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  May 2008
 
The Astonished Head Tee! Buttons, Small and Bigger! Chomskybat Magnet! Proloxil T-shirts and Mugs! 
Ba-Bow Limerence (Falls In Waves) 
Astonished Head: The Ad Miserable Ovoid Creature 
Current Crygender The Hacker Crackdown The Ethics of Ambiguity The New Goddess In the Queue Love and Limerence A General Theory of Love Labyrinth of Desire The Second Sex Decoding Gender in Science Fiction Male Bodies, Women's Souls 
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boingboing Dan's Data Engadget Gizmodo Mozilla Oh Gizmo! OpenOffice Slashdot ThinkGeek Treehugger Ubuntu Ubuntu Forums Wired   
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November 01, 2005
Idle Brains
I would do as these gentlemen suggest, and read the new Virtual Occoquan.
Nine things I am currently very much into the hating of: 1. Mucous. November 02, 2005
Recently, I was masturbating and I came so hard that my contact lenses came out. I still don't know why this happened. I love anything that makes me laugh out loud. Laughter, I find, is a function of the unexpected. So, take a look at Not Proud. It's been around for several years, but it's new to me and, if you click through enough confessions, you're bound to find a Big Funny sooner or later.
Over at Balkinization, Marty Lederman describes an argument that gives primacy to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. He writes, ... for more than a half - century preceding February 7, 2002 the United States had agreed that Common Article 3 reflects a norm of customary international law, and it was U.S. policy to abide by that norm, even where the treaty provision does not apply of its own accord. Arguments coming from this side of the issue continually ignore Common Article 2, which clearly states: Although one of the Powers in conflict may not be a party to the present Convention, the Powers who are parties thereto shall remain bound by it in their mutual relations. They shall furthermore be bound by the Convention in relation to the said Power, if the latter accepts and applies the provisions thereof. If the Geneva Conventions and their attendant Protocols are inadequate to the task of governing 21st - century conflict, then Mr. Lederman should call for their revision. However, as they now stand: Al - Qaeda and the insurgency in Iraq routinely violate Convention I, Article 13, Sections 1 and 2; Convention III, Article 4, Section 2; Protocol I, Article 44, Section 3; Convention I, Article 3, and others. In accordance with Common Article 2, this conduct removes them from the protections afforded by the Conventions, and absolves the United States of observing those protections with regard to them. The administration's argument against application of Common Article 3 recognizes what is explicit in the text of the Conventions. While that article may reflect "a norm of customary international law," so, too, does Common Article 2. While it may have been "U.S. policy to abide by that norm," the U.S. has also been historically inclined to follow Common Article 2, as illustrated by our soldiers' treatment of Germans as compared to their treatment of Japanese during WWII. The Japanese fared far worse, because their traditions of combat involved acts of perfidy and savagery that were alien to the European standards war common to the United States and Germany. The administration has made explicit what has long been practiced by the United States: fight fairly, or our own savagery will know no bounds. I suggest that if the Viet Cong had flown airliners into the New York skyline, we would have arrived at this point much sooner in our history. - - - In the comments to his post, Mr. Lederman writes, The point of my post is *not* to discuss whether any or all of the detainees in the current hostilities are, or are not, protected by the Geneva Conventions themselves. It is, instead, to explain that the U.S. for fifty years had abided by the *customary* international law norms described in Common Article 3, until February 7, 2002 - - and that there's currently a fight within the Administration about whether to adopt the norms of Common Article 3 as a matter of U.S. policy, at least as far as the armed forces are concerned. Fair enough. I've revised the first sentence of this post to reflect that he is describing an argument, rather than making an argument himself.
This NYT article asks, "What Happened to That Cloud of Dust?" When Dr. Lioy talks about what the dust is made of, his tone also changes drastically. "I try to be very careful about how I say it," Dr. Lioy said. The powdery dust on his laboratory table, he says, "contains everything we hold dear." He's talking about the dust of September 11, of course. And I know what happened to a bit of it - it's in a Progresso artichoke hearts jar, up in my office. A small piece of disaster in my house. I wonder how many others who were there that day or who lived in downtown Manhattan have similar jars?
Susanna, proprietess of cut on the bias and one of the first bloggers to link to Astonished Head, is going on (probably) long - term hiatus. Thanks! and good night.
