Re: Prop 19 buzzkill

On 11/3/2010 6:12 PM, Brad Morrison wrote:

Well, shucks. Major bummer. I was sure that the citizens of the Golden State would overwhelmingly approve. I guess I should have relocated in time to have citizen voting status.

I have to say that having 46% of voters agree to decriminalize a drug that has been persecuted and demonized for over 60 years is pretty amazing.

Still, I disliked Prop 19.  Besides the fact that it violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution (though as Karl Lehenbauer pointed out, NY had done a similar thing during Prohibition) I thought there were too many problems with the measure: it was worded terribly, it touched on things it didn't need to (employee drug testing), it further gave power to the localities to make things an even bigger legal mess, it still wouldn't make marijuana legal in the eyes of the Feds, and it's fairly redundant since the current state of medical marijuana in California means it's pretty much already legal to smoke pot as everyone knows it's a fucking joke.

The proposition was conceived and sponsored by Richard Lee, douche-bag extraordinaire.  Yeah, he's that gimp in a wheelchair that proclaims himself the Mayor of Oaksterdam and appears in every news special about pot.  If Marc Emery wasn't incarcerated I'm sure he'd have helped fund it as well.  Richard Lee has amassed a small fortune as a "Medical Marijuana Dispenser" (dope dealer). 

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to get high without fear of arrest just as much as everybody else, but to abuse the legitimate use of marijuana as a medicine to do so is fucking wrong.  Richard Lee has done this.  He illegally sells illegally grown weed to many people without any medical problems.  The guy is a tool.  I support recreational drug use, but I support medicinal drug use more, and this asshole has abused and bypassed the law to make a killing without fear of arrest and made a mockery of CA medical weed laws.  Meanwhile the black and latino dope dealers still face large jail sentences if they are caught.

Marijuana will never be fully legalized.  We'd have to break the Single Convention on Narcotics to do that, and breaking treaties isn't cool or likely to happen.  The best we can hope for is for Marijuana to be rescheduled, and for social change to cause local and federal authorities to not even bother with enforcing marijuana laws (like the Netherlands). 

There is currently a proposal under review to reschedule marijuana, but this will take several years to be (most likely) denied again.  Attorney General Eric Holder has stated that they do not wish to prosecute medical marijuana users.  This violates Federal law, and still makes it illegal for said patients to OBTAIN weed.  Under the Controlled Substances Act the Attorney General has the ability to reschedule drugs at his discretion.   So a simple solution would be for him to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule II.  This would then allow states with medical marijuana laws to operate as they should.  The government could then close down the illegal dispensaries, and patients could go to the pharmacy and get their Ole Miss grown weed legally (well, after the government cracks down on NIDA, and makes them grow real weed, and not schwag, and either relieves them of their duties or bitch slaps them into not being retarded).

The first step in my book is making sure patients can legally obtain and use quality product without fear of arrest.  After that, then we can look at the rest of us lighting up for fun.

--
Dave Maez
You got a Benz, I got a busket: Gimme a dollar!

Film Adaptations of Comic Books in the New Millennium

Sweet Jebus!  There have been over 50 films released since 2000 that are based on comic books.

Marvel and DC have by far the most comics made into movies, with Marvel being extremely dominant. 

Marvel has released 20 films (12 of which were sequels) since 2000.  All of them were super-hero films, and all but Punisher: War Zone made money.  Unfortunately, while these films grossed a ton of money, only 3 of them were actually any good: X-Men, Spider-Man, and Iron Man.  Marvel has plans to release many more bad but high-grossing movies including more X-Men and Avengers sequels, another Ghost Rider movie and a Spider-Man reboot.

DC has only released 10 movies since 2000, with both Catwoman and Jonah Hex failing miserably.  Though they haven't release as many movies as Marvel, or made as much money, DC also has the Vertigo and Wildstorm imprints that rely on other themes besides super-heroes.  So we don't just have to witness lame Superman and Batman movies (though Christopher Nolan's Batman reboot has been excellent).  We get Alan Moore's characters in Constantine, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen, and other non-super-hero movies like The Losers and Red.

