Monthly Archives: October 2007

Stargate SG-1, Star Trek TNG or A-Team? 13 out of 20.

490 years ago Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenburg Castle Church door.

Of course Americans put the shark up the river to scare the Iraqis. It’s what we do.

For all your ghetto spy laser mic needs.

Lileks goes off on the non-evils of Big Corn and he’s got a new gig at NRO.

Got it. DST ends next week; Standard Time begins. It’s one of the crueler events of the year, depending on your position – if you’re one of those hardy souls who bounds out of bed at 4 AM whistling a jig and picks up a pail to go milk the cows, then wakes the rooster on the way back from the barn, you like having light in the morning. The rest of us, however, do not live on a farm, and are unsure why we must reorder our lives along the demands of the harvest. Especially since tractors and combines have headlights. It’s not as if Farmer Brown is out in the field at 5 AM with a lantern tied around Bossie’s neck. Farmer Brown lives in Edina and sold the farm to a company that installed giant stadium lights so they can use GPS Robot Tractors to farm at 3 AM, remotely operated from Bangalore.

The rest of us, however, have to stagger along in permanent night from November to February, and it’s one of those long dark black intervals that turns people surly and desperate. Dark we can take. Cold we can take. Dark and cold, though, is like a toothache during the flu.

Pretty much I don’t care which way it goes, but it would be nice if they quit the whole changing thing. Sure, I love the fall back with the extra hour of sleep which I notice for approximately 2 days, but the spring forward is a killer that messes me up for weeks. Okay, I care a little and would rather have the light at the end of the day when it’s useful to me.

Next Tuesday everyone gets a free taco at Taco Bell.

So, this thread got me thinking it’s time to clean out the junk in my house. This weekend’s plans will include a trip to Goodwill, and possibly the dump. It’ll save boxing up all the crap that I don’t need when I get around to moving too.

Also, Amazon has some decently priced fire safes, in case you don’t get 10 minutes warning.

And btw, I would grab the cats, my computer, my important documents—which would probably take about 5 minutes to gather up, need to work on that, my print pictures and, um, maybe a book or two to read. Gosh, I have a serious lack of irreplaceable stuff. My furniture, TV, clothes, I would be happy to replace.

I guess it was an area wide disaster I would then start in on my camping stuff. Sleeping bag/mat, tent, fire starter, hatchet, cold weather gear, emergency power bars, water purifier, etc. In case all the hotels were full.

To put it mildly, I’m no fan of Bill Clinton, but this deserves a nod.

When another heckler shouted that the attacks were an “inside job,” Clinton took even greater umbrage.

“An inside job? How dare you. How dare you. It was not an inside job,” Clinton said.

I recommend Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, mostly because it’s the only one I’ve seen.

Branagh video. Lawrence Olivier version.

Giant Dumbledore tattoo. On an adult.

The Toshiba HDDVD player is at WalMart for $200.

Personally, I’m not touching HDDVD or Blu-Ray until one wins or a dual player comes out.

Some reporter pulls a do-you-know-who-I-am to the checkpoint guards in Iraq and now the entire world is mad at him. I scanned through the first 100 comments looking for someone defending him, but there weren’t any. That’s got to be some sort of record.

It’s interesting that the most informative blogs lean right. Discussion on why the lefty blogs are more heat than light will not be discussed here.

Gyms with “no grunting” policies irritate me. I grant you some people become annoying when they’re screaming all 12 reps of their 20 pound bicep curls, but if you’re going to actually exert yourself while exercising—and I admit it doesn’t happen that much at the average gym—some noise will be made. Weights might clang down, people might grunt, or even yell. I’m sorry if that distracts you from your reading of Muscle and Fitness as you walk.

“Some people grunt to give others the impression that [the grunters] are doing a lot of work. It’s just like flexing and strutting, trying to attract attention,” she told the Orange County Register. “The other reason is a more physical one — they’re not breathing properly. In order to grunt, they have to hold their breath and exhale forcefully.”

And what is the proper procedure in lifting weights? I do believe you hold your breath the first half of the movement and then exhale forcefully the second half.

The fashion belt. Yes, just keep reading it. All the way to the end.

He is so clever, chasing the Democrats out of Louisiana just so they can elect a Republican governor.

At least it’s not cheap for the government to spy on you.

The cost for performing any FISA surveillance “requiring deployment of an intercept device” is $1,000.00 for the “initial start-up fee (including the first month of intercept service),” according to a newly disclosed Comcast Handbook for Law Enforcement (pdf).

Thereafter, the surveillance fee goes down to “$750.00 per month for each subsequent month in which the original [FISA] order or any extensions of the original order are active.”

So, how about those fires, eh?

Live news feed. It’s Hal, the guy that used to do the 4:30 news when I was a kid. He’s my favorite.

Thinking about what you would do in a case like that? The Red Cross has answers.

How to win customers and make money.

Other cultures, same tattoo issues.

ING Direct, savings account. Interest rate in bank savings .2%, ING Direct interest rate 4.3%. You open one and put in $250, I get 10 bucks for referring you, you get 25 bucks for being so cool.

The only drawback, it takes 3 days to get money from your bank checking account to your ING savings account or vice versa.

So if you want a referral, holler. Or leave a comment.

Comcast is blocking some P2P sharing.

Comcast’s technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer _ it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”

How fortunate that I’m on Time Warner now.

The treadmill computer station. I like the idea but wouldn’t it be hard to type and walk at the same time? Or read and walk?

Robert Jordan died. Last month. I didn’t like his work, but he was a pillar of the Fantasy genre. How could he not be with the size and volume of his books. RIP.

