Overheard in the Office:

RX: "Dinosaurs didn't have a space program."

Me: "How do you know they didn't?"

RX: "Because they aren't still around. Bill Clinton had a space program, and he's still around. Barack Obama has... uh... a space program that somehow involves reaching out to the Muslim world..."

Me: "I can think of a program of outreach to the Muslim world involving rocket ships."

I'm always cranky and xenophobic on Tuesdays.
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Things I Don't Get, #355,401

Remember at the end of Python's Holy Grail, when the cops show up and arrest Arthur and a bunch of his knights, and one of the bobbies yanks a guy's shield away with a brusque "'Ere, that's an offensive weapon, that is"? Remember that?

Well, Canada's got some sweeping body armor ban coming down the pike, which is one of those things I just don't get. Think about it: Why would a loving and benevolent government want the people it claims to be protecting to be easier to kill?

Every time I hear of some jurisdiction banning body armor, I want to grab my copy of the criminal code and run into the street waving it around and yelling "IT'S A COOKBOOK!"

Elite Team Fighter.

Somebody in a forum asked which "elite" outfits were still using 1911s. There was a little discussion, and I realized that this is a line of thinking that I have gotten very out of touch with over the last several years.

I mean, it used to be a Very Big Deal to me that I was carrying zomg teh exact same pistol as FBI HRT! Now I'm carrying a gun just like the one issued by... by... um... I don't know. Or care, really.

Seriously, when I was carrying a Glock 29, you better cool believe that I could inform you that the Kentucky State Police issued 10mm Glocks, and it was a constant point of contention on gun forums to debate which brand of pistol was used by more militaries or police forces.

Maybe the Mall of America's elite Food Court Team 6 issues the M&P 9? Whatever; it's all good.

Locavore-ive Breath

Elsewhere on the intertubes, I find myself explaining the seeming dichotomy of me being willing to hoof over to Locally Grown Gardens on foot to get eggs from the local hippie commune, and yet still make fun of the patrons of the organic whole breakfast food shelf at the supermarket:

I pay double grocery store cost for local free-range eggs from Locally Grown Gardens, not because they're local or because I care about what the chickens were fed or whether giving them aromatherapy every day reduced their carbon footprint, but because a chicken that runs loose and eats bugs lays eggs with thick shells, orange yolks and a white with more flavor than tapwater.

On the other hand, "the rich flavor of natural whole grains" in 90% of Nature's Whole Organic Goodness Breakfast Gruel reminds me of why baked goods always involve salt and/or sugar, and we don't just crop the stuff off the stems in the field with our mouths like ruminants.

The fact that most of those eggs are usually only a couple days out of the chicken is just a bonus.

That's, like, a lot in people years.

"I'm doing this cool new thing called 'blogging'. It's really obscure; you've probably never heard of it."

Charles G. Hill at dustbury.com celebrates sixteen years of logging his travels on the Web.
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All mimsy were the borogroves...

Having had the word verification turned on for so long, I'd actually kinda missed the 'bot-generated word salad they use to try and spoof their way past the Turing screens in the spam filter. Check out this fragment of Vogon poetry I dug out of the spam comment trap this morning:

When traveling, it's not without exception important to prevention together. Let Mom imbibe the kids unified heyday while Dad enjoys a by a circular of golf. The next time Mom should remit in the spa while Dad and the kids relish in some pool time. Splitting up allows each progenitrix to utilize a much needed destroy b decompose during journeys time.

Planning is anyone of the most leading aspects that you whim lack to consider when you are traveling. Score steadfast that you without exception make it at least an hour and a half up front your take a run-out powder so that you cause sufficient time to manage yourself situated. This will eschew to convey you cordial of mind.

...

Instant that you've gotten a hardly tips on making your excursion affair a achievement, you can go flip with confidence. Apply these time-honored tricks of the calling and pass them on to those who may be accompanying you on the journey. One wish better from being more aware of and aware.

