You GOTTA see this.
Requires QuickTime.
Windows Media here.
I convulsively checked my pockets for quarters.
Via Michele.
It’s a rainy Saturday. It’s been a long week. We’re all tired. SciFi has a disaster film marathon on…life is good.
Due to some comments and email that I’ve recently received, I find it necessary to post a few things that I do believe because as one guy put it, I don’t seem to believe in anything.
Sometimes, on ocassion, okay, most of the time, I write things simply just to tweak your pink tomahto nose.
Why?
Because what I have come to believe over the past political season and subsequent victory dance/whine-fest is that the extreme branches of both parties are edging closer and closer to complete meltdown and the sooner they fall apart the better. I believe that these runs to the extreme are based on several factors.
One. 9/11 freaked people so badly they’re still looking for anything to believe in that makes them feel safe. Some folks ran back to the 60s because…well…they don’t remember the 60s except that the music didn’t suck and they got laid a lot so… Some folks ran further back to what they think the 50s were like because the image of an America where everyone is white and Christian and well-dressed is soothing to them. Folks, it’s 2005 and we’ve got to, we have to, start dealing with the realities of THIS world.
I think this is one area where the terrorists have won. We’re more divided now than we were before 9/11, and it’s becoming more, not less serious. We knee-jerked to our respective corners and now we’re fighting each other out of them instead of the bad guys…who are laughing their asses off.
Two. Money. The media understands that extreme sells and they’re playing it to the fullest. Sometimes I think the “true believing kool-aid drinkers” are meeting for beers after work and giggling their butts off. Michael Moore is giving Rush high tens, “Good column dude, I just might have a movie idea to respond to it.” “Thanks Tiny….got any Vicodin?” Malkin, Coulter and Dowd are slamming tequilla and planning their next trip to Cabo. Franken and O’Reilly are in another booth, planning their next trip to the tropics, Franken’s checkin’ the personals, O’Reilly is staring at Malkin thinkin’, “Tahiti baby…”
Seriously. Theater is politics and politics is theater. Always has been. Always will be. If you think for a moment that anything you see on television or the movies or hear on the radio hasn’t gone through 15 revisions, edits, camera angles, you need to re-read your Plato.
Three. Glen Reynolds. Heh. See four.
Four. Frank J.. Because it’s going to piss Frank off to be one under Glen and that’s just fun in and of itself.
Five. Kos. Just because most of his readers annoy the crap out of me.
Six. Fox News Channel. More specifically the SWOOSH, “Fox News Alert.” It used to be when you heard the swoosh, you’d focus on the TV for a moment to see what was happening. Most of us have learned to ignore the swoosh because it’s become meaningless. Others have gone the other direction. When they hear the swoosh they bustle over to the TV, shouldering aside lesser mortals, to see what they’re supposed to be excited about next. I swear in my office some of the wingnuts can hear the swoosh through walls and over vast distances. I believe there’s an underlying secret swoosh in a higher frequency that only minions of Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch can hear. They stand around the tube nodding solemnly about the state of the world and low speed chases. I’ve learned to ignore the swoosh and listen for one guy’s “Holy sh*t.” That’s usually an indication of a real news alert that may actually be interesting or entertaining.
Seven. CNN. Because they gave up even trying to pretend to be objective once Fox News started to gain in popularity. It’s like Ted Turner and his boys rolled up their sleeves and grinned, “Game on!” Hasn’t gotten any better.
Eight. R*U*S*H. Rush. The band. 2112. The album. After too many bottles of Boone’s Farm and too many sessions with the headphones in our youth, there’s an entire generation of us who are watching this mess unfold and all we can hear is “Overture/The Temples of Syrinx” as we watch it all unfold and we wonder how the hell those ugly guys from Canada who played so well could be so damn prescient. (I learned a new word from a reader this week.)
Nine. Okay, forget Rush, I was just trying to use “prescient” in a sentence and the coffee just kicked in and even I don’t know what eight was all about other than my head is starting to become a little too in synch with the shuffle function of iTunes.
Ten. Red Rain. See?
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that wraps up my entire point. You normally don’t see cars with Northern Sun products all over them, but I think someone’s daughter was home from college. The bumper sticker reads, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” See, I think it should read, “If you’re not laughing your ass off, you’re not paying attention.”
That’s right…if you’re not laughing, you’re not taking any of this seriously enough. And believe me, I write this to remind myself much more than I do to remind you.
The divisions are artificial, created by those who don’t want us working and thinking together. Like it or not, deep down inside, we’re all very much the same.
That’s what I believe.
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) — In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.
Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with “context-free grammar,” charts and diagrams.
The rest of the story is here.
What they presented is here.
The program they used is here.
