Double Flee A

so long and thanks for all the fish

2007-12-20T19:57:00.000-05:00

funny

2007-12-12T19:06:00.000-05:00

From the best of craigslist:

It's me! Every girl ever.
Date: 2007-11-07, 10:38AM EST

Knock knock

Oh hi, how's it going? It's me! Every girl ever. I'm really looking forward to this date. I'm not nearly as attractive as you remember me being because when we met the bar was dark and you were drunk. Come on in.

Let's start off with the unavoidable tour of my incredibly typical post-college-girl apartment.

You'll notice that I went ahead and purchased everything that Ikea and Pier 1 have ever produced. There's my decorative birdcage over there even though I don't have a bird, and there's my gay wicker basket with bamboo poles in it. I don't know what the hell that's thing's all about, but I bought it.

Hey check it out, I have more candles in here than a Roman Catholic Church. Doesn't it smell like Hazelnut!? If I were to light all of my candles at once you could see my apartment from space! I fucking love candles!

Come on into the living room.

Oh, I see you met my cat there. That's "Freddy Paws Jr." Why don't you pet him and act like you like cats even though you hate cats? There you go. Oh, he took a little swing at your eye there huh? Yeah, he'll do that. Hey, let's check out the kitchen.

Hey look at my refrigerator. There are pictures all over it! Look at all these pictures of me and my equally vacuous friends from college! We were so crazy! You can tell we're really good friends because our faces are all pressed up against each other like that.

And check it out, we're holding up alcoholic beverages to the camera in every single picture. That's to prove that we were partying. College was so fun! But of course I don't talk to any of these girls anymore because now they're all bitches.

Let's go back into the hallway!

Hey, before we leave I'm going to go in the bathroom for ten minutes for some mysterious reason. Why don't you sit awkwardly in my big, stupid, round papizan chair over there while you wait for me. It's like you're sitting in a hug! Be right back...

Sorry that took a half an hour, I don't know what the hell I was doing in there. Let's go!

Wow! Thanks for opening my car door for me! I'm totally going to blow that meaningless gesture out of proportion and delude myself into thinking that you're a really good guy because that's what I want to believe.

Well, here we are at the restaurant. No thanks waiter, I don't need to see a menu, just bring me some expensive things. Hey I know, while we wait, I'll tell you all about my unspeakably boring job. I hate my boss. He's a jerk! I might get another job. Maybe something in pharmaceutical sales.

Now let's talk about my family. I love my family. I want you to love my family. I want my family to love you. I want you to make love to my family! I want you to go golfing with my semi-retarded brother Travis. That would be so God damned cute!

Wow! I can't believe I ordered all this food! I have no intention of eating any of it. No thanks waiter, we don't need a box. Just throw it out.

Hey, I've got an idea, let's go to a bar and have an after dinner drink! It'll be great, it will be just like how we're drinking here, only it will be louder and we'll have to stand up. Come on!

See, isn't this better? Oh hey, what a coincidence. Look over there! It's a group of my friends that I knew was going to be here. Let's go over there so that they can judge you!

Hey, I have to go to the bathroom for a half an hour again for some reason. You can stay here and talk to my unbelievably hideous friend Christine! Christine's so ugly she scares kids! Talk to her! She has a job and a family that she wants to talk to you about too. Be right back.

I'm back! Sorry I was gone for three hours, there was a line. I want to go home now.

Well here we are at my door again. This was really fun for me and not you. You should pretend like we're going to do it again sometime! Maybe I'll see you at Target a few months from now and we can avoid eye contact because you never called me. Here, have this awkward goodnight kiss that's as empty as my soul. Good night!

just fix the goddamn tire

2007-12-10T15:24:00.000-05:00

I went on down to the closest retailer of tires to me, Rick Johnson Auto & Tire to get my tire fixed. Seems I'd run over a nail. The guy told me it could be fixed, so I said let's do 'er. As I'm standing at the counter I notice over my shoulder a bunch of christian literature sharing a rack with ads for different tires. The guy starts in on the transaction, which as far as he's concerned requires a lot of fields to be filled out on a screen, including a bunch of my personal information.

I gave him my name but when he asked for my address I shook my head and asked if that was really necessary, which he correctly sensed was rhetorical. Here's another rhetorical question. Is it just me, or are transactions getting more and more difficult? It's more rare that I buy something and the counter helper person doesn't ask me if I have one of their company's extra special cards, than that they don't. It even happened the other day when I bought a christmas ornament at the hallmark store. "No, I do not have a hallmark credit card", I was forced to say, though I indulged in saying it as emptily as possible. Thereby did we avoid the follow-up question about if I'd want one or not. You get good at these things after enough nonsense.

When I buy something, I don't want to give out my name address and phone number. I don't want a credit card for your store, even if by so doing, I will get a special discount. I just want to give some money to people who will do something for me I can't do myself. That's what makes this whole big rodeo we call an economy keep ripping along.

But if they won't relent, I also want something else. I want to reply to the zombies that have to spend their days and nights asking people like me if they have special credit cards by asking them something.

Do you want me to get a card? Do you really really want me to? Would it help you out a whole lot if I did? If it's not going to make your day personally, I'm going to need some more convincing, because being asked about whether I want to open an account with your fine firm has already cost me some of my valuable time. Maybe if you could tell me why it is that you are in this place and convince me why it's not a total waste of human life, that could project me into a reality that isn't so hopelessly bleak it makes me think if you were killed in a robbery, it wouldn't be such a terrible loss. If you could let me know that you understand how soulless and deprived your job is compared with what you're expected to bring to it in terms of human interaction, that would make me want a card.

2007-12-05T21:27:00.001-05:00

This sounds like a very funny movie.
Walk hard.

The Fighting Irish?

2007-12-04T22:02:00.000-05:00

Hey, that's a stereotype and it should be changed! Let's see. What about these instead?

The Stupid Republicans
The Greedy Jews
The Wimpy Faggots
The Stealin' Niggers
The Homoerotic Butt-slappin' Coaches

Maybe we should just leave it the way it is so no one will get offended.

2007-12-02T22:43:00.000-05:00

In the United States of America today, churches and religious groups are treated with enormous sensitivity and deference by politicians and the media, a deference they have not earned. Far too often, the government and society in general bends over backwards to accommodate and encourage religious beliefs even when there is no rational reason why they should do so. The most egregious example of this is the sweeping tax exemptions granted to religion.

Tax the churches.

When three hot naked girls go to the beach, it's a lucky thing someone's nearby with a camera, so they don't waste the hot nakedness. Not safe for oppressive regimes.

2007-11-29T22:45:00.000-05:00

Good photograpy.

Good Princeton podcasts.

More good podcasts from WFMU.

