Double Flee A: August 2006

It's been a long day of watchmaking and politics and I'm Preston Tuckered out. Exploratory committee meetings, fundraising team meetings, and I have yet even to pick a running mate.

What does a running mate have to offer? Better graphics, for one. I can't photoshop for dick. Also, ideas for other ways that the world can be improved besides my campaign message, "no more children with cancer". If you or anyone you know is interested, let's chat. It's gonna be a great reality with people behind the wheel who aren't total assholes.

The ideal candidate is someone other than Jack Kemp, not intimidated by the incumbent, and an archaeology professor at some big university out east who sometimes wears a special hat and carries a whip and goes in search of historical relics in other countries and has a father played by Sean Connery.

a better tomorrow with me as god

As your new god, I promise the following:
NO CHILDREN WITH CANCER!

I have a hard time believing that god's biggest fans, the religious, don't see anything wrong with the way things are being conducted, but this appears to be the case. Therefore, I'm planning to change very little when elected. At first, anyway.

For now, we can keep the adults with cancer, the wars, and even clear channel radio. That's how much of a free market god I'll be. I'm a hands-off type. But a world just like this, only containing no children with cancer, how can that possibly be bad?

Vote Dale for god in '06. Just fill out a little sheet of paper and burn it or something. Or think it. That works too. Unless you think children with cancer is good, in which case you're a truly sick piece of shit.

I can't decide what's worse. Ordering fried barf from out-of-work strippers at hooters restaurant, or getting your picture taken outside.

"The best moment of my life is about to happen!"

if god had to be elected

Would there still be wars, famines and children with terrible, painful cancers? I doubt it, and if so, that god would be a one-termer for sure. Think about it: god's doing a really shitty job, and should be demoted to --at most-- towel boy.

It's time to overthrow god and institute an officer that is accountable to his constituency. And I would like to nominate myself for the job.

That's why I'm running for god in '06. Vote for me and there's gonna be some fuckin' law and order around here. Promise.

I have no willpower

Ok, a couple of days ago I intended to quit this blog, and it looks like I can't.

Something so wonderful happened (besides getting called a faggot by the author of the spoonbender) that I have to announce it.

A while back I took a thirty-six hour bench test, three marathon sessions of highly involved micromechanical whatnot. Condensed into a moment, I can liken that to being kicked in the face by an unhappy man with enormous shoes. I won't have to repeat that wholly unpleasant experience in whole or in part, because I passed. So your pal Dale is now a board certified watchmaker. Hip hip hooray, who's awesome, me. [Bows.]

Some people would be all too glad to see me drift hyperbolically away like a ghost ship into the forgotten mists of time and join the group of people that used to be online, and as long as I can muster the self-discipline not to obsessively post it every time the unelected murder monkey breaks the law, or every time some jackass I work with tells me with this big stupid grin how Methuselah lived to be nine hundred and sixty years old (and I quote: "Really! He did!", and you can tell he fully believes it), I think I'll be ok, if I can just post as infrequently as is necessary. It's not like I have to pay anyone to do this or anything. And in large part, the people who want me gone are the exact ones I'm doing this for.

So I guess I'm rescinding my departure, since I can log on from pretty much anywhere indefinitely for no charge and so on. Sorry if I gave anyone a start. Heck, Jesus died for a few days and he came back too! Really, he did!

Things that would make blogging better for me.
1) If people would stop being idiots so I could focus on other things.
2) A sexy little chess plugin for the sidebar so we could play a game over there.
3) If I was as compelled to say nice things as I am un-nice things. That would put me on par with a motivational speaker, though, and those people are as bad as clergy.
4) If I quit dumping every goddamn link I see.
5) If blogging involved pussy somehow.

What does the future hold for Double Flee A? Not these things.
1) a cross-promotional deal with anyone's myspace page.
2) ugly people doin' it
3) accolades for proper syntax and punctuation.
4) "Where are they now: Coolio"
5) a jew-blamin' hoedown
6) becoming an Alton Brown fanpage
7) more pictures of these two:

last post

All good things must come to an end. All other things must come to an end, too.

