i’m half-tempted to move to north carolina just so i can vote for vernon robinson, after hearing some of his ads. my favorite is the "beverly hill-miller."

hmm... dasani water lists salt (which, they tell us, adds a negligable amount of sodium) as one of the ingredients in its bottled water. does that seem a bit odd to anyone else?

so, it seems like both my internet connection and guild wars hate me now. i was just starting one mission earlier and my internet crapped out on me. came back later and things were working fine for awhile, managed to finish one mission. then i went to try another one, and about 5 minutes into it guild wars decided to crash. which is annoying not only to me, but also to the people in my group, who were then operating short one man.

so, i was surfing the university of chicago’s website last night (one of the grad schools i’m thinking of applying to), and found out that their history department accepts about 35 grad students a year. now, having no experience with grad school, i’m not sure how that number compares to other programs/schools, but it seems very small.



also, as i read more into it, i’m thinking it may be a good idea to get my MA somewhere else first. UC is a straight-up PhD program, though they do award MA’s to folks working towards the doctorate. i think the main bit that scared me off was the writing sample required with the application. several of my professors at whitworth told me i was a good writer, but i’m very tempted to think that i was relatively good rather than absolutely good. there were definitely some students in the department i considered good writers (nick fox and j-coe, for example), but a lot of what i read (which was not everybody, of course... there could have been quite a few more good writers out there that i just never knew about) was not that great. plus, there’s this (from the Application FAQ):

The Department of History considers the writing sample the most important part of your application. Please select a sample that you consider to be your best work. It should be self-contained, that is, includes a beginning, a middle and an end of an argument. Generally, 25 double-spaced pages (including footnotes) is sufficient, but do not feel bound by length should your best paper is longer. If possible, the work should be a piece of original research and in the specific field of history you hope to study at Chicago. The writing sample must include your name and the class/publication for which it was created.

the longest paper i had to do at whitworth was 18 pages long (got a B, i think, and i’m not even sure it deserved that), and the one that i considered my best (got an A, and it was used as an example of a good paper) was only 6 pages long... probably closer to 5 without all the footnotes. that’s especially unfortunate because it was on an area that i am very interested in, byzantine history and the crusading orders (the paper was on the siege of rhodes in 1522; i argued that it was the quantity rather than the quality of ottoman troops that won the battle for them).



but who knows? i was just a few classes away from having another BA in political studies. i plan on finishing that up at some point, and maybe i’ll end up doing something in that area instead, go for a job in the state department or something. that’s the wonderful thing about being young... i’ve still got some time to make up my mind. and/or win the lotto.

it seems that a lot of folks around the world want israel to limit themselves to a "proportional" response against hizbollah and hamas. in my opinion, however, that would be very bad for the "palestinians" and lebanese citizens, since it would involve israel randomly firing off rockets at civilian population centers; which, israel’s technology being much better than that of either terrorist group, would result in far more civilian deaths than the hamas/hizbollah attacks. true, israel has killed civilians with their airstrikes... but that’s to be expected when hizbollah is hiding among the civilian population (NPR mentioned that one of it’s reporters was approached by hizbollah militants dressed in plainclothes during "all things considered" a little after 5 tonight... if you’re less lazy than i am, you can probably actually find the audio on their site) and preventing lebanese civilians from leaving the cities.

actually, i’m looking for something more along the lines of someone who speaks/knows a bit of old german. i just finished reading "the name of the rose" by umberto eco (good book), which was completely translated from the italian... except for the parts where the characters are speaking a foreign language (german, latin, french, spanish, etc.), which makes some bits of it a bit hard to understand. anyways, it’s set in the early 1300s, and there’s one line in old (possibly middle, not sure... but a friend of mine who’s majoring in german didn’t recognize many of the words) german that i want to figure out:



"Er muoz gelichesame die leiter abewerfen, so er an ir ufgestigen ."



if anyone can tell me what that means, i would be much obliged. all i know is that it has something to do with a ladder.

guild wars hates me right now, and the feeling is mutual. to all those people (who will probably never read this, but oh well) who have been in groups that i’ve disappeared from, i’m sorry. i didn’t quit, guild wars logged me out.



--update--

and again.



--update--

and again. this time it was w/ henchies though, so it wasn’t quite as bad.



--update--

and yet again, just as we were about to fight the boss. with a pretty good group too.



--update (13 July)--

this time, it let me beat the final boss, and get my faction reward, before kicking me. without registering that i beat the mission.

maybe the french are good for something...

guild wars hates me right now, and the feeling is mutual. to all those people (who will probably never read this, but oh well) who have been in groups that i’ve disappeared from, i’m sorry. i didn’t quit, guild wars logged me out.

i had the weirdest dream last night. i was a jedi, as was a friend of mine. we were in an unfamiliar building, and i have no idea why we’re there. all of a sudden, saddam hussein--who, in this case, was also a dark jedi/sith lord--climbs up out of a trap door in the floor and flops over, apparently not in very good shape. we tie him up and prop him up against the wall, then go back to whatever it was we were doing. a little while later he sort of wakes up, and immediately starts trying to turn the jedi-in-training (not exactly "padawans," since they aren’t specifically assigned to either of us) that we have along to the dark side. there are two of them, both represented by my younger brothers’ friends. we warned them not to listen, and then basically ignored the situation. the apprentices thought they were pretty awesome, but we didn’t think they would be stupid enough to a) listen to the bad guy, especially one that we had just captured with little effort; and b) attack two jedi knights. especially since my friend was amazing with the light saber and i was pretty much awesome with the force. we were, unfortunately, wrong, which resulted in one dead jedi apprentice (not sure what happened to the other one, the dream didn’t cover that). i had a neat force trick that let me temporarily slow down time for everybody else in a small area, which, for all intents and purposes, meant that i could move incredibly fast. as soon as one of the apprentices started pulling their saber out, my friend started charging at them and i used my time dilation-esque power and disarmed both of the apprentices. as soon as i brought things back to normal speed, one of them tried to fight anyways and got herself chopped in half by my friend (again, not sure what happened to the other, though i’m assuming he surrendered). at that point the dream pretty much ended.

you remember all those mac/pc commercials that’ve been showing on tv lately? here’s a much better version of them.

go away and leave me alone. we both know my copy of windows is "geniuine," since i’ve had to prove it for pretty much every update i want to download. so why do you keep telling me (at least 3 times now) that i need to download the latest update of the "windows genuine notification doohicky"? it’s not like i’m going to ditch my legitimate copy of windows for a pirated one... that would just be stupid. i realize that most of your employees are on the "smart" end of the intelligence scale, but c’mon, give the rest of us some credit.

sick days would be a lot better if only it weren’t for that whole "sick" thing.

230 years and still going strong. Keep up the good work, America.

on a good day. maybe. but i’m really starting to doubt it. when north korea starts threatening the US with nuclear war, i figure they’ve completely lost it. in my mind, that’s a good way to make sure there’s no more north korea. they say it would only come if we launch a preemptive strike against them, but i’m pretty sure they don’t have the capability to launch an "annihilating strike" as they are now, and i’m sure they’d have even less after any strike on our part. because let’s face it... when we hit somebody, we don’t do it half-way.

congratulations to my friend pat, who was recently hired for a job at microsoft. well done pat. now update your friggin blog already.

today, the house voted to end the offshore drilling ban. which, let’s face it, was pretty ridiculous. in fact, under the current law, cuba (with china’s help) is able to drill for oil closer to our shore (still in international waters) than we can. i submit that that is bad policy. we can only hope that the senate also realizes this.

bartender says, "hey, you’re that terrorist fella the jackal! what are you doing here?"



the jackal: "i just escaped from a french prison, and i’m trying to make my way to the united states so i can turn myself in and get sent to guantanamo bay... or at least get gitmo-style treatment."



bartender: "mmm... well, good luck with that. can i get you anything while you’re here?"



the jackal: "no, i just stopped by for some of the free peanuts, then i’m gettin’ the hell out of dodge."

the more i read about new hampshire, the more and more tempted i am to move there at some point in life. there’s no sales tax, no income tax (i’m assuming they offset that with a property tax, but we’ve got that here anyways, so i think i’d survive), no seatbelt laws (which i think are stupid; of course, i also think that not wearing a seatbelt is stupid, but i don’t think it’s something that the government should be forcing anyone to do. if you want to take that chance, it’s your own damn fault if something goes wrong.), and apparently you can buy all sorts of good fireworks there (possibly even year round, though that hasn’t been clarified). they seem to think the same way i do: if you want to do something stupid, go for it... just don’t hurt anybody else in the process. and if i remember correctly, they only pay their state legislators $100 a year, which means they either have to be rich or have a job besides passing laws, which really seems to cut down on excess/stupid laws in that state.



for now though, i’m stuck here in the red half of a blue state, thinking of ways to save the world; or, failing that, at least take over it.

so, i just finished reading "ender’s shadow" today, and now i’m tempted to go back and read "ender’s game" again, even though it’s only been a few months. the stories are that good. i actually would have finished it a few days ago, but i had to space things out because i didn’t know when my next book (children of dune) was coming. luckily, that showed up today. also, tomorrow is my birthday, and all i asked for was books (and another video card so i can go SLI, but i don’t think that’s going to happen. oh well.), so hopefully i’ll be set for reading for awhile.

so, i got a promotion last week, a few days after being with the bank for one year. i now get to officially use the titles that i had unofficially been using for the last 4 months or so, and i’m making a little over $1,000 more a year than i had been previously. which, in my opinion, is pretty nice. good reviews from my supervisors, no complaints from the people i work with, and apparently i’m well liked by the majority of our customer base as well. now if only natalie portman would realize how much awesomer i am than whoever it is she’s dating now, life would be nigh on perfect.

title: when christ and his saints slept

author: sharon kay penman



an excellent book, especially for anyone interested in english history. it follows the story of stephen, a grandson of william the conqueror, and maude, daughter and heir of the recently deceased king henry I. in my opinion, it was a well told story, backed up by occasional comments from various contemporary chronicles.



the basic story line is as follows: henry, his family and court are moving from normandy back to england; his only [legitimate] son, riding the famous "white ship" which brought william the conqueror to england, is killed when the ship runs around a few miles out of port. stephen, who was supposed to be riding on the white ship as well, is "miraculously" saved when he changes his mind at the last minute, changing ships at the last minute so that he can travel with the girl who will later become his wife. henry I, in desperation, names maude (the "good guy") as his heir, hoping she’ll bear him grandsons who will be able to take the throne. but when henry dies not long after an argument with maude, england--which is already balking at the thought of a female ruler--is ready to believe the worst about her, and stephen (the "bad guy") is able to have himself proclaimed king.



stephen is either the worst bad guy ever or the best bad guy ever, depending on how you look at it. first off, as the king’s nephew, he had a legitimate claim to the throne... not as good a claim as maude, to be sure, but a good claim. though stephen is initially reluctant to take maude’s place, after some prodding from his brother (an english bishop who seems to hate women) and looking around and realizing that most of the english nobles are neither ready nor willing to follow a woman, he decides to go for it. unfortunately, in the process of this he ends up starting the very thing he hoped to avoid by preventing maude from taking the throne--a civil war.



stephen is, with one possible exception, the best character in the book (that is, he’s actually a good person). maude, on the other hand, is--to put it politely--a bitch. while stephen is fighting for what he believes is best for england, maude is fighting for herself. her driving motivation is me, me, me, mine, mine, mine for almost the entire book. the only thing that manages to change her motivation is the death of her brother (one of her father’s 20+ bastard children), a powerful and well respected nobleman and battle commander, and the only possible contender stephen has for the best character/best person award. at this point, realizing her hope of taking the throne is basically nil, maude retreats to normandy, which her husband--who, though he has a great sense of humor, is pretty much a dick for most of their marriage--has managed to conquer, and begins directing all her efforts towards making sure that her son will sit on the english throne.



stephen reminds me, in some ways, of jimmy carter; a good, well intentioned person who it would be great to work with or for, but who has trouble making the hard decisions that are necessary to run a country. his mercy if often seen as a weakness, and is also frequently used against him; at one time, a rebellious lord provided his five year old son as a hostage, and then promptly breaks the truce, gambling on stephen’s history of doing what is right rather than what is necessary. the gamble pays off; the child is spared, and more people lose their respect for stephen.



although stephen was able to hang onto the throne for his lifetime, he is unable to pass it on. his oldest son, eustace, chokes to death while eating an eel (the same meal that killed henry I). operating from a position of weakness--he’s getting old, and maude’s oldest son henry has just humbled the french king in battle after marrying his ex-wife eleanor and adding aquitaine to his normandy holdings--he recognizes henry as his heir.



it’s a fairly long book, and written from a fairly femenist perspective, but is an otherwise good read.

Areodjarekput, which is an insult that means "to exchange wives for a few days only." and no, i have no idea how to pronounce that either.

well, it turns out that people i know are actually not invincible, contrary to current belief. i just heard this morning that a fellow history major and recent grad (2004) of whitworth, forrest ewens, was killed in iraq. i didn’t know forrest very well, but from the few classes i had with him, he seemed like a great guy. i’ll be praying for his family and for the men who fought alongside him, and ask that anyone who is so inclined would do the same.



--update--

whoops, wrong country. in my defense, i was not quite awake when i was given the news. in the comments, another forrest pointed out that it was actually afghanistan, and provided a link to an article on the event.

well, it turns out that people i know are actually not invincible, contrary to current belief. i just heard this morning that a fellow history major and recent grad (2004) of whitworth, forrest ewens, was killed in iraq. i didn’t know forrest very well, but from the few classes i had with him, he seemed like a great guy. i’ll be praying for his family and for the men who fought alongside him, and ask that anyone who is so inclined would do the same.

i wonder, will blogger let me post without a title? let’s find out.



i’ve been sick/lazy lately... that’s my excuse for the lack of posts. there have been several blogworth things happening in the world, but they’ve all pretty much been covered by other blogs.



tomorrow marks the one-year point at my job at the bank. in terms of my everyday work, that means pretty much nothing. it should, however, mean a raise, and it also marks the point that the bank will start paying into my 401(k); not much (about $50/month at this point), but it’ll add up.



it’s also the beginning of cherry harvest (technically it started last week, but it was raining a lot, which pretty much sucked for anyone hoping to harvest), which means i’m actually doing work at work, which is a nice change.

the babes of the world cup

wal-mart, all on it’s own, is equivelant to the 20th largest economy in the world.



i really hate the new dairy commercials on the radio, which feature little kids or burger flippers telling parents and friends that "you’re totally passing up a dairy opportunity!" forget the fact that your average 8 year old or BK worker knows little to nothing about dairy requirements. "Three-a-day of dairy for healthy moms, healthy kids." (but not healthy dads? apparently nobody cares about dads. 3/day is most important, however, for a healthy dairy industry).



favorite songs of the moment: "cassie" by flyleaf, and "caribou and cake" by scarling.



there were some more, but i forgot them. so they must not have been that important.

wizbang has part of the translation of a document we picked up at zarqawi’s "safe" house, which indicate that he wanted to start a war between america and iran. i really love one of his points:



3. The possibility of acquiring new weapons from the Iranian side, either after the fall of Iran or during the battles. [emphasis mine]



even though he was hoping the war would stretch our forces out and make things easier for him in iraq, he already knew what the outcome of that war would be.

looks like the hadji girl video i posted about below pissed some people off, to the point where youtube decided to take it down. luckily, there’s a slightly smaller but better quality version that you can watch here.

hail is cool. unless you’re an orchardist. several orchards in the chelan/orondo area got hit by a hail storm last night... one guy estimates that he lost about half of his cherry and apple crops. times are not good.

the comments about cows in the last frame of this comic explain perfectly--to me, at least--why peta is wrong.

i’m thinking maybe i need to start playing chess again.



h/t say anything



also, assuming the reader isn’t screwed up again, this is my 666th post. which, you know, good thing it didn’t come on tuesday. because that would have been creepy.



also also, you can use bugmenot to avoid registration on the link above.

it’s been confirmed: zarqawi is dead. congratulations to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces, and congratulations to their Iraqi counterparts.



