Chicken Dinner

Having recently seen 21, I have decided to formally declare my intention to become a card shark forthwith through perfection of the art and science of the counting of cards.

I will, however, refrain from buying ugly white Gucci suits.

We're All Going to Die

A world renowned cancer researcher is in the process of publishing an extensive, independent, peer-reviewed study concluding that cell phones pose a greater public heath threat than cigarettes and asbestos. I guess it takes about a decade of consistent cell phone usage for brain tumors to begin to manifest. And I guess it's been about a decade now.

Yeah, so, we're all totally dead.

Funereal

It struck me today that flowers start to look more beautiful when they begin to die a little.

Creepy.

Just like Crack. Fuzzy Crack.

How did I not know about this website?

Freedom Zero

According to GNU Operating System, free software requires the existence of four freedoms:

— The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

— The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

— The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

— The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Per GNU, "To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." This is an important distinction for those of us who came of eAge alongside Napster. It wasn't about the free(dom) of the music, but the freedom to the music.

I find the concept of Freedom Zero particularly enticing, and wonder what it's sociopolitical parallels might be. Not that free software isn't political; it very clearly is.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Crazypants

Dude. James Carville is totally Voldemort!

Although if James Carville is Voldemort, then George W. Bush is not, which means that John McCain is not his horcrux after all.

This theory requires massaging.

Proto-Tagonist

In 1667 John Milton wrote "Paradise Lost", a romping ten-book philosophical poem, in an explicit attempt to "justify the ways of god to man." It occurs to me that perhaps the real purpose of philosophy, however, is and always has been to justify the ways of man to god.

Or whatever.

There Are Dogs, and There Are Dogs, and There Are Dogs

The Good: "They spent months in an Iraqi war zone cementing a special bond. But after more than a month of being apart, Marine Maj. Brian Dennis began to worry if Nubs the dog would still remember him, especially in a new place like San Diego.

Their reunion early Saturday at Camp Pendleton clearly showed otherwise. The 2-year-old old dog, named for his two nubby ears, drenched Dennis' face with doggie kisses and said hello with excited whimpers.

'You remember that, huh?' Dennis said as he rubbed the dog's head."

Source: SignOnSanDiego

The Bad: "This week, however, Senator Clinton put a pistol to the head of her own campaign and put it out of its mathematical misery. Matthew Yglesias quotes Hillary saying in a speech earlier this week:

'I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.'

That sounds terrible. (If you'd like, you can read the original speech at Senator Clinton's campaign site). But join me as we flashback 1996 and then return to this week."



Source: Daily Kos

The Ugly: "America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known. ... We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude? ... Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?"

Source: Pat Buchanen's Blog

Of Junkies with Guitars

There are few pleasures more sublime than turning on the radio at the precise moment that the first few bars of one of your favorite songs start playing.

Mourning Iraq

Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of the War in Iraq, a war which Donald Rumsfeld once estimated may last for six days; indeed, on May 1, 2003 the president himself declared that the war was effectively over and won.

I guess the citizens of an occupied sovereign nation insurgents didn't get the memo.

Since we invaded Iraq, approximately 4,000 American soldiers have died needlessly, violently, tragically, as a result; estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the beginning of the invasion vary from the appalling to the grotesque.

Yesterday, a reporter had the temerity to point out to Darth President Cheney that two-thirds of American people believe that the war is not worth fighting. Cheney's response was precisely one word in length:

"So?"

Watch it for yourself:



The traditional fifth year anniversary gift is wood. It seems a fitting material.

Make Puppies, Not War

When Delilah was seven months years old, my husband and I adopted her. While she was delightful and small and furry and warm, we've always wondered what she must have looked like when she was even smaller.

Today, Google image search helps answer that question. Just, you know, pretend it doesn't say "Jill" in the corner.

Beyond Putting Food on Your Family

Barack Obama's campaign has recently been surrounded by controversy over what many view as incendiary preaching on the part of his pastor, which you presumably already know since you do not live under a rock. Today Obama delivered a speech in response, addressing not only the present situation but also larger issues of race in American society. I can only imagine where the country would be today if we'd received this sort of immediate and bracingly honest response to potential crises from our president over the past seven years (as opposed to, say, grammatically butchered lies). Take half an hour and watch the whole thing. It's worth the time.