2007-11-26T18:55:00.000-05:00

Read, if you dare, this collection of Disgusting Sights Witnessed At Wal-Mart

2007-11-26T12:16:00.000-05:00

dfa loves fagbug

2007-11-26T10:23:00.000-05:00

write your congressman

2007-11-25T18:43:00.000-05:00

Ever so often a hangover comes along that does not respond to over the counter medications. For this very uncommon yet serious condition, we need legislation that will solve the problem that has been caused by overaggressive domestic drug policy. What needs to happen is, for that one time a year that you over-overdo it, you can walk into a pharmacy and they have to give you a percocet. No bitching, no prescription, one pill, out the door. If you don't use yours it doesn't add up, just one pill per calendar year. How could that possibly be a bad idea?

the funny

2007-11-25T08:55:00.000-05:00

2007 Research Grant Applications for the Institute of Applied Creation Science

two great websites

2007-11-23T21:04:00.000-05:00

Every page is a dictionary when you make all words on the page clickable with lingro

And an ajax dictionary called definr. try it, it's speedy!

2007-11-22T13:09:00.001-05:00

Happy holidays! You know which one I mean, but since I found out I could have a culture war with Bill O'Reilly and the right wing psychos by not mentioning which holidays, I'm not naming names if I can help it, ever again. Hell, I might even be talking about Ramadan or some other budget motel chain.

J and I will run down to Pago Pago for dinner with friends. We didn't make it to no country for old men last night but I have it from three very good sources that when he goes to mexico it turns from a movie you have to see in the theater, to merely rentworthy. We'll be going to see it Monday.

I need a weather widget so I can show you all how great it is here every time you click my page. Right now it's 81 and partly cloudy. I sweated my ass off all summer and now it's payback time. On the condition that I'm the one being paid back, I'm a huge supporter of payback time.

I think I found a widget. Let's see.

the best dancers ever

2007-11-21T23:21:00.000-05:00

Myspace is shit so I'm sorry to do this to you. But.

http://www.myspace.com/peerpressure5

2007-11-20T20:09:00.000-05:00

Before you click on this, see if you can guess what conservatives are thinking about.

Conservapedia: Most viewed pages

2007-11-20T18:46:00.000-05:00

I am really looking forward to seeing no country for old men. I like movies about violence as long as they're not documentaries, snuff films, abu ghraib footage, or that home video where me and some pals killed that drunk hobo.

Tonight finds me preparing for the day of thankfulness. I'm offsetting the gratitude to come by taking things for granted extra much, so I won't waste it when turkey day gets here. The dinner I had was meh, ok I guess and the accompanying beverage was so-so. My health I can't complain about although I could have felt better if I'd just climbed a mountain, and even though I wasn't fighting with anyone or afraid of anything, and even though my family and friends are healthy I still have a kind of ennui about it. I mean, does it really matter that I have a good job and that every day it's more or less a huge pleasure to be alive? Not for me. Because I'm getting ready for thanksgiving by celebrating "not-a-shit-giving".

As for Christmas, everyone's getting Walker, Texas Ranger DVDs this year. I have no choice but to to support a man who I'm convinced is perpetrating the greatest surrealist performance art of our time, because no one can seriously be this stupid. Except Zack. More on him later.

Chuck Norris Roundhouse Kicks Separation Of Church And State:

My friend John looked out his window and saw his neighbor vacuuming leaves off his sidewalk and called me. He often calls me on these occasions, which I love. A couple days later John called me again. Zack had just come over to say hi and drink a beer, and related the following.

Zack's got a wet/dry shop-vac in the garage, but he looked at the leaves and they were dry. Of course, he got the regular "dry" vacuum out of the house. He used it until its bag was full, then changed it, and repeated this process until he ran out of those bags. Before she left him, his wife had kept the house well stocked, so there were now twelve full bags lined up in the front yard waiting to be picked up by the city.

It's not a very long stretch of sidewalk Zack's responsible for, but the leaves were deep and plenty remained. Zack reasoned that he would make his own vacuum liner bag, using a trash bag and duct tape.

The technical details are foggy, but when Zack switched on the vacuum the leaves stayed put, there was a smell of burning plastic and the vacuum quit working. Now it won't even turn on. After being asked, John said he didn't know a lot about vacuum cleaner repair, and that's where the situation currently rests.

Since I forgot to tell you this before, and since according to New Order it's never enough until your heart stops beating, there's another Zack anecdote, about the time he tried to defrost his frozen-on gas cap using a cigarette lighter. John was able to stop him before he killed himself, and it was a wise choice, because Zack is free entertainment too valuable to allow to explode.

That's all for now.

life lessons

2007-11-20T07:59:00.000-05:00

Don't get that thing stuck in there.

Let go of the firecracker in time.

Believe in something enough to get shot by riot police. Rock on, Olympia.

in which i prove the ability to scribble with a keyboard

2007-11-19T17:09:00.000-05:00

Here comes christmas. The stockings are hung by the chimneys, boughs of holly bedeck the hallways, and I'm looking for new excuses to get fat since inclimate weather is off the list. It was 81 and sunny today here in Naples. I was roasting in a long sleeve t-shirt.

Think about that, ladies.

Now knock it off before you get busted moaning and people start asking questions. You whore.

Decorating for the big old holiday is going well; we put up a tree today, the pipe cleaner variety has made major strides to legitimacy in my opinion.

Of all my hobbies I think radiation oncology has to be the most illegal.

Anyway, if anyone wants to go fishing we're chartering one of those first-mate manned jobs on the 26th, a week from today.

In other news, I make the world's finest bloody mary. Mentioning that will hopefully serve a dual purpose of explaining the tone of this post. Woman is a mystery, but man is a simple creature with two moods: regular and drunk.

Likewise. we have only the two seasons here. Regular and tourist. The latter is characterized by sluggish traffic on and off the road. Old people abound in their slow, necessary way, in giant cadillacs fuelled by more literal dinosaurs. Sitting stationary behind the season people at a green light it occurs to me vividly I'd like to cut the car out of the equation and douse them with gasoline directly. Imagination eases the pain.

manatee vs. matinee

2007-11-18T18:14:00.000-05:00

manatee:
also known as the sea cow
herbivore
fat
looks happy to me
evolved out of the ocean and then back in again
naked and loving it

matinee:
low price
small crowd
the latest stuff
potential blowjob from alanis morisette
large popcorn
good seats

winner:

2007-11-15T07:31:00.000-05:00

2007-11-15T07:05:00.000-05:00

brilliant: new stereotypes

it's the internet!

2007-11-14T07:31:00.000-05:00

Which fast food is the worst, by category.

Here's a sunlight map of he world. I think it might even be live.
Study shows that
Low Self-Esteem and Materialism Goes Hand in Hand

Put a ribbon on your website. If it's good maybe I'll steal your idea.

10 brilliant social psychology studies, including "how and why we lie to ourselves: cognitive dissonance"

television

2007-11-13T07:16:00.000-05:00

fuck the rules

2007-11-12T18:21:00.000-05:00

2007-11-12T18:10:00.000-05:00

Hey, Motherfucker, this is a Public Service Announcement.

Science has just discovered that Hip-Hop and Rap are totally different in many important ways.

Motherfucker.

Rapping requires writing rhymes and somehow involves turntables. Hip-Hop is a painting on the canvass of my attitude.

Motherfucker.

Rap is all about jewelry and dollar signs. They’ve even got jewelry dollar signs.

Hip-Hop, on the other hand, likes to wear this Yankees cap that I am currently wearing. Hip-Hop would like to ask that if you borrow my Yankees cap, please return it in a timely fashion.

