Chrononautic Log: madness

August 16, 2006

Because if they wre, they would find this collection of Bruce Schneier fun facts absolutely goddamn hilarious. The rest of you, don’t bother . . . nothing to see . . .

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August 2, 2006

William Sanders on copyright:

1. Then (19 July)
2. Now (29 July)

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June 26, 2006

Update (26 June): So that’s one clear “no,” one “I’m scared,” and one suspect piece of beard advocacy from a known beard advocate. Maybe I should go back to the Colonel Kurtz look. (Not like I need to be any more fixated on Apocalypse Now, but even so.)

And then here’s another option.

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Everyone knows that mirror-universe facial hair is, as Wikipedia so kindly puts it, “a satirical symbol of evil and normality run amok.”

Which might explain a lot about the last couple of weeks.

Figure 1. Good. Clearly. (Reprise.)

Figure 1. Evil? I’m just sayin’.

Not sure what I think about this. On the one hand, it’s so damn sparse I think it might actually make me look younger. On the other hand, there’s something disquieting about waking up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water, having the glass touch your upper lip, and going Aaah! There’s hair on my glass!

Special bonus photo extravaganza: the phase you missed.

 
Figure 1. “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror.”

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June 20, 2006

Okay, clearly setting my Skype status to “Skype me!” was not sending the message I thought it was sending.

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June 1, 2006

What the matter is with Hegel:

He [Hegel] would have had a comment policy that read something like: you are not allowed to leave any comments until I have written my last post, in the light of which you will see that your objections to my earlier posts were mistaken.

(Insight courtesy of Dr. Holbo.)

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May 11, 2006

Kindly take your philosophical feuds elsewhere, sirs. If you have something on-topic to say here, you have my email address. If not, no one’s stopping you from getting your own weblog.

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May 6, 2006

No, I mean really WTF. Belle’s WTFs don’t begin to cover it.

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April 27, 2006

Mr. Hulan:

The Chief looks up at him and suddenly reaches his hands for Willard’s throat, trying to pull Willard down on top of the spearhead, trying to skewer him, and pull him along with him to death.

(That’s as far as I go, though, Mr. H. Infecting other people’s comment sections with memes is already giving them a vector they don’t need.)

Comments (1)

April 10, 2006

Wondering where all the Western pulps went?

Switzerland. Via Germany.

Figure 1. Unfortunately, from a quick google I infer that they’re all reprints. Might be some money in cover art, though.

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March 17, 2006

Some of you noticed the the giant furniture and the odd prominence of plastic lawn chairs in the Fasnacht pictures I took a week or two back; well, today I ran across this Fasnacht 2006 roundup, in English, and all is finally made clear, including the people with leaves on their heads.

You may have seen a lot of cliques carrying around varieties of chairs on their backs or on their floats and wondered what they were going on about. Well, the Stadt Baudepartement, responsible for conserving old buildings and maintaining the “look” of Basel, has issued a decree that all chairs used by pavement cafes and restaurants should be identical and of a standard that would exclude plastic chairs. But this unpopular move doesn’t end there — it gets worse! Where plants are used as decoration outside bars (eg in Steinenvorstadt) all plants must be of the same species. All of them!

How they are going to enforce this is anyone’s guess, but pity the poor bar owner with 40 chairs that go out of production when 4 of them are destroyed by marauding football hooligans from Grasshoppers Zurich. Not only will any injured Baslers have to go to Zurich to have their organs transplanted [see earlier in the article —ed.], but the bar owner will have to replace all 40 chairs, not just the broken ones.

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March 14, 2006

David Moles n. A hard-core grave robber.

— “How will you be defined in the dictionary?

(Via Kameron Hurley, whose Brutal Women, among other people’s weblogs, will be added to the sidebar as soon as I get some quality time away from work with a good net connection.)

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January 10, 2006

Unsurprisingly, this random Garfield strip generator is much funnier than any of the original strips.

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January 6, 2006

I’ve seen some of these before, but this is the best list I’ve run across. Many of them are not especially funny, but many are. A few samples:

• We place a spherical cage in the desert and enter it. We then perform an inverse operation with respect to the cage. The lion is then inside the cage and we are outside.
• The set theoretic method: We observe that the desert is a separable space. It therefore contains an enumerable dense set of points from which can be extracted a sequence having the lion as the limit. We then approach the lion stealthily along this sequence bearing with us suitable equipment.
• In the usual way construct a curve containing every point in the desert. It has been proven that such a curve can be traversed in arbitrarily short time. Now we traverse the curve, carrying a spear, in a time less than what it takes the lion to move a distance equal to its own length.
• The lion has the homotopy type of a one-dimensional complex and hence he is a K(Pi, 1) space. If Pi is noncommutative then the lion is not a member of the international commutist conspiracy and hence he must be friendly. If Pi is commutative then the lion has the homotopy type of the space of loops on a K(Pi, 2) space. We hire a stunt pilot to loop the loops, thereby hopelessly entangling the lion and rendering him helpless.

(I can’t help but think that this style of writing can be instructive, if I intend to continue being so brassy as to write things like “establish a metastable equilibrium that allows convex regions with real and virtual histories to coexist in four-dimensional space-time, while remaining both topologically distinct and contiguous in five-space” with a straight face.)

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December 8, 2005

In the New York Times, of all places. Documented by Tom Tomorrow.

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November 17, 2005

I’m late in jumping on the “Maureen Dowd is being a twit” bandwagon, but this piss-take from Samantha Bonar of the LA Times (via BoingBoing) did make me laugh:

Researchers have apparently found that men prefer long-term relationships with subordinates rather than co-workers or supervisors. Women, however, showed no significant preference for socially dominant men, or for socially inferior men. They appear to hanker for their peers — while, sadly, their peers are at Applebee’s hitting on the women who bring them their burgers and pies. . . .