Sheesh. MommaBear - another of the very first people to link to Astonished Head - has passed on. RIP, MB.
Idle Brains
November 03, 2005
Sick DayTaking the day off. I've actually been sick for about a week, but now I'm at the urgh - flumpf - gak phase, as opposed to the delirious - creative - couchspud phase. Idle Brains and other stuff will resume when I'm a bit better.
Idle BrainsOK, I'm a bit better now. 
November 04, 2005
168 Feet Long, Six Feet Three Inches Wide, and 18 Inches HighThose are the dimensions of the first, actual piece of the Freedom Tower to be built. Construction began at Ground Zero yesterday. Of course - as seems par for the course for this 16 - acre swatch of memory - and blood - soaked earth - there could be problems: A lawsuit filed last month by the Coalition of 9/11 Families seeks to halt the project on the ground that it violates a federal law requiring that historic sites not be used for transportation projects unless there are no feasible or prudent alternatives. Folks? Due respect, but there aren't. This place cannot be a mausoleum forever. Even Pearl Harbor is a working naval station.
Site Upgrade NoozYou may have noticed a few changes here at Astonished Head. You know, small things... like the look of the whole site. Hoo - ha! However, there are still some back - end problems at my hosting company which are preventing me from properly updating all of my Movable Type templates, and that means that the changes have only partially propagated to other areas of the site (like the Comments window and the archives). These back - end problems are supposed to be resolved by end - of - day tomorrow, so hopefully by the time Monday rolls around the entire site will be all shiny and new and so forth. November 08, 2005
Whoa.Astonished Head was there when the universe began. So writes Mr. Sullivan. No, not that one, this one. And no, not that Universe. This one. The blogospheric one. Now, I'm not entirely in agreement that the blogosphere began on September 11, 2001, but the events of that day certainly gave impetus to this site, and became a rallying cause for many others. In February, it'll have been four years since Astonished Head hit the web, a few months after 9/11. I haven't been particularly prolific. My "Greatest Hit" is a parody of a television commercial for an anti - depressant. And I've yet to find the "one thing" that so many other bloggers have found, the one issue, the niche, whatever you want to call it. My site traffic peaked sometime last summer, and is probably a tenth now of what it was then. I take unannounced breaks. I ignore the site for days at a time. But I bumble on, mostly trying to keep myself entertained. I thank those that have wandered by, and have also been entertained.
Oh, The Big Big Gut SicknessThere was a time, on this very blog, when I could wade into the day's events and make with the pithy commentary, rat - a - tat! So maybe it wasn't the pithiest, or the most well - informed, or spelled properly, or in a language I didn't make up. But I could do it. These days... these days, I obssessively click through the icons on my Firefox button bar, and I'm just ill. Sick. I feel it in my gut... nausea, a touch of dread, all coated with the thick goo of Boredom - the little death that brings total annihilation (from Parker Brothers!). I look for something new, unpredicted. And I don't find it. Let's have some coffee with Sully, shall we? Hmmm... yup, Cheney's still the Puppetmaster. Torture still Bad. Oh, the riots... lesseee... he's taking the 'Frenchifada' line. No gay today; maybe it'll show up later. Moving on. The Instapundit, the bastard whose fault this all is, the master of puppy puree himself. Here we have: riots. Iraq, some more riots. Elections in California. Alan Alda for President? God help us all, or kill us, whichever... ah, that's a West Wing bit, which makes my gorge rise all on its own. More riots. Some terror. W00t! Say, let's leave the button reservation and get to Belmont Club via VodkaPundit (whose Arm of Decision bit is worth ingesting, by the way). I say 'via' because I don't visit the Club frequently enough anymore to have it button - bar'd, so I always end up arriving there from someone else's blogroll. What have we got today... ah. Commentary on a graph that someone has made, plotting the number of French cars burned over time. Oh, dear. Daily Kos... Bush same as Saddam, nothing new there, moving along. Fark? Excuse me, I meant, "Drew Curtis' Fark.com"? A man crashed his plane into a Wal - Mart. Sweet relief! That relief is why techie - style blog things outnumber political - style blog things on my button bar. Slashdot, Treehugger, Gizmodo, that sort of thing. I would include boingboing on that list, but Xeni Jardin has shown up once too often with her hair and her belief that intelligence is the same as rationality. That, and I honestly don't give a shit where Cory Doctorow is going to show up next to spout more of his red - diaper baby claptrap disguised as technophilia while signing books that aren't all that interesting to me. Algis Budrys, now there's a sci - fi guy. And so, here I am... and here you are, as well, through the miracle of the tele - fax... never venturing too far off of the reservation, stuck in a feedback loop of commentary on the state of the sickened world, the content of which I have been able to predict for the past year or so. This one: he'll say this about that; and this one over here, he'll say this, but with a bit of rainbow sprinkle spin; and that guy - hoo! - that guy over there will ignore this entirely, because this thing happened over there and he's always more interested in that sort of thing. Urp. I know, I know... all of this is more testament to my own tiny state of mind than anything else. But now I've infected you with it, see. So I can go back to... whatever it is I do these days. November 09, 2005