I wonder if it works for EPRs…
No contest, but this one screams for captioning.
This is me confronting some shit for brains petty officer at the gym who didn’t think it was a big deal that his basketball almost went under my eliptical cross trainer and nearly launched me and the cross trainer across the court. “Dude, it was an accident.” And no…it wasn’t a missed pass, he threw the thing over an entire other court and completely missed the guy he was throwing to by 50 feet. Having been launched in the past and having had a cross-trainer on top of me, I tend to be a little skittish when there are balls around to begin with.
Yes, I over-reacted and yes, his ass is mine. No…I’m not out to end his career, just to scare the shite out of him for showing less than proper respect for a raging old fart who doesn’t like being launched in any sense of the word and likes it even less when said shit for brains turns his back on me just as I’m getting warmed up and tells his “posse,” “Yo, this one’s trippin’.” I understand he needs to maintain his court cred, but not at the expense of MY pride and ego. He had his 5 minutes of satisfaction, I’m going to have about 15 minutes of watching him shiver…just because… Or…I may just leave him alone and wait until I see him in the hallway and then give the smile of death. Part of me likes that even better. But since it was a safety issue…you see it coming don’t you? I think the best bet would be to talk with one of the chiefs and have the young man give a briefing at the next all hands call.
At some point all of us who came from the street to the service have to make that decision, “Which world am I going to live in?” Ya can’t sit on the fence after E4…I know, I tried. They didn’t let me get away with it either.
South Park Studio via Planearium.
Hat tip to Michele.
UPDATE AFTER A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP: The title of the briefing will be, “Hidden Dangers at the Fitness Center” And yeah, I know I’m being a d*ck.
The Cookie Monster is now a…shudder…whimper…healthy eating advocate.
Via Eccentrica.
Un.Be.Freaking.Leivable.
Please check out the current Rockwood comic and enlighten us lesser mortals.
Michele is Barking at the Moon over the death of the Pope. Warnings: Not for the easily offended. She’s a rather devout atheist and serious heathen with a good soul. I almost lost an eigth of a half-chewed breakfast banana on my screen. YMMV.
…this bummed me out more than anything else today.
I opened up a yogurt. Underneath the lid it said, “Please try again,” because they were having a contest that I was not aware of. I thought maybe I had opened the yogurt wrong. Or maybe Yoplait was trying to inspire me. “Come on Mitchell, don’t give up!” An inspirational message from your friends at Yoplait. Fruit on the bottom, hope on top.
Alcoholism is the only disease you can get yelled at for having.
The first time I saw Mitch Hedberg was on some late night Comedy Central thing and he completely caught me off guard with his absurdity. He was like Stephen Wright’s twisted cousin.
More over at MTV. The official site has a message from his family. Those two links from Goldstein.
…And you are too stupid to call you cable company and have them block FNC…
…Then you need to pay this idiot $8.95 for the Fox Blocker.
Kimery’s motives go deeper than preventing people from watching the channel, which he acknowledges can be done without the Blocker. But he likens his device to burning a draft card, a tangible example of disagreement.
And he’s taking this message to the network’s advertisers. After buying the $8.95 device online, would-be blockers are shown a letter that they can send to advertisers via the Fox Blocker site.
“The point is not to block the channel or block free speech but to raise awareness,” said Kimery, who works in the tech industry.
…And I’ve never (well, hardly ever!) read this sort of book… unless I was really, really bored and there was nothing else. (Blondie did, when she was in high school, though.)
So, I can look at these, and about die from laughing!
(Courtesy of the great Blogfather himself)
There seems to be a rumor running around, in connection with the Terri Schiavo affair, about something called the Texas Futile Care Act of 1999 (signed into law by then Governor George W. Bush). The rumor has it that this law allows a doctor, or care facility, to override the wishes of the guardian or family in cases such as Terri’s.
Well, here’s the actual law. And my reading of it only shows a provision for what we would all understand to be a Living Will. If someone else (Sgt. Mom, or another Texan, perhaps?) sees something there which I don’t, please comment.
Update: Mark Kleiman has a lot on this here.
Update 2: On closer inspection, it does appear that the statute allows for the attending physician to go against the wishes of the patient or guardian, WITH THE CONCURRENCE OF A MEDICAL ETHICS COMMITTEE. It is also important to note that this is not directly equivalent to Terri’s case, as it deals with patients determined to be terminal; this is not the case with Terri.
