Wednesday

Scientists Decipher the Chimpanzee's DNA

healthy forests initiative!

States Sue White House Over Forest Plan - Yahoo! News:
California, New Mexico and Oregon sued the Bush administration Tuesday over the government's decision to allow road building, logging and other commercial ventures on more than 90,000 square miles of untouched forests.

religion: bringing people together

769 Dead, 307 Hurt in Iraq Bridge Stampede - Yahoo! News

watch school

This week we took all the oiling data we've gotten and threw it all together. We cleaned, oiled, and assembled our watches, and got graded.

My grade wasn't too great but not so bad it took my average down significantly. My escapement oiling was a little heavy (even though it looked great when I did it, lesson there), the jewels all about right, and the cap jewels on the balance were perfect. As they should be. It's a fortunate area that there's no excuse not to get perfect, since it's easy to tell what's happening visually. A gimme, if you will, built into the grading system. My oiling on posts was fine, and I was a little light on the sliding surfaces throughout winding/setting. The big ugly surprise came with the spots that are all over everything. But they're all over everybody's so it's ok. Looks like the cleaning solution was a little dirty. When that happens we just have to use the leather buff, or if it's bad enough, rewash.

I think my least favorite part of the automatic watch cleaners is the drying cycle. It gets the watch really hot and I don't know if that's necessary. That might serve to discolor and bake on any glumps of shmutz floating about in the used solutions. I don't see why we shouldn't periodically change the solutions, but I don't want them getting changed constantly for no reason, either.

stupid

Lethalo.com, worlds most effective and deadly self defense system

38 per cent of people are retards

Poll: Give Bible story of creation equal time

stolen from mefi

Black people loot, white people borrow. Racist photo captions by Yahoo News/AP illuminate more than Katrina's aftermath. If these pictures are taken down, there are mirrors right here.

Soldiers dying in Iraq, the deep south in deep shit, and the president decides to play country musician. Typical. He plays dress up more than a little girl and people love it. What does the president have to do before his faithful give up on him? This picture was taken yesterday.

Yahoo! News Photo

Intelligent design apologists everywhere prepare to repeat the following statistic hundreds of times:
New Scientist Breaking News - Most scientific papers are probably wrong

Tuesday

free beer

Hurricanes & Tropical Storms on Yahoo! News Photos

the best essay I have ever read

Listen up, Reverend Robertson, Mary Fowler -- every last one of you Apostles of Perpetual Psychosis -- it's time that you were called out.

The time is long past due the rest of us ceased our cowering and stood up to you Christo-fascists bullies.

link

My favorite animal is steak.
- Fran Lebowitz

Monday

whoops

Fox pundit's mistake terrorizes family

Dumbshits.

Since Fox News wrongly identified a La Habra home as that of a terrorist, its five- member family has faced an angry backlash.

When Karl Marx said that religion in the opiate of the masses, he may have been literally correct. If faith in an useless medication can release natural painkillers, won't faith that God will make your life less painful do the same? This might also help explain why religion is so addictive, and why many people like the POTUS pass through the gateway drugs of alcohol and cocaine only to migrate to religion and jogging...

- metafilter

Now if somebody can just tell Rush Limbaugh about the power of prayer...

link

Fafblog Interviews: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

I heart wiki

I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)

Although some people assume that "that" is an exophoric reference to a sex act, it is actually an anaphoric reference to the varying activities specified as antecendents in the lyric that the singer says he won't do.

* I'll never forget the way you feel right now ...
* I'll never forgive myself if we don't go all the way tonight ...
* I'll never do it better than I do it with you ...
* I'll never stop dreaming of you every night of my life ...

In addition, the female vocalist identifies two other things that the lead singer denies he will do: You'll see that it's time to move on and You'll be screwing around. To both of these, the lead singer responds, I won't do that! No, I won't do that!

Everybody who prays and is thankful to god has one thing in common. They're alive. The ones god decided to kill aren't around to give their opinions of how terrific god is. My guess is that they'd whistle a slightly different tune about how wise god's decision to kill them off was. Of course everyone thinks god's decisions are good ones; they haven't died yet, so it could always get worse, until they can't be thankful any more. Every person is so central to their own faith that if they think, "Hey, god might be killing everyone else but he doesn't want me dead yet. Good call."

When I hear somebody crowing about god's wisdom, I think underneath the oceans and battlefields, and just beyond the treacherous curves in the highway, and under Auschwitz and Lubyanka, there are dead guys who would raise a silent finger in protest.

Show Me the Science

Why "intelligent design" doesn't deserve to be taught with evolution

342

Today is the 342nd day of this president's vacation.
ABC News: Is the President Taking Too Much Time Off?

I will never die

ABC News: Study: Drinking Coffee Has Health Benefits

question for Tom DeLay

Does this mean god hates Louisiana?

Sunday

you're a frigging traitor!