--update--

hope you enjoy "paradise" zarqawi. (warning: foul language abounds.)

to natalie portman, who turned 25 today.

it just so happens that my two favorite colors--green and black--are the colors of the atreides battle flag, which may or may not look anything like this. coincidence? yeah, probably. but still kinda cool.

it’s been confirmed: zarqawi is dead. congratulations to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces, and congratulations to their Iraqi counterparts.

or at least my computer is. or will be. 2 more gigs of corsair RAM arrived on my doorstep today, ready to make my computer even awesomer. except i think i’m going to wait on plugging it in until i get a beefier PSU, probably later this month or early next month.

because odds are, you’d get shot, or at least robbed, if you tried this.

for those of you not playing guild wars, this probably won’t mean much. oh well.



MHENLO IS GAY. or, at the very least, the guy who wrote his AI script is. they apparently forgot to tell him that running away from the group that’s supposed to be protecting you while they’re attacking one group of bad guys to attack a completely different group of bad guys all on your own is a really bad idea. so the idiot got himself killed, and now i have to start over on a quest that took me a bit over an hour. GAY GAY GAY.

apparently my state is even more liberal than california, at least in terms of abortion and gay rights issues. i blame seattle.



h/t say anything

i would have designed my statue of liberty a little differently--probably a baseball bat in one hand and a "bring it on" gesture with the other--but in terms of his message itself, i agree completely.

wiffle ball is a lot like legos... until you get old and arthritic, it will always be fun.

while i can understand the desire to get news about potential cloaking devices out must be fairly great, i really think it should be kept under tighter wraps. the less we give our enemies and potential enemies to work with, the better.

no real point to this post, but i really wanted to use that phrase, and it does sort of fit. as he does from time to time, jeff decided that he needed to get clean his shelves to make room for new dvds. i decided to take him up on the offer, and picked up a brand-new copy of serpico for $5, including shipping. normally i would just think "hey, cool, great deal" and let it go. but it still had the $6.99 price tag from best buy on it, which for some reason i found quite entertaining. i understand that if you really want to clear out the space, five dollars (actually, only $3.89, since shipping cost him $1.11) is better than no dollars, but it seems odd to me that he was willing to settle for about half of what that movie cost, especially since it was brand new.



i have, however, come up with one random explanation: people send him movies every now and then. so my guess is this is one he was given as a gift, which means he’s actually not losing anything.



oh, right, how the topic fits. jeff has mentioned several times that he’s a stay-at-home dad. which, while not something i would want to do--unless my wife were able to make a lot more money than i could--i think is a good thing. in my opinion, unless you really can’t make ends meet without both parents working, at least one of the parents should stay home with the kid(s) until said child(ren) is/are in school.



the end.

so, the 9th circus court of appeals, who believes that the phrase "under God" is unconstitutional, now thinks that california school children should become muslim for 2 weeks.

possibly. i think my system may be getting under-volted. here are the cuurent stats:

+12v running at 11.776

+5v running at 4.919

+3.3v running at 3.312

Vcore running at 1.392-1.408 (i think it should be about 1.5)



it doesn’t seem to be causing any major problems, although probably about once a month i get a notice that says my graphics card isn’t getting enough power, and is reducing its performance to compensate. which is not cool.



is there something i can tweak to fix this, or should i be looking for a new power supply?

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people." --Teddy Roosevelt, 1907



h/t rob

is what i’d like to do. the bank i work at has decided to start creating its own brochures, business cards, etc., rather than "outsourcing." we’ve been going through quite a few changes, and decided that it really didn’t make sense to buy in bulk if we’re going to be changing them fairly frequently. and since all the higher-ups are busy and i spend half of my time being bored, i got put in charge of the project. it shouldn’t be too big--we’ve only got three branches--but it’ll give me something to do, and possibly some good experience to boot.



so, what type of printer should i be looking for? i figure higher resolution is better, but how high do i actually need it? it doesn’t need to print overly fast, and won’t be going through a whole lot of pages each month. we’re looking at glossy and non-glossy (basically some "heavy" duty paper) versions, so if you know anything about printers, feel free to put forth several suggestions. i’ve basically been given free reign with this... i get to choose the printer, the software, and the paper, and get to design the brochures themselves, so it may or may not need to be a picture-quality printer.

although to be more accurate, i probably should have said sweaty balls. but that just conjures up all sorts of bad images.



anyways, it was about 100 degrees at work yesterday; at least 96, and it was 100 just a little ways down the river when i left work at 5:00. and our air-conditioner was out of commission. good times were not had.

not quite as cool as bottled oxygen, but i must say, the tv activated batmobile is a close second.

same great taste! i’ve never understood how that would be a selling point for food, but oh well. apparently it works. anyways, if you haven’t noticed, i finally figured out how to update the links on the sidebar. i think they’re all worth visiting, especially my booklist, which i’ve plugged a few times before.

a lot of people seem upset about the NSA caller database (or at least the media wants us to think that). here are my thoughts on that:



*i really like rob’s term "on the envelope information." from what i understand, the NSA is looking at where the call came from, where it went to, and probably the length of the call. when you mail a letter, the post office can see: where you’re mailing it from, where you’re sending it to, when it was sent, and (on one end, at least) when it was recieved. so can the mail man/letter carrier who delivers it.



*if you go into a bank to open an account, the bank will collect more information than that about you: physical address, social security number, driver’s license or state ID number, and at least in the case of my bank, your mother’s maiden name, among other things. so, if you stop and think about it, the NSA is less invasive than your bank.



*if you order something online, you generally need to give your physical and/or mailing address, phone number, credit or debit card number, etc. so the NSA is also less invasive than ebay.



*and, a good standard one. USA today claims the NSA is "amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans"; i say, if they actually are ordinary Americans, they have nothing to worry about.

US Border Control Gives Minutemen Locations to Mexican Governtment



h/t wizbang



more here, here, and some other places

Uzbekistan has banned fur-lined underwear. Sales had been climbing during the cold winter months, but the government says teh undies lead to ?unbridled fantasies."*

mainly, because i can’t understand half of what’s being said. although i do agree with jeff’s intentionalist views; which, as far as i can make out, means that any writing/argument/etc. has only the meaning that author intended for it to have, and not any other potential meanings that people might be able to wrangle out of it (see his post here on curious george). for example, when i say that i don’t like illegal immigrants, it doesn’t mean that i’m racist or xenophobic, it means that i don’t like illegal immigrants; nothing more, and nothing less.



and remember: you can’t spell "analyze" without "anal."

so, what’s the big deal with the fifth of may? many people seem to think it’s mexico’s independence day... those people are wrong (actually september 16). the fifth of may is a celebration of a mexican victory over the french; which, lets face it, isn’t really much of an accomplishment.



also, carhart makes really nice jeans, and treadmills are pretty dang heavy.

it’s only one poll of course, but it looks like there may be hope for this country after all.

my friend kate-lynne started herself a blog the other day. it’s entertaining, in a very random sort of way.

i think we need to change the title of the secretary of defense back to the secretary of war. because let’s face it, what he does isn’t always defensive. the mission in iraq could be argued to be in self defense, but when you get right down to it, it was a very offensive (and, depending on your point of view, offensive in the other way) operation. "war" is much more accurate than "defense."

neighbors

a note to mexico: take a look at your own immigration laws before you start bitching about ours.

inspired by this post over at say anything



Dear George:



Hey, how have things been? I haven’t seen you in a few years, and thought maybe we should catch up. I know I left kind of abruptly, but you weren’t really using me at all, so I figured you woudn’t miss me too much. Unlike my counterpart, who’s been hard at work standing up to the loony left and fighting the good fight against terrorism, I was just kind of hanging around. I should have been put to use sticking it to Vicente Fox, illegal immigrants and their supporters--because let’s face it, breaking the law is a bad thing--but apparently you decided buying a few votes was more important than doing what’s good for the country.

I’m sure you’ll need me again at some point, but I’ve decided to hold myself hostage, as it were; if you ever want to see me again, you need to do something constructive (like a wall) about America’s southern border. Support the Minutemen; not financially, but at least vocally. Maybe take some advice from Mr. Gingrich. Yeah, I know he has a funny name, but that doesn’t stop him from having good ideas.

Anyways, just wanted to let you know I’m still alive, and that I hope we can get together again sometime soon.



Sincerely,

Your Left Testicle



PS: I’ll have moved on after sending this letter, so don’t bother trying to track me back to the return address.

yet another reason for california to fall off into the ocean: california senate endorses monday’s (illegal) immigrant boycott



h/t wizbang

hopefully most of you will recognize that from the animaniacs, possibly one of the greatest cartoons ever. i’m going to do a spinoff, based on the game oblivion.



the following contains spoilers of the main storyline; you have been warned.

here’s the scenario. you have just been proclaimed emperor, the last of your bloodline after your father and brothers were assassinated; as such, you are the only one who can use the amulet of kings to permanently close the rift between oblivion (hell, basically) and tamriel (earth, for the sake of simplicity). you’re not wearing any armor--just ceremonial robes--and for a weapon you have at best a silver longsword... good against the undead, but not much else. the elder council has just accepted your claim to the throne, when news arrives that oblivion portals are opening up all over the city, and daedra (demons) are attacking.

good idea: getting to the temple of the one and relighting the dragonfires, which will at least keep any new oblivion gates from opening, if not close the ones that are already active.



bad idea: holing up in the palace and hoping to withstand the siege



actual course: going to temple of the one. 1 for 1 so far.



good idea: letting your elite bodyguard protect you while you haul ass to the temple.



bad idea: trying to attack any daedra you come across, even if you have no body guards around to help you



actual course: you’ve got a melee weapon and don’t use magic, so if you can attack them, they can attack you. since your life is really the only one that matters, exposing it to danger is definitely a bad idea. 1 for 2 now... but hey, that’s still a passing grade in core 250, or at least it was when i took it.

by this point, you’re a little beat up from all that fighting.

good idea: wait to heal up, and let your guard get reorganized.



bad idea: charge on ahead to the next section of the city



actual course: it’s not quite the same without a horse, but who cares? chaaaarge! 1 for 3 now... still a good batting average in baseball, but you’re failing school.

after charging around killing daedra and getting beat up for awhile, you notice something different about the cityscape... holy shit, it’s mehrunes dagon (the uber demon)! with the exception of the imperial palace, he’s bigger than any building in your city; although since the imperial palace is visible from about half the map away under decent weather conditions, that’s not really a fair comparison. shutting the oblivion gates won’t do any good now that he’s here, but you have an idea for how to use the amulet of kings as a weapon, if you can get to the temple. you tell the main character (myself, the player) to take you there immediately.

good idea: following said main character--who, while not untouchable is definiteily unkillable by this point, as long as he’s paying attention to his health--to the temple as fast as your legs will carry you.



bad idea: letting the main character run to the temple, all the while thinking that you’re following him; but instead of following him, you run off to fight more daedra. because it’s fun, or something.



actual course: you get yourself killed, dumbass, and the game is over for the main character. mehrunes dagon wins the day, and demons roam freely over the world. normally this would make you 1 for 4, but getting killed pretty much cancels out any smart ideas you had earlier. congratulations, you finished at 0 for (insert any number here). you have failed at life. at this point--since this has already happened three times--the main character gets pissed (again) and quits the game to write an angry blog post that maybe 3 or 4 people will read. which, i guess, puts it right on par with a UN proclamation, so maybe i’m not doing so bad after all.

all those pro-illegal alien protests over the last few weeks are actually making the minutemen project more popular. which is just fine and dandy with me. they should get together with the folks from send a brick.

please? i think both the state and the country would be better off if you did. and while you’re busy trying to make "price gouging" by the oil industry "illegal," read this.

no, it’s not fruit fucker prime. tongues: not just for tasting with.

so, the obvious thing to do would be to hitch a ride on the back of a butterfly to the boulevard of broken dreams, where he and greenday can play their crappy attempts at music and not be so alone.

we should have invaded russia when we had the chance.

today is the anniversary of an event almost as important (at least in terms of land acquired) as the louisiana purchase in American history. on this day 170 years ago, the battle of san jacinto was fought, and the texan army, led by sam houston, did what texans do best: kick ass and take names. or, in this case, prisoners. in houston’s force of about 900 men, 9 were killed and 30 injured. the mexican side, led by santa anna, didn’t fare so well: 630 dead, 208 injured, and 730* captured--including santa anna himself, although not till a day later.



texas went on to join the Union, bringing with it land that included the present-day states of arizona, new mexico, nevada, california, utah, and parts of colorado, wyoming, kansas and oklahoma. not too shabby for a days work, if i do say so myself.



*i don’t think that number can be right. even if we assume (safely, i would think) that all of the wounded were captured, santa anna was only supposed to have a force of about 1200. so unless we captured some dead people too, it looks like this total would put the total numbers at about 150 more than the total size of the mexican army involved.

so, i read a fun theory on homosexuality awhile back. unfortunately, it was put forward in a sci-fi book, and then shot down later on in that same book, but i still found it pretty intersting. it went like this: homosexuality is nature’s way of keeping deficient/inferior (don’t remember the exact terms) genes out of the breeding pool. personally though, i still think it’s a personal choice.

almost forgot it. on this day, 231 years ago, the shot heard round the world was fired.