Update 2: Here’s a good article on the subject, from 1998:
Though no one knows how many hospitals have medical futility guidelines, the trend seems to have started around 1990, according to the Rev. John Paris, a professor of bioethics at Boston College. Until that time, the treatment model was fairly paternalistic. Physicians dictated treatment with little input from patients. Families sued to terminate medical care that physicians and hospitals wanted to impose against their wishes or those of the patient. Paris thinks patients right to terminate unwanted care was fairly well-established with the 1990 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Nancy Cruzan. The verdict gave her parents the right to disconnect the feeding tube sustaining their daughter, who had been in a persistent vegetative state for years. In 1991, the federal Patient Self-Determination Act was passed, which established advance directives. “Then suddenly, we find a new phenomenon: families demanding treatment and aggressive interventions that physicians believed were inappropriate,” Paris said.
I just posted a story about my week’s flying – funny I hope! at my personal blog here
Enjoy!
Joe Comer
As cool as it is to be referred to that way, I just wanted to point out that not everyone who posts here is Sgt Stryker. There is but one Stryker and he mostly posts over here these days.
I’m kind of curious…do folks just consider us all Stryker in sort of a collective way? Should we pull a Ramones and all change our posting names?
Can I be Joey?
This was forwarded by regular “Daily Brief” reader Capt. J.M. Heinrichs; it is an amusing Australian variant on one that has been going the rounds since WWII, or possibly earlier:
Text of a letter from a kid from Eromanga to Mum and Dad. (Eromanga is a small town west of Quilpie in the far south west of Queensland)
Dear Mum & Dad,
I am well. Hope youse are too. Tell me big brothers Doug and Phil that the Army is better than workin’ on the farm – tell them to get in bloody quick smart before the jobs are all gone!
I wuz a bit slow in settling down at first, because ya don’t hafta get outta bed until 6am. But I like sleeping in now, cuz all ya gotta do before brekky is make ya bed and shine ya boots and clean ya uniform. No bloody cows to milk, no calves to feed, no feed to stack – nothin’!!
Blokes haz gotta shave though, but its not so bad, coz there’s lotsa hot
water and even a light to see what ya doing!
At brekky ya get cereal, fruit and eggs but there’s no kangaroo steaks or
possum stew like wot Mum makes. You don’t get fed again until noon, and by
that time all the city boys are buggered because we’ve been on a ‘route
march’ – geez its only just like walking to the windmill in the back
paddock!!
This one will kill me brothers Doug and Phil with laughter. I keep getting
medals for shootin’ – dunno why. The bullseye is as big as a bloody possum’s
bum and it don’t move and its not firing back at ya like the Johnsons did
when our big scrubber bull got into their prize cows before the Ekka last
year! All ya gotta do is make yourself comfortable and hit the target – its
a piece of piss!!
You don’t even load your own cartridges – they comes in little boxes and ya
don’t have to steady yourself against the rollbar of the roo shooting truck
when you reload!
Sometimes ya gotta wrestle with the city boys and I gotta be real careful
coz they break easy – it’s not like fighting with Doug and Phil and Jack and
Boori and Steve and Muzza all at once like we do at home after the muster.
Turns out I’m not a bad boxer either and it looks like I’m the best the
platoon’s got, and I’ve only been beaten by this one bloke from the
Engineers – he’s 6 foot 5 and 15 stone and three pickhandles across the
shoulders and as ya know I’m only 5 foot 7 and eight stone wringin’ wet, but
I fought him till the other blokes carried me off to the boozer.
I can’t complain about the Army – tell the boys to get in quick before word
gets around how bloody good it is.
Your loving daughter,
Jill
(For maximim giggles, imagine Cate Blanchett as Jill– Sgt. Mom)
First I was annoyed at what “genius” George Lucas had done to Star Wars. Jar-Jar was NOT a picture I needed added to the freak show that plays in my mind. Episode II gave us a crystal-meth-fueled whirling dirvish of a Yoda, that was good for about 30 seconds of “Woohooooo!” but other than that…YAWN wake me before the popcorn butter congeals on my face. You know the main problem with Episode II? There was no tension in the love scenes because (smacking myself in the head) we know about Luke and Leia. Ya don’t make twins by talking about it, ‘k? There was just too much time wasted there for the “God, Titanic was SUCH a good movie.” crowd.
And now James Joyner of OTB reports that Lucas expects Episode III to be “too strong” for lil kids and it’s going to get a PG13 rating. PG13. Here in the heartland, that may as well be “R” for the problems that’s going to cause parents.
This means that I’m a bad parent no matter how I handle this. Boyo is 8. He’s seen and loves every Star Wars Movie, Cartoon, Coloring Book, Little Reader, and Sticker set that he’s ever laid his eyes and hands on. He owns exactly one action figure (doll) and that’s young Obi Wan. He’s gone through 3 different light sabres. So if I take him to the movie, I’m going to have parents looking at me with that, “You KNOW this is PG13.” look. Folks here in the heartland are good at that look. There’s a fish fry on every corner on Friday nights this time of year, you figure it out.