"Imagine you are a young father or mother. You have been away from your family, your newborn kids, your young husband or wife, you haven�t seen them in months. You are scared shitless of every civilian around you, whom you are supposed to be protecting. You have to travel in crudely armored vehicles from here to there and you have no idea when you�ll be back home or if you are making any progress of any kind. Then, you get a picture of a yellow ribbon on a tree in Los Angeles! A picture of a yellow ribbon! Think of it! A yellow ribbon! How great is that? That must be an awesome feeling! Fuck, I wish I was one of the troops just so I could feel the greatness of knowing somebody put a fucking yellow fucking ribbon up in reference to me! Ribbons of Yellow!"
Bob and David - It's Official!

I just can't decide whether I think Scarlett Johanssen's really hot or just kind of okay. The only reason this bothers me is that I should have decided my celebrity crush factor on this chick by now. Anyone have thoughts on the hotness of Scarlett Johanssen?
This picture might help you decide.

I find it amusing that three people other than me, upon grasping the near-infinite utility of the internet, did what I did, and immediately set out to discover what Meatloaf was talking about in that song "I would do anything for love but I won't do that".

long time no see

CIA - The World Factbook

happy birthday

160 years ago today, Scientific American published its first issue.

i could have slept all day

Saturday

A Child's Primer of Intelligent Design
See the Bible. The Bible is a textbook. It is all you will ever need to know about anthropology, zoology, astronomy, psychology, or nuclear fission...
link

More than you ever wanted to read about:
After Postmodernism
There are links from here that could take a long time to get through.

if Christ spoke at a Republican Party fund-raiser

Microsoft:
How to perform a clean boot to prevent background programs from interfering with play

I've been wondering about what the rules are, governing the text in movie ratings boxes. It seems to me the studio's marketing department is in charge of it, and not the ratings people.

This is from "mean girls", the movie about a girl moving into a new high school.

Teen partying? Shouldn't that be "underage drinking" or "juvenile delinquency"? Don't make it sound so damn glamorous, if it's worth warning people about.

Here's one from what looks like an upcoming art film, which means the focus of the movie is likely to be something about gay people that's silly in a languid, overdone kind of way, but since it's aimed at the vanilla strip mall audience, doesn't have to do anything but semi-shock people and make them wonder if they're getting it or not. The movie's called "thumbsucker":

"A disturbing image"? Fully a third of the people who see this movie are going to be there to see what that could possibly be. Any guesses?

You hungry?

I LIKE FOOTBALL!

Want pizza?

I WANT TO ROCK!

I'm hungry.

LET'S MAKE A PHONE CALL!

Does the fish place deliver?

I WANT A TACO!

kids: don't have sex with the homeless lady

ABC News: Homeless Woman Who Gave Birth to Teen's Child Sentenced

stupid

ABC News: Doctor Reprimanded for Calling Patient Fat

ChevronTexaco 3Q Profit Surges 62 Percent

Great!

The media shudders with delight as things are about to get even more media-riffic in Crawford.
Crawford Braces for Dueling War Rallies - Yahoo! News

Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.
- Doug Larson

Friday

If you're centcom, be careful who you ask to help you spread phony good news propaganda.
Yet another time irony goes minsunderstood.

god is totally real

Over Three Hundred Proofs of God’s Existence

I've had most of these tried on me lately.

Thursday

potential print at work

Gateway to many free books:
E-Books blog

yeah, that's what that is


subway pervert caught by camera phone
I predict he'll be caught in real life.
When a person like this comes along, meaning wanders into my field of attention, I usually think, "How did this person develop the idea that freaking people out completely by masturbating in public is fun?" It goes without saying that the guy's got problems, that it's not acceptable behavior, even that the guy should probably do some time to teach him a lesson, even if it's just a month or so up at Riker's. Shit, I did ten days (not there) for skipping court. This is worse.

I think I'm okay in the long term with the explanation that this person's sexual identity was repressed at some point, because people who can express themselves normally don't get so horny they jerk off in public. It's the people who can't that are the problem. That problem comes from people encouraging the repression of normal sexual development, and not only that, but from the people they're trying to get to repress themselves acquiescing. Who's to blame? I think in the end it's the relationship between them that's at fault.

Whenever you have authority, it will be fought back against. To borrow an expression from national security, what is needed is not a system that won't fail (there are none) but a system that fails smartly. It would be great if it were possible, but unfortunately, moral authority claims that it's absolute, and the believer is forced into a highly unhealthy relationship with him/herself, as they have to continually police their thoughts to purge themselves of all wrongthinking. This is usually so unbearable that people grow out of it fairly young, so that's for the best. But some people can't separate the bullshit from the reality, and they have to struggle to live up to the expectations of a clean mind and conscience, which is totally unnatural, and to later suffer the excruciating, awful failures of people like Jerry "I spent your church offerings on hookers" Falwell.