This blog is coming to an end, and as long as it wasn't totally stupid all the time, it fits in with the rest of human experience enough to suit me. See, it sucks having a body because of all the things that can and do go wrong with it, like a pulled muscle or fevers or cancer, but how you gonna eat a BLT or have sex without one?

The last three-odd years has been a rich tapestry of good times. I have other things to attend to and, not without a little sadness, need to close out the ol' blog.

Over these three years I somehow avoided getting around to putting in the work necessary to present a coherent argument for the importance of people taking responsibility for the way they feel, which I see as one of mankind's most serious problems. I find it a deeply disturbing revelation that no one encourages people to think for themselves except me and possibly other atheists, who are trusted very little by the supermass of idiots who apparently take the time to fill out forms for pollsters.

Ascribing unnatural importance due to the way one feels, say, looking at a sunset, to imaginary things like god muddles and confuses people, and religion in general is a self-perpetuating tragedy, that hopefully one day will disappear in the light of reason. First, though, we'll all have to agree on what evidence consists of, and as long as religious leaders know that their trade can only go on if people are unable to form proper thoughts and deal in realities, expect nothing to change. I've done what I can and it's time for me to move on.

One last indulgence: my twenties are ending next month and I thought I'd just post a little of what I learned during that time, and then be done and thank you all for stopping by and chipping in your two cents. It was fun and if I could buy you all a cake I would. Hell, might as well make it a cake and a Ferrari.

In my twenties I dated some women, drank a lot, and embarrassed myself at a couple of parties. Later on I started seeing other people embarrass themselves at parties, and eventually I just quit going to them completely. I also quit smoking and feeling sorry for myself in my twenties. I outgrew talk radio in my twenties. I ate some truly great sushi. I got married. I went back to school.

In my twenties I learned that:

Running from the cops will always teach you something you didn't know about wherever you are.

There are some things you have to do every once in a while to remind yourself why you don't do them, like drinking too much, watching cartoons, or eating fast food.

"Black comedies" don't have to be funny and rarely are.

Teach a man to fish and he'd still prefer to be given a fish.

Even if it gets to the heart of the matter singularly well, accusing a black person of behaving in an "uncivilized" way will get you called a racist.

I'm not as intelligent as I'd like to be, but find my imagination to be adequate.

If he's wrong about everything other thing in the world, Rush Limbaugh's right about oxycontin. It's fucking great.

Bow ties belong on older men only, and it helps if they're doctors.

Patriotism and smoking mainly afflict the poor.

There's a very important thing you can tell about someone by what they consider funny, and no one has ever defined it to my satisfaction.

Unless you yourself are one, never fight a farmer with anything but the expectation you're going to lose.

That was a total of 7,651 posts beginning to end. Not bad. You can still reach me via email.

So long and thanks again,
Dale

So there's this guy that is suspected to have killed Jonbenet Ramsey. And where do they pick him up but the underage sex Mecca, Thailand. If there was one thing that more than any other could make this guy look guilty as fast as possible, it's happened.

Suspect in Ramsey Killing to Return to U.S. - New York Times

kids 4 truth

Ah, morning. The birdies sing, the trash truck thunders by, a steaming pot of coffee brews, and I check my email. When you're me the kinds of emails you get are enough to make you not want to check in until you've woken up a little more, but it's routine. I have only myself to blame.

It looks like there are some "kids" out there who want you to "know" the "truth". (Thanks to the "miracle" of punctuation, I don't have to "deconstruct" that last sentence for you.) That's why those "kids" learned to program flash and wrote this cartoon equating the necessity of a watchmaker to the process of watchmaking to the impossibility of the billion-year process of evolution. The "truth" is important so that you'd "know" we didn't come from monkeys like the "evil godless liars" want you to think we did. They work for the "prince of darkness".

