yoda and Bail Organa.

I always knew Han was a patsy in my heart of hearts.

Freedom Is Slavery

2007-01-21T17:38:00.000-08:00

Apparently a chimpanzee escaped from the Little Rock Zoo recently.

I'm sure you are asking with baited breath "What sort of typical monkey mischief did the beast get up to while it was out? Did it put on lipstick? Fling poo at passersby? Find a TV news crew and masturbate furiously in the background of a very serious story?"

The answer is no. What the chimp did was rifle through a fridge, then she cleaned a toilet (using a brush) and then she got a wet sponge and cleaned the inside of the fridge.

(On a side note, what do you have to do to your toilet and fridge that a chimp walked by and said to itself "That's just intolerable"?)

I find the depressing because the only things a near-human being (both genetically and in terms of self-awareness and general intelligence) that has been kept captive for years wants to do when it finally escapes and breathes the sweet air of freedom is gorge themselves on sweets and do menial labor.

Alternatively, this is part of some diabolical plan to replace immigrant labor with primate labor.

Nerd Alert

2007-01-15T20:18:00.000-08:00

I am about to post several intensely geeky things. If you do not like geeky things, do not read on.

So first off, George Clooney and Neal Stephenson are developing Diamond Age as a mini-series. The bad news is that it will be on Sci-Fi. I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope that it's more Battlestar Gallactica (though I have my problems with that show, at least it has decent production values) than S.S. Doomtrooper or Mansquito.

Secondly the inventor of the infamous bear protection suit has created a suit of sci-fi armor that he says ought to cost $2000. I wonder how the cops will feel about this stuff if the military doesn't buy it. All I know is that I want it.

Also, there's a new DIY kit for a desktop 3D printer. The parts would cost a bit, but just imagine being able to make anything you can think of.

This Is How Cargo Cults Get Started

2006-12-11T00:12:00.000-08:00

Well, actually, cargo cults have historically gotten started as the result of our efforts to woo native islanders to oppose (or at least keep an eye on) the Japanese for us in WW2.

Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that Doritos mysteriously washing up on the beach would be a rather auspicious start for a good cargo cult as well.

I'm holding out for one of our fine local breweries to be stricken by a flood, sending thousands of bottles floating around the city for the taking. Failing that, a rain Twikies following the Hostess bakery downtown being hit by a tornado would be pretty cool, though I'm not all that hot on Twinkies as a rule.

G Is My Letter. There Are Many Like It, But This One Is Mine

2006-12-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

From Hex, who is acting as the monkey at the airport for this one.

10 things beginning with the letter G that I love:
1- Grover
2- Gregor Mendel
3- Curious George
4- "Green Eggs and Ham"
5- Garrison belts (hopefully I'm not the only guy around who has a Batman utility belt)
6- Green army men
7- Garlic
8- Guinness
9- "Ghostbusters"
10- William Gibson

You're Welcome

2006-11-26T21:09:00.000-08:00

How to turn your pee blue.

I know all the guys want to. Especially the guys who live places with snow.

A Little Less Mystery

2006-11-24T12:51:00.000-08:00

I read today that researches have pretty much cracked the Antikythera Mechanism. This artifact was found in 1902 and now appears to have been a calculator that could add, subract, multiply and divide and may also have had a function whereby it tracked the planets and predicted eclipses. This ancient machine had been a mystery for over a century and as far as we know is the most complex mechanism created until Europeans started making accurate clocks and pocketwatches in the 17th century. All in all quite an impressive achievement for iron-age craftsmanship and mathematical knowhow.

This is obviously wrong. Calculators are not mentioned in the Bible, so this artifact must be a trick planted by the Devil to confuse us.

We Shall Overcome

2006-11-14T21:06:00.000-08:00

So apparently someone took the Anti-Borat League message too far and cracked Sacha Baron Cohen in the face. I would like to make clear to everyone that the ABL is a purely non-violent movement. Please do not hit Mr. Cohen in future.

In other news, John Moe is a funny man, who has an entertaining blog. Go buy his book, and perhaps even listen to him on the radio on the weekend (if your NPR station carries Weekend America rather than endlessly re-running "Prairie Home Companion" for 48 hours).

Sometimes, life doesn't merit posting on the internet

2006-11-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

Which is why I haven't been.

First off, lets get a bit of business out of the way. I will be in Tallahassee from the 20th to the 29th of December, after that we will be in Orlando until the 31st. If you want to do something with me and Marla while we're down there, just leave a post or whatnot and I'll e-mail a number that you can reach me at if you want to get together to do something.

So, I watched "The Island" last night. It was not good. It was basically a thinly veiled anti-stem cell research propaganda piece. Really though, it got me thinking much more generally about the use of science in the movies. Why is it that writers can NEVER be bothered to actually look anything up, or even talk to a scientist (seriously, a grad student would more than suffice for most of the retarded shit that they write into movies) when some sort of scientific thing is the basis of their whole story. Asshats.

Speaking of asshats, would anyone like to join my Anti-Borat League? I don't know how any of you feel about Borat or his impending movie, but I don't think that the world really needs another Yakov Smirnov and I'm generally tired of this sort of "assault comedy" where some dick with a camera ambushes you and it's supposed to be funny because either you are polite to them ("ha ha! He's such a pushover! What a moron!") or because you "overreact" to the freak ("Ha ha! He just can't take a joke! What a moron!") . I also question the wisdom of supporting anything that will lead to a world where every time anything unusual happens you'll find yourself pausing to consider "Hey, was my best friend really just eviscerated or am I being Punked?"

Membership in the anit-Borat league costs you nothing, and your obligations include nothing more than arguing with people who think that the guy is a comedic genius.

Oh The Irony

2006-09-27T21:59:00.001-07:00

So this is a really callous thing that occured to me. Feel free to hate me a little.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but I find it to be intensely funny.

You know the tainted spinach with E. Coli that's been in the news? The name of the brand of spinach that has been found to be infected is "Natural Selections".

I Believe In Planning Ahead

2006-09-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

Which is why I can usually outsmart my dog. Usually.

Anyway, in the interests of planning ahead I thought I would mention to everyone that I will be back in FL around Xmas/New Years for about 2 weeks. The plan is to be in Tallahassee for Chirstmas and then go to Orlando for a bit (my cousin is getting married there).

The exact dates have not yet crsystallized. Is anyone going to be around at that time of year (I know Monster won't and expect that J and Ceara probably won't, as they usually have to go to Tennessee or wherever for the Walton Family Christmas thing, descriptions of which usually make me kind of uncomfortable in that "whoa! little too much religiosity in the religious holiday there, I was just looking to unwind for a few days with some spiked eggnog and gifts" way), and if so what sort of time periods should I be looking at (i.e. more time in Tallahassee or Orlando, if in Orlando can Marla and I use a spare bedroom or something after we have to leave the wedding hotel)?

Ideally I would like to spend more time in Tallahassee (because I know where things are there, and would not have to sleep on anyone's couch, and because I like my parents and do want to spend some time with them), and probably will anyway, but I can carve out some extra days for Orlando if necessary to see people (or add some days after Orlando to be back in Tallahassee).

Anyway, I figured it would be good to mention this sort of thing before everyone thinks "I've got nothing going on at Christmas now that grandma kicked it, I ought to go to Bermuda" or something similar.

Though really, if you've got the means to go to some idyllic paradise you should still go. I seriously doubt I could compete with that, and you'd just end up staring at me with hate in your eyes thinking "Fuck, I could be scuba diving right now, or swimming with dolphins, or drinking maitais in Rio, or molesting children in Thailand. Asshole." Which would be a real drag for all of us I'm sure.

