Double Flee A: October 2006

a video of Philip K. Dick, 52 mins. entitled on the edge of blade runner

cool

stolen from mefi:

TIBET is an artist who works entirely underground (literally) in Stockholm, Sweden. All of his work is done only in the most hidden of places, and very few people will ever get to see it. Each statue is made of concrete and are 11" tall and weigh about 5 pounds each. They are glued, welded or drilled into the solid rock and will stay there for a very, very long time.

Look what a freak Jessica Simpson is at WFMU.

when does it stop being special?

* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Oct 30 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Oct 31 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Oct 31 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 01 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 01 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 02 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 02 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 03 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 03 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 04 05:00am
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 06 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 06 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 07 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 07 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 08 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 08 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 09 05:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 09 11:00pm
* Special Report With Brit Hume, FNC Nov 10 05:00pm

it's links!

I'm trying something new out today, this is a song slightly too large to send via gmail (by half a meg, curses).
Here's utti-ray, a song by owdive-slay

Hey, look, national geographic actually did something cool and geographic! Make your own map

And here you can watch a video about one of the most important images ever taken, the deep space field, by Hubble telescope.

It surprises me how much I enjoy listening to these mp3s of some guy cycling up and down the spectra of world band radio.

them's some good feeds

popular, at least.
feeds that matter

Who wants to hear the music recorded from a bunch of video games?
"Me, me, oh god please let it be me!", I take inordinate pleasure imagining hearing you cry.
And here they are, ready to disappoint you.

diabetic heart attack

This from Yahoo:

A view of a new fast food making its debut at U.S. fairs this fall. Ping-pong-sized balls of batter made with Coca-Cola syrup are deep-fried, then served in a cup, topped with more Coca-Cola syrup, whipped cream, cinnamon sugar and a cherry on the top. (State Fair of Texas/Handout/Reuters)

it's the goddamn liberals, that's who

In a transparent plot to undermine consumer confidence, the tax-and-spend, flip-flopping, trying-to-have-it-all-three-ways liberals are up to still more of their dirty tricks of pawky election-time political scheming, this time sinking to an all-time low and manipulating the housing market in order to cast the republican congress and the Bush administration as the failures they most definitely are NOT. The slumping housing market has the fingerprints of the lying, degenerate left all over it, and this time it's affecting all of us.

My friends, behind every loss in a home's vaule stands the same power which is responsible for this loss; behind these harmless insignificant fellow-countrymen who were instigated and incited to crime stands the hate-filled power of our liberal foe, a foe to whom we had done no harm, but who none the less sought to subjugate our patriotic people and make of it its slave - the foe who is responsible for all the misfortune that fell upon us in 2001, and for all the misfortune which plagued freedom in the years that followed. Liberalism has attacked the foundations of our whole human order, alike in State and society, the foundations of our conception of civilization, of our faith and of our morals: all alike are at stake.

Your life's work must not be ground into dust under the birkenstocks of the godless liberal traitors. My friends, sharpen the knives that will cut liberal flesh and bone!

BBC news:
Housing slump batters US economy

Despair dot com, there are lots of funny sociopathic management videos to watch here: if you like the office, you'll like this.

Would the Second World War have been won if we'd had daily body counts in places like Normandy and Iwo Jima?

You have to be as stupid as a bag of hammers to think of these kinds of questions. Fortunately conservative columnists are up to the challenge. Behold! Meeting in the oval office by Mona Charen
(It's called meeting in the oval office 'cause it was a meeting, and it happened in the oval office.)

summertime and stay the course, where have you gone?

slogan change is bittersweet

I dunno

I'd have to take the one with Julianne Moore.

New Yorker Wins Best Cover of the Year

If you assume that you and I are both asses, conventional wisdom is that it's totally cool.

the ice fish

In the southern ocean near Antarctica is a group of fish whose blood is totally clear. They have no red blood cells. Red blood cells have been characteristic of invertebrates for over 500 million years, but it wasn't working for the cold water fish because red blood cells made their blood more viscous and harder to pump in the sub-zero temperature. So how they get oxygen is, they pump a lot more blood around with a bigger heart at the same O2 saturation as the surrounding seawater. Problem solved.

Even though they have no need for it, their DNA contains an old, leftover remnant of a gene that produces hemoglobin. It isn't active, it just sits there the way genes do when they're not being used any more, an unused vestige.

It's a good word, vestigial. It describes things that are still uselessly hanging around. Most of the time they're a nuisance. That's how appendices are in humans, as I found out at the hospital this year with my wife.