In addition, British researchers have recently “discovered” that the higher a woman’s IQ, the fewer prospects she has for marriage. (Jane Austen could have told them that.) To be a droll, dry, wry, sarcastic or clever woman is deadly, apparently. (Yes, you may point out the example of Mr. Darcy, who loved Elizabeth Bennet’s witty repartee, but I still say he’s secretly gay.)

In other words, you can be tall, blond, thin and a former runway model, but that all counts for naught if you are smart and successful and, thus, annoying. . . .

I have therefore decided to modify my romantic résumé . . . I also have decided to limit my vocabulary to 10 monosyllabic words (not counting contractions and articles) . . . But for the most part, I plan to not speak. I will alternate between giggling and tittering. I will be vacuous as I vacuum.

The payoff will be a man who loves and wants me. Whoever “me” is. I’m sure he can fill me in on that. Hee hee.

Hey, women readers! (The ones, anyway, that aren’t otherwise attached — or just not into guys — and that may be having doubts about Ms. Bonar’s strategy.) After considerable research of my own, I’ve concluded that brilliant, opinionated, successful women (especially the ones with large vocabularies) are fuckin’ hot. Also that real women are much hotter than airbrushed blonde gynoids with implants and eating disorders. Call me!*

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* Advertised product is not a tall, dark, handsome “bad boy.” Advertised product may be from your side of the tracks. Side effects may include discussions of genre fiction, social history, astrophysics, cognitive science, and postmodernism, as well as reading books, getting up early in the morning, eating dinners at restaurants with tablecloths, spending quiet evenings at home, playing video games, and watching John Sayles and Ang Lee movies “for the fight scenes.” Some customers may also experience a statistically significant decrease in “dancing the night away.” Void where prohibited by law.

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November 9, 2005

It would explain so much:

Conventional “theories” of history teach that “stuff happened,” which is insolent and implies that we are nothing but random accidents. But Giblets has found definitive proof that history is intelligent, and has worked over the course of millenia towards one singular purpose: the creation of Giblets! Think of everything that had to happen in order for Giblets to be born! Mom Giblets and Dad Giblets had to meet, Grampa Giblets had to flee the great turducken blight back in the Old Country, Napoleon had to destabilize the Gibletsian economy with his unsound policy of weevil regulation. Yes, the birth of Giblets is so unlikely it can only be explained as the supernatural action of a nearly-divine agent acting over the course of thousands of centuries in a way that looks exactly like a bunch of random stuff!

This ingenious new theory will revolutionize the way we see history and indeed life itself! What was the cause of the American Civil War? Giblets. Why did Bismarck publish the Ems dispatch? Because of Giblets. What caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic? Political instability and economic depression which would eventually result in Giblets.

“Are you an offensive figment or a pleasant figment? Discuss.”

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October 13, 2005

Apparently when you tell google Google’s Advanced Search “Return pages written in English,” it figures you really mean “Oh, anything North Germanic, we don’t care what.”

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Update: For the two of you actually following the Ahnlund/Jelinek story, an amusing twist: Apparently it’s not actually possible for Ahnlund to resign from the Swedish Academy. Also, he’s apparently been in a snit and boycotting the Academy since 1996.

It’s oddly . . . legitimizing to know that this sort of behavior isn’t confined to our little literary demimonde. Though I’m willing to believe that Ahnlund’s Svenska Dagbladet piece was a little more coherent than Mr. Truesdale’s opus.

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October 12, 2005

So: Trying to put together a guerilla Twenty Epics reading for World Fantasy. Problem: Venue. Ideas, so far:

• Michelangelo’s coffee shop: Advantages: No friction with hotel or with concom. Disadvantages: No alcohol. Might need permission.
• Hotel room: Advantages: Easy to do. Disadvantages: Crowded, less convenient for audience, could generate noise complaints.
• Second-floor conference room hijacking: Advantages: Convenient for audience. Disadvantages: Could collide with official programming.
• Party coup d’etat: Advantages: Cheeky, beer-friendly. Disadvantages: Staging an event in the middle of someone else’s event always confusing. Don’t know if there are any good target parties.
• Hotel lobby invasion: Advantages: Cheeky, public. Disadvantages: Hotel might get irritated if we start handing out free beer.

Other thoughts?

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October 11, 2005

Chiwetel Ejiofor is the man. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I’ve got nothing against Daniel Craig, but if Sony/MGM had any balls, Chewy would be the next James Bond.

As for the rest —

Things blur together. Clearly it is pure coincidence that the outfit Annabella Lwin was wearing, Saturday night at the Paramount, was no more than a strap and a shade of blue removed from the inexplicably tattered outfit Summer Glau was wearing all through Serenity. A strap, a shade of blue, and a pair of boots. Coincidence. Clearly it was only to be expected that Mark Mothersbaugh and the Casale brothers would embrace, extend, and accelerate any fragments of science-fictionality that might happen to be rattling around your subconscious. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. And yet.

I don’t think at this point I can emotionally respond to Serenity in a way that doesn’t treat it as just one color of paint in the Pollock canvas that was this Saturday, especially since Sunday was red wine and California sunshine and mad conversation with Susan and Matt, and yesterday was hangover and not quite enough sleep and flying from summer into what on the California coast would easily pass for winter.

So what you get is the cold, clinical, intellectual reaction . . . which could best be described as a cartoon monkey in surgical scrubs with SCRIPT DOCTOR stenciled on his chest and the voice of Steve Buscemi, swinging from branch to branch through the tangled thickets of the plot, saying things like “Could we get a little romantic tension over here?” and “Listen, kid, make me care about the leads, then we’ll talk about this guy who’s only got six lines . . .”

What is Inner Script Monkey is trying to tell us? Well — Serenity was clearly a movie for the fans. It’s a high-mag zoom on overlapping segments of plot and character arc, high enough that some of the segments are optically flat, and all of them have their endpoints cropped out of the frame. It’s not that the plot wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but as a story, it was frustrating. It would have made a great season-ending two-part TV episode, but as a stand-alone film? Flat.