Security Theatre

2006-09-04T12:05:00.000-07:00

Here are two good essays from Bruce Schneier about security theatre and why it is stupid and wasteful.

http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html

http://www.schneier.com/essay-038.html

And another on the implausibility of the binary liquid explosive scheme as explained by the newsmedia, as well as some fun reasons why by the logic currently being used we all ought to be flying in the nude with no posessions after a cavity search and a cat scan, with all persons having any sort of medical need for anything (including wheelchairs and canes) being prohibited from flying.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200608/msg00087.html

?!

2006-08-22T20:30:00.000-07:00

Someone left the box for a rubber vagina next to my trashcan.

Who buys a rubber vagina and can't wait to get home to take it out of the box?

The Real Terrorist Plot

2006-08-12T15:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.wondermark.com/d/220.html

Don't Panic

2006-08-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

This is an awesome paper from 2004 about why terrorism is not actually all that scary. I love it.

P.S.- It's a PDF. If you live in a hole and don't have any sort of Acrobat reader you'll have to wonder what it is I was babbling about FOREVER.

2006-08-06T15:43:00.000-07:00

According to the L.A. Times the guy who runs the Girls Gone Wild empire is, in fact, just about as much of a dick as you would imagine him to be.

I really hope that this twerp is not the Hugh Hefner of our generation. The lack of even a thin veneer of class is upsetting.

Who Needs Wonder When You Have Science!

2006-07-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

This is reposted from my wife. I have reposted it because I like showing off how smart she is, and because I like nice thorough debunkings. Enjoy...

So, there was an auction on Ebay this month that got a bit of attention, for a "Golden Mermaid" that the lister had supposedly found washed up in Desoto Beach, FL. The creature sold for over $1,500! You can see the actual auction page here: http://cgi.ebay.com/GOLDEN-Mermaid-Found-DEAD-on-Lonely-Florida-Beach_W0QQitemZ300006962914QQihZ020QQcategoryZ1468QQcmdZViewItem

Now, I know what you're saying, "How could anyone believe that thing is a real mermaid?", etc., but the reality is, some people do! The mermaid was featured on the syndicated radio program Coast 2 Coast, which is this wierd, squirley program run by a guy that saw a UFO, and where they discuss all maner of strange and hidden phenomena. It's like Mysterious Mysteries of Strange Mystery in Invader Zim, but as a radio call-in show. I found out about it because my mom, a devotee of C2C, had seen the photos and was so disturbed it gave her bad dreams! She asked me to take a look at it and use my biology-fu to decide whether it was real or not. I did so, and I am reposting my analysis here for your perusal and amusement.

After careful consideration and research, it is my professional opinion, as a biologist, that what we're seeing here is most assuredly a hoax. It is made of a replica human skeleton, a sculpting material or two (plaster, latex, etc. can't tell for sure from photos), the teeth of a large Cervid (deer, elk, moose) and the preserved remains of a large species of marine fish, most likely a Cobia (Rachycentron canadum). The lister states only that it has “real fish skin, fins, and teeth”, and I believe this is true, as he is very carefully avoiding making fraudulent claims in the auction.

The Cobia or "Crabeater Fish" is very common in the Atlantic, and, as a favorite of sport fishermen, is often stuffed and mounted as a trophy, i.e. taxidermy. Living Cobia are a mottled dark brown color on the dorsal side, and creamy white ventral/underside, with a distinct caudal/tail fin with a crescent shape, and long, draping pectoral fins. The dorsal and ventral fins are long, (running the length of the body from the upper thorax to the tail fin) and the dorsal fin has a large, distinct triangular shape at the anterior end. The fins and scales are brown in life, but fade to a sunny yellow color in preserved specimens. Cobia are a very large species, and are commonly caught at weights over 60 lbs, up to 109 lbs, and over 5 foot in length.

How did they do it? Well, I believe they removed the feet from the skeleton, leaving the femur, tibia and possibly fibula intact, to fill out the lower body (the "tail"). The iliac crests of the coxal bones (pelvis) are clearly seen beneath the skin, as are the spinous processes of the vertebrae in the back, the true ribs and clavicle, the nasal bone and vomer in the skull, and the humorous, radius and ulna. They then wrapped the skeleton with the thick, leathery hide of the fish, which retains some of its original pigment only in the fins: where it used to be golden brown it is yellowed with death and age. The remainder of the hide, covered in scales, has whitened considerably from its original brown. This could be due to either having lost its pigment through molecular breakdown post-mortem, or, due to a coating of plaster, paint/sealant, or some other agent this "artist of the grotesque" has employed to assure consistency to the thing's appearance and strength to its construction, or a combination of the two.

They wrapped the hide such that the dorsal and ventral sides of the fish are now the lateral sides of the "mermaid", shown by the presence of what are clearly dorsal and ventral fins and the lateral line (a component of fish nervous systems, which allows them to sense changes in water currents) which is clearly visible running down the center (medial) line of the "mermaid". They did not use the upper portion of the fish's body, stopping just below where the head attaches to the body, and they removed the pectoral fins from this upper, unused portion of the fish's body and attached them to the skull as "head fins".

The carpals, metacarpals and phalanges of the hands are wrapped in material (unclear whether it is fish hide or another type) to give them a "webbed" appearance, but they too have no musculature.The true "fish scale" hide appears to end in a tapering point in the center of the ribcage (on the anterior/front side of the body) and about ½ way up the back, in the middle of the thoracic vertebrae. The close-up photos clearly show a very different pattern of scales on the tail, compared to the upper chest & upper back (much larger, inconsistent and rougher "scales" on those areas), suggesting they used plaster/latex to cover the upper body, and attempted to replicate the scale pattern there, but were not able to get it quite true-to-life.

They removed (or plastered over) the mandible (lower jaw bone) and the human teeth from the skull and used whatever sculpting material they're employing and possibly the round, hinged jaw of the fish, to create a round buccal cavity (mouth) in its place, which they have then filled with a circular cluster of elongate teeth from another animal, embedded in red material (resin, acrylic). From their long, tapering, cylindrical shape, I would guess a member of the family Cervidae (elk, deer, moose) teeth, which, once removed from the jaw bone, appear long, conical and sharp, despite the herbivorous diet of Cervids.They are not the teeth of a carnivorous animal, which have a triangular, sharp-edged shape in marine predators whether they are Piscine or mammal (sharks, predatory fish, dolphins). Also, the jaw, as it is constructed, would not allow for chewing or tearing, and altogether seems a poor functional design for a mouth, though it looks frightening, which was probably the artist’s goal.The total lack of musculature, (most clearly seen on the skull, in between the ribs where the intercostal muscles are found, and the neck and the upper limbs: trapezoids, deltoids, pectorals, biceps brachii, all missing) especially given the intact nature of the skin, is a sure sign that this "mermaid" did not die and decay in the sea, but was rather "built" from the skeleton model up, by people. Only mummification, which requires utterly DRY conditions, can even approximate an appearance of having intact skin without underlying adipose (fat) or muscle. Obviously, floating dead in the ocean is hardly the correct condition for mummification, and, in addition, the skin is not shrunken into the skeleton as it would be in the case of it being a mummy, but rather stretched over the bones like leather pants on Mick Jagger.The eyes are most likely the glass eyes used in the taxidermy fish they found to use as the covering. The stated height ("slightly under 5 foot") is the height of the standard "Skeleton Stan" anatomy model used in colleges and doctor's offices the world over: 4 foot, 10 inches. Cobia are known to reach lengths upwards of 60 inches, which would provide plenty of hide to wrap the lower body. Taking into account the removal of the feet, and the length added by the tail, this is just the measurement one would expect. Due to the total lack of muscle, and the erroneous, non-functional placement of the fins, this animal would not have been able to swim; a very important skill for marine life. Also, there are no features made by the artist to suggest gills, or other respiratory structures, so it couldn't breathe either. If we are supposed to believe that this creature, despite having the external anatomy of the Piscine type, nonetheless retains mammal respiration (like dolphins) and is able to spend long periods of time underwater without respiring, there would be evidence of increased lung capacity, of which there is none.I cannot even express how absurd it would be for this mermaid, evolutionarily, to exist, NOT because there couldn't be creatures akin to "mermaids" via evolution, (there could be) but because if there were, they most assuredly would not have the skeleton of a man, no fat or musculature, and the hide of a fish on sideways!A true mermaid, built on a primate skeleton, would have features in common with other mammals which have returned to the sea over evolutionary time, like toothed whales. It would look more like a dolphin-man than a fish man, were it to exist.

