The gator lost his mind...

One of my favorite songs as a kid (along with "They're Coming To Take Me Away (A-Ha)" was "The Battle Of New Orleans."

Jackson fought for the port in 1815, after the War of 1812 was technically over. Not only did he defeat the British, he held on to the major port of the United States and kept trade flowing.

MyDD has an excellent summary of the long-term implications of this disaster. Katrina accomplished what the British could not—the largest US port is shut down.

Depending on the effect on the Port of Southern Louisiana, the ability to ship could be affected. A narrow, two-lane highway that handles approximately 10,000 vehicles a day, is used for transport of cargo and petroleum products and provides port access for thousands of employees is threatened with closure. A closure of as long as two weeks could rapidly push gasoline prices higher. At a time when oil prices are in the mid-60-dollar range and starting to hurt, the hurricane has an obvious effect. However, it must be borne in mind that the Mississippi remains a key American shipping route, particularly for the export and import of a variety of primary commodities from grain to oil, as well as steel and rubber. Andrew Jackson fought hard to keep the British from taking New Orleans because he knew it was the main artery for U.S. trade with the world. He was right and its role has not changed since then. This is not a prediction. We do not know the path of the storm and we cannot predict its effects. It is a warning that if a Category 5 hurricane hits the Port of Southern Louisiana and causes the damage that is merely at the outer reach of the probable, the effect on the global system will be substantial.

Now, of course, Katrina was "only" a category 4 hurricane, but since New Orleans's levee system is (was) at best prepared to handle a category 3, the point is mute right now. Needless to say, the world's 5th largest port - which is a key entrepot in the incredibly stressed world energy market, to boot - has been rendered inoperative. It is anybody's guess when - if - ever it will function again, considering that conservative estimates suggest the city will be uninhabitable for at least a month and most likely longer. New Orleans as the world has known it will never exist again.

A quick summary from the Wikipedia article:

• New Orleans is covered in 20 feet of water and is under martial law
• Cities like Biloxi and Gulfport have pretty much ceased to exist
• Over 150 people are dead, that we know about, and casualties are likely in the thousands
• 35% of the Louisiana National Guard is stationed in Iraq at the moment
• Whether you're "finding" or "looting" depends on your skin color.
• Hundreds of thousands of people are now refugees; over 750,000 people are without power
• Current damage estimates are $36 billion dollars, most likely to rise

We'll be dealing with the consequences of this storm for decades. Whole towns have disappeared, one of our major grain ports is shut down right as the harvest is coming due, and both oil and natural gas prices are going to rise. At least some people got cake out of the deal.

Freebird!

Colorado, August 30, 2005. Not content with gutting funding for disaster preparation, shipping 3,000 Louisiana National Guard troops to Iraq, and giving stump speeches while the worst natural disaster in American history erases an entire town, the President also sang a very poor rendition of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia."

The libretto for the operatic version of "The Pet Goat" must have been unavailable.

Martial law declared in New Orleans

Via TalkLeft...

New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL-TV is reporting that martial law has been declared in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish after levee breaks caused major flooding in the city Tuesday morning, sending waves of water through the downtown and French Quarter. Mayor Ray Nagin is estimating that 80% of the city has been flooded. WWL-TV provides continuing updates on its Katrina Blog.

12:02 PM ET - WWL-TV says that a break in 17th Street Canal Levee is 200 feet wide and water from it is gradually inundating the city.

12:16 PM ET - WWL-TV reports that martial law is now in effect in Plaquemines Parish southwest of New Orleans, where 60% of homes are said to be flooded; persons found on the streets there will be arrested. WWL-TV is broadcasting live video via KHOU in Houston. Some looting has begun in New Orleans, according to AP.

Also, go read this bit from Attytood, which I cannot quote enough of. Not only is there little in the way of military support for the rescue effort (as of this writing, Bush is still. on. vacation.), but funds to prepare for such a disaster have been reduced over the years by Bush's budgets.

I'm guessing the FEMA and Army Corps of Engineer chiefs will get some medals and/or promotions for this, just like Bremer receiving commendations for the sterling success that is Iraq. Up truly is down.

