comics I like

Achewood -- simply the best thing going right now

3E Presents: Catchphrase Friday

You want to be the coolest cat on the block? You've got to have a catchphrase! With the weekend coming up, 3E is here to help. Whenever some fly honey is up on you, or you're ready for the check at Chili's, just let out:

"oh hell and damn yes gimme that thing"

Be the coolest guy around this Friday, 'cause it's Catchphrase Friday.

Everything I know about opera

Checklist:

go to show? check.

fall in love with singer? check.

get introduced to her? check.

giggle? check.

actually talk to her? NO.

get copy of sample cd from friend who actually did talk to her? check.

spend several hours Sunday fastidiously perusing all available internet materials on her and her band? check.

find a poster advertising the show and put it up in apartment? check.

FAIL? check.

Movies I should be ashamed of owning.

WARNING: I was going to post the original trailer, but there were far too many boobies. In its stead, the opening scene.

oh, Xzibit

You act tough, but we know you're a big softie inside.

I'd enjoy it

Pretty good, but it doesn't have my favorite, from David Bowie: "Sometimes when I'm at a McDonald's, I wait until nobody is looking, and then I stick my hand inside the straw dispenser and touch all the straws." Oh, and the better Tom Hanks one: "Peter Scolari and I went out once in our Bosom Buddies outfits to see if we could really pass as women. The answer? I made $760 that night."

Small fish, meet big pond: Wolverhampton Wanderers

Promotion: clinched. Welcome to next season's relegation quagmire.

Location: Wolverhampton, West Midlands. Just across the surprisingly-whitebread Black Country from Birmingham.

Nickname: Wolves. Not "the Wolves," just Wolves.

Stately, Non-Commercial Stadium Name: Molineux Stadium.

Crest: This is what the road signs in hell look like.

What they'll bring to the table (metaphorically speaking!): If nothing else (and there's probably nothing else), a little black and gold to break up the monotony of the blue, white, and red dominated premier league.

What they'll bring to the table* (literally!): Not much. This will be their second season in the premier league. Don't expect much improvement on their average finishing position of 20th.

*remember fruitsnacks, "table" means "league standings!"

3E Fears

First the orca, now this.

Ashes the hairless chimp

I've made the picture very small because my first response on seeing it was, "Gah oh God please make that stop." You can click on it to make it bigger. So, here it is. Ashes, the hairless chimp. He looks a lot like the bull demons from Doom.

a lil old.

"I show up to one meal wearing the skin of my last."
- Miley Cyrus

It's good to know this is close by.

A private retreat for adult men in a serene, stress-free environment.

It looks like a good time.

License Plates of the internet

Vanity plates.

Missing my favorite, seen in Huntsville: ZERGRSH

Tattoos

LOLTATZ

Big time

hash, sluts

"If your company doesn't suit your mood, alter your mood so that it suits your company."

-Soren Kierkegaard

hot.

Join or Die.

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated.

I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness. It would be easy to let the images slide into territory that's strictly pornographic—the lurid and hardcore, the predictably "controversial." One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its "Fuck the Man" symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do.

March 2009

Some more politics

In my mind, the best (and really only) reason to vote for Obama last year was concern that McCain would continue or worsen Bush's policy when it comes to civil liberties. This was a legitimate concern.

But any hope that the Obama administration would be significantly better than the Republicans on civil liberties is more or less entirely gone at this point. Three items:

From Radley Balko,

The Justice Department announced (pdf) over the weekend that it will not intervene in the Charlie Lynch medical marijuana case. The federal judge in Lynch’s case had postponed Lynch’s sentencing to inquire if the Obama administration might want to back off, given Attorney General Holder’s recent statements about not prosecuting medical marijuana distributors who are complying with state and local law.

It would be merely disappointing had the DOJ based its decision not to intervene on the fact that a verdict had already been rendered in Lynch’s case. But the DOJ response goes much further, specifically stating that entire prosecution of Lynch is consistent with the government’s new position on medical marijuana, as laid out by Holder. I’s hard to say, then, exactly what distinguishes Obama’s position on medical marijuana from Bush’s. Lynch sought out and received assurance from state and local authorities that he was in complete compliance with state and local law. If that isn’t enough to meet Holder’s new policy, what is?

Pretty much speaks for itself.

From an RCP interview with Janet Napolitano:

NAPOLITANO: Well, you know, Sheriff Joe, he is being very political in that statement, because he knows that there aren't enough law enforcement officers, courtrooms or jail cells in the world to do what he is saying.

What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor, the human traffickers who are exploiting human misery.

Whoa, really? As Nick Gillespie asked, "In what alternate universe is the secretary living where it's evil (E-VIL!) to hire immigrants who are willing to work?" And wasn't throwing around terms like "evil-doers" part of what got so many people irritated about Bush?

And from last week, Glenn Greenwald on "New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ":

Taking them at their word, EFF -- which was the lead counsel in the lawsuits against the telecoms -- thereafter filed suit, in October, 2008, against the Bush administration and various Bush officials for illegally spying on the communications of Americans. They were seeking to make good on the promise made by Congressional Democrats: namely, that even though lawsuits against telecoms for illegal spying will not be allowed any longer, government officials who broke the law can still be held accountable.

But late Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government's first response to EFF's lawsuit (.pdf), the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush's NSA program. But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the "state secrets" privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is "willful disclosure" of the illegally intercepted communications.