Rap is an element of a certain kind of music. Hip-Hop, by contrast, is a nebulous cloud of energy that shares my views on Globalization.

This is a Public Service Announcement.

I’m like McGruff the Crime Dog. But I say, “Take a Bite Out of Rap.”

I have a character I call Whitey. Whitey loves sailing. But Whitey hates poor people. If a hobo points his sailboat at Whitey’s, Whitey takes evasive maneuvers.

Rap has no position on American’s foreign policy. Hip-Hop finds it imperialistic. Hip-Hop says that the CIA needlessly meddles in foreign lands. God I love music!

When I look at someone I give them a Hip-Hop rating, ranging from 1 to 10. Send me your photo and autobiography, and I will send you your Hip-Hop number. Society depends on it.

This has been a Public Service Announcement.

You can learn a lot from a dummy.

Motherfucker.

Nicholas Moore (2007)

RIP

2007-11-10T20:25:00.000-05:00

Norman Mailer died.

With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something. That's where Iraq came in...

the ugly guy can hold more eggs than you!

2007-11-10T19:45:00.000-05:00

hongry

2007-11-09T20:43:00.000-05:00

2007-11-09T20:30:00.000-05:00

Bedroom media isn't a porn site, it's just lots of streaming videos of all kinds.

2007-11-09T19:39:00.001-05:00

2007-11-08T08:03:00.000-05:00

My wife's on vacation, not as the picture implies, "vacation". I need some help thinking of things to do, so let me know all the wonders of the universe that married life has made me forget about.

Maybe I'll watch a movie.

somebody's post about fascism

2007-11-02T07:49:00.001-04:00

Have fun in your little made-up universe where the government comes to round you up and you manage to fight it off.

In the real world, fascism is when the corporations and governments work as a single entity, and you can wander around with your fucking gun all you want. In fact, you'll have to wander around, because the government/corporations took your house and your car, and no one will hire you.

At which point you'll be arrested, not as some big anti-government hero by jackboot thugs, but for stealing bread to live on, by a perfectly normal cop who's just doing his job, a job that absolutely no one except you disagrees with, so when you shoot and kill him you're getting the electric chair and no one thinks you're a hero at all.

There are different types of totalitarian governments, and assuming a fascist one operates like a communist one is faulty. Fascist governments don't put troops in the streets...they work with corporations to make sure 'the wrong sort of people' do not have any economic power, and do not have anywhere to peddle their ideas.

Modern fascist states don't even bother to kill those people, and pretending they're going to show up in some stormtrooper outfit and start a gun battle with you is insane. They'll show up with a court order to evict you from your home because you failed to pay your mortgage, because pressure came from the top at your company to let you go. Or they'll just sue you and ruin your finances.

America is not a bunch of tiny castles where, as long as you can hold off the invading armies, you will be fine. The idea that that is how the world works is astonishingly naive. Almost all the population of America lives in housing they do not fully own, they get food from places they do not control like the supermarket, they require operating in society for money to obtain said food and shelter, a society where economics are controlled by some very large players that can crush them like bugs.

And a fascist state isn't going to 'assume control', you asshat. There's not going to some insane coup, there's a going to be a slow change, which has, in fact, already happened, or have you not looked at the telecom immunity stuff? That's classic fascism. The government breaks the law, the government gets private companies to break the law, the government gives said companies huge amounts of cash, the government attempts to make such behavior legal retroactively. We've got government officials and AT&T officers leaping back and forth between each other in an incestuous loop. Your government spying on you, sponsored by AT&T. It's not 'totalitarian' yet, as evidenced by the fact Democrats managed to stop the immunity, but it is fascism, at least the start of it. (And the same thing's happened with Blackwater.)

Oh, and before you start ranting about gun control some more, be forewarned I'm against it. I'm just not stupid enough to think that the US government being slowly corrupted by business is something that can be fought off with gunpowder. Guns are useful to deter crime and to deter invasion. They aren't useful against a corrupt government in any meaningful way.

2007-11-01T07:46:00.000-04:00

Why a salad costs more than a big mac

the best website idea in a grip

2007-10-29T20:50:00.000-04:00

The internet has always had a huge blind spot for information seekers wanting to know what song a certain song is. Until now.

And here's a funny picture.

2007-10-27T20:36:00.000-04:00

where the underground wound up

2007-10-26T21:32:00.000-04:00

It can't have been more than a week ago I was reading about the issue of drug legalization. The gist of the article was that drug legalization has occurred, but that because of the way it happened, through psychiatry and big pharma, legal drugs are available in any desired quantities and varieties to those that have access to them, and the rest of the poor bastards have to resort to meth and dirty illegal drugs to perform the same sorts of functions: relief from anxiety and what have you. I wish I could find it but I can't, so for the time being unless you've read it you'll just have to trust me that it makes sense.

Then I saw the post right under this one, the parodic comic strip about how gayness has been driven underground too, in the sense that it's the very people who are the most obsessed with gayness that are likely to themselves have some homosexuality of their own to hide.

Drugs and gay sex have been driven underground, and because of the structure of our society and the way it sees itself, they've ended up right out in the open as a result. When we surrendered the adult bookstores and the functional boundaries of public sexuality we summoned the irrepressible impulse of gay sex to every suburban doorstep. Drugs that do the same things as the old illegals are now pitched to every magazine reader. It's a weird time to be alive in America.

Ted Haggard's a good public speaker, maybe he'll come out of retirement one day and make it all simple for us.

the funniest comic strip

2007-10-26T20:44:00.000-04:00

thank you
Tom the dancing bug

two great things

2007-10-26T08:05:00.000-04:00

Hot chicks with douchebags

from Cracked, The 10 Most Terrifyingly Inspirational '80s Songs

cleaning off my desktop

2007-10-23T07:58:00.000-04:00

2007-10-21T23:03:00.000-04:00

Have you been to a bar lately? It's pretty distracting. Distracting enough to make you react melodramatically, depending on on the kind of day you're having. There's so much shit going on in the form of televised sports, it's hard to focus on your company. There they are, talking to you, being your friends, and war music pours out of a hundred speakers at an incredible volume, festival on tap like the shitty beer for which hundreds of advertisements hem in your every glance. Rock and roll and trumpets and sirens screaming the signal of the gridiron, destroying all patience, analysis, and intelligence like an armored steamroller. Whether they wanted to or not, the bar has been forced by the marketplace to send a message to all who enter:

if you don't think football rules, FUCK YOU!

2007-10-17T18:28:00.001-04:00

2007-10-16T18:31:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time in a little town in Tennessee, there was a man who loved little girls. He was a gym teacher, too, so he got to touch them a lot. Many a student of both genders, myself included, learned the invaluable lessons of "gym" at South Cumberland Elementary school under his expert tutelage and in plain sight of his tight polyester shorts.

Some kinds of affection between men and children aren't as legal as others, and things being what they were it eventually came to pass that the old gym teacher got busted for the bad touch. He is Charles Rankhorn.

Sorry, Charlie.

I am Charles Rankhorn's mug shot.