He is rizzle fo’ shizzle.

so, apparently may 1 has been proposed as a day that no illegal immigrants will work, shop, or participate in our economy in any way. i think that jay tea over at wizbang has a fairly good take on that. but i want to take it a step further. what would happen if, instead of just a day, we made the absence of illegals permanent, sending them home to either get in line and try things legally or to stay there for good? here’s my opinion: wages would rise, and overall unemployment would go down. things would definitely be uncomfortable for awhile, especially for the agriculture industry, but i think we’d get over it. i’ll use orchards for an example, since there are quite a few of them in my area. orchardists would have to offer higher wages to attract legal workers, which would probably force the smaller family operations out of business. their land would either be sold off for residential lots, fueling the housing market and creating construction jobs, or bought up by larger orchards or conglomerates who have the capital to offer higher wages, and who will still need workers for their newly acquired lands. many of the smaller orchardists are also dependent on government handouts in the form of subsidies to continue their jobs (subsidies which would no longer be necessary without the smaller orchardists in the picture, allowing the government to spend the money elsewhere, or, ideally [but unlikely], to give it back to the tax payers--because why should i be paying for someone to continue a job that another person or group could do for less or for free?).



it could also have the added benefits of reducing expenditures on public services, reducing crime, reducing insurance costs (at least for auto insurance; since most if not all illegal aliens do not have insurance, the costs of any accident they’re involved in is passed on to those who are paying for insurance), and probably some other benefits i haven’t thought of.



as i’ve mentioned at least once before, i’m no economist, and all of that was pure conjecture. but to me at least, it makes sense. so i’m with jay tea... to the illegals who want to "strike", i say bring it on. and once you’ve done that, keep it on.

while i understand that they are occasionally necessary, i have to say that for the most part, i’m against them. take the upcoming eastmont school district levy, for example. it would be assessed on home values; they give the example of a $150,000 house, and say that for someone in that situation the cost of the levy would slightly less than $5/month over the 3 year of the levy. they complain that if it does not pass, non-varsity sports and after school activities will be cut, and they’ll lose something like 30 teachers, 45 para-educators, and 8 secretaries, and trot out the usual "it’s all for the children" guilt-trip. now, the cost itself is fairly insignificant... it’s about 1/3 of the cost of playing WoW for a month, quite a bit less than the average cell phone bill, and i think the radio commercial says it’s something like 2 lattes a month. it’s not the cost that bugs me, it’s the thinking behind the cost.



to me, the fact that eastmont would have to fire about 80 people if the levy doesn’t pass means that they hired about 80 more people than they could afford, and now they expect the taxpayers to pick up the bill. why should they be rewarded with more money when they can’t even manage what they already have? at least, however, they have the decency to put it to a vote. i’m no economist, but if the federal government did the same, giving a vote on the budget to the citizens of the country--not the right to propose budget amendments, but simply to vote yes or no on the budget--i think that out national budget would be much more balanced. on which note, here’s a budget simulator... play around with it and see what you can come up with.

so, it turns out that the citizens of china are more supportive of free market capitalism than any other country in the world, with 74% approval. france is the least supportive, at 36%.



h/t say anything

the president of iran is either a complete moron, or he has balls of steel.

death to the hippies



h/t say anything

some of you will probably recognize that as at least a rough quote (though i think i got it right) from Kingdom of Heaven. but that’s neither here nor there. it’s catchy, and it sort of fits with something i’ve been thinking about.



why do so many muslims blow themselves up for their religion? why were they so violent in response to the mohammed cartoons? according to them, Allah is supposed to be all-powerful--one imam even proclaimed that Allah would, at some point in the future, wipe out the US with a major flood. apparently he forgot about the part where any flood big enough to get past the cascades and rockies in the west and the appalachians in the east would probably wipe out a good chunk of the rest of the world.



back to the thought; if Allah actually is all-powerful, then why blow yourself and innocent civilians up? is Allah so weak that he needs to be defended by a mere human, and one deranged enough to commit suicide at that?



i think i may expand on this later, but it’ll probably be next week at the soonest. i need to get done procrastinating so i can finish up my lecture. on which note, it’s time for bed.

found here. thanks kate-lynne.

america is often accused of cultural imperialism, with phrases like "McWorld" thrown out there. yes, mcdonald’s was formed in america. but from my experience and from what i’ve heard, mcdonald’s changes its menu depending on what country its in, and hires from the local labor force. so other than originating in america, i wouldn’t consider it’s overseas franchises to be overtly "american."



that was kind of random... bear with me.



the real cultural imperialism, in my opinion, is not flowing outward from america, but into it, in the form of mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal.



cultural imperialism is texas students declaring that the mexican flag should fly "at least above the texas flag" on a flagpole outside of a houston school. at least? as in, maybe it should be above the american flag too? i think not. and these arrogant bastards (strong language, but i think appropriate) in california taking down the american flag and rehanging it upside down under the mexican flag.



cultural imperialism is dallas county requiring it’s teachers to learn spanish or lose their jobs. not offering incentives like a salary bonus for learning a FOREIGN language, or doing more to teach the mexican immigrants english, but forcing employees to learn another language or get fired.



cultural imperialism is me--well over 1,000 miles from mexico--having to speak spanish so that i can communicate with part of the customer base at my bank. because it’s obviously too much trouble for them to take the time to learn the language of the country they’re living in. i don’t expect them to be fluent (because i wouldn’t expect myself to be fluent in their situation), but i expect them to be able to communicate in the local language. the younger generation of mexican immigrants (often second-generation) is picking up english in school and is well on it’s way to becoming bilingual, which i think is a good thing. but the older generation seems to be much more interested in american money than american culture.



cultural imperialism is the mexican state of yucatan publishing a guide on how to sneak across the border into the US. (unfortunately, it looks like the link to the actual guide is down, so you’ll just have to work with this article)



cultural imperialism--or more appropriately in this case, sheer mexican arrogance--is illegal aliens protesting for relaxed immigration control. if you want the rights and privelages that come along with being an american citizen, you need to be an american citizen.



and none of this is helped by the fact that our politicians seem to have no balls (or whatever the female equivelant of that expression would be) when it comes to immigration and border security. mexican immigrants are far from being a majority in america, but they are still a fairly decent sized chunk of the voting population. our elected representatives seem to be more interested in getting re-elected than in border security and immigration reform. they are, in effect, selling their votes on matters regarding illegal immigrants so that they can buy the votes of the immigrants who came here legally.



i think i’m going to leave off here, because i’m getting more and more pissed as i write and this is turning into a rant. i think this gets my point across, and gives you a starting point if you’re interested in reading more.

as you’ve probably figured from reading this blog before, i am strongly against illegal immigration. but i’ve just had a really fun thought about it. starting march 31st, or some other random date, keep track of all expenses related to illegal immigrants. then, at the end of a year, we send their countries of origin a bill for the expenses. i wouldn’t expect any of them to actually pay it, but publicizing the results would definitely be interesting.



on a somewhat related note, here is a very interesting look at our relationship w/ mexico, h/t say anything.

after years of waiting, oblivion finally came out last tuesday. and i’ve been playing it ever since. right now i’m playing a dark elf nightblade (mage-warrior combo), and just recently got turned into a vampire. which is kind of cool, because it gives me extra stats, and kind of sucky, because i’m constantly taking damage if i try to do anything between 8am and 8pm. which, conveniently, is when most of the shops are open. oh well. the game, overall, definitely rocks. i’ve heard of quite a few people having problems with it (which is not overly suprising... morrowind, it’s predecessor, was quite possibly one of the buggiest games ever), but i’ve only had one: whenever i quit, it tells me that there’s been an error and the program needs to end. which is really more annoying than anything.



luckily, rachel is home on spring break this week, and her boyfriend from honduras was finally able to come up for a visit, so i should be able to spend some time with them and away from my computer.

i seem to be going through these fairly quickly. anyways, the hero of the moment is chris muir, author of day by day, which i finally started reading. he gets about 8 million bonus points for this comic.

so, we got a new fridge a few weeks back, and unlike our old one, this one is not magnetic. apparently this has something to do with the fact that the exterior is stainless steel, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. last i checked, steel is made with iron, and iron is definitely magnetic. so why isn’t our fridge?

so, as i mentioned earlier, next friday i’ll be giving a presentation to the holy war in europe class at whitworth. i’ve known when it was going to be for a good two weeks now, and yet i haven’t put that much work into it yet. it’s like i’ve got senioritis all over again. that, and i don’t have nearly as many resources here at home as i did at school, which makes things a bit tricky. i think it will still turn out pretty well, but won’t be as authoritative as it should.

i was watching saturday night live the other night with a friend. i think it was an old one, but i could be wrong. alec baldwin (FAG, for those of you who’ve seen team america) was the guest host and shakira was the musical guest. kate-lynne argued that shakira had a weird voice, and i have to agree with her, it does sound a bit strange. maybe because english isn’t her native language (and yet she took the time to learn it... good for her), but who knows. and despite this, she’s managed to become quite famous and popular. which brings us back to the subject: shakira may have a weird voice, but she does a very good job of presenting herself.



i think the idea is usually applied to cooking, so i’ll borrow a line from emeril: "bam!"

now, i know very little about shiloh inns, and what i do comes from their radio commercial i hear on the radio every now and then. but one thing caught my attention:

"And Shiloh doesn’t outsource; we keep American jobs in America."

now, ignoring the fact that outsourcing isn’t always a bad thing, i just have one question to ask: how in the world would you outsource a hotel job? fly in your bellboys from india and your maids from mexico every night? move all the shiloh inns overseas? i just don’t get it.

holy frick. after several years of having it recommended by nate, and apparently several more from my mother (a librarian) that i don’t remember, i finally got around to reading "ender’s game." orson scott card, you are my new hero.

me: *urinating*

toilet: dude, what is this? 12 times so far today?

me: *still urinating*

toilet: i’m just saying man, that’s a lot of times

me: *finishes urinating, zips up, washes hands*

toilet: so, see you in 5 minutes or so?

i’m a little over half way done with "ben-hur" now, and still thoroughly enjoying it. i highly recommend reading it if you get the chance.

i got to meet dino rossi, the man who should be governor, this weekend in wenatchee. he seems like a pretty cool guy, and definitely has his ducks in a row when it comes to politics. though he’s said he won’t make an official decision on whether or not to run again, i’m thinking--and hoping--that he will.

and we want to give these people a state of their own? a people whose children desire nothing more than to blow themselves up and kill as many jews as possible? i vote no.



h/t protein wisdom

how can you rehearse something without first having hearsed it?

why haven’t these people been arrested?

"That’s like petting a kitten with a 2 x 4." --Nate Backman



the denver post thinks we have so many illegal aliens in the country because border security is too tight, and that’s keeping them from going back to mexico after they sneak onto our side.



rob port responds: "Right. So obviously all of our illegal immigration problems would disappear if we’d just laxen our border security a bit. Of course, isn’t that a little like saying that a woman wouldn’t have been raped if she’d just said ’yes?’"



i will never use the phrase "cautious optimism" again.



man i love penny arcade.

not for awhile, actually. i will, however, be giving a "guest lecture" of sorts to corliss’ holy war in europe class on march 31. if you’re one of the whitworth folk that read this, i recommend you attend. if only so that a higher percentage of the people laughing at me are ones that i know.

today at the bank, a customer pulled up to the drivethrough. we had a very enlightening conversation.



me: "How are you today?"

him: "Cash please."

i cash his check, and count out the money to him.

me: "Have a nice day."

and then he just drives off, not even bothering with a "thank you" or "you too."



and i thought to myself, hmm, i wasn’t aware that that was a state of being... i’m used to the more usual tired, good, pretty good, etc. after cashing his check, i had another thought. several of our non-hispanic customers have commented on my spanish, saying how it’s a good thing that i know it. but i think, if some of our hispanic customers (though not all... several speak fluent or near-fluent english, and quite a few others have enough to get by) aren’t going to trouble themselves to learn more of the local language to say more than "can you cash my check," why should i go out of my way to learn a foreign language to make them more comfortable? especially given the fact that many of them have been living in america for quite a few years now, whereas at this point, i have no desire to even travel to a spanish-speaking country, let alone to live in one. for some time now, my thought has been that if you’re planning on being in the country for longer than a decent vacation (2-3 weeks), you need to learn the language. you don’t have to be fluent, you just have to be able to communicate, and not count on somebody there being able to speak your language. this applies to both people coming to america and people going out of it; i hope to travel to rhodes at some point, and plan on learning some greek before i do.



which, somehow, brings me to hyphenated-americanism, which i still hate. a case in point, brought up by this article from tongue tied (excerpts follow):

Two cops in Topeka, Kan. have been disciplined for writing a letter to the editor of the local paper and emails to one of its columnists that the local NAACP considers racially insensitive.



Both are accused of using racially inflammatory language in their complaints about a columnist, Glenda Overstreet, who wrote that a black defendant with five prior felony convictions was the victim of racism because the judge didn’t let him walk when he "spoke eloquently."



In a letter to the local Metro News, Eaton [one of the cops] called Overstreet [head of the local NAACP] a racist and said "being a colored person does not give you a ’get out of trouble free card’ to be used when you want it." He mocked her use of the term "African-American," and said "If it’s so great in the ’home land’, then why are you here?"

in my opinion, that last comment was a bit overboard. but at the same time, it raises a good point. the average "african-american" was not born in africa; odds are they have never been there, nor have their parents or even grandparents. odds are, i know more about africa than your average "african-american." so why do we tack "african" in front of "american"? or any other group, for that matter: chinese-american, arab-american, etc. for a first generation immigrant, that makes sense. after that, you’re either american or you’re not; and if you’re not, you have my cordial invitation to get the hell out.

right in the headlines, as usual. example:

8,000 US TROOPS DESERT DURING IRAQ WAR



sounds pretty bad, right? the war is, obviously, driving our soldiers out of the service. unless you bother to finish the first sentence of the article:



"...although the overall desertion rate has plunged since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001."



and here:



Desertion numbers have dropped since 9/11. The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marine Corps showed 1,603 Marines in desertion status in 2001. That had declined by 148 in 2005.

...

