The Indigestible

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of comment on the fact that Gm has announced a shutdown of four plants; the facilities were producing trucks and SUVs, and only an inbred cretin like Bush could possibly be surprised at the news “news” that big fat-assed gas pigging vehicles are not what we want or need on this planet. They’re even considering dumping the Hummer brand, about a decade too late for it to do anyone any good.

That this is a beautiful example of thoughtless, mindless consumerism — the ultimate outcome of pure “free market” economics — is something which seems to be escaping many people.

Ideally, a corporation’s CEO will, among other things, look to the future of his company with wisdom, or at least enough foresight to see to the end of any given decade. US automakers’ leadership, however, has been dismal; rather than realize the hard, inescapable fact (in 1998) that gas prices would never, ever go down, they chose to produce pigmobiles, and put a significant amount of material resource into their production.

And Americans, hypnotized like chickens with lines drawn before their beaks, lined up to buy the idiot machines.

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One of the problems about the claim of the US being “the lone superpower” is that the claim is patently false. While it’s true we’ve got a hell of a lot of nukes, what we don’t have is an infrastructure to speak of (focusing our entire economy on service and nonskilled labor for the last decade and a half has pretty well assured that), nor the possibility of supporting a long-term offensive — as any conventional battle will surely be.

The moronic saber-rattling going on between Iran and (hey, let’s face it) the White House — two religiously addled idiots bleating at one another over the strenuous objections of pretty much all their fellow countrypersons — is one obvious example of what happens when a cretin is told, over and over again, that the US is a “superpower”. We simply are not. The overstrained military is struggling in Afghanistan and Iraq; a war on two fronts is a known precursor to disaster; a third front would leave our national offensive (and, by extension, defensive) capabilities in tatters. Presumably any “Commander in Chief” versed in history no deeper than the Napoleonic wars would know that.

The only thing we had going for us was the “coalition of the willing” — and that has taken another serious blow this weekend, as Australia’s begun pulling its troops out of Iraq.

Why now? Because Australia just had some elections, and a few die-hard Bushies bit the dust, that’s why. It’s analogous to the US midterm elections that have terrified Republicans in recent months. Supporters of Il Duce the Retard are beginning to see the headstones capping their political careers, and — just like most dupes — they end up taking the anonymous fall with damned little to speak of for their years of self-serving public “service”.

Best damn thing to happen in a while, I think.

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just a few minutes ago.

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No comment at all.

Ascot World, an online community devoted to men and woman in wheelchairs.

http://www.ascotworld.com/

Personals.

http://www.ascotworld.com/asadper.html

Good? Definitely. But … but what if your kink is a para or quad … and science, not caring at all, just up and refixes the situation in, say, 2021 or so?

How do you file for divorce? “Your Honor, I loved him … and then the bastard got up and walked.”

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I’d like to take credit for this, but I can’t. Las Vegas didn’t make their smog go away overnight because I advised them to do so yesterday.

The real cause? Twenty-four hours of steady southwesterly wind, approximately 20 MPH, with gusts to 40.

It will be back, though.

Ordinarily I don’t mention when I un-roll another blog, but I thought I should go into why I’m not following Pandagon any more.

The warning signs came a few months ago when Amanda was still pushing for Edwards. At one point in an entry, she was dispensing advice on how to affect primaries so Edwards would have a stronger showing — overall a good idea, but her presentation was something along the lines of, “Here’s what you should do.” In context, that should felt considerably more like an order than a suggestion, and it rubbed wrong.

Additionally, the commenters on Pandagon often seem to have extremely low tolerance for those who don’t line up precisely with their views, which is ironic in any population that styles itself liberal.

Finally, though, she linked — with favorable comment — to an article from the Village Voice that starts out by launching lowbrow and narrow-minded (as well as humorless) critiques at another blog which, frankly, I value much more highly than hers. I didn’t read past the first page. Willingness to appreciate diversity in voices matters, and she seems to have lost sight of that fact.

If the liberal front is beginning to lose its sense of humor — something that almost always happens whenever a subgroup begins to take itself too seriously, begins to get a little taste of power — I promise you that in a decade it will look precisely like the conservative front does now: Angry, out of touch, and foaming with rage when things don’t go precisely as desired.

Life is too short to waste on that kind of anger.

Because it already didn’t happen.

A West Coast scientist who believes it may be possible to transmit information backwards through time has been funded by individual donations after established mad-scientist groups refused to cough up.

Um … um … established mad-scientist groups?

Oh right, them.

ANYway, if we could send a message back in time, we could stop, oh I don’t know, maybe the last fire at Alexandria (”Don’t light the match!”) or the stupidity that was most of the twentieth century (”Avoid Hitler, look out for chickens with a cough, and fuck pretty much everything you hear from 1946 onward”), or gee, I don’t know, recent years (”It wasn’t iraq, you fucking goddamn useless wannabe Texan inbred retard, fuck you and your pissing contest with your dad, you both suck, and history will have a really fucking hard time deciding who was the shittiest president ever — ha ha, no, lie, it’s you, duh-bya, you’re worthless and we, the denizens of the future, wish you had choked on that pretzel”).

Seriously. If we could send a message back through time, what could possibly explain the fustercluck that has been, gee, everything we’ve ever experienced ever, in history?