I blame moral authority for this behavior. Unfortunately, those same absolutists use these kinds of people to make their case, as well, and there's no penetrating the rhetoric, because the situation has nuance, and people have no attention span. Related: I believe that christians and republicans have made a more careful study of the human mind and know how long it can pay attention to them than have their opponents.

wow

"Teaching the black man how to claim, tame, train, and dominate the black woman to make her his queen once again!"

Now how could you not want to see that?

tame black women

One of my very favorite writers, and one I've had to defend as being in the same league as Borges to my near-expatriate friend Randy, who I haven't heard from in too long, now that I think about it, is Italo Calvino. Author of the unforgettable "If on a winter's night a traveler", "The baron in the trees", "Invisible cities", and "six memos for the new millenium", to name what I consider the essentials, Calvino died the year before Borges did, in 1985, before he could deliver the lectures he outlines in "six memos".
Calvino on Post-modernism, in his "Visibility" lecture: "the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate their alienation."

Just in case you wanted a good, working definition of post-modernism.

This, its surrounding paragraph, and all about Borges and Calvino's parallels are available in this staggeringly well-titled and worshipfully deferential:
"The Parallels!" Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges


Bill Moyer, 73, wears a "Bullshit Protector" flap over his ear while President George W. Bush addresses the Veterans of Foreign Wars. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac)

partly right:
TIME.com: 50 Coolest Websites 2005

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Trying to Translate What My Girlfriend Is Saying in Swedish While She's on the Phone to Her Mother.

Robertson apologizes, is still crazy

Robertson Apologizes for Chavez Remarks

Wednesday

The lovely J and I got a new refrigerator the other day, a supa-deluxe style one that lets you choose, as you stand in front of it, whether you'd like the ice it dispenses to be crushed or cubed. Too fancy for ol' tap water Dale. We went to Target to buy one of those big PUR fridge things, the water filter that holds a gallon or so, like a pitcher but bigger... (why do I feel like I'm losing a game of pictionary here?) you know what I mean, and on the way home, the dreaded weirdo in the parking lot. At first when you're accosted by a weirdo in a parking lot, you think he's going to ask you for directions. They put that out there, sort of. The "I'm just going to ask you for directions" vibe. Then all of a sudden, it's actually money they need. Like anywhere else, once I realize it's my money that people want, our time together is over, but the thing that got me was that he was
1) driving a van and
2) talking about how he ran out of gas a few blocks back.
The story went something like "Yeah, you know, I was about three blocks back and ran out of gas and I had about this much in a lawn mower can and now I've got (laughs, looks at palm) about fifty-five cents left and..."

Since when do beggars drive around begging?

night

I've heard that if you go in a darkened bathroom at midnight and repeat "crazy eddie" five times into the mirror, his image will appear and offer you prices so low they're insane.

afternoon

excellent

Google Talk

Boing Boing's $1 million Intelligent Design challenge

I guess I'm a pastafarian now.
Boing Boing: Boing Boing's $250,000 Intelligent Design challenge (UPDATED: $1 million)

morning

token periodic astronomy story:
Black Hole Surprise: Multiple Eruptions Seconds After Birth - Yahoo! News

Pat Robertson, psycho

The day before yesterday,
U.S. evangelist calls for assassination of Chavez - Yahoo! News

Yesterday,
U.S. Dodges Robertson Comments on Chavez - Yahoo! News

Today,
Who gives a shit? It's just like Karl Rove. Where did that treasonous son of a bitch wind up?

I bet

Swaziland Girls Celebrate End of Sex Ban

Tuesday

Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
- Stanislaw Lem

Monday

intelligent design is stupid bullshit

And that's how I really feel about it.
In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash - New York Times

Here's some information about the discovery institute, a "think tank", whose whole mission is to push creationism.

duh

Ex-Halliburton worker pleads guilty to bribes [and defrauding the United States] - Yahoo! News

screwed

Fugitive Couple Returns to Tennessee - Yahoo! News

cool

Forensic astronomers date famous photograph - Yahoo! News

Where does your $2.85 per gallon of gas go?

unreal
"In case you're wondering where this hotel is..."

awesome

Boing Boing: Flying Spaghetti Monster bumper sticker, Version 1.1

back in school

It's going to be an interesting term. We're going to learn how to tweak the watch in all kinds of ways. Starting from winding and setting and going all the way to the hairspring and back again, the semester will be very busy. Let's put it this way, there's even homework. Hopefully I'll have time to do the ren fest, the fair, and Elko a couple of times before it drops below zero.

Sunday

cool speed test

Connection Speed Test

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
- Mahatma Gandhi

this page of google map hacks is really interesting

and then there's this:
Evangelical scientists refute gravity with new "intelligent falling" theory.

After you have had sex, on the dance floor, to the song rubberband man by the spinners, there is nowhere for your life to go but down. Nevertheless, you must try. I admire a friend of mine, who will remain anonymous, for not only accomplishing this holy grail of awesomeness, but for managing go carry on afterward.