Manufactured needs

I'm a little depressed that the #3 link on Google for s'mores is this product:

A sterno can with some fancy containers.

I was at a party last night making them the old-fashioned way. With fire. I'd have taken a picture but I seem to have found a way to crash my futurephone. Something about the switch of SIM cards from my old phone to my new phone is making it behave... oddly. When I moved over, it had the index of all the photos from my last phone, but the actual image files themselves were stored in the phone memory, not the card. So now when starting up phone mode, it just crashes.

Which I didn't think was possible—if anything, the testing requirements for phones appear more strenuous than most video game publishing standards. (If you've ever seen the testing specs for PlayStation games, you'll know what I mean. For example, you have to pause on screens for 8+ hours without memory leaks or crashes. Try that with most PC games.)

Still, phone issues aside, it was a nice night with friends and fire and carbonized gelatinous sugar bits. I'm a firm proponent of just igniting your marshmallow as soon as possible and letting it blaze like the Sucrose Torch. I've not the patience for toasting them, and the carbonized bits are pretty tasty.

What would Mister Miracle do?

As mentioned on other, more timely, Web sites, yesterday would have been Jack Kirby's 88th birthday. Just one of the many fine pieces of art he brought us:

Kirby's birthday should be a national holiday. It would be, if I ran the store. Unfortunately, I don't, so I will have to settle for reading my paperbacks of his work over my lunch hour.

Looks like New Orleans didn't get the full force of Hurricane Katrina, which is probably not much of a solace for them. It still ripped a ton of the city apart, damaged the Superdome where the Saints play, ripped a couple of oil derricks loose, etc. Good thing there's no such thing as global warming, or we'd really have some powerful hurricanes. And luckily the Louisiana National Guard is at full strength to help in this crisis... Oh, wait.

As I was looking around the Web for usability/accessibility books this morning, I found this cover, which is unintentionally funny to me. I'm not sure I'd want to borrow the image of goatse.cx for my book, but that's just me.

All The World Is Wonderful...

...When You're An Idiot

Or so goes one of the stores in The Goon, which I picked up this weekend in a trip to my shop. Seems to be true, particularly if you're in certain tax brackets.

I adore The Goon. It's a bit like Hellboy would be if it took place in the 30s with lots of Monty Python references and carnival freaks. And zombies. Man, who doesn't hate zombies? Other than the Nameless Guy in the comics who keeps creating them...

Also, inspired by this post at Dave's Long Box, I found the issues of 1963 that were missing from my collection. I'll have to read them all later—it's been a long day and I'm evidently still a bit discombobulated from other stuff I've been doing lately. Napped through a party I was supposed to go to this afternoon, and I think I may have kickball practice tomorrow. The fall season is starting up fairly soon now.

Briefly considered, but did not purchase, a hardbound copy of Miracleman Volume 4, which they were selling for a lot more than the $25 list price on Amazon. Of course, it was in really good condition. Also passed on the first trade, which they had in a French edition. All I know of French I learned from Eddie Izzard, so unless it contains "The monkey is on the branch," I'm pretty much lost. (This will serve me in good stead if I ever meet the President of Burundi, I imagine.)

Inmates running the asylum

It's bad enough we have dueling movements in Crawford, but now a travel show about Europe is tagged for "mature audiences only."

Rick Steves, the most lovable travel geek in history, gets a warning label on his program because it shows (gasp!) art.

I don't know whether to laugh or be outraged. As a tour guide for 25 years, I always laughed with my American tourists at the puritan fig leaves Victorians retrofitted onto great art. But today we live in a country in which some people apparently wish David's marble penis had a fig leaf and Venus wore a sports bra.

I never will figure out why it's OK to show a human body being shot and killed on American TV, but to show it unclothed is bad and naughty and makes the saints cry. Plus, swearing is bad. And video games are bad. And movies. (Well, any industry that can make a sequel to Deuce Bigalow probably needs some serious examination...)