It’s easy to see what Inner Script Monkey would do, if there’d never been a TV show. Keep the prologue, cut the doctor and the crazy girl out of the opening sequences on the ship and the Wild West planet, make the fight scene in the bar the first time they meet the crew (making the captain’s choice to take them on contrast all the more sharply with his “I stick my neck out for no one” ethos). Show the crushes the doctor and the engineer have on one another instead of telling. Give some snappy Bogey-and-Bacall (or at least Ford-and-Fisher) scenes to the captain and the high-class tart. Give the village people more than one scene and the Oracle old black guy some more lines. Give us enough Union Alliance territory to make it clear why they’re worth fighting against, maybe a flashback or so to make it clear what the Confederates Independents went through. Give the crazy girl a costume change and a pair of shoes. You get the idea. There’s lots of ways to do it.

Script Monkey also would have had the schoolteacher in the dream sequence and the kids she was teaching, crazy girl included, sound like an actual schoolteacher and actual kids. He would have had the mad scientist sound like a sane scientist. And he would have either cut the folksy dialect or made the characters who spoke it speak it more consistently. But Script Monkey’s picky that way.

Seriously — I wanted to like it more than I did, which is a hundred and eighty from what I expected going in. I think most of the credit for that goes to the actors, not just Chewy Ejiofor, but the guy who played that one bad guy in Jade Empire, and the guy from A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, and the guy who had the cameo as the cult leader on Strangers with Candy, and the Baldwin brother who’s not actually a Baldwin brother, and the girl who’s done a bunch of TV that I haven’t seen, and the lady who probably deserves better than the work she’s got, and the girl who has really good hair, and the girl who could probably act well enough if she wasn’t being asked to play an anime character. They all tried like hell to sell it.

I don’t regret the cost of the ticket, by any means, but I do kind of regret not getting to see the movie it could have been.*

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* About that other movie, the one I didn’t actually get to see — just one question. If the Reavers are angry all the time, how do they keep their ships working? “Killing rage!! Arrrrgh! Must! Fix! Fusion! Reactor! Arrrrgh!”

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September 14, 2005

On eBay. Not really being auctioned, per se, unfortunately (unfortunately for whom? Don’t ask me) and it looks like they didn’t sell.

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September 11, 2005

My new blog. Courtesy of the Flangitizer.

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August 30, 2005

Am I the only one wondering why this NYT story, “Rape Charge Follows Marriage to a 14-Year-Old,” about a 22-year-old Nebraska man married (in Kansas) to a 14-year-old girl and charged with statutory rape, focuses almost exclusively on him and his parents, with only one quote (on college more kids [Thanks, Jed]: “But later on. Much later on.”) from her?

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August 26, 2005

You know, for only $27.99, I’m really, really tempted.

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Who knows? Maybe they’ve got Tim Powers or James Blaylock working for them. (Or Brendan Doyle himself — he wasn’t exactly Dr. Ethics, was he?)

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August 18, 2005

Hal “Smithereens” Duncan, over at the Night Shade boards:

I won’t deny that mainstream media is more than willing to jump on the easy “Sci-Fi Fans Beam Down To Glasgow“ story and exploit the freak show for all it’s worth, but at the same time, we have the masquerades and the filking and the furries and downright loons who buttonhole you in a corridor to tell you about the arcane mysteries hidden within this specific episode of Babylon 5 they’ve typed out from the video and are carrying with them in their bag (and that's a real incident I remember from last Worldcon). If crime fans all got together and wore trenchcoats and fired water pistols at each other, the media would treat that with the same Paxmanesque ye-e-e-e-es. The media exploit the spectacle of frippery, but they don’t craft it out of thin air; fandom is, for many people, partly about all that stuff, every convention a golden opportunity for exhibitionists to make spectacles of themselves. Part of me cringes, part of me says power to them; it’s not my idea of fun (largely) but po-faced puritanism isn’t my style so I’m not going to frown on it. But the subculture is absolutely begging to have the piss taken out of it.

Man, I would totally become a mystery writer if it meant trenchcoats and fedoras and water pistols.

Okay, I wouldn’t. But I would laugh at newspaper articles about mystery conventions.

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August 10, 2005

Could the web be any more useful than this? (Okay, it’s mostly about board breaking, but still.)

Meet Chris, kung fu expert and general, all-round crazy person. Sometimes he breaks concrete blocks just for the hell of it.

Meet Michelle. She’s a physicist working at the Institute of Physics, but recently she’s been learning kung fu. In particular she wants to learn how to break wood with her bare hands, and find out the physics behind the feat.

(Via Cosmic Variance.)

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July 13, 2005

You’re The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien!

Harsh and bitter, you tell it like it is. This usually comes in short, dramatic spurts of spilling your guts in various ways. You carry a heavy load, and this has weighed you down with all the horrors that humanity has to offer. Having seen and done a great deal that you aren’t proud of, you have no choice but to walk forward, trudging slowly through ongoing mud. In the next life, you will come back as a water buffalo.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

(Via Dave Schwartz.)

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June 30, 2005

Not all of Hugh Macleod’s cartoons (or his pronunciamentos on the future of marketing) work for me, but this one hits close enough to home to be worth posting.

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June 24, 2005

Here’s what Ellis remembers about the trip from Los Angeles to San Diego: not a goddamn thing. Apparently he got to the airport, boarded one of the San Diego shuttles that left every half-hour, flew for 22 minutes and landed. The first thing he recalls is sitting in a taxi, telling the driver to “get to the fucking stadium. I got to play.” Next thing, he’s sitting in the locker room. 5 p.m. By that point, Ellis had enough experience with LSD to know that it wouldn't be wearing off anytime soon; as a, uh, “precautionary measure,” he took somewhere between four and eight amphetamines and drank some water. He walked to the railing at Jack Murphy Stadium where, each time he played in San Diego, a female acquaintance would bring him a handful of Benzedrine. White Crosses. He took a handful of those and went to the bullpen to warm up.