I'm a little ashamed that I assumed that grown-ups were behind this, but look at the URL. It says kids4truth right there, and we know the internet never lies!

Thanks, kids, for the truth. You're good kids.

Kids 4 Truth - The Watchmaker

cool science fantasy stuff

Print the pdf.

Stolen word for word from mefi:

An experiment recently performed
by the AET RaDAL group shows that the gravitomagnetic field produced by a rapidly-spinning superconductor can cause a 1.117 times increase over the Earth's gravity.

Gravitomagnetism, a phenomenon predicted by General Relativity, is a poorly understood but promising topic in modern physics. Speculation about harnessing the bizarre, space-warping and gravity-altering effects of gravitomagnetism has already begun. Reactionless space propulsion [PDF] is the most apparent use (previously discussed), with the potential applications far-reaching and nearly inconcievable. The earlier experiment by the European Space Agency involving another rapidly-spinning superconductor earlier this year found a massive increase in strength over the predicted values, but still miniscule by our standards. Things could become very interesting if the results from this latest experiment pan out.

Is Breastfeeding a Gateway Sin?

hagar, is that you?

Every so often something comes along that makes me remember why I first fell for the internet. This post by Xeni at bb is one of those, with links that go to (increasingly rare, this) a bunch of places you haven't seen before.

Boing Boing: Web Zen: Zine Zen

no love for the ladyboy

Lia pretends to clean the pool
not safe for work

interesting

Room 101: The Evolution of Desktops

Like something I'd do, but much better.
Jhuger - The Watchmaker

It's an odd sort of war when more children (and their mothers) are killed than armed men.
picture of dead child warning

a memo I posted on the wall

The next exciting episode in my ongoing mission to get fired.

The creation of the new shelving organization has broken the drugs up into four separate alphabets. We must look at this optimistically, like a man whose daughter marries a complete loser. Follow my train of thought here: That's four ways to do a great job, where before we had only one.

We must choose not to look at the new system and see not the loss of time, but gaining a new exciting opportunity. The pain we feel as we spend extra hours searching the shelves with absolutely no guide or map is merely the birth pangs of a better tomorrow.

In the spirit of improvising on the weekend, with no management to lead us and no lean team personnel to consult, some of us have created a fifth shelf which will contain things that don't go on any of the shelves so far.

The reasoning is, as long as you have to look in four places for something, what's a fifth? That's only twenty per cent more work; it's not as if it's four hundred or something totally crazy like that.

In order to keep things nice and understandable and simple, I will list the products below. They are kept on a shelf across from the beginning of the super slow section. Feel free to add to this list as needed.

Nystatin tablets

Spironolactone/hctz tablets (Aldactazide)

the world is a beautiful place

This kid got blown to bits in southern Lebanon.

Not to worry, these chinese women will replace that kid and then some.

print: SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | Michael Graham: Why I helped my wife to kill herself

See the many, many reasons why if you're in a Charles Bronson movie, you don't want to be anyone besides Charles Bronson. I agree with my brother in that death number 16 is my favorite. Charles Bronson is so good at killing pieces of garbage, I think it's time consider his potential involvement in the shooting of rap legend Tupac Shakur.
Charles Bronson Death Wish Bodycount - Google Video

wow

The star tribune:
Four Stabbed With Sword In Minneapolis
Another local news outlet:
Would-be robbers get cut ... and run
Fortunately a blogger lives there, who took pictures of the blood everywhere:
William Stiteler.com
A quick zaba search for him shows the address is 3142 Lyndale Ave S. I used to live a block from this house. It's a pretty typical neighborhood except for the samurai sword shit.

It's not good to have people getting their fingers chopped off, but when you think of the alternative being living in a place where nothing ever happens, I'll take the risk.

In 1965, Ford built what might be the most beautiful car ever.

Dear Abby,

My father is a business man who travels. Each time he returns from one of his trips his shoes and trousers are covered with blood but he never forgets to bring me a nice present. Should I say something?