But thank god we have Talking Points. It's a video clip from Crooks and Liars, which is unfortunately in Windows Media format. Still, it's worth it for the rap video they made out of Bush saying "making progress."

I value stability in an application...

Hey Josh, if you're having trouble getting your coworkers to switch to Linux, make them watch this short film.

American Taliban member Pat Robertson is now backing off of his death threats for Hugo Chavez, democratically-elected leader of a foreign country.

"Is it right to call for assassination? No, and I apologize for that statement. I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him."

Maybe he thinks that because YOU JUST CALLED FOR US TO KILL HIM YESTERDAY.

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism looks better and better all the time.

Coffee loves you and wants you to be happy

Pooper2
Originally uploaded by Torrie.

For some reason, if you can't get to sleep until 1 am and then you go into work at 8, you feel a bit tired. (Flickr's new clustering found some interesting clusters for the word tired. Not quite sure why drunk is a synonym, but that's a question for Roget, perhaps. He was a weird guy, and the thesaurus was a religious argument of a sort, if I recall correctly. At least at first.)

Sooner or later I'll have to head to the comic shop, but mostly I've been in multi-hour meetings and fighting off zombie visitors who drop cars off on my street. OK, that last part may not be true. She wasn't a zombie, she'd just been in a Starbucks for a while. Still, there are whole scads of comics calling my name, along with the Battlestar Galactica set, the Makai Kingdom strategy guide, etc.

Bleh. As Odd Todd says, Mon-ay is important and stuff. It can be exchanged for goods and services.

Hey, this is new to me: the Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection. The Fantagraphics editions of Peanuts are fascinating, and remarkably well-done. One hopes these are of similar quality, though I can't really find much on the creator's input. Where has Watterson been these last few years, anyway? I know he's not the one making those god-awful "Calvin peeing" and "Calvin praying" stickers. (Great gallery of horrors online, by the way.)

A while back I saw somebody who'd placed a picture of Calvin peeing over a picture of Calvin praying. Man, I wish I'd had my camera. I think I remember where that was...

To rule the Netherworld

My posting frequency has been kind of light latey. Part of it may be that it's summer, what with the heat and battling ants and the mysterious "slow time" that I hear about at work but never see. Summers are usually my busiest time, really, and this last month is no exception. Work work work.

Hard work, and like most Americans, I don't get 30+ vacation days. Of course, if I did, I sure as hell wouldn't spend it in Texas like some people... (And if I had a ranch, it would have horses and cows and livestock on it, that's for sure.)

Anyway, another distraction as of late is this game I've been playing—Makai Kingdom. It's another great tactical RPG from Nippon Ichi, and I adore it. The presentation is a bit... shallow compared to some of their other efforts (the sheer weirdness of cut scenes in Disgaea boggles the mind... talking robots weeping for their lost memories, knife-wielding penguins who punctuate every sentence with DOOD!, angels telling us what ninjas say as they sneak around, etc.) Here we get characters talking against a black background. Sometimes they say stuff like "I'm gonna Overlord your face off," which does break it up a bit.

I dunno, maybe their background and character artists were out on vacation or something. In any case, the non-grid terrain from Phantom Brave is back, tweaked a bit and far more playable. Nippon Ichi ruined me for most tactical games when they introduced the concept of throwing characters back in Disgaea. Ruined me for Final Fantasy Tactics, since it was really fun and really, really funny. The new thing this game is vehicles and buildings you can summon at will. Tanks drive around the map, characters have battle armor, etc.

Doublejump Press does all of the strategy guides for these games, and they're the best guides I've seen since the Versus Press books of a few years ago. The discussion board on the DJ Press site has a thread about art in Makai Kingdom. It's worth a look if you like that sort of thing, though the fanwanking can get pretty deep at times.

(Typing as I watch this. Man, every time I see this Best Buy ad with the Black Eyed Peas, I keep thinking of stuff from Go Fug Yourself. That's probably not be what Best Buy wanted when they commissioned the ads...)

Touched by His Noodly Appendage

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the first organized belief system that has held my interest since the Sub-Genius caught my eye in college.