It's turning into fall here in Minnesota. The weather is an absolute peach, and alas, the days grow shorter. It's a bummer of a trade off, and the slight chill you start to feel in your bones when it begins to cool off here (which is longitudinally north of Toronto), automatically initiates a mental check to see if you know where your jacket is, much in the same way that seeing a careening big rig out on the interstate makes you check your mirrors to see what else is on the road with you that would be better to smash into, should you have to choose.

Those gigantic trucks scare the crap out of me, and I don't like to make people afraid, but the next time you're a pasenger on a two-lane highway, look up at the person driving that truck next to you. When it's winter and the windows get rolled up, you won't be able to see them as well, but for now you should get visual confirmation. Some look normal, but some look like crazed visigoths on about ten pounds of the good stuff.

Another thing to be thankful for, up here in this season, is that the roads are all nice and clear. When they freeze in the winter months it's an ugly scene. Something I normally don't think about, but I sure am glad for all the lovely contact my tires have with the road, short-lived as it is doomed to be. Can't we get a train or something? This is the twin cities; just connect the two, you know, so we don't have to fight and die on that narrow, choked corridor?

Work was a breeze yesterday, in part because I was abstemious at the wedding Friday. It's just better not to be hung over at work or at school. Which for me, means every day now. Which unfortunately necessitates (for the most part) a lack of beer. I don't care about the white man's fire water so much. Liquor can get you down. It's so blatantly "daddy's medicine".

John gets back to town so I won't have to take care of his ferrets any more, which is good. We have stocked his refrigerator, though, so I want to get that cleared out. A new refrigerator will materialize here tomorrow; the landlord is buying us a side-by-side frost-free behemoth to replace our current one.

Saturday

naked redhead
NSFW

Toss a Salad With Cookie Monster

breaking news!

New Evidence Suggests Noah's Sons Rode Flying Dinosaurs:
"For years, Creation Scientists have disputed how Noah was able to quickly collect millions of indigenous animals from remote, inaccessible regions of the world for a 40-day ride in his ark. New evidence from an archeological find in China supports the long held Christian belief that Noah's sons rode giant flying dinosaurs to transport duck billed platypuses from Australia, and penguins and polar bears from the Antarctic, to name a few."

hats off to Stephen Jay Gould

Penguins Kill Intelligent Design Theory

Well, sort of. Also poorly "designed" (but well adapted) is the panda for its thumb and a variety of other creatures. This point was made famous by a series of articles and lectures by the late eminent natural historian Stephen Jay Gould, who confounded creationists with his crazy "science".

I'm just going to quote him some here:
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense."
"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms."
"The fundamentalists, by 'knowing' the answers before they start (examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science-or of any honest intellectual inquiry."
"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question."
"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos."

"Mr. President. You have daughters. How would you feel if one of them was killed?" - Cindy Sheehan
Whatever your position, I'm guessing that how you feel about Cindy Sheehan is a mirror image of how you feel about the war in Iraq. Here's what the president thinks:

4 More Years!

In Iraq!

Thanks, Bush faithful, for the sorry state of affairs in Iraq. When we told you it was a mistake, you didn't listen, and now it is all of us who bear the burden, but it is you who ultimately bear the responsiblity.

banning people

I hate banning people. It sucks and it's a very last resort, but when people use other people's names there's no alternative. If phil03 and whoever else that was can figure out how to change their IPs, and they can behave themselves (very loose definition here, just don't cop other people's names, guys, the gay porn of "me" is fine. whatever you prefer), we can all get along just fine.

Thanks!

in case you haven't noticed

There is some stuff going on around here that is, in my opinion, some of the most entertaining stuff in the history of this blog. Go through the comments of some of these posts. It's all together enough to keep you busy all afternoon. I'm not going to ruin any surprises.
-------------------
***Sad update***
Some guy calling himself "phil03" made a fake page where he claimed to be me and then put up some picture of a guy sucking his own dick. It said "me when I was younger". I guess he was pretty upset about something.

When he realized he was being a retard he took it down, and not a lot of people got to see it. It was my first fanpage and it's gone, and that makes me sad, even if it implied autofellatio.

I'm not letting him retract his comments, though. Those are mine now.

the enemy's disney film reviews.
backstory: I guess baptists boycotted Disney a while back because their (disney's, duh) hatred of gays wasn't sufficient.

more disney,
disney books are made in sweatshops. in a picture perfect example of that there is no black and white as in good and bad, disney, from whose wholesome jockstrap families across america swing, uses slave labor. but does that surprise anyone, really? if you're going to boycott disney, do it for the right reason.

We can have facts without thinking but we cannot have thinking without facts.
- John Dewey

Friday

beginner webpages, not sure how this works
protopage

congratulations

To the good-looking couple I saw get married tonight.

