These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.
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"Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs. John McCain, you're walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out 'Terrorist' or 'Kill him,' history will hold you responsible for all that follows. John McCain and Sarah Palin, you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations."
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"40 F or lower is the recommended refrigerator temperature to slow bacterial growth and maintain quality. Freezing occurs at 32 F; adjust refrigerator accordingly between 32 F and 40 F to prevent unwanted freezing, such as freezing milk. [...] 0 F or lower is the recommended freezer temperature. At this temperature, bacterial growth will be stopped. However, freezing does not kill most bacteria, nor does it stop flavor changes that occur over time. Though food will be safe indefinitely at 0 F, quality will decrease the longer the food is in the freezer."
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Good to remember — "tasklist /SVC" will tell me what all the svchost.exe's mean if I am on a Windows machine.
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Woman: "I've heard that Sen. Obama is an Arab." McCain: "No, ma'am. He's a decent family man and citizen. He's not. Thank you." Some small credit to defending Obama, but a much heftier portion of what-the-fuckedness about the implication that an Arab wouldn't be a "decent family man and citizen."
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"Fifty percent of the colonies of the iconic emperor penguin and 75 percent Adelie penguin colonies face marked decline or disappearance if the global temperature is allowed to rise 2 deg C above pre-industrial levels."
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Several look useful, including the black-and-white one.
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If I ever actually buy Textmate like I've idly contemplated, I need to grab this plugin.
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"‘There are millions of people around this world praying to their God – whether it‘s Hindu, Buddha, Allah – that [McCain‘s] opponent wins for a variety of reasons,‘ Pastor Arnold Conrad said. ‘And, Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they‘re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens.'"
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These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.
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People are "commenting" on the seventh season premiere as if it actually happened. Some fun creative thoughts in there.
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"That one where Saffron gets her memory back after a year as Mal's actual wife, 'Missy' was a roller coaster ride and Mal's still carrying those scars, figuratively and literally. She knows the show inside out, having been around since her first season episode, 'Dead or Alive.'" *sigh* If only.
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"[U]nder the proposed $2.25 fare, 21 round trips would cost $94.50, so he'd be getting $4.50 worth of 'free rides' from the CTA at the new $90 monthly price. And if that person is in the 25% tax bracket and using the Commuter Transit Benefit, he's buying the pass with pre-tax dollars and saving even more. Of course, that's true even if you're not using the monthly pass." Noting this for myself just in case the fare passes.
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"Obama began his response with a simple declarative sentence: 'I believe that health care is a right for every American.' The rest of his answer could be used as a template for how to deal with a complex issue in a town-hall debate. He began with a personal story: his mother, dying of cancer at age 53, having to fight her insurance company, trying to prove that her disease had not been a pre-existing condition. He broadened that into a general proposition about the proper role of government: 'It is absolutely true that I think it is important for government to crack down on insurance companies that are cheating their customers.' And finally, he transformed the issue into a metaphor for the entire campaign: 'That is a fundamental difference that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That's what we've been going through for the last eight years. It hasn't worked, and we need fundamental change.'"
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"A palm nailer is a magic hammer. Like a nail gun, you hook it up to an air compressor, but unlike a nail gun, it can be held in the palm of one hand. Its appearance doesn't make its usage obvious, but this air tool pounds in nail after nail without hurting my hand at all. "
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"BRIAN DENNEHY grizzles his way through his scenes as the POLICE CAPTAIN." I love the idea of "grizzle" as a verb.
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We spent $0.4 million on a party for our AIG executives after you gave us billions in bailout cash. Now we need you to give us billions more.
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"[Max] Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States. "
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"Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen. The computer had found a way to get out of the game. When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory – just like in the movie."
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My reading list is bursting at the seams, but wanted to put this aside for future reference.
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"Obama offers [...] a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama‘s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers."