More Site Madness.You'll see some extra links at the end of each post. I'm still finalizing the template formatting, but they work. Oh! you exclaim. What do they do? (I'll wait.) I'm glad you asked! Basically, they're links to posts from the same date in previous years. Sort of an "On This Day In Astonished Head History." Just part of my ongoing effort to expose people to the mounds of refuse hidden in the archives.
A plague!A plague, I say! I'm still dealing with server issues at my hosting company, the gist of which is: this server sucks. Move my site to a new one. One that doesn't suck. And so on. Part of the new Apache environment is a new set of statistical tools, measuring site visits, referrals, ethnicity of visitors, sexual orientation, etc. I really hope that these new tools are lousy, inaccurate pieces of snotty code. Because if they're not... well, I might as well hang it up. Because nobody comes here. Ever. All right, so that's not entirely true... but yesterday, when I remarked that my traffic is a tenth of what it was a year ago? According to the new tools, it's now a tenth of what it was two days ago. Why, it's almost enough to make me announce a Crazy Stunt of some kind! Anyway. The cold that I enjoyed two weeks ago seems to have snuck into my lungs after hiding out in my knees, giving the Happytime Bronchitis and Crazy - fun Pneumonia, all of which makes for a bang - up, shootin' folks from the clocktower kind of a day, yessir! I may or may not make with more wordage later on this evening, depending on whether the chest - burster has decided to have a go at the cat or not.
Idle Brains
November 10, 2005
The Amoral Cookie
I came into the middle of the interview, and had an "Ah, of course!" moment when Mr. Fisk was finally identified by name. He's a well - spoken Brit with the kind of accent that makes me tend to give him more intellectual authority than he perhaps deserves, which can be corrected by paying closer attention to what he's saying. I blame heavy adolescent exposure to Monty Python.
Read the rest...
Astonished Head #40
November 11, 2005
This Explains Everything
Me? I've got John Lithgow enthusiastically singing about soup. In my brain! The campaign is the most elaborate send - up of musical comedy to be sponsored by a premium - priced soup brand since 1970, when Stan Freberg presented Ann Miller in a commercial, tap - dancing atop an eight - foot replica of a can of Great American Soup, sold by the H. J. Heinz Company. Mark it well: that is a pristine gem of trivia... its perfection is almost godlike. Just breathtaking. Humm humm... deedeedee... why just have soup when you can select
Read the rest...
Just So You Know
Anonymous CowardSomeone, apparently, thinks that I need to know what Henry Ford thought about the menace of international Jewry. Which I already do, thanks. In addition to developing modern production techniques and applying them to autmobile manufacturing, Mr. Ford was an ardent anti - Zionist, to the point of printing up 500,000 copies of Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He bought a newspaper to further his views, and published a collection of that paper's writings as the "The International Jew, The World's Foremost Problem" in the 1920s. Other tracts followed. You can read what the ADL has to say about all that here, and, if you're so inclined, you can read the original text of "The International Jew" for yourself here. Anyway. If you feel the need to send me a document or direct me to a particular set of writings, have the courage of your convictions and do it in your own name. November 12, 2005
Ads And A Tipjar, Two BitsYes... it has happened. I've finally added a tipjar and set up some Google ads. The reasons for this will be apparent on Monday. So... if the mood strikes, please hit the tipjar over there on the left. But! Click on those ads as often as humanly possible, even if you're not the slightest bit interested in what they're selling. It will cost you nothing but some finger effort and a few seconds of your time, and - if I'm understanding the good folks at Google correctly - each click - through will send fat, bulging sacks of cash to my door, delivered by a gold - plated armored truck staffed with heavily - bosomed Valkyries. November 14, 2005
A Job Bleg
November 15, 2005
Idle Brains
Don't PanicI'm fiddling about behind the scenes with the site, so you may experience quirky behavior and hot flashes.