(Insert obligatory give "BoB" your slack reference here.)

They have an open letter to the Kansas City school board, and the following fantastic reasons to join:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONVERT TO FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTERISM

• Flimsy moral standards.
• Every friday is a relgious holiday. If your work/school objects to that, demand your religious beliefs are respected and threaten to call the ACLU.
• Our heaven is WAY better. We've got a Stripper Factory AND a Beer Volcano.

Beer volcano? SIGN ME UP. And I am tempted to send out Pirate vs. Temperature shirts to everybody I know.

Why would you do THAT?

Blogger told me it has a Blogger-for-Word plugin available now.

It's like buying an X-Box Doubleplusgood 360 With a Twist McSkanky Muffin for $400. I just can't see it. But then again, I'm still bitter about Halo being announced at MacWorld NY in 1999 and then becoming an X-Box exclusive, so I may not be the most rationale third party.

On the other hand, I had to remember how Mail Merge worked in Word today, which is never a fun thing. It's like learning Access and it's fucked-up version of SQL—I remember or relearn just what it was that I needed, and then that part of my brain goes back to remembering fun things, like where the hidden items in Final Fantasy VII are.
John Rogers is a genius:

Pres Vacation Watch - Day 16
Bush Vacation Day*: 16
American Soldiers Killed While Kickin' It in Crawford: 54

Bush Days on Vacation Remaining: 18
Every Other Working American Has Been Back on the Job for*: 3 days

* (assuming Aug 2 as first full day of vacation)

*(based on 13 avg. days of vacation, courtesy World Tourism Organization)

Vacationing for a month. How very... European. Aren't we supposed to still hate them or something? Damn freedoms they have. Speaking of freedom, an open letter to the asshat in Texas who was threatened by some crosses in the ground.

On an entirely different note, two of my favorite people in the world have had birthdays this week. Gifts are on their way soon.

DM 1.5.2!

Poking around VersionTracker this evening, I see there's a new update to Delicious Library.

And then after looking at the Delicious Monster blog, I see this interview with Wil Shipley, former head of OmniGroup and current head of Delicious Monster. It's one of the most interesting and engaging interviews I've read in a long time.

Shipley on small companies:

My feeling was (and is): You don't adopt the mannerisms of big, successful companies when you're small, because those mannerisms aren't what made the companies successful.

They're actually symptoms of what is killing the company, because it's become too big. It's like if you meet an really old, really rich guy covered in liver spots and breathing with an oxygen tank, and you say, "I want to be rich, too, so I'm going to start walking with a cane and I'm going to act crotchety and I'm going to get liver disease."

The really important thing to remember is that what worked once won't necessarily work again, and in fact is less likely to work again because it's been done.

Some really intresting bits about working on NeXTSTEP, barcode readers, and cross-platform development. He also hits home why I'm a hardcore Mac user:

[W]hat if people stop booting into the Mac once they're done playing, don't want to deal with dual-booting at all, or developers of larger software start telling Mac users to just boot into Windows (or boot up an emulator) to save costs?

They're not going to reboot to Windows. Windows sucks dogs and everyone knows it. I don't even have to quote the stories of Windows machines getting viruses after 10 seconds any more, because everyone has had it happen to them or someone they love.

They're going to use Wine (or something a lot like it) to play games. It's a perfect technology for this at a perfect time. Windows programs (or a subset of them) will run in a virtual environment on Mac OS X just as Java, Mac Classic, and X11 programs do right now.

The Windows user experience is so much worse than Mac OS X that I can't imagine anyone thinking it wasn't worth it to boot back. It's like saying, "Hey, it's too much trouble to leave the video arcade and go back to our office and get some work done... let's just stay here and sit on the sticky chairs, surrounded by 14-year-old skateboarders."

Considering our entire workplace had to patch systems today thanks to the Zotob exploit. (Holy shit, it's up to variant Zotob.E already...) And don't even get me started on Outlook. It does a bunch of things, but none of them well. It's also an incredibly shitty mail client in a non-Exchange environment. Its LDAP support is... embarrassing, really. And face it, who is going to have three full-time employees and thousands of bucks to keep an Exchange server limping along?