There are also cultural vestiges. For example, in metropolitan areas at this time of year the highways thunder and scream with cars cutting each other off to get their occupants (as quickly as possible!) twenty miles out of town to relaxing hay rides, a sort of living fairy-tale postcard from a pastoral past most people weren't around for, but that we like to imagine was real anyway. Fake nostalgia informs much of our tradition in the United States. There is another cultural vestige I'm more interested in discussing, though.

It's the vestige of my expectations for the civilization of academe, at any institute of higher learning. It must be said that my expectations low as they are, are unreasonable: to associate the school I go to with academe is like shaving a reptile: why. When describing my school the word prestige comes to mind only as a sick joke. (I'm just in it for the watchmaking certification, for anyone just joining us and asking the obvious question.)

Expectations low, check. Thus is my happiness guaranteed. But what could I expect from standing outside a classroom and looking in -- not peering, mind you, not fogging up a window, not the over-close, loitering, hallway pollution equivalent of breathing heavily into the receiver. What could I expect.

Walking back to my classroom from the computer lab, passing a classroom, out of the corner of my eye, I had noticed words that I thought said "escapement principles" just above the instructor's gesturing hand, so I stopped to see what they said, which was "exponent principles". Much to my satisfaction my vision still extends that far after looking through magnifiers all day for a couple of years now. While I was at it, I decided to stay for a second and find out what "exponent principles" were. Two very plain women looked over at me the way cows look at fenceposts. This is nothing new to me since I once worked on a farm, so I ignored them and read on.

A to B means A times A, B times. So far so good.

I went on. A to the minus B. But I was not to learn this riddle of the ages. Things were about to get uninteresting. Because then the thinkable, the extremely predictable, the most boring thing that could happen, happened. It's like work even telling you about it.

Suddenly the entire portion of the class that was within the horizons of my visual field through the small window was looking at me. Next, the doorway no longer contained a nice door, but a disappointing-looking thirty year old pudgy asian guy, asking me a question, and in a tone that is strangely familiar... Why must the bitch-ass people even ask, when by so doing it is evident that that helping is clearly the last thing they would prefer to do? Why not just say "Hey fuck you, get outta here." At least it's honest.

"Can I help you?"

Normally it is a woman that asks me this question in this way, and I have a stock answer that never fails me. I smile like a guy who's about to get laid and and ask them loudly what they had in mind, making sure everybody can hear. This was a man, though, who I'm not taking any chances on. I have broadband and I know that Asian people do all kinds of bizarre sexual things to each other, so this response doesn't likely produce an outcome that holds any allure for me.

I said no, suggested that he could instead help them though, and pointed in his class, since I was just walking by and they were paying to be there. I blinked. The door closed as abruptly as it had opened, and I wondered many things.

How is it that this place can be accredited, employing staff of this low personal caliber? How much dumber will the lessons be in the future? In this very room in thirty years will someone be teaching the principles of integers? "Repeat after me, NUM-BER!!"

Does it surprise me that the accrediting body, the same body that is responsible for verifying the quality of the education avaiable in this meager institute, has also sealed with approval the system that produced these college-age bird-brains who have to be re-taught seventh-grade math? No! It doesn't surprise me one bit.

I looked in the window for another moment. The class sat there incomprehensibly incomprehending, the way they will for the rest of their lives. They don't need a teacher as much a feeding tube, and in a lucky accident, what they've got more closely resembles the latter.

I try to be nice to people. Really. They just make it so goddamn hard.

So the ice fish didn't turn out to have much to do with the story, but it's a blog and my expectations are low, so my happiness is more or less assured.

makin' do

In a time and place where you might be denied emergency contraception based on the religious/ethical hang-ups of your "care providers", i.e. here and now, it's good to know that people are pulling together to avoid unwanted pregnancies without killing themselves with coat hangers. If you can't get the drugs, these people will help you:

Emergency kindness

cool

Not a dating site. Harper's connections is a place to click from thing to thing. Sort of a civilized version of everything2.

Hell unavailable: Shitsack Skilling gets jail for 24 years.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

After Pat’s Birthday, by Kevin Tillman, Pat's brother.
(if anybody wants to know how a veteran who's lost his brother is about you-know-what)

thanks benchie for the link

Iraq is an unqualified disaster, but Bush wants to say it's going well. Something has to give.

