I’ve blogged about this before, but ~10 years ago, news started flying around the (newborn) blogosphere that Wil Wheaton (best known, at that point, for Star Trek: The Next Generation) had begun a blog!  HA! So we all rushed over to laugh.

And … well, shit.  He was awesome.  Struggling actor; great stepdad; fucking awesome writer; even lived nearby.

His writing turned into book deals, which were even better.  His acting became more and more successful.  And he slowly moved from alt.ensign-crusher.die.die.die among geeks to Super Geek Overlord.

He’s been picking up great gigs — Eureka, Big Bang Theory, The Guild — and further cementing himself as geek idol.  He’s a fixture at Comi-Con.  He is super-humble — his normal response to his fame, he explains, is shock, because “I’m just this guy, you know!”  He’s also known for (further-)popularizing the phrase “Don’t Be A Dick”, which is a fine motto for life.

So it’s his birthday today.  On Twitter, where he has, by the way, >1.6M followers, stuff just — well, kept getting awesomer.  Awesomer and awesomerer.

ThinkGeek marked today as “Don’t Be A Dick Day”. Twitter users from John Hodgman, Peewee Herman, and the joke “Death Star PR” account, to NASA (yes, that NASA) tweeted him happies.  Apparently his birthday showed up on Entertainment Tonight.  Nathan freakin’ Fillion tweeted him wishes, adding “Stay shiny” (!).  People started making him shit, both physical and digital.  And this graphic was created — which, OK, to be fair, you’re gonna have to be a geek to really appreciate — and sent to him:

Another user started a #toastwheaton hashtag, urging people to raise a glass and take a picture (I joined.)

Wil Wheaton, for his part, chatted with people, was publicly thankful, and tweeted about the gifts from his family, including a vintage Casio calculator watch from his stepson (he exclaimed how awesome it was that the default year in the date setting was “1980″.)  He took a picture of the results of the first calculation on the watch.  Yes, 42.

Just wow.  Geek overload (the colloquial term is “nerdgasm”, for the record).  This might be my favorite birthday ever, and it’s not even my birthday.

Here is Wil Wheaton on Twitter.  And this search will let you follow more good @wilw birthday stuff.

If you don’t get why this is cool or funny: I’m sorry.  Sucks for you!

I ordered takeout at the local (Americo-)Chinese restaurant last week.  Opening one of the fortune cookies, I remembered that the one I had opened the previous week had two fortune slips in it, although I couldn’t remember what the fortune was.

And then I realized that there were two fortunes in this one, too!  No, wait: three!  And I read the first one, and thought “Oh, yeah, that was it!”  And the other two were … the same.  Comme ça:

So, while “every-thing” might be overstating it, I am way-fortunate in receiving extra fortunes!

The Gibson Les Paul guitar is by a near-infinite margin my favorite electric guitar.  As what I play and write is mostly bluesy and funky grunge, there is nothing remotely like a heavy slab of mahogany and their particular pickups to get an incomparable thunk sound out of an instrument.  Using only the neck pickup and doing stuff like strumming hard enough to bounce the strings off the fretboard only enhance this.

So I was really interested when I saw a link to the article ”15 Iconic Les Paul Players” at gibson.com, and while I agree with most of their inclusions (Jimmy Page, Slash, Ace Frehley, and Pete Townshend, for instance), there were a couple of frustrating omissions.  Some should-be-obvious guitarists such as Neil Young, some recent converts that might easily be missed such as Alex Lifeson, and those in my personal pantheon (that might not be in everyone’s) such as Stone Gossard and Adam Jones.  But the most bizarre omission?  Les Freakin’ Paul.

I miss my axe.  I hate thieves.

I’ve been asked for my Vegan Curried Lentils & Rice recipe by several people so far.  So here it is.

This might be an obnoxious recipe to those who do not cook as I do.  It’s basically a framework to hang a recipe upon.  The good news is that as long as you follow a few basic ratios (rice/lentils/water) and a couple warnings (don’t burn stuff, don’t salt it while cooking), it’s pretty hard to mess up this dish.

In the broad strokes, it’s:

2 parts white rice
2 parts lentils
8 to 10 parts water
oil
plant matter
spices
salt

In the way I made it last night, I used about 1 ½ half cups each of rice and lentils, so these guidelines will use those figures.  Scale up or down, arithmetically, as needed.

Sort the lentils on a tray, removing stones and broken, freakishly deformed, and very hard or discolored lentils.

