mcgees.org

My choices for radio among my presets on the ride home:

1. KCLU: Pledge drive, and I lose the station as soon as I leave Thousand Oaks.
2. KCRW: Electronica.
3. KPCC: Pledge drive, and as I’ve noted twice before I’ve contributed and I’m tired of being scolded. They alternated this with Tavis Smiley, whose show makes me cringe.
4. KPFK: This is Pacifica.  They had Black Panther women on the program.  More on this after the list.
5. KUSC: Unpleasant flute music.
6. Air America: Today’s it’s launch, but I couldn’t receive the station (1580 AM).

I ended up listening to the Black Panthers. They were highly articulate, but they were espousing really militant stuff, talking about how it was fortunate some of their leaders “didn’t have to kill people” and referring to race riots as “rebellions” (which I’ll admit deserves a bit more thought.) At least one of the women was talking about her expatriation to Cuba and the Soviet Union, which makes perfect sense as both Castro and Brezhnev were African black power enthusiasts with absolutely no ulterior motives in encouraging seditious Americans.

More Hollywood donations:

• Ben Affleck: $2,000 to Wesley Clark
• Chris Carter: $1,000 to John Edwards
• Robert DeNiro: $2,000 each to to Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, and John Kerry
• David Paymer: $500 to Wesley Clark
• Ben Stein: $1,000 to George Bush

(Oh, to clarify, I’m not the “fact-checking police” who originally posted the comment.)

I think somwhere in the fog of high school biology I may have been exposed to the correct information, but the plot lines and theme songs from two decades (60’s & ’70’s) of television seem to have used up all my long term memory slots.

Think I’m joking?  Try this:

Sing the theme songs to Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres and Mr. Ed (extra credit for the closing themes). Good, now (without looking it up) tell me the periodic table symbols for Sodium, Potassium and Silver.

Not feeling so smug right now, are you?

No clue about the TV theme songs.  I think the Gilligan’s Island theme lists the people on the island, and says something about a fateful trip, but when I try to hear it in my head I just get fragments of “A Whale of a Tale” from Disney’s version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.  I had to look up what movie that song’s from just now.  Mr. Ed: something about “a horse, of course, of course?”  Hell if I know about Green Acres.  But the elements are Na, K, and Ag, and I’m not a chemist.

I’m also not a child of the 60s and 70s, but I’m not sure I could do much better with more recent decades.  If Cheers’s theme indeed has just the one verse that I’m thinking of, I could probably do that. Faced with the choice of recitation or immediate execution, I could probably come up with The Brady Bunch’s song.  But not Friends, which had its theme song on the charts for a bit — or, well, anything else for that matter. Maybe TV show themes don’t have lyrics as much as they used to. Alias, X-Files, and Mythbusters don’t, anyway.

I’m not “feeling smug” right now, but it doesn’t strike me as a hard question.

Well, maybe I know bits of Thundercats, one of my brother’s old shows. And everything else I’ve forgetten. If you come up with songs you’re sure I’m forgetting, go ahead and ask. But let me state for the record that I have Gold, Antimony, Tin, Lead, and Tungsten down pat. [Not enough emoticons in my posts of late. Any time it seems like I'm being a dick, mentally add a smiley. That will work, unless I'm actually just being a dick.]

One of my local NPR stations is having a pledge drive, as you might have inferred from a previous post. Good grief, the hosts are annoying in pleading for money. They try every trick, every guilt trip, every manipulation in existence to compel you to give money. I want them to stay on the air as much as anyone, but it gets ridiculous.

One interesting departure, however, was when they delved into the realm of fact. They cited a statistic, presumably calculated by dividing the annual operating budget by the number of minutes in a year, that it costs $18 per minute to run the station. They were proferring this as if it demonstrated the high cost of the radio station. Does it seem to anyone else that this is really cheap? $18 per minute is thirty cents per second; you can drop quarters into a coffee can with a slot cut in the top faster than that. If I can count out an amount of money, in broadcasing, with coins, in real time, I don’t think it can qualify as expensive. I’m not complaining: paying NPR, PRI, and BBC subscription costs, as well as maintaining multiple offices and many hosts and on-site reporters for so little money is admirable. I just don’t think it’s expensive.

I narrowly avoided a traffic ticket yesterday. I was leaving a drive-through restaurant and was making a right turn. I saw a car coming, but it seemed to be adequately far away. I started to pull out, and realized it was coming faster than I had thought. Instead of stopping or backing up, I accelerated and essentially cut the speeder off, forcing a deceleration. As I did it I thought, “Boy, if that’s a cop, he’s going to be pissed.” Sure enough, it was. The cop (I know I said ‘he’ earlier, but it could have been a woman) flashed his lights at me, which was a nice adrenaline rush, and swerved around me to race down the street. I guess he had something more important to do.

