May 1st, 2004
Ah! I know! Consumerism never sleeps! To the nearest mall I must go to march in a parade displaying my most fiercest arms (being my left *and* my right, before which no tick on the blood of the worker can stand) and playing the dirgiest songs in my collection.
Join with me, my comrades! March with me for justice!
Oh, to increase effectiveness of our rightness, can someone bring some semis for us to park in the middle of the mall in order to assure we've shut down the theft by false consciousness that is consumerism?
Posted by fad at 11:28am
Oh thank goodness.
A month after stalled contract renewal talks led the voices of "The Simpsons" to stop work, both the actors and Fox are getting more "D'oh!"The series of attention getting, and massively inconveniencing, stunts I had planned to gain attention to this detail which was important to my life so should forcibly be important to everyone's life has been canceled.
Posted by fad at 9:20am
April 30th, 2004
Posted by fad at 3:15pm
Having lost several thousand monkeys myself, I can sympathize.
Serbia is trying to account for around 600 monkeys thought to be missing from a consignment imported from Africa, the daily Balkan reported on Friday.They're always in the last place you'd think, too. Plus, damn things are excellent hiders and masters of illusion. I once watched two of them as they made the Space Needle and my pants disappear, then skedaddled before when the cops should up. Damn pigs. Ruining our fun.
Posted by fad at 1:27pm
Oh yeah, and every one of the toedick splits involved in this better not see the light of day for a very long time.
Posted by fad at 1:22pm
France-style protest comes to California.
Truckers parked their rigs on a busy freeway outside Los Angeles on Friday morning, snarling rush-hour traffic for miles in a wildcat protest over high diesel prices.In other news, a record number of swear words was created this morning.
[...]
"They just sort of slowed traffic down, parked their trucks, and got out," CHP Officer Ricardo Quintero said. "They just took off in a car."
Posted by fad at 1:16pm
It's very odd to get a trackback notification from a blog whose author is seated 5 feet away.
Posted by fad at 12:04pm
From Michele:
1. Grab the nearest CD.
2. Put it in your CD-Player (or start your mp3-player, I-tunes, etc.).
3. Skip to Song 3 (or load the 3rd song in your 3rd playlist)
4. Post the first verse in your journal along with these instructions. Don’t name the band, nor the album-title.
I discover the wheel and watch the buildings go by.
You talk a little soft, turn off the radio.
I just want hear all the past times,
The rushed hours, the endless lies.
Don't become a burden, say the word and be free.
Posted by fad at 11:12am
If it's Friday, it must be a day to celebrate the glory that is love.
ond of $10,000 has been set for a 33-year-old woman accused of trying to kill her former husband by starting his house on fire.Nothing shows love better than a little violent destruction. Remember, it's always exciting and new.
[...]
The criminal complaint said Makesstrongmove used at least gasoline to light the back of Brady Twobears' house on fire April 19, 2002. He was not home. Another woman and three children were there, but they escaped unharmed.
Posted by fad at 10:53am
Admittedly humor is subjective, but reactions can be interesting.
The founder of suspected terror group Ansar al-Islam, normally cool under pressure, lost his temper when a female Muslim comedian jokingly lifted him off the ground before an audience.Ok....well, still funnier than Leno. Let's see how the gentle sir reacted.
[...]
Pakistan-born Rehman walked onto the stage, grabbed the Mullah around the hips, and lifted him up.
"A man who can be carried by a woman can't be a fundamentalist," Rehman said to howls of laughter.
Krekar, who comes across as calm and tolerant in public appearances, exploded with rage and grabbed the microphone.He also demanded that the word "lift" be erased from all dictionaries and that he be immediately provided with the information as to how many licks it truly does take to get to the center of a tootsie pop using non-infidel methods.
"She does not have the right to touch me. She is showing contempt for me. I can't accept this," the Oslo newspaper Aftenposten quoted Krekar as saying.
The mullah threatened a lawsuit, and demanded that all the photographers in the hall erase any pictures of him being lifted.
Posted by fad at 9:02am
Wait....wasn't John Kerry just saying that the administration has overplayed the threat of terrorism? Oh yeah, he did, before he didn't*.