Desertions in 2005 represent 0.24% of the 1.4 million U.S. forces.



and, further down in the article, the navy at least says that nearly 60% of their deserters come back and finish up their terms.



but you know, we wouldn’t want to put any of the good news in bold print, would we?



h/t say anything.

never be predictable. your enemy/opponent is not stupid; or, if they are, they probably have intelligent people working for them. if they can predict what you’re going to do, they can come up with a way to stop it. this applies to politics, sports, battle, and probably a few other areas as well. keep them off balance, and you can keep them on the defensive, at which point the battle is already halfway over.

i think it’s been to long since i’ve posted one of these, so here we go.



were you living in ancient rome, one of the possible jobs you could have was underarm hair plucker. i kid you not. which, let’s face it, is a lot worse than working at wal-mart.

i’ve begun noticing that every day, at around 10:14 (it gets 2 seconds later every day) my computer gets disconnected from the internet. a few seconds later, i’m able to reconnect with no problems. any ideas what might be causing this, and what i could do to fix it?

i actually took this test awhile back--as did pat (who still needs to update... hobag)--but apparently never posted about it. then a few days ago, i got an email from the author of the test asking if i would mention the test on my blog. now, odds are he’d reach a bigger audience by throwing his test at random people on the street, but i figure what the heck. i found it a bit long, but incredibly entertaining; below are the "sample questions" he provided in the email. if you’ve got some free time, i recommend giving it a look-see.



Key to abbreviations in test questions that follow:

CONS: Conservative (Archconservative)

LIBL: Liberal (Leftwing Wacko)

LBRT: Libertarian (Antigovernment Libertine)

COMM: Communist (Commie Sympathizer)

1: Government’s practice of stealing from the rich to give to the poor is...

CONS: a crime.

LIBL: a brave, generous and heroic deed.

LBRT: a foolish, misguided attempt at social engineering.

COMM: an inspiration to us all.

7: The Center for Public-Health Dietary Self Control releases a study that says eating just one jelly donut is as harmful to human health as smoking 10,000,000 cartons of cigarettes. Do you...

CONS: keep eating jelly donuts.

LIBL: demand that jelly donuts be removed from vending machines, and public school cafeterias.

LBRT: hoard jelly donuts before they are regulated off grocer’s shelves.

COMM: hoard jelly donuts so you can sell them on the black market.

10: What techniques are best for maintaining discipline in the classroom?

CONS: If just one student misbehaves, severely punish the entire class.

LIBL: Force boys who refuse to settle down to take psychotropic drugs, such as Ritalin and Prozac.

LBRT: Anyone who doesn’t want to be in class can leave.

COMM: Anyone who doesn’t want to be in class can be made an example of.

20: What’s the best way to stop people from illegally crossing our borders?

CONS: Seal the borders so no one can get in.

LIBL: Do nothing to beef up security at the borders, and offer illegal aliens a wide array of free services.

LBRT: Allow unrestricted passage across the borders.

COMM: Seal the borders so no one can get out.

21: How would you define the word "profit"?

CONS: What business owners earn by selling a quality product at a competitive price.

LIBL: What business owners RIP-OFF from their customers.

LBRT: What business owners are rewarded with for risking the loss of their own money.

COMM: What business owners RIP-OFF from their employees.

so, there you have it. and for the record, jelly donuts rock.

"I’m sure that an American company would bid on the ports if this [port management] was restricted to American companies...." --DNC Chairman Howard Dean, responding to Alan Colmes’ comment that no American companies had bid on the ports deal.



which to me seems obvious to the point of stupidity. that’s like saying "i bet men would buy more chocolate than women if it was restricted to men." or, in a situation i’m sure dean would like, "i bet democrats would win more elections if voting was restricted to democrats."

now here’s some irony for you. the democrats are getting all lathered up about the ports deal with the UAE. apparently it will be bad for national security. at the same time, they have failed to mention the fact that for the last 20 years, the UAE has been flying planes into JFK airport in NEW YORK CITY... you remember, that same city where 4 and a half years ago, some terrorists flew planes into our buildings. and in all of those 20 years, they have never managed to do cause any security problems for us, and have actually won several awards along the way. now, maybe the dems just didn’t know about this. but if they did, i’m sure they’d bury it in some deep dark place and hope nobody else noticed.



h/t say anything

state tax revenues rise. and oddly enough, they rose the most in states that raised taxes the least. could that mean tax cuts work? nah.



h/t say anything

cleash: ikko nok grish!

me: you are a giant bug, did you know that?

cleash: nokko ono! smile ko.

me: time to melt you into bug sludge!

cleash: POKO



at which point he attacks me, and gets melted into bug sludge

the william j. clinton foundation is looking for 25 interns who are looking for some hands-on experience.



h/t michelle malkin via wizbang

the william j. clinton foundation is looking for 25 interns who are looking for some hands-on experience.



h/t michelle malkin via wizbang

spongeback mountain

after reading this post over at wizbang, i left a comment that is basically what i’m about to ask here: why the hell do bush and congress have to come to some sort of agreement over whether or not one foreign company can buy another foreign company? i realize that the decision will affect our ports--although as more and more comes out about it, it seems like less and less of a big deal--but shouldn’t that be between foreign company A and foreign company B? maybe i’m just misreading it... maybe we aren’t deciding for them whether or not they can purchase the company, but saying something along the lines of, "if you buy it, we’re not going to use them at our ports any more." who knows. again, let me know what you think.

why rob a grocery store when you can just go straight for the source? via msnbc: thieves make off with $26,000 of beer.

playing alien logic, eating a croissant, and drinking fat tire. does it get any better than that? i submit that it does not.

i broke out laughing when i read the following passage from "the mysterious island" by jules verne. i found it quite hilarious, but also rather confusing. the book is set at the time of the American Civil War.



Characters involved:

*Neb, a former slave who loved his master so much that he stayed on as a servant

*Gideon Spilett, a reporter for the New York Herald

*Pencroft, a sailor

*Herbert, a young man

Characters not making an appearance:

*Cyrus Harding, a military engineer for the Union Army

*Top, a dog



this group has been stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere in the south pacific, and has just found and begun to open a chest they found washed up on shore.



"Oh!" cried Neb, "suppose it’s jam!"

"I hope not," replied the reporter.

"If only there was--" said the sailor in a low voice.

"What?" asked Neb, who overheard him.

"Nothing!"

The covering of the zinc was torn off and thrown back over the sides of the chest, and by degrees numerous articles of very varied character were produced and strewn about on the sand. At each new object Pencroft uttered fresh hurrahs, Herbert clapped his hands, and Neb danced--like a nigger. There were books which made Herbert wild with joy, and cooking utensils which Neb covered with kisses!



i thought to myself after reading that, what the heck does that even mean? that it’s just like a n****r to dance at a time like that? he’s dancing in a fashion common among n****rs? i’m really not sure what the point of that little addendum is. discuss amongst yourselves. or, as is more likely, amongst myself, since i’ll probably be the only one to leave a comment.

some good news from the muslim world.

although the ap still manages to make the story look negative, i think. oh well. by next year, wal-mart plans to make $11 dollar monthly insurance premiums available to half it’s US workers, or roughly 650,000 people. their enemies--in this case, the folks at wake up wal-mart--say that it’s basically just a PR stunt. but that’s less than my monthly premiums, and i work for a bank. wal-mart is also reducing the amount of time before the part-time employees can access their benefits, though they’re not sure how long yet. which is also fairly impressive. i’m pretty sure that the bank i work at has benefits for the part time workers (all two of them), but i know that i didn’t when i was originally hired for a seasonal position.



on a sort of side note, at least one other blog that posted that internal wal-mart memo i put up a few days back actually heard from the new york times about it. apparently my 5-10 hits a day--several of which come from myself--weren’t enough to warrant the NYT’s attention. but i still find the situation fairly humorous.

i’ve been wondering for awhile what’s up with all the i’s in apple products; itunes, ipod, etc. there is no i in apple. turns out i’m not the only one who’s noticed.

bear with me here.

1) a few years back now, gates and his team at microsoft developed windows xp.

2) constantine, before fighting a battle that would make him the sole ruler of the roman empire, supposedly had a dream in which Christ told him "by this sign you will conquer." here are a few versions of that sign:













called the "chi rho," it symbolizes the beginning of the name of Christ. which, i suppose, could also mean that bill gates has a God-complex. discuss amongst yourselves.

i realize i was a bit light on posting over the weekend. but in my defense, i was playing alien logic (user review), a really great game from the mid-90s that was based on a tabletop RPG. i would love to see a new version of it, but i doubt that will happen. oh well. took me about 20 minutes of fiddling with a dos emulator to get it to work, and i just figured out how to get it running smoothly last night. which meant i was then up till about 2 playing it. good times. on which note, i’m off to bed... 6:30 in the morning is not my friend. although though in its defense, neither is anything else that ends with "in the morning."

sort of. it was 0 (zero) degrees when i left the house this morning at 7, and 9 degrees when i got back around 5:30. which is an increase, but it’s definitely on its way back down, so i don’t think there will be any net gain for the day.



all temperatures in fahrenheit.

stocks hit 5-year high

"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." --Robert Frost

this time, it’s "star wars: the empire brokeback"



if you do a little hunting, you can also find "brokeback to the future," which is also hilarious.

we’ve finally reached the end. as i mentioned at the beginning, the last day is a sort of general category, without a specific target. here’s a list of people/things that should feel insulted by this post:



*al gore, for being a nut case

*christmas music. it’s nice the first time, but after about 2 straight months, it starts to get old.

--people not named bing crosby or nat king cole who try to sing classic christmas music

*liberals, for being complete morons

*too many republicans, for acting like liberals

*the joos; i actually kinda like them, but if they’re insulting themselves, why can’t i?

*black people who say "the N-word" and then get pissed when white people do the same

*illegal immigrants. once i’m president, you’re all headed home.

*businesses that rely heavily on illegal immigrants for labor. if you’re that dependent on something that’s against the law, it’s probably time to find a new line of business.

*people who bash wal-mart. if it were really that bad, they wouldn’t have nearly 25,000 people applying for 325 positions at a new chicago-area store

*people who use their right to free speech to bash the military and government. and conveniently ignore the fact that the groups they seem to be so buddy-buddy with (ex: cindy sheehan and caesar chavez) would not allow them to do the same thing.

*pat robertson, also for being a moron. you’re giving us normal Christians a bad name buddy.

*ann coulter. she’s smart, hot, and very conservative, but i do think her "raghead" comments were going just a bit overboard. you’re sinking to the level of our opponents ann... don’t do that.

*PETA, again, this time for having things backwards. vegetables aren’t food, they’re what food eats.

*any group that has either refused to publish or condemned the "mohammed cartoons," bowing to pressure from islam. a fight is brewing, and sooner or later they’ll lash out against you anyways (example: britain, who had nothing to do with the cartoons, being threatened by muslims); i say, if they want a fight, bring it on. it may take us most of the day to mop things up, but we’ll have their asses kicked in time to enjoy barker’s beauties prancing around on the price is right. while eating ham for a late breakfast.

*michael newdow, for being a moron. we’re not forcing you to believe in God, so why do you feel the need to force our beliefs out of the public view? if we can ignore your lack of faith, why can’t you just ignore the fact that we have faith?

*jimmy carter. he may be a good man (take his work with habitat for humanity, for example), but he needs some work on his "foreign policy." he failed to find a resolution to the iranian hostage crisis, and i still think he needs to be tried under the logan act for his dealings with north korea, which basically ended with us giving them a bunch of free oil.

*people who try to sue fast food chains for making them fat. news flash, dipshits: eating fast food all the time can make you fat. if you don’t want to be fat, don’t eat fast food all the time.

*people who try to sue gun companies for gun related deaths. again, with the news flash: guns don’t kill people, people do; more specifically, dangerous minorities (according to the family guy, at least... an entertaining show, but probably not the best source of information) kill people. guns are simply a tool. if we didn’t have those, we’d be using knives, or longbows, or rocks, or our bare hands. if you really want to kill someone, the lack of a gun isn’t going to stop you. and in the mean time, restrictive gun control laws--which don’t keep guns out of the hands of criminals, who tend to acquire them illegally anyways--are taking away a valuable tool for self defense from the rest of us.

*people who sued the tobacco companies, who are apparently responsible for killing lots of people. people who conveniently ignored the surgeon general’s warning on the side of the package that says "this shit is bad for you." you chose to smoke, so it’s your own damn fault you’ve got lung cancer.

--the lawyers who represented the people suing the tobacco companies, and probably saw most of the money from the class action lawsuits. thanks for being more concerned with lining your own pockets than with the rights of phillip-morris, et al., who quite likely had to lay quite a few people off to cover the multi-billion dollar suits. don’t quote me on that one... they may have just had a few billion dollars laying around, or covered it by raising the price per pack or something.

*zell miller; what the hell were you thinking when you retired? you and joe lieberman are about the only good examples the democrats have to follow. you can, however, redeem yourself by running for president at some point in the future. maybe in 2008, because i have to say i’m not overly excited by any of the republican prospects at this point.

*bill clinton’s parents, for bringing him into the world

*people who talk about "palestine" and "palestinians." there is no palestine, and the "palestinians" are just a bunch of displaced jordanians. if the rest of the arab world really cared about them, they’d take them in. as is, they’re just a convenient excuse for the arabs to hate israel.

*the city of san francisco, for voting to violate the second amendment, among other things.

*the french, for building new orleans where it is, and the federal government and the state of louisiana for deciding to rebuild it. why? you’re just going to have to fix it up again after the next big hurricane. and in the meantime, you’re using my tax dollars to rebuild for somebody who chose to live in a potentially dangerous area. if you don’t want to have to rebuild after a hurricane, LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE! this also applies to everybody else living in hurricane-prone areas, especially florida. the rest of us should not have to pay for your dumb choices.

*the french again, for losing their balls after they lost napoleon.

*the french yet again, for being cheese-eating surrender monkeys

*people who are in favor of abortion. the ONLY time it should be acceptable is if it comes down to a choice between the life of the mother or the life of the baby. "but what about things like rape or incest?" some of you will say. well sure, lets just kill a baby. that will make everything better. why didn’t we think of that before? we never had to invade iraq... we could have just killed a few dozen babies and saddam would have given up his WMD and stopped torturing and killing his own people. shit happens. that doesn’t make rape and incest ok... far from it. i think that anybody who commits rape or incest should be castrated (or its equivelant, for those rare cases of women raping men) and then thrown into one those famous pound-me-in-the-ass prisons to see how they like it.

*femi-nazis, also morons. though in their defense, they tend to have more balls than the french.

*the MSM, for claiming to be objective while advancing left-leaning ideals and propaganda. unless you think you can actually be completely objective--which i don’t think anyone is capable of--you need to state your bias up front, so people know where you’re coming from. for example, if you haven’t already guessed, i am very conservative, so pretty much everything i write will have a conservative bias to it. now that you know that, you’ll be better able to analyze (not that much of what i write needs much analysis) what’s being said. go read a lefty version of the same events i write about, find a happy medium between them, and you’ll probably be fairly close to what actually happened.