Even the good thing Obama did, releasing the Bush torture memos, is effectively negated by Obama's insistence (or at least, that of his Attorney General) that there will be no prosecutions or apparently investigations.

Inbreeding

A study of the extended family tree of the House of Hapsburg has found that the last Spanish Hapsburg king, Charles II, was the offspring of a marriage that was almost as genetically inbred as an incestuous relationship between a brother and sister or parent and child.

Scientists have found that the Hapsburg fashion of marrying their relatives to keep their dynastic heritage intact had dire consequences for subsequent generations, which culminated in the last heir to the Spanish throne being sickly and impotent.

Charles II of Spain was nicknamed El Hechizado – The Hexed – because people at the time thought that his physical and mental disabilities were the result of sorcery. Now a study into the genetics of his immediate ancestors has found that he was so inbred that he probably suffered from at least two inherited disorders.

Despite his deformities and severe health problems, Charles had married twice in the hope of continuing the rule of the Hapsburgs, but he was incapable of fathering an heir and died childless at the age of 39. He was the last of a long line of Hapsburgs and it spelled the end for the Spanish branch of the dynasty.

Scientists believe they can show just how inbred Charles was following a study of more than 3,000 relatives of the Hapsburg family extending over 16 generations. The researchers found that his "inbreeding coefficient" – a measure of the proportion of inbred genes he had inherited from his parents – was on a par with that of the offspring of an incestuous marriage.

Revealed: the interbreeding that ruined the Hapsburgs

When does one of these open locally?

Starting today [that is, some time last week] and running through the 25th, A temporary bar dubbed "Alcoholic Architecture" is popping up in London offering a cloud of breathable gin and tonic to it's patrons.

The brainchild of culinary adventurers Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, Alcoholic Architecture creates a intoxicating vapor using the same ultrasonic humidifier system found in Antony Gormley's installation at the Hayward in 2007 called Blind Light. Patrons pay around $7 for hourly slots between 7 and 9pm where they can don protective suits and get drunk off the air. It's a novelty for sure, but $7 isn't a bad price for an hours worth of gin and tonic no matter how you look at it.

London bar pumps gin and tonic into the air

It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!

God bless you, Billy West.

They're making this into a feature film.

Graduate School Nonfiction

This totally happened.

Four graduate students sit around a table in a pleasantly decorated academic lobby.

Graduate Student Alpha: ...and my dad has a battleaxe that he keeps next to his bed and sometimes when he's in the living room he carries it with him just in case. He also showed me where all the guns are in the house in case something happens to him. Also, he has a mace. It's really just a club with a bunch on nails hammered into one end. Also, I think he might have a blow-gun. Anyway, he always likes to carry a gun when he does yard work... oh hey, there's a tortilla in my pocket.

Graduate Student Alpha stops, reaches into her pocket, produces a folded white flour tortilla. She takes a bite. Graduate Students Beta, Gamma, and Delta stare, caught in a state of surreal amazement.

Graduate Student Alpha: It's better than the time I found a five month old taco in a CD case. So, anyway, he says that nobody expects you to be armed when you're doing yard work...

curtains.

Just in case you're stoned this afternoon...

...here's Kermit the Frog attempting to drain the lifeblood of Vincent Price.

The Owen Fulrice Project: Update

From one of my numerous email sources:

I used to have all of the "Just Ask Owen" column, but I had a hard drive crash a few months back and I don't think they survived that. I know that there were some political columns, stuff done in 1996, that
were archived somewhere on the Net; some quotations, too.

I also know that there was a blog post somewhere that had Owen Fulrice's real name, Jody Stitt; he's a untenured English professor in a Southern university now. I haven't researched far enough into that; imagine a scholarly paper written like these columns, Frederico Jalapeno being cited, etc.

A Jody Stitt did not win the English Core Teaching Award in 2006, but was a finalist. Jody Stitt: not a lot of help.

But! Until about 2008 UAB had a Joseph Stitt teaching. People seemed to like his classes. He is a 1995 graduate of the University of Alabama, which with working at UAB fits both the time and the place, plus: "Stitt is a writer and editor who has published book reviews and essays for several Birmingham area publications. He has also been a consultant for GreenThink.com." Here's something by a Joseph Stitt that certainly sounds like Owen Fulrice.

The biography here makes me think we've got our man:

Joseph Stitt grew up in Cullman, Alabama, went to college at the University of Alabama (B.A. and M.A. in English, 1993 and 1995), taught composition for a year at Wallace State College, then worked for four years as a writer and editor for the web sites Hecklers Online and Greenthink.com. For the last two years he has taught composition and literature at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His story “Sunset for a Tennessee Mule” was in the spring issue of the Aura Literary Arts Review. He has published numerous essays, articles, book reviews, and parodies both in print and online.

Next up, I guess, is sitting outside his house in my car, waiting for him to come outside.

The Modern Masters Collection

I saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic's

His hair was perfect.

The Big Juicebot

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

The film begins with a short voiceover introduction by an unnamed narrator (Fred Ashe) introducing the character of Juicebot as he is buying half and half from a grocery store in 1991. The voiceover explains that Juicebot calls himself "the Juicebot".