Thought experiments involving the God-universe and the Nature-universe, the Turing-complete Game of Life, and a lot of insightful back-and-forth in the comment section, to boot. One of the most interesting and thought-provoking essays I’ve read on the Internet in a very long time, by Eliezer Yudkowsky on his blog, Overcoming Bias (via).
These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.
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More on the crazy preacher who was the audio source for that YTMND.
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It scares me that there was a preacher who actually said this. I mean … good grief. Still, where there are idiots, there will be people to make fun of the idiots. And at least we'll have that.
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"To pronounce something correctly is to be 'ostentatiously exotic,' while pronouncing something incorrectly is raised to the level of something like a presidential qualification. Meanwhile, there are thousands of Americans of Pakistani descent who are themselves 'ostentatiously exotic' by virtue of their names (and it would be elitist of them to expect anyone to pronounce them correctly) and ancestry."
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"Last month I wrote about the sunk-cost fallacy, the mistaken belief that just becuase you‘ve spent money on something you should continue to spend money on it. In reality, once you‘ve spent your money, it‘s gone. According to economists and psychologists, it‘s a mistake to consider past expenses in deciding what to do with your investments, your home, or your Stuff. What‘s important are future expenses and future happiness. To the extent that we can focus on the future instead of the past, the better off we‘ll be financially (and mentally)."
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"[S]ome politicians–our current president included–offer meanderings in the higher realms of drivel that leave the diagrammer groping for the Tylenol ("Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream") or the gin bottle ("I remember meeting a mother of a child who was abducted by the North Koreans right here in the Oval Office"). "
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It's enjoyable when television shows don't even bother to try to create a technically correct sentence. "I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic. See if I can track an IP address." Appropriately enough, my geek brethren in the comments are simply writing, "This is Unix, I know this!", which is an equally-as-awful moment in "Jurassic Park."
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"In an attempt to save the home as a historical landmark, Meltzer tells us raised over $100,000 and not only saved the house, but can now make the necessary repairs to keep it functional."
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"The thing is, I don‘t want ‘Joe Sixpack‘ in office. I don‘t want someone ‘just like me‘ as the Vice President–or President, for that matter. I want someone better than me. I want someone more experienced, more intelligent, more educated, and more able to deal with the situations to be found in and around the Oval Office. I can barely manage my own finances, let alone those of the entire country, why in the world would I want someone ‘just like me‘ in office? What a frightening thought."
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Classy. The John McCain campaign — or the RNC — apparently bought the "VoteForTheMILF.Com" domain. You know, my hope is that the Republicans lose so very soundly this November that the "survival mechanisms" that kick in for their next campaigns make them lead a more Obama-like campaign in 2012, 2016, etc. If the Obama '08 campaign's way of doing business becomes the standard way of doing politics in America, things would get a hell of a lot better.
From the Seattle Times, I present you with quite possibly the biggest dickhead on the West Coast:
Burke Jensen moved to Kennewick about a year ago, bought a nice house in the country south of the city and began to settle into a new job at Energy Northwest.
Then came the call five months ago to serve his country in Kuwait.
So Jensen, who says he is an involuntarily mobilized reservist, headed off, leaving behind a pregnant wife, a young son and a 2.5-acre lot with not a spot of landscaping.
Now, Lt. Jensen is being told to get an irrigation system and landscaping on his property as soon as possible or face legal action from the Oak Hill Country Estates Homeowners’ Association.
“I really don’t give a [expletive] where he is or what his problem is,” said [the] owner and developer of the 47-lot subdivision at the south end of Oak Street in Kennewick.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” said [the owner]. [...] “[Jensen] doesn’t have the right to walk away from his obligation,” said [the owner], who as the developer is the only member of the homeowners association. “I have most of the property still, so I am the homeowners association,” he said.
[...]
DeAlicante said Jensen also would like to find a renter for his home, but [the owner] said that would be a commercial use not allowed by the homeowners association.
“He’s not going to rent it,” said [the owner].