Finely chop the vegetable matter you want.  How much?  More than you might think.  Last night I used  about four inches of ginger rhizome, peeled; two (small) bulbs of organic heirloom garlic; and a medium-sized jalapeño pepper, seeded but leaving the placenta.  A shallot or two are awesome, but I couldn’t find any here.  Some people add half an onion, but I’m allergic.

Combine the spices you want in a cup or bowl so that you don’t have to fiddle with measuring them while stuff is cooking.  Here is where it gets super-fun.  Use your creativity here.  I might use

1 tsp each of:

white pepper
paprika
cumin
fenugreek

Somewhat less of:

nutmeg
cardamom

Much less of:

asafœtida

A few leaves of:

bay

And a hellishly large amount of:

turmeric

Seriously, like two rounded tablespoons of turmeric.  In my opinion it’s the key, and will help nutrient absorption, digestion, and prevent gas.  Really.

You can play around with other spices you might like.  If you do enough cooking, you will know what will go well.  You might use some anise (a small amount), if you want to take the dish in that direction.  I haven’t tried ground mustard, but I bet it would work.  Black pepper would also go.

There are, of course, commercial curry powders.  I think that’s no fun at all, but if you’re new to this, you can use solely such a powder, or (better) half commercial prep and half what you design.

Do not add salt.  You will ruin the lentils if you salt while cooking.  It’s a chemistry thing.

Heat oil – about 4 TB – in a heavy pot over high heat until it starts to sputter.  I find grapeseed oil works best.  It’s a bit yummier, I think, made with ghee (clarified butter), but that of course makes it not vegan.  If you use ghee, use medium-high heat and don’t wait for it to sputter.

Add the spices and fry them to dissolve the fat-soluble chemicals.  Don’t let the oil smoke.  Before the oil reaches that point, add the chopped vegetable matter and cook that in the oil to soften the chopped vegetables.  You might find you need to decrease the stove temp, depending on your stove and pot.

When you’re about to faint from how freaking awesome your kitchen smells, add the white rice, dry.  Toss it in the oil, vegetables, and spices, and keep stirring and cooking.  You are trying to toast the rice at this point.

When it’s toasted, add the water.  I used six cups, but you can use as much as 7 ½ or so.  Stir to make sure the other ingredients aren’t sticking to the bottom.  Add the dry lentils; stir again.  Increase heat the the highest setting and, uncovered, bring to a rolling boil.

Cover and immediately reduce heat to the barest simmer.  Set a timer for 45 minutes.  If you’re using green lentils, they need a bit longer; 55 minutes, say.  Resist the urge to take the lid off and check during while cooking.  They’ll be fine.  They’re grown-ups.

After the timer goes off, move the pot off the heat and let it sit for, say, 10 to 15 minutes.  Open and stir (the rice and lentils are likely to have ended up in layers).  Is the consistency what you wanted?  If not – too gruely or too thin – make a mental note to adjust the water as you see fit next time.  If it’s way thicker than you wanted, you might have some luck adding water and simmering a bit longer, but that’s a gamble.

You can salt the whole pot now, but I prefer to salt each portion.  Serve hot.  It makes it not vegan again, but you can stir in sour cream for transcendent awesomeness.  Various Indian-style relishes – the ones Patak makes are great – can also be stirred in.  Their “Mixed”, “Hot Lime”, and “Hot Mango” relishes are among my favorites.

Let cool to lukewarm and put in a sealed container in the refrigerator.  You will have a ton of it – probably more than you expected.

Enjoy!

So, if you were to imagine the most amusing thing that could have fallen out of your backpack at the library, leading the librarian to rush after you to return it, what would it be?  ‘Cos my story today pwns everything else I can think of.  Mostly because, had it been intentional, it would have been legendarily corny.  Contemplating doing that on purpose would have made Tobias Fünke blush.

My last tweet was “That’s it! Fuck Windows! I’m rebooting in[to] Ubuntu!”  That was, in the words of the old saying, “Nine hours ago.”

I rebooted into Ubuntu to try to fiddle with WiFi again.  Couldn’t get it to work.  “So,” I thought, “I’ll go back to Windows 7, research, get any files/drivers I may need, then reboot into Ubuntu, copy the stuff from the NTFS partition, and I’m good to go!”

Um, no.  A Facebook-distributed virus bricked my Windows installation.  Hardcore.  I’m almost certain, upon research, that this was the cause.  “So, OK,” I thought.  “I’ll go to the library, do the research there, burn any files I might need onto a CD-R, and go home and do the Ubuntu thing that way.”  That wouldn’t fix the Windows problem, but, as I wrote (poetically) before, “Fuck Windows!”