OK, PanicIf you want to, I mean. Anyway, I broke the Commentarium. I'll fix it as soon as I can. November 16, 2005
Idle Brains
Commentarium Still BrokenYou can click on it and play with the buttons, if you want. But you won't accomplish anything.
Pop N' Fresh
My Inspiron 700m is all charged up, and I'm using my Kyocera KPC650 the way 'twas meant to be used: with no Verizon - imposed dormancy. See, they're afraid I'll use my laptop to steal movies and BANKRUPT HOLLYWOOD or set up a pirate warez website that uses a bajillion gigabits of bandwidth, so they force the EVDO card to go into dormant mode every few minutes. After reading a website or doing some other task, I try to move on to another site or maybe FTP some files around, and I can't actually get connected to the service for 5 - 10 seconds while the card wakes up... which means that the websites time out, or the FTP client throws a hissy fit.
Read the rest...November 17, 2005
"You're sick, sweetie..."There's a poster in this train car that's tangentially related to yesterday's post. It's a full - frame photo of a little girl's face, in black and white, wearing a tweed hat and a quirky expression. Maybe she won't "just grow out of it," the poster reads. Maybe it's a neurological disorder. Maybe it's TS. The poster is an ad for the Tourette's Syndrome Helpline. Mere seconds after I read the poster, the man sitting behind me got a call on his cell - I could hear him because there was a momentary silence while my laptop buffered the audio stream from NPR. The side of the conversation I could hear went like this: Hello? It was an eerie moment of voyeuristic synchronicity. I had just read the poster, and was thinking about it. At first, I thought the man was joking with her - that he had read the poster, too. But he wasn't. His tone, patient and soothing, belonged to someone who deals with such phone calls frequently. At home, he has a wife or daughter, someone who has a condition that makes her lose her grip on reality. She was frightened, and called him on his cellphone for reassurance and reorientation. It's the exact opposite of what I was talking about yesterday: true mental illness, a failure to grasp and operate within the basic structure of reality, a failure so complete that even awareness of that failure is fleeting or nonexistent. Such an odd series of moments as it unfolded. First, passing interest, just because I happened to be able to hear the man: he's got a child at home, sick. Then, the strangeness: he's joking with her, grabbing that phrase off the poster. Then, the realization: it's no joke. Whoever is on the other end of that phone is in need, and this man, sitting behind me on the train, is her lifeline. Now, I'm sitting in my car in the train parking lot, having o\put the laptop away and gotten off the train. I passed by the man's seat as I exited. He looked tired.
If I Had More Integrity...... I'd link to this.
Bla - hurrgh
Mmmm...Fake PopesTwo fake Popes, actually. Both are alive, and both are out of their gourds. [Via Reverend Sensing, who links to Jonathan Last's "God On The Internet" over at First Things.] November 18, 2005
To Whom It May ConcernI do not need:
Thank you.
Foolin' AroundThe HTML is being flung about all fast and furious - like. Don't be alarmed. You may, however, want to shield your eyes if you happen to hit the site while I'm testing my Japanese Seizure Robots formatting. - - - OK, it's all over but the slogans. I've been at this for hours, there are 25 slogans, and I just don't feel like making every single one of them legible right now. Oh, and the other pages on the site. Those are all still a mess, too. So, it's all over but the slogans, and every page other than the homepage. Sigh.
