Category Archives: Links

Just some stuff

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Once more, I have no particular plans for today’s entry, so I am winging it.

Luckily, being someone who is way better at coming up with plans than at actually implementing them, I have a certain amount of experience with winging it.

I have highly developed wing muscles.

Luckily, I still have the random stuff that ends up washing ashore in my browser to work with, so I will just share said things with you.

For instance, I came across this recently, and it made me so very happy.

It is a half hour of Genesis in their prime, with Peter Gabriel looking all sexy and intense and the rest of them all looking like the dirty shaggy hairy hippies they were back then. There they are, making awesome 1972 Prague rock prog rock happen, and showing that for them, half an hour can be basically a single song.

I cannot emphasize enough how hot Peter Gabriel looks back then, despite his tendency to overdo the gesticulation maybe just a little. Well, they were barely out of college, and part of prog rock’s “thing” was that it was done by highly educated bookish types who were not natural entertainers and who often therefore did not exactly rock the house with their stage presence.

In fact, part of Pink Floyd’s standard lore is that they had such incredibly expensive and daring and eye popping visual concerts, with giant parade balloons and huge special effects, in their heyday because they knew they were basically three very dull upper class British fellows who just played their instruments and sang without doing much. And so they had to make the rest of the show so interesting that nobody would pay attention to the three boring British dudes on the stage.

The fact that a lot of their audience was on, shall we say, performance enhancing drugs (leading to drug enhancing performances) did not hurt either.

Genesis, in the clip above, had obviously not quite reached that stages yet. and so it is just four British hippies getting their progressive rock thing on.

Bonus knowledge for me : I had often wondered who played the flute in their early stuff. Turns out it was Peter. Now I know.

I could go on about Genesis for the entire thousand words, easily, but I suspect none of the rest of my readers care about them, so I will move on.

Next, there is this little bit of fun :

Did you see the twist coming?

Isn’t that always the way it goes, fellas? You go after what seems like the perfect girl and she turns out to be a bitch?

Seriously, though, cute trick, Atlanta Humane Society. I am sure that amongst those fifteen thousand men, you got at least one decent adoption prospect. Not sure it was worth the 14,999 pissed off, angry, embarrassed calls from guys looking to bang a hot black chick (of the human kind), but still, cute.

I particularly like the cleverness of the phrasing. Everything in the ad is no doubt perfectly true of Daisy, the black bitch in question. Dogs love to play, especially the sporting breeds like black Labs. Dogs certainly do not care about your ethnicity, and they love to go hunting, fishing, and camping with you. Basically, they like doing things with you, especially in a stimulating outdoor environment where they can romp and play and smell everything.

And unless you are one of those weird people who puts clothes on your dog (totally unnecessary for a black Labrador, they are retrievers, they are naturally waterproof), then she will certainly happy to greet you at the door naked.

I hope Daisy went to a good home, with someone who would take care of her and love her and play with her. We already know he must have had a good sense of humour.

Finally, there is this pretty damned interesting article on near death experiences on Salon.com that I am slowly making my way through.

That is how it tends to go with me. When something is really interesting, it takes me a long time to read it, because I keep needing to stop reading to really thinking about what I just read.

I already knew the basics about near death and out of body experiences from having read about the subject before in my readings on various paranormal and fringe science type phenomena. But there is a lot about this I did not know, like this :

However different their personalities before the NDE, experiencers tend to share a similar psychological profile after the NDE. Indeed, their beliefs, values, behaviors, and worldviews seem quite comparable afterward. Importantly, these psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes one would expect if this experience were a hallucination. And, as noted NDE researcher Pim van Lommel and his colleagues have demonstrated, these changes become more apparent with the passage of time.

Now that is an interesting result. Anything that can take the wide variety of human personality and move it towards unity bears a second look. I have tended to somewhat pooh-pooh the notion that a great deal of what we do as human beings stems from the fear of our own death, but this would seem to lend credence to that idea. Once people have this personal experience of an afterlife, they are completely convinced that there is life after death, and they become much happier people.

They laugh a lot, they get pleasure from the little details of life, their new positive personality lets them make friends with everyone they meet… it is, by all rational measurement, a vast improvement. They become like wise holy men, happy and relaxed and perfectly at peace with themselves.

And all because they had a brush with death and came back.

You know what that means, don’t you?

Flatliners lied to us, man!

Still, one wonders if you could found a religion based on (safely) giving people near death experiences.

From The News

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Tonight, continuing the non-introspective streak for an unprecedented two in a row, I will be discussing two interesting items from the news in order to warm up for tomorrow’s regular Friday science jag.

It does me a lot of good to get over myself get away from myself for a few days and let my introspective muscles rest for a while. Too much of that, and you lose all sense of perspective and proportion, and that is literally the worst thing in the world.

Well, enough introductory palaver. Time to get on with the news items!

First one : I just love the word “palaver”.

But coming in a close second….

Catholicism Remembers Compassion

I have a lot of problems with the Catholic church. Things like protecting pederast priests, living in golden palaces filled with priceless works of art while billions starve, and worst of all, their entirely nonsensical and extremely counterproductive opposition to contraception are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I cannot decide whether they are a net force of good in the world, or evil. There are just too many variables.

And complicating the issue even further is when a story like this one about the Vatican condemning the Paul Ryan budget in the USA comes along and shows that despite their appearance of unrelenting and hopelessly antique and backwards evil, the Vatican does do a decent thing now and then.