Signed, America

Tony Hoagland

3 good things

Nedroid.com is where some great drawings live.

7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable is a good page.

And this may be the best sad soldier's letter home ever.

After losing about a million baseball games, the Colorado Rockies have done what anyone would do. Get a Jesus makeover!

"We had to go to hell and back to know where the Holy Grail is. We went through a tough time and took a lot of arrows," says Rockies chairman and CEO Charlie Monfort...

USATODAY.com - Baseball's Rockies seek revival on two levels

These aren't all that obvious:
Accelerating Future » Six Places to Nuke When You’re Serious

That table over there on the top right --->
is a list of what music I've been listening to. It's powered by last.fm, which is a great service that plugs into anything. I'm sure I'll get tired of it and move it around a little bit, but for now it's designed to keep me listening to music, which I've noticed I don't do as much as I'd like. It might not be working right, since my music collection is "mis-tagged", and was accumulated during the heady, carefree days of Kazaa and winamp, when things were all one huge mess.

Surreal Pop Erotica
Not safe for work

I'm so happy Dennis Miller's going to be a Fox News tool, it kind of makes me cry.

Take away all the hubris, ego, greed and knee-jerk politics of both sides of this tiny bandwidth we let pass for a “political spectrum,” and we will find that most of the commonalities ordinary Americans used to enjoy still exist -- although buried under so much self-deluding media driven horseshit we may never shovel ourselves out -- the kind of commonalities and equal respect we acknowledged back when liberals still owned guns and even the most conservative Christians understood that the Constitution and the Bible were two entirely separate documents.

Joe Bageant’s book available on Amazon

As usual Tom Tomorrow knocks it out of the park as he takes a look inside the rightwingoverse.

lots of military history links

I see this headline about every six months. I should probably get used to it.
Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD.

Here are 279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation of the Abu Ghraib torture barn.

Here's what the news from the middle east would look like if it weren't censored:
Israeli propaganda censorship

Q: So when is it officially a dictatorship around here?
A: Perhaps it's when the unelected murder monkey gets his own private army.

"a proposal in Congress... would let the president take control of the National Guard in emergencies without consent of governors."

Governors object to Bush's Guard plan

It isn't easy to understand what's happening in Lebanon right now. So we're lucky there are people living there who can tell us. It looks like Israel wants to destroy Lebanon, Hezbollah or not. Publicly, meaning on television, political leaders across the spectrum --representing all colors in the rainbow of crazy-- are engaging in a Hatfield-and-McCoy-style PR campaign of "they started it".

Beirut Spring posts this article about what's happening in Lebanon right now, which I cut and paste.

Who Is Really at War? The Patterns So Far.
By Chibli Mallat, Lebanon

Three weeks into the war between Israel and Hezbollah, some patterns have emerged. In the first week, Israeli security officials declared that they wanted to bomb Lebanon back 50 years, and indeed destroyed over 40 bridges across the country in the first few days, as well as a large number of factories, over 30 according to the Association of Lebanese Industrialists. Then the targets changed radically.

Clearly prompted by the United States, the Israeli government announced an objective alliance with the Lebanese government on the latter’s exclusive sovereignty over its territory and borders. Israel then acted accordingly in its warfare. On a handful of occasions, which have puzzled the observers, Lebanese army points were targeted, but non-Hezbollah areas were rarely hit. The map of destruction was characteristically Shiite; only few missiles were fired in other areas. In Beirut, destruction was limited to a perimeter of about one and half square kilometer, now known as the security quadrangle, which consists of a small, poorer section in the Shiite suburbs, where Hezbollah’s sway has been historically dominant.

I went on Tuesday to see for myself that area of Beirut where I had been a guest on the Manar TV station a few times before 2004. Some of the neighborhoods have been bombed to Ground-Zero-like lunar places, with ten-story buildings reduced to rubble. It is hard not to feel sad at the sites.

Much destruction can also be found in the south of the country — from Tyre to the Blue Line, and various parts of the western Bekaa, close to the border, and in the historic city of Baalbeck, which lies much further north.