Ten reasons target is better than wal-mart

Summary:
Crime
Target Doesn’t Destroy Small Towns
Target’s Prices are Competitive
I’ve Never Seen Anyone Wearing a NASCAR Shirt, Purple Sweat Pants, and Pink Fluffy Slippers at Target
Employees
Happy Customers
Cleanliness
Better Parking Lots
Positive Atmosphere
Wider Aisles

The transcript of the video from two days ago. Maybe it's better to read than watch.
Olbermann is a hero

nobody bothers me

for real?

Are these two North Korean blogs really North Korean blogs? I think they just might be.

Juche girl

Songun blog

my Hannity week

I listened to Sean Hannity on my drive home this week, and it was very educational. I learned about repetition on an epic scale. I learned that nothing has to mean anything as long as people want to believe it. Sean Hannity boils down to one thing, one phenomenon. It's all about the slogans, which are now in our feel-good world euphemistically called "talking points".

Sean Hannity runs through his talking points constantly, and it isn't at all difficult to tell what they are. This week it was "how does house speaker Pelosi sound to you", and her "San Francisco values". Presumably this chills the blood of all of red America. It's a self-taxonomic last-ditch effort at rallying the base, which I guess never tires of rallying. When I think about what they have to believe, and how long they've done it, I collapse from vicarious exhaustion.

If he's on the line with "a liberal" which is a rhetorical form of objectifying and identifying the enemy, by the way, he'll say "I know you're just running through the talking points" and at the exact same time he's running through his like the Jesse Owens of talk radio. It's sad that a man this dumb can enjoy any measure of popularity.

Each question is framed. Literally, every single question is loaded with associations and slogans, so that it makes a statement. And that statement is all that can get traction in the mind of the listeners, because every question is a complete informational vacuum. Each of these questions is not a question at all, but a delivery device. I can't remember any sentences now but fortunately he's on some channel constantly if you want to see for yourself. The substance is one-dimensional, an incredibly obvious and successful experiment in branding.

Notable callers: A guy called up "I'm an ex-marine and if you or your family ever need a security detail...". Another guy called up and asked when he should move from Ohio to Virginia, based on where his vote was needed most.

People worship this clown. I'm done with him, just wanted to see what the deal was with Sean Hannity, red America's sweetheart.

Olbermann on the military bill passed a couple of days ago:

wonderful

Federal Judge Orders Bush Administration to Release Vice President Dick Cheney's Visitor Logs

Puree the can of [chipotle] peppers with olive oil, soy sauce, honey (1/2 cup each), a bit of sugar and pepper and lemon or lime juice.

recipefilter

I made this marinade last night and it was great. Not riveting to read about, but dinner was a smash.

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

The only two consecutive sentences of the hallucinatory, schizophrenic, autobiographical, insane work of science fiction I found to be honest without some painful, twisted element of confusion and self-referentiality, Valis, Philip K. Dick. But to be fair, I only got through maybe seventy pages of it, the first 22 and fifty more from here and there. It wasn't easy to be Philip K. Dick.

Bob Lassiter was a radio guy from the old school, and when he passed away a couple of days ago WFMU memorialized him.

There are collections of phone calls and monologues that will give you an idea what he was like.

Ignorant people hated Bob Lassiter. See "big fat pig" for that one. /hotlink, mp3

Devil birds from hell!

The complete works of Darwin online

Ricky Gervais reads the book of Genesis, google video

At a briefing this morning, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld informed the President that 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq.

To everyone's amazement, all of the color ran from Bush's face. Then he collapsed onto his desk, his head in his hands, visibly shaken, almost whimpering. Finally, he asked Rumsfeld: "Just exactly how many is 'a brazillion'?"

Got ten lifetimes to waste? Watch this!
Toshio Matsumoto - Experimental Film Works

in which I introduce a great blog

This from the notable gin and tacos:

You have to hand it to the far right. If nothing else, they're phenomenally subtle.

Case in point: as the Republican loss of power in the House appears inevitable, the NRCC, the RNC, and assorted other right-wing blowhards have started trying to turn the election into a referendum on Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Part and parcel of this strategy is frequently using the "San Francisco liberal" epithet at every possible opportunity.

Now, Nancy Pelosi is an idiot. Approximately 90 seconds of conversation is more than enough to exhaust her knowledge of any single issue. But in this case I'm more bemused by the Republicans' "clever" rhetorical strategy than I am turned off by Pelosi.

"San Francisco liberal?" Get it? GET IT? (*nudge* *wink*). We know you rural folk don't like them "San Francisco" types! Isn't it awesome how well that term allows you to feign ignorance when people call you a homophobe?