Hot

2006-07-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

I am melting.
Note to self: Buy house ASAP and have central air conditioning installed. Mock fools for about 2 months out of the year, curse expense for other 10.

Hey Melissa

2006-07-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

Go look outside at sundown.

Sharing The Pain

2006-07-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

I think I saw the worst movie ever last night.

I've found a font of terrible movies on cable called "Retroplex" that basically plays every bizarre movie from the 1970s that nobody has ever heard of for a reason. It's as if MST3K put the collection of movies they had not gotten around to mocking yet on TV as some sort of home-version of the show but forgot to tell everyone.

So I've seen some real stinkers on this channel late at night. I saw a movie about worms that begin eating human flesh after a power line is knocked down in the swamp in some tiny town in South Carolina (a tiny town complete with every single stereotypical redneck white trash bumpkin you can think of). I saw that horrible movie that always seems to be on SOMEWHERE on sundays about the car trying to kill a lady and her daughter.

But now I have seen the apogee of bad 70s film, and its name is Zardoz.

Zardoz is every bad play that ever got put on in a tiny black-box theater. It's every bad idea that every burned out hippy you ever met (and for those of us who used to hang out at the Epitome that's several metric tons of burnouts) babbled at you convinced that they were a misunderstood geniuses), and as an added bonus the star of the movie is Sean Connery (who I'm pretty sure only agreed to to do the movie because it involved so many nameless young actresses that he was no doubt neck-deep in pussy the whole time he was shooting, in addition to getting to grab a lot of bare tit on camera). Not just Sean Connery though, Sean Connery in some sort of weird red diaper. With a red ammo crossbelt (think Mexican bandit accessory). And a bizarre papier mache helmet/mask.

Please, go find somewhere you can rent it from. For me. Because I can't be the only one who sees this thing.

Damned Danes

2006-06-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

So a couple of days ago Mar and I were sitting around the house, and Marla decided to pluck Dogville out of the free movies on cable. We had watched something Lars van Trier was involved with a while back (The Five Obstructions) and enjoyed it for the most part.

Well, that was a mistake. The previous movie only sort-of involved van Trier, Dogville was all him and it was non-stop pretentious tripe liberally mixed with misperceptions and absurd notions about America (which, btw, he has apparently never visited because he fears travel) and what seemed like a very weird and bad take on the Christ/Messiah myth that only someone raised by hardcore Marxist atheists could come up with. We then mocked numerous glowing reviews that we found online that called it things like "an unwatchable masterpiece." It was slow, unsatisfying (and not in a good way that makes you introspect, in a bad way that makes you wish that you'd played Tetris on your cell phone through half the movie instead of wasting your time watching it), and worst of all visually un-interesting.

Yeah yeah, the whole taped-out-set thing is relatively innovative. That could have carried a short. Overall I think the whole film could have been 30 minutes long and been at least decent. Yet it was almost 3 hours long.

So after watching that abortion, we decided to try our luck on another famous Dane with "van" in his name and watched Elephant. Well, at least it wasn't 3 hours long. About half way through this movie, while we were watching yet another excruciatingingly boring sequence of teenagers walking in hallways, my wife asked me"Why is he doing this to us?" and I answered "He thinks that he is building up tension and a feeling of suspense. We are, in Gus van Sant's mind, on the edges of our seats. In reality, I am uninterested and am going to go outside and have a smoke."

Can you guess what the reviews we looked up afterwards said? That's right, they said that van Sant had masterfully created a staggering sense of tension.

So, in closing, I curse these dirty damned Danes and suggest that everyone think twice before watching anything by a man with "van" in his name.

My Obligatory Jobs Post, volume 1

2006-06-02T14:35:00.000-07:00

First off, I apologize for not posting a damn thing for so long. I've had some really heavy shit going on, really heavy shit that I don't feel like broadcasting to the world on the internet. If people are really interested to know they can e-mail me.

I promised that I would write about all of my crappy jobs, so here it is (not that it will be the highlight of anybody's day or anything). After starting to write it I realized once again that I am very wordy, so I will probably break this up into a couple of installments.

So I did my last of HS at Tallahassee Community College. My parents and I found an obscure option in the county school district rules that allowed me to take all of my classes at TCC and still technically be in HS. We had to pretty much threaten to sue the school board in an election year to get them to let me do it, but it was pretty much the only thing that we could find that might possibly save my grades (it worked).

This lead both to my first car and my first job. The car came along because after the first couple days of shuttling me back and forth (and me using the Marine recruiter who had been badgering me for the better part of a year to get rides home a couple of times in exchange for listening to their spiel and upsetting them by stating that if I joined the Marine Corps I would prefer to have a job where my primary duty would be killing people) and deciding it was a pain in their ass. After the first semester they noticed how much free time I had compared to when I was in high school and suggested that I get a job.

I kind of dodged this by getting an internship at the state legislature through one of my political science professors. I spent a lot of time filing bills (the kind that sing songs and perhaps one day become a law), reading and sorting letters from all the crazy people that wrote to the representative I was working for (I recall specifically one guy who wrote about 10 pages on notebook paper every week about how a bullett train from Jacksonville to Miami would solve all of the problems in the state), fielding phone calls for the secretary/PA when she was out of the office (almost all of which were from lobbyists offering to take my rep to dinner) and running things up and down the Capitol buildings (and I do mean running, I found the elevators too slow and started taking the stairs as much as I could). I think I spoke directly with the rep I was working for a total of one time. I learned from this experience the following: that politics is an extremely dirty business; politicians are in general posessed of an animal cunning but not much actual intelligence; and that I really did not want to major in PoliSci. I think that the report I wrote on my internship kind of upset my professor.

Once the internship wound down I had to start looking for a job that actually paid money. I was honestly pretty half-assed about it. I answered some classifieds for office jobs that I thought my internship experience might count for and my Mom persuaded me to go to a "job fair" at a strip mall. There I found myself with the options of: McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, Wal-Mart, various branches of the military, and Target. I filled out an application for Target and slunk out of there generally disheartened by the evident lack of cushy jobs that paid more than minimum wage. Target did call me a few days later and set up an interview. I went to the store and sat on a weird, uncomfortable orange-red bench in the back office lying on personality tests and filling out forms while I waited for my interview. While I was back there a guy wearing jeans and a plaid shirt (this was odd because everyone at Target, even the store manager, is required to wear khakis and a horrid orange-red polo shirt) came into the office and talked to me for a minute before I got called in. The interview went okay, and the HR person led me to believe my options were going to be "cart attendant" and "food services." I was not pleased but decided that money was money, that my friend Colin worked at Target so that it wouldn't be a total drag, and kept in mind that I would be allowed to quit in the fall when I started going to FSU.

The HR person called me back the next day and said "Do you think you would like to work in AP?" I said "I don't know. What exactly is AP?" She explained that AP stood for "Asset Protection," which was then de rigeur retail jargon for security. I asked her if it paid more than being the cart boy, and she informed me that it paid about $3.00 and hour more. I immediately agreed to it and thus began my career in security. It turned out that the guy in the plaid shirt was the AP manager, and I'm pretty sure he decided to hire me because I'm shifty. I look around all the time, I tend to sort of size people up whenever they come into my field of vision etc. I'm pretty sure that it also helped that I'm big and fairly mean looking. In any case, I got hired and worked security there for about the next 3 years.