After returning to his apartment in St. Louis, two thugs break in and rough up The Juicebot. They are attempting to collect a debt Juicebot's supposed wife owes to a man named Eric Fillebaum. After realizing they were looking for a different person with the same name, they leave, but only after one of the thugs urinates on the Juicebot's rug. At the instigation of his friend and bowling teammate Charlie, the Juicebot decides to seek compensation for his urine-soaked rug from the other Juicebot. The next day, the titular "Big" Juicebot, a wheelchair-bound millionaire, gruffly refuses the Juicebot's request. After craftily stealing one of the Big Juicebot's rugs, the Juicebot meets Christine Neumann, the Big Juicebot's nymphomaniacal trophy wife on his way off the property.

Days later, the Big Juicebot contacts the Juicebot, revealing that Christine has been kidnapped. He asks him to act as a courier for the million-dollar ransom because the Juicebot will be able to confirm or deny their suspicion that the kidnappers are the rug-soiling thugs. Back at his apartment, the Juicebot naps on his new, stolen rug, only to have a new set of criminals burgle his apartment. The criminals knock him unconscious. Following a musical dream sequence, the Juicebot wakes up on his bare wooden floor, his new rug missing. Soon after, when Christine's kidnappers call to arrange the ransom exchange, Charlie tries to convince the Juicebot to keep the money and give the kidnappers a "ringer" suitcase filled with dirty underwear. The Juicebot rejects this plan, but cannot stop Charlie. The kidnappers escape with the ringer, and the Juicebot and Charlie are left with the million-dollar ransom. Charlie seems unperturbed by this turn of events, and takes the Juicebot bowling. Later that night, the Juicebot's car is stolen, along with the briefcase filled with money. The Juicebot receives a message from the Big Juicebot's daughter, Jenni. She admits to stealing back the Juicebot's new, stolen rug, as it had sentimental value to her. At her art studio, she explains that Christine is a porn starlet working under producer Eric Fillebaum and confirms the Juicebot's suspicion that Christine probably kidnapped herself. She asks the Juicebot to recover the ransom, as it was illegally withdrawn by her father from a family-run charitable foundation for orphans. She offers him a finder's fee in exchange for his services.

The Big Juicebot angrily confronts the Juicebot over his failure to hand over the money. The Juicebot claims that he made the pay-off as agreed, but the Big Juicebot responds by handing the Juicebot an envelope sent to him by the kidnappers which contains a severed toe, presumably Christine's. The Juicebot is enjoying a relaxing bath when he receives a message that his car has been found. Mid-message, three German nihilists invade the Juicebot's apartment, identifying themselves as the kidnappers. They interrogate and threaten him for the ransom money. The Juicebot returns to Jenni's studio, where she identifies the German nihilists as Christine's friends (including her pornographic co-star Scott Love AKA "Karl Hungus"). The Juicebot picks up his car from the police, and based on evidence he finds in the front seat, he and Charlie track down the supposed thief, a teenager named Teddums. Their confrontation with Teddums is unsuccessful, and the Juicebot and Charlie leave without getting any money or information.

Eric Fillebaum's thugs return to the Juicebot's apartment to bring him to Fillebaum's beach house in McAlla. Fillebaum inquires about the whereabouts of Christine and the money, offering him a cut of any funds recovered. After the Juicebot tells him about Teddums, Fillebaum drugs the Juicebot's drink (a vodka and sunny delite) and he passes out. This leads to a second, more elaborate dream sequence in which "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" By Kenny Rogers and The First Edition is playing. Upon awakening once again, the Juicebot finds himself in a police car and then in front of the sheriff of McAlla, who berates and strikes him with a coffee mug for ruining the peace. After an abbreviated cab ride home (in which he is thrown out of the cab by an Eagles-loving driver), the Juicebot arrives home and is greeted by Jenni, who hopes to conceive a child with him. During post-coital conversation with Jenni, the Juicebot finds out that, despite appearances, her father has no money of his own. Jenni's late mother was the rich one and she left her money exclusively to the family charity. In a flash, the Juicebot unravels the whole scheme: When the Big Juicebot heard that Christine was kidnapped, he used it as a pretense for an embezzlement scheme, in which he withdrew the ransom money from the family charity. He kept it for himself, gave an empty briefcase to the Juicebot (who would be the fall guy on whom he pinned the theft), and was content to let the kidnappers kill Christine.

Meanwhile, it is now clear that the kidnapping was itself a ruse: While Christine took an unannounced trip, the nihilists (her friends) alleged a kidnapping in order to get money from her husband. The Juicebot and Charlie arrive at the Big Juicebot residence, finding Christine back at home, having returned from her trip. They confront the Big Juicebot with their version of the events, which he counters but does not deny. The affair apparently over, the Juicebot and his bowling teammates are once again confronted by the nihilists, who have set the Juicebot's car on fire. They are still demanding the million dollars, despite the fact that the Juicebot does not have the money and Christine has not even been kidnapped. Charlie viciously fights them off, going so far as to bite off one nihilist's ear. However, their third teammate, Tha Captain, suffers a fatal heart attack.

After a disagreement with the funeral home director over the cost of an urn for Tha Captain, Charlie and the Juicebot go to a cliff overlooking a beach to scatter Tha Captainz ashes from a large Folgers coffee can. Before opening the can's lid and haphazardly shaking out Tha Captainz remains into the wind, Charlie remembers what little he knew about Tha Captain, including that he loved to surf and bowl, then quotes a line from Hamlet: "Goodnight, sweet prince." After an emotional exchange, Charlie suggests, "Fuck it, man. Let's go bowling." The movie ends with the Juicebot in the bowling alley and meeting the narrator at the bar. The narrator tells the Juicebot to take it easy and the Juicebot responds by stating, "the Juicebot abides". The narrator briefly comments on the film to the audience, saying that although he "didn't like to see Tha Captain go", he hints that there's a "little Juicebot on the way." The film transitions to the closing credits as Townes Van Zandt's version of "Dead Flowers" plays.