*and last, but not least, all those "undecided" voters out there. face it, you’re sitting on the fence, hoping to jump on the winning side at the last minute. that’s not nuanced, that’s opportunistic. or lazy. either pick something to stand for and stick with it, or stay home and don’t vote.

this is officially awesome. go jews!

so, does anybody else find it a bit odd that we’re currently listed as third in the olympic medal standings, even though we have 25% of the total gold medals awarded so far?

well, this comic came in really handy, since i had no idea who to insult tonight. this is more "poking fun at" than actual insulting, but it puts them down and makes me laugh. which, in this case, is a good thing.



target: CNN (and, by extension, the left-leaning MSM in general)











ok, thatisall. two days left.

yeah, this is going to be another lame one. this is harder than it looks... i probably should have put some actual planning into this idea before i started it. oh well.



target: treehuggers/greenies



first off, one of my favorite expressions:

"Earth first: we’ll log the other planets later!"

even better, someone seems to have turned it into a (fairly lame) song, complete with tabs.



yes, that’s from an actual shirt. good times.



then, we have this variation on the saying:

"Earth first! We’ll pave the other planets later."

This site actually has a whole section devoted to it, only it’s labeled "sarcasm." if you visit it, you’ll see why. these people are some pretty liberal nuts.

then there’s the easiest target, ralph nader. who, some liberals would argue, cost gore the election in 2000. except that would be like comparing him to ross perot, who quite possibly cost george h.w. bush the 1992 election, claiming nearly 19% of the popular vote. nader, on the other hand, topped out at under 3%, and over the course of his three runs is averaging about 1.25%. not really that great. [for that last paragraph, all of those statistics i pulled out can be found here. unfortunately, the site does not allow direct links to specific election years. otherwise, it’s great.]



poor ralph. unfortunately, the button seems to be right.

in one more fun ralph moment (which rachel should remember, along with a few other friends), back in 2000 we saw a vote for ralph nader poster--that was nailed to a tree. which i hope was intentional on the part of the person who put it up, because if not, they’re a moron.



ok, done for tonight. that was not quite as lame as i had anticipated, but still not great. oh well. only 3 days left. if i remember to do one of these next year, i’ll be sure to plan it out ahead of time.

i’m feeling lazy, so this won’t be as big as the other days. in fact, it won’t be much of anything.



target: congress



especially the republican part of congress, which seems to have lost its balls. you’ve got the majority in congress... start acting like it. because right now, it looks to me like you’re more concerned about getting reelected than you are about doing what’s right and good for the country. you’re following opinion polls like you were democrats. and you can only say "the democrats are nutcases, so compared to them we’re still doing good" for so long. after awhile, being relatively good isn’t any good any more, and ultimately you start to suck.



congress: how hard could it be to pass a balanced budget? go back to the constitution. if there are any programs not mentioned there, get rid of them. we don’t want to be a welfare state. this country was founded by a spirit of "rugged individualism," by people who were not afraid to take care of themselves. life would have been much easier had the founding fathers said "screw it, we’ll stay with britain." but easier is not better. if things are easy, you’ve got no motivation to excell; if being good enough (or even being a drain on society) gets you as much or more attention and assistance (welfare, etc.) as going above and beyond, going the extra mile, then why go to any extra effort?



ok, i think that’s about it for now. i’d love to rant some more, but without the research that i really don’t feel like doing right now, this post will remain just that--ranting.

target: PETA and other animal activist loonies











source for above images













source for above images



i’ve said it thrice, and i’ll say it again: if animals weren’t meant to be food, they wouldn’t taste so damn good.



and my all time favorite, sent to me by pat (who still needs to update one of these days):

so i just got ahold of a copy of a sweet old game by the name alien logic. unfortunately, it was produced way before windows xp, and doesn’t seem to like compatibility mode for windows 95. i’ve been trying to use a dos emulater (dos box right now), but still can’t make it work. anybody know something that could help?

target: easily offended muslims

























source for above cartoons



and a humorous response:



if you don’t hear from me tomorrow, it’s probably safe to assume that either my house was burned down or i was beheaded.

twas the night before tookie’s execution



h/t tongue tied

name: lacey chabert

occupation: actress













i thought i had some more pictures, but i guess not. stay tuned next time for an attractive female who is not laura alito.



--update--

whoops, forgot to give credit for these. i believe i found all of them using google image search... if not, then i’m sorry to whoever i got them from.

so it looks like i should be getting a pretty decent tax return this year, and i’m looking at buying a new monitor with it. flat panel, at least 19". any recommendations? and what sort of specs should i be looking for (contrast ratio, etc.)?

so, what did everybody think of the new black and yellow uniforms the refs were wearing at the superbowl? i personally prefer the black and white ones, but that implies, you know, objective refs. did the seahawks play a great game? no, they didn’t. but if the fans are the twelfth man for seattle, the refs were the twelfth man for pittsburgh.



a fitting cheer:

"Nuts and bolts,

Nuts and bolts,

We got screwed!"



--update--

i do have some good news though. i just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switcing to geico!

islam: a religion of peace (i.e., pieces)

name: lacey chabert

occupation: actress













i thought i had some more pictures, but i guess not. stay tuned next time for an attractive female who is not laura alito.

literally. this is an actual last name i spotted at work yesterday: Xochiquiquixque

WRONG! idiot.



h/t say anything

the internet is for porn.



no, there’s no actual porn involved, or even any nakedness.



there’s also a WoW version out there, but i’m more familiar w/ Guild Wars, so i like this one better.

i’ve got a good friend headed off to afghanistan today; and while from what i understand it’s not quite as hairy as iraq, it’s still not as safe as being back in the states. prayers for his safe return (i think he’s there for a year) would be much appreciated.

"Marauders were pirates and they weren’t nice to women, and things like that." --University of Mary Athletic Director Al Bortke, on the school talks about changing its sports name to something more friendly.



h/t tongue tied

i’m not sure who first said it, so i’m not going to give anyone credit, but i’m fairly certain this--or something very like it--has been said before. the more you learn, the more you come to realize how much you don’t know.



--update--

see here for more.

i’m not sure who first said it, so i’m not going to give anyone credit, but i’m fairly certain this--or something very like it--has been said before. the more you learn, the more you come to realize how much you don’t know.

more proof that the government really wants your money. today at work, we were discussing some orchardists who wanted to sell their land. they can get the most money out of it by ripping out the trees and selling it as residential lots... so that sounds like a great plan, right? only, according to our assistant manager (and she wasn’t 100% sure about this, but she’s usually pretty on top of stuff), if you want to do that, you have to pay about 7 years worth of back taxes on your property as if it were residential zoning. which to me seems just plain wrong.

seahawks just beat carolina 34-14, and are headed to the superbowl. let the good times roll. or something like that.



--update--

so does anybody else find it awesome--or at least completely hilarious--that carolina’s star steve smith, who was hyped for the entire game despite accomplishing very little (aside from a very nice punt return), fumbled the football on carolina’s last drive?

right now, things at work are a study in opposites. the manager and assistant manager are both busy as bees working on loan documents, so the orchardists in the area can afford to work for another year. add to that the fact that our manager also manages another branch, and since october has been the only loan officer--and thus the one who has the final word on any loans--between the two of them. contrast that with an average day in the life of the other teller and i, half of which consists of us playing solitaire, and the other half trying to figure out what to do with the random people who are still bringing in checks.



customer: "I’d like to cash this check."

me: "OK."

customer:

me:

customer: "So, were you planning on cashing that any time soon?"

me: "Oh, right."



it’s especially hard because we’ve already done all the busy work there might have been, so half the time we can’t even look busy. i’m really looking forward to spring.

seahawks just beat carolina 34-14, and are headed to the superbowl. let the good times roll. or something like that.

name: Christy Carlson Romano

occupation: actress, singer

where i’ve seen her: Even Stevens (Disney)



















also, it appears that i need to do some more regular posting... i think there’s only two posts between this and my last one of these.



sources: here, here, and good old google image search

and i thought intro to business information systems was a joke. welcome to porn 101 (no pictures involved). although i have to say that it doesn’t really surprise me to see berkley on the list of colleges offering the class.



h/t say anything; rob, i’m not sure if i want to know how you found this one

"Today?s refusal on the part of al Qaeda to provide us with any information about the conditions of a potential truce simply reinforces that message: you can?t fight terror by fighting terror in a way that fights terror unfairly." -- Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin)



so... i wasn’t aware that there was an "unfair" way to fight terror. i always thought that things like blowing up or beheading civilians were "unfair," as it were, seeing as how they have nothing to do with the conflict. but apparently the esteemed senator thinks that listening in on a conversation with a terrorist can be defined as "unfair." i wonder what his priorities are?

"When accused of profaining the Eluesinian mysteries, she [Phyrne] was defended by the orator Hypereides, one of her lovers. When it seemed as if the verdict would be unfavorable, he rent her robe and displayed her lovely breasts, which so moved her judges that they acquitted her. According to others, she herself thus displayed her charms." (source)



or, as a.j. jacobs puts it:



"... I wonder if lawyers today could make this work. It could revolutionize the profession. ’Yes, my client poisoned her husband and chopped him into chunks the size of croutons and fed him to her Rottweiler. We admit that. But gentlemen of the jury: have you seen her rack?’"

less pictures this time. oh well. this week’s crush is Reiko Aylesworth, who plays michelle dessler on "24."

it says:



Dear Hermaphrodites: Go fuck yourself.



Yours Sincerely,



St. Paul

"George W. Bush won the election. If you don’t like it, you better win elections." --Rahm Emanuel, Democratic representative from Illinois, on halting a conservative movement on the Supreme Court

well, i finally started getting spam comments, so it’s time to switch on word recognition for the comments. i realize that this will only actually be inconveniencing about 3 or 4 people (including myself), but i figured a warning would be nice.



on a side note, go seahawks! try as they would, they were unable to throw the game to the redskins, and went on to win 20-10.

your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read the following two sets of headlines and sub-headers, and decide which one of them came from the new york times.



1) Top Democrat Blasts Alito’s ’inconsistencies’

Sen. Leahy starts third day of hearings with warning from his party



or



2) Judge Alito Proves a Powerful Match for Senate Questioners

For the most part, the Supreme Court nominee left his questioners shuffling through papers in search of the next question

i was cleaning some stuff off my computer a few days ago... mainly stuff from my old system that i decided i didn’t really need. it appears that i wasn’t paying too much attention though, because i also managed to delete a good portion of my pictures. most of them will be recoverable, but it’ll mean putting my old compy back together--just putting the hard drive back in and hooking up a monitor, keyboard and mouse, so no big deal, but a pain in the butt. in celebration of that, here is a more recent picture, taken from the back steps of my house:

all that’s missing is some cheese in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

senator robert byrd (d-ranged) were to sit down and play a game of nethack?



note: i got distracted while typing this post up, so it will be finished sometime tomorrow. also, starting tomorrow i’m going to sell out (sort of) and start a series called "crush of the week." it will be somewhat similar to rob’s friday babe of the week (including the infrequent updates... they must not have had any fridays in north dakota for quite awhile now), except everything should be safe for work.



ok, here’s the full meal deal:

?senator robert byrd (d-ranged) sat down to play a game of nethack? this will make a lot more sense if you?ve played the game. also, a quick disclaimer: this is not meant to piss off anyone, with the exception of robert byrd and maybe some whacko liberals. if you are offended anyways, either a) it was unintentional on my part? no intended harm, so no foul; or b) you?re just too dang sensitive, get over it.

Who are you? White Dragon (?That?s got a catchy sound to it, doesn?t it Hoodie??)

Shall I pick a character?s race, role, gender and alignment for you? [ynq] (?Hell no!?) n

Pick a role for your character (?Hmm? wizard sounds good.?) w

Pick the race of your Wizard (?Let?s see? human, elf, gnome, or orc. Why not just say ?human or subhuman???) h

Pick the gender of your human Wizard (?What, only the two choices? Howard Dean would hate this game. Oh well, male it is.?) m

Pick the alignment of your male human Wizard (?Neutral, of course. I am an unbiased force for truth and justice!) n

Hello White Dragon, welcome to NetHack! You are a neutral male human Wizard.

(?A pet cat? What the hell is this??) C. What do you want to call the kitten? (?Hmmm, something appropriate? aha!?) Kat the Klan masKot. (?Hehehe, perfect!?)

i (?Force bolt, knock, not bad spells. But when do I get the one that lets me dump a hooker in the river with no repercussions, like Teddy? Hell, I guess I?m already older than the river is? what?s a few more days of waiting? Besides, I got a scroll of enchant weapon? great way to start.?)

[Narrator: after adventuring through several rooms and killing multiple monsters?including a newt (n), a lichen (F), and a jackal (j)?White Dragon/Senator Byrd quaffs a healing potion (!) and decides to risk drinking from a nearby fountain (?).]

You?ve unleashed a water demon! Grateful for its freedom, it grants you a wish! (?Booyah! Score baby!?) What do you wish for? A white hood. Sorry, no such item exists. You receive a leather helm. (?Horse shit! No white hoods? What kind of crazy world is this? Next thing you know one of those darkies will try and walk on the same side of the hallway as me. Oh well, may as well put it on.?)

[Narrator: unfortunately for our non-dungeon-savvy senator, that was a cursed -3 elven leather helm he just put on. He?s actually easier to kill now than he was with less armor. However, he somehow manages to survive for several more levels, wandering down into the gnomish mines.]

You hit the gnome! The gnome misses you! You hit the gnome! The gnome hits you! You hit the gnome! You kill the gnome! (?About freaking time, too. Lets see what the spoils are this time, eh??) You pick up a scroll called Foobie Bletch. (?What the hell? This better not be another scroll of stinking cloud.?) r You have found a scroll of genocide! What monster to you want to genocide? (?F?k yes! The day has finally arrived!?) N*****s. Sorry, no such monster exists. What monster do you want to genocide? (?Umm??) Blacks. Sorry, no such monster exists. Wiped out all grid bugs.

[Narrator: At this point, Senator Byrd/White Dragon begins frothing at the mouth, and dies one of the most embarrassing NetHack deaths possible: kicking a wall until he ran out of hitpoints. The only potentially more embarrassing deaths are slipping while trying to mount a horse, choking to death on food, zapping yourself with a wand of death, or getting killed by a grid bug. The moral of the story? Being in the KKK doesn?t pay. And kicking walls is just plain stupid.]

so here we go, the first "crush of the week" (by the way, if anybody can think of a better name, please let me know).



name: kari byron

where i’ve seen her: mythbusters

what she does: helps bust myths, and some art























most pics courtesy of nuclear beef, the rest from google image search

senator robert byrd (d-ranged) were to sit down and play a game of nethack?



note: i got distracted while typing this post up, so it will be finished sometime tomorrow. also, starting tomorrow i’m going to sell out (sort of) and start a series called "crush of the week." it will be somewhat similar to rob’s friday babe of the week (including the infrequent updates... they must not have had any fridays in north dakota for quite awhile now), except everything should be safe for work.