2007-10-13T07:10:00.000-04:00

Top Ten Signs You're a Fundamentalist Christian

The official god FAQ

print

2007-10-11T08:02:00.000-04:00

Why we curse by Steven Pinker

2007-10-08T19:38:00.000-04:00

What do you call an American who votes Republican and isn't a millionaire? A "Sucker."

art

2007-10-08T17:22:00.000-04:00

san salvatore

ied

2007-10-08T11:11:00.001-04:00

magic is real!

2007-10-06T07:54:00.000-04:00

One of the more pleasant things about living in this part of Florida is that billboards are illegal. That means I don't have to see what I used to see in Minnesota; literally half of the hundreds of billboards advertised right-wing talk show hosts and country music stars which played on the same stations owned by the same company whose logo rode low on the billboard itself, Clear Channel. Drive a little way from the city and you see billboards like the ones in this link:

Pro-life billboards

My question is, what happens when the guys who pay for these watery, dopey advertisements, stop? Are we going to have a situation where people forget that babies are magic, life is a miracle, and fetuses are hand-made by Jesus, down's syndrome and all?

I think that they must actually consider this is the case, at least on some level. And since it's the level that people have to drive underneath time and time again each day of their impulse-ridden lives, it's the only one that matters.

What an incredible insult to the intelligence of everyone these things are. How preposterous that they continue to sit there.

Or if you think about it this way, what a fine testament to the tolerance of people who can think and continue to put up with people who can not. I take comfort in that.

2007-10-05T21:08:00.000-04:00

my challenge to president bush!

2007-10-05T07:50:00.000-04:00

Eat this hot pepper, tough guy! Since you're so tough. I bet you won't. Weenie.

Go ahead and show us what a big bad commander you are and grab that pepper and show us who's boss, mister big shot. Want my support for the war? Eat that pepper and I'll support any damn thing you want. But you won't. Because you're too chicken to respond to the challenge on THIS blog. You can't hang and you know it.

And that's why my blog is superior to president bush.

Q.E.D.

nothin' but smiles

2007-10-04T17:38:00.000-04:00

Today someone drove seventy eight miles to where I work so I could do a job that took me five minutes. It might have taken someone else a little longer to do, but mainly it's just a watch thing that almost no one who didn't know watches would understand. The owner of the watch was told that where I work was a good place, so she jumped in her car and came over.

I got to thinking as I left that right now, people are coming to me because of where I work. Eventually that will switch over, and different people will come to where I work because they've heard I work there. And that made me pretty happy. So here's a picture of a kitten with a dildo over it.

Today, 10/4, has been and continues to be national trucker day. Get a trucker to honk at you with that loud-ass horn of his! Ladies, don't be stingy with the titties: flash a trucker and party down! 10-4, good buddy!

2007-10-04T02:04:00.000-04:00

“atheist” is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don’t need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We simply do not call people “non-astrologers.” All we need are words like “reason” and “evidence” and “common sense” and “bullshit” to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion...let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves “atheists.” We should not call ourselves “secularists.” We should not call ourselves “humanists,” or “secular humanists,” or “naturalists,” or “skeptics,” or “anti-theists,” or “rationalists,” or “freethinkers,” or “brights.” We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

The Problem with Atheism

2007-10-02T07:43:00.000-04:00

The secret. It's a book from Oprah-land, a housewife-friendly feel-good motivator. I hope you've heard of it, because I don't have time to get you to agree with me that it's ridiculous. Like left behind and the celestine prohecy, it's essentially a book for people who don't read books. The secret is apparently that you attract what happens to you by the way you think. It's your classic mystical emergence mantra premasticated for a target audience: reality itself derives from the prophecy within you! See how much power you have after all? Am I right, ladies?*

Time saver, I put the footnote right here! *Maybe that's what Oprah's whole thing is, boiled down to a single line. It's "Am I right, ladies?" but without meaning to be funny, and not interpreted as such.

It only takes about a tenth of a second by my watch to ponder the important question, by which I mean "the one that eliminates the legitimacy of the entire scenario": So people who have pain in their lives are attracting it with their thoughts?

No.

The secret deserves no more space here. But I did see yesterday that a group session is being held next week, for people to get together and discuss how to live the secret. It was in a psychiatrist's office, where I had to go, uh, pick up a friend, and it made me think that my friend needs to consider getting an appointment elsewhere. The secret crossed with mental health is like sports crossed with bars. I'm always wondering if there's a bar anywhere without a flat screen tv and sports on. Just give me a bar, people, and just get the secret the hell out of the office. My friend, though, sees a different person in that office than has anything to do with the "living the secret" meeting, so it's not a dealbreaker.

I include the following picture because it's a great piece of advertising, not because it fits in anywhere in the story. Read: it doesn't. Blow this up. It's freaky.

In other news, I started taking lexapro the other day because I wasn't doing my part to support big pharma, and that had to change. I don't know if it's possible pharmacokinetically speaking, but during the night I had the happiest dream I can remember.

2007-10-01T09:52:00.001-04:00

2007-10-01T08:29:00.000-04:00

The only terrorist most Americans will ever encounter is a policeman with a badge, nightstick, mace and Taser.

America’s Police Brutality Pandemic

2007-10-01T08:10:00.000-04:00

The typological array’s inherent ability to depict prevalence and repetition make it the perfect technique for examining the excess, redundancy, and meaningless freedom of our current age of consumption. Part of my intent with this work is to answer the question implied by the title of Robert Adams’s book What We Bought: If there is some kind of big sellout occuring, what are we getting in the deal?

Ridgemont Typologies

the best thing you'll see today

2007-09-30T12:45:00.000-04:00

Unless you're looking at ME, that is.

Pictures of cities from the mid-20th century

2007-09-29T06:15:00.000-04:00

Little Larry, patron saint of the blog

crime

2007-09-27T07:02:00.000-04:00

Sunny Florida is home to many criminals. Most of them, like me, restrict their activities to traffic violations. Oh, how we speed. For the more serious criminal there's burglary, and for the foolhardy, doing it while people are home.

Last night someone attempted to get in here, no doubt to steal my passwords and sabotage my blog. How heinous. Little do they realize there is no insult to which I have not already subjected it. Who's laughing now, burglar Bill?

My lovely wife discovered the damage to our deadbolt this morning when her key didn't fit on her way out the door. Neither did mine, and since locks are notorious for the sameness of function and idiosyncrasy our deduction of the cause was quick; today I have to dick around and get the stupid property company to call a locksmith and tell me how to program our burglar alarm, which has been sitting on the wall doing nothing for months except reminding me what a lazy ass I am for not knowing.

Maybe the would-be burglar saw how awesome I am and wants to hang out with me. To them I would say as I say to you all, email me and make an appointment like a civilized person. Breaking in in the middle of the night does not confer good discretion.