I was one of those irritating guys in a cheap shirt that stands at the front asking people for their receipts, spying on the cashiers and calling in people who I thought looked suspicious to the plainclothes security out on the salesfloor. Occasionally I would even get to take off the cheap shirt and work plainclothes on the floor, which is fun and carries the added benefit of being able to spot when you are being followed by store security when you are shopping. At our local Best Buy here in Seattle I have found that I am almost always followed by security. I don't mind it the first few times because, frankly, I pretty much look like a shoplifter. I would follow me if I were in their place too. My problem comes in when I go in regularly and always pay. These guys (and they are the same couple of guys) stick to me like glue every time I go in. Every time I'm careful not to pick up things that I am not purchasing, not to crowd the displays, and generally to act as contrary to how a shoplifter would act as possible. They still follow me up to the register every time. I have considered going the other direction and acting as suspicious as I can and seeing if they'll do a bad stop on me. Civil penalties for falsely detaining someone run around $10,000/minute that you are held (at least that's what they told us to keep overzealous security from falsely detaining people) so it's a bit tempting, but on the other hand they might just decide to plant something on me. Regardless, I do almost all of my electronics shopping online now because I get edgy when I'm being followed and it makes it unpleasant to browse (which is the only reason I go to physical stores anymore).

The funny thing about security at that particular Target was that there weren't very many shoplifters. We hypothesized that since it was so much easier to steal from a Wal-Mart (they have very narrow ailes, tall shelves, and at the time generally had exactly one security person to cover the whole store, which was generally open 24 hours. Do the math) and there were so many Wal-Marts in the area that shoplifters just didn't bother with Target for the most part. We got in trouble for having "bad numbers" for a while until the annual inventory was done and the shrink (another jargon term, shrink is the difference between what you ought to have in inventory and what you actually have in inventory) showed that we weren't losing very much merchandise. I eventually ended up quitting Target because I was too busy with school to work. I was a theater major at the time, and found that between working on a show and all the projects I had to do that I hardly had time to eat and sleep, much less work. It didn't help that we had a new manager who was not very fond of any of the existing security presonnel and did her best to drive us out (which worked after a while).

About a year after I quit at Target (and after quitting the theater program at FSU) I found myself tired of being broke. My roomate, Grier, had a job selling crap from a cart in the mall near our apartment and talked his boss (a jowly and often disturbing man named Don, which was kind of uncomfortable when I dated someone named Dawn for a while when I was still working at the cart) into hiring me.

It should be noted that I am a horrible salesman. If I worked for a truck that sold ice, rum and ice cream, all for half price, at the beach it would probably go out of business. In this case I was selling a variety of essentially worthless herbal weight loss products. I don't think that they worked outside of the placebo effect, and I'm sure it didn't help that I'm kind of a fat guy. I did try the things myself, and found that they had no appreciable effect (though the founder of the company that manufactured the pills that we sold did manage to rupture his heart after taking several times more than the reccomended dosage for years on end, so maybe they did something after all). Business had been booming for a couple of years when I got hired, and my hiring coincided with the bottom dropping out of the market for the stuff we sold. I guess lots of people had tried them and the word was out that they did not really work all that well. Most of the customers we had were repeat customers or occasionally guys who wanted to flirt with the very disturbed girl that worked at one of the carts (she was admitedly pretty hot until you started talking to her and found out that she was batshit crazy).

Mostly what I did was read, play computer games on my laptop and try to avoid chatting with the neo-Nazi asshole mall security guard that had apparently decided I was some sort of kindred soul (though in his defense I did start shaving my head around this time, only I was doing it because my hair had thinned to the point that I was going to end up with a comb-over before long rather than to make some sort of political staement). People would occasionally bother me when they did not want to buy things from me, usually feigning interest in buying something and then saying something along the lines of "just kidding, I'm not interested." I would regularly shout at these people, occasionally getting them to leave the mall. I consider myself lucky that I never beat anyone to death with the cashbox for interrupting my reading for a non-commercial puprose.

The owner of the Snake Oil carts (as Grier and I and thence everyone else came to call them) was pretty trippy all on his own. When I first started working for him he was a sort of archetypal fat small-time entrepreneur. He was red-faced and loud and rather unpleasantly pushy. All that changed when his business went bust. He had to shut down his carts for a few months and choked back tears when he laid us off one by one.

He went on a trip to the Balkans and was apparently had some sort of conversion experience while he was there. He managed to get some more financing and opened up for business again, though he lost a lot of weight in a bad way. His formerly florid and plushy head now looked sort of like a skull with massive amounts of skin and eyeballs topped with some sort of industrial sized brush. He cornered Grier one day and talked to him about his Yugoslavian miracle experience for a full 8 hour shift once. Grier said that it involved a long story about walking up a muddy hill, though Don never really had a chance to corner me the same way.

Business was still bad, and Don became increasingly freaky. He started calling every two to three hours for an update on how much had been sold and he would occasionally show up to try and show us how to apply hard sales techniques. He also diversified into selling those weird herbal pillows that you can heat up the microwave or put into the freezer and velcro on to various joints for various allegedly soothing effects. This led to a memorable episode one day when he came in and tried to convince people to buy the things by draping them all over himself and waddling around the courtyard of the mall like a madman accosting people and telling them how wonderful the pillows were while occasionally picking on overwight women and trying to convince them that they needed to by the herbal supplements by telling them that they were fat. The carts shut down again for good after a few more months, though this time Don blamed the supplier for the failure because they had cut a deal with Wal-Mart to sell the same product we sold but for half the price. I was left without a job again for quite a while (because between student loans and my parents all my vital needs were taken care of), and found that I had spent pretty much all of the money from that job on a handgun (a nice Sig-Sauer that I still have), a big pile of books and many nights of beer and shooting pool.

Next up: My life as a mailroom hooligan, several hilarious short lived jobs after I moved to Seattle and a return to security work.
Stay tuned, or run screaming to something more appealing than my experience in downward mobility, whichever suits you.

I Totally Didn't Realize...

2006-05-01T12:52:00.000-07:00

...that Bush was sitting two chairs away from the podium at the WH Correspondents Dinner. Stephen Colbert is officially my hero for the year. If you have not yet seen his speech, go to Youtube and do so right now.

I Fucking Hate Them All

2006-04-30T10:27:00.000-07:00

After having dealt with them for some time now I have come to the conclusion that on average (I am aware that there are exceptions, most likely along the lines of a bell curve) realtors are some of the stupidest and most dishonest people on earth. It's like dealing with meth addicts in suits. I hope that their entire profession is largely destroyed by the internet like travel agents and that they all end up selling Amway or cosmetics door-to-door.

Oops, they did it again.

2006-04-23T16:06:00.001-07:00

The Department of Homeland Security has once again struck a mighty blow against terrorism: They have caught a ninja at the University of Georgia.

Well, maybe it wasn't a ninja. Maybe it was a college student with a bandanna over his face coming back from a costume party.

I really like the DHS goons justification for this one "Uhhhh, he looked like he had a gun" and "Covering face is against an unwritten federal statute." Good job guys, you get a gold star.

What is it about the Atlanta office of DHS anyway? This is the second fuck-up of theirs thaqt I've read about. I mean, I'm sure that other DHS offices screw up too, I just don;t read about them in the paper. Repeatedly. Within 6 months.

All that on top of having one of their Deputy Secretaries nabbed as a child molesting motherfucker not too long ago.

I promise I will post something more subatantive soonish. My life is busy right now.

2006-03-30T14:56:00.000-08:00

I mentioned a little while ago on Henry David Thorough's blog that there is a significant faction within the Christian right who actually think that there is a "war on Christianity."