[...]
“This is a contract. I don’t like the way his property looks. This clown gets to do what he wants, and I’m as mad as hell,” he said.
UPDATE 10/11/08: The commenters here aren’t the only ones who got pissed. Montgomery Construction Sprinkler Systems Specialists laid out curbing, a fabric weed barrier, and decorative stone, and on the 17th, they’re looking for volunteers to help lay out 18,000 square feet of sod that’s being delivered. They’ve had “dozens of volunteers and donations from at least a dozen businesses,” of plants, sod, rock, dirt, a loaner home security system, food for the workers, courtesy of Operation Thank You, Wood’s Nursery, C&M Nursery, Red Mountain Feed, Job’s Nursery, Bedrock, American Rock Products, Kennewick Industrial, United Pipe and Plumbing, Moon Security, Subway, Costco, Home Depot, Basin Sod, Fluor Hanford, military reservists, the Elks Club and the River View High School Panthers. If you have a HAPO Credit Union near you, you can make donations at any branch. (Wonderfully enough, the article has no comment whatsoever from [the owner], who evidently is a farmer of hay.) (Hat tip to Mike Hanscom of Eclecticism for the link!)
UPDATE 10/20/08: I’ve gone ahead and closed the comments a second time, and I’m grateful that I had the WordPress setting turned on where new commenters’ comments had to be approved before they were posted to the blog.
For God’s sake, people, twice now, I’ve had people try to post this guy’s home address and telephone number, and I’ve had a good number of other people make violent suggestions. None of these were published. (All of them were deleted internally, so even I don’t have them around any longer.)
I think that this guy’s behavior in this instance was an utterly despicable act. But I hate his behavior; I don’t hate him. That’s the way I was raised: if you hate, you hate what the person does, not the person. And even when people share my opinion on an issue, if they are blasting out unadulterated, foaming hate at someone, it’s … well, let’s put it this way. The Internet offers a few zillion ways to give you a soapbox on which to stand up and talk. But we each have control over our own soapboxes. There are some things I’m just not going to lend out my soapbox for.
Unadulterated hate doesn’t make anyone look good, or manly, or right. It didn’t make the owner look impressive, did it? Did you think any better of him while he was foaming at the mouth? Well, it doesn’t make those who hate him look impressive, either. You know who behaved impressively? All those people in the October 20th update (right above this) who actually went and did something constructive to help Lt. Jensen. If you want to show this twit what an utter asshole he is, go help them, if you’re geographically nearby them … or call HAPO Credit Union and ask if there’s a way you can donate to the Lt. Burke Jensen Landscaping Fund over the phone. Or find out how you can help Norma Nunamaker and Project Thank You (I can’t find linkage to point you towards) and help her out. That’s the way to best get back at this asshole — because by doing that, you’re helping out Lt. Jensen and our veterans at the same time.
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So, the site has reopened, and it no doubt looks very different.
New name! While Musings of a Chicagoan was a good name, I like this more. You’re probably wondering, however, what the hell it means. Pertinacious is defined as “stubbornly tenacious” or “perversely persistent.” And metanoia means a “transformative change of heart.” Thus, a pertinacious metanoia is a perversely persistent transformative change of heart.
New theme. I’m using the ultraminimalist Sandbox theme. This was a move partially inspired by this webpost, and partially because I like how it forces focus on the content, as opposed to the design. I’ll be doing tweaks here and there to layout, but I’m guessing nothing massive or extremely noticeable.
Integration of Tumblr posts. I’m using a WordPress plugin called WP-O-Matic to feed my Tumblr posts into the blog itself, and using AsideShop to style them differently than my normal posts. (Tumblelogs focus more on images, videos, and short bits.) The one thing that doesn’t come across is, for some reason, videos … this appears to be a problem either with Tumblr’s RSS feed or with the WP-O-Matic plugin.