Here is a clip :

“Affordable housing programs have not been protected in various budget and deficit agreements, and as a result many families are at further risk of being pushed into poverty,” said one letter, written by the Rev. Stephen Blaire, the bishop of Stockton, Calif. “We urge you to draw a circle of protection around the programs that serve ‘the least among us.’ ”

And that is exactly why I can never entirely condemn the Catholic church. Not just because they do this sort of thing (in this case, via the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) but because they seem to be the only one of the large Christian sects which remembers Christ’s actual teachings about helping the poor and being compassionate.

At the very least, they remember to pay lip service to it. Eric Ryan claims to be Catholic and that his Catholic faith “informed” his budget, but it would seem the Church does not agree. All reports say that is a distinctly cold hearted budget, which ignores the true financial score in favour of just cutting all the things social conservatives do not like regardless of how much that will save versus how much misery it will cause.

It is good that the Catholic Church seems to at least faintly remember that Christ said to sell all you own and give it to the poor, and that nobody who calls themselves any kind of Christian can possibly spew hatred of the poor when their Savior, the one their entire religion is supposedly about, taught them to love their neighbor and give of themselves freely.

And even to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. You know, taxes?

Making Homelessness Illegal

And speaking of massive right wing abuse of the poor, how about the laws passed in Hungary recently making it illegal to be homeless?

That is the effect, anyhow. Technically, the set of laws in question merely make it a crime to habitually reside in a public place or to store belongings there. And we all know that without laws like these, everybody would do that all the time, right?

Wrong. This is the result of a concentrated two year campaign to make homelessness illegal, presumably driven by the kind of people who, out of sheer moral laziness, think homeless people, like all poor people, are just lazy, and could change their position in life any time they wanted to do so.

That is a classic response from the morally bankrupt who will gladly believe absolutely anything that gets them out of having to care about someone who is not themselves. They are doing well, so the world must be fair, and they got where they are via the prime empty virtue of our modern world, hard work (funny how many supposed rugged individualists still want a pant on the head and a dog treat for being good little worker drones), ergo anyone not doing as well must not be working hard to the exact degree they are less successful.

Ergo, homeless people must be the laziest people in the world. Anything else would mean caring! And even worse… maybe actually doing something, or… the worst thing of all… SHARING.

And sharing means you have less stuff, and if you have less stuff you are more poor, and if you are more poor that means you lose social status in the incredibly minutely competitive world of the middle class, and losing social status is, to middle class people, worse than death.

So clearly, this sort of thing is reprehensible. But to me, the irony of it all is that the next result is clearly just going to be a lot of homeless people into jail, where they will be inside where it is warm and out of the elements, and getting three meals a day plus free medical care, and guards to protect them from other prisoners somewhat….

… in other words, it will improve their lives immensely by turning all prisons into really, really expensive homeless shelters.

So apparently, these people would prefer to spend far more money (homeless shelters are way cheaper than prisons) in order to satisfy their puny punitive reptile brains that they are cracking down on the problem, rather than risk seeming even faintly compassionate (higher brain functions pain them so) by just increasing the number of homeless shelter beds and thus solving the problem more cheaply, more humanely, and more practically.

Well, that is all the rant I have in me tonight. I had forgotten how exhausting it can be to have opinions. No wonder I got out of the habit.

The Most Hated Man In The World

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After yesterday’s big emotional roundabout, I am once again bored with talking about myself, so I thought it was time I did something other than root around in my navel lint looking for gold, and actually talk something outside my head for a change.

No doubt this too shall pass, and I will revert to form and go back to sorting my entrails soon enough. But for today, we will be discussing some interesting news items I have come across recently.

I hope the sudden shock does not cause any of you undue stress or anxiety.

Now let’s continue.

With the recent centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, there has been a flurry of media and public interest in this most famous of all disasters at sea.

Much of this has just been the repeating of facts already well known. But recently I came across this fascinating article about J. Bruce Ismay and how, as a result of the Titanic disaster, he became, for a time, the most hated man in the world.

Ismay was the chairman of the White Star Line, the company that built the Titanic, and was on board the night she struck an iceberg and sank.

But building the doomed ship was not the crime for which he was pilloried. It was getting on the initial (scant) lifeboat launch with all the women and children that was the nail upon which he was hung in the press and in the court of public opinion.

To further compound the matter, it became clear that he had been responsible for the Titanic’s excessive speed (he controlled the often vilified captain of the ship), and, most crucially and damningly, his decision to reduce the number of lifeboats on the vessel far below the number necessary to carry all the ship’s passengers to safety because he “didn’t want the decks to look too cluttered”.

Well, the ship was unsinkable, so really, why have any at all? Just to make it look more like a ship to the passengers, presumably. After all, you expect to see lifeboats on the deck of a ship, right?

To finally cement his position as public pariah, he refused to talk about his experience on that fateful April night and absolutely refused to take any responsibility for it whatsoever, even to the point of claiming he was on board as an ordinary passenger and had no idea why Captain Smith handed him an ice danger warning shortly before the disaster.

As a result, he got hate mail, he got blackballed from his club, a close friend turned him away at the door, and he lived the remaining 25 years of his life as a shadow of his former self, reclusive, nervous, depressed, and plagued by such horrific nightmares that his screams woke the whole household.

Granted, he was still a rich man. But he was not a happy man, and what else is money for?

I find the story fascinating because it is such a pure personal tragedy to come from the much larger tragedy that is the story of the Titanic. The fact that Ismay went from being one of the most rich and powerful men in the world to a shattered and crippled figure living out his days in misery makes him a highly tragic, though not sympathetic, character.

And all for basically acting exactly like any other rich person who was used to being treated like he was far, far, far more important than anyone else and so he just did what came naturally to such a person. He put himself first.