Why, whoever said anything about gays? We were just talking about those "San Francisco" liberals! Hee hee!

Cute. So cute.

update

I deserve a big pat on the back for not commenting on all the flickr pages of people with pictures like this, with their potpourri-scented hallmark titles: "WOW! It looks like GOD lives there!" That activity alone could keep me pretty busy, since there's so much affectedly tender bilge to nauseate me.

Anyhow, I have bigger fish to fry on the internet these days. To say that the internet wasn't made to find watch jobs would be accurate in synthesizing the point, but it would metaphorically be putting the cart before the horse; due to the temporal relativity of the two technologies, it's not the latter's fault. It was made to help people communicate about anything, but the watch world hasn't reached back for the baton. They want lots of papers. They like to set them down and glance at them and think about them. If the power goes out, the paper just sits there obediently like it has for a thousand years. There are no cursors, advantage paper. When paper gets rumpled nobody has to call tech support either. Still, you'd think if a place wanted watchmakers they'd use every means available to find them, and I can think of a really good one. I don't have to continue.

A kind of roundup.

Media:
The negativland speech that came in 8 parts from WFMU is great, and I hope everyone gets a chance to hear it.

I finally put it together that if I subscribed to the podcast feeds of different magazines I'd have something good to listen to all the time, so I did, and do. Nature, new scientist, the list goes on. One of these days I'll figure out how to post my feedlist as an OPML here and it will be easy for you all to preview it. Because that would be great.

The Aaron Russo movie about taxes looks great, I've seen the first 45 minutes or so.

Family:
One of my brothers did well on his MCAT so it looks like he won't have to work as a research assistant (the Hitler of mice) in perpetuity. After more processing he'll choose some place; he's virtually medical school bound.

My other brother is getting ready for a wheelchair test to satisfy some state requirement about insurance, disability, and so on. I understand this only as far as it's a fact of life in a healthcare system as complex as the one that has evolved in Tennessee. I wonder if he can get little stickers made for handicapped republicans to put on their wheelchairs that say

"Let's roll" - President G. W. Bush.

My mother finally has her dream job, tromping through the woods looking for endangered plants.

Weather:
Things finally cooled off a little up in Minnesota again. After our trusty indian summer of 80 degrees, two days later it snowed. Now it's the rainy autumn for a tenuous interval, and then the big freeze. In Minnesota you might not like what you get but you know what you're getting, and you have to like that.

School:
We continue to work on the Lemania 1873 (the Omega 861) chronograph, the ETA 2892, and the ETA 955, for which I drew up a rough draft of a testing sheet last night. I don't know what else to say about school, it just seems like it's going on forever. People drop parts on the floor and then we all help them find them and start over.

That about does it.

Television + toddlers may equal autism.
/pdf

I'm looking forward to 2007.

church to youth: "don't blog"

watch this

This comes highly recommended from a friend whose recommendations are usually excellent.
Watch the new movie "America: freedom to fascism" online in its entirety.
This is about income tax, fractional reserve banking, what they are, and why they're bad. Among other things.

I like when women get naked. Even more, when women get naked but that isn't the point.
Enter the sassy, stripping Ursula Martinez, not safe for work google video

2621 since mission accomplished

hear ye

As WFMU suggested, this is the worst comedy I have ever heard or expect to hear.
unkie dunkie

This, though, is an excellent educational lecture and multimedia presentation given by one of the members of media mashup group negativland. If you've got a couple of hours, go for it. Audio only, but you can see the videos on youtube later if you're so inclined. The speaker gives background without which the work of the band might seem to make no sense.

All 1,943 Cornell Faculty were asked to respond to the following question:

Of the many charts (graph, map, diagram, table and ‘other’) you have seen in your life, which has been the most important, remarkable, meaningful or valuable?

the love only another man can give

When a cheerleader touches a wrestling coach who doesn't even live with his wife, something special happens.

MST3K comes in handy when you're too lazy to make fun of eegah, which is always.

the story at fleshbot

All kinds of streaming video, chooseandwatch.com

Wolcott sounds off on Dinesh D'Souza's forthcoming sleazy, shameless, ignorant, ahistorical, tendentious, meretricious lie, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

How to launder money, a bbc audio documentary, part one

powered by ODEO

part 2
part 3

Not that there's time for it, but odeo has lots of easy to get mp3s of every type. There's even a math show

underground nuclear test

summer's over

she seems a little sad, no?

political humor bloggers: the new hippies

Hippies tried to change the world, but not really. They were all about love or hair or some concept called peace. If the hippies can teach us anything useful, it's that if you take your hands off the political wheel, it shouldn't surprise you that you lose the ability to steer. Alas, a great many people have not learned this. And they're making political satire.