So it’s obvious that this guy’s time travel thing never worked, just like everyone else’s never will have. It’s cute fantasy, especially when it includes David Tennant — a cute fantasy indeed — but it just. never. happened.

If it had, we’d have nothing to discuss.

Jeez, don’t you love Apriil Fools’ Day jokes?

Well, I do, if I have a chance to post images like this one, and especially link to them twice in the same article.

…well, if you’re a graphics person. Who likes to get his work done on a stable OS. That doesn’t harass you all the time with dialog boxes like a needy, attention-hungry child (I printed the file! I sent your memo! I installed the program! Do you like me? Can I please be even better? Huh huh huh?). And especially if you dislike viruses, Macs are better.

Anyway, each year the hospital does a gathering for its employees called the Snowflake Ball. Last year it was at the fairgrounds, and I put together a (sigh) PowerPoint slide show recap of the year. For this year, the gathering was at a casino outside of Laughlin, and instead of a PPT we were asked to do a DVD. The request came from the casino’s side of the event; they were set up for video playback but a PPT presentation would have been problematic.

Fortunately Macs have iMovie built in, as well as DVD authoring software. (I know, a lot of PCs have that too, but the Apple tools are pretty quick to pick up and have a tolerably useful set of features.)

The loop part was pretty straightforward, but the title sequence gave me pause. It was something that really needed to be seen with attention, ideally just once for maximum impact. It was decided to use that for the program opener rather than as a bit of eye candy running in the background form time to time. The piece I did follows the fold; it’s a 3.1 MB QuickTime video.

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Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time — update the work Mac to OSX 10.5 to take advantage of the new features, particularly Spaces (the virtual desktop manager) and Time Machine, the automatic backup engine.

Aha, ha ha, silly me.

I use Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 to do most of my work. This includes the big three tools: Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. PS is great for bitmap hacking; AI is a nonpareil vector editor, and ID is a pretty damn good page layout program. CS2 is one version down from CS3, the current release, but CS3 didn’t do much for adding features so much as it changed the way a lot of the tools functioned, making them more accessible to relative novices.

Oh, I also use Acrobat 7 to print to PDF, because when your work is sent to press, that’s generally the format desired.

Imagine my surprise when, after finishing the 10.5 upgrade, InDesign began behaving like it was running on Windows, complete with random crashing and unpredictable printing behavior — by which I mean that sometimes a document would print, and other times the exact same document would not print. OSX Leopard: Bad, bad kitty!

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Good golly. So many new things to share. The Mac Mini is performing magnificently, which is great, but sheesh, I’ve been heavily at it since it arrived (in time for my Big Four-Oh, FWIW).

Graphics and — yes — video will follow soon. But not now. It’s all Top Secret™.

I am pretty stoked right now. I just learned that my freshy-ordered Mac Mini is about to ship.

So TF what, right?

Well, I’ve been staggering along here with an iBook, a 600 MHz machine with 640 MB RAM,* for longer than I care to admit. Well, actually, I bought it new, and you can do the math and figure it out for yourself. (If you groaned at half a fucking decade, congratulations on your prizewinning entry.)

My Mini-Mac-Me? 2 GHz, dual core, 2 GB RAM, and the damn thing is about the size of a DVD case for width and depth, three times that or so in height, and here’s the shit.

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But it’s genuinely not possible. After you’ve read some of the mock ad copy and checked out the PDF of the “advertisement” flyer,¹ I think you’ll agree that it’s tragic no such device will ever exist.

Spam Got you Down?

In 2006, 17 exabytes of junk emails and commercial spambot blog comments were transferred in the United States alone. If an equivalent amount of data were put to paper, the resulting pile would be as large as Saturn.

Just reading the headers and junking the mails cost an estimated 250 million person-hours, sucking the nation’s productivity into an ever-increasing spiral of wasted time.

If you have email, chat or a blog you already know how much time you waste per day dealing with the annoyances of spam and viral scripts. You’ve installed filters and firewalls, but the flood of useless data has continued to rise like an unholy cesspool connected to Lucifer’s own privy. And it seems like there’s no way to stem the rising tide.

Now there is. Now there’s SPucker™.

SPucker™ is an innovative, simple-to-use tool that will eliminate spam at its source — the spammer himself. Simply connect SPucker™ to your Linux, Macintosh or Windows PC, then copy and paste (or drag and drop) any spam email, blog post or IRC transcript you encounter into the SPucker™ system icon.

Select the way the message was sent to you, the way you want SPucker™ to respond, and the level of dissuasion you want to transmit. SPucker™ will do the rest, delivering a 50 Kv, 0.01 mA charge or — at your choosing — a 100 Kv, 10-amp charge to the sender of the spam.

Painful or permanent, you can be sure your message will be heard loud and clear.

Doesn’t this sound like a lovely little gadget? Image mockup after the flip, as well as the link to the PDF, which goes into more detail and has a “FAQ” on page two.

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An excerpt from a recent Dinosaur Comics:

Go and check out the whole thing. Doesn’t this seem like a hell of a fun idea?

Once when I was getting cable installed at a rental, the technician asked if I had a ladder he could use. I was suddenly overcome with an insane urge, one I intend eventually to follow through on when the opportunity presents itself once more: To say, Yeah, I’ve got a ladder in the dead body, then leave the room casually as though nothing unusual had happened, returning in a few minutes with the ladder.

He would spend the rest of his life wondering if he’d heard me right or not.