I think anyone can see by his psychological reaction, especially the nightmares, that despite what he said, he felt incredibly guilty over the entire thing and that this guilt, plus the shock of his sudden reversal of position in the world, were simply far more than he could handle. He could not face it either publicly, privately, or in his own mind. And so for the rest of his life, he was a man living the fragile existence of a soul incapable of facing a terrible, terrible truth.

And it is this profound lack of character that makes him a tragic figure to me. He is a man who failed the test of history and hence became a pariah and a nervous wreck. This is both tragic in the literary sense, and just. Inasmuch as the Titanic disaster was any one person’s fault, it was his, and his failure to take even the pro forma “the buck stops here” responsibility of any leader, let alone any shred of personal responsibility, quite rightfully made him a detested figure in his own life, and will insure his place in the history books as a coward and a failure and a victim of that most classically tragic of attributes, hubris.

And you can see how this sort of thing might happen. I have written before on the corrupting and indeed infantalizing effect of wealth and power, and how there is genetic social programming that emerges from the human psyche when one becomes socially dominant that is entirely unknown to the common citizen who lives in a state of relative social hierarchical equality with his or her peers.

To me, it seems clear that the tragedy suddenly placed an enormous burden of conscience on a man who had grown quite used to the sort of complete lack of accountability available only to those at the very top of their respective heaps. He went from socially dominant to the bottom of the heap, the pariah, the leper, the criminal in all but law, so fast and so unexpectedly that his enfeebled character simply could not take it and as a consequence, he made his situation far worse by refusing to face it, therefore failing one of the most basic tests of human leadership and the chain of command, and thereby condemning himself to that very special circle of social hell reserved exclusively for our failed and disgraced former leaders.

The sheep have no mercy for the shepherd who throws down his crook and runs away.

In Illness and in Link Wealth

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In this death defying entry, I will attempt to both whine about being sick and share videos and links with you at the same time.

Please keep your hands and head inside the vehicle at all times and if you are ill, elderly, have a heart condition, or are just really fucking stupid, you might want to consult your doctor before going any further into this no doubt highly contagious and flammable blog entry.

First, a video link. This looks like a pretty interesting movie.

Granted, the trailer does not exactly tell you what this non movie is about, but there is enough intriguing thought fodder there that I am quite intrigued. There is still a lot of life in the powerful “handheld with special effects” style of film-making, at least in my books, and this seems like it leverages that power to great effect.

I only hope that this film-maker is a real guy who was really arrested for making a movie deemed critical of the Iranian power structure, and the film really had to be smuggled out or Iran to Cannes on a USB memory stick hidden in a cake.

If that is all just a public relations myth created to give the movie false value via viral marketing, I will be extremely disappointed and lose all interest in the movie.

Well, maybe not all interest, but most of it. It would still be an intriguing looking movie, even if shorn of its meta-narrative. But I would be pretty pissed off.

OK, back to me. Finger still doing fine in the dressing that looking like a hand knit condom. Taking the antibiotics and so on.

But wait, a new contender has arrived!

I have been experiencing the symptom known as sulfur burps. Burps that taste like sulfur, or in other words, have that distinctive “rotten egg” flavour to them.

This has been accompanied by a loss of appetite and a large increase in gassiness. Historically, these have been the heralds of Bad Times In The Small Intestine in my life, and so I am being very, very careful about what I eat and drink, and making sure to eat slowly and with plenty of water so that there is no chance of that gass getting bottled up by a blockage or bolus and giving me cramping.

Back to the other stuff. I do not get what is so creepy about this now banned app.

Sure, it gives guys a heads-up about what girls are around and gives you some basic info about them, but
that is about it.

I distinctly feel I must be missing something here.

OK, back to me. As the sulfur burps article states, one of the causes for them is two fairly serious infections, Helicobacter pylori and Giardia, the latter of which causes Giardiasis, more commonly know as “beaver fever”.

What it has to do with beavers is beyond me.

I am worried that I have one of those two problems. I have been made well aware of the effects of a malfunctioning immune syndrome lately, and Helicobacter pylori in particular is one of those infections that you can have for years without any symptoms, but then when opportunity arises, it becomes a problem, and that sounds like the perfect recipe for something that has recurred many times in my life without apparently cause or cure.

Back to content. I think this video is all the proof I will ever need that George Lucas will not stop, will not rest, until ever nerd in the world hates him to the maximum of their capacity for hate.

Yes, that is beloved anti-hero Han Solo dancing like a gay zombie robot in an officially licensed Lucasarts video game.

To me, it is like Lucas is actively hunting the tiny shreds of respect that I did not even know I still had for Star Wars, and terminating them with extreme prejudice.

I envy those who are numb to these things now.

Back to me. Interestingly, from what I can tell, the literature says Keflex can actually kill both of these infections. So really, I am already taking the solution. But I don’t know.

Doctor Wong from the ER said that Keflex can also kill all your useful gut flora and fauna, and if that happened, that might be just the opportunity an infection needed to take over the joint.

I will see how things work out. I have skipped supper due to lack of appetite, but that is the last meal I skip before I am confident I am back to normalish.

Back to content. I really enjoyed this little bit of satire about the Quantum Nature of Mitt Romney.

It explores the deep science required to understand how Mitt Romney can hold so many positions at the same time, and how it is mathematically impossible to know both what his position is now and what it will be in the future. Position or vector… pick one.

It is, admittedly, a fairly nerdy kind of satire. But I am a fairly nerdy guy.

OK, back to my sepia toned kind of life.