Well Wang Dang Doodle!Yazoo! Much work is done this day, HTML - wise. The Commentarium is still all broken and smashed, but most everything else works. Except for... well, here's the thing. If you're using Microsoft Explorer to view this site, you're in the minority, according to my statistical elves. The Constitution does not protect minority browser users. And I'm tired of trying to figure out all of the interesting ways in which Explorer is going to mangle my site, and then implementing a bunch of wacked - out code just to get it to properly display transparent .PNG images. Tired. Of. It. So: Explorer users? You're out of luck. If you choose to keep using the Big Suck, well then go with God and so on. But there is another way: you may choose to become wise in the ways of properly - implemented HTML browsing: go get Firefox. Or even Opera. You'll be glad you did. November 19, 2005
Insert Fanfare Noises HereThe Great Site Redesign of 2005: is finished. The Commentarium is open for bidness, yeah boyee! The annoying table - width error that plagues certain archives... remains. Like a vast pus - filled canker on my pristine site. We hates it! We hates it! There will be some minor tweaks here and there (like a "Read More" feature for the longer entries), but other than that, the New And Improved Astonished Head is complete. Now, I must go outside and roll around naked in the cold grass, to give thanks to the Great HTML Goddess whose Web this is. No, there won't be any photographs. Except, of course, for those of you who have access to the 3 - centimeter infrared satellites that the Gubmint keeps sending over my house. But that's only three of you, so I'm not really concerned. I know who you are. Ha! How do you like that, spy - bastards? Not so much fun when you're in the viewfinder, is it? Is it?
Crank Spit VrooomWell now. Let's take this here rebuilt blog out for a spin, shall we? Yesterday was my
Now why would he need a titanium french press, you ask yourself. Hmmm. (Some people already know why, but I'm a'tellin' them to keep their yaps shut, because it isn't time yet.) The combination of hat and coffee and HTML - hell on the couch was made much better by the playing of The Music That Sends Me. The exact nature of this music varies from time to time and place to place, but it all does the same thing, to wit, sending the shivers up my spine, and sending the creepy crawlies down my lager and limes. It's a memory, thing, mostly... past associations rearrange my whole vibratory matrix, see, so that I am transported through the times and spaces of my life. The music strikes me like a tuning fork, and I get all harmonious and tingly. It's a good thing to do the day after the day which marks another year spent trudging towards death. Today, it was:
I can't wait to listen to this stuff next Spring on the iPod I haven't got yet, while while I'm - - oop! Right, not time yet. Now then... let's see how this posts and so forth...
I Will Take Your Nuclear Globe To Tierra del FuegoIn fact, I believe that the entire population of Rhode Island should get inside a flotilla of these and head on down there. When they arrive, they will establish a utopian free love colony among the seals and flightless ducks. It'll be beautiful. [Via Gizmodo, who got it from The Cool Hunter.] November 20, 2005
Messing With AdsenseSupposedly, Google Adsense tracks my content and generates ads for my pages to the best of its scripty ability. It does well for the category archive pages, which are all about one thing, but apparently the pool of ads isn't quite deep enough to bring up interesting bits on the homepage. Therefore: NERF PIZZA NERF PIZZA NERF PIZZA NERF PIZZA NERF PIZZA NERF PIZZA NERF PIZZA NERF PIZZA That is all. November 21, 2005
Clicky ClickyNot to belabor the point... well, all right, yes, I will belabor it into the very ground: if everybody who visits clicks on an ad before they go - just one - I'll make piles of spare change. You don't have to buy anything, just click. For the love of God. Click.
Getting It Wrong, Again
If it weren't so vitally important to our national security, I'd be amused. I've practically been jumping up and down on the roof wearing nothing but Fusion Orange body paint and a sequined g - string shouting "He's... over... .here!" since early January, and have attracted not even the slightest interest from our intelligence services. This, as you can imgaine, has been quite frustrating. I've been expending high - quality creative energy coming up with new and interesting uses for pork products, apparently for my sole amusement. Does the CIA not appreciate what it takes to have a fifty gallon drum of bacon grease delivered in clandestine fashion? Does the intelligence community not understand the sheer audacity, not to mention the brilliantly nuanced grasp of Jewish law, that is required to arrange for the production of thirty pounds of thinly - sliced kosher prosciutto? Or the complicated expense of arranging for the travel, housing, and feeding of a dozen Iraqi girls who are willing to spend all day loudly describing their plans to go to university and become lawyers and doctors in front of what is, to their eyes, a featureless black trunk with a few air holes in it? So, I'll say it again: al - Zarqawi is not dead. Al - Zarqawi has not been captured, he is not in Pakistan, or Baghdad, or Kabul. He's in my basement. This week, it's the Five - Variety Pit of Hormel: six hams each of Bavarian, Honey Maple, Double Smoked, Honey Roasted, and Virginia Style, liberally coated with bacon grease. The man's up to his neck in a pit full of the things - which, I might add, was not easy to dig out of a concrete slab - with his head sticking up through a doughnut - shaped metal lid, facing a television that's playing an endless loop of old Betty Friedan speeches interspersed with "Girls Gone Wild: Co - ed Tryouts." Not that anyone will notice. Honestly, sometimes I wonder why I bother.