Today there is a
smattering
of
sarcastic
fake
republicanism.

Mainstream America knows that hippies were easy to identify and mock, so hippies went away, high, confused, and a little unsure how they lost. The spirit of rebellion lingered as it always does. Now, due to the opportunity of "unlimited access", it has found purchase in a special kind of political protest, one that appears almost everywhere you look these days: fake reports from within the right wing of the culture wars, which seems clever and subversive.

Naturally, their readability and humorous effectiveness varies. I think the most sophisticated is probably the razor sharp fafblog, whose author appears to have phased it out. I don't want to turn this into more than a brief exposition on the ways in which culture wars miss the point, but I can't resist the opportunity to exhibit how good satire is supposed to look, from the late Fafblog:

Run for your lives - America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America's freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the "Blame Atrocities First" crowd will tell you these prisoners were "driven to despair," that they "had no rights," that they were "held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice." But what they won't tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide! This fiendish attempt to slander the great American institution of the gulag is nothing less than an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States - a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people! - and when faced with a terrorist attack, America must respond. Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast!

"Oh but Giblets there are dozens of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo" you say because you are a namby-pamby appeasenik who suckles at the teat of terror. Well if these Guantanamo prisoners are so innocent then what are they doing in Guantanamo? Sneaking into our secret military prisons as part of an elaborate plot to make it look like we're holding them in our secret military prisons, that's what! And once they get there they can chain themselves to the floor, break their bones on helpless guards' fists, and waterboard themselves to their heart's content to further their sinister Salafi scheme to sully the reputation of secret American torture facilities everywhere!

And that's just the tip of the iceberg! Even as we speak the forces of Islamanazism are infiltrating our network of classified CIA prison camps, rendering themselves to third world dictatorships, and launching unprovoked assaults on innocent American bullets! There's only one thing to do with all these malicious prisoners, torture victims, and massacred civilians - and that's to imprison, torture and massacre them before they can mount another attack! Yes it will be difficult, but these people want to destroy our very way of life - our obliviously violent, guilt-free way of life. Let's roll!

[Applause] That's nearly a perfect piece of satire. But does anyone change the way they vote based on it? It's not that the page is inaccessible. The page loads easily into any browser, it's made out of the same words as is any other page, but a big problem, commonly misunderstood, is that access is the opposite of how it seems. The person is the access point, not the news channel, not the blog. Carnies and hucksters have known this forever, you don't sell the electrolux vacuum cleaner, you sell the person buying it. The concept couldn't be simpler, but it's no fun to think about unless you're going to make some money off of it.

Limbaugh and Hannity and Bill Krystal and the Heritage foundation and the Fox news channel, the contents of whose private meetings would boggle the minds of the people they broadcast talking points to daily, get it. Through big channels, the information has access to the audience, for whom it's like a warm fuzzy blanket, and it's a simple sociology functioning on a massive scale. You all know the rest.

Once a person has a worldview they're comfortable with, they'll do nearly anything to keep it, so there's a built-in audience for a certain kind of political entertainment format. Fox news viewers want to believe America is a bulwark of goodness, and why not want to do that? Even I want that to be true, even if it sometimes isn't. If Fox news makes top ratings for pretending the world is neatly divided into evil and good, it's not to be diabolical, it's to make money. Another great quarter, pass the Moet.

Yes, it's a goddamn shame it's as simple as it is and yet nothing can be done about it, at least here at places like this blog or even at other ones that get a lot of traffic. When I see Shelley the Republican hammering away as if it's funny that her point of view as a person other than a neo-con media insider doesn't matter, all I can think about is that I wish it made me think about something other than that the point is that she really wouldn't matter otherwise, and it's also and mainly that she still really doesn't matter anyway. No offense, hilarious left-wing inside-outsiders, but I have a tough time getting a belly laugh together in this condition. Pass the bourbon.

print

Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.

Challenging the Culture of Obedience

3 good things

Stolen, but why not.

Some of history's great insults:

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
Winston Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about."
Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know."
Abraham Lincoln

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
Groucho Marx

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend... if you have one."
George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second...if there is one."
Winston Churchill, in response

"I feel so miserable without you, it's almost like having you here."
Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial."
Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others."
Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
Paul Keating

"He had delusions of adequacy."
Walter Kerr

"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure."
Jack E. Leonard

"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt."
Robert Redford

"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."
Thomas Brackett Reed

"He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them."
James Reston (about Richard Nixon)

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts...for support rather than illumination."
Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
Billy Wilder

If you want your marriage to last, marry an atheist.