I am trying to balance proper alertness to potential health problems with the proper amount of skepticism needed to keep things in their proper perspective.

There has to be some sane middle point between self-neglect and hypochondria. In my life, it has tended to be either/or. Half the reason I neglect my own health is that I lack the coping skills to handle dealing with health issues in a balanced sane way. So it is either ignore things completely, or freak out over them.

Both of those are bad, but at least ignoring them is not painful in the short term.

That has been the emotional calculus so far, but I hope to write a better equation into myself in the future via my own brand of cognitive therapy.

Even if it is one of those infections, while they can be very serious, most of the time they are not. So really, there is no rational basis for worry.

Yeah. That always works.

Some picture and some words!

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Was going to do the usual after therapy blogging thing today, but… nah. Sure, it was a good session and I feel like I continue to release some long buried dark emotions with my therapist’s help, and that is sure to help me big time in the long run, but nothing particularly noteworthy came out on this particular day, so fuck it. Plus, I am getting a little tired of my own stuff lately, and so I figure I better lay off talking about it for a little while.

You can’t spend all the time up your own… uh, navel. You have to get some fresh air and perspective now and then, or you just end up choking on your own fumes.

So what the heck, let’s do some funny pictures!

Like this one!

It's true. They are.

Hardly groundbreaking news. Wetness is to women what hardness is to men. I am positive this is why so many products for women are all about moisturizing. Women fear going dry like men fear going soft. Thus, all these moisturizing products prey on this fear od dryness. Whatever the problem is, the solution is to make some part of you more moist.

One gets the feeling some of these ladies have gone past moist, through slick, and into downright gooey.

Back to the pic : what I love about it is its simplicity. Someone just took two signs that we have all seen a million times before and juxtaposed them. Nothing was added or taken away. They just put the two together and voila, a joke.

A fairly obvious joke, but still, a joke. I bet whoever put that together was real proud of themselves and thought there were quite clever. Well, good for them! More or less.

Hey, they’re trying!

And speaking of killer juxtapositions, how about this (presumably accidental) one?

I love definitive doubt, don't you? Kinda?

I love that kind of humour. When the marquee signs just happen to align to provide a whole new meaning unintended by either filmmaker.

Who can forget “Crouching Tiger Snatch”? I certainly can’t.

Plus, of course, it’s hilarious how it comes together to contradict itself. There Will Definitely Be Blood… Maybe is actually a pretty good title for a movie. A hilarious rom com about the early days of oil. People will remember the “sipping your milkshake” scene for years!

Next up…. I am pretty sure that I declared a previous All Time Winner At Planking, but if I did, then I have changed my mind, because I am pretty sure this guy has it.

And look, he's already dressed for the award ceremony (click to enlarge)

Yup. That is about it. I realize it lacks the usual “suspension” aspect of the better planking attempts, but for sheer awkwardness, I still think this one is a winnar.

Besides, apparently “planking” is dead, and now all the hip kids are “stocking”, which means doing your own reenactment of a funny and/or awkward stock photo from one of those stock photo websites.

What is it with kids today and doing reenactments of things? Do something creative, dammit! Add value.

Then there’s this friendly little bit of healthy advice :

Not necessarily this box, though. Any box. Click to enlarge.

Well, some people need practical advice. You know, “open box before eating pizza”, “lift lid before pooping”, “don’t pour sulfuring acid on your genitals”. Little helpful hints for the reality challenged. Factoids for those enjoying a low information lifestyle.

You know… morons.

Of course, I can just see that pic showing up on one of those “stupid instruction labels due to our overly litigious society” type sites, even though it is clearly meant as a joke. Presumably, some hip little pizza place thought this would make their pizza stand out in people’s minds, and hey… when was the last time you got a joke with your pizza?

Nothing can make up for bad pizza (contrary to what some say, pizza is not good even when it’s bad), but if the pizza was good, the little joke would make me feel like ordering from that place again.

Comedy moves product. Think of how much people like the factoids under Snapple caps!

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t share this little pic with you :

"Hah. Stupid n00bs. Nobody camps a cat!" (click to enlarge)

So now you know. This is what your cat does while you are work. It grabs a controller, logs on to Live with your credit card, and uses its vastly superior reflexes and object tracking ability to completely dominate all the n00bs on Call of Duty.

A telltale sign that you are losing to a cat : A GamerTag that has “meow”, “mouser”, “hunter”, or “tuna” in it. If you find yourself being dominated by MeowTunaHunter, you can be sure you are up against either a cat, a 12 year old Japanese girl, or a 37 year old guy who thinks he’s a 12 year old Japanese girl.

No matter which is true, you probably should be a little scared.

Oh wait, I have one more picture to share, a tribute to a legend who was taken from us far far too early and who is dearly missed by his fans.

This escalator is now stairs. Sorry for the conveniece.

We miss you Mitch Hedberg. You were the freshest, funniest motherfucker to come out of the comedy mills in a long damn time, and you died just when people were finally beginning to realize it.

Even seven years after your death, it makes me sad to think about it. Fucking drugs.

And on that happy note, I will leave you, my faithful readers, for today.

Remember kids, don’t do drugs. You will die, and before you die, you will spend thousands of dollars on your habit and that will just be to feel like you feel right now.

Except for weed, of course. Smoke that shit all you want, it’s good for you.

What I am not writing about

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I was going to write about this whole incident, but I can’t. It makes me too damned angry to even think about being able to write about it. That makes me feel like a bit of a failure as a writer, but writers are human beings too, and sometimes something is simply far too painful to write about.