[link excised]Cheap Ray Ban glasses[/link excised]

I'm envisioning tanks of Cylon Hybrids in Shanghai, murmuring endlessly...

FTL system check diagnostic functions within parameters repeats the harlequin the agony exquisite the colors run the path of ashes fifty-two percent of heat exchanger cross-collateralized with hyper-dimensional matrix upper senses repair ordered relay to zero, zero, zero, zero, Christian Louboutin Replica...

Overheard in the Office:

I'm reading a post at Popehat about a legal setback suffered by the food nazis of the CSPI via the dismissal of the anti-Happy Meal lawsuit of their willing cat's paw, Monet Parnham-Lee. Any time those Gladys Kravitzes take one in the "L" column, it's a win for freedom.

Out of curiosity, I went and looked up the Center for Science in the Public Interest at Wikipedia. The article contained a picture of a medium-sized office building rather grandiosely captioned as "CSPI Headquarters in Washington, D.C." By this, of course, they mean that the fourth window from the left on the third floor is CSPI headquarters.

Clicking on the picture takes you to the page containing the photo, where the caption is a little less disingenuous. I started reading off some of the tenants out loud...

Me: "Wow, look who all has offices in this building! CSPI, Environmental Defense Fund, National Bank of Pakistan, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Population Reference Bureau, the Rendon Group... Luddites, Malthusians, and provocateurs... it's like bipartisan supervillain headquarters!"

*I lean over until my mouth is right over my turned-off cell phone, laying there on the desk...*

Me: "That's where the truck bomb needs to go."

RX: "Great, now you can never buy diesel fuel again."

Fuzzy...

Still can't brain.

Have the dumbs.

Smart people talking at roomie's blog.

Go there.

Happy Whatever Spring Festival You Celebrate!

So we're right around the weekend where Jews are celebrating Passover, neo-Pagans are no doubt engaging in some (carefully re-created/long-held in secret folk custom) affair or other that most likely involves being naked in the woods, Christians are commemorating the day when Christ rose from the grave and walked the Earth in search of human souls, and all of America builds elaborate shines to sugar-crusted marshmallow baby chickens.

Whichever of these applies to you, may it be enjoyable.

(Sorry for the feeble amount of content, my brain's not been working right this weekend. I blame my relatively low-carb diet and sleeping in the last two mornings; I think that by the time I dragged myself out of bed and sat in front of the computer, my blood sugar was through the floor.)

But I don't care about the kind with racquets, either.

Unc asks, apparently in regard to the Masters' kerfuffle:

I’m guessing most women (as in an overwhelming percentage of) don’t care about golf one way or the other.

I don’t personally know anybody, setter or pointer, who gives much of a damn about pasture pool one way or another.

They could spice it up by incorporating some of my ideas:

• Let golfers try to disrupt other golfers' swings by assaulting them with their clubs. Your caddy would be allowed to try to ward them off with your own clubs.


• There should be a par time from tee to hole that requires at least a mild jog to avoid going over. You can attempt to trip other golfers along the way with your club.


• The obstacles as they exist are too lame and easily avoided. I'm thinking a ditch and abatis clear across the fairway, and perhaps some barbed wire around the green. Rattlers would liven up the sand traps.

If this catches on, you should hear my ideas to liven up curling.

QotD: Rite of Spring Edition

All the signs of spring are in the air: Flowers blooming, grass growing, birds singing, Congress bloviating over the need to Do Something About Gas Prices.

The Adaptive Curmudgeon noted that, like Christmas decorations, it seems to start earlier every year lately.

Looks like a dozen years of generally earlier onset of “gasoline psychosis”, albeit with a brief remission in 2011. Only time will tell what will happen in 2013 but if trends continue it’ll be somewhere between early April or mid/early March.

Of course, Congress could learn that gasoline, like everything, is subject to market forces. Ha ha ha…I’m just kidding. Bet on an outbreak of cluelessness in April 2013 and you’ll probably have called it a year in advance.

(Italics and implied facepalming in original.)