Here's a link to full text of the speech, and here's link to my favorite response, pointing out that the guy actually wrote the damn thing himself — something no president or presidential candidate has done since 1969.

1969!

Be still my geeky heart.

Why I Like the Stuff I Like

While I lazily and confessedly use the Fellow Travelers link in my sidebar as something of a makeshift self-serving set of bookmarks, I thought I'd take a moment to explain why they're worth checking out for the rest of you who wander through here occasionally.

Daily Kos — I'm a big proponent of tossing the myth of objective journalism out the window and returning to the days of owning one's lens and reporting accordingly. And that's what Kossacks do.

Go Fug Yourself — Because thongkinis are never okay.

Open Left — A less cool Daily Kos, but still worth an occasional browse.

Slightly Perfervid — A friend's insightful and often amusing blog asserting that happiness and neuroses are not mutually exclusive.

The Futon Critic — This site is pretty much the only way I can keep track of what is airing when, since there's about as much consistency and logic to network airing schedules these days as there is to Bush's position on FISA.

The Huffington Post — Sort of like The Drudge Report, but with way more bloggers and way fewer trojan horses.

The Mean Bean — A friend's fledgling vegetarian blog. Lots of awesome recipes for people who are more microwave than Martha.

United Hollywood — Because if there's one thing I love more than pop culture, it's organized labor. Wait, strike that, reverse it. Or not. Doesn't matter; UH has both.

Do you write or read an awesome blog I don't know about (*cough*ProjectRunway*cough*)? Let me know!

Five Things Not To Do in Making a Best Picture

1. Kill your protagonist three fourths of the way through.

2. Kill your your protagonist off-handedly and off-screen.

3. Forget to use music until the closing credits.

4. Sprinkle in gratuitous dog corpses every twenty minutes.

5. Give the bad guy a bowl hair cut.

Don't get me wrong. The fate/coin/sociopath motif was cool, the closing scene was brilliant, and the Coen brothers remain hilarious. But There Will Be Blood was so very robbed.

Practice Violent Acts of Random

This morning on the way to work I had the delightful experience of getting stuck behind a gigantic tree-trimming truck. When I finally found a hole in the traffic to my left and pulled around the guy, I was struck by the message stenciled onto the side of the vehicle: "Jesus won't cut you down."

I understand that perhaps in the 1400's "won't chop you to bits" may indeed have played well as a selling point for proselytizers, but I suspect that most modernites want a little more from their lord and savior these days than a promise to abstain from dismemberment.

There Is a Specter Haunting Laughter Shrapnel

So, I appear to be a bit of a commie, having scored a -9.75 on Political Compass' economic continuum (-10 being the greatest possible left-leaning score). My merrily Marxist -9.75 is paired with a -8.36 on the Libertarian/Authoritarian scale, which means that I literally make Gandhi look conservative.

I just need some pasty, tea-fed troops to lie down in front of, I guess.

The Political Compass' U.S. primaries page is also worth a look. This bit made me laugh:

"While Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are depicted on the extreme left in an American context, they would simply be mainstream social democrats within the wider political landscape of Europe. Similarly, Hillary Clinton is popularly perceived as a leftist in the United States while in any other western democracy her record is that of a moderate conservative."

Sadly, the only candidate even in the same time zone as my clearly insane level of leftyness is Ralph Nader; meanwhile, Mitt Romney is a fascist.

Up in Smoke

A new study on life expectancy has found that educated Americans are likely to live an average of seven years longer than their less bookish counterparts. Much to my surprise, this discrepancy is not accounted for by the fact that stupid people are more likely to walk in front of moving vehicles. Rather, the study found, less educated people are more likely to smoke cigarettes and hence have higher rates of emphysema and lung cancer, dragging their mean life expectancy down significantly. Walking in front a car strikes me as cheaper and likely less painful, but whatever.

Still, I imagine Darwin would be somewhat amused.

Ew.

Ew ew ew ew ew.

Eeeeew.

Myriad-Minded

When I was small, my parents, in their (I have come to increasingly realize) great wisdom enrolled me in a wide variety of extracurricular activities ranging from clarinet to karate, from riding horses to rowing canoes. One of these activities was acting, and I remember spending one summer taking classes from the fine thespians at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre.