Leigh and Michael, may you have many happy years together.

hilarious

0tv.com - Porn
(not really porn)
Real porn can be seen here.

this guy can drive very fast

Something is very wrong when I'm filling out a form and I get the urge to complete the "gender" field with "Yes, please!" I think I need some sleep.

I thought of a way to reduce the amount of country music. Simply go back in time and prevent the invention of front porch swing. There will be at least thirty per cent less to sing about right there.

"Arguably the best fridge magnet ever made."
Bottle Opener/Fridge Magnet

google maps pedometer

what to bring

The Universal Packing List

i love tomatoes


Bummy brought some beauties over last night and they were nothing short of spectacular.

Thanks, bummy.

the man show boy is dressed up as a girl scout

Man, they make this kid say some mean stuff.

Biking Toward Nowhere - New York Times

Not a joke, I think.
GEORGEWBUSHISGOD.COM

be thankful

CNN/Money: Global gas prices

Thanks, Jesus

I hate you, milkman Dan
awesome

The guy who wrote this book:
Amazon.com: Books: Pieces of My Heart: Writings Inspired by Animals and Nature
Had his house raided because he abused and neglected his animals.
ThePittsburghChannel.com - News - Residence Of Inspirational Animal Author Raided

The spoonbender breaks it down the way it needs breaking down:
The Spoonbender discusses Cindy Sheehan.

Thursday

Todd Horton and I have been enjoying the hell out of each other over at his website online church, where in his comment section he has been straining to conceal his fangs with a thin veneer of good old fellowship, a charade I became quite used to down south, from good old boys and baptists.

A cabal of intellectual heavyweights has been calling me names like "big boy", which can't feel good when you're a goody two shoes and what you want to say is "fucking cocksucker", and challenging me to answer questions like "what was the origin of everything in the universe if god didn't make it, then, genius?" Which is absolutely hilarious.

It's really been a lot of fun, but with school and work starting again tomorrow, they're on their own, and will have peace and quiet again.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
- Wilson Mizner

Chick on cell: That is not true!...No!...I would never do that! Gross! I so did not do that...Did I?...Really?...Oh, well, maybe I was too trashed to remember.
--Times Square

Overheard in New York

those nutters at fox...

Only on Fox: "Kill Social Security!" ... [Media Matters]

want to get laid?

Give stuff away on Craigslist.

This chick gave me her phone number in an email and then when I called her she started flirting with me.

Here are the steps:
1) go outside and grab some junk.
2) list it in the free section of craigslist.
3) sit back and watch as the emails pour in from young, broke chicks.
4) contact them.
5) have sex.

oops, i did it again

dale's mails

terrible

catpage

Wednesday

I'm batting the idea around of starting another page where I can post the random email crap that goes on in my busy life.

Do I really want to juggle four ugly-ass blogger pages?

democracy now torrents

Well, chicks and dudes, it's a beautiful night here in minnesotaville. The trees sway in the gentle breeze, it may or may not rain, and Garrison Keillor is nowhere in sight. It doesn't get much better than this. Unless James Lileks dies.

In weather like this, I like to fire up the wifi, hit the porch, and wait for it to collapse. You should see my porch. And when I'm sitting there wondering which beam's going to be the first to give way (could it be the one that looks like it's rotted away completely? or maybe it's the one that's just much lower than it should be for no readily apparent reason...) I like to fire up good old winamp and listen to "100 years" by five for fighting, because I want to die, but suicide is too permanent. Ok, I don't want to die. But that is the only reason I can think of why anyone would intentionally listen to that song. Before my brother left for TN I had made quite a sport of mocking it. It's a song that, like the masterpieces of Dave Matthews, can be sung wordlessly. Just pretend you've got a mouthful of you-know-what, and make music-like mouth noises. I realize this doesn't translate well to the typed page, so I will have to urge you to try it yourself. The lyrics are available here for syllabic simulacra. For beginners to this art form, I recommend "under the table and dreaming", the part where Dave starts breaking it down all funky like a duck getting buggered by John Ashcroft on amphetamines singing scat-style. It's the lamest.

In other shitty music news, I hate shopping at JC Penney. Going in there is an adventure into the music I hate most in the world. I never realized what good buys they have in there, and I think it's because I've mentally blocked out every trip I've ever taken to JC Penney. When I went there in Vegas to buy funeral clothes I heard the Doobie Brothers do a song, which is already a cruel joke, and then I managed not to puncture my eardrums only to be rewarded by "you're so vain" by Carly Simon. That drove me to the women's dressing room with J's camera to cope. Here's a bunch of certificates of achievement for women who have completed the bra fitting training course, and who JC Penney deems adequate to the task.

Here's my favorite, Connie.

I get the feeling you're not going to surprise this old pro. She's seen it all. After I took these pictures a lady came and kicked me out.