No children roam about my home; hence the gun at my bedside is loaded. I doubt getting killed by myself is the goal of anyone, because I'm the exact guy you wouldn't want to be the one who killed you. I'm too friendly, too genial. I brush my teeth twice daily, make introductions, pick up tabs. It would be a disappointment. Besides, there are quicker ways to die that that don't involve breaking in places, and humans tend to follow the path of least resistance. I don't want to kill anyone a lot, but I don't want to die even more.

something's not right at Forepaugh's

2007-09-26T19:05:00.000-04:00

Next time you're out to a fancy dinner at Forepaugh's in Saint Paul, know that the people doing the dishes off of which you dine are meth addicts, nearly toothless zombie-people who have scratched almost all the skin off their arms. Please pass more of that delicious gravy. Where broad smiles gleam and photographs of governors grace the walls, mere feet below tweak the living dead, shakily, uneasily, and with declining possibilities of any future at all. Bon appetit!

The moral of the story is, the more complete a class separation succeeds in being, the more dehumanized all involved become. In a society that isn't deeply sick, you might not want to have dinner with the dishwashers, but is it too much to expect not to be afraid to?

10 rules for dealing with the police

2007-09-21T19:44:00.000-04:00

1. Don't Talk.
Do not say a word to the officer. Just shut up! I cannot stress to you the importance of this rule. Do not talk! Do not attempt to convince the officer of your innocence. Everyone is innocent, no one should be arrested and no one should be in jail and that is all the officer hears all day every day. He / she does not care generally whether you are innocent or guilty and there is nothing that he / she can do at this point. Most times, when people speak to officers they say something that makes their situation far worse. Keep your mouth shut, there will be plenty of time to talk later.

2. Don't Run.
I said above to listen to the officer and follow his / her instructions. Do not be scared and do not let the liquid courage, aka alcohol, convince you that you can outrun the twelve officers and helicopter that will track you down. Also, police become highly suspicious that someone running has a weapon and may be quick to draw their weapon. Additionally, when they do run you down expect much stronger force used to subdue a fleeing suspect.

3. Never Resist Arrest.
Perhaps the most important thing not to do is touch the police officer at all! Again, sober up quick and follow what the officer says. Many people attempt to bump the officer or swat an officers hands away. This often falls under the assault statutes and now a minor misdemeanor arrest becomes a FELONY. Thus a reckless driving charge leads to a year or more in state prison. Additionally, touching the officer in any way can lead to a baton in the mouth.

4. Don't Believe the Police.
It is perfectly legal for the police to lie to get you to make an admission. The police frequently separate two friends and tell one the other one ratted him / her out. Because of the lie, the other friend now rats the first friend out. Police and detectives also state that "it will be easier" to talk now...LIES!!! DON'T BELIEVE THIS BS! It will only be easier for the police to prove their case!

5. No Searching.
Do not allow the police to search anywhere! If the police officer asks, they do not have the right to search and must have your consent. If you are asked make sure you proclaim to any witnesses that "You (the police) do not have consent to search." If they perform the search anyway, that evidence may be thrown out later. Also, if you consent to a search, the officers may find something that you had no idea you had placed somewhere, ie: marijuana left by a friend. Remember, that denying the police consent to search DOES NOT give them the probable cause they would need to conduct a search.

6. Don't Look At Places Where You Don't Want Police to Search.
Police are trained to watch you and react to you. They know that you are nervous and scared and many people look to the areas that they don't want the police to search. Do not react to the search and do not answer any questions. LOOK DOWN AND KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!!!

7. Do Not Talk Shit to the Police.
I don't care if you have been wrongly arrested and the true culprit is standing in front of you. Don't talk shit! Police hear all day that my dad is the the Governor's Assistant's Intern and I will have your badge for this! Police have a lot of discretion in the upcoming charges brought. Police can add charges, change a misdemeanor to a felony, or even talk to the prosecutor that is ultimately prosecuting you.

8. If Police Come to Your Home, Do not Let Them In and Do Not Step Outside Your Home.
If the police are confident you have committed a felony, they are coming in anyway, because they generally don't need an arrest warrant. Make it clear to the police by stating: "No you may not come in", or "I am comfortable talking right here", or "You need a search warrant to enter my home." If they return, your attorney can arrange for you to turn yourself in should that be necessary and you will spend no time in jail between the hearings.

9. Outside Your Home Arrested, Do Not Accept Offer to Go In Your Home for Anything.
The officer may say to you, how about you go inside and change, freshen up, talk to your wife, husband, get a jacket, or any other reason. The police will graciously escort you in and then tear your home apart searching through it. Also, do not let them secure your car. Your car is fine. Remember they are lying to you. They don't give a damn if you are really cold or if you need to talk to your wife or husband.

10. Speak to a lawyer before discussing your case with the police.
It's incredible how many people feel that they can convince the officer, the booking officer or a detective (if your case reaches that stature) that they are not guilty. YOUR CASE IS NOT DECIDED BY THESE PEOPLE. They have no affect on your records. Wait to speak to your lawyer! The courts give enormous weight to "confessions" during this stage. A suspect is almost NEVER released after being arrested.

why it's not my job to come up with science fiction story ideas

2007-09-20T19:01:00.000-04:00

Bad guys party down after building awesome weapon that triggers superdupernova which later blows up the universe.
The whole universe passes through a huge black hole which freezes everything forever at the moment the protagonist is stuck in traffic and the guy he hates most is having an orgasm fucking the girl he was always in love with.
Blue people from another planet try to "fit in" in high school.
Three brown haired boys find a meteorite, it turns two of them albino. The third has a terrible secret!
There's a time machine that only travels backward. The main character tries to figure out how to use that to his advantage, fails by arriving at historically opportune moments in dreadful microcosms. Eventually arriving in prehistory, he's totally fucked.

green morning

2007-09-20T05:50:00.000-04:00

For Nobel laureate Francis Crick, of the Salk Institute in San Diego, dreams are nothing more than random attempts to clear from the brain unneeded or even harmful memory. Crick claims this clearing activity is a necessary step to reset the brain for the next day, much as one erases old data from a floppy disc before reusing it.

That's like saying "...much as one erases pesky dinosaur stains from your finest wooly mammoth rug before reusing it." I'm not sure what the rules are governing the use of an analogy to describe another analogy, but my logic doesn't stray into the experimental. This article's about ten years old, still during the lifetime of Francis Crick, a man who as much as anything was in the right place at the right time; a circus clown and a midget could have discovered the structure of DNA in the conditions Watson and Crick did. But it was them, and as a result they would be cultural touchstones, elevated to the rare pedestals that allow the description of impenetrable phenomena like dreams as "nothing more than" whatever they like.

"Hi. I'm Francis Crick. You may remember me from such events as, oh, I don't know, THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT OF ALL MANKIND! [A small, overworked brass ensemble wearily plays Crick's chosen triumphant theme music. One of them coughs. Crick looks over his shoulder disapprovingly.] And I am here to tell you that these, these DREAMS as you call them, are nothing more than a mere trifle! I cast off your old ideas as a molting crab sloughs off its shell; they are to me the mouldering and withered failure of the past! Pah!"

Nonetheless I woke up thinking about the above dream theory, having just had a series of dreams "starring" people I've known from different times. What I'm wondering is, according to this theory, is the information in your dream what the brain's trying to get rid of, or is it representative of other information that the brain's trying to get rid of? Because that second option has to be one of the great cop-outs.

Do recurring dreams verify the recycle bin theory inasfar as harmful/unneeded goes, and if they don't, are they only seeming not to? Is this gap in what can be said and what can be measured created by a logical leap which can't be neatly laid over a thing as impossible to assimilate as dreams are? Exactly how hard does one have to work to make this theory make sense before they have tried too hard?