In a bit of twisted accounting, I guess that savings pays for last week’s NPR contribution (otherwise known as “At that price it had better be the mug Christ drank out of at the last supper.”)

As a first-order approximation, all 41kB emails are viruses.

Tolweb’s Tree of Life web project is so cool, you wish it was 1000 times as detailed as it is. Among other things, you’ll learn that they don’t teach you about Archaea in high school (or didn’t me), bats are more closely related to humans than they are to rodents, penis worms and peanut worms are different, and water bears aren’t nearly as cute as you’d hope.

There are lots of things that some people have a problem with that don’t bother me at all, even though I wouldn’t do them myself: gay sex, body piercing, first-trimester abortion, smoking marijuana, and promiscuity with careful protection, for instance. There are lots of things that I don’t personally approve of but don’t think should be illegal, such as heroin use, cigarette smoking, extreme body modification, Abrahamic religion, and S&M. There are even things involving death that fall into the latter category for me, such as suicide and properly documented euthanasia. I think the resources of society should be extended to help these people, should they want it, but in the end I believe people have a right to their own bodies and minds. But surely — surely — we have to have a law against one man offering himself for sacrifice and another man killing and eating him.  Right?  I mean — right?

Problem is, I can’t figure out how to justify this. If suicide is OK, and meat-eating is OK, and hurting and killing another person with his or her consent is OK, why is this behaviour different? Why am I so viciously opposed to this? Some people will surely claim this points to a failure of a life lived without a God-given moral code, so if you want to post and say something like this, that’s fine, go ahead. If you want to post a non-answer, such as “How can you approve of those things in the first list?” or “How can you oppose the things in the second list?” that’s fine, too. But I’m really hoping some fellow extreme lefties among my readers (Dave? Becca?) will help me tackle this. Is there something unique about human slaughter and human cannibalism among “consenting adults” (let’s be really clear here, there’s no way we’re not talking about severely fucked-up people with significant mental health problems) that makes it worthy of legislation, or do I need to bite the bullet and say that if people are free to their own bodies, they’re free to do this as well?

From Metafilter:

It was a week before Xmas in 1989. I, my girlfriend, and a friend from out of town had gone out to a Sunday brunch … When we got home, we found that our apartment had been burglarized. The back window was smashed , the Xmas tree … was knocked over, all the presents had been opened, and everything wearable or electronic was stolen. We called the police. They showed up and came in to inspect the scene of the crime. They took statements from us, looked at the broken window, tsked-tsked about the rising crime rate in our neighborhood, congratulated us on having the foresight to have renter’s insurance, and were preparing to leave when one cop turned around.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to my three-foot-tall bong pipe leaning against the couch.

As he came back in the apartment and I watched in horror as my life dissolved, his partner put a hand on his shoulder and said the coolest thing I’ve ever heard come out of a cop’s mouth:

“When we catch those burglars, we’ll be sure to ask them why they left that there.”

There seems a trend in, say, the last ten years, to make movies where the “twist” is that some portion (frequently a large portion) of what you just watched, action committed to honest-to-goodness celluloid, properly dressed, acted, and scored, never actually happened in the story, that you have been watching the delusion of a main character filmed not as a delusion but as reality. I’m not going to list the films I’m thinking of here, because doing so will spoil the point of the movie, but I can name four five six without putting much thought into it. The questions are, how many can you name (again, please don’t list them)? And do you think this is losing its novelty?

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

In what dialect or dialects of English do the pairs image and stage, grimace and grace rhyme?  Can anyone help?

I found a site called Gender Genie, that “uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.” So I decided to do a controlled experiment. Taking publicly-available blog entries, it predicted that I am male, my brother is male, my brother-in-law is male, and Bob Mike is male.  Not bad, I thought.  So I tried the other set.  And the genie predicted that my wife is male, my sister-in-law is male, my brother-in-law’s girlfriend is male, and Bob Mike’s girlfriend Chelsea is male.  Not a bad algorithm, methinks, as long as you only feed it texts written by males.

Interesting thing is, I am nearly certain I could identify the sexes of each of these people by even a small sample of his or her writing. This implies that I’m doing something semantic (likely), some more sophisticated syntactic analysis (less likely), or both (oddly, I guess this is likely.)

“[T]he next morning, courtesy of Tim, I had 23 pictures of the house, the cars in the driveway (with license plate numbers) and the neighborhood. I’d like to see a Dell user do something like that at 4:30 in the morning for a complete stranger a thousand miles away.” This guy, a Mac fanatic, sought vigilante internet justice against an online con artist, and succeeded.  He fantasized about killing him.  But at least he didn’t.