Twitter-powered asides. On those rare occasions where I have a small little blurpy observation to share with you guys, I’ll use Twitter, which should then autopost as an aside here courtesy of Twitter Tools.
Better linklog handling. I’m now using a great plugin called Postalicious which handles my del.icio.us linklog posting a lot better than their experimental daily posting. It may not be daily, however; it won’t post until a minimum of 10 new links are collected.
Some new widgets. Stuff I noticed, such as the little GTalk badge to the left. If I’m on GTalk, you can talk with me live by clicking there. And the FriendFeed widget serves as a “lifestream” of sorts, since FriendFeed collects a lot of the stuff I’m doing all the time.
Inspired by Merlin Mann. Merlin Mann, for those of you who don’t recognize the name, is the man behind a website called 43Folders, which used to be about productivity porn. But at the beginning of September, Merlin announced on his personal website and on 43Folders … well, I can do no better than to quote his own words:
[T]he things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks — empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.
Don’t get me wrong. Gumming the edges of popular culture and occasionally rolling the results into a wicked spitball has a noble tradition [...] [b]ut you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing.
What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me.
With this diet metaphor in mind, I want to, if you like, start eating better. But, I also want to start growing a tastier tomato — regardless of how easy it is to pick, package, ship, or vend. The tomato is the story, my friend.
So, yes. I am cutting way back on trips to the steam table of half-finished, half-useful, half-ideas that I both make and consume. And, with respect, I encourage you to consider doing the same; especially if that all-you-can-eat buffet of snark and streaming produces (or encourages) anything short of your “A” game.
I can’t say that every blog post from here on out is going to be quality writing. But it occurs to me that a lot of my blog posts have been “off the cuff” quick-jots … and that some more thoughtful and well-written essay-style posts might be good to bring the table.
Speaking of which, I didn’t stop blogging in the interim. Here’s the meatier (non-”tumble”) stuff:
And here is what was posted to my linklog during the interim.
CBS:
So many people were coming to register to vote in Cook County Monday that the elevators at the George W. Dunne Cook County Office Building couldn’t handle the foot traffic.
Voters may register in Illinois only through 11:59 p.m. Tuesday night, and already, officials at the Chicago Board of Elections say they have broken final-week records set in the 2008 primary.
The offices for voter registration are on the sixth floor of the Dunne Cook County Office Building at 69 W. Washington St., but the elevators could no longer handle the traffic, so the board set up tables on the ground floor, according to spokesman James Allen.
I know I’m about three years behind the times on this one, but I just recently realized who the protagonist of “You’re Beautiful” is:
I saw an angel [...] She smiled at me on the subway / She was with another man [...] I saw your face in a crowded place / And I don’t know what to do / ‘Cause I’ll never be with you [...] Yes, she caught my eye / As we walked on by / She could see from my face that / I was flying high / And I don’t think that I’ll see her again / But we shared a moment that will last ’till the end
It’s a guy who falls in love with a woman whom he sees on a subway, who is with her boyfriend, and how he thinks she’s so beautiful that he’ll never be able to find beauty the rest of his life.
I can kind of understand now why “Weird Al” entitled his parody “You’re Pitiful.”
Man, this just nailed it. From someone going by the handle ‘Copperwise’ on LiveJournal:
So, Governor Palin et al, let me tell you who the Joe Six-Pack that you think you’re talking to really is.
Joe is the guy I worked with who served in Vietnam, worked construction, had four kids, thought Portland micro-brews were for hippies and weirdos — and told me one day about having to change churches, because “our pastor spends all his time talking about how bad the gays are, and I go to church for God, and I really don’t think God cares who you sleep with or who you marry.” Oh, and he went back to school at 45 to get a degree in architecture, so I guess he won’t be Joe Six-Pack soon. His income will put him into that Better Class of People y’all think you’re part of.