Skynet Claus Is Coming To Kill YouThe Hunter Killer is so much more effective than the reindeer - pulled sled, don't you think? [Via Engadget.] November 22, 2005
Your Retinas Will Be Theirs...SomedayMirage Motion Media is about to launch a new sort of billboard: Using our proprietary software, we convert sequential frames from any video or film source (such as a shot from a TV commercial) and produce special rear lit motion prints that re - animate the moving pictures. This is actually a kind of lenticular imaging process. The basic technology has been around since 1908, and you can find peanut - smelling examples of it in every fifth box of Cracker Jacks. While I don't think it's quite as groundbreaking as the company would have us believe ("There's nothing like a Mirage experience" the site promises), it does remind me of an advertisement I recently saw in an unexpected place - underneath the Hudson river in a PATH train. Movement on the other side of the broad plexiglass window caught my eye, and I watched a flickering 15 - or 20 - second clip of a car going through its Buy Me paces. Each frame of the ad had been placed in an illuminated section of the tunnel wall, so that as the train sped by it created a little motion picture, like a flip book. Now, I can't remember which auto manufacturer was represented by the ad. But I'm sure that everybody who rides the PATH regularly can. Mirage Motion Media's offering doesn't exactly herald our arrival in the Dickian world of advertisements tightbeamed directly into our eyeballs accompanied by tympanic high - focus soundblurbs whispering in our ears, but it does serve as a reminder: when they can do that, they will. And then there will be a huge market for ad - blocking contact lens shields, and little wi - fi scramblers that fit into your pocket and make the roving personalizers think you're an ambulatory house plant. [Via The Cool Hunter.]
Big Dead PlaceSay - ever wonder what happens to your mind when you spend several months at a time locked indoors surrounded by vast expanses of lethal emptiness? Well, wonder no more. Big Dead Place is a site I came across while its author was still working in Antarctica at McMurdo Station. There's a book out, now, and he's off being insane somewhere else. The site remains a window into a place and a culture that's far removed from the everyday, where the exotic locale becomes mundane, leaving liquored-up silliness as the only salvation: A few weeks ago we had a party where someone took a big block of ice and carved little “ski trails” in it down which kamikazes were poured into the eager mouths of those wearing ski goggles and holding ski poles. This was called Liquor Mountain. Women gave prizes to any man who showed up in a dress, so there was much cross-dressing. Myself, I wore a nasty leopard-print number with the nipples cut out, drank one too many kamikazes and barfed up corn dogs in the snow. Sift through the site, and look for the stories. You will learn many Interesting Facts, which you can trot out at parties and thus seem much more adventurous than you actually are.
Moichandise
It's got the snazzy Astonished Head slogo on the front, and the newly redesigned URL logo on the back. Available in white with black bands, white with blue bands, and gold lamé. Too fantastic! And while you're at it, pick up a Small Astonished Head button, or a Bigger Astonished Head button, or go nuts and get a Vicious Cyborg Chomskybat magnet for your fridge.   