Chris Marquis, a disabled loser teenager, operated an online radio equipment scam within full view of his kleptomaniac mother. Until, that is, his mom signed for a UPS package bomb and carried it to her son’s room. His fatal mistake was trying to cheat obsessive truck driver Chris Dean. Marquis had tried to trade radio equipment with Dean. Dean’s equipment was worth twice as much. Why did Dean go for it? Because Dean, who packed his Anarchist’s Cookbook pipe bomb in hex nuts for maximum fragmentation damage, had stolen the gear to begin with. Nice when a story has so many sympathetic characters, isn’t it?

You can read an account of the Dean case if you don’t mind subjecting yourself to the worst piece of journalism ever penned.

A bill has just passed the Georgia House making it a crime to allow a child’s genitals to be mutilated (including male circumcision) but allowing consulting (er, that should be consenting) adults to do whatever the hell they want to their own genitalia.

Just kidding.  Male circumcision is still allowed.  But all female genital mutilation — including adult women seeking piercings on their own bodies — are expressly forbidden.

When the issue of consentual female genital piercing was brought up to sponsor Bill Heath (after a 160-0 debate-free vote), he was reportedly “slack-jawed”.

“What?  I’ve never seen such a thing,” Heath said. “I, uh, I wouldn’t approve of anyone doing it. I don’t think that’s an appropriate thing to be doing,” he went on to say, as if what he thinks women should be doing to their own bodies is in any way relevant.

Stone Gossard gave $2,000 to Howard Dean.  Janeane Garofalo gave $2,050 to Howard Dean, which exceeds the maximum allowed donation of $2,000. If she knew about the limit she may have tried to hide it: she divided her contributions between NY and LA addresses.

Is it a good thing that I can find this information in a few seconds? I don’t think so. But if there is one lesson to take away from this, always, always, use a PO box or PMB for political contributions.

(I guess this post could be titled “George W. Bush: Thanks, Dad!“)

(Note added 30 March 2004, and for readability not in the standard red: This is not how this post originally appeared. There was an alternate version that was on the site for about twelve minutes that I hoped, after revision, that people would miss. That’s the problem with having legions of devoted readers (insert appropriate string of punctuation that qualifies that as a wry attempt at humor): they catch you on that stuff. I was asked if I had “gotten an email” and was trying to “cover [my] ass”. So, for the record: no, I was not. I was just being an ass, and caught myself. My original post, which was intended to be somewhat funny, had said something really snarky along the lines of “Janeane Garofalo gave $2,000, but at least she tried to hide it.” I of course have no evidence of this, and although what she did was illegal, it’s wise to “never attribute to malice [or malfeasance] that which can be attributed to stupidity.” I respect Janeane Garofalo and apologize for any offense. I do, however, think she should get a letter from the FEC.)

It’s painfully self-aware pop art, and I love it.  Check out the globe.  Everything is, unfortunately, sold out.

I saw The Wicker Man the other day.  I may be naïve, but I had no idea they made movies this disturbing in 1973.

(No, I won’t link to it at IMDB. If you want a disturbing film, better that you know absolutely nothing about it, other than the fact that I gave it nine stars at IMDB.)

I know it’s one o’clock in the morning, but I want to do my bills right now and both my banking site and my loan site are down for maintenance. This doesn’t happen with paper, does it?

You know, I went to school with guys like this.  Everyone wanted to kill them, not just the military.

We all know that some conservatives are dumb as fucking rocks. Some liberals are dumb as fucking rocks. Some moderates are dumb as fucking rocks. But it’s still mildly amusing when The Associated Press uses “conservative” as a euphemism for “dumb as a fucking rock.”

Continuing the mcgees.org trend of reviews for crappy TV shows, I watched the series premier of “Century City”. It has some interesting things going for it. It’s set in Los Angeles in the year 2030, and its genetically-enhanced-humans-3D-holographic-displays mood reminds me most of — and I know this is unflattering — the ill-fated 1993 sci-fi show Time Trax. But aside from that, the writer seemed to have a lot of fun, and many subtle things increase the enjoyment factor. There is the offhanded remark about characters from LA driving to Thousand Oaks to go to a nightclub (OK, local joke, but trust me, it’s funny), there is the name (”Axl”) of a seven year old not raising any eyebrows, there are the seventy-somethings named Jason and Melanie, which is just about perfect. Kristin Lehman’s character is named Lee May, but watching the show I was desperately hoping her name was actually Li Mae, that there would be nothing odd about somebody with a trans-culture name in 2030 (I know that her character, who is probably around 30, would have been born in 2000, and white girls still aren’t being named Li Mae in large numbers, but it’s still a cute idea.)