Well, apparently they have a conference (and here's a second take on the conference). At this conference they complained about the liberal media, cited 5-10 year old incidences of feeling slighted, heaped glory and hosannas on Tom DeLay and generally whined.

So apparently these folks feel that having people make fun of them consitutes a "war" on them, and pretty much seem to beleive that unless we all agree with them that mankind is doomed.

Christianity generally does much better historically when it feels like it is under attack. What's interesting now is that leaders on the right are purposefully manufacturing feelings of persecution. This is far from a unique circumstance in the annals of history, but it is dangerous. It feeds into a larger theme for me. I keep hearing bits of rhetoric and seeing blips of policy discussions forwarding this idea of a "Clash of Civilizations" (as Tony Blankley outs it). It is in many ways a seductive idea. Basically it comes down to this: do away with limited response, shift the U.S. and if possible Europe to to full on wartime footing and start World War 3 with the Muslim world. This does away with all of the complexity, all of the subtle moves needed when acting outside of total war. That's why it is so seductive. It seems so easy in a way. No more confusing fiddly diplomatic moves, just a few years with everyone under the age of 40 under arms and we'll usher in a new Pax Americana with a dozen westernized Japan-in-the-desert clone states where once there were Muslim dictatorships, theocracies and so on. This would not work of course, for a number of reasons.

In the same vein as this nihilistic vision of foreign policy is the domestic "Culture War" idea. That by pushing everything to the wall and breaking down the barriers between church and state so as to force everyone back to "traditional" values that the U.S. can be brought back to the prosperity and happiness of a 1950s America that never really existed. I understand the allure of both of these in that we humans like things to be simple, even if they may be more painful. Simplicity is seductive as much as it is false, because no matter how simple your overarching idea is and no matter how much you try to use brute force to hammer those screws in the devil is in the details and the details will always be there.

Your next installment of Bill's Rambling And Largely Incoherent Crap will be all about how the fall of the Soviet Union has created most of our problems as a country.

Grounds For A Bobbiting

2006-03-30T14:41:00.000-08:00

So this is a "marital duties contract" written up by a guy in Iowa who is on trial for some kiddie-porn charges. It's pretty fucked up.

The most fucked up thing about it is how much it reminds me of the sort of agreements that corporate employers try to force you to sign, specifically the sort of things that ACS tried to get new employees to sign when I was there. Though obviously the corporate version doesn't involve quite so much in the way of dry legalistic definitions of acceptable pubic hair shapes and how many brownie point you get for unexpectedly taking it up the ass I nonetheless get the same vibe from this as from those corporate "code of conduct" documents that ACS tried to get me to sign, in particular all the weird obessession with about what to wear (I recall the ACS "contract" delineating under what circumstances one would need to wear a belt, the range of khaki which would be acceptable, which shades of polo shirt you must choose from, etc.).

Congratulations corporate America, you are becoming difficult to distinguish from child molesting abusive husbands.

Meme Away

2006-03-26T10:16:00.000-08:00

Accent – None to speak of, though I think I get a bit southern at times. I do insist on using "y'all" though, mostly because it's a neccessary part of speech which is not handled very well in the current usage of English.

Booze of choice – Good beer. Precisely which type is highly variable, depending on the time of year, the weather, what I'm doing and my mood.

Chore I hate – Taking out recycling. For some reason it's always a big pain in the ass to get all the glass out to the curb. That and Seattles mandatory recycling law chafes my libertarian soul.

Dog or Cat – Slight preference for cats, but I like (and own) both.

Essential electronics – Computer, cell phone, i-pod. There are a lot of other things I want or like to have handy, but those three are really the essentials for me.

Favorite perfume(s)/cologne(s) – I don't really pay much attention. Some women smell good, some women smell like they marinated themselves in rubbing alcohol for 3 hours before leaving the house. Most men who wear cologne annoy me. It's not a causal relationship, but I have noticed that a pretty significant percentage of men who choose to wear cologne also have other more serious things that they do that irritate the shit out of me.

Gold or Silver? - Silver. Gold is gaudy and should be used only for money.

Hometown – Daytona Beach FL. I moved to Tallahassee from there when I was about 12 and then I moved here to Seattle in 2002 after my apartment was ominously burned down to signal me that I should get the hell out of Tallahassee.

Insomnia? – Oh yes. I don't get it as much as I used to, but it still crops up. I don't do anything real useful with the extra time though.

Job Title – Security Officer. It's a crap job.

Kids? – Not yet, but probably in the next few years.

Living Arrangement – I live in a small rented house in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle with my wife Marla, my brother in law Gio, 2 dogs, 2 cats, 10 sugar gliders, 3 snakes, 2 lizards, and 4 guinea pigs.

Don't worry. I make Mar keep everything but the cats and dogs in an out of the way room. You'd never guess we have crazy amounts of animals unless we took you upstairs to look at them.

Most- Hell if I know. I've never been real into self-aggrandizement, so much so that I don't even really think about stuff like this. Mostly I just am who I am and I figure that people who like me will figure out what they admire and what they deplore for themselves.

Number of Sexual Partners – I flatly refuse to reveal this sort of information.

Overnight Hospital Stays – None that I can recall, though I've had a couple of outpatient surgeries.

Phobia – Randomness. We live in a world of uncertainty, and if I think about that too much it freaks me out.

Quote – "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." -Oscar Wilde

That's not actually my "favorite" quote, it's just the first good one that I could think of. I don't really have a favorite quote. The reference I most often use is probably the "I am Jack's " from Fight Club.

Religion – I guess I would be classified as some sort of Deist. I think there is probably some sort of unmoved mover, but I don't think it fiddles about with things and I most certainly don't think that it needs me to grovel and fawn over it.

Siblings – One younger sister, whom I need to call sometime soon...

Time I wake up – No set time. I usually work at night, so I wake up some time in the afternoon.

Unusual talent/skill – Verbosity?

Vegetable I refuse to eat – Brussel sprouts. They're utterly disgusting. My wife has told me that there is actually maybe a genetic basis for my hatred of Brussel sprouts. Apparently some people have a trait that makes Brussel sprouts smell and taste like rotting garbage.

Worst habit – Procrastination.

X-rays – Um. I dunno. I guess several times at the dentist plus about 3.

Yummy foods I make – There are a lot of things that I make. I like cooking a lot. Who would have guessed, a fat guy who likes cooking? I make pretty good quiche, kick-ass roasted chicken, spaghetti with meatballs (which is harder to really do well than one might think), extremely good mashed potatoes, butter beans, chili, I know how to prepare steak properly, tuna steaks, and the list goes on and on. Suffice to say that I cook a good number of things pretty well.

Zodiac sign – Leo, but I remain convinced that such things are utterly meaningless.

I won't tag anyone else. Memes should have to stand on their own two feet.

Another Pointless Waste Of Time

2006-03-06T21:05:00.000-08:00

DHS is at it again.
The above story is about retired couple who paid off their JC Penny card all in one big chunk. Apparently terrorists are very financially responsible, because paying their bill caused the Department of Homeland Security to investigate them. It seems that their account was frozen pending investigation for a while, then went back to normal operation after it was determined that they were not paying off Osama's loaded riding lawnmower.

Even more than the privacy issues that this illuminates, I wonder how many man hours are spent on this kind of crap. That would seem to be the problem with big data mining operations. You'll spend so much time checking out statistical anomalies that you will miss actual intelligence, and thus while you will have managed to arguably violate the privacy of thousands of people, you will not have prevented any sort of terrorist attacks.

At least I can feel good about only making minimum payments. Apparently living on the bare razors edge of one's means is the heart and soul of good citizenship these days.