Kerry painted a bleak picture of the danger facing Americans and suggested there could be an attack before the November election. He said every report out of Washington shows that it's not a matter of whether there will be another terrorist attack, but when.I'm glad he's at least talking about taking it seriously now, though it is sloppy to go from accusing the other side of scare mongering, then saying they aren't scared enough of those mongering terrorism. But at least it's consistently inconsistent for Kerry.
"So if we know it's a matter of when, then when are we going to stop pretending that all has been accomplished in our shared mission to keep America safe?" he asked. "When are we going to start dealing with dangers that we still know exist in this country?"
*My apologies for using this tired and already used up joke.
Posted by fad at 8:49am
Driving across state yesterday, I touched near Branson territory. The signs started about 50 miles out of Springfield, but Branson-like things infested the whole area. The most horrifying thing I saw was a billboard informing me (yes, just me, dammit!) that if I took the next exit I could go to Precious Moments Park and tour the display gardens. Oh, if only I had the time!
Posted by fad at 5:56am
This is quite interesting, and when one thinks about it, not really all that surprising.
The proportion of people who are born with profound hearing loss has doubled over the past 200 years.And what is the suspected reason behind this.
They say the introduction of sign language allowed people who are deaf to communicate with each other more easily.Advances of technology and culture must be so disappointing to eugenicists.
They say it also led to many more people with hearing loss marrying.
Posted by fad at 5:49am
Looks like that federal oversight of the Teamsters won't be ending anytime soon.
The former federal prosecutor who heads the Teamsters' internal anticorruption program resigned yesterday, along with 20 other investigators and lawyers involved in that effort, saying the union's president was not fully committed to fighting corruption.The union said it regrets the resignation and respects the commissioner even though he's a stupid, lying poopyhead.
Posted by fad at 5:39am
April 29th, 2004
Have fun, y'all.
UPDATE: I made it just fine. Actually, I'm more shocked that my car did.
Posted by fad at 12:23pm
Jim McDermott (D - A District So Safe, He Could Demand To Eat Every 5th Baby Born There And Be Handed A 6th) is mostly known to the nation for going to Baghdad to denounce the US before the war started. Yesterday it was his turn to lead the House in the Pledge. He left out "under God". Normally I wouldn't care about something so trivial, but his excuse is too stupid to ignore.
McDermott said he mistakenly reverted to the pledge as he had recited it in childhood. The phrase "under God" was added in 1954, when McDermott was 18.Uh huh. I wonder if he is sometimes puzzled why coloreds and whites are in the same schools until he suddenly remembers that Brown vs Board of Education was the same year "under God" was added to the Pledge. Plus there's this.
But in an interview last month with the conservative weekly newspaper Human Events, McDermott said he makes a point to omit "under God" when reciting the pledge.I think every American should get a dollar off their taxes for every time an elected official makes one of these ridiculous, easily disproven denials.
Posted by fad at 11:29am
Boomer narcissism is legendary. Supposedly one of the achievements Tom Brokaw listed that made the Greatest Generation so great was that it produced the Boomers. I do not know if that is true or not since I never read the book, but its not an unbelievable claim coming from a Boomer.
This is the first truly Boomer election. In 1992, it was only half-Boomer. I remember how excited the press was that there was finally a true Boomer candidate -- one who matched the template not only in age , but also in attitude -- running for President. It was their time to finally, officially be in charge. Finally they had taken over The Man from within. 1996 had no real Boomer elements, though efforts were made to make it the WWII vs Boomer election, no one really cared. It turned into the "It's Dole's turn, let's get it over with" election. The last election, though the first between two Boomer generation candidates, had the more immediate shadow of being about Clinton.
No, this election is the first time the Boomers get to show their glory, 30+ years gone, once again. For anti-war, and anti-American forces, it's always 1968. The no-nukes movement of the 80s was the exact same movement and thought process, nothing new. Our current version still uses the language and ideas of that time. They speak of "baby killers", inaccurate as a general slur then as now. They use the same music, look and rhetoric. And why not? They're Progressives, and Progressives hate progress.