Hrm. Perhaps it's time to go scan some more items into my Delicious Library. I do hope they get around to XML/RSS export one of these days.

$10K up front

A while back on Achewood, Roast Beef decided to MAKE.MONEY.FAST. by opening a site to harvest GoogleAd revenue.

Some enterprising reader has developed a magnificent tribute to that strip. I give you: I-Got-Problems.com. Try what I did, only $10K up front.

Sooner or later, somebody will have a clip of Steve Carrell on the Daily Show last night. Great stuff—I do miss him as a regular on the show, if only for "Even Stevens."

[Implant command]

When I wasn't playing kickball this weekend, I spent part of my tame playing the latest arrival from Gamefly: Destroy All Humans!

I'm guessing the design documentation included the tagline: "It's the bastard child of Grand Theft Autow and Mars Attacks!" The gameplay goes a little something like this—your little Furon alien dude wanders around with a bunch of weapons, zapping humans, reading the repressed minds of 50s-era Americans, flying around on jetpacks, driving your flying saucer and blasting buildings with your death ray, extracting brains, etc.

It's fun, though a little short. And sad, in that they've not really innovated as much as they could. They keep all the things that suck about GTA in addition to the fun bits. For every bit of mayhem with the disintegrator ray, there's the fact your alien dude can't touch water or he'll die (just like Tommy Vercetti).

One of my favorite missions so far has been impersonating a Kennedy-esque politician and answering questions from townsfolk. As long as you ignore everything and mouth platitudes, they'll buy anything you say. That may actually explain a lot about the current adminstration, where Bush can go bike riding and attend a Little League game, but he can't actually talk to a parent whose child died during his clusterfuck in Iraq.

Speaking with a mother about why we're there is not conducive to the health of our precious bodily fluids. Have you ever seen a grieving mother drink a glass of water? It's because of the fluoridation. The greatest conspiracy in America today. Which is why he bikes for two hours on days when it's over 90 degrees. (Why do I assume biking is some sort of euphemism, like choking on a pretzel?_

He's just denying her his... essence. That's it. Go over to the corner, Mandrake, and fix me a cocktail of rain water and grain alcohol.

Here's the pitch...

playoffs05JPG
Originally uploaded by GiantFightingBot.

What a different a couple of games make. The first time we played this team, they trounced us, solidly.

The Commandos beat us again today, but it was nowhere near the same score. They outscored us, but by fewer runs. We also improved our fielding, performance on the field, and mental attitude.

There wasn't the panic I saw in earlier games when a run was scored. There were still some issues with people throwing over the heads of their teammates, but at least I was not tempted to rename myself "Throw-the-ball-at-the-baseman-not-at-the- runner Pie" like I was last week. (I'm Key Lime this season. I might be Grasshopper Pie later on.)

It's also really, really, really hot out today, which is one of the reasons I've given most of the games a miss. Out to the final now, and then a party.

Arrow of Apollo

OK, so I went to the coast and I didn't take any pictures. Mostly because I left my camera in my bag and the futurephone's camera isn't what it used to be.

(As an aside, I am hard on phones. This Samsung of mine has taken quite a beating and it's on its second faceplate. Should really be on its third, what with the five cracks and all. In any case, the damage makes a lot of my shots... very fuzzy.)

Season two of Battlestar Galactica is still hitting pretty hard. I think my friend Alice is right in that Starbuck is totally a Mary Sue at this point—she's good at shooting, she's the best fighter pilot ever, she's a tactical genius, she was almost a pro Pyramid player, she paints, she drinks, plays cards the best, has abusive parents, yadda yadda yadda. OK, so she's emotionally stunted, but that also comes with the territory.

On the other hand, it's good to see Edward James Olmos earn his paycheck by doing more than lie in a bed looking comatose (which is probably WAY harder than it sounds). Adama is back, and we've missed him. Lots and lots of Starbuck action, and we get to see a new Cylon model. Plus, Boomer's back. Sorta.