Ioan Gruffudd, despite having a kick-ass Welsh name, is unbelievably bad. Good-looking in a preppy way, but horribly, embarrasingly bad. Some of it might be the effect of having to affect an American accent and having it come out unnaturally shrill and abrasive (the Catherine Zeta-Jones phenomenon), but really he’s the worst thing this side of Elisabeth Röhm (oh interesting, they were born less than six months apart.  There must be something horribly defective about 1973. 

The best thing the show has going for it? It enters the landscape in the middle of the vast Sahara that is American Tuesday “Prime Time” network television. Even if it only lasts until June, it will probably be better than anything else that’s on. Faint praise, but praise nonetheless.

Donald Rumsfeld to Eric Westervelt: “We’ve been working the U.N. from the very beginning.”

Now presumably he accidentally ommited a crucial preposition, but not to put too much of a pop-Freudian spin on it, how indicative are lapses like this of underlying mindsets?

Hear for yourself: NPR News, headline “Rumsfeld: Iraq Improves Despite ‘Uneven’ Security”, timecode 04:03.

I had a notable experience at Home Depot today. I had to pick up some things for work (yes, I know, I write software) and thought that as long as I was there, I should pick up some poultry staples. I didn’t actually know what they were called, approximating them as “U-shaped nails with a point on both ends that make an eye when you hammer them into wood.” Lame explanation, but I used my thumb and forefinger to help, which is a technique I use frequently at Home Depot.

(It’s also fun to describe something that you aren’t sure exists but have a need for, e.g., “I need something to plug into my power drill to turn it into a sander.”

“Oh, right over here.”

“Thanks, and, uh, I need something to plug into my power drill to let me cut things.”

“Well, that doesn’t actually exist, you’ll need a Dremel tool for that.”

“Oh, OK.  Jenn, can I get a Dremel tool?”

“What would you possibly need a Dremel tool for?”

“Uh, to cut things.”

“No.”)

I was led to them (we’re back to the poultry staples) and put a 1 lb. box into my orange shopping bucket. I used the self-checkout because, let’s be honest, it’s lots of fun. First I rang up all my modeling supplies for work, and used the corporate credit card to pay for them. I then set those items aside and scanned my 1 lb. box of poultry staples.

The price came up as $0.01.

That was unexpected.

I called over the sales associate who supervised the four self-checkout stations and explained the situation.

“Perhaps you can buy them individually, and that’s a per-staple cost?” I asked.  “But surely they’re not one cent per pound.”

She took the box over to her station and rang them up there.

“No, they’re ringing up as $0.01 over there, too,” I suppose suspecting it be a per-station bug, “so I’d just take it. They’re probably liquidating them or something.”

I always feel a little bit awkward in these situations, as I’m not sure her manager would agree, but hey, I had the blessing of a clerk. I was setting them down onto the scale (there is a digital balance on each station, and presumably an associated weight for each item in the store on a server, and they check to make sure the weight matches what they’re expecting) when she said “no, no, don’t put them there”, took them out of my hand, and put them on the top of the machine, above the touchscreen display. OK, that’s fine, I’ll swing with it. I take out one oxidized penny, dropped it into the coin slot, and received my receipt for $0.01.

So if you need poultry staples….

Let’s say you’re convicted in Great Britain of a crime you didn’t commit. After decades in prison proof of your innocence comes to light. David Blunkett (Home Secretary) wants the right to bill you for your time spent in prison. No joke. The reasoning is that you shouldn’t have been able to scam free room and board off the state if you didn’t have reason to be there in the first place.

Starting at the beginning and working with the defaults, where does it start to get difficult for you?  For me it was chromatic intervals — too many choices.

Awesome site.  I’ll be playing with it a lot.

Crossing Jordan from Sunday was actually OK, and it looks like Ken Howard is back.  Best line: “I’m an insomniac and a recovering addict.  When you can’t take sleeping pills, Lifetime Network’s all you’ve got.”

I can take sleeping pills, however, and my Ambien’s kicking in.  I’ll see how my modifications to the spam filters on mcgees.org worked tomorrow.

A LiveJournal meme I picked up from Bob Mike: Turn on your music randomizer of choice (iPod, WinAmp, CD jukebox), set it to shuffle play, then list the first twenty songs it plays.  You can post your response on the discussion page, or post a link to your personal corner of the web if you want to put it there.  I made a vow to not edit the list, regardless of how unflattering it might be :-).  Here it is.

1. The Colour of Memory, “Into My Own”    (from The Old Man and the Sea)
2. Massive Attack, “Teardrop”    (from Mezzanine)
3. Black Sabbath, “Hand of Doom”    (from Paranoid)
4. Silverchair, “Abuse Me”    (from Freak Show)
5. Mudhoney, “Night of the Hunted”    (from Tomorrow Hit Today)
6. Metallica, “St. Anger”    (from St. Anger)
7. Candlebox, “Butterfly (reprise)”    (from Lucy)
8. Tool, “Forty Six & 2″    (from Ænemia)
9. Days of the New, “Bring Yourself”    (from Days of the New 2)
10. Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes, “Hey Hey What Can I Do”    (from Live at the Greek)
11. Garbage, “Vow”    (from Garbage)
12. A Perfect Circle, “Breña”    (from Mer de Noms)
13. Fugazi, “Strangelight”    (from The Argument)
14. Jeremy Toback, “Unbecome”    (from Perfect Flux Thing)
15. The Kronos Quartet, “Pannonia Boundless”    (from Caravan)
16. The Young Dubliners, “Don’t You Worry”    (from Breathe)
17. Enya, “Smaointe…”    (from Shepherd Moons)
18. Page & Plant, “Heart in your Hand”    (from Walking into Clarkesdale)
19. Led Zeppelin, “You Shook Me”    (from Led Zeppelin)
20. Queensrÿche, “The Lady Wore Black”    (from Queensrÿche)

This is really unsettling.  Who is doing research on me?  And who is offering information about me?  What kind of information are we talking about?

Here’s the pitch of the company:

Obviously, there must be some people in our world that have previous experience with almost any particular
individual.  The problem is that you may not know them, or know of them.  Furthermore, many times the people
you know are reluctant or unwilling to share information with you because they lack anonymity.  For
example, one person may not be comfortable sharing information about another person because of fear that
same person would later discover he or she shared this information, and so on and so forth.

Yikes.  This is terrible.

(Note added 26 July 2004: Oh, I see, it’s a scam.  Clever.)

“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”  Typically sensationalist Sun journalism, but I’m captivated.  I know it’s morbid, but really, he had it coming.  Poisonous animals are not pets.  And make no mistake, nature needs scavenger animals, and there is no reason humans should be exempted.

I know I would have regretted it, but I wish there were pictures.

Following the TV recommendations from a few days ago, it turns out that Mythbusters was a repeat and Crossing Jordan is still as crappy (sorry) as it used to be, except now it seems to be missing perhaps its best actor, Ken Howard (how this will affect the “mythology” episodes about Jordan’s mom is unclear.)  At least it’s on twice a week now, though (Sundays and Fridays), so you can at least see more of it.   And it still, of course, has Jill Hennessy, the reason I watch the show, as I mentioned on the discussion page.  As much as I want her to be, however, she’s still not a very good actress.  Not Elisabeth Röhm-bad, mind you, but not very good.

Alias was good, though.  If I felt guilty about my pleasures, this would be near the top of the list.  By almost every metric I should hate this show.  My brother and I have talked about this.  “It should suck,” as he says, “but it just doesn’t.”  I will complain about the horrible, embarassing, complete sell-out product placement in the episode, however.  They’ve always had a sweetheart deal with Nokia, it seems, and I’m fine with that: the copyrighted “Nokia tune” plays every time Sydney’s phone rings.  But this time was an order of magnitude worse.  The agents were pursuing villains through a parking garage.  The latter jumped in a Mustang to speed off, and our heroes have to nick a car to follow.  They have a split second to decide, and Sydney hollers (yes, hollers) “the F150!”  Not “that one!”, not “the truck!”, not even “the Ford!”, but “the F150!”  Then they cut to a close-up shot of the logo on the vehicle’s side and hold that for a bit.  The heroes begin to drive (no indication of whether the keys were in the car or whether they hot-wired it in approximately 0.3 seconds) but, Oh No!, the truck is boxed in.  That’s fine, “the F150″ pushes the other cars out of the way, then races down the helix of the parking garage, cornering at speed, and generally looking like a car commercial.  When the villains get away (not due to a failure of “the F150″, but because they tried to go out an entrance and were gracious enough not to want to push the innocent occupants of the other car into traffic), we cut to commercial.  There is a still graphic on the screen and a voiceover says, as if we hadn’t gathered, “Alias is brought to you by the new F150.”  And then — wait for it — there’s a commercial for “the F150″.  Presumably this technique is used to combat TiVo users, and presumably we will see this more and more of this as time goes by, but let me state for the record that this sucks.

Not Crossing Jordan-sucks, mind you, but it sucks.