The only problem with taking acting lessons from actual actors is that you're taking acting lessons from actual actors. I assume anyone who has ever met an actual actor will take my point. One day in improv class (the sort of painful activity in which a room full of 12-year-olds pretend to be donkeys and CEO's) our instructor burst into an utterly unsolicited monologue (or was it some sort of schizophrenic soliloquy?) in which he bemoaned the lack of soul, soul, in our performances and decried the shallow, materialistic culture that was clearly responsible for superficial and desultory acting.

Midway through what was probably the first nervous breakdown I'd witnessed, our poor instructor cried out "Have any of you even read any Shakespeare?!?!" Painfully geeky, painfully honest, it never occurred to me to do anything other than pathetically raise my hand and assure the poor man that I'd read Julius Caesar out of curiosity when I was 10. Tears literally sprang to the man's eyes, at which point he spun himself into some sort of fit involving shouts of "Children in Africa are starving to death and only one of you has ever read Shakespeare! Oh the HUMANITY!" Predictably, the 20 other children in the room stared at me as though I'd suddenly spouted an extra head (the contents of which they perhaps would have required to successfully crack a tome of the bard, but that's neither here nor there).

The lesson I took from all of this is that unashamed intelligence, while occasionally appealing to the acutely insane, or the insanely acute, to the well-socialized it is off-putting at best. And that I didn't want to be an actor.

Actually, the classes were pretty great once I got a Romulan cloaking device for the second head (and if American electoral politics teach us nothing else, Americans have very short memories). But some days I think I'd recommend canoeing.

Go Blog Yourself

We've all seen it. Horizontal stripes mixed with animal print. Pleather pants combined with a "Metal Up Your Ass" t-shirt. Highwater jeans with, well, anything.

We mock. We laugh. But the girls at Go Fug Yourself... well, they blog.

And lo, but it is funny.

Laissez Not So Fair

The Federal Reserve acted today to further attempt to stave off an impending credit crisis.

How, you ask? By instituting a mandatory cap on interest rates charged to consumers? Perhaps a government subsidized mortgage assistance program (which would benefit both the residents and the banks)? Or maybe by providing low-interest, short-term loans to economically troubled parties?

If you guessed option number three, you get a cookie. But that's all you'll get. The feds aren't offering this bailout package to actual human beings who could benefit from it. Rather, they are making available $100 billion in loans to troubled banks... who will then turn around and loan that very same money out to their customers at marked up interest rates.

Somewhere Adam Smith is puking into his cravat.

Calling all Losties

My prediction: Michael is Ben's man on the freighter.

That is all.

Shiny New Toy

What do you get for the political junkie who has everything? His or her very own delegate counter!

This awesome little device allows you to create an infinite number of presidential primary result scenarios in the remaining states, and shows exactly how many delegates would be allocated to each candidate under each circumstance. Want to know how many delegates Obama picks up if he wins Mississippi 55-45? He nets three. But what if he wins 70-30? Well then he nets 13.

Mix and match, presto chango, and you can play the same game Clinton's playing — the "there's no damn way to win unless we hold a caucus in Tijuana but shhhh don't tell anyone" game.

Seriously, though, it's an addictive little widget.

While you're at it, check out Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter's column analyzing what the delegate counter shows. It's pretty compelling stuff. Not to give away the ending, but Clinton would have to win all twelve remaining states with a 62-38 margin to beat Obama in pledged delegates. Here's my official prediction: the day Clinton wins Mississippi 62-38 is the day Bush stops tap dancing on public television and signs the Kyoto protocol.

Hucktastic

In honor of the departure of one of the biggest congealments of crazy from the presidential race, I present to you my five favorite Mike Huckabee quotes:

1. "I'm pretty sure there will be duck-hunting in heaven and I can't wait!"

2. "We ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade."

3. "[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

4. "If you want to believe that you and your family came from apes, I'll accept that... I believe there was a creative process."

And I would remiss if I did not include...

5. "When we were in college we used to take a popcorn popper — because that was the only thing they would let us have in the dorms — and fry squirrels in the popcorn popper."

So long, Huck!

The Bush Signal

I stumbled across an article today entitled "Bush Says He Lets Red Phone Go Straight to Voicemail". In the article, President Bush responds to Hillary Clinton's recent "red phone" attack ads in which she implies that in the event of a global disaster, neophyte Barack Obama would let terrorists eat your sleeping toddlers.