— Keven McAlester, “Balls Out: How to throw a no-hitter on acid, and other lessons from the career of baseball legend Dock Ellis”, Dallas Observer

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June 22, 2005

From the horoscope section of The Onion, 26 June 2056 (helpfully back-propagated into 2005):

Zelazny (Sept 7—Oct. 13): Even if you do find their unique combination of style, universal competence, ennui, and raw ambition strangely exhilarating, you’d probably be a lot happier if you stopped keeping company with suicidal types, immortals, and suicidal immortal types.

Sound advice. I’ll try to take it to heart.

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June 13, 2005

I’m not going to bore you with the details of the output from the Amazing Meganame Generator, but I will say that “The Twitchy Aleph” is an all-right band name, in an art-school, collar-and-slacks, nostalgic-for-CBGBs kind of way.

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June 5, 2005

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June 1, 2005

At some point my co-workers are going to notice that I’ve been back at work for five hours and all I’ve done is surf the blogosphere trying to prolong my WisCon experience.

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May 29, 2005

Figure 1. From left to right: Campbell finalist Elizabeth Bear, duel referee (and Hugo finalist) Benjamin Rosenbaum, Campbell finalist David Moles

In order that all participants should be able to keep their dignity, the duel was naturally fought with cream pies.

(There’s a very high-resolution version for you Wiscon copyfight Campbell Award Osh Kosh B’Gosh whipped cream bukkake fetishists, too. Or Locus.)

[wiscon]

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May 24, 2005

Figure 1. Highly symbolic portrait of the author.

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.

What is Your World View? (corrected...again)
created with QuizFarm.com

I find the precision suspicious, considering how few questions they ask, but what the hell. (Via Chris Barzak. We’ll miss you at WisCon!)

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May 16, 2005

Okay, on continuity in fiction, mostly. (But from my position as a fiction writer and therefore a seeker of plausibility more than of truth, it seems to be very much the same thing.) From an excellent essay from Todd Seavey:

And then, naturally, we have the highly efficient way that normal people [as opposed, in this essay, to geeks like ourselves —Ed.] reconcile continuity errors: ignoring them. I can see a certain sensibility in this approach, but somehow I have more admiration for people like my friend Ali Kokmen (who majored in Modern Culture and Media back in our Brown University days), who is so attentive to continuity issues that he once wrote a long, thoughtful e-mail to friends about apparent contradictions in a Muppet TV special featuring Elmo. (Elmo time-traveled into his own past yet did not encounter himself. Does that mean his past self was destroyed? Temporarily displaced? Fused with the Elmo from the present? Why do the writers seem unconcerned about the existential can of worms opened up by Elmo’s cavalier toying with the timestream?) Ali once said that he felt great pride, after years of telling his wife Michelle about DC Comics’ system of parallel timelines (Earth-1, Earth-2, etc.), when the two of them watched an episode of The Odd Couple together and Michelle, on realizing that the episode contained an explanation for Oscar and Felix’s first meeting that contradicted the explanation given in a previous episode, said that the newer episode must take place on “Earth-2.” Ali beamed, “My work here is done.”

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Update: See also this hilarious bit from John Holbo over at the Valve:

Extra bonus point question: compare and contrast the situation of classicists, with all these new Oxyrhynchus texts come to light, with the Episode 3 situation. In both cases the situation is technology and effects driven. The classicists use “multi-spectral imaging,” the Star Wars people rely on special image effects, too. Who is happier, fans or scholars?

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May 5, 2005

Actually, last time wasn’t really about Galbraith; this time isn’t really about Husserl, Heidegger, and Freud.

How curious that teachers who permit into the curriculum the most experimental fiction are aggressively defensive when it comes to literature which demands as much or more: the writings, namely, of great speculative thinkers like Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud . . . I call it ‘literature’ not only to make a polemical point but from the conviction that each thinker draws on and in turn generates a text milieu of his own, so that it is not a matter of ‘knowing’ Derrida or Heidegger but of reading and steeping oneself in a corpus of critical, philosophical and literary texts which they incorporate and revise. [Geoffrey Hartman, quoted by A. Cephalous]

Yes. I know Einstein, to the extent that you can know Einstein without knowing tensor calculus. But Foucault, say? Foucault I merely appreciate.

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April 15, 2005

But, what the hell, I’d never be this good at it.

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April 8, 2005

The first rule of Book Club . . . you get the idea. (It goes on from there.)

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March 24, 2005

 . . . or anyone else who has nightmares about wandering mines.* But if the MIT Media Lab ever commercializes Clocky, I might have to get one.

(On the other hand, I’d probably have no trouble with my sleep schedule if I just spent October through March in Sydney.)

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* Believe Library Journal, not Publishers Weekly.

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March 2, 2005

Spider-Man’s Greatest Bible Stories. (Via JWZ, who probably got it from BoingBoing.)

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Figure 1. The Triphibion — for Land, Sea, and Air.

(From Tales of Future Past. Via BoingBoing.)

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February 25, 2005

Lincoln College, my alma step-mater, has put Brasenose* up for sale in order to make “space for a new bar/sauna complex.” You don’t get the Radcliffe Camera, but you do get a nice view of it. Well worth ten million quid, if you ask me.

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*Familiar to some of you Connie Willis readers as one of the two Oxford colleges lucky enough to have their own time machines.

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February 7, 2005

You’d think somebody would have coined one, if not the Greeks or Romans then some classics-obsessed European educator of the 19th century: “the sin of confusing what you said with what you might have meant to say if you had known in advance that you were going to get in trouble.” It happens a lot, and there should be a word for it.

(Phenomenon itself identified by Nick Mamatas.)

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February 1, 2005

Fig. 1. I liked things better before

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January 28, 2005

Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel

Right now, there’s a writer out there with a vision as vast as Mark Twain’s or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. He is laboring in obscurity, working with deliberate patience. He isn’t using tricks of language or pyrotechnic plot turns. He is doing the hardest work of all, the work of Melville, of Cather: He is capturing life on the page. And when the time comes, I’ll be here — green pencil in hand — to remove the excess commas from that page.