YouTube and making money

This seems bizarre to me:

But it might surprise you to learn that one of the largest and most-celebrated new-media ventures is burning through cash at a rate that makes newspapers look like wise investments. It's called YouTube: According a recent report by analysts at the financial-services company Credit Suisse, Google will lose $470 million on the video-sharing site this year alone. To put it another way, the Boston Globe, which is on track to lose $85 million in 2009, is five times more profitable—or, rather, less unprofitable—than YouTube. All so you can watch this helium-voiced oddball whenever you want.

[...]

YouTube isn't alone in Poor House 2.0. Yahoo bought the popular photo-sharing site Flickr in 2005, and though the service might be marginally profitable, it certainly hasn't added appreciably to Yahoo's bottom line. (Yahoo similarly doesn't break out Flickr's financials.) Facebook provides an even better example. The social network is running up a huge tab to store and serve up all the photos, videos, and other junk you stuff into your profile. Last year, TechCrunch reported that Facebook spends $1 million a month on electricity, $500,000 a month on bandwidth, and up to $2 million per week on new servers to keep up with its users' insatiable photo-uploading needs. (Members post nearly a billion photos every month.) But Facebook gets relatively little in return for storing all your memories. Ad rates on its network are terribly low, the company doesn't make a profit, and it hasn't shed any light on how it will make good on investments that valued the company at $15 billion.

It's weird to me that YouTube pays for content, instead of the other way around. I don't know anything about it, of course, but why aren't Fox, NBC, ABC, etc, paying YouTube for space in exchange for letting them put up whatever kind of ads they want on their videos? And why doesn't YouTube have tons more ads? Even if the problem is figuring out who the market is, some companies (auto insurance, Coca Cola) have an interest in reaching every single demographic, which YouTube can do. It is quite confusing.

Fixing Facebook also looks pretty straightforward: limit the number of pictures people can have, or make them automatically expire. Deactivate inactive accounts. Eliminate or limit profiles from outside the US (which apparently costs a lot more). Sell more user data. And why are separate developers creating all the applications? The games, especially chess, are the only reason that a misanthrope like me checks Facebook every day.

Or, thinking a little bigger, make Facebook into more than just a social networking site. Put in a newsfeed, a way to check email, etc. Maybe even add a search engine in conjunction with Google or someone else -- essentially a Yahoo! homepage with your social network included. I know people who would make that their start page. In fact, I'm kind of surprised they haven't done this already.

Nice moves blanco nino

3E: Not afraid to go old school.

Emerson Biggins

More.

Profiles in Zombie Courage

Sure, he's got a lawnmower, but you've got numbers. Get stuck in, zombies.

...that's ZOMBIE COURAGE.

Tax day!

I think pretty much everyone agrees that the American tax code is dysfunctional. It is enormous, over 67,000 pages and 3.7 million words long: literally beyond the capacity of any single individual to know or understand in its entirety. Its progressive features are weakened by its complexity and some loopholes, tax credits, etc. Plus, we pay entirely too much.

Everybody's got ideas about how to fix it. Here's mine!

1. If you are currently disabled such that you are unable to work, have no income beyond government relief in some form (Social Security and such), are currently in the military, or make less than $12,000 a year (a number than can change with inflation), you pay no taxes.

2. For everyone else, there's a formula.

a. For income between zero and X dollars, you pay .5%. So, let's say that in 2008, X = 48,000. If you made exactly $48,000 dollars last year, you pay $2,400.

b. For all income above X, you pay Y%. Let's say for 2008 Y=30, and you made $58,000. You'd pay 1% of that first $48,000 ($2,400) and then 30% of the next $10,000 ($3,000). So your total tax burden would be $5,400.

Simple! The most complicated part would be figuring out the value of items you received that act like income (like receiving stocks as a bonus, or using a company car). The entire thing could be done on a medium-sized postcard. It would be easy too to make it more progressive -- just add $Z. Anything more than three levels would be a bit too complex.

3. There is no withholding, so people recognize how much they are actually paying the federal government every year, and there are no tax credits or loopholes, because it's not our place to subsidize people for having kids, buying houses, getting married, buying a new car, going to school, etc etc.

4. This is the sole income tax that the federal government levies -- no business taxes to encourage people to put their money back into business (although any perks would qualify as income). No social security taxes, because if we're going to do wealth transfer we're going to be honest about it.

5. Congress must choose, by December 31 of the tax year, numbers X and Y (and maybe Z) such that the income would, if these numbers were applied to the previous year, completely cover total government expenditures plus 10% of the debt. This means everything -- military expenditures, welfare benefits (including for veterans), interest on the debt, Medicaid, and so on. It should probably include a provision in case of emergency, but it should be extremely difficult to do (say, the approval of 3/5 both houses of Congress) and limited in duration (for only that tax year).

The whole effect, I hope, would be to make paying taxes easier. It would also force people to recognize just how much spending is going on and how much of it they're paying for.