Vegas is all lights and stuff on the strip, but out in town it's just like any other place. Later to cheer me up after the Carly Simon incident we ate at a Joe's crab shack for comparitively nothing. If it's an evil chain, I know nothing of it. It isn't as obnoxious as what we have now here in MN, which is the Forrest Gump Shrimp Company. That's out at the mall of America. down Ikea Way from Ikea. I guess that's some furniture store. I want a Joe's crab shack here, but I more just want to burn down the Forrest Gump Shrimp Company. One of my favorite articles of all time is one about censorship going on the offensive, and it features Forrest Gump.
Here's that, cached.
The original's missing right now.

Ebert's Most Hated movies of all time
:: rogerebert.com ::

bumvertising?

PokerFaceBook.com Bumvertising Campaign

the dukester

David Duke's European American home page -- Why Cindy Sheehan is Right!

Gross.
Welcome to Flavor Spray Diet Online

Why would anyone want to look at a brunette in various stages of undress?
I just don't get it.
NSFW

When my sister died we wanted a refund on the tickets we bought through vegas.com but they wouldn't give us one without a death certificate or an obituary. Combine that with J's name change to Shipley rather than the actual name on the credit card she bought the tickets with, and you've suddenly got a fairly substantial fax to send. Fortunately, kinko's loves charging you to send big faxes. Vegas.com has to make sure people don't lie to them, I guess, but I wish there was another way. At least we didn't have to get the actual death certificate.

Crap. I couldn't get a jar of salsa open and the lovely J could. I heard a tapping noise coming from the kitchen so I think she's got a special method. I wouldn't have given up but my arms were getting sore from all the squeezing.

There's a new kind of absolut vodka, peach, so to celebrate this, last night I had a peach cosmopolitan at Eli's with the illustrious robinkisser. When I took him home so he could change his shirt so we could go to the C.C. Club, he went in and didn't come out for a while. He eventually came out wearing no shirt, having forgotten what was going on. I laughed at him and went home. Those comsos sure pack a wallop.

Take Back Your School In the Name of Jesus!

The Top 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time

coolest thing of the week

Neave Lab › Flash Earth

AlterNet: Intelligent Is as Intelligence Doesn't

The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney

don't blame me when the economy eats shit

The War in Iraq Costs

$188,032,840,79

yet more right-wing hypocrisy

Charlie Daniels on a certain war:
Charlie's Soapbox:
"It is a Civil War. It is being fought among a civilian population. We are starting out in a manner which could keep us involved for years to come. The politicians have neither the will nor the stomach to win. We have no clear cut definition of victory. And the list of analogies goes on and on. The Vietnam war was not lost by our military forces, it was lost by the politicians. That war should have been over with before the tide of opinion in this country turned so vehemently against it. What soured this country out on the Vietnam war was the duration. Here was a third world country who played by nobody’s rules and our politicians sent our troops into battle with ridiculous orders about when and who they could shoot."

That was Kosovo. Chuck loves the war in Iraq though.

Tuesday

zesty

Isn't that a great word?

Related:
I've decided to pound on
Blogger: User Profile: Todd Horton.

He's got a couple of little sites that need irrigation by the ample metaphorical waters of Dale's hatred of stupidity.
First, there's
Online Church

Then, his personal site,
Perspectives of a Career Student.

Bathroom graffiti photography
::PHOTO GALLERY 1:: Latrinalia

don't click this

I don't know what this is, but nightmares may ensue should you choose to watch it.
quicktime
not safe for...something

patriotism rules

sociology

Have You Heard? Gossip Turns Out to Serve a Purpose - New York Times

hallelujah

If there's one thing better than god, it's people shoving god down kids' throats. And what's even better than THAT is political rhetoric summer camp! Behold the wonder!

ABC News: Christian Campers Focus on Politics

methane problem

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Warming hits 'tipping point'

New Scientist Breaking News - Erotic images can turn you blind

cool

Strip Generator

print at work

RollingStone.com: Four Amendments & a Funeral : Politics

cool door

Gizmodo Japan: Auto door : Gizmodo

Monday

If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.
ABC News: A Promise of a Better Life Lands 12-Year-Old in a Brothel

hilarious

The Webshite :: George Bush's Spin Doctor Speaks
/quicktime

funny

What Fox News Channel Would Have Done to Rosa Parks:
The Huffington Post | The Blog

registration sucks

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 14, 2005


LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire.

But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.

The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat to root for.)

As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American public is lost.

That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion, half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly dubious."

It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on 9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19 marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.

These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr. Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics. Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.

Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end. That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam - and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president," suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and smoke out its leader "dead or alive."

But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have "politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who recklessly created it.

The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.

Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.

WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency), followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.

Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago next month.

let the games begin

Every time the US sends soldiers to do bullshit police work, we get a bunch of raving psychopaths back from the army. It's the Vietnam vets of another generation, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Being a soldier doesn't make you a functional human being who's good to be around, it makes you a good killer who's bad to be around.
U.S. Marine opens fire outside Mass. nightclub - Yahoo! News

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
- Elbert Hubbard

Ok, so much happened and I'd like to tell you about it but can't, that something's got to give. I could sit here for two straight days and still miss a good deal. I'll break it down tiny-like, miss a lot of details, and then move on.