(Via Making Light.)

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December 22, 2004

Contra Plymouth University’s monkey results from last year, no less reputable a publication than the Weekly World News reports that monkeys at the Raleigh Institute, near Manchester, have successfully produced “Romeo and Juliet.”

“We’ve been holding our breath for weeks,” says Alan Ripshaw, the researcher in charge of the Monkey Project. “We knew the monkeys were getting close, but we’ve had a number of false starts.

“One time they got to the fourth act of Macbeth, before making a mistake. The monkeys also recently typed out a Thomas Pynchon novel, but that doesn't count.”

Ripshaw says he began the project because he was intrigued with the controversy over whether Shakespeare really was the author of the plays bearing his name.

“Some scholars think Bacon was the real author,” Ripshaw says. “That’s when I had the thought, ‘What if they were written by monkeys?’”

Of such thoughts is scientific history made.

(Via Maureen.)

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October 12, 2004

I’m with Fafblog on this one:

“I don't get it,” says me. “How could Derrida die? He was a social construct."

“True,” says Giblets. “Nothin is outside the text, includin Derrida.”

“Then he couldn't die,” says me. “After all if he did he would be reinforcin the hegemonic Dead Derrida/Live Derrida binary.”

“We must deconstruct Derrida’s death!” says Giblets. “Beginning by inverting the priveleged duality! Derrida is alive!”

“He’s stuffin his face with cake right now over there!” says me.

“Mmmfff,” says Derrida. “Waffff uppppf fellaf.”

“Derrida stop eatin all our cake!” says Giblets. “That cost good money!” Man that Derrida’s always been a greedy bastard.

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August 20, 2004

Since I was here till 9:30 last night trying to reproduce a bug that was causing problems for a high-risk demo that’s happening today but really in any reasonable world would be happening at the end of the QA cycle instead of less than halfway through it, maybe today’s Bob the Angry Flower seems funnier to me than it really has any right to.

But I’m laughing anyway.

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August 3, 2004

Havin’ some real deja blog here . . . I think Greg originally found this, some time back. Came up at Rockaway. Been looking for it for a while.

Confused by my own web-site.

Or ‘web-station’ as my friend Lee and I have taken to calling them. As in ‘oh, I lined-on to the interweb to inload some web-stations’.

Feel free to borrow this lingo. It’ll either make you sound really dumb or like you’re onto something new. We use it cos it makes us sound stupid.

Which is funny. Sometimes. To us. Or to amuse your friends you can refer to the internet as ‘the email’. As in, ‘Oh, I love lining on to the email. They’ve got weather and news on the email. My friend Jenny just can’t get enough of the email.'

— quoth Moby.

And speaking of web-stations, I’m soliciting suggestions to improve mine. (Not this one; the static one.) The SFWA won’t list it in its current state on account of not being “clearly identifiable as a personal author page.” Various folks have complained about the bibliography. And me, I’m not too happy with the stack-o’-boxes layout. Thoughts?

---

Update: Moby’s rearranged his journal; the entry’s now here.

Comments (3)

August 2, 2004

Via BoingBoing: Finnish (or Estonian? can’t tell) blogger Kaksoisagentti remixes Cory Doctorow’s copylefted Ebooks: Neither E nor Books to produce “Posthumans: Neither E, Nor Humans”:

I take the view that the human is a “practice” — a collection of social and economic and artistic activities — and not an "object." Viewing the human as a “practice” instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a human? — Brewster Kahle’s Internet Humanmobile can convert a digital human into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine flesh human in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a flesh human to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketHuman or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It’s ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring flesh to posthumans is that flesh humans confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this posthuman thing, owning a flesh human is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text.

I love the phrase four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine flesh human. Even Bruce Sterling would be hard-pressed to invent that one without mechanical aids. Further proof that if everyone would just listen to the ideas Cory expresses so well about copyright and new media, the world would be a much more fun place.

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July 16, 2004

Nick Mamatas is my Monster from the Id.

Mostly, these days, I like to be the voice of moderation. Nick doesn’t.

When one is the stupidest motherfucker in the room, the world is a hostile and inexplicable place.

I just don’t say shit like that any more, and barring a really bad headache or a personality-altering blow to the head, I’m just not likely at this point to turn into the sort of person who does. On balance, I think that’s probably a good thing.

But occasionally it’s nice that someone’s saying it.

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June 22, 2004

Everyone should read A Softer World.

It’s just like Red Meat, only not fucked up. (Depressed, yes, sometimes. But not fucked up. Also, not into reruns.)

(Thanks, Hannah. No, not that Hannah, the other Hannah.)

Comments (0)

June 14, 2004

Cat and Girl (well, just Girl, really) find out what Timaeus and Critias were really on to.

Figure 1. The true location of Atlantis

Read on to understand why it is that the Z. A. Simons and J. M. Allens of the world haven’t had much luck finding it.

Comments (0)

June 10, 2004

What about Ray Charles? What about Robert Quine? What about William Manchester? What about them?

Comments (4)

June 9, 2004

If I wasn’t already taking the following week off, I’d be real tempted to drive down to Mojave next weekend .

Comments (1)

May 30, 2004

I’m definitely getting the feeling the authors of Fafblog read Bob the Angry Flower.

FB: So what is Your position on the Iraq war Jesus? Does the Holy Spirit have an exit strategy?

JC: I think you’re missing the point. Acquiring earthly power for the sake of the church, making laws in my name — it’s the last thing I want. I told them my kingdom was not of this world.

FB: Is it on the moon?

JC: It’s —

FB: ’Cause we’re goin to the moon again Jesus!

JC: (sighs)

FB: It’ll be awesome!

JC: Yes, Fafnir. My kingdom is on the moon.

FB: That’s so great! Jesus and the moon, together at last. Are there robots in the kingdom of heaven, Jesus?