...not even a mother could love.

I had no idea that the Indy Red Star had actually penned a "Leave Brittney Lugar alone!" editorial. I wish one of their three remaining subscribers had pointed it out to me when it was still fresh so that I could have fisked it.

I mean, I don't want to come across all Pauline Kael, here, but I've yet to hear anybody, of any political persuasion, have a nice word to say about the man in my presence. How Lugar continues to get reelected is one of the more baffling mysteries of my adopted home state.


(h/t to Shermlock.)

Mother Gaia's gone all Sibyl.

I would like to apologize to all the gardeners of central Indiana for the freeze warnings last night and tonight.

I cannot tell a lie: I put all my fleece pullovers and long-sleeved tee shirts away on Tuesday, figuring that after a week or two of highs in the 70s and 80s that it was safe to do so. Sorry 'bout that. My bad all 'round.

Tab Clearing...

• While I doubt the sky is the same color in Mr. Granderson's world as it is in mine, I have to admit that some of his suggestions in this column made me go "Hmmmm..."


• I do not like malingerers, nor either do I like frauds. Neither does friend Ambulance Driver, as this post will so richly attest. Slip'n'fall thespians like the one in his tale are what made my dealings with insurance companies such a pain when I actually had bones hanging out of my leg. Negotiate settlements for too many "soft tissue injuries" and even multiple compound fractures become suspect, I guess.


• To those of you who hit the tip jar recently, many thanks. It would have been a Ramen-flavored month after my excessive exuberance with the Smith. I'm going to take a group portrait of it with the other domestic pocket pistols today if it gets warm enough. There's an interesting story in there if I can figure the right angle, about how all the US gun companies got into self-loaders and all save Colt got out again by the end of the twenties and America was revolverville for another thirty-plus years.


• Since Jay G didn't turn into a pillar of salt, I'm going to toy with turning off the verdammt word verification as well. If I'm not buried under waves of spambots, it will be good riddance. (ETA: It took less than twenty minutes for the first Cyrillic bot-generated spam to hit the filter...)
  

It's not about the Benjamins.

Humans are not rational animals. Oh, sure, we pay a lot of lip service to logic and reason, but we're suckers for ceremony and symbolism. Ultimately, it's about all about feelings.

Every time gas jumps ten cents, somebody trades in their perfectly functional Accord and goes thirty long into hock on a Prius that, even were gas to double in cost, would not have a prayer of paying for itself in fuel savings before it, too, gets traded in.

People browse the organic breakfast food shelves for the muesli that tastes most like authentic sawmill floor sweepings, because that's how you know it's good for you. It's not food, it's a hair shirt you eat. When you're doing penance for not going jogging this morning or for having that extra martini last night, it's not supposed to taste good.

Likewise, wind turbines are not meant to actually be an efficient way to supply the power grid, rather they're prayer wheels for New Age iBuddhists, their whirring blades drawing white guilt from the atmosphere and pumping it safely underground. This is why they put them out in farm fields in the country and not, say, off Martha's Vinyard or out on the back nine, in view of the clubhouse: What good is a shrine if you don't have to make a pilgrimage to get to it?

QotD: Probulation Edition

Because it's my blog and I can have as many Quotes of the Day as I want:

If they can’t keep a cell phone out of a septuagenarian’s high-security prison cell, they can’t keep anything out of anywhere.

Point this out to your seatmate on your next flight if they're one of those drooling nitwits constantly opening their piehole about being glad for all the security that's supposedly keeping them safe from the guys with the Semtex Underoos.

And as for Charlie's guards? They should just be glad he was more interested in dialing 1-900 numbers then he was in getting his hands on a Kel-Tec.

QotD: You Can't Crowd-Source Smarts Edition

Michael Z. Williamson and Cory Doctorow were on the same discussion panel at a convention. Oddly, they were not instantly annihilated and every atom of their beings converted to pure energy, which caused the scrapping of several current theories at CERN. Anyhow, the discussion turned to "crowd-sourcing", which is awesome for lots of things, but, um...