Maybe when I have more years of writing experience under my proverbial belt, I will be able to take even something like that into myself and retain the ability to remain articulate about it, and fulfill my duty as a public articulator of opinion. But that day is not today.

And it’s probably not going to be tomorrow, either.

So let us stick with lighter news today, and move on for now to happier themes.

Like, how about seven minutes of completely kickass science fiction made just for the hell of it?

This Is Not A Trailer

That is the only bad thing about it… despite all appearances, that is not a trailer for an upcoming movie. That is the whole movie, right there. Although I would not be surprised if someone offers the makers a movie deal just based on how good that looks and the quality of the acting. I thoroughly enjoyed it and so, according to the YouTube comments, did a lot of other people.

That is the sort of thing I would notice, were I a venture capitalist.

Admittedly, the actual plot is corny as hell. Oh no, the perfect killing machine designed by evil scientists starts to remember its humanity and kicks some ass. Been there, done that, a million times.

But that doesn’t really matter because it’s just so damned well done.

And the best thing is, it was done just to do it. The people involved have done other work in big Hollywood moves, but Archetype, they did just for the hell of it.

And what do you know, when you let creative people do what they want, you get great stuff.

If only the money people were capable of understanding that. But they see the world through an entirely different set of lenses.

Girl Scouts United

Next up, we have this fun little story about some Girl Scouts who did not take the theft of their Girl Scout Cookie money lying down.

Instead, they beat on their assailants some, and while the thieves still escaped with around $200 in Girl Scout cookie money, at least they have the painful humiliation of taking a few hits from some nine year old girls first.

Of course, the obvious question that screams from this story is : what kind of a piece of shit steals money from Girl Scouts? How low in the human dignity hierarchy do you have to be to even consider stealing Girl Scout cookie money? How badly do you want to get beaten when you are caught, and then beaten again (and worse) when they find out “what you’re in for” in prison?

And well, there is definitely the possibility that these girls somehow lost their cookie money and came up with this exciting story of derring-do in order to cover it and not get into trouble, and it just snowballed out of control from there.

After all, the Salem Witch Trials started with some little girls stories, too.

Still, I hope it’s true.

How To Offend

Then there is this fun little guide to offensive hand gestures from all around the world.

Of course, I am not recommending you actually use any of them. I offer the link purely because I find it absolutely fascinating as an avid student of humanity and all its marvelous expressions.

I had no idea there was such a wealth of ways to be rude without words in the world. And I am sure the list is far from exhaustive. But even so, the sampling offered is rich and various.

Like this one :

Write-off

Meaning: I am ignoring you
Used in: Greece

The literal translation of st’arxidia mou, the phrase that accompanies this gesture, is “I write it on my testicles.” And while there may well be people who, out of a strange psychological compulsion or simply boredom, actually write on their testicles, here the threat is simply metaphorical and tells the subject you’re ignoring him. One needn’t possess testicles to use the gesture, which is employed by men and women alike.

I am impressed at how well developed such a gesture is. Outside Greece, if we want to say we are ignoring someone, we don’t involve out genitals at all. We just turn our back on them, or look away, or plug our ears and say “La la la, I can’t hear you, la la la!”

Clearly, for the Greeks, those are not nearly specific or testicular enough.

But my favorite one is this one :

Idiota

Meaning: Are you an idiot?
Used in: Brazil

A South American gesture indicating stupidity, this requires improv skills and an actorly flair. To perform, put your fist to your forehead while making a comical overbite. The gesture is most effective when accented with multiple grunts. When executed correctly, you will be rewarded with appreciative laughs, though not, perhaps, from your subject.

I figure this is the equivalent of the North American “Well, DUUUUUH”, but with far more of a Latin American flair. It’s like you suddenly do an impression of Hagar the Horrible’s best friend while making Tim Allen noises.

You have to admit, that really puts some oomph into your sarcasm.

I can only imagine that it makes people from the countries neighboring Brazil think Brazilians are, well, kinda dickish.

End of File

Well, that’s it from me for today. I managed to make it through this blog entry and come out of it in a good mood, despite the terrible news and the fact that the wind is making all kinds of spooky sounds outside my window tonight.

Off now to have a nap and possibly weird spooky dreams. Seeya tomorrow after therapy, folks!

Gathering some moss

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Time to clear out the browser again. Maybe I should make this a separate category of post. Put it under “links” as “dump”.

It sounds gross, but if my StumbleUpon is any judge, an awful lot of people put “link dumps” and “pic dumps” on their blogs without even thinking about it twice.

Anyhow, got some keen things awaiting inclusion clogging up the old Firefox right now, so I figured it is time to line them up, kit them out, give them a stern talking to and a big hug, and then send them out into the world to fend for themselves.

Letting go is always the hardest part.

A Very Interesting Question

A fascinating article over at TechCrunch (where did the E go? or is that a totally different site?) asks a highly pertinent question for our time : Is printing a gun the same as buying a gun?

Not that long ago, this would have been a completely nonsensical question. “Printing a gun” would be as absurd a concept as making yourself rich by drawing pictures of gold bars. You could no more print a working, functional, real world gun than you could print a living dragon.

But with the rapid advances in what used to be called “rapid prototyping” and is now called, much more sensibly, “3D printing”, things are not so clear.

People are 3D printing out all kinds of things. I mean, you can download and print a freaking Stradivarius, for crying out loud.

But somehow, despite my even mentioning the printing of rifle parts in the above linked article, the issue of people being able to 3D print dangerous things never really occurred to me before now. (I guess I was too distracted by the Stradivarius thing. )

The potential implications are vast. The law certainly has no way of coping with this. The entire structure of gun control laws revolves around controlling the manufacture and sale of firearms. The idea that someone without a whit of gunsmith training might just decide to print themselves out an AK-47 and some ammo was never envisioned.