Anglophiliacs Rejoice

Your final four, as per usual, coated in the stench of England.

Semifinal A:

In which the saucy Catalan lads of Barcelona will travail to do gentlemanly battle with the high-society Old Etonians of Chelsea.




For the Spaniards, scoring goals comes as easily as the flamenco, brutalizing bulls, or shocking racism. Bad news for the posh boys from West London who've conceded a rather unsettling seven in their last two games.






Semifinal B:

Wherein neighbour shall be turned against neighbour and brother against brother as Albion sees two of her favorite sons take arms against one another.





Shall the natural order of things be retained? Or will fair Londontown see one of its own inch tantalizingly closer to the ultimate prize?




Two weeks. You would be wise to make ready.

Every picture is of you when you were younger

3E Announcement

For tax purposes, on all official documents please refer only to the "Tri Epsilon United Church of the True Cross, LLC."

You know, those power grids in China

Interesting report about China's gender imbalance:

A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating “an imminent generation of excess men,” a study released Friday said.

For the next 20 years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper, which was published online by the British Medical Journal. “Nothing can be done now to prevent this,” the researchers said.

Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study, by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher, provides some of the first hard data on the extent of the disparity and the factors contributing to it.

In 2005 , they found, births of boys in China exceeded births of girls by more than 1.1 million. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls.

This disparity seems to surpass that of any other country, they said — a finding, they wrote, that was perhaps unsurprising in light of China’s one-child policy.

Pundits and science fiction writers have asked what the future for a China with a massive oversupply of men might be. I tend to be pessimistic, so I imagine things going a bit more negatively. A mild export of the gender imbalance to other countries is almost certain. A decrease in the position of women is likely, either due to growing demand for them or a backlash against women trying to use their new found rarity to improve their lot. And at what point does war become likely, either to distract an unruly male population or because of unrest?

UPDATE: It didn't pan out.

...but if every soccer game were as much fun as that one, soccer wouldn't just be the most popular sport in the US, it would be our football that would have the gerrymandered, goofy name.

...and Edward Norton in goal.

So, whether or not Tha Pool's comeback pans out today, there's a natural (and constantly referenced) connection to the 2005 final in the artist formerly known as Constantinople. So, here's the shortest and most non-footy-fan-palatable video I could find. Or it's the first one I clicked on, nobody cares.

The only difference in how I watched that game and how I'm watching this one? I now have enough money to run my air conditioner. Stay cool, bitches.

Fortune Cookie Revisited

Oh, dear reader, it was you. It was always you.

Running

But a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors. Over time, the survival of the swift-footed shaped the anatomy of modern humans, giving us a body that is difficult to explain absent a marathoning past.

Our toes, for instance, are shorter and stubbier than those of nearly all other primates, including chimpanzees, a trait that has long been attributed to our committed bipedalism. But a study published in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, by anthropologists Daniel Lieberman and Campbell Rolian, provides evidence that short toes make human feet exquisitely suited to substantial amounts of running. In tests where 15 subjects ran and walked on pressure-sensitive treadmills, Lieberman and Rolian found that toe length had no effect on walking. Yet when the subjects were running, an increase in toe length of just 20 percent doubled the amount of mechanical work, meaning that the longer-toed subjects required more metabolic energy, and each footfall produced more shock.

“If you have very long toes, the moment of force acting on the foot’s metatarsal phalangeal joint becomes problematic when running,” explains Lieberman. Our hominid ancestors, Australopithecus, of which Lucy is the most famous specimen, had significantly longer toes than humans. “Lucy could have walked just fine with her long toes,” says Lieberman. “But if she wanted to run a marathon, or even a half-marathon, she’d have had trouble.”

The Running Man, Revisited

History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men

Next up: Sasquatch

11 extinct animals that have been photographed

Everybody: look at your hands.

Name a better music video. You can't!

The Father/Son Talk Part 1

Son, it's time we talked about Tool. Your mother and I have agreed that you're old enough and it's not fair to keep this from you any longer. We didn't want you hearing this from some of the older kids at school so we figured it was best to tell you here. Just remember that we love you and if you have any questions, just ask.

Okay, well, let's see. You have to realize that this isn't the easiest thing for me either, son. I know, I know, we'll be done in time for Malcolm in the Middle. Alright, where do we start. Um, maybe you can tell me what you already know... Nothing, huh. That's for the best, I suppose.

*sigh* Here goes, Tool released their first EP, "Opiate" in 92? 93, maybe. I probably should have done some research. Anyway, it was an aggressive little gem filled with thrashy riffs, overt themes, and sometimes downright salty lyrics. This is "Hush" from the youtube, pay attention now, son.

I guess I could have warned you about the imminent manparts, but it's nothing you haven't seen around the locker room. What, you don't have a locker room in Kindergarten? Where do you shower? Hmm. Well whatever.

Where were we? Oh, right. Tool released their first real album, "Undertow" fairly soon after. The songs were a little longer, the meanings more veiled, and the artwork more obscure. Again, I've just discovered this youtube thing and it's a lot easier than actually talking to you.

Okay, this is taking forever. I don't even think you're paying attention. Fine, go watch your programs. We can talk about this some other time. I love you, too.

3E endorsed

"Matilda" is the name of Heath Ledger's daughter

Easter eggs

from

3E approves

The Map Scroll, "a blog about maps and the world." Click for bigga.

When will the smaller winter thirst for its overload?