Um, no.  I found what I needed, yes.  I burned it onto a CD-R, yes.  I brought it home, yes.  But my notebook doesn’t ship with an optical drive and my external drive — well, doesn’t work.  At all.  Ubuntu can’t see it, the BIOS can’t see it.  I feel lucky that I can see it.  It’s black and opaque, so that helps.

So I used F8 to boot into the Windows restore partition to try to repair, and:

Um, no.  The “repair” failed.  I think this is because I resized the partition.  So the only option was to rewrite the Windows partition (fortunately I can do that rather than wipe the whole disk).  So I started it going, glancing at it occasionally, and then decided to — um, go build Rome.  WTF?  The reinstallation took approximately 14 of the nine hours.  In the last stages, the Toshiba and Best Buy software was installed, which, frankly, is a metric ton of malware.  OMFG.  It interrupts one’s work, spies on the user, reports stuff to who-knows-whom.  But I got it going again, after the so-many hours.

But, of course (“of course”?) my MBR had been rewritten by the reinstallation.  So I can’t load Ubuntu any longer.

But, OK, that’s cool!  Now all I have to do is download a Karmic USB live image and boot off that!

Um, no.  Can’t find my frakking USB key, the reason for which is likely related to what I plan to be the next post.  The one avec much hilarity.

So I went looking for a way to reinstall GRUB or lilo from Windows.  This is: well, somewhere between “I haven’t figured out how to do it” and “Fucking impossible”.  I’m leaning towards the latter, as all of the utilities I’ve found are x86, and I’m in 64-bit Windows. 

So (another “so”) I’m going to try to do it through Wubi, which I have essentially-zero confidence will work.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying: I may disappear.  For a long time.  Especially if Windows gets hosed again.  And the cheapest fix may be to go buy another USB key tomorrow.  And a big part of this problem — not all, but much — is a virus.  Infecting Windows 7.  Distributed via Facebook.  #FAIL

Please email me any luck you may have lying about.  Not that I’m guaranteed to be able to check my email in finite time.

On Sunday, Bishop Donal McKeown addressed a 112-year-old Irish temperance association in a homily during which he spent a large portion of the time discussing clerical abuse:

Many criticised the Holy Father when, in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he spoke of the need to do penance and proposed that Friday should be kept as a weekly day of penance.  Some commentators dismissed that as asking the ordinary people of Ireland to do penance for the sins of clergy and bishops — and they couldn’t understand that idea.  But all Christians come from the strange belief that Jesus is the innocent One, the Lamb of God that took away the sin of the world.  Our secular society — that so often likes to locate sin and repentance only in individuals rather than accepting the possibility of corporate responsibility — cannot easily comprehend the idea of doing penance and making reparation for others. But Pioneers and all Christians can. … Continue to do penance for the sins of those Church personnel who abused children.

He also, by the way, wished that the “secular hierarchy” would “accept that they too share responsibility” for child abuse because they are entrusted with “righteously punishing offenders”.  These would be the same offenders that the Church has … actually, never mind.  There’s just simply nothing snarky that I can say here that would begin to do this wickedness justice.  I guess I can sum it up this way: the bishop is right in his argument that this is strong evidence for the existence of evil and the need for reparation.  But the evil is in his speech, and the responsibility for reparation is not on the secular.

Idea:  We all have nonstandard characters that we want to use in our posts, tweets, status updates, emails, comments, and what have you.  In the dark ages, one had to enter the character entity in HTML markup to have it show up in a post (entering “ö” for “ö”, for instance.)  Entering the actual character (the “ö”, for instance) could make your character disappear when you hit “Submit” or (!) crash the software that ran the blog or message board (I told you it was the dark ages.)

But now, not only is there better handling for more extensive character sets (such as ISO 8859-1) in web apps (and, crucially, browsers), but using HTML markup in, say, Facebook or Twitter will actually not work.

So: why not keep a list of characters you need most frequently in a place where you can cut-and-paste?

The absolute best place to do this is Google Notebook, but for some unfathomable reason, this product, which is one of Google’s best, is no longer accepting new signups.  So you may have to put it somewhere like an email draft, or a blog draft, or … somewhere else.  It’s best if it’s on the Web, so you can access it wherever you need it.