Before we get too excited, I must caution, this is not happening right now. 3D printers print things in plastic polymers, and fairly soft ones at that, so they would make pretty lousy guns. But this is something that we may have to deal with in the near future.

This sort of thing has the potential to make all kind of laws meant to keep dangerous things out of the wrong hands completely obsolete.

A sobering thought, and something to chew on.

The Ultimate Silencer

And while we are thinking dark thoughts about the future, let us talk about this weapon that makes it impossible for people to talk.

Now, the story is a tad sensationalistic. It acts as though this is a magic “silence gun” that could make a whole room full of people unable to talk like it was some kind of mute button on life, and it is nothing of the sort.

Instead, it just plays a single person’s voice back at them with a slight delay. This seriously disorients people and makes them instinctively stop talking to clear up the confusion.

This is no big leap for science. This is technology so basic that I used a similar device at the Ontario Science when I was a kid in 1978. At the time, this Delayed Auditory Feedback was considered a possible explanation for why some people stutter. They hear their own voice echoed back to them.

So anyhow, relax, this is not some totalitarian superweapon. It could only ever work on one person at a time, and a determined enough person could, I think, shake off the effects.

What interests me is the stated purpose of this weapon, to wit :

The researchers were looking for a way to stop “louder, stronger” voices from saying more than their fair share in conversation. The paper reads: “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.” In other words, this speech-jamming gun was built to enforce “proper” conversations.

To me, that just bristles with the rage of the shy and the unassertive. Like some perhaps mildly Asperger’s engineers got so angry at being verbally bullied by hecklers and highly articulate people who were NOT FOLLOWING THE RULES that they invented what amounts to a “shut the fuck up gun” to insure they would get a chance to speak.

Seems downright mad scientist to me, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But you know, you could take an assertiveness class, or get a better chairperson for your meetings.

I’m just sayin’.

How “Now” Is This?

Finally, a story for this exact moment in history, about how that modern demon known as “autocorrect” actually prompted a major police incident.

Damn You, Autocorrect, indeed.

For those of you who don’t know, “autocorrect” is a feature mostly used in texting via cell phone, where the phone tries to guess what you meant to type and replaces what you typed with said guess.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? Well, it is. And in this case, it actually caused a high school to go into lockdown for two whole hours before the situation was resolved.

It all started when a student tried to text a friend “Gunna be at West hall this afternoon”. Seems simple enough, right?

But autocorrect, in all its dubious wisdom, turned “Gunna” into “Gunman”.

And the recipient of said text, instead of say, texting back asking “Did you mean to say gunman??”, freaked out, told the authorities, and madness ensued.

To me, autocorrect makes things worse far more often than better. It is way easier to simply absorb a typo (we cna figrue otu thigns pretyt esaily) than to deal with a completely wrong word in a sentence.

I mean, compare “I have to see you after clsas” with “I have to see you after Callais”.

I rest my case.

But people get caught up in this because autocorrect is turned on by default on most cell phones, and people don’t know they can turn that shit off.

Although after an incident like this one, they might take the time to learn.

That’s all for today, folks! Seeya tomorrow, with SCIENCE!

Dear Landlords Of Vancouver

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This was originally posted to the Vancouver Craigslist. It is by someone known only as kxvng-2875427096@hous.craigslist.org and the original post got yanked, so I felt absolutely compelled to preserve this marvelous gem of satire on my blog.

Hope you enjoy it!

Dear landlords of Vancouver:

I know it’s difficult for you. You are all just hardworking people struggling to maintain your right to have someone else pay the mortgage, and trying to avoid the unfair situation of having your second home or investment property unoccupied for a month. I feel your pain, truly. However, there are a few things that I think might be helpful in your noble endeavour, and I’d like to pass them on in solidarity:

1. A closet is not a den. If it doesn’t have a window, a door, a wall, or more than ten square feet of space, it is not a den.

2. A den is not a bedroom. Even if your second, clearly demarcated room is so expansive as to be able to fit a table and chair, if it cannot fit a bed, it is not a second bedroom.

3. “Separate entrance” is not a selling feature of an apartment. If it does not have a separate entrance, it is not an apartment. Ditto “ceilings over 7 feet”, “full bathroom”, and “full kitchen.”

4. Burnaby is not Vancouver. It is not East Vancouver. It is not Commercial Drive, or Trout Lake. It is Burnaby. Coquitlam, Mayne Island, and Assmunch, Arizona are also not Vancouver. Most prospective tenants will clue in to this when you give them the address.

5. It’s logically impossible to be 5 minutes’ walk from Renfrew Station, *and* from Commercial Drive.

6. Granville Street is not “right next to” or “just west of” Main Street.

7. If your rental space is within ten feet of a major artery, like Broadway, 12th Avenue, or Kingsway, it is not quiet. Can’t hear what I’m saying? It is NOT QUIET.

8. “Cozy” and “small” and “cramped” all have different definitions, which might be helpful to review.

9. A basement suite is a basement suite. A garden level suite is a basement suite. A ground floor suite is a basement suite. An “almost above ground” ground floor suite is a basement suite.

10. Laminate flooring is not hardwood. Laminate is plastic. Hardwood is wood. Hence, hardwood.

11. You can have ONE damage deposit, and it is completely refundable. You can’t have two, and you can’t have a handful of nonrefundable cash to hold a place for 2 hours.