A Tale Of Two LeaningsI'm always interested in the filters that people use to interpret events. Other people, that is. I don't have any filters, myself, because I am a veritable god of objectivity. The incident: a jetlagged Bush in China, trying to leave a room full of Press and discovering that the doors were locked. First up: Andrew Sullivan, no Bush fan these days: I'm amused by emailers calling me a Bush-hater. He drives me crazy, I disagree strongly with some of his decisions, I think he's been a disaster for conservatism, blah blah blah, but I find it very hard to hate him, or even dislike him. A man who gets trapped in a press conference by locked doors and responds, "I was trying to escape. Obviously, it didn't work," is not someone I find easy to hate. He did look shattered on the television, however. I hope he gets some sleep on the plane. Next: one Gary Lerhaupt, quoted by Mark Frauenfelder over at boingboing: "Video of the Bush Escape incident from China on Sunday. The video was grabbed from the BBC after I spent a half hour fighting with Linux to get it to play, I decided to re-encode to make it more friendly. Be sure to watch for the smirk Bush makes as he at first thinks he's about to successfully duck out of the conference and then the 'beam me up' pose he later goes into when he doesn't know what to do." I appreciate how Mr. Sullivan - despite his bitter disillusionment and his staunch opposition to many of Bush's policies - continues to see the human that holds the office. On the other hand, Mr. Lerhaupt - like far too many Bush "critics" - is on the lookout for any snippet of video, any quote, anything at all, really, that will contribute to Bush's caricature as a barely-trained chimpanzee. It's a succinct illustration of the difference between principled criticism and herd-mentality dogmatism. November 23, 2005
Oh, The Moist, Buttery IronyThe nature of the cell structure and overall texture of the dried bread crumb employed in this invention is of great importance if a stuffing which will hydrate in a matter of minutes to the proper texture and mouthfeel is to be prepared. Ruth M. Siems, definer of precise crumb dimensions and co-inventor of Stove Top Stuffing, has died.
Welcome, PopWatchersStay awhile, have a look around, try not to frighten the peacocks.
Too Much!digg is a linky-style site akin to Slashdot, co-founded by ex-Tech TV Guy Kevin Rose. Digg is a technology news website that employs non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do. As with Slashdot, a successful entry can result in overloaded servers as eighty billion people link to the hapless site mentioned in the story - to the point where the term "diggdotted" has been coined. Today, there's a story on this multiplayer rock 'em sock 'em space fightin' game. I am amused by the sequence of comments on the game's site: NO DIGG!!!
Senator, Stop Stealing My BitsMe, in March of 2002: I have a slogan in my head, spoken in a tinny yet sonorous Movietone News announcer's voice: "The exit strategy...is Victory!" John Kerry, in March of 2003: “It appears that with the deadline for exile come and gone, Saddam Hussein has chosen to make military force the ultimate weapons inspections enforcement mechanism. If so, the only exit strategy is victory, this is our common mission and the world’s cause. We're in this together. We want to complete the mission while safeguarding our troops, avoiding innocent civilian casualties, disarming Saddam Hussein and engaging the community of nations to rebuild Iraq.” Better late than never, I guess. "Louder" would've been nice, too.
Idle Brains
November 24, 2005
Uh...Happy Thanksgiving?
And, As Always...Every Thanksgiving, there are people who think it's meaningful to mention great big festering piles of dead Indians and other obvious things. This year, I choose to highlight boingboinger David Pescovitz, who just outdoes himself with his posting of "A Thanksgiving Prayer," a poem-shaped assemblage of words by the late junkie, crime fetishist, and all-around moral American, William S. Burroughs. An excerpt: thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison — You know, I never saw the irony before. Let me go get the dustpan so I can sweep up the scales that now lie in great drifts at my feet. We really should let the 36,000 people who immigrated from Russia last year know that they ought to head on back. There are going to be 13,000 very disappointed Poles, and a like number of disillusioned Yugoslavians. Send those 65,000 Indians back to the subcontinent! There's nothing for them here. There's nothing here for the 55,000 Filipinos, 30,000 Vietnamese, and 19,000 Koreans who made their way to our shores in 2004, either. Silly Africans! 62,000 of them clearly didn't know just how good they had it. Those 30,000 Dominicans and 13,000 Haitians would certainly have been better off if they had just stayed where they were. And there are 6,000 Iranians who need to start packing their bags right away, before we round them up and kill them all. As for those 22,000 Canadians? If they hurry, they can slip back over the border to safety. Who would have thought that that so many people could be taken in by the Lie that is America, especially when folks like Mr. Pescovitz and Mr. Burroughs have worked so very hard to expose the truth?