Maybe it's the theme, not the characters, that is the "problem", maybe the characters themselves are "it"; but any theory that's unassailable is also untestable, and science without experimentation is, well...

I'll grant you this, the theory definitely would explain my recurring nightmares of being in a TGIFriday's and not being able to leave. For those of you that are just tuning in, I once worked in one of those restaurants, the worst one in the world, and to this day I dream I try to leave out the front (the only way out) and it opens into the back of another TGIFriday's. This generally goes on until I wake up in a panic. It's a hilarious, foolish place, yet it terrifies me to the core.

The dreams I'm thinking about are the ones with people in them that I haven't seen in a long time, and I resent the notion that these people, whose images are very real and contain many useful lessons, are kicking around in there unneeded and harmful.

I think that things that bother us bother us for a reason, and that we need to be vigilant in our self-affliction and steady in our doubt. Just because something's harmful doesn't mean you need to ignore it, like a bear beyond the light of your campfire, and as acceptable as is any theory that casts broad assumptions about what's unneeded and harmful and floppy discs, I would think just as valid any theory encompassing the brain's tendency to cultivate itself in its own terms. All brains, however unusual, consider themselves to have a system that's working so far.

Who's to correlate dream imagery, which may be the faintest trace of anything in the entire universe, with one reason for being rather than another? I'd hope people would try, and they are, but if we could keep the focus on the measurement of continuous variables instead of grandiose proclamations about the nature of everything I'd feel better about it.

2007-09-19T18:33:00.000-04:00

57 bits of wisdom that anyone can pick up simply from playing video games

QVC disasters

2007-09-17T17:02:00.000-04:00

Falling off a ladder

the famous samurai sword incident

ham vs. jewelry

another ladder

2007-09-17T16:32:00.000-04:00

A handful of awesome stuff:

brain milk

2007-09-16T16:30:00.000-04:00

Every time I see this:

It makes me think of this:

The revolution will be televised, and will end in time for Wheel of Fortune.

Just once, I'd like to see the person walking a dog, only the person's naked and the dog's wearing a jogging suit. Then the person could squat and crap, and the dog could smile politely at me. That's a dog I could really be friends with.

the good old days

2007-09-16T13:35:00.000-04:00

Oh hello there. Didn't see you sneak up on me. As long as you're here, why not step into a magical time machine, and read some quotes from back when President Clinton was committing troops to Bosnia...

"You can support the troops but not the president."--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)"

American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."-- Governor George W. Bush (R)-TX

Stolen from some site called young turks

read read read

2007-09-15T07:58:00.000-04:00

Good photography

Why is the systematic refusal of evidence-based, reason-fuelled conclusions about human and natural realities - from genocide and 9/11 to global warming - so persistent? Keith Kahn-Harris investigates.

Britney Spears gets her titty stuck in a paper shredder. Link missing.

László Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer. He is marching directly against what the age is about: that literature should become part of the entertainment industry. He is failing to adapt smoothly to what is going on. This art is powerfully pitched against the intention to skim through life laughing or just sticking it out as best you can without taking any particular risk.

Which leads us to this:
The central image of The Melancholy of Resistance is an enormous truck that moves at funereal pace through the half-lit streets of an obscure town in eastern Hungary. Contained within the truck is what is proclaimed to be The Worlds’ Largest Giant Whale...

Wal-mart shoppers rejoice as god opens northwest passage to cheaper shipping from China.

snapshots

2007-09-13T18:53:00.000-04:00

Remember "where were you", my post two days ago about how the question itself has taken on a life of its own?

Check out this document: http://www.scribd.com/doc/282415/Awesome-Military-photos-of-the-Twin-Towers

I quote the last page of it for those who have gotten burned when clicking links from here:

Yep, some people just want to forget. I think it's "high time" these memories were re awakened. How about you? Ron Burch, August 8, 2007

These amazingly familiar images of destruction have little to offer my imagination. I'm far more interested in this slideshow as an example of what actually affects my life, which is the mindset of those millions of true believers who dependably react to shock in predictable ways. Like the guy who wrote this and hasn't spent enough time doing fancy book-learnin' to construct any kind of coherent argument, or even to use the language (I will give you, yes, you, ten bucks if it's not the only one he speaks) correctly.

What interests and terrifies me is what this man's mind looks like. How can he think anyone's goal is to forget something? Take me for example, a person who complains about the repetitious parading of the same images, an endless exhibition that never becomes a discussion about what it means and what ought to be done about it? No, I'm not trying to forget anything, I'm just frightened by the monolith of resistance to do anything but worship every decision the military makes to go git 'em, regardless of who they are. So where has he been getting his information from?

Ok, now for a little us and them from my side of the street. People like me are sick of people like him sticking his flagpole in a national disaster like it's something to be proud of. He thinks somebody's winning something, or maybe losing it, if they don't pay heed when HE SAYS SO. How can one explain the appalling subhuman leap that equates this man's satisfaction with rubbing "their" face in 9/11?

My only theory: the world of a paranoiac is full of "thems." In the case of nine eleven, the first "them" was the people who had done this awful thing. The second wave of "them" was the unpatriotic ones whose reactions didn't match up with their own. So is the country full of paranoid people who are suffering from an inability to conceptualize what other people might be thinking? It can't all be that simple, but it's still a decent guess.

Aside from this theory, my astonishment and incomprehension is complete.

I can't abide being wheedled by someone who has nothing to say. Ron Burch can't read and write and yet he's preaching at me, just like a bumper sticker arrests the attention of anyone literate and unfortunate enough to look at it. This kind of oversimple tagging and branding serves to shred mental fabric, to stunt potential growth, and to therefore subdue and prevent mature, thoughtful discussions about anything. Ron Burch is what makes stupid happen. Way to go, dickhead.

Now I'm going to go think about something other than September eleventh. If it's all right with Ron Burch, intellectual midget.

life is complicated

2007-09-13T07:22:00.000-04:00

In far away lands that suck, women have to put on ridiculous getups so that men with poor impulse control won't want to fuck them.

In America we have our own forms of man repellant that are just as effective.

2007-09-12T07:52:00.000-04:00

2007-09-12T07:43:00.000-04:00

The title of these remarks consists of the two terms that bring us together in this Workshop, "Religion" and "Media", and in the middle, not the "media" but a third term: Repetition. A term that is not usually associated with the other two but which, perhaps, contains a key to their enigmatic and yet indissoluble relationship.

Religion, Repetition, Media

the cognitive neuropsychiatry of religious belief and experience

2007-09-12T07:39:00.000-04:00

The claim that religious belief is delusional is evaluated using a current cognitive neuropsychiatric model of delusion formation and maintenance. This model explains delusions in terms of the conjunction of two cognitive deficits—the first a neuropsychological deficit giving rise to an anomalous perceptual experience, the second a deficit in the machinery of belief evaluation.