Each of us has different character needs, but mine looks like this:

♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♯
№ ✓ ✔ ✗ ✘
← → ↑ ↓ ⇐ ⇒ – —
« » † ‡ …
♥ ♡ ☺ ☹ ★ ☆ ☠ ☮
® ™ ± ° ℃ ℉
² ³ ¼ ½ ¾ ƒ ℵ ∂ ∞ ∫ ∴
≅ ≠ ¿ ¡ £ € ¢
ñ ç ö æ œ

I also keep a list of frequently-needed words:

Renée
naïveté
über
résumé
Gödel

This page at Big Baer is really useful.  So are lixlpixel live preview and fileformat.info, without which writing on the web would be much more difficult for me.

So, idea:  Play with those and make your own list!

Here’s a self-indulgent post (another, I guess).  I’ve been thinking about my favorite music videos of all time.  This is sure to be a fascinating list, given that I don’t watch music videos, and haven’t since the mid-’90s, so the chance that these are representative in any fashion is vanishingly small.

Still, though, these five struck me as seminal when I first saw them.  All (huh) were directed by feature film directors, significant animators, or those who went on to direct feature films.  I believe this suggests something about the legitimacy of the art form.

In chronological order:

1984, Thriller by Michael Jackson
Director John Landis directed the films The Blues Brothers, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and the (excellent) Masters of Horror episode “Family”

1990, Vogue by Madonna
Director David Fincher directed the films Se7en, Fight Club, The Game, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

1994, Sabotage by Beastie Boys
Director Spike Jonze directed the films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Where the Wild Things Are

1998, Do the Evolution by Pearl Jam
Directors were Todd McFarlane (the artist behind Spawn) and Kevin Altieri of Batman: The Animated Series

2009, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga
Director Francis Lawrence directed the film I Am Legend and has another in development

I’ve never tried to share a YouTube playlist before.  Nor, as it happens, create one.  Put this squarely in the “I would have thought it would be easier” square.  I can’t seem to embed it meaningfully or to give a nice graphical preview, so, to make it big at least:

Here is the playlist link!

I would start at the one on the top, the Caliendo.

Let me know what you think.  I think they’re all worth watching and were the best among those I watched.  And let me know if I can do the YouTube linkage better.

I was told yesterday that I look like rock star Claudio Sanchez, a name I didn’t know.  So I went looking for a pic, and thought I’d strike the same pose to show that is nonsense:

Digging the new USA show Covert Affairs, what appears to be a stylish bubblegum espionage action/romance series.  Good production values and effects, even though the makeup is, of course, a bit over-done.

Wide-mouthed Piper Parabo is looking very toned, very hot, and is growing into her features quite nicely in her mid-30s.  She’s acting better than I remember her having done, and although I don’t speak the (many) languages her character speaks, I’m convinced by her accents.  Seeing her character have to play a role within the show, she’s showing good range.  It’s also nice to see charming and boyishly-handsome Christopher Gorham, a fave of mine I haven’t seen around in a bit, be back on a show.

So far — and my predictions in the past have been notoriously bad on the nature of programs based on their pilots — it is coming across much like Alias without the fantasy element, and with some nice intrigue.  Provisional recommendation.

A new meme floating about is I Write Like, a statistical analyzer wherein one pastes a writing sample — longer is better — and the software determines, according to metrics the programmer has chosen, which author’s writing most resembles.

Reading on forums, it’s apparently actually doing something, and the author has promised to provide more info on the algorithms.

I posted a chapter from my unfinished sci-fi novel — a bit reluctantly — and this is what I got:

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

OK.  I guess I can live with that.

The recent Sharron Angle post gets this:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Pardon me while I go celebrate.  There’s nothing like affirmation by a piece of software using secret criteria.

Here is a true story you might not know:

Classically, the definition of luminous intensity involved whaling and Imperial measurements.  The CIE, an international group, realized the problems in this definition, both because the definition no longer jibed with modern opinions on conservation and a post-war rejection of systems unique to one empire, and because guaranteeing that this definition could be properly employed worldwide was, in practice, hampered by its dependence on the technological sophistication of those in the respective areas, which is unfair.

With the growing understanding of the revolutionary impact black bodies could play in the collective scientific community, the CIE, an international body, attempted in 1948 to change the old standards.  Making use of this growing respect, a universal that could be employed all over the world was agreed to be necessary, and the definition was thus changed to eliminate false measurements.  At long last, the promise of truth overthrew candlepower.

But this was 1948, well before other revolutionary restructurings on the international stage.  And, problematically, luminous intensity was still held at arm’s length in the scientific community: it existed independently of the standard measurements used worldwide.

Jumping forward 31 years, it was realized that this was no longer tenable, and that science as a whole would benefit from a closer embrace.  Understanding the dramatic impact of Watts, luminous intensity underwent a fundamental redefinition.  After much work, this new unit — given the beautiful name candela, from the most-classical language in science — was made the peer of other standards.