Vicarious Glory

2006-03-02T08:00:00.000-08:00

This is a story in which NPR interviews my wife's uncle Gary (which no doubt burned his Republican soul). In case you miss it, he is their representative example of a key grip. Was it key grips or best boys you used to cheer for during the credits Monster?

I have had nothing to do with his success or his work.
I am nonetheless proud of him, and all the other members of the family I married into that are involved in the same sort of work.

List-o-rama

2006-03-01T02:14:00.000-08:00

So, I don't really engage in the whole cult of celebrity thing. I don't really think about celebrities very much, and I don't think I would put up with listening to any of them reading the phone book. I certainly don't have any that I am particularly jonesing for sex with. So I'm choosing to ignore that part of the list tag.

20 Thing I Want To Do Before I Loose This Mortal Coil
1- Have a job/career that is intellectually challenging and emotionally fulfilling
2- Have kids.
3- Have a fairly large house built to my specifications on a fairly large piece of land about an hour or so outside of a sufficeintly interesting city.
4- Travel widely.
5- Live in Ireland for at least a year.
6- Fly an airplane.
7- Own and regularly ride a motorcycle. A sweet motorcycle.
8- Circumnavigate the world in a comfortable sailboat.
9- Make all of the furniture in my house.
10- Convert or create my home such that it is energy self sufficeint.
11- Make a fab lab in my basement.
12- Learn what I need to know to really make extensive use of #11.
13- Gain a thorough understanding of physics.
14- Learn how to fix my car.
15- Write and publish a novel, or at least some short stories, or even just write occasionally for a magazine or newspaper.
16- Go into space (and I want a proper trip to space, not some poxy 20 minute ride up just past the stratosphere. I want at least LEO).
17- To read everything that interests me (this will not happen unless a way is discovered to either speed up the human brain considerably or a device is created which can slow time).
18- Experience a direct neural interface (yeah, I know. It's weird and doesn't exist yet. So?)
19- Make my own beer (yes, the basement will be crowded with all of the crap that I want to do that will involve things in the basement).
20- Continue to be as happy in my marriage as I am.

Yeesh. I'm a nerd.
Oh well.

Word of The Day

2006-03-01T02:08:00.000-08:00

The word for today is "coopetition."

I heard this fabulous bit of newspeak from the Governor of Michigan, who apparently got the word from Ford. Ford was apparently using it while talking to the Governor about having Toyota show them how to make cars efficiently. Sounds like a fabulous new word for "cartel" or perhaps "gentlemans agreement."

Orwell was right, and sometimes I wish that he would rise from his grave as an avenging angel of the English language to destroy those who would sully it with words like coopetition or twist meanings or dissemble using "plain language" as a smokescreen.

Hey Kids!

2006-02-12T20:08:00.000-08:00

Would you like to see some creepy government cartoons? I know I sure would.

If I haven't missed any of the real creepy ones, the CIA the NSA and the Department of Homeland Security all have sites for kids, and they all have friendly cartoon characters for mascots/spokesbeings. The FBI has a little game featuring "Bobby Bureau." The Geospatial Intelligence Agency, while way less creepy than the others in general (being the guys who deal with mapmaking, satellite image analysis, and generally synthesizing all of the myriad data streams about terrain into one set of data) does have Terry Firma and Wanda World with their little pet Orbit.

In a shocking display of good taste for a government agency in this era of slick propaganda torn from what appear to be the playbooks of the makers of sugary cereals (or perhaps concern over their rock-n-roll brand identity created by a couple of decades of advertising focused on how much like a very responsible heavy metal video that will make your parents happy service in the military is), the armed forces in general appear to not have any cartoon mascots, or even a "kids page" in general. The ATF has a kids page, but it does not include any eerily Joe-Camelish cartoon characters.

What happened to the good old days, when the intelligence business was all about middle aged guys with drinking problems?

The Mark Of The (Retarded) Beast

2006-02-11T20:45:00.000-08:00

So a Cincinnati company is requiring its employees to get an RFID implanted in their arm to access their datacenter. They say that they won't fire anyone for refusing, but you all know they're lying.

Now, aside from the "Can I just cut it out and leave your employee to bleed out in the deserted warehouse" issue that I am positive jumped into Monster's head, the best part is that it was recently found that you can scam the data off of these things remotely and clone them. Meaning that the implants are effectively useless as far as serious security is concerned.

Why, if these guys are so worried about security, did they not keep their keychain RFIDs and put a guy at the door logging everyone in and out of the datacenter? If you're willing to pay the guy more than $12 or so an hour you can probably even get a guy with a gun. Why do companies consistently overlook the value of employing human beings in favor of paying oodles of money for untested and often nigh-useless technological solutions?

And for further amusement, consider the potential court cases if Christian employees claim that they will not get chipped for religious reasons? There's nothing I love quite so much as court testimony about the supernatural.

We Can All Start Having Anonymous Sex Again!

2006-02-08T02:59:00.000-08:00

Apparently if this line of research works out there will be a truly effective anti-AIDS drug, and from the way it's described most likely an effective new type of anti-biotic (i.e. will work against MRSA and other strains that have become resistant to current anti-biotics).

Yay for science!

Free Poetry

2006-02-08T02:48:00.000-08:00

Like you'd really pay for poetry, eh?

But you'll want to read this poetry, because it's by Neil Gaiman, and because it has zombies in it.

Who can resist zombie poetry?

Great Moments In Counterterrorism

2006-02-05T21:27:00.000-08:00

A Department of Homeland Security agent was surveilling a Vegan protest recently and got made.
He then arrested one of the protestors for writing down his license plate number.

Go find a terrorist asshat.

And try not to get caught this time.

W to the T to the F

2006-01-31T17:27:00.000-08:00

Andy!
What the Hell is going on over there?
And is it just me or is he wearing a rug for a cape?

Clearly you need to start a gubernatorial campaign.

Intriguing if not dangerous

2006-01-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting pile of articles. This website puts an annual "question of the year" to scientists and academics, then publishes the answers. The question this year is "What is your dangerous idea?" Few of the responses are actually dangerous, but most of them are at least thought provoking.
One of the things I found most interesting was how the responses broke down by the chosen area of expertise of the respondent. Most of the psychologists gave fairly silly answers that involved some finger waggling ("Theory X is proved, this kind of freaks people out, the fabric of civilization unravels almost spontaneously..."), and most of the pysicists gave ideas that were dangerous only to the careers of established physicists. A lot of the computer scientists had fairly far fetched but intriguing ideas. Anyway, well worth reading if you've got some time on your hands and you enjoy navel-gazing as much as I do.

Found But Not Art

2006-01-11T04:20:00.000-08:00

Tonight I found a whole set of wedding photos sitting in a laundry room where people put their old tupperware and antediluvian microwaves out to pasture in the hope that someone in their building will not yet have a microwave or a 10" by 6" plastic airtight container and want a stranger's grotty garbage. It was all in a box, containing several nicer boxes inside with professional labels (from the photographer, one assumes) and an assortment of loose negatives and prints. The negatives were particularly in disarray, uncoiling and bent in places like dead tapeworms.

Inside the nicer boxes were bricks of prints and a completed album. These things had not been left as if someone were sorting through the pictures and putting them in scrapbooks whilst waiting on their laundry (that these things may have been left behind in error after a couple of hours listening to dryers and working on a more formal presentation is also highly unlikely in my mind because these are clearly the sort of people who just pay the photographer to paste their allegedly precious memories into albums). The prints were not cohesive at all, there was not even evidence of the nascent glimmerings of order only a horrible jumble of people (mainly young women) in ill-fitting clothes that in another time might have been called "Sunday Best" but that now passes for finery appropriate to a formal occasion. Clearly this box had just been abandoned.