JC: Sure. Why not.

Comments (0)

May 20, 2004

I am so tempted by this —

— but I’m afraid too many people wouldn’t get the joke, and one of them would smash up my car.

Does that mean the terrorists have already won?

Comments (2)

May 5, 2004

Michael F. Patton provides some deeper analysis of the trolley problem.

On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.

On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones, who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge that the orphans’ bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans that will be killed would have grown up to become a tyrant who would make good utilitarian men do bad things. Another of the orphans would grow up to become G.E.M. Anscombe, while a third would invent the pop-top can. . . .

It gets better. (Courtesy of the Making Light sidebar.)

Comments (0)

April 26, 2004

We aren’t struggling to understand you. We understand you quite well. We just think your arguments blow chunks.

—— Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Comments (8)

April 1, 2004

Courtesy of Brandon “no web presence” Dudley, a truly bizarre Onion AV Club interview (that link will stop working next week; if it doesn’t work, this might, though it doesn’t at the moment) with Dave Sim of Cerebus: a clear contender for Most Screwed-Up Canadian In History. Highlights:

• [Cerebus is] the longest sustained narrative in human history

• I’m not sure that I would advise a general readership like yours to read Cerebus.

• The evidence that I see around me in society indicates that not only is thinking very much out of favor, but I’m not sure that the last couple of generations . . . even know what a thought is, having been raised to be women.

• As a central example, they don’t want to examine feminism as a philosophy; they want to re-experience it as a new phenomenon. For obvious reasons. It doesn’t work, so there’s a very strong urge to go back 30 years to when it seemed that it might work.

• Because my work discusses feminism and disapproves of feminism, it is important from the leftist standpoint to destroy Dave Sim as an individual and to ignore his work.

• I’m so used to being misunderstood and I’m usually a ‘minority of one’ that I have this compulsion to try to explain myself as thoroughly as possible — to really try to break through that Marxist-feminist sensibility that always chooses ‘not thinking’ whenever it's presented with facts that don’t fit the Marxist-feminist program.

• I don’t ‘feel.’ If I ‘felt,’ I would never have gotten the book done. I’d be off ‘feeling’ somewhere. My best intellectual assessment of the completed work is that I said exactly what I wanted to say, exactly the way I wanted to say it.

• At this point, I think history will do most of the dirty work. Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization.

• Arguably, over the next year or so, [my personal worldview] will probably result in a Cerebus version of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for those sorts of people who would rather collapse themselves around a lie than face the possible existence of an alternate truth which suits the given facts. That is to say, leftists.

• [W]hen you’re dealing with feminism, you’re dealing with women, and that means if you frame a persuasive argument with which they disagree, they will, instead, indulge in character assassination.

• Married guys, boyfriends, newly divorced guys, and guys — like Cerebus — who are permanently stuck on a chick that they might never even have slept with, or they might have broken up with 10 years before, are like that. Part chick. . . . I finally stopped hanging around with guys when I realized that they were all just waiting for the next one to come along and stick an ice-pick in their brain.

• I got closer to the end of Cerebus, I started examining it as if it were a math problem. I got X and Y figured out and made some progress structurally, and then I hit the brick wall of feminism. I live in a society that believes feminism is workable. They literally won’t read anything unless it’s founded on an outright lie. . . . I’m afraid I’m going to have to wait for my society to grow up.

Does anybody know what he means when he says “feminism”? Does anybody even know what planet he’s been stationed on?

Comments (9)

February 18, 2004

Twin Cobra Fist, Drunken Temple Boxing, Hidden Monkey Hands — Rummy’s got it all.

Figure 1. Donald Rumsfeld demonstrates his Grimace Palm technique.

How did Carter ever defeat Ford with Rummy by his side?

(Via Electrolite Sidelights.)

Comments (2)

February 8, 2004

Help! This café is full of Teds!

Comments (0)

February 4, 2004

ovnílogo, -a: ufologist.

Comments (2)

January 15, 2004

No, really.

Itinerary:

• Day 1 — Depart your Hometown to Moscow.
• Day 2 — Arrive in Moscow. Transfer to Hotel Russia. Sightseeing Moscow. Overnight in Hotel Russia front of St. Basil's.
• Day 3 — Sightseeing Moscow in morning. Afternoon flight to Murmansk. Board Yamal Icebreaker. Overnight aboard Yamal.
• Days 4-7 — Enroute to North Pole
• Day 8 — Spend day at the North Pole
• Days 9-11 — Enroute to Inner Continent
• Days 12-14 — Travel up Hiddekel River to City of Jehu.
• Days 15-16 — Monorail trip to City of Eden to visit Palace of the King of the Inner World
• Days 17-18 — Monorail trip back to City of Jehu
• Days 19-23 — Enroute from City of Jehu back to Murmansk.
• Day 24 — Flight Murmansk to Moscow. Connecting flight back to your hometown.

*Please note that if we are unable to find the Polar opening, we will be returning via the New Siberian Islands to visit skeleton remains of exotic animals thought to originate from Inner Earth.

I’m not optimistic about the Jehu-Eden Monorail, or for that matter about the Kingdom of the Inner World in general. I’ve read a bit about the Hollow Earth, and from what I’ve heard it’s mostly full of savages, prehistoric monsters and man-eating giant ants. Let’s hope they’re prepared.

(Courtesy of Jay Lake.)

Comments (4)

January 9, 2004

I don’t know what a Hades Palmetto Cationic Entry Fuse is, or does, but I’m not putting anything with a name like that anywhere near . . . er, the part of my body that the spammer who used that subject line seems to think could use one.

Comments (0)

January 8, 2004

Apparently in 1998 the city of Woking installed a full-size Martian fighting machine to commemorate the 100th anniversary of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

Figure 1. The Woking Martian

No word yet on whether Grover’s Mill is planning anything for 2038, but the US Army has just doled out $2 million-plus in grants for the development of a gasoline-powered mechanical dog.