Final note: if you look at the definition of of candela, you will see a cryptic “683″ in the denominator.  This number is significant for several reasons.  It is indivisible; it was made most famous by Sophie Germain, a pioneering female mathematician who fought against oppression and bigotry all her life to fulfill her calling; and, under the Eisenstein definition, it has no imaginary part.  This is not the reason given for its use.  But I think you will agree that it is pleasant to keep in mind.

Holy crap.  Dear Bob Mike: Official Historian of mcgees.org, please mark this as the day when mcgees.org realized the power of YouTube for something other than funny skits and music videos.  Fucking fantastic.

Video:

Government responses to various ad campaigns:

“Join our health club and you will live forever” → Fines
“Join our diet program and you will live forever” → Fines, FDA investigation
“Join our church and you will live forever” → Tax exemption

Saffron Burrows told Craig Ferguson that she was traveling in Spain when she was contacted about joining the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.  Thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act, I have a transcript of her interview with Dick Wolf:

Wolf:  Are you a good actress?

Burrows:  Yeah, I’m pretty good.

Wolf:  What color is your hair?

Burrows:  Brown.

Wolf:  Can you play a bitch?

Burrows:  Sure!

Wolf:  Are you hot?

Burrows:  Yes.

Wolf:  Skinny?

Burrows:  Hell yes!

Wolf:  Can you drop your voice by an octave and kind of growl a sentence at me?

Burrows:  [voice change:] A sentence like this?

Wolf:  Sexy!  Can you over-enunciate your “R” phonemes?

Burrows:  No.

Wolf:  What?

Burrows:  No, I’m English.  We don’t have hard “R” sounds.

Wolf:  [wilted:] Oh…

Burrows:  Have I mentioned, though, that I’m really skinny and really hot?

Wolf:  Oh, OK!  Well, you’re in!  When can you get to New York?

Burrows:  New Yuhk?  Thuhsday.

Wolf:  How hot did you say you were, again?

Burrows:  Willy fucking hot.

Wolf:  OK, see you then!

I wish I could narrow it down to a day, but do you know why this month, 15 years ago, was significant for me?  Other than that?  And that?  And that other thing I’m not going to talk about?

My first website went online.

No shit.  July 1995.  Crazy, huh?

Free bananas through the mail for life for anyone who can find an archived copy of that site somewhere.

As some of you know, I majorly ♥ Claire’s Restaurant in Hardwick, Vermont (@clairesvt on Twitter).  Their slogan:  “Local Ingredients, Open to the World”.

I was sitting at the bar last week and a patron from out-of-town, visiting for the first time, was deciding what to eat.  I was witness to this exchange:

Patron:  Is this beef local?

Server:  Right down the road.

Patron:  From a small farm?

Server:  If you’d like, I can probably find out the cow’s name.

You are welcome to find this as creepy as did the last person I told, but if you are creeped out and are not a vegetarian, please spend a long moment working through that one.

Actress Olivia Wilde — Maxim Magazine’s choice in 2009 as the hottest woman in the world — has repeatedly selected roles in which she plays sexually adventurous and liberated characters, and has used her resultant sex-symbol status to great success.  So she can’t have been born with a name so fitting her career choices as “Wilde”, right?  She must have chosen it as an adult to increase the potency of viewers’ — and casting directors’ — sexual (masturbatory, really) fantasies about her.  Surely.  So I looked it up.

I was right.  She wasn’t born with the last name Wilde!  Ha!

She was born with the last name … Cockburn.

Once again the pressure of pop-culture memes built up to the point where I decided to take an hour and try to discover what they were about.  They were:

• What is going on with LeBron James that everyone keeps referencing?
• Who is Justin Bieber?
• What is Jersey Shore?
• What is significant about The Real Housewives of New Jersey?  Isn’t that a reality show capitalizing on the success of a sitcom?
• Why should the magazine covers be talking about Sandra Bullock’s stress and sadness?  What’s going on?
• What is a “Team Jacob” or a “Team Edward”?

Usually I’d put hyperlinks in there, but that would entail doing more than the absolute minimal amount of typing on this post, the purposes of which are to point out how (again) out-of-the-loop I am with pop culture, to (cautiously) ask for help, and to propose a question, yet unasked, at the end of this post.