So the question this brings up for me is this: Why abandon this collection of photos? I can understanding wanting them out of your life along with the partner depicted in them (especially if you got married and it fell apart within two months, as is indicated by the nice printed labels on the fancy boxes). I can see burning them in an orgy of rage, I can see tossing them off of a cliff, I can see renting a convertible and letting them spool out of their fancy boxes in the wind while you speed across a long bridge, but I can't see just leaving them in the laundry room at the apartment complex of a friend. How do you just divest yourself of something like that, strangling the memory of what was no doubt an intense experience (even if entered into by mistake) with a pillow and slipping out the door?

I Am A Quasi-Intellectual Prat

2006-01-08T21:56:00.000-08:00

And in part because of this, I want all of you to read David Foster Wallace. I'm reading his latest book (really an anthology of essays and old magazine articles) "Consider The Lobster" and it is genius. You don't have to start with that one though (though you might as well, it's great), he has many others. I do reccomend that you avoid his fiction, at least at first. It's not that it is bad it's just a little difficult to approach at first, in particular "Infinite Jest" which is the sort of book that most English grad students will bring up to make their students feel small and weak. While reading it I felt small and weak even though I enjoyed it immensely and it took me about a month to finish it (which is unusual since I was unemployed at the time and it was the only thing I was reading). His other essay-type books are "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" and "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again".
I should also note that this reccomendation is not an entirely altruistic move on my part. While I'm sure that most of the people who read my blog would probably enjoy at least some of the essays, I mostly want to be able to discuss or at least refer to DFW with some normal, decent people lest I be tempted to speak with an English Comp grand student.

"Sir, we have a jolly elf bearing one-four-nine sector alpha tango foxtrot..."

2005-12-23T03:43:00.000-08:00

According to NORAD, they are able to track the progress of Santa around the globe because Rudolf's nose emits an infrared signal similar to that of an ICBM launch.

And just for Andy: NORAD got into the Santa-tracking game due to a misprint in a department store ad, which led a little girl to call a "Talk to Santa" hotline which was, in fact, the NORAD hotline for use by 4 star generals and the Secretary of Defense.

Since Someone Asked...

2005-12-20T13:12:00.000-08:00

Normally I don't do things like this, but Monster asked so I shall here unviel my new dog. Behold Pavlov! We don't know exactly what sort of mix he is (we suspect his mom is a finnish spitz though, but don't care enough to put a lot of effort into finding out) . People at the dog park seem to enjoy guessing at it, but I've just been telling people he's a mutt. The picture on the top is what he looked like when we got him. Overall we picked him because I thought he looked like an archetypal dog, the sort of dog that you see getting adopted by G.I.s in WW2 movies or following kids in TV shows from the 50's. He's bright, energetic and generally well behaved aside from a tendency to try and gnaw on your hands when you're petting him (though that's possibly a teething thing). He likes cheese above all other foods, and with the help of operant conditioning (and cheese) learned how to sit and lie down and come when called and so on by the time he was about 3 months old. He seems to have housetrained himself (when we got him the rescue had done zero housetraining, yet he has not had one accident since we got him), which I thought was pretty awesome.
Anyway, that's our new dog.

When I'm 64...

2005-12-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

It occured to me yesterday that I know at least one of my "old man moments." You know those little comments that grandpa made about people using horses to get around when he was little, or grandma's job as a county telephone operator back when you had to talk to a person and tell them who you were calling every time you picked up a phone. Those are old people moments, and the first one that I'm aware of that I will definitely be using is this:
"I remember when I was your age there wasn't any e-mail, no internet at all really, and you had to do all your shopping in person..."

After Long And Careful Study...

2005-09-15T20:05:00.000-07:00

...I have determined that it is, indeed, all about the Benjamens.

In other news, there is apparently a variety of lab rat that is capable of regrowing all sorts of tissue without any scarring, and I do mean ALL sorts of tissue. We're talking limbs and heart tissue here. The best part? The trait is sort of transferable. Non-regenerating rats injected with liver stem cells from regenerating rats apparently get this freaky trait for a limited period of time.

I also just heard a news item about researchers in the U.K. using rodent stem cells of some sort to grow back heart tissue in sheep, which they did simply by putting the stem cells in the right area. In case you don't keep up with this stuff, that is much easier than stem cell therapy was expected to be.

We are all going to live absurdly long amounts of time if this keeps up.
Then we'll all die at once when we run out of everything.
Cheery, no?

Splogged!

2005-08-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

So, my apologies to the vanishingly few people who pay attention to my boring and rarely updated blog. I am making use of the new word verification feature because, well, just look at the comments on my previous post.

Damn robots. First they spam your blog, next they shoot heat-beams into your living room and destroy your weak fleshling meatsack of a body. It's a slippery slope I tell you, a slippery slope that leads to HELL

Let Four Captains Bear Him, Like A Soldier, To The Stage...

2005-08-20T18:50:00.000-07:00

Hunter S. Thompson is having his funeral today. His ashes will be fired out of over 30 mortars from a 153 foot (2 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty, by the way) statue surmounted by a giant red fiberglass Freak Power fist to explode over the Owl Farm in a bright white flash as the climax to a giant party in his honor. A giant bar has been constructed able to accomodate around 400 attendees. Johnny Depp is footing the (enormous) bill for the whole thing.

I'm glad to see he's getting the send-off he always wanted.

Cheers Hunter, I'll raise a glass for you.

Dimensions of Perversity

2005-07-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

I have a strange love/hate thing for advertising. Advertising seems to me to be a microcosm of our modern world in that it amuses me (in a gallows humor sort of way for the most part), horrifies and disgusts me, and shines a spotlight on the mechanics of why we consume things.

In that vein, I would like to share my thoughts on a couple of the most notable commercials I've run across recently.

First off, I would like to deal with the new Kool-Aid Man. I recently saw an ad where everyones favorite anthropromorphized beverage pitcher blasted through a brick wall screaming "OH YEAH!" (btw, I still can't believe that Kool-Aid didn't sue the Slim Jims people for ripping off that routine). The mom was updated for the 21st century (i.e. she was wearing khaki capri pants instead of blue jeans, showing how much the world has progressed since I was a kid), but, and here's the bit that freaks me out, the Kool-Aid man was updated a bit too. This time round, he is wearing a pair of shorts (khaki, again. I sincerely believe that the devil invented khaki). Now you're probably thinking that I'm some weirdo overreacting to a slight change in a character from my childhood, like a Trekkie looking for innaccuracies in a new movie. I promise you, I'm not. You see, the problem with Kool-Aid Man having shorts on now is that it implies that throughout the 1980s Kool-Aid Man was running around nude waving his dick at millions of kids. Why the hell didn't they just leave him pants-less and without any evident need for pants? Now I know how the angels must have felt after Adam and Eve started slapping foliage on their naughty bits.

The second odd commercial I've noted recently is the second installment of those ads for internet service featuring angry stick figures throwing dollar signs away (I think it's for NetZero, but I'm not sure which is a pretty sad comment on the effectiveness of advertising in general, don't you think?). This one seems to feature a vacuum cleaner (representative of old fashioned ISPs such as AOL) sucking dollar signs out of the angry stick figure as the stick figure holds on for dear life as if it were taking part in the ending sequence of Rejected. The problem with this one is that it looks to me, due to the angle at which the dollar signs fly from the horizontal stick figure to the vacuum cleaner, that the vacuum cleaner is in fact sucking money out of the asshole of the angry stick figure. I don't even really want to think very much about the symbolic possibilities inherent in this one.

And the big question is: Did no one in the focus groups warn them about this stuff?

Popular Culture Is The Ourourboros of The Modern World...

2005-06-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

...self consuming, self referential, self reverential.
That was my little thought to start the day. I have no idea where it came from, but that's what popped into my head while I made coffee and tried to decide if I wanted waffles or pancakes.