A studio sings outside taint. The warming bottle presses against the plural crisis. Tha Captain thumbs the object before the floppy. The directing preview farms. Taint computerizes the hypocrite.

Creativity tools.

The Random Sentence Generator: Does a demise act?

World Cup Qualification Map OMG! Flags n shit coming laterz.

Green: Yes!
Red: No!
Blue: Maybe!
Purple: ACCESS DENIED!
Grey: Not a real country!

all u need 2 kno.

Gah!

Wah!

Unsettling.

Stephen Jackson Stephen

It is cruel not to have pulled this guy.

Also, why had I never seen this before?

Last Supper

'Bout a million more here.

NEED NEW SEASON.

Saint Stephen?

Backmasking:

An alleged practice of certain evil people, especially rock musicians, of saying or singing words which, when listened to backward contain evil messages such as "My sweet Satan"* or "Kill yourself." Or they might contain messages such as "it's fun to smoke marijuana"* or "sleep with me, I'm not too young."* Of course, you probably won't hear these messages until somebody first points them out to you. Perception is influenced by expectation and expectation is affected by what others prime you for.

Found heah.

comics I like

A Softer World

Click the pictures to avoid the gross overlap with the sidebar. Or don't. Go with what you feel.

Tha Captain Swears By:

You've got to be solid in the kicking game!

Halfway through the quarterfinals. You know you're interested. To keep things fresh, I'll describe the games through nothing but soccer/sports cliches.

Villareal 1 - 1 Arsenal
Appropriate Cliches: Anything you can do I can do better! Brilliant goal by Villareal answered by brillianter goal by Arsenal. Slight advantage to the Gunners heading back to London. But anything can happen!

Manchester United 2 - 2 Porto
Appropriate Cliches: Against all odds, the scrappy underdogs looked like the more motivated team against the overwhelming favorites. Mistakes will cost you! Three of the four goals came from egregious defensive errors! You can't hurt yourself!

Liverpool 1 - 3 Chelsea
Appropriate Cliches: The Comstock Lode of cliches. These two teams seem to play each other every year in the Champions League! It's so crazy! The games in question haven't always been the most entertaining affairs but today's game was up and down the field. BASKETBALL ON GRASS! Also too: krazy komeback! Liverpool scored first then Chelsea went bonkers! Also too: Who is this guy?!?!?!? Fringe player and only occasional starter scores two for Chelsea. And if that wasn't enough of a heartwarming story, he's Serbian! It doesn't get any better! Liverpool faces an uphill climb!

Barcelona 4 - 0 Bayern Munich
Appropriate Cliches: The best team in the history of sports? Indubitably. Barcelona are putting up video game numbers. They took their foot off the gas in the second half. You can't stop them, you can only hope that they don't plow your wife after they're done scoring lots and lots of goals.
BONUS CLICHE: Garbled internet text comment from uefa.com regarding game! "Barca players they are not human I thinking there are ufo man ;) playing great!" Nice.

The best news you've heard all day: Only one week to wait for the second legs. Pencil Chelsea and Barcelona into the more interesting of the two semifinals. Admit it, you're erect.

I need this clip readily accessible at all times

Funnier than it should be.

Seriously people

So I see that Fast and Furious made over 70 million dollars last weekend, plus God knows how much internationally. This apparently was the best April opening ever.

Okay, listen. They already made this movie, and it was pretty bad, plus they made two others. You have seen Vin Diesel drive a fast ugly car before, and if you haven't, watch TNT any two consecutive weekends. The only excuse for this is that 10 million people got drink on their way to the theater in the last four days.

Playa shoulda hit that.

"Be careful that your regrets do not weigh on you so greatly that your hands can no longer hold up your hanging head."
- Martin Heidegger

Oh, High School Tha Captain, you must have been dumber than I remember if you thought minge like this was just going to float along again.

The story, one we've all heard before, goes something like this:

1. boy meets girl on internet
2. boy tells girl about other girl he loves
3. girl tells boy she loves him
4. boy tells girl he loves her
5. boy and girl become a couple
6. boy tells girl he doesn't love her but instead still loves the other girl
7. girl reacts appropriately
8. boy lives with regret
9. girl marries a dude named Master Acid

Reservoir Dogs Muppets

Just what it sounds like, playas.

Flattire

It also illustrated a pattern which that excellent veteran critic, Philip French of the Observer, identified with his lethal coining "flattire". He meant films which are ostensibly satirical but which really flatter the audience by ingratiatingly reinforcing all their prejudices. One of the direst had "American" in its title but was by a British director. The venerable Pauline Kael was still alive when American Beauty came out, to ask sharply why the middle-class liberals who were drooling over this tripe couldn't recognise the way it sucked up to them, with its catalogue of cliches and every punch telegraphed.

When we meet the morose former marine colonel, he might as well say straightaway "I'm a neo-Nazi", and when he mutters something opprobrious about Jim and Jim, the insufferably sweet gay couple, you know for sure he'll grab another man's groin by the last reel. Had American Beauty been a really clever satire, we would have learned at the end that one Jim worked in undercover dirty tricks for the tobacco industry, and the other was an arms dealer who had been supplying the Serbs.