A few quick notes:

Justin Bieber:  I found his YouTube site first, then Wikipedia.  Watching the lead video I thought “Holy shit white boy’s messed up.”  He has to have been raised a sheltered Southern Baptist or Mormon or something.  One cannot act this kind of dangerous naïveté.  He will quickly learn that this industry, this imagery, and this lifestyle are not sleepover games, but by that point his life may be beyond salvaging.  There have to be evil creeps taking advantage of this boy who are going to crumple him up and throw him away the first time he ends up in rehab.  Shit.  Watching a plane crash in slow-motion.

Teams Jacob/Edward:  I’ve given up googling about this, because it seems that everyone expects one to understand about this already, but this — named after characters in the Twilight pulp serials that are now films, right? — represent … loyalties that are argued about / cheered over / debated in places including movie theaters, loudly, during the screenings, regarding who gets to win the heart/other-body-parts of the girl?  This can’t be right, can it?

The question for the end — typing as quickly as I can here — is one that I have been utterly unable to answer.  Why would anyone — anyone — care about this stuff?  I’m not just being an affected jerk; I am literally baffled.

I think it would be amusing to try to demonize opponents in debates by invoking their similarity to Hitler for entirely fatuous reasons:

“You know who else liked painting, don’t you?!”
“… who else wore shoes?!”
“… who else went to school?!”
“… who else listened to the radio?!”
“… who else had facial hair?!”
“… who else was heterosexual?!”

Yes, there is a good chance that other people would fail to get the humor.  But in that case, they would probably think “What the hell is wrong with you?!” which is always a close second among my desired reactions to my jokes.

You know who else found that no one laughed at his utterances, don’t you?!

I drove to Morrisville today which, as far as I could determine, is the nearest town with a store that sells men’s clothes.  It’s a store called Arthur’s: a department store that came well-lauded on online reviews.

I went in and gave my size and what I was looking for: shirts, short-sleeved, muted colors, button-down or at least three buttons at the neck.  Service was awesome: I waited while the salesman went and got everything that matched my specs.  And I bought the shirts.  Both of them.

(I’m adding a new post category: “vermont culture shocks”.  This is because there have been … a few, so far.)

I think the following comedic sketch might work:  the unfunny members of famous comedy families complaining about their exclusion.  Like, Ted Bundy might say “it wouldn’t bother me none of they were married with children”, and O.J. Simpson could whine that Matt Groening won’t talk to him even though he explained he could contribute voice performances by telephone from prison: “Hell, Matt’s been phoning in his work on ‘The Simpsons’ for years!”

And then Karl Marx could start to lecture, dourly, about how this unfair selectivity in casting was representative of all that was wrong with supposedly-meritocratic societies, and Ted Bundy could retort with something like “And you are not the one they call ‘Groucho’?!”  The Juice could say “Really?  That’s the joke you’re going with?”  And Tina Yothers’ character from ‘Family Ties’ could walk onstage and say “How about ‘There’s a difference between getting people together, Karl, and making them laugh!’”  And Karl could say “But, wait: Jennifer Keaton was a character on ‘Family Ties’!  What are you doing here?”  And she’d apologize and explain that she thought the only criterion was to be the unfunny one.

Anyone?

As Vedder Tuesday has kinda fizzled out, and my “Recycled Tweets” was annoying everyone, me not least of all, I thought: “Step 3 Profit!”  There’s still some stuff-I-think-is-funny that I’m saving for the “short form” (gah) that’s not Twitterverse-specific (gah-er).  So, at least until it bores a bunch of you, or just one of me, I thought I’d do a…

WEEEEEEEKLY REHASH!!!

(OK, I swear I’ll never do that as an <h3> again.)

Mine:

• New discovery: fastest way to reboot laptop is to insert headphone plug into USB port.  You’re welcome.
• Was hoping that Eyjafjallajokull  eruption would end in cataclysm.  But it was only ash changing weather for a bit.  That’s just anticlimatic.
• Can anyone fix either Windows or GNOME such that a new window can’t steal focus? I’ll make it worth your while. NOTHING is off the table.
• ♪ What do you do with a drunken sailor? ♪ http://bit.ly/aecln6
• I wonder if, in the afterlife, Allah provides his martyrs with divinely perfect pretreatments for bedsheet bloodstains
• If I ever go on “Millionaire”, I want it to be in the UK: one fifth the population, 1.5 $ to the £, and them there Brits are morons.
• If Apple ever comes out with an iRobot, it will surely not follow any of Asimov’s Laws.
• Report says Mojave Desert is worst place in California.  Needles to say this is untrue.
• “You know what’s cool?” Ice cream. “You know what sucks?” A leech. There, questions answered.  #BadSpeechHabits
• The new trend of embedding self-referential commentary in ending hashtags is a bizarre literary conceit.  #SoStopDoingIt
• Dear Twitter:  I would pay ten times as much — hell, TWENTY times as much — for a Twitter that never went over-capacity.
• My new article: “Prima Donna Maradona Belladonna: A reflection on vain and temperamental coaching’s toxic effects”  (No?  Tried!)
• Titling a book “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem” is a really skeezy way to boost sales http://amzn.to/9GKYTz
• Dear Facebook: In the “Reason for reporting user” dropdown, the option “Is a whiny little bitch” has been omitted.