"I’m... dreaming... of a white... Christmas..."



"RACIST!"

so, i ran into another interesting guild wars glitch today, and again it ended up getting me stuck. luckily i was working with a group of real people (as opposed to the fake ones) this time, so i got to rejoin the quest at the next cutscene. here are some pics of what happened:















as usual, click the thumbnails for a larger image. for those of you that it means anything to, i managed to get myself stuck in one of the watchtowers in the riverside province mission.

can be found here. it’s very entertaining, i must say. as expected, i agreed with mostly the conservative answers, with a several from the libertarian side of things thrown in. and, the test beign satirical, i even agreed with a few of the commie answers, believe it or not. anyways, go check it out.



h/t tongue tied

shooting a .45 is really fun. and really loud.

which means it will probably never make it through. but i can dream, can’t i?

i’m only going to anal-ize the first page or so of the article [ed. note: there is actually only one page two it... i saw the 1 of 4 at the bottom and got confused], but i would recommend reading the whole thing (free registration required).



recently, colin powell spoke out on the whole "domestic spying" issue. and the nyt’s take on it is leaving me slightly confused.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 - Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on Sunday that it would not have been "that hard" for President Bush to obtain warrants for eavesdropping on domestic telephone and Internet activity, but that he saw "nothing wrong" with the decision not to do so.

~~~~~~~~

"I see absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions," he said.

Asked if such eavesdropping should continue, Mr. Powell said, "Yes, of course it should continue."

jewmas.

...and to all, a good night.

"There are only two girls in my major who shave their legs." --Rachel (rough quote; and no, she’s not a womyn’s studies major, whatever the hell that is)

the twelve days of christmas: gifts for your liberal friends. start here, and work your way back.

discuss amongst yourselves.

"Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall." --Luis Ernesto Derbez, foreign secretary to Mexican president Vicente Fox.



and i just have to wonder to myself, what the hell is mexico planning on doing about it? turn to the ap for help, by the tone of the article. note that anyone who supports the wall is part of a "growing tide of anti-immigrant sentiment," which, when you get right down to it, is a baldfaced lie. i am strongly in favor a wall along the border, and have been for quite some time. but am i anti-immigrant? no, i am not. i am anti-illegal immigrant. i consider those who respect our laws and enter our country legally a good thing, in fact. we are, essentially, a country of immigrants; but we are also a country of law. it is good to remember the former, but we must never forget the latter. laws (most of the time, at least) are there for a good reason.



also note that one mexican worker who was interviewed said it would "unleash conflict" in the US, due to small businesses losing out on labor. to which i would reply: any business which relies on illegal activity for its success deserves to go down in flames.



and here’s another fun quote: "If people in the U.S. and Canada had an accurate view of the success of democracy, political stability and economic prosperity in Mexico, it would improve their views on specific bilateral issues like immigration and border security." that from Rob Allyn, president of a PR company the mexican government hired to improve their image. he conveniently (or ignorantly [is that a word?]) forgets that if mexico were as successful as he seems to think it is, we wouldn’t have such a problem with illegal immigrants. that, and according to the article, the only thing that brings in more money for mexico than people up here sending it there is oil. that’s right... immigrants, both legal and illegal, bring in an income second only to oil.



read the whole article... it’s pretty ridiculous.



h/t say anything



semi-related: the immigration game

more and more this year, we’ve been hearing about the "attack on christmas." while i don’t think the people/groups behind the "attack" are trying to convert us to atheism/polytheism, i just have to ask... why? you don’t see anyone running around telling people they can’t say happy hannukah, happy kwanzaa, have a great ramadan, happy holidays, etc. i certainly don’t do that. so why can people tell me that it’s not ok to say "merry christmas" because i might piss someone off? if you can’t ignore my holidays as well as i ignore yours, you’re admitting that:

a) you’re scared of the mention of my holiday, for some reason

b) you’re not a very tolerant person, even though what you’re doing is supposedly in the name of "tolerance"

c) some other things that i can’t think of right now, since i’m typing this up before breakfast



on that note, have a Merry Christmas everyone. if you don’t feel like having one, that’s fine... go away and leave me in peace to celebrate.

or, in this case, a neat little graph from the NYT.



h/t say anything

is morgan freeman, who says what i’ve been saying for quite some time now. only he had a bigger audience for it.

hooray for the moral high ground...

this old lady rocks.



h/t say anything

picked up a copy of civ 4, which is installing right now, and got a free copy of office 2003 from a friend. and pat, i’ll respond to your comments later, possibly tomorrow.

while i am not an author myself, i am an avid reader. not to name any names, but in my opinion, some otherwise "professional" authors have a decent amount of room for improvement. so here’s a few things i think would make books better.



1) don’t make up your own swear words/terms. especially if you’re not going to bother explaining to us why said words/terms are considered swearing. either stick to previously established swear words, or don’t use any... for example, "character X swore profusely."



2) you don’t need to redescribe the main characters in every single book. by the time a reader has reached, say, book nine of a series, they should have a pretty good idea of what the main characters look like. we already know how wide character A’s shoulders are, and how expansive character B’s bosom is... move on to something important.



3) implied sex is your friend.



4) enough with all the chicks running around naked already. any women reading the story aren’t going to be interested (hopefully...), and if a man wants to see a naked chick, there are much easier places to find them than in books.



5) limit yourself to a single cohesive storyline, or at most two or three. more is just showing off (if you can even pull it off), and while it will extend your series nicely, it detracts from the overall trend of the story.



that’s about it for now, but this post will probably be expanded later as i think of more.

first off, why do the wealthy get more back from tax cuts? because they pay more. quite a bit more, in fact. h/t say anything



second, a great quote:

"...[I] think that it would be better to educate Muslims to respect the culture of the majority in Denmark, if they want the majority to respect their culture." --Bent Lexner, Denmark’s chief rabbi



that was found in an article about cookies, of all things. but i have to agree with him. you could replace "Denmark" with the name of quite a few countries around the world, and it would still hold true.

h/t tongue tied

john mccain, unsurprisingly, is not one of them. oh well.

i probably just jinxed it, but oh well.



*yesterday, i got a $200 christmas bonus.

*today, i got a new/old monitor from work. not great, but not bad, and free. 17" flat panel dell. so i’ll be hooking that up to my old compy.

*tomorrow, dad is bringing me liquor.

*at some point in the last day or so, a friend’s dad just got home from iraq.

*in a few weeks, i’ll have friends coming home from college.



i love life.

that will soon be replacing "the prayer of jabez" at bookstores near you.



"Dear Lord: keep me safe, keep me sane. Amen."

winter is finally here. it was 18 degrees outside when i got home from work, and we’re up to about a foot of snow on the ground now. let the good times begin.



--update: holy balls--

as of about 19:00 pst, the temperature is down to 9 degrees.

and how! last night, i decided it was time to expand my dvd collection. so i hopped on over to amazon, and did just that.



1) The Audrey Hepburn Collection

--Breakfast at Tiffany’s

--Sabrina

--Roman Holiday

2) The Steve McQueen Collection

--The Great Escape

--Junior Bonner (i’ve never heard of it either)

--The Magnificent Seven

--The Thomas Crown Affair

3) The Jack Ryan Collection

--Clear and Present Danger

--The Hunt for Red October

--Patriot Games



total cost, after shipping and tax: $53.90

total cost per dvd: $5.39. not too shabby.

here’s an interesting tidbit: in california in 2004, there were nearly 2400 reported homicides. during the same period in iraq, there were just over 900 coalition deaths. you do the math.



via say anything

in a logical arugment, there are several different types of fallacies/fallacious arguments, one of which is the argument ad baculum, roughly meaning an appeal to force: i.e., agree with me or i’ll shoot you in the face.



while reading today (nothing dirty, believe it or not... "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," by Jared Diamond), i learned that the penis bone of a walrus is called a baculum.



going back to logic, i’ll leave this as a third-order enthymeme, and let you draw your own conclusions.

well, i finally broke down and got myself a cell phone today. which means either: a) i finally caught up with most of the rest of america, or b) i finally sold out; i guess it all depends on your view of things. i’m still not entirely sure which view is mine. i’m splitting a family plan three ways with my parents and my younger brother... "my share" of the time is 333 minutes a month. which is probably about 330 more than i spend on the phone during an average month. anyways, if you’re interested, feel free to contact me for the number. i’ve gotta use up all those minutes somehow.



random historical fact: joseph smith, the founder of mormonism, was killed exactly 140 years before i was born. coincidence? i think not.

mr. miyagi is dead.

....

Harry regretfully takes one last drag from his joint, then swallows the roach and glances at his surroundings. No longer is he an angsty teenager. No longer is he a powerful wizard. No longer does he get to spend time with the foxy Hermione. Not that that had done him any good, what with her going after that fat bugger Ron. No accounting for taste these days. After relating his seven-year dream to his "mate" Tyrone, he dozes off to the sound of Tyrone saying "Man, that is some trippy shit. But if you wanna have some really fucked up dreams, you gots to try the hashish. Man, this one time...."



The End

i made it myself!

movie review in five words or less. plus two more.



movie: batman begins



starring: christian bale, katie holmes, rutger hauer, gary oldman (as a good guy!), morgan freeman, and some other people i recognized but don’t remember off the top of my head.



review: Liam Neeson as a Ninja. Hot stuff.

although i probably screwed several things up in the subject. oh well. i just ascended on my first try in guild wars. nowhere close to fast enough to get the bonus, but still not too shabby, i think.

but still funny.

so this morning at work, i was listening to the radio. some guy called in and requested the song "fat bottom girls," and dedicated it to his wife. the dj--a woman herself--pulled out a funny joke to go along with that. it went something like this.



so this guy forgets to get his wife something for their anniversary. when she finds out, she demands that he have something for her in the driveway that does 0-200 in under 5 seconds by the next morning. next morning she wakes up and looks out in the driveway... and sees a bathroom scale.

i was introduced to this webcomic over the weekend, and i have to say i find it quite funny.

over all, it was a great weekend.

Friday

left for spokane friday morning after bible study, and got there a bit before noon, dropped my stuff off in ben’s room, and then made my way over to dixon for corliss’ crusades class. which i really wish i was in. then mark bought me lunch at the cafe, and then i wandered around visiting profs for awhile. didn’t see as many as i would have liked, but oh well; i ended up talking with corliss, dr. migs, and briefly with my old advisor jim hunt. dale was supposedly "around" all day, but apparently "around" means "somewhere in the general vicinity of the campus," because i never ended up seeing him. after that i played some frisbee golf with nick, jason and mark, and then mark, ben and i went over to alison’s place and started a game of settlers of catan. had dinner at zips, then back to work on my tripping character and watch mark play some san andreas, which is a horrible but very entertaining game. then back to alison’s to finish the game of catan and play one more with a slightly faster set of rules. back to campus and bed around 1 or 1:30.



Saturday

woke up way the hell too early, went back to sleep, and finally got up around 9. chilled in the hub for awhile, read my email and some blogs, then back to arend to start tripping. good times were had. except for the battle when i got killed in the first round, and was completely useless. lunch at tomato street, where i had an awesome sandwich, and they forgot to charge me for my mozarella sticks. then more tripping. no real dinner, but i was still fairly full. watched josh trumpet’s senior performance. it was... interesting. actually, had it not been for the last song (where he pretended to know about the political/world stage), it was pretty good. he organized/orchestrated/whatever a big-band version of "toxic," which actually sounded really good. definitely sounded better--and was easier to understand--than the britney spears version. then off to pat’s place for some munckin with mark stevens and emily, and then all but mark headed off to the catacombs, where we met mark (schuldt), steve, and josh. and that stupid, useless waiter. he must have been an english major. we got back to campus around midnight, and i crashed into bed.



Sunday

got up h-early again, but for a better reason this time. left campus around 9 and headed down to pullman to meet kate-lynne for church. which was pretty interesting. they had a very enthusiastic black preacher, which on it’s own was fairly cool. not something i’d want to do every week, maybe once every month or two, but it was an interesting change from what i’m used to. the audience was fairly enthusiastic too, which to me was annoying. it’s a little tricky to focus on the sermon--which didn’t seem that focused to begin with, but maybe i’m just not used to the style--with people around you suddenly calling out "hallelujah!" and "yes jesus!" and "amen!" or softly chanting "thank you jesus" during prayers. that one really bugs me. when you get right down to it, it’s much like a family relationship. we may get annoyed at each other occasionally, and even throw a few punches every now and then, but when you get right down to it, we’re still a family, and we’re still on the same side. after church there was a potluck, where they announced all the small groups/bible studies in the area. there were almost more group leaders than there were people attending... it was pretty ridiculous. then back to kate-lynne’s place to watch "run lola run," play a few games of star munchkin, and then the long drive home. other than the part where i got turned around for awhile after stopping for dinner in moses lake, it was a pretty good trip, and i made it home in just over 4 hours. the end.

i’m on my way to bed now, so i’ll say more about it later. for now, i’ll leave you with the following thoughts:



~the catacombs + friends + irish carbombs = teh r0XX0r

~waiter from the catacombs named rich = teh suXXor. i think we saw him about 5 times over the course of two hours. it took 45 freaking minutes from the time we were done with our food to the time we got our bill. and then we said we’d like it split, and he handed us a calculator. because his time is obviously too valuable to spend it doing his job.

looks like senate republicans, led by graham (SC), are not entirely useless after all. from today’s NYT (free registration required):

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.

~~~

If approved in its current form by both the Senate and the House, which has not yet considered the measure but where passage is considered likely, the law would nullify a June 2004 Supreme Court opinion that detainees at Guantánamo Bay had a right to challenge their detentions in court.

the article notes that there is a possibility this part of the bill could be overturned later, but i’m hoping the republicans will actually stick to their guns for once and get something useful done.

hey all. as a few of you know already, i’m planning on visiting whitworth this weekend. to those that don’t, here’s your warning.

but maybe not compared to this: people in london are using so much crack, traces of it have been detected in the river thames. considering how dirty the thames is, that’s quite an accomplishment.



h/t say anything

i’m pissed at guild wars right now. mainly because i’m standing about 10 feet away from where i need to be to finish a 30-40 minute quest, and i’m stuck. i think it’s on my henchmen. which would be really stupid, since i just brought them back to life a minute ago. oh well. here’s a picture... some of you may recognize that as the end of borliss pass.