Doctorow, however, said, and I closely paraphrase, "Maybe we can reach the day when someone says, 'You bring those rivets, and I have some girders, and we can build a skyscraper.'"

Really. A crowd-sourced skyscraper.

I verified that he wasn't talking about funding for said edifice, but actually building it as a crowd-sourced project.

I said I'd even let him have the corner office in the top floor. I don't intend to be within a trigonometric ratio of it, and will add a safe distance for rebounding debris.

He tried to compare the internet and web infrastructure. This fails, in my opinion, because that started as a government, in fact, Defense, project, and has numerous very well-heeled players. I have a website hosted on a friend's bandwidth but neither of us would be able to do so, even with the help of a million geeks, without someone to provide a combination of capital and knowledge. I asked, "And how often does your browser crash?"

He actually said, "My browser doesn’t crash because I use Firefox."

I don't know where to start with this, other than to observe that not only does Cory Doctorow imagine futuristic fantasy castles in the sky, he gets his mail delivered to them.

I'll also note the irony of wookie-suited anarcho-libertarian Mad Mike Williamson being considered the conservative voice on the panel. Maybe they were afraid that if they invited Kratman, he would show up in Hitler drag and start goose-stepping around the stage or something?

Lastly, am I imagining that Mr. Doctorow implied that someone of Mr. Williamson's political views was obviously an Explorer user? I could just be inserting that subtext myself, because, you know, only squares would use IE or vote to invade Iraq.

News from the dark side of the moon...

Any of y'all ever watched Current TV? That's Al Gore's network for people who are fed up with the pervasive right-wing bias of MSNBC, for those of you who weren't aware of its existence.

If you weren't aware of it, don't feel bad, because according to the ratings, neither was anybody else. I mean, it's been on the air since 2005, and I never even noticed it 'til a year ago or so. The star poodle of their prime-time act, the recently-fired Keith Olbermann, had viewership numbers that could easily be equalled if every man, woman, and child in Salem, Oregon watched their local public-access channel to see the Cherry Queen crowned at the State Fair.

More people were listening to late-night entertainer George Noory warning them about reptiloid aliens than were listening to prime-time Authorized Journalist Olbermann warning them about Republican congressmen. That's gotta suck. If he wasn't such a thoroughly unlikeable person, you'd almost feel sorry for him.

Speaking of thoroughly unlikeable douchebags, have you heard about what happened when Keith was actually expected to ride in the same car as one of the 99%? This guy was such a colossal douchebag that the only guy they could find to fill his spot in the lineup was Eliot frickin' Spitzer.

Think about that: If the only person on the planet douchier than you was a politician who had been hounded from office, basically for excessive douchiness, it'd be time to sit in the garage with the car running and the door closed and have a long talk with yourself. Of course, Olbermann probably owns a frickin' Nissan Leaf or something, so he won't be able to do the right thing.

Ah, Spring in Broad Ripple, when a young man's fancy...

...turns to strolling nekkid along the Monon Trail apparently.

Also: Dead guy in the canal!

What gets me is that my first thought on hearing that there was a stiff bobbing around in the canal was "Ew! Citizens' Water runs the canal; there was a corpse in what could be my future drinking water!" That's a pretty silly thing to get all squicked about, because anybody who's looked at that canal knows that, depending on how you feel about waterfowl feces, a dead body is probably among the more appetizing things to be found bobbing in it.

QotD: A Series of Annoying Tubes Edition

Regarding the Arizona legislature's contribution to the inane fad of "cyberbullying" legislation, Ken at Popehat writes:

You've been swept up in the moronic and thoughtless anti-bullying craze and consequently passed a bill that is ridiculous on its face, a bill that criminalizes annoying and offending people on the internet. That's like criminalizing driving on the road.

Man, if insulting people on the internet is against the law, this whole blog is nothing but evidence to be used against me in court. "Annoying and offending people on the internet" is pretty much my raison d'être.