Joe is a writer or an actor or an artist who waits tables, pumps gas, shelves books, does landscaping, delivers pizza, scrubs toilets, and otherwise works his or her ass off all day or night to pay the mortgage so they can continue to write or act or make art.
Joe is the lady down the street who is “just a secretary” and never finished college. She also reads D.H. Lawrence and lots of egghead poetry. Oh, and she can also name the newspapers she reads, but then she doesn’t actually have time to read all of them.
Joe is a POC with parents of different races, who gets interrupted an awful lot at work to be asked “what ARE you?” by customers, and continues to bag your damn groceries with a smile. Then he goes home and watches Britcoms on PBS, plays long distance chess with a guy in Russia over the Interwebs, and feeds his kids before putting them to bed and reading them subversive stories by Neil Gaiman.
Joe is a stripper (who doesn’t have a drug habit and isn’t a prostitute.) She’s putting herself through school. She’s going to be a lawyer and look like one of you on the surface, but you’re really gonna hate it when you’re up against her in front of the Supreme Court.
Joe spends 8 hours a day on an assembly line with a wrench, turning bolts and hoping you don’t send his job to a child in China. On Thursday nights he bowls with a bunch of construction workers and he does share a pitcher of beer with them. Budweiser, even. Then he goes home, puts on his ABBA records, and dances with his partner — Andrew.
Joe comes in when you call I.T. because you’ve opened a forwarded executable file from your sister in an email with the header “Smile, God Loves You” and locked up your machine with a nasty killer worm. She smiles politely when you tell her how impressed you are that a pretty little girl like her knows so much about computers. Then she goes to her Tai Chi class and later dances naked in the back yard with her coven. But she drives a Chevy truck, so who knew?
Joe Six-Pack isn’t who you think he/she is. You don’t have a fucking clue about Joe Six-Pack.
These are things I ran across recently on the Internet and thought were interesting, remarkable, or stood out in some way to me.
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"What is your quintessential Chicago moment? Walking up Wabash from the old 12th street station with the L roaring overhead, seeing the Sun-Times at the head of the street, and going in for my first job interview."
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"Sometimes a frantic heave will net a score, but you get the sense that even if McCain stages a last-minute rally, Obama will not be daunted. Under insane pressure — as brutal a year on the stump as I've ever seen — he has kept his head. He is the least angry man. "
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"You look like a Jack-o-Lantern having a difficult crap." I cracked up about five times during this. That's really remarkable for me and Internet humor.
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That's right: I had utterly forgotten how bad Megatron looked in robot form.
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"The Graysons will focus on Dick Grayson before he became Robin and joined up with Bruce Wayne. In other words, it'll be about a kid hanging out at the circus with his acrobat parents, who are doomed to die due to trapeze sabotage. Or maybe not: apparently Smallville exec producers Kelly Souders and Brian Peterson have come up with a 'unique take' on the character, now called D.J. Grayson." Oh, Christ.
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Gov. Palin interviews with my second cousin once removed, and lets off a telling comment about her being a "normal Joe Six-Pack" for the Presidency. Good analysis from Mike Hanscom on why that's such a bad idea.
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"As a matter of fact, no Alaska governor in the state’s nearly 50 year history has ever visited the remote outpost that still has little running water. We were curious what the Little Diomeders thought about Palin’s claim of foreign policy experience because of the proximity of Siberia. Interestingly, many of these Alaskans had no idea who Sarah Palin was! It turns out they have no TV on the island, and therefore, many don’t follow the news."
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"In our household, we discovered a trick: the Good Clean sponge [for dishes] is used as-is, straight out of the package. When it gets downgraded to the Wiping Sponge [for kitchen counters and the table], we cut one of the corners off. When the sponge gets downgraded again to a Skunging Sponge [the dregs of cleaning], we cut another corner off."
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"We come against the spirit of witchcraft! We come against the python spirits! We stomp on the heads of the enemy!"