This is a Hezbollah-Israel war, but sociologically it is a Lebanese Shiite-Israeli Jewish war. Probably 90 percent of the people who fled their homes in Lebanon — some 800,000 people by United Nations accounts — are Shiite. This represents nearly a quarter of the Lebanese people. I suspect close to 95 percent of the more than 800 Lebanese killed so far are Shiite. Camp Palestinians also have remained outside the main war zone. So have Syria and Iran.

Consequences of this glaring split on the domestic Lebanese situation are difficult to fathom, and all politicians have rightly endeavored to manifest a patriotic sympathy for the plight of Shiite Lebanese. Politically, such contradictions will in time be more difficult to paper over.

For my part, I do not find it healthy to carry on with a dual language, which is deafening in most Lebanese political circles — wishing wholeheartedly for Hezbollah’s military defeat, while professing in grand speeches a desire for unity. I feel strongly about the suffering of my Lebanese compatriots, as I do about Israelis’ suffering by-and-large. And I take pride in non-Shiites opening their homes and offering hospitality to the refugees. I prefer, however, to voice my open disagreement with Hezbollah over the start of the war and the way it is being prosecuted. I think that candidness in times of violence and death on such a scale is needed, and that the narrowing of the gap between private and public talk in politics will yield a far healthier result in due course, and will help accelerate a workable cease-fire.

On Friday morning, Lebanon awoke to the destruction of one power plant four bridges north of Beirut, all outside the Shiite areas, cutting the capital off from the north. Concern will grow high: is a new pattern emerging?

This is also reportedly an excellent synopsis of modern Lebanese sociopolitics: print me

Or we could turn on talk radio and get the real truth of it all.

This sentence occurred to me at dinner Friday night:

"What has one thumb and likes blojwobs?", the grizzled one-armed hobo asked jokingly, making it painfully clear what was about to come next.

Is that still as funny as it seemed after a few vodkas?

Saw a screening of a documentary called Jesus Camp. It focuses on a woman preacher (Becky Fischer) who indoctrinates children in a summer camp in North Dakota. Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears...

David Byrne Journal: 8.2.06: American Madrassas

over the line!

Although the entire year has felt like a celebration, today the lovely wife and I will venture forth to celebrate even more enthusiastically than usual our first anniversary in the salubrious air of Duluth, America's most underrated city.

Duluth is essentially the polar opposite of Las Vegas.

In Vegas one looks around and tries to comprehend how all this crazy bullshit got to the middle of the desert. What will become of this place? Why did we come here? Even with five thousand people a day moving in and construction cranes at every point on the horizon, abandonment seems to be close at hand.

But at the edge of the world's largest body of fresh water, abandonment and vacuity couldn't be a more foreign concept. Duluth's story is not the mythology of supply, but supply itself. A long look at the lake (and every look out at the lake becomes a long one) and it's as if everything's going to be all right. There are no fabulous prizes and flashing lights, rather, Duluth is like an old dog that's seen many dinner guests come and go from its master's house, who will look at you only briefly and then resume snoozing. Duluth is the bulwark of my peace of mind, a place where I sense America's slipping consciousness catches and holds fast. To stand on the lake shore is to take the pulse of reality.

Sorry, I get carried away sometimes. Now that I've done that horrible thing to you, I've got to get out of here. I'll be back Monday.

The frayed threads anchoring the American government to reality have finally snapped, just at the moment radiologists are reporting that Americans are getting too fat to be x-rayed or shoved into any existing MRI tube.

The gamma rays can't get through the blubber, same way actual conditions in the outside world bounces off the impenetrable dome of imbecility sheltering America's political leadership.

Twenty-three years after one of America's stupidest Presidents announced Star Wars, Reagan's dream has come true. Behind ramparts guarded by a coalition of liars extending from Rupert Murdoch to the New York Times, from Bill O'Reilly to PBS, America is totally shielded from truth.