I view my morning coffee as a sort of meditative ritual. It's no cha no yu, but it is an important part of my intellectual life. It's sort of a chance to think about things more or less in a vacuum, i.e. not driven by immediate events, sort through the vaporous scraps of dream left over from the night before (assuming that there are any, I don't remember by dreams very often), and generally let my brain go out for a good run to stay in form for abstract thought.

Plus, having some sort of "thought of the day" makes me feel like Mr. Rodgers evil twin.

Shamelessly stolen from Andy

2005-06-11T21:08:00.000-07:00

William is usually a black man.

William is an electrical engineer.

William was a slave who later wrote a book.

William plays chess obsessively.

William died in the Second World War in Germany and his funeral was presided over by Reverend T.F. Grier.

William runs a lab studying molecular biology solutions to the autoimmune effects of the HIV virus.

William owned a bookshop on Pall Mall in the Victiorian era with his brother Lionel, and they wrote their prices in code on colorful slips of paper put into the books.

William drew cartoons for high end British magazines in the 1920s and 30s.

William sells antiquarian books.

William purchased a number of Sir Isaac Newtons alchemical manuscripts at auction.

William was promoted to 1st Sgt. in a Connecticut infantry regiment after the battle of Antietam.

Lord, Protect Me From Myself

2005-04-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

I found out that my employer is looking for a new book-keeper today.

I have a terrible urge to write up a resume for Herbert Kornfeld (a.k.a. tha H-Dawg from the Onion) and fax it in to them from some anonymous copyshop.
Are there any reasons NOT to do this?

Adrift In The Fog

2005-03-11T04:21:00.000-08:00

Last night I was stuck on the 520 bridge across Lake Washington at about 4 AM. The bridge was fogbound and the city had closed it for 30 minutes to do some sort of unspecified stuff to the drawbridge section. The fog cut the bridge off so that it felt like I was driving through a tunnel in the clouds, then lights loomed out of void. Soon they resolved themselves into brake lights and the spinning yellow lights on the construction vehicles, glowing away with that strange halo that fog creates around every source of light. Then, I stopped. For about half an hour myself and about a dozen other souls sat on a floating bridge rocking back and forth in the gray nothing seemingly removed from the rest of the universe. It was quiet and remarkably peaceful. I was surprised that I was the only one to get out of their vehicle. I paced, I leaned, I smoked a cigarette and jacked the volume up on the BBC so I could hear it while I wandered. I even dared to look over the side and spit, hoping to hear a small splash to indicate that reality hadn't hit a pothole and left us (and a small but vital portion of a major bridge) behind in the aether.

Then the bridge started to go down, and it was all over. It was like being hijacked by roadwork fairies for a little while.

I was keeping an eye out for hovercars or the destroyed remains of major landmarks all the way home to ensure that I hadn't been removed from the world for 1,000 years or anything. Once I got there I made a sandwich and looked in on my wife sleeping to re-attach myself to reality. I've found this to be necessary surprisingly often working nights. The graveyard shift creates its own weird twilight world, and I've grown familiar with the feeling of being unhitched from the F-250 of reality (though never quite to the same degree as last night), and nice simple things do a good job of chasing that away. Anyway, I'm drifting off into my magnum opus material on working nights and my beer is reaching the critical perfect temperature. Cheers.

It's Not You, It's The Frosted Flakes...

2005-03-08T04:39:00.000-08:00

I heard what sounded like a PSA on the radio the other night. It was talking about the importance of breakfast for children. "Even just a bowl of cereal has been shown to improve the test scores of children significantly..." blah blah blah.
I thought to myself "My, I wonder how much of that has to do with the cereal and how much of a child's breakfast-enhanced performance is due to the fact that they have parents who give enough of a shit about their kids to take 5 minutes to pour some cereal in a bowl for the little monsters?"

The ad was, of course, from the American Cereal Makers Association or somesuch, and once again the world felt the need to slap me in the face with evidence of its own impending doom.

Whence Have Gone The Snowdens of Yesteryear?

2005-02-28T15:30:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about all the old hardboiled detective stories lately.

Just in case anyone is about to accuse me of being too firmly entrenched in pseudo-intellegentsia here, I started thinking about them because my wife recently boiled an entire carton of eggs and wrote "Hardboiled" in large letters on the carton (which of course made me want to draw a little Dick Tracy sort of cartoon character on the carton).

Anyway, it has occured to me that the P.I. of yore is notably lacking these days. Most of the time when I do see them, it's in a story that is set in the 40s or 50s indicating that they are only there because the person is trying to write a period piece more than they are trying to write a mystery story. Andrew Vacchs is really the only person I can think of who writes anything like a hardboiled detective story that has any sort of originality to it, and his main character is a total outcast. So what happened to the hardboiled guys in trenchcoats? They filled a niche in popular literature that hasn't really gone away, so what has replaced them?

It seems that the spot that was once occupied by the likes of Phillip Marlowe is now filled by two things, namely Old Lady Mystery Stories (Mrs. Marples, Inspector Poirot, and all those stupid stories about cats solving mysteries) and Super Patriotic Bullshit Mysteries (e.g. Tom Clancy). I think we can readily discount the Old Lady Mysteries as a market born solely out of higher retirement rates, increasing life spans, and large-print sections at the supermarket. The other side of the genre is what has really caught my eye. What does it say about us as a cultural entity that we have gone from wanting hardboiled detectives (whose salient point is really their independence) to wanting Special Forces operatives (whose salient point is their submission to duty and authority)?

How exactly did the desire for independence give way to a desire for the security of having orders? Did Reagan use all that Star-Wars funding to build a mind ray or something? Is it because the world has become so complicated and scary since the early 70s that we can't deal with the idea of navigating it without someone to hold our hands? Maybe it's because we're citizens of a waning power, and reading stories about how invincible our supersoldiers are is more comforting than reading about a type of American whose personal strength we don't think we can really measure up to.

RIP

2005-02-21T04:02:00.000-08:00

Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Apparently, he shot himself.
I have mixed feelings about this, largely based on the paucity of information. It's not that I criticise his family for their decision to not publicise all the details of his death, I just don't have the data to decide how to react.
If he offed himself on purpose I think that my sentiment of "Fuck you, you cowardly bastard" might be in line with what the man himself might have said in better times. The world is a shitty place right now and HST always had a pretty dark vision of the world, but suicide is still the cheap way to get out of dealing with it. Even so, I have the deepest respect for the clarity with which Mr. Thompson saw the world. Maybe that's why the thought that he killed himself is so disturbing. If someone so remarkably clear-eyed who always seemed to revel in life (albeit often in ways I find generally repulsive) couldn't take the heat, what's a poor slob like me going to do with it?
On the other hand, it's entirely possible that this was either an accident (he WAS, after all, a drug addled old man with too many guns) or a pretty reasonable reaction to some sort of debilitating illness that had been kept out of the public eye. My bet is that nobody will be quite sure, since he was alone when it happened.

Funny how killing oneself to escape pain and/or degeneration of the body is so much more acceptable than doing so simply to escape the awful world we live in.

In any case, I don't think I can really hold it against him for too long. His work has had too much influence on me for anything of that sort, though I think I will always be irritated that he had to lump himself in with that hack Hemingway one last time.

Feh

2005-01-29T03:41:00.000-08:00

I have a blog. Aren't I trendy?
Now you get to read whatever stupid crap falls out of my head, and seriously, I work nights, my thoughts get weird in the dead of the night when it seems like I'm the starring actor in one of those 70s-80s post-apocalyptic "the last human on Earth" movies.

Well, except that I don't get to loot nearly as much as I would if I were, in fact, the last human on Earth.

And with that I will ask, with the exception of AK/Pub/clichemonster, why the hell are you reading this and what sort of dead end search thread brought my blog to your attention?