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"Knight Rider is NBC's SF show for the mythical American Heartland, a show full of traditional values and none of that smug bi-coastal liberal elite intellectualism. Somewhere where an Iraq War vet gets treated like the hero that he is, and can keep kicking bad guy butt without having to worry about ambiguous morality - Kind of like 24 with more wheels and less comedic ridiculousness."
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“*faceplant*”
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“The line that Sarah Palin toed was basically this: no way, no how, no public funding at the municipal, state, or federal level for rape kits that contain emergency contraception. [...] And what’s so bad about emergency contraception? Well, a lot of radical pro-life groups view emergency contraception as tantamount to abortion on the grounds that it runs the risk of preventing the implantation of a fertilized ovum, which religious nutballs apparently view as the equivalent of murder.”
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“But you know what I mean. It was good to talk to someone who could answer my questions. But I gotta go catch up to my wife, wherever she is. Got some thinking to do.”
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“I just think you need time to know / That I’m the guy to make it real / The feelings you don’t dare to feel / I’ll bend the world to my will / And we’ll make time stand still.” *sniffle*”
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“Ebert did this with an utterly serious face but intending satire. People promptly thought he had converted to Creationism.”
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“Dumb, dumb, dumb move for McCain campaign. It’s just more ammo for our guys to continue fueling the “she’s an utter idiot unready for command” meme. Of course, they could be purposefully underplaying expectations. Hmm.”
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“After 29 seconds observing the meeting, CNN and other photographers covering the meeting were escorted out of the room.” Yes, McCain, it is always very wise to piss off the media. Because they respond well to that, don’t you know?”
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“Bernanke disclosed that the Treasury would attempt to buy these debts from banks at close to their ‘hold-to-maturity’ value, not the market value. In practice, it means banks who sell their debts to the Treasury would receive cash equivalent to something like twice the value in their books of these poisonous assets.”
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“[H]e’s not black. Do you know he has not one shred of African-American blood? He doesn’t have any African — that’s why when they asked whether he was authentic, whether he’s down for the struggle. He’s Arab. You know, he’s from Africa. He’s from Arab parts of Africa. He’s not — his father was — he’s not African-American. The last thing that he is is African-American. I guess that’s splitting hairs, I don’t — it’s just all these little things, everything seems upside-down today in this country. “
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“A brilliant analysis by John Gruber of how Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” commercials entirely miss the premise.”
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“In short, Walter’s a neocon.”
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“Ba dum dum.”
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“Nice.”
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“And they are utterly beautiful. You really need to check these out — they are AMAZING.”
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“… and asked how to go about banning books. Man, this just gets worse and worse and worse.”
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“You like the idea of having certain things, but you don’t actually use them.”
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“Wow. Whad. Da. Fuck. It’s kind of fun to watch your political opponents just … implode.”
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“If a small-town mayor ever ruled with an iron fist — it was Palin. Eleven days after taking office in 1996, she mailed letters to each of the city’s top managers requesting that they resign as a test of loyalty.”
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“So much for the P.R. line that they planned this.”
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“An utterly fascinating discussion by Roger Ebert on how you can “read” a movie via stop-action pausing. If you read one thing by Ebert, read this.”
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“Use this interactive calculator. (No, he’s not going to raise your taxes. You’ve fallen victim to the GOP meme machine.)”
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“… and thinks that it started out using the phrase “Under God.” It was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, and didn’t include “under God” until 1951.”
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“According to Politico, McCain ’spoke with just once on the phone’ with Palin ‘about the position before offering it in person earlier this week.’”
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“Interesting. Such hatred in the world.”
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“Man-oh-Manschewitz.”
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“WHAT?”
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“At least three people were under arrest on firearms and drug charges in connection with a possible plot to kill Senator Barack Obama during his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday night.” Shit.”
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“(Click the words.)”
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“Not kidding. Not an Onion article.”
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“When the woman went to collect it from the repair garage she found a brand new model and a note of apology on the windscreen. “
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“Whoops!”