J and I went to Vegas, where we honeymooned our asses off. We stayed at the MGM and shut off the ringer. There was lots of sitting by the pool with and without daquiris, et cetera. We both played a good amount of blackjack, and I, a little roulette, which I did surprisingly well at, and decided to quit while I was ahead. We played people's money they gave us, which had their names on it, which didn't go well. Slots are kind of a drag if you ask me.

We ate a lot of great food. The buffet at the MGM was smashing.

Our second morning there when J checked her messages there was one from my father, urging us to reply immediately. We looked at each other and suspected someone had died, which it turns out they had. My step-sister, who had been such fun at the wedding and in general, had passed away of unknown causes in her sleep, and we buried her Saturday afternoon. We saw all the family we had just seen at the wedding and then some.

It was a long trip, especially considering that in Vegas you have to walk ten miles a day. We finally made it home last night and it's really good to be here. I've had enough airports to last me the rest of the year. I know how three barbecue places in Nashville and Memphis stack up, and that the soap in Memphis is the color of too-much-vitamins-urine, and smells cheap.

We slept ten hours. J slept eleven.

Now there's a new problem, which is that box elder beetles have decided they love the giant tree outside the house. So there are these little harmless bugs absolutely all over the place.

This week we've got some detail work to do what with getting J's name changed and I'm housesitting.

My seven day a week grind resumes Friday.

impressive

Praying Mantis Eats Hummingbird (Bird Watcher's Digest)

Sunday

The lovely J and I have returned from our trip, and we're a little tired. If anything exciting happened on the net, what was it?

Monday

recoil knocks a guy on his ass
/video

"Even if your kids aren't directly taught ID or aren't in one of the new Bible Class districts, the overarching cultural damage has already been done. Through this group of RadicalRighties' constant rhetoric, they consistently strip away the idea that there is indeed a rigorous scientific process through which certain non-negotiable physical truths can be ascertained. They have suffused the county with with an intellectual laziness and a terrifying narcissism. Opinion has been enshrined as superior to fact. No longer need a person take into account the way the world works when forming their worldview -- they can instead hunt down "facts" and "theories" which support their own comfort zone, and what's worse, we can NO LONGER CALL BULLSHIT. Because if our leaders -- pardon me, your leaders -- don't call bullshit, who will? They have undermined the very process by which we know WHEN to call bullshit!"
Kung Fu Monkey: The President and Intelligent Design

not the watered down second version

Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962

The lovely J and I leave tomorrow for our honeymoon. This blog is dead to me for that time. No fancy guest-blogging, nothing of the sort. Thanks for checking in, and have a great day.

Fractal Animations

Sunday

impossible siamese girl

i heart art

awesome fluid photography

the wedding was great

Thank you to everyone who played a part, who attended, and who in any other way expressed their support. As a gesture of gratitude, here's Boney M.'s album cover.

Friday

ecstasy is good for you

Amphetamines may slow Parkinson's, study shows - Yahoo! News

I know of five videos on this site. The crazy at home video is one of the funniest videos I have ever seen. Hang on tight for the vaccum segment. (It's in the dvds section)
queen of farts

Thursday

0-60 in 3.0

tv sucks

In tv land, a lot of things happen real fast. If you're not paying attention, all that information can get right in your brain without your noticing. Commercial messages take advantage of this, and it's almost worth watching tv if you're bearing in mind the whole time, "this is what they're trying to get me not to notice", which in our postmodern world is actually true. Gone are the days of "whiter, brighter laundry", and here are the days of one company's ironic mocking of another company's advertising. (I'm thinking Geico's mocking of various companies' ads, especially Old Navy's, and Papa John's/Domino's.)

My least favorite thing I have ever seen on television, other than when the president of the United States pitched a hissyfit at the debates last fall and didn't get creamed in the (liberal? don't get me started) media for it, is the Johnsonville Brats guy. I can't find a trace of him on their website or anywhere else. He comes on and says something like "My name's Biggie and I like things big!" Then he launches into a droolingly stupid list of things he likes, you know, so we'll know what he, the spokesman for a bratwurst company, likes. Because this is exactly the kind of information we need.

He actually says "I like big American flags!" in the middle of his listing off of things he likes. I didn't find anything about that when I googled it and it's just another idiotic sign of the times, so I thought I'd be the one to document it. The Johnsonville brats company spokesman likes big American flags. There's something very creepy and obnoxious about the flag's regular association with ONLY this kind of dreadfully insipid puke. Whether it's these commercials with the fat guy, politicians with flag lapel pins ransacking the public trust, or any other application of it as a symbol to persuade people to buy something or think a certain way, the flag has been done to death in the media, partly because we're too damn lazy to give a shit when a fat guy needs an easy way to make people feel really good so they'll buy his company's lips and assholes packed as cheaply as possible into a package with a splashy logo. Hot dog, anyone? It's patriotic if you do! Fuck, that makes me mad.