If I don’t take him, he’ll hate me. All there is to it.
Now some of you are going to hang your heads and shake them disapprovingly and say to yourselves that I’m caving, that I’m too permissive, that he can wait until he’s mature enough. And you go right ahead. Because there’s no freaking way in the world that I’m going to NOT take my son to see Star Wars…I don’t care if it has a X rating and the light sabers suddenly become sex toys and Natalie Portman runs topless through the desert yelling for Jean Reno to save her from Gary Oldman while eyeing the bulge in Samuel L. Jackson’s robe and wondering how Yoda fits Frank Oz’s whole hand up his butt.
Because it’s Star Wars. You take your kids to Star Wars. When I was 16, 17 and 19 I went to Episodes IV, V, and VI, sometimes over and over and over again. I watched the videos with my nephews, sometimes over and over and over again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the 5 available movies on DVD with Boyo. It’s something we do. Star Wars is part of our family’s life. It’s iconic.
So Mr Lucas, damn your once brilliant soul to hell for making EpIII dark enough to possibly be interesting for me, while simultaneously making me an a**hole for taking my 8 year old to a movie too strong for him. Way to pay back 30 freaking years of being a fan.
While I agree with Kevin that it’s best to let the newly-retired anchorman fade quietly into the woodwork, I can still enjoy a wee bit of mockery. Especially when it’s cleverly presented.
Iowahawk gives us the final story in his “Detective Dan Rather” series, this one called “The Big Snooze.”
For any who loved Sam Spade, this is worth reading.
Excerpt:
It was a blustery March morning in Manhattan. I hiked up the collar on my trenchcoat and stepped out into a fresh sheet of snow that had fallen in front of the seedy West 80’s flop house I call home. Pretty stuff, that snow. But just below the surface it can conceal something icy, something treacherous. Something that can make your Florsheims lose their grip, set your arms and legs windmilling spastically, cause you to make a violent, jarring, assplant into a frigid sidewalk filth-slushee. And in my line of business it’s all part of a day’s work.
My name is Rather. And I’m a dick.
Enjoy! (I’m heading back over to read his earlier works in that series)
hattip to Slarrow
I’m thinking of calling up Beautiful Wife and seeing if she’s up for a Famous Feast for this evening in honor. We order the beef brisket vs the pork, that way we kill as many animals as possible with one meal.
I absolutely refuse to apologize for being on top of the food chain.
PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals
Correction: It’s not until March 15th…but too late now…I’ve got a hankerin’ for a Famous Feast and I’m not stopping until some Devil’s Spit has been consumed on tasty animal flesh.
UPDATE: After all was said and done…we started with the catfish appetizer, Boyo had the Chicken Tenders, we had the Famous Feast as the main course. Total of at least 5 animals dead. Luckily I’m back at the gym with a cautious blessing from my surgeon because DAMN I gained almost 15 pounds while laid up. I’d start smoking again but I feel so damn good without them I just can’t.
In related news, Sting challenges Kofi Anon to a game of Roman Knuckles.
OK, I know I said (two months ago) that I’d write stuff twice a week. And I haven’t written a thing since then.
So much for that New Year’s resolution!
Anyway, I return with good news.
Background first: About a month ago, the General and I walked into our local Arby’s for a quick dinner. Now, for me, no Arby’s meal is complete without their trademark potato cakes. I’m sure it drives my cholesterol numbers through the roof, but still, they’re so delicious.
“A roast beef sandwich and some potato cakes,” I said. “Sorry, sir, we’re no longer selling potato cakes,” said my server. “What??!!” I exclaimed. “Why, they’re the only reason I come here. This is outrageous!” I said, with all the drama I could muster. “I’m very sorry, sir,” said this purveyor of all-but-potato-cakes, remorsefully. “Perhaps you’d like to fill out one of our suggestion cards.” “You bet I would.” says I. And I did.
Well, you get the idea.
So, this week, I get a voice mail from the regional Arby’s headquarters (who knew?), who received the aforementioned sugestion card. Apparently, enough people complained that they have returned potato cakes to my local restaurant. And today, to verify this information, I returned to that very store and indulged in some piping hot (OK, mildy hot) potato cakes (along with a Beef ‘N Cheddar).
Arby’s, I’m back.
Moral: it pays to speak your mind.
Secondary moral: somebody is way too obsessive about potato cakes.
The Law of Monkey. I think my old Sociology Prof would have loved this.
Via Dean.
Now that the Airbus A380 is flying, will France’s Jacque Chirac order one for his state aircraft – just so he can claim he’s got a bigger one than George Bush? 🙂
Golden Age of Cartoons has more art and articles related to the “New and Improved” version of Bugs and crew.
Via John from Michele’s comment’s.