There's evidently a bit in one of the podcasts (which I totally need to start listening to) where Ron Moore talks about the resistance on Caprica being something like, "What if the world ended... and then you ran into the LA Lakers?"

If I knew basketball as well as I knew hockey, I'd make some sports-related joke here, but as it is I'm trying to get ready for our kickball playoffs tomorrow. So that is left as an exercise for the reader.

OMG WTF BBQ

IMGP1239
Originally uploaded by eviltwin.

I have a day off today, having completed a bunch of work that has kept me from regular postings for the past month.

I'm off to the coast today. Perhaps if you're good, I'll be back with some pictures. And some cheese curds, but you can't have those—they're mine!

I have destroyed your definition of "dish"

One of my favorite Get Fuzzy cartoons involves Bucky the cat selling his destroyed household objects to Satchel as art. By placing crumbs on broken pottery and selling it to a dog, he "caused you to think about dish in a new way."

The world is full of wanna-be avant garde artists. A vacationing president signs a special-interest-laden energy bill on the same day oil hits $64/barrel. Painting a tomato soup can can't compare with the majesty of watching private citizen Bob Novak (or, as Jon Stewart calls him, our little "douchebag of liberty") get suspended from his network. Not for destroying the cover of a covert agent charged with policing nuclear materials as you might expect, but for swearing on TV.

I had this idea that I would go all Dada in our kickball league this fall. (Maybe not Brotherhood of Dada in what may be the best storyline Morrison has ever written. Mostly since I don't have a painting that can eat a city and my name isn't Mr. Nobody.) I was thinking of foregoing baserunning and instead replace it with cartwheels or ballet leaps along the baseline, maybe attempting to kick while blindfolded and tied to a post, cigarette dangling from my lip. Perhaps trying to register my cat Zelda as a player. She's gotta be 21 in cat years by now! But still, nothing I can do can compare to the masters above.

hiroshima umbrellas

hiroshima umbrellas
Originally uploaded by manthatcooks.

There have been a bunch of posts this weekend in the blogosphere about the use of atomic weapons at the end of the war. Whether it was justified in order to save lives in the invasion, intended to piss off the Russians, a horrible mistake, an act of war, what have you.

Some links off of BoingBoing...
The documentary. Some photographic evidence from the Lewis and Clarke University collection.

There are no good answers. Truman had an eye towards the post-war world after the Yalta conference. The Soviet Union was going to enter the war against Japan two days after the second bombing, having taken a month after V-E day to retool and move forces to the Pacific theater. Patton wanted to re-arm the Germans to go after the Soviets right after the war. And the Soviets, having lost 20 million people during the war, were understandably paranoid about the shape of things to come. So I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that Truman wasn't thinking of a larger picture.

There's a book by H. Bruce Franklin called War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination which goes into some of the history of weapons, war, and foreign policy. There are whole chapters on genocidal wars against Asians in literature (hell, Jack London wrote a novel about the Yellow Peril). Looking at propaganda during the war, it's clear that the caricatures of the Germans and the Japanese are very, very different animals. There's also that Life photo of the woman whose boyfriend sent her a skull captured in battle. Not to mention the thousands of Japanese-Americans put into internment camps here in the US, something not done for the Italian and German citizens. (Racist apologist Michelle Malkin would have you believe this was a wise decision, but she is so very, very wrong in this, as in most things. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese-American volunteers, was one of the most-decorated units of the war. Defending a shitty policy years ago to bolster arguments for Gitmo is just bad.)

The world changed a lot that week. Two bombs destroyed two cities, ushering in the framework for the Cold War and marking the US as the only nation to use atomic weapons in war. (Though private Canadian companies currently have enough nuclear material to accomplish the same thing. Good thing the NHL decided to have another season, eh?)

Old school

Spent a good fifteen minutes trying to synchronize our Handspring Visor with my work machine today—it looks like the contact points were having trouble connecting. I suppose I could scour eBay for an old Handspring cradle... Wow, looks like it would set me back all of $4. However, now that I'm on eBay I'm looking for all sorts of stuff I don't really need. Underworld DVDs, a clapboard from Babylon 5 signed by 15 cast/crew members, or a Cardboard Tube Samurai print.