Figure 1. Boston Dynamics “Big Dog”

Fossil-fuel robots to fight over oilfields — I have to admit that in this twenty-first century, that’s starting to look like a very twenty-first-century idea.

Comments (0)

December 3, 2003

I’m half-tempted to recommend this Onion story for a Sidewise Award:

New Alternate-Reality Series Puts 12 Strangers
On Island Where South Won Civil War

LOS ANGELES — CBS executives announced Monday that they have begun filming Antebellum Island, a new “alternate reality” series in which 12 strangers compete for $1 million while isolated on an island still under Confederate rule.

“Set to air in the spring of 2004, Antebellum Island gives us the unique opportunity to play with both social dynamics and recorded history,” CBS Chairman Leslie Moonves said. “The contestants on Antebellum Island will spend 60 days braving the elements, each other, and the unfamiliar customs and practices of a 21st-century Confederate States of America — all for a chance to win a cool million.”

Added Moonves: “That's one million in Union dollars, of course!”

What I’m really looking forward to, though, is The Man In The High Castle In The Outback, if it ever gets the green light.

Comments (0)

November 26, 2003

Sometimes Google serves up the weirdest stuff:

Long viewed as a symbol of communistic repression and a threat to the West, the flag of the Soviet Union, with its Hammer and Sickle, attests to the prophetic destiny of God on this great nation.

• Hammer: “Is not my word like fire and like a hammer that shatters the rock?” Jeremiah 23:29
• Sickle: “Thrust in your sickle and reap for the harvest of earth is ripe.” Revelation 14:15
• Star: “Until the day dawns and the Morning Star arises in your heart.” 2 Peter 1:19
• Red Flag: “The blood of Jesus.” He has redeemed every nation . . . every nation shall serve Him. 1 Peter 1:19

— Jay Rodgers, “Mikhail Gorbachev: The True Meaning of the Soviet Flag”, April 1991.

Comrade Rodgers is apparently also the distributor of the educational videotapes “God’s Law and Society” and “The Beast of Revelation Identified”.

Comments (3)

November 24, 2003

BUDAPEST (Reuters) — Police on Friday removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself at least a year ago after builders and students at Budapest’s University of Arts had initially mistaken it for a modern sculpture.

The body hung for a whole day in a garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers realized what it was and called the police, local media said.

The building, in campus grounds crowded with different types of sculpture, had been closed five years ago pending reconstruction work.

(Courtesy of Charles Stross.)

Comments (0)

November 17, 2003

So I broke down last week and ordered a copy of the A Shoggoth on the Roof cast album, and now I’ve got “If I Were A Deep One” stuck in my head.

If I were a Deep One
Blub-blub blub-blub blub-blub-blub blub blub-blub blub-blub blub-blub-blub
All day long I’d swim beneath the sea
If I were a De-eep One

I should have known better than to start, as Nanny Ogg would say, paddlin’ with the occult . . . Yaa Cthulhu! Cthulhu F’thagn!

Comments (0)

November 10, 2003

Someone at Electronic Gaming Monthly — probably someone about my age — had the bright idea of turning loose some of today’s twelve-year-olds on yesterday’s video games, with predictable results:

TIM: My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball.] Whoops.

You’d think at thirty-one I’d be starting to get used to the generation gap. Kids today. I mean, I was never that good at Pong.

Comments (5)

November 5, 2003

John & Belle, who have a blog called John & Belle Have A Blog, have found a fantastic example of why, despite postmodernism’s several useful ideas and techniques, I can’t be bothered to keep up with the state of the art.

“What if . . . one should precisely throw out the baby with the bath water and renounce the very notion of erratic affective productivity, and so on as the libidinal support of revolutionary activity?“

I say: hasta la vista, erratic affective baby! Limp on, revolutionary activity!

(Courtesy of Making Light.)

Okay, let’s be honest: I just like saying erratic affective baby.

Comments (1)

October 23, 2003

A fantastic collection of vintage newspaper advertisements, 1920s through 1960s, culled from the microfilm archives of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Fig. 1. Oshkosh B’Gosh: The World’s Best Fitting Overall. 1939.

The collector, Mr. James Lileks, has some other fun stuff, too, like “The Gallery of Regrettable Food” and “The Grooviest Motel in Wisconsin.” Worth checking out.

Comments (0)

October 3, 2003

If you’re not sure, consult BS 6008:1980 (or its equivalent ISO standard, ISO 3103:1980; but I can’t find a bootleg copy of that one on line, so it’ll cost you forty Swiss francs). A sample of the useful information contained therein:

The flavour and appearance of the liquor are affected by the hardness of the water used. The water used for the test should therefore be similar to the drinking water in the area where the tea is to be consumed. In exceptional cases, for example when comparative tests are requird to be made in different areas and it is not possible to procure similar waters or suitable ordinary water for this purpose, distilled water or deionized water may be used. It should be recognized, however, that the reslts will not then necessarily bear a true relation to the flavour of the liquor produced with ordinary drinking water, since the mineral salts in the latter may modify the flavour and appearance of the tea.

I’m glad we got that cleared up.

Comments (4)

September 25, 2003

And one of which I think the TorCon committee should have warned attendees: Legally, at least within the jurisdiction of the Ontario Superior Court, extraterrestrials are not persons.

[I]f the plaintiff is not a person in that he is neither a human being nor a corporation, he cannot be a plaintiff as contemplated by the Rules of Civil Procedure. The entire basis of Mr. Joly's actions is that he is a martian, not a human being. There is certainly no suggestion that he is a corporation. I conclude therefore, that Mr. Joly, on his pleading as drafted, has no status before the Court.

—— Joly v. Pelletier, [1999] O.J. No. 1728 (Ontario Super. Ct., May 16, 1999)

Comments (0)

September 19, 2003

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, we have what is possibly the world’s only ergonomic keyboard for pirates.

Comments (1)

September 12, 2003

Or other reasonably priced beverage of your choice, for the first person to come up with a compelling explanation of why someone would actually need one of these.