Hallucinating God, pdf

where were you

2007-09-11T18:36:00.000-04:00

This morning, someone asked me where I was. They didn't even say "You know", even though not saying it was even worse than saying it. I realized I was dealing with someone who was just trying to be nice and say the right thing, so I spared them my most cynical and cruel rejoinders, merely replying as was the case...

I was asleep. I was going to buy the Bob Dylan album that day and my psycho girlfriend called me and said "America's being attacked!" I asked her what she wanted me to do about it and hung up, then went to Figlio for Joe's eggs (one of the great dishes of that part of town), and watched the planes crash about eighty times, then went home. The year after that where I was was somewhere being asked where I was that day. And then you know what? The year after that, the same thing happened. And the next and the next and so on.

Then I stopped talking, just short of saying "eventually, today, six years later, I'm starting to think I'm going to be answering that question every September eleventh for the rest of my life, and that maybe we ought to just call it WHERE WERE YOU day", because that would be, you know, mean. But really, and you can tell I mean it because of the pitiable note of hope, maybe making the asking of "where were you" what's expected is the only way to get people to realize how OBNOXIOUS and REPETITIVE and ULTIMATELY MEANINGLESS it is. Yeah, some fanatics knocked a building or three down. Did ANYONE learn anything from it that made anything better AT ALL? That would be worth celebrating, but as a nation, our reaction was a million pejorative adjectives you can read anywhere on the internet. Not the least accurate of which is cowardly.

Also, this is the birthday of my mother-in-law, so Happy Birthday, Sue! I'm having a beer for you right now. Looking forward to having you down. And I promise not to ask you where you were.

This post brought to you by Pabst Blue Ribbon, selected as America's best in 1893, back when standards weren't what they are today.

2007-09-11T07:38:00.000-04:00

Church services always started off quiet enough with the organ playing and parishioners quietly whispering greetings and shaking hands. But among the kids, there was a kind of electricity in the air. Half of the time, we could barely contain ourselves. We knew that if things went well, it was likely we’d see some crazy ass shit.

Miracle at Pentecost

Depressing documentary about heroin in San Fransico

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism:

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

defining life

2007-09-10T07:38:00.000-04:00

There are smart people working very hard to say for sure what can and cannot be known. They deserve credit for this effort, and since Glenn Beck is busy doing other things (maybe trying to invent a meat popsicle!), I'll just give them a mention here.

One of the chief problems with the modern world is deciding what is credible. With every side being treated equally so as not to say, insult someone's irrational belief that they will vanish from their bumper sticker-bedecked Astro van, it's easy to imagine a young mind that looks around it and wonders what secret currency it is that allows so much fractious logic. Is this the force of history bearing down like a heavy stone?

The part of credibility I find most fearsome comes in the form of a question: are these questions resolved in young minds before they can be properly comprehended? And I have to assume based on what people grow up into that the answer isn't no. Before I knew the word "cloying", I just had a vague bad feeling sometimes. Later I found out that it was because the music of Air Supply is not the natural state of things and I could sense the disconnection between it and my life, and it was bad, but in a way that wasn't personal; it just made me want to destroy radio stations. This is a great example of how destruction and blaming others is semi-positive and healthy, and also that words mean something. And without a modicum of intellectual rigor to navigate meaning in different senses and situations, all that's left is a vague bad feeling. I have no love for anyone who chooses the latter over the former, but can they be blamed? This is as yet unresolved, but what's not unresolved is right here in this 2002 paper which was news to me. The abstract:

There is no broadly accepted definition of ‘life.’ Suggested definitions face problems, often in the form of robust counter-examples. Here we use insights from philosophical investigations into language to argue that defining ‘life’ currently poses a dilemma analogous to that faced by those hoping to define ‘water’ before the existence of molecular theory. In the absence of an analogous theory of the nature of living systems, interminable controversy over the definition of life is inescapable.

...interminable controversy over the definition of life is inescapable. We can send the parade of ethics panelists and commentators from news "shows" (the new 64,000 dollar pyramid?) back to the cow states from which they so enthusiastically barnstormed.

The paper

cleaning off my desktop

2007-09-09T01:16:00.000-04:00

stuff that sucks

2007-09-08T07:49:00.000-04:00

Buy a statue of a Klansman!

Unidentified human remains covered in clay to make them more nightmarish I mean lifelike! Help identify them!

If no sissy PC social scientist who drives a hybrid's going to tell YOU how to view global warming ;) maybe you should join the conservative book club! High five!

What do Yoda, Tyler Durden, Gandalf, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard have in common? This person wants to have sex with them! (The only scenario that makes any sense is the person writing this has no idea what sex is or is for.)

Senator Craig tells it on the mountain

2007-09-07T18:17:00.000-04:00

2007-09-07T07:42:00.000-04:00

In the effort to retaliate against terrorists who hijacked planes six years ago with an arsenal of $3 knives, this year’s overall defense budget has been pushed to $657 billion. We are now spending $3 billion a week in Iraq alone, occupying a country that had nothing to do with the tragedy that sparked this orgy of militarism. The waste is so enormous and irrelevant to our national security that a rational person might embrace the libertarian creed if only for the sake of sanity. Clearly, the federal government no longer cares much about providing for health, education, hurricane reconstruction or even bridge safety, as the military budget now dwarfs all other discretionary spending, despite the lack of a sophisticated enemy in sight.

Why Is Bush Smiling?

"Bush is too self-righteous to see the dark humor in his denunciations of Iran for threatening 'the security of nations everywhere' and of the Iraqi resistance for 'a vision that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power,'" writes Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury. "Those are precisely the words that most of the world applies to Bush and his Brownshirt administration."

Former Reagan aide

In the administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party has achieved the greatest combination of idiocy and evil in human history.
Why this is.

essay

2007-09-04T19:57:00.000-04:00

Porn is vital to freedom, by Salman Rushdie

sure would be nice if we could read it

and another one's gone

2007-09-03T21:26:00.000-04:00

Just the usual. Not really worth reporting even. Senator Larry Craig, Idaho republican, has resigned his post amid allegations that he's a gay guy. He was caught trying to hook up with a dude in a bathroom in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. It was a sting operation being staged just to to catch guys who try to pick up other guys in airport bathrooms.

What this means is, someone's job is to sit in the airport bathroom all day and see if the guy next to them nudges their foot. Think about that for a minute.

It occurs to you to wonder why you became a cop, since today your assignment is to sit in a stall at the airport all day. Some of your other assignments have been bad, but never anything like this. You're wishing for a guy to play footsie with you; you can make this paperwork last a long time, if you could just get a nudge. Just a little one. If the guy sits down next to you and DOESN'T nudge your foot, just has an explosive stink-burst that sends ooghey gastric steam to settle into the creases of your integument, that's worse. Today it seems like there's an irritating surplus of normal people out there.

Have you been to a public restroom lately with lots of stalls? I don't know what people are eating, but it doesn't sound like that when I shit. I think it is because I am healthy and these people are not. It sounds and smells like these people's rectums are poking out their rear ends like two-foot tails that belch vinegar and fire and splash cheerfully around in a bath of rotten vomit. Eyes squint shut in there. Faces are red. In your mind's eye guts are literally busting. And even if that's not what's going on, you don't know what is; a Kafkaian state of terror prevails.