12. A “bathroom” is a place with a toilet, a sink, a shower and/or tub, *walls*, and *a door*. If you are tempted to call something that does not meet this definition a “bathroom”, take a moment to clarify in your ad that it is a toilet in the middle of the bedroom, or using more traditional phraseology, an “open pit latrine.”

13. If one cannot see the mountains/ocean or other advertised geographic features by looking out the window, the apartment does not have a “gorgeous view.” If one has to crane one’s body out the window and dangle precariously in order to try to see the horizon, it is not a “peek a boo” view of the North Shore. It is a latent lawsuit.

14. There is no such thing as “one mouse, that one time” Ditto cockroach or bedbug.

15. Landlords, I know you are very busy collecting money and trying to earn interest on it, and you barely have two cents to rub together in this harsh economic climate, but please know that it is not your tenants’ responsibility to paint or repair your rental space. This is part of your job, because you collect the rental income. It’s a new concept to you, I know, but should be fairly easy to remember if you consider the logic of it. When the happy day comes that your tenant owns her own living space, *then* she can do her own repairs and maintenance.

16. “Old” is not “heritage.” It is not even “character”, really. While the Vancouver Special style of housing arguably *forms* part of Vancouver’s heritage, it does not in any way meet the criteria for heritage designation and the attached rent premium.

17. Try to keep your word about showing times. If you make an appointment with prospective tenants, and then decide to rent the place to the first person with cash in hand, please use your phone skills to let your other prospective tenants know that they no longer have to take transit across the city to view your place.

18. No means no. If I have decided not to rent your poorly maintained, possibly “one-mouse” infested, heritage, gorgeous almost-top-floor basement suite, with two bedrooms and a den, with peek a boo views, just next to granville island at the quiet intersection of hastings and boundary, *please* do not contact me again by email or phone to persuade me that your rental suite is amazing. I am not looking for a new friend who collects rent, I am looking for a decent place to live.

Some stuff from the stuff place

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So I’m feeling uncreative. So sue me!

Thought it was around time I shared the cool stuff kicking around the browser with you nice, sweet, clearly highly intelligent people once more.

Love Amongst the Geeks

First up, one of the happiest things in the whole wide world : nerd love!

Wife-a-chu! Use your SAY YES attack!

Isn’t that just the sweetest thing? I heart nerd love so much. Finally, romance stories I can relate to on a personal level. In general, love stories involve impossibly perfect people, except in romantic comedies, in which case they involve adorably flawed but otherwise hopelessly perfect people. People who are not a darn thing like me. They seem nice and all. But it might as well be alien mating rituals.

But nerd love, the real world kind that is, well that makes me feel all good inside. Not only can I relate to it, but it reminds me and the world that being a nerd does not, necessarily, mean you are forever frozen out of the world of love, sex, romance, and commitment.

You might have to work harder to find it, and you might even, if you are a straight nerd, have to out compete a lot of other nerd males for the small (but growing) number of eligible nerdy females.

Or suffer a little because you have a non nerdy girlfriend with whom your nerdy life will have to be, shall we say, negotiated.

But nerd love is possible. Hang in there, boys!

It Came From New Zealand

From romance we go to horror now. If you’re Scottish and have a heart condition, please be advised that the Och Look After Ye Health Lad Board has advised against viewing the following imagine.

In Soviet Scotland, mutton eat YOU!

Total LOL. I would honestly be scared at that moment. It’s the one sheep standing alone in the foreground of the picture that does it. That really sells the scary. I would be expecting that one sheep to start demonically levitating into the air, head bent at an unnatural angle, making some kind of horrible otherworldly howling slash screaming of the tormented in hell, then all the other sheep would turn into horrible twister hellish creatures of some sort, and they would attack and evour me and then poop me straight into Hell!

But then again, I am a city boy with a diseased yet very vivid imagination. Presumably, if you are farm folk and raise sheep, you see shit like this every time you go to bring the sheep inside at night. The eyes catch the lifhgt of your flashlight and it’s spook city. I have certainly seen the same thing happen with cats a ton of times in my life.

They haven’t changed, it’s just a trick of the light and the light-gathering membranes in the eyes of some animals that give them excellent night vision but the tendency to get the spooky eye.

More Good News About Newt

Newt Gingrich, you magnificent cunt, you just keep delivering the hits.

Now it turns out that as venerable a Republican rag as the National Review is not fond of the poisonous amphibian known as the Gingrich Newt.

In fact, they are openly calling for him to drop out of the race to give Santorum a chance.

Just how venerable is the National Review? It was founded by William F. Buckley Junior.

Now, I thought that Newt pretty much had the “intellectual Republican” and “blue blooded Yankee Republican” demographics all sewn up. After all, he is clearly the most intelligent of the group, with quite a superb academic record at quite superb and prestigious educational institutes, and is clearly less of a religious loony than Romney or Santorum.

One would think that would enough. But no, the Review wants him gone.

The fun conclusion would be that Newt is such a massive prick that even the National Review can’t stand him and so not even they can love such a motherless reptile of a human being.

The less fun but more likely conclusion is that they simply want to maximize the chances that the Republicans will beat Obama, and they realize that Gingrich has no chance of winning but plenty of chance of damaging the hell out of every other Republican in the universe by trying.

So they want him out for the same reason I, and other lefties, want him in.

What a bunch of spoilsports.

Sadly, the National Review is being really polite about it. I suppose it would be too much to hope that the learned and reasonable National Review would publish an editorial entitled “Die In A Fire With Everyone Who Supports You, You Horrible Fucking Person, Newt Gingrich. ”

And then the rest of the article is just swear words, Ginrich, and conjunctions.