--but at least they gave me a cool pen: yesterday, i went over to seattle to try out for jeopardy. and got my ass handed to me by the first part of the test. in my defense, so did about 80% of the other people there.



--looks aren’t everything: i picked up a sweet hammer in guild wars earlier today. sweet enough that i deleted my mesmer and started a hammer warrior. it doesn’t look like much, but it does 19-35 lightning dmg., +15% against undead. i have to say i’m fairly happy with it.



--where have all the marbles gone?: when i originally planned this post, there were more than two thoughts to go in it. i’m not sure where the others went to.



--update--



--addicted? possibly: remeber that new warrior i started earlier today? yeah, i just got it to level 10. now it’s time for bed.

i’m near the end of book six right now, which means just over halfway through the series. here’s my thoughts on it so far:



--the storyline is still good, but it takes too damn long to get anywhere. if the characters spent half as much time doing things that they spent talking about doing those things, the books could be several hundred pages shorter without losing anything.



--pretty much all of the female characters suck. the only exceptions in my mind are moiraine right before she died, at which point she was finally useful, and min, who seems to be the only one not trying to control or manipulate rand in some way. and maybe birgitte, who can occasionally talk some sense into elayne. the rest of them spend their time being pissed at men and trying to manipulate them, thinking that they know best. egwene, for example, spends half of her time complaining how big rand’s head is getting (which i personally don’t see happening), and the other half running around with a seriously inflated head of her own, especially now that she’s amrylin, thinking that she and the "little tower" know more about what’s good for him than he does. in some ways, they remind me of kim from 24: pretty to look at, but also pretty useless



--i’ll still finish the series. i’ve made too big of a time commitment to it to quit now. and pat, now i think my vote counts for something. jordan’s story, while good, is not better than tolkien.



--update--

potential spoiler alert. although i think that the only people who read this are either farther in the series than me, or really don’t care what happens.



so. my guess, for the last half or so of the book, is that mazrim taim is demandred. that, and i’m tired of rand being such a pansy. he made it through this book without killing a single forsaken. in my opinion, he should pick up callandor and that ter’angreal that links him to the huge crystal-ball guy sangreal (literally "holy grail" or "royal blood", depending on where you split it... jordan borrowed bits from some interesting places...), and go out and kick everybody’s asses.

i’m headed to seattle tomorrow in what appears to be fairly crappy weather. though i’m planning on driving safe, i can’t say anything about all those other crazy folk on the road.

why, exactly, is it bush’s responsibility to come up with a plan to deal with a problem that may or may not even happen? personally, i would think that sort of thing should be left to... i dunno... maybe medical professionals? you know, those folks who might actually know something about the bird flu. so how about we lay off the man and leave him to what he does best: talking funny and scaring the hell out of terrorists.

everyone is invited



--update--

the pumpkin helm:

only it sounds more official and impressive coming from teddy:



"There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation of all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities." --Teddy Roosevelt



h/t say anything

harriet miers withdraws her nomination. i’m excited to see what real nominee bush will bring out now.

houston just got swept in the world series. i’m not really upset that the white sox won--it’s been 88 years since the last time they pulled that off--i’m just upset that the series didn’t go on longer. that’s 2 years in a row now that it’s been over in 4 games, which is just not cool. oh well. there’s always next year. maybe the mariners will finally pull things together, and, after making it to the post season, not suck. or maybe the marlins will be able to pull off another good year. because when you get right down to it, other than those two teams, i really don’t care.

democrats = sunnis. only with less beheadings and suicide bombers.

so this morning when i turned on my computer, my chipfan decided to start working again after about 2 weeks on strike. i threatened to shoot it if it ever even thought about joining a union, and i’ve got a strike breaker on the way just in case, so it probably felt like it had no other choice.

"Now I’ve got Ho Chi Minh’s pecker in my pocket." -- Lyndon B. Johnson

a renaissance man, according to wikipedia:

A polymath (also known as a polyhistor) is a person who excels in multiple fields, particularly in both arts and sciences. The most common other term for this phenomenon is Renaissance man, but also in use are Homo universalis and Uomo Universale, which in Latin and Italian, respectively, translate as "Universal Man".

a woman of the renaissance, from book 3, chapter 6 of machiavelli’s discourses:

... and to show that she did not care for her children, she showed them her genital member, saying that she had the means of making more.

i like bush, and i still find this funny:

President Bush?s morning security briefing is wrapping up. Donald Rumsfeld is concluding his part and says, ?Finally, three Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday near Baghdad.?

?OH MY GOD!? shrieks Bush, and he buries his head in his hands for a seemingly interminable 30 seconds. Stunned at the unexpected display of emotion, the

president?s staff sit speechless, not sure how to react.

Finally, Bush looks up and asks Rumsfeld, ?How many is a brazillion??

h/t say anything

"There was a woman who got lost in the desert. She stumbled across a lamp, rubbed it, and out came a genie. The genie offered her the traditional three wishes.



Her first wish was to be powerful, intelligent, and loved by all.



The genie thought a moment, snapped his fingers and turned her into a man. "



thanks dave.

it’s probably not worth a whole lot, but now it’s out there. from what i’ve read about her so far, it seems to me that the miers nomination is a perfect picture of the entire bush presidency: more good than bad, but it could have been so much better.

watching the movie right now. and as different from the book as it is, it definitely came from the mind of douglas adams. they’re on vogsphere right now, and the robot that played marvin on the original bbc series just had a cameo appearance.

damn you asus! your mobo is hot stuff, but the chip fan is teh suXXor. and apparently i’m not the only one with the problem (see here). less than two months after i got it, the chip fan died. so i’m trying to contact asus for a replacement, only i can’t connect to their website. of course. murphy seems to be working against me as well. that bastard.

i seem to be going through them rather quickly, don’t i? oh well. my new hero is columbus, of sort-of-discovering-america fame. because he gets me a paid day off of work on monday. what a great guy.

i was actually planning on trying something very similar to this at whitworth, but i never got around to it. i wanted to start a white student union. i figured, if there can be a black student union, why not a white one? and a japanese one? and hell, while we’re at it, why not one for all of the other minority groups represented by exchange students from halfway around the world? i think it’s because, in my expereince at least, the regular old "student union" was good enough for them. why is it that blacks were the only ones who found it necessary to form their own student union? why is it that they seemed to have a harder time fitting in with everybody else than students from japan, vietnam, germany, france, tibet, scotland, and other foreign countries? maybe there’s something here that i’m missing; maybe it’s right out in the open, and i’ve just been overlooking it. but to me, this just doesn’t seem to make sense.

A DVD copy of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children now belongs to me. It also came with a bonus anime movie that explains what happened in the time between the game and the movie. Should be good.

if i have any clue what i’m doing here, this one will stay on top for a few days.



i realize that this will only reach an audience of about two or three, but more is better in this case. a friend of mine was in a car wreck yesterday, and is currently in ICU at harborview. she’s had her spleen removed, her pelvis is fractured, and i think one of her arms is broken. if you think about it, please include her in your prayers.



--update--

things are looking pretty good. they operated on her arm, leg, and spleen (or where her spleen was... still not sure on that), and all the operations were successful. tomorrow comes the pelvic operation.

wwrd?

no pun intended.

so if you’re ever looking for a good space-sim to play, this is it. x2: the threat is what freelancer should have been. i’m just getting started, but already i have many options open to me... assuming i can accumulate enough credits, that is. the game allows you to become a corporate mogul, buying and placing as many different production facilities as you want. if you start overproducing something, prices for that product will go down; not just in your area, but across the entire game universe. and if you get too successful, other groups may get jealous and start attacking your assets. again, given enough credits, you can build up a fleet big enough to take out an entire system. you can set your ships up to automatically trade for you, both within a certain area of space and within a specific price range. at any given point, as long as you’re in the right sector, you can fly any one of the ships you own, from carriers to scouts to transports. and the space combat, from what i’ve seen so far, is not too shabby either.



there are a few odd bits. whether intentionally or not, it seems that the game was translated from japanese and that some things just didn’t translate. for example, your character will occasionally be told to "wait just a mizura," or that someone has been looking for him for "trazuras." or they’ll stick -sama on the end of his name. the names can be fairly interesting too... the first guy you get to talk to is named Ban Danna.



overall though, it looks like a great game. should give me something to counterbalance all the time i’ll be spending on guild wars once i get that.

0% of polled Americans are in Iraq.



via say anything

i just got an email from the folks at jeopardy... i’m going to try out in seattle on november 4th. here’s to hoping i can remember all the things i’ve picked so far, and maybe learning a few new ones before then.



--update--

that, and being able to beat the other folks to the buzzer... that was one of our biggest problems back in knowledge bowl.

Chinese condoms named for Clinton and Lewinsky. NYT article here (free registration required), or you can read a short version at Say Anything.



wow, that was more impressive than i thought... i actually used capital letters.

via msnbc: north korea renegs

or something like that. i just got back from visiting friends at whitworth this weekend, and it was fairly strange. every fall for the last 3 years, whitworth became my home (away from home). but now that i’m graduated, i’m having to adjust to not being back there. which could take some time. it was easy for me to fit back in there, but this week will seem strange now, and i probably won’t see those friends again for another month at least.



the weekend itself, however, was very fun.



Friday

got to the campus friday night around 8:30. met pat, recruited herr schuldt and jason, and headed down to the catacombs, a pretty sweet bar/pub in downtown spokane (near the spaghetti factory), where we met mark stevens and dave brewster. had some beer and some potatoes, then headed back to pat’s place to watch "final fantasy VII: advent children." that movie was amazing. it was a little hard to follow (but it’s japanese, so that was to be expected), but the battle scenes will drop your jaw so far it’ll take a week to get it back in place. got back to campus around 2, and crashed in ben’s room.



Saturday

woke up way the hell too early, around 6... my body is way too used to getting up early for work. tossed and turned for awhile, finally gave up on sleep and got up about 8:45. ben and i headed to ihop for breakfast (because let’s face it, once you’ve got saga to release it’s hellish hold on your bowels, you never want it back there), and then back to the dorm to get started on the new fantasy trip. it was originally intended to have only 4 players, but mark (schuldt) is much nicer than i am, and let some more in. we played till around 12:30, and then andrew had to leave to pick up some stuff for cool whip (improv group on campus), so pat, mark, jason, emily, nick and i headed out to lunch at red robin. normally, i think red robin is overrated. but this time was different. both mark and i were wearing our whitworth college republicans t-shirts, and somebody besides us apparently liked them. when our waitress brought the bills, she said an anonymous customer had liked our shirts and paid for our meal. so, although the odds are very much against said anonymous person being a reader of my blog, i would like to give them my profuse thanks.

after lunch, we headed to a hobby shop and picked up some various flavors of munchkin, which is ridiculous in more ways than one. 2, at least, that i can think of off the top of my head: ridiculously fun and ridiculously funny. here are some examples of cards from the versions we had (munchkin, super munchkin, munchkin fu, and star munchkin). played a round of that, tripped some more, went to jack in the crack for dinner, tripped some more, then recruited briggs and hunter for some more munchkin, and then watched advent children again. and again, it was awesome and hard to follow. bed around 1:30.



Sunday

woke up around 7:30. gave up on sleep and read from about 8:30-11ish, finishing "deception point" by dan brown. went to brunch at saga... apparently, i am still a glutton for punishment. i blame briggs for that. spent most of the rest of my time there reading news and blogs online, while everybody else was working on homework. left campus about 3:15. stopped by the phonathon theme house to say hi, bye, and democrats suck to alison, then left for home. arrival at approximately 7:00. boredom ensued almost immediately.



so, now you know more than you ever wanted to know about my weekend. either that, or you were actually there for the whole thing, in which case you hopefully skipped reading this post, as it would be fairly redundant.

ann coulter for supreme court justice! i like the way jay tea thinks.

probably not time to quit my actual new job yet, but i did manage an honorable mention in the wizbang weekend caption contest (that’s me at #7).

first, read this piece by paul, who was actually there. then read this one, pointed out by rob and others at say anything.



--update--

paul strikes again.

well, this makes me feel a little better about our own government. not a lot. but a little.

i do, usually. but that was before i saw her. shallow of me? probably. but that happens every now and then. now if only we could get rid of all those pansy french guys, it might be a pretty decent country.

good news (in my opinion) from the judicial front: the 4th circuit court of appeals has decided that the bush administration can continue to detain jose padilla. on a sort of side note, padilla lawyer sounds like a moron.

?Not only would we need American forces to fight against terrorism, we need some of them to frighten our neighbors and prevent them from interfering in our internal affairs.? -- Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq

i am teh uber 1337! or something like that. i just got confirmation today that i’m getting hired at the bank for at least another year (i’m currently just seasonal help). the details won’t be hammered out till next week, but it’s going to include the full package; or, at the very least, the fullest one i’ve had yet, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, as well as more money than i’m making now. life is good.



on a complete side note, gaim doesn’t seem to be liking msn messenger, and won’t log on to that account for me. anybody else having problems with this?

i personally think jay tea is being overly generous, but that’s just me. and who knows, it might even work. which means that it will probably never actually be tried. if bush recommends it, all the democrats will automatically say no, and the republicans in congress seem more worried about staying popular and getting reelected than about actually getting something done in the country. between those two groups, any idea that i see as a good one is bound to get shot down.

i don’t normally like using caps, but i think this is worth it.



DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, SHOP AT GAMESTOP.COM. THEY HAVE INCREDIBLY BAD SERVICE.



i pre-ordered dungeon siege 2 from them on august 5th. the game came out on the 16th. immediately, they put a note up that said it was back ordered. i kept checking in over the next few weeks, and it alternately said under status that the game was "backordered" or "usually ships within 24 hours." i finally gave up yesterday, and sent them an email saying that if i had not recieved my copy of the game within the week, i would be cancelling my order and telling people not to shop there. earlier today, i received a reply:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for writing to us at GameStop.com

Per your request, we have cancelled your order. We value your business and hope to see you again soon at GameStop.com.

Best regards,

Castle

since they cancelled the order, i’m assuming that they felt unable to meet my very reasonable request, and that if you check back on friday, the game will still probably be backordered.

and so, in closing: GAMESTOP.COM SUCKS. that is all.

the title doesn’t really go with the post--at least not directly--but i still thought it would be good to put it out there. anyways, my roommate from last year sent me this video, but conveniently forgot to send me a link. luckily, i have another friend who are on top of things. and unlike that other friend, i do mean offense. because if i haven’t pissed off a liberal, my day feels somehow incomplete.

so after about 7 hours of work and way more problems than i anticipated, i finally got my new compy up and running. i’m still having problems with some of the stuff i moved over from the old one, but i can worry about that later. for now, i’m glad to be back to having a good computer.

i’m temporarily out of commission... should have my new computer up sometime later tonight, and everything should be back to normal. only it’ll be a much better version of normal.

so now, they’re shipping my GPU past my house again. as we speak, it is on it’s way from spokane to wenatchee, which is on the seattle side of my house. it is getting closer, though. after this--just for good measure, of course--they’ll probably send it back across to coulee city, then to orondo, then to douglas, and finally to my house. but as long as it actually arrives today, i really don’t care.

jonah goldberg is cool beans. and a good writer to boot.