And then, as if Mariah Carey was singing sweetly in your skull (not the real, ghetto Mariah but the one that she wants people to imagine, the one that's perfect and angelic and wants you to know you can find love), a hero comes along. A foot nudges yours. You can get up now. It's not enough to have the desired effect, you think, as you swing the door open and tap your radio, but in a way, you kind of love this guy.

On behalf of some poor bastard from the Minneapolis Police Deparment, thanks, Larry Craig.

cool

2007-09-03T21:18:00.000-04:00

top two news words, updated hourly

cryptome, the best website besides metafilter

2007-09-02T17:28:00.000-04:00

I know what you're thinking: on someone's list of the ten weirdest diseases, does progeria makes the list? Yes. There could be a hundred of these and I wouldn't get tired of reading about them.

Sometimes when a girl licks something it's sexy. Other times it looks like this.

But when you're getting paid by the hour you do as you're told.

There are people who would kill for something and people who would die for something, and there are some who would do both for different reasons, but the point is that the lack of education and a suitable public forum is such that it's impossible for these multifarious groups to have enough time to talk over their respective differences and similarities. One thing that doesn't contend with this time dilemma is the machine of war, which always benefits from other people losing, dying, and maiming. Bring back the champions. Even if it didn't decide anything, it would buy us some time.

Experience has taught me that this is probably not made up, though there's no way to know for sure:

Bill Nye, the harmless children's edu-tainer known as "The Science Guy," managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.

link

I should show this to my wife. Drive your car to death, save $31,000

ho ho ho

2007-09-02T09:43:00.000-04:00

'Twas the night before war, and all through the house, not a creature dissented, not even a mouse.

All the men of war were sure as could be; they'd been willing to fight since about 1973.

The press corps stood mute by the press room with care, with hopes that big headlines soon would be there.

The graphic artists worked all through the night, so the splashy graphics would look just right.

The Americans sat in their dimly lit rooms, awaiting the pretty flashing lights and booms.

The troops got prepared for another dumb war, it was no big deal; they'd done it before.

On Blitzer, on Cooper, on O'Reilly, on Matthews! On Geraldo, on Couric, on Greta, on Paula! Happy mass murdering to all, and to all a pocket full of antidepressants and a clean conscience!

2007-09-02T00:28:00.000-04:00

Why do I get the feeling the U.S. has already decided to declare war on Iran?

2007-09-01T07:59:00.000-04:00

Andrew Brown on the pleasures offered by attack journalism:

Hunter Thompson was not just famous for his heroic consumption of drugs and production of expenses, but for the force and clarity of his hatred; in American television and radio, the way to power and influence is almost always now the mongering of hate. Sometimes, very rarely, the invective attains a quality of beauty almost independent of its object. But almost always the pleasure in reading it comes from pretending that you are the author and can be like Hunter Thompson, have that much fun and never be arrested.

Is this guy's expertise in how to appear to have expertise?

2007-08-31T08:02:00.000-04:00

great

2007-08-27T19:39:00.000-04:00

The worst colleges in the country

it reads the content. it does as it's told.

2007-08-27T08:58:00.000-04:00

Death Grip: How Political Psychology Explains Bush's Ghastly Success.

“...research we conducted after 9/11 demonstrated that reminders of death or the events of 9/11 increased Americans’ support for President George W. Bush and his policies in Iraq...”

The Denial of Death and the Practice of Dying (or: "Tasting Death")

The Allure of Toxic Leaders: Why We Follow Destructive Bosses and Corrupt Politicians—and How We Can Survive Them

"The Party Directive": Faith in Action: repeating themes

castro's dead

2007-08-26T21:22:00.001-04:00

'Cause I said so.

2007-08-23T07:58:00.000-04:00

Today's home prices can best be described as a recession in the making, but are most often referred to as a bubble. Prices have grown so much in the last decade that they are now completely disconnected from the fundamentals that have historically ruled the real estate market.

link

Some basics of information theory, whatever that is.

Vermont suspends war on nudity. Psychologically wounded masturbators, people who don't like wearing clothes alike rejoice.

Class, let's review:

2007-08-22T20:16:00.000-04:00

I have it from the head guy at metafilter that google's bots are scraping blogs every ten minutes now, so it might be useful to post that the number 876 393 4223 is texting people and asking them to call. A quick google search tells me "DON'T EVER DIAL AREA CODE 809, 284 AND 876. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION PROVIDED TO US BY AT&T. DON'T EVER DIAL..." and so on.

Hey, another thing. Anyone checking this gets bonus material. Christopher Hitchens ruining the day of religious people everywhere:

2007-08-22T19:57:00.000-04:00

Hey, it's the sky! Skymap

2007-08-21T20:18:00.000-04:00

My wife is playing a game called diner dash, in which the main character is a waitress. When I suggested that maybe she should cure cancer instead of playing a game where she's a waitress, she replied "Well, I like this game." I guess I relate this anecdote to give you an idea where is the point past which I consider bothering her would be more trouble than it's worth.

If I could go back in time a few years and tell myself I'd be in this location doing what I'm doing, and married at that, the other me would be pretty shocked, if I could convince him I wasn't some delirium-induced phantasm, which is probably what he would think given his penchant for booze and already tenuous grasp of reality. (Maybe I'd give him take him out and get him laid. That would be pretty easy. This wedding ring is a skank magnet. It's never been easier to say no thank you.)

But if I were to appear to myself from the future from a similar temporal interval and with as dramatic a shift in lifestyle, I'd be more bothered than I would have back then. Maybe because I like what is happening now more. A good deal of effort has gone into my current situation and then there's the emotional investment with my wife that I dryly refer to here as significant. If things changed now by the same factor as the previous change, I'd be justified in expecting there was a hell of a surprise coming up soon.

I suspect there's a theme developing; it may be more rewarding for me to create a situation whereby the future becomes more contingent upon the terms I've created in my daily life than to reduce my causality field to a cosmic blur, which is by and large what it was when I was bartending. A Johnny Walker-flavored cosmic blur. I knew a lot of waitresses then, and looking at their lives each day is part of why I'm so baffled that anyone would want to play a game where they are one. But hey, she likes it, so what are you gonna do?

One of the waitresses where I worked fucked the bassist of Hooverphonic. So you know. I'm somebody, dammit. One of my friends made out with Robyn Robinson. True story.

At the same time it seems like I've never given up so little to gain so much, I have to look back and if I can, try to think of things not to take for granted and so on. That was supposed to be the subtext of a couple of sentences in there but I don't think it came across effectively. It may not be rewarding to lock myself into a routine that resembles itself more each day, until I can't tell one day from the next and ultimately have to buy a corvette in order to cope.

Either of these scenarios may be the one that exists, but there won't be any way to know until after the foreseeable future. Fucked up, ain't it?

youtube monologue about faith and respect

2007-08-21T07:38:00.000-04:00

2007-08-20T14:33:00.000-04:00

Tennessee cops are tricky.

They put up a cardboard cutout of a cop with a speed gun. Once drivers started to get wise and zoomed by it, the cop stood behind it and gunned people for real! Harsh!

music

2007-08-19T12:19:00.000-04:00

bleep

boomkat