Lest Ye Think...that I'm some bizarro wacked-out ultra-serious Thanksgiving crackhead: here is The Bird, what I hunted, killed, beheaded, gutted, plucked, and cooked myself:  But I did have to wrestle the beast down into the wet autumn mulch of a forest clearing and pop a hole in its little bird skull with my trusty 14.4-volt Makita 6337D. We did not get it free from the Shop-Rite at all. Not even a bit.
ahh...mrgle...urp oof.
November 25, 2005
Stairway To Nowhere
This morning I took a different route from the ferry dock to my office, crossing over the West Side Highway on the new pedestrian overpass at the east side of Ground Zero. Once on the other side of the highway I walked past the only remaining bit of aboveground structure from the WTC complex: a scraped and truncated section of a concrete stairway, leading nowhere. I tried to figure out where the stairs would have been, and if I had ever used them. But I couldn't imagine it, not really...they were in the general area of the old Borders bookstore, but they could have been for service use, hidden away behind the retail facade, tread only by maintenance workers. Today, the NYT has an article titled "Survivors Begin Effort to Save Stairway That Was 9/11 'Path to Freedom.'" Now I finally know where the stairway was before the buildings came down. It wasn't in the bookstore, and I never used it: These are the final steps in another sense. The Vesey Street staircase, also called the "survivors' stairway," is the World Trade Center's last above-ground remnant. I'm also glad that I'm finally able to get a decent photo of the stairway. It's behind a chainlink fence, and there was always construction equipment blocking any clear shot I might have gotten with my half-pixel non-telephoto cellphone camera. As for what happens to the stairs themselves, I'm with the New York Landmarks Conservancy and the Municipal Art Society. Leave them in situ, and build around them. Perhaps enclose them inside the lobby of whatever ends up getting built there. Like the USS Arizona, that stairway is a memorial to people who died in the attack that created it. Moving it from its place would remove some of its intrinsic meaning, and make it just a little easier for people to forget that which shouldn't be forgotten.
Idle Brains
November 26, 2005
Help Me Rename Idle BrainsI named the six-frame comics you see here "Idle Brains" on a whim, after a phrase I rattled off in the first post that had a cartoon in it. However, I don't really like the name, and never have. In fact, for awhile they were accidentally called "Idle Minds" until I remembered that I had decided to call them Idle Brains. You can see how very unattached I am to the current name. So, before these things make me incredibly famous and wealthy, not to mention thinner and just a bit taller, I thought I'd better rename them, thus avoiding confusion at an inopportune moment in the successification process. Plus, somebody's already using idlebrains.com. I've been thinking of some new names, and thought I'd run the finalists by y'all. I put this post up over the weekend, on the theory that only people who might actually give a damn will visit. Don't embarrass me by not commenting. In no particular order:
[Silly me - yes, suggestions are welcome. Forgot to mention that. It was late, and the bottle was empty.] November 28, 2005
Idle Brains
Leave The Writing To The ProfessionalsSay, do you remember Saddam Hussein? The guy who ordered the use of chemical weapons against Iran, killing 5,000? Whose forces then gassed another 5,000 Iraqi civilians at Halabja? He's the one who directed the slaughter of somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds during the Anfal campaign, remember? He invaded Kuwait, then brutally put down the post-invasion uprising in Iraq, killing around 60,000 more Iraqi civilians. Still doesn't ring a bell? His regime killed more than 10,000 of his political opponents. His sons were in charge of the systematic murder, rape, torture, and intimidation of those opponents and their families. His supporters are, even now, killing attorneys and threatening judges involved in his trial for crimes against humanity. Yeah, that guy. The same guy that New York Times reporter John F. Burns described today as "combative and feisty." Oh, that Saddam! What a rascal. |
I usually have NPR on in the car, because it is often interesting, and because it helps me understand how the leftish side of the polity is shaping their discourse (I have the web for the rightish side). Every so often, they'll have some luminary on to pat the troops on the head and drink some Kool Aid with them. Today's personage was Robert Fisk, he of 
Ms. Althouse has a 
So I'm done with the on - site portion of my day (yes, 
Once more, Standard Media, Inc. blows it. 
Hey hey, kids! Are you Astonished? Now you can prove it with the 
Two years ago, while I still worked three blocks from the World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan,