OK, so I installed Dum-Dum, because I like the look of it. K2 was starting to get … well, crusty, I guess.
In the process I also had to upgrade my entire WP engine.
Fortunately, it went far better than my last MacOSX upgrade. Things appear to more or less be working still, and I’ve got this perky graphical look now…
Micheline Calmy-Rey, the Swiss Foreign Minister, has gone on record saying that peace talks with Osama Bin Laden are the only way to effectively combat terrorism.
I have a major issue with that, and it’s not the obvious one.1 OBL is a figurehead; he doesn’t and wouldn’t speak for terrorists, not even in Qaeda. Reaching detente with him wouldn’t necessarily have any real effect on other terrorist cells, and that’s something I’d expect the Swiss Foreign Minister to actually know.
What is the answer? Good question, and though I still believe Iraq was a mistake, I’m also certain that appeasement isn’t the way to go with this creep, nor his bastard minions.
==
1. The way to deal with OBL is, of course, to kill him in the most ghastly, painful and drawn-out way that can be devised. But in order to do that we have to capture him. So I propose we capture his family, and slowly put each member of his family to death, until he surrenders.
Then we kill the fucker.
Being a Drama in One Act.
[Launch]
[Click]
You have selected the Pen Tool!
[OK]
[Click]
You have made an anchor point!
[OK]
[Click]
You have made another anchor point!
[OK, OK, got it already!]
[Click, drag]
You have made a curved anchor point!
You seem to be drawing a Bézier. Would you like me to help?
[NO, tits or GTFO!]
[Click, drag]
You have made a third point!
Your points are not in extrema. Would you like me to correct them?
[NO! FUCK OFF!]
[Click, drag]
You have made a curve!
This curve is not closed. Would you like me to close it for you?
[N…Fuck it, I'll ink it on vellum.]
This scanner is not recognized.
[Click]
This document is not saved.
Are you sure you want to quit?
[!…!]
Exeunt.
So now we know (and are shocked, I’m sure, to learn) that the “bigfoot” “carcass” was actually a monkey suit on ice.
It’s not the hoax that’s really the story here, though; it’s that the hoaxters seemed to believe they’d be able to get away with it.
One of the two men in the fraud is a sheriff, and damned well should have known what kind of forensic analysis his “corpse” would be put to. But both of these backwoods yokels seemed to be caught unawares by how quickly their story came apart. Just a few days after saying they’d offer hair (polyester fiber) and DNA (monkey, opossum and some human) samples for analysis, they saw their house of stupidity implode with total and stunning — to them — rapidity.
The ignorance they displayed in the face of early 21st century science — the rank moronism they betrayed at how well we can probe the natural world to seek its secrets — is to me the real story behind the story.
What saddens me most is that this nation is crawling with people even less intelligent than these two are — and these people breed, and vote.
Isn’t it obvious?
It’s because no one in white America wants to vote for a nigger.
My second blogaversary passed on the 16th!
I’m always so damned inconsiderate. Not only did I forget — I didn’t even get me anything. What an ass.
Byrne and Eno1 have a forthcoming release, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.
Get a nice little taste of it right now…
==
1. David and Brian, respectively.
Harrold Independent School District in (of course) Texas has OKed teachers and staff bringing firearms to school.
This festering stupidity begins and ends with David Thweatt (the district’s superintendent), it seems, who offers up these statements as evidence of his own severe retardation:
He said the district’s lone campus sits 500 feet from heavily trafficked U.S. 287, which could make it a target.
Right. Placement near a highway — not, mind you, an actual interstate — makes schools vulnerable to attack. Somehow. Maybe by deranged long-haul produce truckers?
The fact that it hasn’t happened yet seems not to faze our man:
When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started.
Which is actually an outright lie. Attacks on schools are considerably fewer now than they were in, say, the early 20th century — before schools were no-gun zones. And is anyone stupid enough to genuinely believe that a student bentt on violence won’t actually end up using a staff member’s piece to make it happen?
And before you even try it: The US is not like Israel, so we don’t want to emulate them in terms of arming teachers; any other equally stupid “argument” in favor of guns in school will be summarily deleted from the comments.