Even by those standards, Curtis is grim. Anyone who sees a film which dares call itself Love Actually has been warned (it stars an excellent actor, but Bill Nighy has gone awry). Martin Amis described one of the bleakest evenings of his life as sat watching Four Weddings, desperate to leave but unable to. He had gone to the cinema with Salman Rushdie, whose life was in danger and who had to stick to the timetable he gave his police guards. And so they were forced to endure every last minute. Not the most zealous Wahhabist could have wished such a punishment on the poor man. Four Weddings isn't a bad movie, it's a crime against humanity for which all concerned should have been indicted at The Hague.

"Our knack for dire romcom"

Wow! Totally together!

Thunderbird tastes so bad, and it causes a hangover to anyone who even handles the bottle.

why all the haters?

Wait, people don't like puns?

Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies. Odds are that a restaurant with a punning name — Snacks Fifth Avenue, General Custard’s Last Stand — hasn’t acquired its first Michelin star.

I'm a bit insulted. 3E was founded upon and lives by the noble pun.

It's only Monday if you let it be Monday.

And when you're rocking the Friday Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, it's never Monday.

Hey! Don't cuss in front of my pipe!

Now I am walking saying, "Suffererrrrrs, come out to plaaaa-aaaay!" over and over.

Don't worry folks, Tha Captainz back at the helm.

...but he certainly enjoyed his stay in the sticks.

Pretty much lived out the song, really:
1) Didn't use my cell phone.
2) Nailed a cat/bear/woman.
3) Killed a stranger.
4) Drank moonshine until I went blind.

Not moonshine, actually. To balance out all the hickishness, we went with the most city-fied liquor we could find. And it doesn't get more city-fied than Wall Street:

Tha Captain takes shore leave: Head for the Hills

Upon my return: moonshine and pork shreddings for all.

Finally!

A Milhouse blog, with the only possible name:

Everything's Coming Up Milhouse

Although it does kind of seem like a rip-off of Eye On Springfield.

Tops ten reasons to procrastinate

1.

Over the weekend, put this in your mind-pipe and smoke it

WARNING: The movie is actually much weirder than this trailer makes it seem.

Viral videos

I think I have mentioned in this space before how much better the Cracked website is than its analog magazine ever was. Recently: 6 "Stars" of Embarrassing Viral Videos. I had seen all of these but the "Impossible is Nothing" one, which is just stupid. My favorite story is for this guy:



I don't know if it's his ridiculous tan or the quality of the video, but I thought this guy was black. So this part was a surprise:

A few years later, Scott left KAXS (the Dallas TV station where he was the anchor) and eventually wound up at WAAY in Huntsville, Alabama, presumably because there are fewer lizards there. At that point, things again took a turn for the strange.

According to The Huntsville Times, Scott was let go earlier this year after a "dispute with a producer." The Huntsville Times has a serious gift for understatement, because in this case "dispute with a producer" means "committing an act of career self-immolation so complete that he's unlikely to ever get hired in his field again."

According to BET, the "dispute" was that during a commercial break, Scott referred to a co-worker as a Negro. When that co-worker asked him not to use that word, Scott, in an act of mind-blowing asshattery, decided to use the, um, other N-word and was fired shortly thereafter.

Of course this is the best actual video:

But if you tried it then you might agree

From the YouTube description:

From Peter Jackson's surreal masterpiece Meet the Feebles, which has been described as 'the Muppets on acid'.

In this scene a homosexualist fox sings about 'sodomy' while a manic bipolar hippo runs the rampage backstage with a machine gun.

Interesting fact: The M-60 used in this scene is loaded with real rounds and results in the majority of the sets and puppet models being destroyed.

Suck it, everybody else.

"War Damn Eagle."
-Robert E. Lee

Real all about it. Pascal Wallach is a student of mine. I feel largely responsible for the achievement.

He and His Man

These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand. Then when the season comes they are sent abroad to Holland and Germany. In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their kind, and, seeing how miserably these Dutch and German ducks live, how their rivers freeze in winter and their lands are covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language which they make them understand, that in England from where they come the case is quite otherwise: English ducks have sea shores full of nourishing food, tides that flow freely up the creeks; they have lakes, springs, open ponds and sheltered ponds; also lands full of corn left behind by the gleaners; and no frost or snow, or very light.

By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and settle them down in their decoy ponds on the fens of Lincolnshire, chattering and gabbling to them all the time in their own language, telling them these are the ponds they told them of, where they shall live safely and securely.

And while they are so occupied the decoy-men, the masters of the decoy-ducks, creep into covers or coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen toss handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or duckoys follow them, bringing their foreign guests behind. And so over two or three days they lead their guests up narrower and narrower waterways, calling to them all the time to see how well we live in England, to a place where nets have been spanned.

Then the decoy-men send out their decoy dog, which has been perfectly trained to swim after fowl, barking as he swims. Being alarmed to the last degree by this terrible creature, the ducks take to the wing, but are forced down again into the water by the arched nets above, and so must swim or perish, under the net. But the net grows narrower and narrower, like a purse, and at the end stand the decoy men, who take their captives out one by one. The decoy ducks are stroked and made much of, but as for their guests, these are clubbed on the spot and plucked and sold by the hundred and by the thousand.

All of this news of Lincolnshire his man writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills that he sharpens with his little pen-knife each day before a new bout with the page.

-J. M. Coetzee's 2003 Nobel Prize address

"I felt compelled to sponsor the Alabama Interior Design Consumer Protection Act"

At least Alabama isn't the worst state, recently overturning a law that would send unlicensed interior designers to prison.