For our press, it's always 1974. A couple years ago, I took a look at most of our major opinion writers. Not the best ones, but the best known ones. Almost every one either came to prominence around the time of Watergate, or they graduated from college/began career at that time. And it's not just them. I don't need to go into a lengthy description explaining how that era changed journalism and how all those that followed think in that vein now. That's why our press cannot conceive of this world in terms of its reality. They can only see it in the shapes of Vietnam and Watergate, events and ideas that happened before I was born.
I am going to be 30 years old in less than two months. We were out of Vietnam years before I was born. Nixon resigned less than two months after. At 30, I am still a relatively young man, but I am at that age that Boomer legend taught them not to trust anyone older than. I am older now than my parents were when they had me, their youngest. Most of my peers are married, about to be married, or, in some cases, already once divorced, though I haven't even successfully gotten a date yet. This may be a relatively young age, but that still doesn't mean that things that happened before I was born weren't a hell of a long time ago.
Growing up, we used to mock the hell out of Boomer obsession. Lots of jokes started with the phrases, "Back in the 60s, man" or "Back in 'Nam, man". The Simpsons even hit this in an early episode where Lisa had stolen the teacher's editions, they show one classroom with a teacher, whose receding, greying hair was tied in a ponytail, sitting crosslegged on his desk saying, "Did I ever tell you kids about the 60s?" Even into college I got a professor really upset with me over this. It was a world literature class. Then, as now, none of it made a lick of sense to me, especially the poetry, but I managed to fake through. Since one focus of the class was that many of the world's cultures had tales of commandments being handed down from on high, we were to write commandments for college classes. Yes, that passed for higher learning. One of ours was "Thou Shalt Not Revisit The 60s".
Look, questions, as well as their responses, of behavior, statements and ideas held by someone over 30 years ago can be very important in judging the character. But when those questions or events become the actual focus of the election, that is just ridiculous. I have more pressing concerns known as "the present" to care about. It's just another case of Boomer narcissism being more important than anything else happening today.
And don't be surprised if that narcissism causes many my age, and especially younger, to tune out. You want to energize the youth vote? Then try talking about stuff that happened during their lifetime, especially, perhaps, the last 3 years.
Posted by fad at 10:30am
April 28th, 2004
Posted by fad at 8:00pm
The self-loathing has won today. There will be no posts.
Posted by fad at 10:28am
April 27th, 2004
Moscow has asked the US to pay $9m in back rent for its ambassador's residence, for which Washington pays less than $3 a year.Wish I'd signed my lease in roubles.
The 20-year lease was set in 1985. But the rouble's value has since plunged by more than 99.9%, slashing the mansion's annual rent, Interfax news agency said.
Posted by fad at 5:07pm
Dissent cru....well, questioned.
One drawing showed President Bush's head on a stick. Another depicted Bush as a devil launching a missile.What? No sea turtles? This boy is a little too focused. He needs to branch out to puppets, too.
The drawings by a 15-year-old boy in Prosser were enough to prompt some questions from the Secret Service.Actually, the teacher called the cops on the kid who then called the Secret Service. It's not like the Secret Service swooped in, nor was the kid actually arrested.
Posted by fad at 2:11pm
Hey, it wouldn't be Chicago without a little abuse of power.
Mayor Daley's newly appointed buildings commissioner was accused Monday of abusing his authority to halt a major home-remodeling project on his Northwest Side block because his wife didn't like the look of it.And what use is marriage if you can't make your spouse abuse his power for you?
Posted by fad at 2:03pm
George W. Bush's destructive environmental policies continue to allow pollutants to rain down on us.
A chunk of the moon that landed on Earth as a meteorite contains a new mineralWhen he isn't adding arsenic to the water, or feeding mercury to babies, he is standing by as non-native minerals spread over the earth. Where are the environmental impact studies? Where are the hearings demanding to know the long term effects of allowing these foreign substances to muck up our delicate ecosystem? I am enraged.
Posted by fad at 1:36pm
This story is begging for left winger humor, so, as an exercise, I'll provide it.
Supporters of Ronald Reagan have begun raising money to establish a university in his name in Colorado.Right-Wing U, motto: "When Bob Jones isn't white enough."