“Others’ Tweets” → With my responses

• “Why do people who know the least know it the loudest?” → Inverse square law.  I know that from physics.  I KNOW THAT FROM PHYSICS!!!
• “Never sneeze while you’re hiding.” → …but if you’re at the opera or Wimbledon, the reverse might be good idea.
• “Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today.  It is already tomorrow in Australia.” → Sure — but when it’s winter there, it’s never Christmas.  Sounds like Narnia to me.  And we know time runs strangely there.
• “I had a bad night’s sleep.  Heard rustling outside.  BTW whatever happened to the 2,000 monkeys Bush procured for military purposes?” → Two words: “Hamlet”
• “You are a limitless, vast, and unbounded being.  At least, that’s how it looks when you wear horizontal stripes.” → The Buddha warned me against wearing black: “It symbolizes killing and anger.”  OK!  I’d kill to not look vast and unbounded, darn it!
• “Live every day as if it’s a holiday.  Specifically, Latvian International Women’s Day.” → No kidding.  Have you SEEN Latvian International Women?!  HOT!
• “If only God would give me some clear sign!  Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.”  → He did that for Mary.  Except it was Nazareth, and it was a sperm bank.

That took far longer than I expected.  But some of those are worth it, right?  As retort-fodder if nothing else?

From Twitter:

jelenajensen I HATE when people don’t say thank you when you wait and hold the door open for them!  Learn some fucking manners!

I wonder if this means something else in her industry.  To begin with, where the emphasis is in the second sentence.

(Yeah, I know:  So dickish to make dumb jokes about her job, especially when I like her writing.  But the setup was awesome.)

Say you’re at the mall.  There’s a little table with survey forms.  You pick up one of the surveys.  It reads: “Tell us who your friends are, where you went to school, when your birthday is, whether you’re in a relationship (and with whom), what your interests are, what causes you support, your sex, (continued on back)”  At that point you realize the form is several pages long.  At the end of it it says “Also, please allow us to contact you by email FOR ANY REASON WE WANT, including ads that we tailor to your personal info.”  Now you’re getting excited.  What can I win?  A vacation to Paris?  A new Lexus?  A PRIVATE JET?!  I mean, this is a LOT of info to give a stranger, right?  The payoff must be AWESOME!

So you read the sign on the front of the table.  It says “Fill out one of our forms, and we will tell one of your friends you wish you could hug him or her / send one of your friends a PRETEND cup of coffee / ask him or her, on your behalf, what Simpsons character he or she is most like / etc.”

Do you fill out the form?

Friends:  This.  Is what.  You are doing.  When you accept a Facebook app request.

Do you know about Sharron Angle yet?  She is the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for the 2010 election challenging Harry Reid. 

So, here’s a HuffPost article about a January 2010 exchange on the Bill Manders show.  You can play the audio at that link, but here’s a transcript:

Manders:  I, too, am pro life.  But I’m also pro choice.  Do you understand what I mean when I say that?

Angle:  I’m pro responsible choice.  There is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kind of good choices.

Manders:  Is there any reason at all for an abortion?

Angle:  Not in my book.

Manders:  So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something [trails off]?

Angle:  You know, I’m a Christian.  And I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations.  And we need to have a little faith in many things.

So — going to try to be exquisitely fair here: if a father holds his little girl down and rapes her, and she becomes pregnant, God could intercede.  If he doesn’t intercede, that’s part of his plan.  We would be sinning and subverting divine will if we allowed the girl to have an abortion.  The proper response is faith in God.

Does that about cover it?

This.  Woman.  Is running.  For national office.

She is the candidate of the more-conservative of the two main U.S. political parties.

Before I move on to the rest of my post, let’s get this vile piece of Angular detritus out of the way.  It is too late to unspeak the words she spoke about rape and incest.  That horse has left.  There is no way you mess that one up that bad.  It’s more absurd than saying, ‘Officer, when I said ‘Open the register and give me all your money!’, I meant to say ‘Do I have to buy something to get some change for the pay phone?’”