Back when this was a good country, if someone stood up and said "You know, I don't think the government is doing enough about interior design licensing," they would have been laughed out of the room. Up yours, America.

impressive to MOST people

"Never should reflection be mistaken for glorification."

-Ṣadr ad-Dīn Muḥammad Shīrāzī

Plea deal

Accepting a plea bargain that her attorney described as unprecedented in American jurisprudence, a 22-year-old Maryland woman yesterday agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other defendants in the death of her son under the condition that charges against her be dropped if the child rises from the dead.

Heah.

Dolphin bubbles

When the apocalypse comes, and mankind flees death from above, at least we'll have one marine ally:



We'll be -- well, humanity will still be dead, but it'll be cool to watch.

School

So, Slate's various advice columns are always a source of hilarious hand-wringing (especially their Green Lantern, including favorites like "What's the greenest form of birth control?" and "What's the greenest way to keep my clothes looking sharp?"). Their My Goodness column ("Advice on how to make the world better") today had this question:

My family lives on the west side of Los Angeles. I face the same choice as many urban families: Will the kids attend public or private schools? Should one minimize opportunities for one's own child in service to the greater good?

What is interesting from my anti-everything perspective is that both respondents agree that it's okay to send your kids to a private school, and one of them already did, but at the same time both insist that we really need to worry about is improving public schools. Respondent Patty seems to put this solely in terms of bigger budgets (in mentioning the stimulus plan's $15 billion toward education as "limited good news"), while Respondent Sandy at least notes that just throwing money at it won't solve the problem. The better and easier option, I think, would be to open up more schools to the kind of competition that already provides the options and choices these elite white women have the opportunity to select from. School vouchers and bigger, shifting or tiny-but-easy-to-transfer school districts would force schools to improve or watch their funding dry up as enrollment declined.

I also think the emphasis and choice and competition would go toward fixing the underlying problem -- a warped view of education that, at the bottom, sees schooling as a meaningless waste of time, or, at the top, as a taken-for-granted entitlement that gets in the way of socializing and getting to the "real world." Almost everybody who really wants their children to have a good education can obtain one. We need to encourage all parents that this is a worthwhile effort by giving them a reason to think it is.

The greatest trick I've pulled... so far

Convincing an accredited institution of higher learning that I deserved a Master's degree. If I can similarly bamboozle my way to a doctorate it will be the stuff of scheister legend.

Highlight taken from the Vita:

"While at BSC, [Tha Captain] served as president of Kappa Mu Epsilon
Mathematics Honor Society, an editor of The Hilltop News, and was a
founding member of Tri-Epsilon."

We rule the school.

Hilltop memories

Inspired by TC, I've been going back and looking over my own production for the Hilltop News. It almost universally awful. But here's something I think holds up fairly well, and it displays a sentiment about higher education I believe even more strongly today. Original printed title: unknown. Written: 9/10/03. Publication date: unknown.

It’s good to see that my soon-to-be alma mater has been included in the top tier of liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report rankings released last August. Though I’m reasonably sure that this means nothing except that tuition rates will soon be raised, it’s always nice to be noticed. Especially noteworthy is that BSC’s rankings have been climbing, moving from a Tier IV school to number 66 in the nation in less than fifteen years.

On the whole, though, I think the rankings leave something to be desired. Because the schools with the best reputations are naturally going to attract the best students, they will almost certainly turn out the best graduates. I wonder how well the rankings really measure the education a student will get. Will a student at BSC be getting a significantly better education than one at the delightfully named Wheeling Jesuit University (Wheeling, W.Va.)?

Honestly, I only picked WJU as an example because I like the punk-bandesque name. But it leads to further questions that any good WJU alumnus might ask. How quantifiable is something, like a good education, which is essentially qualitative? This is a particularly good question when the numbers sometimes seem to be simply made up – I doubt, for example, that the student-faculty ratio at John Hopkins has doubled in the last year. The numbers used by U.S. News & World Report could be (and indeed have been) criticized for a number of reasons. But these numbers, and the report itself, are only the symptoms of the problem.

No one at BSC seems to mind that the editors of U.S. News & World Report are trying to rank colleges like golf clubs or football teams. Has BSC really improved more than a hundred schools in the country in ten years? Have the other schools simply slipped a great deal? Most likely, tweaking of the formulas used to decide “the best” have simply favored BSC. I doubt we will see many issues of the 2004 report in the admissions office if by some change of the formulas used Birmingham-Southern drops back down to Tier III.

The statistician mindset is particularly widespread in the United States. We want to rate and rank our colleges, our states, our hottest celebrities. I think it would be better for Birmingham-Southern, and for higher education as a whole, if schools would turn away from this ranking mentality and instead focus on what the actual educational experience is.

Here, someone - let’s say, for the sake of example, that it’s Robert Duvall - might object that the rankings are doing just that, trying to grade education in an easy-to-compare way. The proper response to this objection is that quality of education can’t be graded. It’s different for every student. Trying to make a list of the best colleges for every prospective student in the country, or even most of them, is nothing better than a way for U.S. News & World Report to sell more magazines. Birmingham-Southern, and every school which touts its rankings, only reinforce this regrettable tendency.

My favorite thing about this is that the hypothetical critic is Robert Duvall. What a great actor.

WARNING: DO NOT EAT! SWIMMING WITH DISEASE!

April Fools!












Not.