Shatner will have a cameo in the Star Trek XI: Teh Suck.

/please don’t suck, please

The first 10,000 posts are your worst. So things ought to really be taking off here in a couple more years.

Gutsy Gibbon 7.1. I will not be getting it as my poor 1GHz processor is choking on Feisty Fawn. I dare not go further, cool as it sounds. Also, it is still not a OS killer as I can’t install Java or play mp3s without going through a bunch of folderol.

Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows.

At Chicago O’Hare International Airport, screeners missed about 60% of hidden bomb materials that were packed in everyday carry-ons — including toiletry kits, briefcases and CD players. San Francisco International Airport screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed about 20% of the bombs, the report shows. The TSA ran about 70 tests at Los Angeles, 75 at Chicago and 145 at San Francisco.

So, can we relax the rules a little then? Since it doesn’t matter much.

I’m having a hard time feeling sorry for them. Perhaps they could branch out into ditches.

His name is Caden.

He’s blurry, but I think he’ll grow out of it.

Maps of the change of rule in the Middle East over the last 4000 years.

Where Ron Paul’s money comes from.

California passes law saying employers can’t force employees to be tagged. I’m glad they did it, but was anyone saying their employees had to be tagged?

Tim Blair on the Gore peace prize. He can pack more into a few sentences than anyone else.

The first boomer has applied for Social Security.

An estimated 10,000 people a day will become eligible for Social Security benefits over the next two decades, Astrue said. The Social Security trust fund, if left alone, is projected to go broke in 2041.

I have no doubt Congress will get on this sometime around 2032 or 2036.

How to win a Nobel peace prize.

A debate on the Assertion of Western Civilization vs. Reluctance to Assert Western Civilization. As in all debates they talk past each other, but it’s interesting. Plus they have cool accents. The “Reluctant” ones should have started with the third guy and built on that in their opening statements.

I have mixed feelings on this as a vehicle for political change.

Way to rock the old skool ooga-chaka baby though.

I’m trying to think of how they could make the Nobel Peace Prize more ridiculous. Ahmadinejad was the only thing I could come up with on the fly.

Has no one, in the world, done anything to forward the peace of the planet in the last year? Maybe they should only give them out once every five years if this is a problem

So 40s sci-fi. So cool.

Artists these days. They should just write letters to the editor.

But someday soon someone is going to paint a pastoral scene filled with Greek mythological features that will be enjoyable to look at and meaningful and it will rise to international acclaim. It will give rise to a new birth of art causing artists everywhere to rediscover line and color and perspective. A, what’s the word, renaissance, if you will. I can hope, anyway.

Yeah, yeah, it was a bad idea. But it’s not my fault.

Thundercats: The Movie.

The origin story expands on the major heroes and villains from the animated series, with the plot focusing on Lion-O coming of age as the leader of the Thundercats…The property revolves around a group of humanoid cats who must flee the planet of Thundera, which is destroyed. Once crash-landing on another planet, Third Earth, they must thwart Mumm-Ra, an evil sorcerer bent on killing them off.

Sounds fantastic.

Possibly the stupidest thing you’ll see today.

Hollywood strike may cripple US TV.

You Tube University.

Turkey is thinking about heading into Iraq to hunt down Kurdish separatists.

Flying is a hassle. Just look through the photos of London and save yourself some money and the embarrassing wanding.

The poor children who need governmental healthcare. The story. Mark Steyn.

He’s an internet expert, you know.

Amazon’s MP3s, while a great idea, have nothing*! No Carbon/Silicon. No new Dame Shirley Bassey. No Little Man Tate. No Rodrigo y Gabriella. No The Fratellis.

*nothing I’ve been looking for anyway

The IgNobel prizes have been announced. Among the winners:

“Linguistics” – Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Nuria Sebastian-Galles, of Universitat de Barcelona – for a study showing rats sometimes fail to distinguish between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards.
“Peace Prize” – The Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon, the so-called “gay bomb,” that “will make enemy soldiers become sexually irresistible to each other”.

Today, since it’s Friday, I guess, I decided to use a lot of commas, and also go to Starbucks for some coffee. The guy misunderstood me and I ended up ordering a white mocha. Or he might just be pushing them.

“Ah, I’ll have a orange caramel machiatto.”

“So that’s a white mocha, what size?”

*Eh, whatever, just get me through this line* “Grande.”

Anyway, it was delicious. I recommend it.

Star Wars defense system is coming online now.

And here we see the fundamental problem between consumers and the music companies.

Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,” she said.

Yes, ripping a copy of a CD you bought to your computer—much less another to your mp3 player— is theft, according to Sony.

Teeny tiny invisibility cloak for flatlanders invented.

Know why kids don’t know anything about WWII? You spend weeks talking about slavery at the beginning of the semester and in the last two weeks you cover the entire 20th century.

/also, 10/10

This is why you should be careful in curtailing freedoms you disagree with. The pendulum always swings.

A Bosnian muslim wanted to blow up the US Embassy in Austria.

He was foiled by a metal detector. It is mind-boggling that he would try to go through one with a backpack full of nails. Clearly, these people need to watch more movies with cunning plans in them. Maybe a Mission Impossible TV show marathon or something. I think even Get Smart would help.

But it’s the UN, what do you expect?

“The reason we couldn’t come to an agreement,” said South Africa’s U.N. Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, “was because most of us feel that this was a terrorist act” and every report says it was done by rebels, but some council members argued that they wanted to wait for the results of an investigation to find out what happened.