They want to open by 2010 with 10,000 students and 2,000 faculty members and staff.Yeah, right. Even though the SAT is culturally skewed in their white privilege favor, like there are 10,000 right-wingers in the whole world who can score that high.
[...]
Officials plan to admit only applicants with SAT scores of 1,400 or above. A perfect SAT score is 1,600.
Ok, actually they'll just make a bunch of Alzheimer's jokes.
Posted by fad at 1:28pm
April 26th, 2004
Posted by fad at 9:45pm
Huh. Sounds like some of my neighbors are breaking in their new lead ski boots. Either that, or they've joined some new religion that requires the repeated dropping of bowling balls as a sacramental rite.
Posted by fad at 6:58pm
This is a very interesting twist on the internet 'meet-up' trend.
The site, whose address www.quienmeayudo.com translates as "who helped me.com," aims to bring victims together with the people who, in the words of one injured 44-year-old, "descended into hell" to rescue them.Unfortunately, this is a Reuters report.
Lists of names, ages, heights and hair and skin color are followed by poignant accounts of the carnage that claimed 191 lives on March 11 when bombs exploded on four packed early-morning commuter trains.
The authorities suspect Islamist militants with links to al Qaeda of carrying out the attacks, which injured 1,900 people.I hope they can figure out for sure who committed this murder. I'd hate for the mystery to linger.
Posted by fad at 4:48pm
Ok, the Strib has pulled the story completely. So, instead, since I dug it up, read this nice and depressing story about the man who created a technology we all use today.
Posted by fad at 2:21pm
Dungeons & Dragons is celebrating its 30th year. It's strange to think it's as old as I am. I only participated in D&D once in my life, and that was entirely to annoy and piss off the guy running the game.
This guy stood about 6'5" and weighed (he claimed) 375lbs. He was as self-proclaimed super genius who "won" every argument by never shutting up (last word type thing) or by trying to intimidate with his size. The latter didn't work so well as long as you were spry enough to jog 5 feet, after which time he would be too winded to even engage in the former. He once became enraged at me because, one evening, he was going on about how that bright object in the eastern sky was Venus, lovely Venus. I pointed out that it was actually Jupiter because it is physically impossible for Venus to appear in the east in the evening. This came up because he was off to an evening lab for his astronomy class. Someone in the group who was also in that class said the professor's first words were, "Tonight we'll be looking at Jupiter over there in the east."
Another anecdote about this jellied mountain comes from an effort to clean his dorm room. He actually did nothing, leaving the entire effort up to his girlfriend. As she dug through the piles, she would find old packages of various Hostess treats that had been there for who knows how long. Whenever she found one of these, all activity would stop, they would open it up and eat the treats. Then back to work.
The night of the D&Ding, I wasn't alone in my quest to annoy this guy. We didn't plan together; it just turned out we were both there for the same purpose. It would come to my turn, and I would say my character was cleaning his knife whilst singing softly to it. When it got to this other guy, four turns in a row we got:
"Lyle, your turn."
"I'm trying to kill everyone!"
"You can't do that!"
"Why not?????"
"Because you can't! I'm in charge and say you can't!"
"Awwww...ok, I'm digging a new latrine."
Our characters died real quick.
And that is my one experience with D&D. Oh, and I lived in the town that TSR (makers of D&D for years) was based. Worked a temp job across the street, I did.
Posted by fad at 1:51pm
On Friday, a radio show I was listening to brought up The Devil in the White City. In my post about the book I mentioned that some of the events found echo in and may have had some inspiration for events and characters in The Fountainhead. Well, I finally unlazied enough to get out my copy to see if the 1893 Columbian Exposition is referred to at all. Welp, page 45 of my paperback copy has this:
The Rome of two thousand years ago rose on the shores of Lake Michigan, a Rome improved by pieces of France, Spain, Athens and every style that followed it. [...] Its architects competed on who could steal best, from the oldest source and from the most sources at once. It spread before the eyes of a new country every structural crime ever committed in all the old ones. It was white as a plague, and it spread as such.So whether there was direct inspiration for events and characters is still uncertain, but the outgrowth of those events certainly laid her setting.