So, I’m setting my clock as of the timestamp of this post.  The RNC has 48 hours to withdraw all support for Angle.  That much is a given.  A statement on the order of “We were unaware of the insanity of Ms. Angle, and we apologize for our previous support of her.  The Republican National Committee does not oppose abortion in the case of rape nor incest.  We disown anyone who argues otherwise, for any reason, including superstitious special pleading.”  If they do not, they are complicit.  If they do not, and if you are registered Republican, you must be publicly vocal about how abhorrent this is, and at least write a letter to the party, or you are complicit.  That’s my line in the sand.

OK, now that I’ve established (to my satisfaction) that she is reprehensibly inhuman, or sociopathic, or both, my main point is done.  But I want to take a look at something very interesting that fell into place while researching this post.  I want to argue that this functions as a case study of when some religious conservatives choose to play the “illegally imposing their agendas” card.  Let’s do a little quoting:

Here’s Sharron Angle’s official “About” page on her website:

She is proud of her past chairwomanship of We The People Nevada PAC

We The People used to have a web presence, but no longer.  But that’s what archive.org is for.  Stored on the archive servers 2005-03-11:

There is a strong movement by atheists to ban religious thought form the public square.  This should be recognized as an attempt to establish atheism as the national religion. … The ACLU, NEA, and other organizations are examples of atheistic institutions trying to gain political control and an unfair advantage over Christian groups

So: atheists are trying to illegally impose their religious beliefs (“lack thereof”, actually, but when your only book is the Bible, everything looks like a faith), through political means, to the unfair detriment of some others, in a fashion that would set national policy.

One more.  Also from the cached PAC page:

The radical homosexual movement and other groups seek to destroy the traditional family structure which is the underpinning of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

Gay activists (and, remember, the ACLU was implicated above) are trying to destroy the underpinnings of society.  Their agenda should be opposed.

So, tying it together: silly, silly, silly me.  You know how crazy-liberal I am?  I thought one of the underpinnings of society was undoing the harm caused by fathers who rape their children.  I thought that, given that We the People and I agree that “The establishment clause prevents the combining of the state with religious organizations”, that dictating the definitions of what family means — not only who can get married, but why it is OK to let a god mediate when a “traditional family” is destroyed by a villain from the inside — on the basis of what the god the person speaking happens to believe in is interpreted to desire — could be considered … pretty much nuts.

But that’s just me.  I’m an atheist.  I, therefore, am probably using this unfairly in an effort to make my lack of religion the official national religion, to the unfair disadvantage of these Christians.  Who, of course, have no such desires.  Unless they win.

(For the sake of rigor:  I haven’t been able to determine [help?] what years Angle chaired We The People, and cross-reference it against archive.org caches of their “Principles” page during her tenure.  Until I get this, it is just conceivable that this politician who thinks that abortion is not justified even in cases of child rape does not believe in a conspiracy of gays and atheists to destroy America.  I think that’s unlikely.  I expect you would think so, too.  But let me know if it’s that’s the case.  I’ll have to Google for another example.  In the interests of efficiency, I’ll start with listings of Tea Party candidates.)

As Plato quoted Heraclitus, and the peerless Dr. Nathan Tierney had us memorize, “ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ”.  Tomorrow may be better.  It may be worse.  But it will certainly be different.

As the Sufis graced us, and Lincoln quoted:

هذا أيضا سوف يمر أو يعدي

And, with any luck, when it passes, it will pass into publication.  Properly lived, then properly rendered, it may be exquisite — and, it is to be hoped, meaningful to Niall in his adulthood.

But that is not for now.  For tonight, I console myself with Tibullus’ elegy: “Credula vitam spes fovet et melius cras fore semper dicit“.  The hope may be unwarranted, but it is good enough for a pillow.  Good night.  See you on the flip-side, friends.

Someone stopped me on the street in Hardwick:

Person:  You have hang-ups.

JHM:  I … I’m sorry — what?

Person:  Hang-ups.

JHM:  {blink. blink.}

Person:  Your shirt.

JHM:  {looks at shirt}  Oh, that’s clever.  Sorry I didn’t laugh the first time.

JHM, internally:  WTF?!

I was wearing this shirt that I designed.  If you are interested in ordering one — this is just info, not a sales pitch — I increased the image size by two clicks and it still printed accurately in XXL.  I think it looks much better that way, but Zazzle wouldn’t let me post the product with an oversized image:

Hanger Shirt by joshuamcgee
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