The first few paragraphs from the article contain a rather disturbing confession from the President:

President George W. Bush commented on Sen. Hillary Clinton's controversial "red phone" campaign ads at the White House today, telling reporters, "When that red phone rings, I just let it go straight to voicemail."

Mr. Bush rarely comments about the Democratic presidential contest, but he said that he had to speak up about Sen. Clinton's red phone ads because he found them "so confusing."

"If I answered the red phone every time it rang, I would never get any sleep," Mr. Bush said. "Sometimes it starts ringing at 9 PM, and I am already tucked in by then."

The sad thing is, I didn't realize the article was a satire until the second to last paragraph, wherein former President Clinton attests that he always used to answer the red phone in case it was a "booty call." And I'm not the only one — the comments section is full of readers who also thought the article was legit until halfway through. How tragically comic that so many citizens find the notion of President Bush letting the machine pick up in face of nuclear disaster plausible.

Lasagna Love: Introducing the Sparta-Choke Lasagna

Inspired by The Mean Bean, I decided to create my own veggie lasagna today. Shockingly, it was quite good. For the curious (and the brave):

Ingredients:

8 oz. cream cheese
8 oz. ricotta cheese
A few handfuls of shredded mozzarella cheese (hey, I said this was an experiment)
An indiscernible quantity of parmesan cheese
Optional: 2 eggs
Optional: Chopped garlic
14 oz. can pizza sauce
14 oz. can fire roasted tomatoes
14 oz. spaghetti sauce (your choice)
1 can sliced black olives
1 can quartered artichokes
A few handfuls of spinach
9 no-boil lasagna noodles

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix all of the cheeses together in a large mixing bowl and set aside. If you like, include the eggs and the garlic. Mix all of the sauces together in another large mixing bowl and set aside. In a 9x13 lasagna pan, pour a thin layer of the sauce to cover the bottom of the pan. Then lay three noodles on top of the sauce. Spread 1/3 of the cheese mixture over the noodles, then spread 1/3 of the veggies over the cheese mixture. Repeat the layering until all of the ingredients are gone (although you should save some sauce to pour over the top of the final layer). Toss another handful of mozzarella cheese over the whole thing and pop it in the oven for an hour. When you remove the lasagna, let it sit for 10 minutes before eating (unless you're like me and you don't mind eating stuff that is literally still boiling).

Total prep time is about 15 minutes. And it's really good!

Which is nice, because I'd be eating it for a week either way...

FOR SPARTA!

The [Insert Your Name Here] Show

I just rewatched The Truman Show and was struck by how the world satirically predicted in that film 10 years ago has increasingly come to manifest. I'm not just talking about the growing domination of popular culture by "reality" TV shows such as American Idol, Project Runway and even the pure embarrassment that is Celebrity Rehab. Rather, I'm talking about the reality TV show starring you — the one in which you're caught on camera roughly 500 time a day. That's not a random number. It's the number of times the average American citizen is videotaped by cameras in ATM's, gas stations, stoplights and other subtle public surveillance stations, according to a recent study (I'd link, but Drudge took it down, the bastard).

An article on Military.com (and wouldn't you love to own that domain name) explores the extent to which high-tech surveillance is penetrating our daily interactions without our knowledge (let alone our acquiesence). It's well worth a read. For those of you who doubt the slipperiness of the slope, here's an interesting excerpt:

"This may sound like a privacy wonk's paranoia. But examples abound. Take E-ZPass. Drivers signed up for the system to speed up toll collection. But 11 states now supply E-ZPass records -- when and where a toll was paid, and by whom -- in response to court orders in criminal cases. Seven of those states provide information in civil cases such as divorce, proving, for instance, that a husband who claimed he was at a meeting in Pennsylvania was actually heading to his lover's house in New Jersey. (New York divorce lawyer Jacalyn Barnett has called E-ZPass the "easy way to show you took the offramp to adultery.")"

Of course, an active and informed citizenry could rise up and speak out against these incursions into our privacy. But considering the fact that off-handed remark I made calling something "Orwellian" at the gym the other day was met with "Oh, yeah, I remember that book" by the guy scanning cards behind the counter, I'm not holding my breath.

As Ben Franklin (or possibly Richard Jackson) wrote two centuries ago, "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."