Posted by fad at 12:33pm
Look at will be burned soon at the "peace" rallies.
Posted by fad at 12:20pm
Matt Hale, whose idiotic beliefs and personality probably hurt more than the evidence, was found guilty.
White supremacist leader Matthew Hale, whose gospel of "racial holy war" was linked to a follower's deadly shooting rampage five years ago, was found guilty Monday of trying to have a federal judge killed.If only the supply of batshits like this would finally dry up.
Posted by fad at 12:18pm
Saudis are confused.
"They're mentally ill, this crowd," he said of the Islamist militants who killed at least five people and wounded 148 Wednesday.You mean that it isn't just America and its allies that they want to kill, but anyone they see as less pure than them (which is pretty much everyone)? Stunning.
[...]
"There's not one American in this entire area," he said plaintively, sweeping an arm to take in a neighborhood eerily still, its streets laced with police tape. "Not one! What kind of jihad is this?"
Saudis curse the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah and praise Hamas suicide bombings in Israel even as they pass through metal detectors and steer their cars through the checkpoints that choke Riyadh's traffic to a standstill.Woah, woah woah....checkpoints in Riyadh? I thought checkpoints were only used for oppression of Palestinians.
"This is not against invading armies like Afghanistan or Iraq. This is against a legitimate system, against civilians and traffic officers," said Khaled Batarfi, an analyst at Saudi Arabia's Arab News and a childhood friend of Osama bin Laden. "We don't see this as jihad. We have the ability to differentiate between what's jihad and what's not."That's right! Jihad is killing Americans and Jews, dammit! You need to let us define who you kill because we hate Americans and Jews too!
Oh, you know how the US pulled its troops out of Saudi territory? Well don't you believe it! The internet says otherwise.
However, postings on Web sites associated with Islamist radicals warned that word of a troop withdrawal was a lie. The infidel soldiers weren't going anywhere, the Web sites argued, it was just government propaganda.And now this amazing bit of analysis.
Some analysts argue that rhetoric against America has turned into a sort of fig leaf for all manner of political rage.Nah, that can't be. What about the root causes?
Posted by fad at 10:39am
I cannot swim. I cannot even tread water. Therefore, there are certain things I do not do. Such as dive into a river from a bridge.
A belly flop contest in the Rock River turned tragic, with one contestant missing and feared drowned.The contest was sponsered by a bar. That provides a pretty strong hint as to what might have contributed to the decision.
Three men jumped about 20 feet from a bridge into the cold water Saturday
[...]
[A friend], said he did not understand why his friend jumped from the bridge.
``He doesn't know how to swim,'' [his friend] said.
UPDATE: I removed the names from the quotes in hopes to prevent search hits.
Posted by fad at 9:18am
It's a momentous day for one who has been most supportive of this site in all its incarnations. Sad that he's such an old bastard* now.
*"Old bastard" is defined as any guy older than me, even by an hour.
Posted by fad at 12:18am
April 25th, 2004
Posted by fad at 1:36pm
Instapundit links to a sometimes too navel-gazery piece about how the Bush administration rejects the notion that the press is the voice of The People™.
And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept thatNow later on, he takes his "thesis" too far in that he can't understand how, if the president believes that, he would allow embedded reporters. The author doesn't understand that one can reject the notion that the press is necessary to speak for the people, yet acknowledge that press is very important for providing information to the people. The point is that the press is most important for providing information so the people can speak. They are not The People™'s advocacy group.
But to the press' view of themselves (I'll spare you my oft-typed bit on how they see themselves as a priesthood called to control and intermediate our access to the gods....ok, so I didn't) as The People™'s Voice, remember the debate over campaign finance before George Bush cowardly signed it. The press' main argument when citizens complained they would be silenced was that they (the press) would do all the talking for the people. Since the press, in their mind, represents the desires of The People™, then any other group must be a nasty, small "special interest". In other words, the press doesn't believe there are any legitimate needs for citizens to speak outside of it. And that condescending, anti-individualist, elitist attitude is largely what turns off a lot of those for whom they presume to speak.
Posted by fad at 12:23pm