UPS, on the other hand, is teh suXXor. something about shipping my graphics card from seattle, and then across the state to spokane, and then back to the middle of the state where i live--adding an extra day to the journey--just doesn’t strike me as very bright.



--update--

john bolton is also pretty cool.

i had been planning to avoid ever mentioning cindy sheehan, but this was too good to pass up:



media whores, unite!

that bush finally pulls his head out of the sand and takes a good, hard look at our southern border.



Bush Promises Border Enforcement.



h/t say anything

not as bad as the last one, though. in fact, not really bad at all. just really weird. it was one of those dreams where you’re at a location that you know really well... only it’s not actually that place. if that makes any sense. anyways, i was at whitworth, only it wasn’t really whitworth. the layout was way off. i don’t remember much of it. i walked into the beej, changed clothes, and then walked out into the snow in bare feet and across to dixon, which was somehow right next door. and then i went into a science class that was beign taught by dale soden (who, as history/poli sci and science majors can probably tell you, does not actually teach science); there were several other recent grads there. didn’t make a whole lot of sense. oh well. i’m gonna miss whitworth this fall. for those of you still there though, i’m planning on making it back to visit as often as i can.

unfortunately, it wasn’t very pleasant. i don’t remember what it was about, but it inolved me frothing at the mouth. that, along with my bowels hating on me, made for a fairly unpleasant night and a very long monday at work.



on a slightly brighter note, my processor is due to arrive tomorrow, and my graphics card should be here by thursday at the latest. since i’m keeping my old hard drive for now, that means only 2 or 3 more days till i get to put the new compy together.



here’s the graphics card i decided on. still looking for a good SATA hard drive, preferably 250+ gigs.

how’s this as a new logo for the democrats?

while listening to npr news this afternoon at work, i heard yet another person lamenting the fact that the iraqis had not met their deadline. it is, of course, unfortunate, as it gives the left-leaning media and the imported terrorists in iraq more fodder for the propaganda machine. but keep in mind that these people have not even had 3 years of saddam-free rule yet. it took us 11 years after declaring independence to get our constitution figured out, and another 2 before it was put into effect.

and today, some of those computer pieces should be arriving. i also get paid today, which means i can order the rest. so i am a happy camper right now.



yesterday, i finished The Count of Monte Cristo... it was an excellent book. I finished it in 11 days, at an average pace of 124 pages a day. next, i’m headed back to david eddings to finish "the mallorean" series... from there, who knows?

today, i start purchasing pieces for my new computer.

what a waste of a day. i was planning on spending a relaxing day at home, sleeping in, reading, playing computer, maybe spending some time with the one friend i have left here. but then about 9:00, mom decided it would be a good idea to drive over to seattle and visit relatives. nevermind the fact that since we left our house at 10:00, and their house at 5:30, we spent 6+ hours driving so that we could see them for about 4 and a half. and by the end of the trip (actually, it was probably closer to the beginning), as usual, we were all tired of being stuck in the car with each other, and things went downhill from there.



so basically i ended up with a one-day weekend, and it’s back to work tomorrow. not cool.

i’m not entirely sure how the topic came up, but last night i started complaining to a friend about head cheese. it was while we were looking up information for her parents about canning apricots, which, to the best of my knowledge, has little or nothing to do with head cheese. anyways, for those of you unaware of the process, head cheese is basically processed pig head. literally. a pig head gets boiled, and then everything that’s not bone gets scraped together into a sort of loaf. this loaf, instead of being fed back to other pigs--who will eat just about anything--is instead deposited in deli cases, where some really screwed up people will pay for it, and then eat it. it is incredibly vile stuff, and if left to sit for awhile, could easily be classified as a biological weapon. i had to slice three pounds of that stuff for some psycho back in my deli days... i almost gagged just from the smell.



if for some odd reason you feel like looking for it, it’ll be the stuff that looks like a meat version of particle board.



on a complete side note, i’m looking for ideas for a good project for this fall, when all my friends are back in skool and i’m stuck at home working. last summer i made a fairly large RISK board, which was, in my opinion, incredibly awesome. so if you have any good ideas, feel free to let me in on them.

my friend rachel just started a blog. she has basically no idea what she’s doing at this point, but she has several computer-savvy friends to point her in the right direction.

mat lauer got pwn3d. hard.



h/t say anything

mat lauer = pwn3d. hard.



h/t say anything

bastard rats.

robert vasquez is my new hero.



h/t wizbang

but not in that kind of way.

The yin and yang of intimate interpersonal relationships post, 16" (from the protein wisdom conceptual series)

yin: ?Do these jeans make me look heavy??

yang: ?The jeans? No. But all that extra fat on your ass is a whole different story.?

pw



--update--

how long before our politicians get a clue and start doing this?

the only road that he has ever known. and he walks alone.



i wonder if he ever stopped to think that maybe if his music didn’t suck so bad, he wouldn’t be alone all the time.

now here’s an interesting thought.



h/t powerline

so, as of sometime last night when the bidding ended, i am now the proud owner of an 1897 edition of Bram Stoker’s "Dracula."



--update--

nevermind. i got an email from the seller that said "oops, it’s actually from 1910," so i’m not buying it.

here’s a very interesting way to look at the war in iraq.

i just pre-ordered dungeon siege II today. hopefully it will work on my computer. if not... well, then i have an excuse to buy a new one. not a very good excuse maybe, but still an excuse.

also, my diploma finally came in the other day. it looks nice. i’ll try to have a picture of it up here someday soon.

Title: The Three Musketeers

Author: Alexandre Dumas



Excellent book. Dumas is a great story teller, and occasionally works his sense of humor into his writing. Well worth reading.



Current score: 11.3/11.2

dean’s screams



h/t michelle malkin

another good topic that i’m too lazy to write about.

for better or worse, here is the phrase of the day: ego masturbation (scroll to the bottom of the post).

take this, you liberal buggers. a plan that will actually work (free registration required). and won’t cost an arm and a leg. john writes about it much better here.

first, rob over at say anything found this interesting article, which makes you realize how rediculous the government can be.



second/last, i saw a great sign today, also put up by the government, albeit the local one. it read: "Littering fines mean less beer money."

it just took me 12 minutes and 45 seconds (and, for the truly curious, 84/100s of another second) to run about a mile and a half. back in the good old days, when i was in shape, it took me a minute less to run 2 miles. oh well. someday, i will be there again. and some other day, i will quit saying "oh well" so much.

Title: The Aviator

Starring: Kate Beckinsale was the only one I cared about



Verdict: Not worth watching. It had a few funny moments, but didn’t flow very well, and didn’t explain the main characters mental problems at all. So unless someone else is paying for you to see it--or preferably paying you to see it--don’t bother watching it.



Score: -15/42,000,000,000

so i spent all of yesterday downloading the beta for dungeon siege 2. when i tried installing it this morning, it told me i needed a key number, so i hopped online to find one. instead, i found out that the beta was already closed, and there were no more numbers. so unless someone decides they don’t want to play the beta anymore and gives me their number, i’ll just have to wait for the full game. oh well.

once more, mark steyn proves why i like him. now if only the stupid spectator webside wouldn’t spread the article out over 5 pages...



h/t powerline

title: dark water

starring: jennifer connelly, camryn manheim, pete postlethwaite, and a bunch of people i didn’t recognize.



the movie would make a lot more sense if they told you at the beginning, rather than at the end, that it was based off of a japanese novel. in my experience, japanese writing tends to make very little sense, which is about what this movie did. it was billed as a scary movie; it was fairly dark, but more startling than actually scary. and very strange.



verdict: worth watching, but not worth paying for. wait till it’s out on DVD. [unless, like me, you like jennifer connelly, in which case it’s probably worth paying for]

1) everything is pretty easy for about 5 or 6 hours out of the day. after that, 8000 mexicans who speak very little english will come in to cash harvest checks with me, who speaks slightly more than very little spanish.



2) entertaining coworkers. i think banking must warp their minds some how. most of the time, like at the last branch i worked at, that was good... everyone there had a great sense of humor. sometimes, like at the branch i’m working at now, it’s not so good... the lady is spend most of my time working with is very paranoid.



3) as with most jobs, you occasionally have the opportunity to meet an attractive person of the opposite sex. today was a good day in that sense. i got to meet a very attractive canadian girl (by "meet" in this case, i mean i said hi and then the old lady i work with took over the conversation), a fairly attractive hispanic girl, and a very attractive farming girl.



4) that’s about it, really. but it pays better than the last job i had, and having regular hours is pretty nice. now if we could just eliminate that whole morning thing, where pretty much nothing is actually happening anyways, life would be great.

i just learned the history behind that expression last night while watching "myth busters" on the discovery channel. great show.



anyways, the expression comes from a civil war myth. a man on the battlefield was shot through the testes. the bullet then hit a woman standing some distance behind him, striking her somewhere in the lower abdomen. 9 months later, she gave birth to several children.



the myth was, unfortunately, busted. they tested it using a civil war-era rifle, a pouch of sperm sandwiched between several layers of canvas etc. representing the guys clothes, and some sort of jello-y stuff under several layers of clothing to stand in for the woman. though the bullet passed cleanly through the "man" and hit the "woman" behind him, there was no trace of the sperm in or around the entry wound. they speculated that any that actually got caught on the bullet was fried by the heat.



don’t you feel better about knowing that?

I would like to wish a happy birthday to our President, Mr. George W. Bush. it’s kind of late, in the sense that it’s tomorrow on the east coast, but since he won’t actually be reading this, i don’t think it matters.



tomorrow: the origins of the expression "son of a gun"

thank you God, for this great country.

thank you for the brave men who helped to found it.

thank you for the men and women serving in our armed forces, fighting to protect freedom at home and abroad.

thank you that in spite of all our screw ups, you haven’t decided to smite us.



happy 229th birthday, America. may you enjoy many more.

never, ever, watch the movie "the forgotten." or at the very least, don’t ever pay money to see it. on a scale of 1 to 10, that movie lost hardcore... even with the help of alcohol, i’m going to rate it a negative 47 at best. it was very disjointed, it never really explained the bad guys, and julianne moore was a freaking psycho.

available here. unfortunately, i still haven’t practiced any html stuff on the site. oh well.

or at least trying to...

"Teachers are either enthusiastic or unsuccessful. Teachers are not all unsuccessful. Therefore there are enthusiastic teachers." that statement can be expressed and proven in symbolic logic as follows, using Tx to represent Teachers, Ex to represent Enthusiastic, and Ux to represent Unsuccessful; also, pretend that the 3 in (3x) is actually a backwards "E", and that the greater than symbol is more of a horse shoe:

1. (x) [Tx > (Ex v Ux)]

2. (3x) (Tx * ~Ux) / (3x) (Tx * Ex)

3. Ta * ~Ua 2 Existential Instantiation

4. Ta > (Ea v Ua) 1 Universal Instantiation

5. Ta 3 Simplification

6. ~Ua * Ta 3 Commutation

7. ~Ua 6 Simp.

8. Ea v Ua 4, 5 Modus Ponens

9. Ua v Ea 8 Comm.

10. Ea 9, 7 Disjunctive Syllogism

11. Ta * Ea 5, 10 Conjunction

12. (3x) (Tx * Ex) 11 Existential Generalization



fun stuff, eh? and that’s one of the shorter ones... one of the homework problems is supposed to take 26 steps.



on that note, i had a very strange dream last night. have you ever had one of those dreams where you’re at a location you know, only not really? for example, you’re your house, but everything about it is different? i definitely had one of those last night. i don’t remember the whole thing, unfortunately, because it was fairly interesting. it took place at whitworth (only it wasn’t really whitworth), in Mac and BJ (only they weren’t really Mac and BJ) and the space between it (not real either). and it involved several characters from the show "boy meets world", and some other people that i knew but don’t remember now. and i didn’t even have anything weird to eat.



also, a belated happy 21st birthday to ben tkach, a quality individual, and to my mother, whose age shall remain unspecified.

they are fun. especially when used in conjunction with either apple or pomegranate tobacco. which taste really good. one of the guys from security came down to hassle us, but once we had established that what we were smoking was, in fact, tobacco, he told us a story about how he had lived in seattle for six years. i’m not entirely sure of the significance of that, if there is any. and now it’s time to brush my teeth and go to bed, so i can get up and do homework tomorrow.



the end.

along with some general entertainment.



h/t red

spontaneous combustion is one thing, but spontaneously exploding? apparently that’s what’s happening to a bunch of toads in germany. now if only all the other frogs in europe would start exploding, the world would be a much nicer place. that seems unlikely, but i can dream, can’t i?



h/t the rott

well, its official now: i’m graduating this year. it seems like people are normally excited about graduating early, but i’m actually kind of bummed. most of my friends are graduating next year, and it would’ve been fun to walk with them. and to have an extra year to figure out what i’m going to do with my life. and to finish up the 9 freaking credits i still need for the poli sci major. but oh well. i may have no clue what’s going on in my life, but as long as God does, everything is ok.

to a cool girl and a good friend, emily.

i’m still not up to photoshop yet, but my camera came with some decent software. for example, here is me, frozen in carbonite. or embossed, or something:







one of these days i need to learn how to host my own pictures, so i don’t have to worry about max filesize and stuff.

this is so much easier when somebody else does all the work. like in this case. thank you powerline, for working hard so that i don’t have to.

its been an interesting sort of day. i got my IPE midterm back... i had been really worried about it. but i rocked it hardcore. on a 4.0 scale, i got a 4.3. i also got my digital camera in today, which will be fun to play with. i’ll try and get some pics up before the weekend is over.



on the other hand, it looks like i’m going to be getting squat for financial aid next year. i’m going to try and do some tweaking with stuff, maybe switching one of my classes from upper- to lower-division so i don’t have enough crap to finish the first degree. we’ll have to see how that goes.

well, i didn’t get the RA job that i applied for. it’s kind of a bummer, but i wasn’t really expecting to get hired, so its not a huge letdown. it just means i need to look that much harder for the money i’ll need to stick around at college.



anyways, time to finish rewriting a paper. and then run. because lets face it, i am a glutton for punishment.