A bunch of pieces of classical music that you can't name, all together.

the case against utopias

I used to think that in a perfect world, everyone would get paid to do what they love. But then I thought, some people love telling everybody to shut up. And that's not cool at all.

plane takes off, time lapse photography

If they would let this girl wear what she wants, I probably would know what the game of squash is.

The Nietzsche Family Circus

Kids write funny letters to god, which kills my browser

series of tubes pomo remix

I get it:
updated monopoly cards

I don't get it:
scientists teleport objects

paging Congressman Foley...

3 good things

1. Actually the first one's absolute shit. Tucked away in a military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because illusions are expensive.
yee-haw

2. When happy hours collide with google maps, you know where to get a cheap beer. Now if I could just take the internets around with me. Mappyhour!

3. Next time you feel like you want to masturbate, feel shame instead. Otherwise, how are the people at this website going to make any money? Something about this website makes me reeeal horny. I'll be right back.

Download A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Here, or if you can't bring yourself to look at anything but Times New Roman, font of the gods, email me for a formatted copy. Then print it at work.

swarm

It's times like now that I really love my bittorrent client.

Someone whose spelling I had to correct on why Paris Hilton's pants were missing in yet another series of photographs that emerged on the internet:

Her pants may have simply committed hara-kiri, just to escape the indignity of being the fabric that protects the rest of the world from her cooter.

I was in the middle of pretending to hold my wife's stethoscope on my balls earlier and wondered, if they could make noises what would they sound like, before settling on "Take a chance on me" by Abba.

What about yours?

I'd better cut back on the booze. Drinking alcohol can turn you into a gay pedophile. Wow. How tight a grip does the Republican party have on the media for this not to bring the whole sick carnival sideshow crashing down? That's a good graphic in my imagination. A bunch of sickly pale perverts peeking out from behind a candy-striped tent flap doorway in buttless chaps with elephant masks on. May I present to you the party of integrity and values, ladies and gentlemen. I should really learn how to draw.

Ah, but! If Tony Snow says we should avoid a rush to judgement, perhaps we should listen to him. Or not.

Here's Mark Foley's website. Totally gone. Even the google cache is vapor. Heh. I'm not a genius, which is ok, since that's exactly what it doesn't take to know that the moral of the story is, don't have a fetish for boys in the first place.

Here's the text, if you want to read it. I can save you some time, it's like every other one-sided horny IM exchange you've ever seen on dateline. I love that 'hunting pedophiles on the internet' show, by the way. I like it when the guys find out they're on dateline and all the cameras show up. There was a rabbi I saw once who about came out of his skin when they told him. Watching people at the moment they're getting fucked over that hard is both evil and gratifying.

Display this animation full-screen when they ask you to open your laptop during a security check on the subway.

and

this flash toy came from here.

An indespensable guide to the dispensable world of christian comedians, at WFMU.

The very foundations of my worldview shook like a willow in a storm when I saw this. God really did make everything, including children with cancer. And, Kirk Cameron believes it, so it must be good. Behold the banana, the atheist's nightmare...
the stupidest thing I have ever seen

And it looks like the GDP of the top 100 economies is predominantly generated by (51 of 100) corporations rather than countries.

Creation being as compelling as it is, I'll opt for a little George Orwell to feed my mind instead.

Double Flee A

Tuesday

cool

Monday

when does it stop being special?

it's links!

Saturday

them's some good feeds

diabetic heart attack

Friday

it's the goddamn liberals, that's who

Thursday

summertime and stay the course, where have you gone?

Tuesday

I dunno

the ice fish

makin' do

cool

Monday

nobody bothers me

for real?

Saturday

my Hannity week

Friday

wonderful

Thursday

Wednesday

Tuesday

in which I introduce a great blog

update

Monday

watch this

Sunday

2621 since mission accomplished

Saturday

hear ye

Friday

Thursday

the love only another man can give

Wednesday

Tuesday

Monday

summer's over

political humor bloggers: the new hippies

Sunday

print

Saturday

3 good things

the case against utopias

Friday

Thursday

Wednesday

paging Congressman Foley...

3 good things

Tuesday

Monday

swarm

Sunday

retina barbecue

eustachian justice league

many moons

toys