But hey, there’s still time, National Review! Convention is not till April.

Keep my idea in mind if Newt doesn’t take the hint, OK?

Kick Start My… ouch!

Finally, an update on my idea of maybe starting a Kickstarter page for This Show Has Already Been Canceled in hopes of getting enough money to shoot a pilot episode.

It’s still a possibility, but according to my research, the price tag on a professional produced pilot is somewhere around $250K+, so the top desired option is looking pretty unlikely.

So I am mulling over cheaper options. Something involving people wearing a lot of different hats in the production. I really want it to look professional, so I would want studio time or at least some professional camera operators (preferably with professional cameras) and sound.

That’s the most important part to me, having everything look and sound professional. First impressions are vital and I want the first impression to be “hey, this is funny!” and not “hey, this is crappy! ”

Well that’s all for tonight. Tomorrow is a therapy day, so you know right now what I will be writing about tomorrow. See you then, all you lovely people!

Up from the depths

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Up From The Depths of Tartarus

If I seem to be smoldering and leaving a foul pall of thick black greasy smoke that smells of must and musk and magma wherever I go, it’s because I just dragged myself up from the depths of my own personal Tartarus and all that smoke is coming from the overheated bearings of what passes for my brain.

So don’t worry. Eventually, that scorched smell will fade, the surface blackening is merely carbonized dural epithelials (easily washed away when the surface is cool enough), and my brain will go from its current black-hot state back to its usual red-hot running state.

Meanwhile, I am investigating brain lubricants. All this overheating is seriously adding the miles to the poor old thing, and the wear and tear alone must be shortening its useful life.

Doing a fairly decent job of not letting it depress me, though. Or rather, accepting that it physically depresses me, making me feel crappy and dragged out and achey and giving me a pounding headache (must be from my brain expanding when heated and being too big for its case), but not letting the depression spin those temporary pains into something about life, or me, or the universe, or anything.

It’s just some shitty weather. All you can do is protect yourself as much as you can from its effects and ride the rest of it out. It doesn’t mean anything.

Even the fact that my emotional awareness of the world tells me things are terrible is meaningless.

It’s just the weather.

It’s Waiting For You!

Speaking of foul creatures that rise up from the depths, take a gander at this here picture.

Uncle Red! No! (click to enlarge)

That has to be the most hilarious advertising fail I have seen this year. You can totally see what the people who put together this extraordinary cocktail of seafood and nightmare sauce were trying to do. They were trying to convey the idea “Hey, weary traveler. Just a friendly reminder that we here at Red Lobster are always here, waiting for you with delicious seafood feasts at an affordable price. So come on over, friend. We’ll be here waiting for you. ”

A fairly typical approach. Make your restaurants seem friendly and warm and inviting to people. I personally strongly dislike faceless corporations driven entirely by lust for profit trying to pretend they are my friend so they can get closer to my wallet, but still, it’s not an unusual approach.

But of course, somewhere, that intent went horribly, horribly askew. Instead of making it warm and inviting, they instead created something that sends the message “Red Lobster is a horrible mutant zombie who is waiting to kill you and serve you up on a platter like he did to this seafood. ”

In fact, the whole thing seems like it could be the poster for a horror movie for lobsters.

Imagine this in the Movie Guy voice with a slight “underwater” filter : “They thought they were safe. They thought they could eat the tasty food in the wooden boxes and still not get caught. They thought they could live that way forever. THEY THOUGHT WRONG. ”

Or maybe you should do that in the voice of Doctor Zoidberg from Futurama. That works too.

I'm telling you, that man is a menace!

Can a libertarian be a fascist?

On the news front, there is a depressingly and disturbingly large and growing pile of evidence that Ron Paul has strong ties to white supremacists and neo-nazis.

I sincerely don’t want it to be true, but this evidence uncovered by Anonymous is making it hard to maintain my denial. At the very least, you can no longer deny that Ron Paul has ties to these horrible genetic rejects in the American racist movement(s).

That is the best case scenario. The worst case, of course, is that he has not only been happy to associate with those people, but shares their deepest beliefs and is, in fact, deep down, deeply racist and hateful and is therefore actually the most successful Neo-Nazi candidate for President in the modern fully integrated era.

It makes me feel bad for ever liking him a little, like somehow, by liking his refusal to tow the Republican line of insane bullshit (he has his own, thank you very much) and his liberal-friendly positions on things like drug legalization, he has gotten some Nazi on me.

I imagine a lot of us on the left are feeling kind of like that about all this now. We never wanted that little nutball to be President of anything. But we couldn’t help liking him a little, and now, we feel pretty weird about that.

Say it ain’t so, Ron.

I want to assure my contributors that I am not a Nazi, I just pretended to be what they wanted me to be in order to get their money... uh, unlike what I am doing right now...

Might As Well Go For A Coda

I am going to hell for that heading. But I resigned my soul to Pun Hell many years ago, when I bought an eraser shaped like a television just so I could say “I think I’ll watch a little TV” then whip it out and stare at it.

Yes, I seriously used to do that, and what’s more, I enjoyed it immensely.

No wonder I loved Night Court so much. I practically am Judge Harold T. Stone Presiding.

What can I say, I get enormous pleasure out of things like that. I am not even sure it still qualifies as comedy exactly when I do things like that. I think it’s more about a deep craving for a world that is as funny as the sitcoms I grew up watching.

To me, that always seemed like a great world to live in. Everyone is hilarious and even the most serious problems can be fixed in half an hour.

Works for me!