Back to the pixel mines after a weekend of OMG WTF BBQ, kickball, and Mike's Hard Limeade. Plus, I finally saw the last few episodes of the current Doctor Who season, which is probably why I'm so bloody tired today.

Hot. Cranky. Tired.

Thoughts on Tuesday's shenanigans in Ohio:

• Billmon
• Steve Gilliard
• Dibgy

I'd also like to point out that I predicted the recess appointment of Bolton in June.

Maybe there is something to this Plame investigation after all. Bob Novak just lost his shit on TV today. And man, it wasn't like Carville said anything that bad to him, either. Maybe he's not happy about the idea of spending the rest of his life in prison for treason. CNN has asked him to take some time off. Pity they didn't ask him to do that years ago.

I bet this means he gets his own show on MSNBC.

Lots of good comics today, none of which I've purchased as Stumptown was emulating the surface of the sun this afternoon. Maybe this weekend.

And now for something completely different...

Were you to ask me, I'd say I don't watch all that much TV. However, I am sometimes convinced that the true reason we watch is for commercials. Though the best ones never seem to make it over here...

A big ad. (Australian beer ad, made me laugh.)

Turnpike Films made this ad for Nutri-Grain. I FEEL GREAT. YEAH! (It's off their site now, probably for bandwidth issues.)

In any case, I am off to enjoy a beer. Hooray, beer.

It was a dark and stormy night

The Bulwer-Lytton awards have been announced, and there are some good ones.

Patricia wrote out the phrase 'It was a dark and stormy night' exactly seventy-two times, which was the same number of times she stabbed her now quickly-rotting husband, and the same number of pages she ripped out of 'He's Just Not That Into You' by Greg Behrendt to scatter around the room -- not because she was obsessive compulsive, or had any sentimental attachment to the number seventy-two, but because she'd always wanted to give those quacks at CSI a hard time.

The Flickr interestingness page is pretty sweet. Some very cool photos that you might not find on your lonesome. Plus, they've figured out a way to tell the difference between photos tagged with cat noses, and photos with dog noses. Which reminds me, I really should get that pro account...

And HOLY SHIT. Hackett, the Ohio Democratic challenger in a district that went for Bush something like 72% is winning. I expected a moral victory at best—the netroots forced the GOP to spend millions of dollars on what should have been a slam-dunk. Granted, these are still early results, but this is fairly impressive. Wow.

(19:54 PDT) Update:
All sorts of weird voting shenanigans in Ohio, with ballots being stuck together "because of humidity." It's close—within 800 votes—but not quite automatic recall territory yet.

Ohio is the new Florida.

(20:20 PDT) Update:
Very interesting. All of a sudden, Hackett is down 3,000 votes and Schmidt is declared the winner after "humidity" stuck some cards. In an area with 44% relative humidity.

Interesting. But stupid. Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket, I am sick of this shit.

A world of its own

One of the things I like most about my job is helping patrons with their research needs. Today I managed to help a couple from Astoria, which involved figuring out the weirdness of the US Patent Office.

Why the Patent Office has chosen to implement their image files as a strangely-formatted TIFF that requires a special third-party browser plugin is beyond me. Other than they're The Man, and The Man can do whatever He wants.

The guy made me laugh when he started mentioning "I'm here with the woman I sleep with," and they've been married for 30 years. "It sounds more mysterious that way."

So one way to stick it to the man is to donate to Paul Hackett for Congress. He's running an amazing campaign, and the GOP in Ohio is trying to Swift Boat him, saying that being in Iraq as a Marine Reserve officer isn't service. Will their lies ever end? Eight such officers never came back alive. Maybe their families weren't displaying enough yellow ribbons or something.

Do yellow ribbons negate the overwhelming feelings of guilt for voting for a horse-fearing liar, I wonder? There aren't enough acres of magnetic fabric in the world, I am guessing.