(And no, the sensory deprivation torture scenario from Schismatrix does not qualify.)

Comments (13)

September 5, 2003

Fascinating piece by WNYC on the “Wilhelm Scream,” the trademark “guy falling into a bottomless pit” scream that appears in everything from Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark to 50s B-movies and a Judy Garland song. I’d never noticed it before, but I bet I start now.

Comments (4)

August 16, 2003

Courtesy of Rob, finally a candidate for governor of California that we can all get behind, even if it’s only in order to keep him where we can see him.

Comments (0)

August 10, 2003

Fig. 1. Mystery space monster over Seattle Center

As seen on the Seattle Times website less than half an hour ago. (Caption added by yours truly, but what else could it be?)

Comments (2)

July 18, 2003

So on NPR this morning I hear two rather disturbing things, both of which get passed over very quickly. The first — the mysterious death of British government advisor and former UN weapons inspector David Kelly — has since been adequately reported, but the second has not been explained to my satisfaction: something along the lines of “Congress declined to ban bear-baiting on federal lands.”

Bear-baiting.

Bear-baiting.

(Okay, I understand they don’t really mean bear-baiting. But still.)

---

Update: For some weird reason, this particular post is a prime comment spam target, so I’ve turned comments off.

Comments (4)

June 29, 2003

Two or three links away from the train wreck going on in Electrolite’s comments section, we find this amusing transcript from The O’Reilly Factor or whatever it’s called. A sample:

O’REILLY: Would you be in favor of the government investigating this at all? Would you be in favor of that?

HIGGINS: I’m in favor of the government investigating anything that it sees fit to investigate. I like government investigations for the most part.

O’REILLY: Right. Well, you are one of the few who does, but see I’m a little bit worried. . .

HIGGINS: You are a Whitewater fan. You liked that.

It’s nice to see that there are still some people out there who can think on their feet instead of just reading from the teleprompter.

Comments (28)

June 27, 2003

Okay, so, like, my real question about this otherwise uninteresting article is: I guess I can kind of understand why the cold-blooded Scandinavians up here in Seattle do these crazy things . . . But why the hell would anyone in Los Angeles ever want to eat at a Taco Bell?

(I mean, okay, I know Taco Bell was founded in SoCal. But still. My mole-deprived soul is in torment.)

Comments (7)

June 9, 2003

Okay, I’m all for reclaiming and defusing offensive epithets — black power, grrl power, queer pride, all of it.

But today when I went to get my morning coffee there was a sheriff’s deputy in the coffee shop wearing a navy-blue ball cap embroidered with the words:

(I wonder what the LEIU protestors would’ve had to say. Come to think of it, maybe that’s where he got the hat.)

Comments (2)

April 28, 2003

Okay, maybe Lord Whorfin and John Bigbooté aren’t part of the picture. But, nonetheless, we’re up against a world-ending catastrophe, as Planet X

will pass between the Earth and the Sun causing a pole shift in 2003. The pole shift will set off worldwide cataclysms — massive earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and hurricane force winds.

Planet X (now visible to the naked eye!) explains everything from SARS to global warming to giant squid:

Planet X is affecting Earth in a number of different ways as it is approaching the solar system... extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanic activity, meteors, odd animal behaviour, unusual or rampant disease outbreaks, and other stories pertinent to earth changes.

The site also has handy tips on supplies, food, and postapocalyptic gardening. If you haven’t already started preparing for the Aftertime, you’d better get to it — the Pole Shift is due any day now.

Comments (3)

April 24, 2003

We’ve all heard

one too many stories about some recluse who, when their neighbors finally got the city to act on repeated complaints about noxious odors, turned out to be living in filth and squalor with 137 live cats, all of them in pitiable condition, plus the rotting or mummified or partly cannibalized or refrigerated carcasses of an indeterminate number of dead cats.

[Pithy summary courtesy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light]

And that seems to be pretty much the case with this guy down in Riverside, too, too.

Only in his case, it wasn’t Felis domestica. It was Felis tigris.

Sometimes, I don’t even know why I bother to make stuff up.

Comments (6)

March 25, 2003

Rob reports that, according to a Moroccan newspaper, Morocco has offered the US the use of 2000 mine-sweeping monkeys for service in Iraq.

This must be what General Renuart was talking about on the radio this morning when he said forces from “all our coalition partners” were undertaking “special operations” in Iraq.

Comments (1)

February 25, 2003

Rob “aphrael” West* has ported his journal from K5 over to discontent: Bound in a Nutshell. Good stuff, including the more personal stuff that he doesn’t think is suitable for K5. He’s using Blogger for the moment, so no comments, but I expect you’ll be able to find him here, if you need to.

Rob knows more than I do about half of the things I'm interested in, and he’s a much more reasonable person. I recommend him.

* In addition to his pithy comments here, some of you may remember Rob from that big round table in the Chinese restaurant at Conjosé.

Comments (10)

January 27, 2003

Another gem from Reuben “Tom the Dancing Bug” Bolling: Did You Know? This Week: The Lord of the Rings.

With the second installment of the “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy, ring fever has taken over, causing fans the world over to wonder whether a series of ring fun facts could be written by someone who has never seen the movies nor read the books!

I, for one, did not know that the character of Virginia Woolf was added to the film “only to increase its Oscar gravitas.”

Correction

The link works now.

Comments (0)

January 21, 2003

I'm a sucker for Shepard Fairey's André the Giant gag in all of its manifestations.

In general I'm not that impressed with the fark.com forums — if Photoshop and the Internet had been around when I was in high school I'd have been a whole lot better at that sort of thing, you betcha — but, sucker that I am, I'm pleased to be informed (via Ars Technica) that

kim jong il has a posse

I am, however, disappointed to realize that the site hosting that particular image is totaltapeservices.com and not, as I had first thought, totalapeservices.

It does appear, by the way, that totalapeservices is still up for grabs.

Comments (1)