Alexander Cockburn: The Triumph of Crackpot Realism

Or, check out this awesome electric car named after Tesla.

Why Must the Right Wing Sound So Brutally Stupid?

charts

If Americans Knew - what every American needs to know about Israel/Palestine

print one of these

"Postmodernism, commodity fetishism and hegemony" - Néstor Kohan

"Git-r-done" - Larry The Cable Guy

I wish David Brooks would close his mouth all the way

Michelle Malkin's heart is black

Crooks and Liars » Malkin on Qana: “If it’s not Qana, it’s something else. … It’s Gitmo, Abu Ghraib. It’s beauty pageants.”

This is actually kind of cool:
Click Survey

it was only a matter of time

the passion of the mel:
mike tidmus : blog

"Why are you running around telling people there is no gold under your bed?"

A very familiar adventure in rhetorical turntablism:
Jhuger - Good News!

In a related story, Christian beliefs are being challenged in Kansas. When will we pull together and stop persecuting these people? All we have to do is whatever they want us to. Is it really asking so much?
Evolution Fight Shifts Direction in Kansas Vote - New York Times

Normally I don't go for these, but Stalin's picture is that little something extra I need.

frickin' cool

Listen to what was happening at Norad the morning of 9/11:
VANITY FAIR : 9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes

kids these days

Watch this kid freak out.
YouTube - (Translated) Angry German Kid - Correct Translation

we should do this again

It was common for incumbents in the county about 45 miles northeast of Chattanooga to take ballot boxes to the jail and stuff them with pre-marked ballots. A group of WW2 vets figured "Why fight overseas for freedom and come home and be denied the right to have your ballot counted?" So they did what anyone would do. Shoot the cops.

stealing elections wasn't always cool with Tennesseeans

how to eat a watermelon

After Mel Gibson's recent drunken verbal rampage against Jews, it's not hard to imagine why some people who are none too quick to forgive and forget would think less of him for his stupid, bigoted opinions.

Mr. Gibson now claims not to be a bigot.
Mel: "I Am Not a Bigot" - Aug 01, 2006 - E! Online News
See?

But the problem is, he is a bigot. If you hate Jews at least own up to it. It's a free country and you can say anything you want about whoever you like. Take advantage! Don't be a bigot and a pussy, too. You might as well keep it real, like this one guy I'll tell you about.

Once I was ripping on a youth pastor for shaming little kids for a living. Picking on little kids is not a nice thing to do, or even fair, and seeing as how it does no one any good, it represents a cumulative minus. I told youth pastor guy this and it got back to one of his hairy-palmed minions, who in an act of revenge, made a gay porn version of my blog. (If a picture of a guy sucking his own dick is gay porn, which I feel safe in assuming it is.) But did I get bent out of shape? No! It was the high point of my blogging career! Gazing wistfully into my monitor, I realize how true the words of the old sitcom theme song are, "life goes on, and so do we..." Reminiscence makes us feel marvelously aged and a little sad, does it not?

I won't be watching any Mel Gibson movies not because of the crazy shit he was talking about Jews, but because he's a punk bitch.

Flying Spaghetti Monster hate mail

Double Flee A

Thursday

Wednesday

a better tomorrow with me as god

Monday

Friday

if god had to be elected

Thursday

I have no willpower

Tuesday

last post

Saturday

Thursday

kids 4 truth

Wednesday

cool science fantasy stuff

Tuesday

hagar, is that you?

Monday

no love for the ladyboy

interesting

Sunday

a memo I posted on the wall

the world is a beautiful place

Friday

wow

Thursday

3 good things

Wednesday

Tuesday

Monday

Sunday

Friday

over the line!

Thursday

charts

print one of these

I wish David Brooks would close his mouth all the way

Michelle Malkin's heart is black

it was only a matter of time

Wednesday

frickin' cool

kids these days

we should do this again

how to eat a watermelon

Tuesday

retina barbecue

eustachian justice league

many moons

toys