Larry King, fifteen, was shot quite dead at school last year by a classmate who didn’t like to face the reality that King was gay.
Rather than put the blame where it belongs — on his murderer — King’s parents are suing his school because administrators “permitted” him to show up in drag.
Of course, if the administrators had not done so, they’d've been sued by the ACLU.
The fault for King’s death is immediately on the shoulders of his killer, Brandon McInerney. In a broader sense it’s on those who believe bigotry, homophobia and weasel phrases such as “hate the sin, love the sinner” are acceptable. Thus, in addition to McInerney, I blame Fred Phelps, James Dobson, Jim Hartline and every other hateful, twisted wretch that gives courage to the troglodytes among us.
This might include King’s own parents, who very clearly didn’t understand their son. At all.
n.b.: This is a long post on graphic design, typography and commercial art. It is full of images. Peruse if you wish, but don’t bill me for the bandwidth suckage, or any other suckage you may encounter. Caveat lector.
I take a relatively unorthodox approach to graphic design, it seems. Relatively in the sense that what I do is atypical for healthcare marketing, but actually somewhat passé in the larger world of commercial art.
Vogue in graphics seems to be tribal designs (a la intricate aboriginal tattoo art) and really exquisite, though to my eye cluttered, cursive script with lovely roundy swoopy flourishes. While this stuff is pretty, it tends sometimes to the too-symmetrical for my taste (I prefer the tension that follows classic Rule of Thirds placement), and often seems to occupy the entire visual frame (I’m a big believer in negative space, particularly where display ads in publications are concerned — a quarter-page ad in a cluttered newspaper or magazine that’s at least half whitespace is a hell of an eye-catcher, not the least because there’s lots of room for the visuals to breathe, and it brings the focus to the crucial content).
I haven’t imported that vogue into the stuff I do professionally, but I also haven’t made much use of the trends in healthcare marketing graphics, which seem to be a bit sterile.
Remember when Windows NT 4 debuted? It came with some low-key, grey-blue themes that seemed very modern and business-professional, quite unlike the gaudy choices available under Win95, and I don’t think I was the only NT sysadmin who adopted the battleship-at-midnight motifs available.
But hey, that was 1996, and things progressed since then. Right?
Riiiiiiight.
Healthcare graphic vogue seems to be a kind of extension of the decade-old NT4 trend. Colors seem to largely be muted, cooler pastels; and fonts are typically ultra-crisp, ultra-clean sans-serifs set in sizes that are too large at 12 points. Lines and borders tend to be smaller than one point, and gradients, if they’re used at all, are muted and heavily reduced.
I’ve made use of that a bit, actually, with an ad that I developed a couple years ago now but still recycle, because it’s so damn clean:
Ha, well, compare that with the ad placed, in the same publication, by MedCath, the hospital consortium that’s got a project under construction nearby. (They’re not really worrying anyone here; as a for-profit hospital, and one that offers considerably fewer services than ours, with a third of the beds, well, they’re just not exactly competition. Particularly if you’re not rich, or don’t have insurance.) The quality here isn’t ideal; this is a scan.
Unnamed airlines, according to the VFW, are charging troops extra fees for the baggage they check — as they’re going off to war.
This raises two questions:
You’d think there would be a little more patriotism and class amongst our air carriers — but their anonymity in this case, coupled with the way Cheney et. al. have very carefully kept awareness of our two-front war from the minds of most Americans, make it unsurprising that such thoughtless behavior is going on.
Unsurprising, but still entirely disgusting.
Meanwhile a recent congressional report reveals that American corporate welfare is still going strong, even though we can’t afford national health insurance. Nearly two-thirds of US businesses are not paying income tax, and a little more than that percentage in foreign-owned businesses are also dodging their fare share.
With the crushing war debts imposed upon our grandchildren by the worst shitbag administration in US history, with infrastructure collapsing, with education being tossed out the window — still, we aren’t taxing the wealthy.
Perhaps the second amendment is a good thing after all.