A disturbing trend, via The Spoonbender

9 Anti-Porn Myths Debunked

retarded people love Huey Lewis

"There was no god in Auschwitz." -- a female concentration camp survivor

"There's no god anywhere." -- me

Wednesday

I'm ready to get married. I've got another day and a half until I see my betrothed, who's back in Eau Claire getting arrangements locked down. In the meantime I am idling. All I have to do is make sure I don't forget stuff like black socks and to vacuum and stuff. Boring. In domestic news, I did make a spectacular pork loaf.

To fill up the time, I'm going to go to the twins game tonight.

good

"Darknets" cast to cloak identities of computer file swappers - Yahoo! News

Man killed by cops was sex offender with long record
thanks for the info, G

Bush reignites evolution debate, is a retard

print somewhere

Informed Comment

Stop looking at my dick, please.
ABC News: War on Terror Goes Under Your Clothes

Wal-mart economics
The Price Is Right - New York Times

Plastic Stacking Chair Definition: Tupperware Container for Lard-Butt Zombies

The Residents

a bunch of prehistoric animals I'd never heard of
MegaFauna

cool

trifinite.blog: Introducing the Car Whisperer at What The Hack

free money

Boing Boing: Class action: $5 if you saw a movie plugged by Sony's fictional critic

"The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature..."
try at work

Tuesday

awesome

After their jet skidded off a runway and went down into a ravine in inclimate weather, 309 out of 309 people hustled and got their Canadian asses out of there before it went up in flames. Not one person got killed, but fourteen got minor injuries, which were treated for free in the universal health care that they have in Canada, and in every other first world country, other than the U.S.A., where we know better.
All 309 Survive Plane Crash in Toronto - Yahoo! News

Talented WSJ artist Noli Novak:

the best one

Mangle Random Link Generator

200 Amazing Secrets

print somewhere

Atheist Correspondence with Phillip Adams

CNOOC withdraws offer to acquire Unocal - Yahoo! News

Is there any way you religious guys can get god to make some more plankton so everything in the ocean doesn't die, please?
Pacific Coast Life Concerns Scientists - Yahoo! News

get rich or die tryin'

A block from here, there was a guy whose identity hasn't been released as of yet, who stabbed a couple of Minneapolis police officers this morning after they caught him trying to break in to a check cashing place.

I would imagine the money in a check cashing place is probably some of the more secure cash in the world. Even behind a locked door and plenty of thick plexiglass, the courteous customer service representatives who work there practically risk their lives serving the down and out poor bastards who can't wait the extra how many hours to take their check to an actual bank, who have to Get That Money, like, fucking NOW. I can just see him flinging himself against the window, envisioning his ransack of "THE MAN's" moneybag. First he simply cracks the lock somehow, then the next door inside, all the way to the safe. Boom, done.

But not. I'm guessing it would probably take a sober and talented locksmith a fair amount of time to get to where the money is, which is the only reason to go. They have the worst magazine selection since Hitler or something.

A person who was so strung out that they had no other choice but to break into a check-cashing place at eight Monday morning, in broad daylight in heavy traffic, had chemical dependency problems I will never understand, and he's probably better off dead. More importantly, I'm better off with him dead, which he now is, because after he stabbed the cops who tried to dislodge him from the storefront, the cops used his body to store their bullets in. As much as I love Franklin Avenue, I'd never want to bleed to death in the middle of it, but maybe that's just the level of devotion some people have.

RIP, dude. Minneapolis's finest saved you the trouble of needing that money, but just to give you the benefit of the doubt, drug-wise, I'll memorialize you with an album the name of which sums up your situation.

Monday

In which is revealed the key to understanding why both left and right can plausibly denounce the same media for being biased in favor of the other:
Bad News - New York Times

I am interested in this company calling itself "prison health care".
A Company's Troubled Answer for Prisoners With H.I.V. - New York Times

damn

This happened about a block from my house today, making me have to use a detour to get where I was going. I never trusted those "money centers". When a check-cashing place moves close to you, I think it's safe to say "there goes the neighborhood."
Two officers stabbed in south Minneapolis

Triumph of the Machine - New York Times

Grades are in from summer semester, I got all As. I hope to do as well in the fall.

If you stopped eating lots and lots of beef, it might affect some company's profits, and given the choice between money and life itself, we all know what's more important. So don't worry about food safety, which is just one more word for communism. I mean, have you ever had CJD or know anyone who has? I rest my case.


This is your brain on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.


Would you like fries with that?

Mad cow cases met with shrug instead of safeguards - Yahoo! News

A sad day for the Carlyle group.
Saudi King Fahd dies; smooth handover to Abdullah - Yahoo! News