Thankfully independent comics and comics from small publishers give us a much wider variety of topics (though still giving us shit like Hellboy and LXG).  300 is the top small publisher comic adaptation to date, and had a 601% return of investment (larger than any other comic book film) and was probably why producers decided to back Frank Miller's The Spirit which was a box office disaster.

Marvel / DC
2000 - X-Men (Marvel)
2002 - Spider-Man (Marvel)
2002 - Blade II (Marvel)
2003 - Daredevil (Marvel)
2003 - Hulk (Marvel)
2003 - X2 (Marvel)
2004 - Catwoman (DC)
2004 - Blade: Trinity (Marvel)
2004 - The Punisher (Marvel)
2004 - Spider-Man 2 (Marvel)
2005 - Elektra (Marvel)
2005 - Constantine (DC)
2005 - Fantastic Four (Marvel)
2005 - Batman Begins (DC)
2006 - X-Men: The Last Stand (Marvel)
2006 - V for Vendetta (DC)
2006 - Superman Returns (DC)
2007 - Spider-Man 3 (Marvel)
2007 - Ghost Rider (Marvel)
2007 - Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Marvel)
2008 - Punisher: War Zone (Marvel)
2008 - Iron Man (Marvel)
2008 - The Incredible Hulk (Marvel)
2008 - The Dark Knight (DC)
2009 - Watchmen (DC)
2009 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Marvel)
2010 - The Losers (DC)
2010 - Jonah Hex (DC)
2010 - Iron Man 2 (Marvel)
2010 - Red (DC)

Small Publisher / Indie / Foreign Publisher
2001 - From Hell (Indie/Top Shelf)
2001 - Ghost World (Indie)
2002 - Road to Perdition (Paradox Press)
2003 - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Indie/Top Shelf/DC)
2003 - Bulletproof Monk (Indie)
2004 - Hellboy (Dark Horse)
2004 - AVP: Alien vs. Predator (Dark Horse)
2005 - Sin City (Dark Horse)
2005 - A History of Violence (Paradox Press/DC)
2006 - 300 (Dark Horse)
2007 - 30 Days of Night (IDW)
2007 - TMNT (Mirage)
2008 - Hellboy II (Dark Horse)
2008 - The Spirit (Indie/DC)
2008 - Wanted (Top Cow)
2008 - Speed Racer (Shogakukan)
2009 - Surrogates (Top Shelf)
2009 - Astro Boy (Kodansha)
2009 - Whiteout (Oni Press)
2009 - Dragonball: Evolution (Shueisha)
2009 - Solomon Kane (Dark Horse/Marvel)
2010 - Kick-Ass (Indie/Marvel)
2010 - Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Oni Press)
2011 - Priest (Daiwon C.I./Tokyopop)

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AgAGaKD0clcNdGtJaDFiM0libnpndUZ5ZGdaay1Jc0E&hl=en&authkey=CKLq46UG

Actors doing multiple comic book characters:

Chris Evans is the king of Comic Book films with 5 different characters:

•     Fantastic Four (2005)  [Johnny Storm]
•     4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)  [Human Torch/Johnny Storm]
•     TMNT (2007)  (voice)  [Casey]
•     The Losers (2010/I)  [Jensen]
•     Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)  [Lucas Lee]
•     Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)  [Steve Rogers/Captain America]
•     The Avengers (2012)  [Steve Rogers/Captain America]

Character actor Jason Flemyng gets around, too:

•     From Hell (2001)  [Netley, the Coachman]
•     The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)  [Dr. Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde]
•     Solomon Kane (2009)  [Malachi]
•     Kick-Ass (2010)  [Lobby Goon]
•     X-Men: First Class (2011)  [Azazel]

Ryan Reynolds with 3 different characters:

•     Blade: Trinity (2004)  [Hannibal King]
•     X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)  [Wade Wilson]
•     Green Lantern (2011)  [Hal Jordan/Green Lantern]
•     Deadpool (2012)  [Wade Wilson/Deadpool]

The same for  Morgan Freeman:

•     Batman Begins (2005)  [Lucius Fox]
•     The Dark Knight (2008)  [Lucius Fox]
•     Wanted (2008)  [Sloan]
•     Red (2010/I)  [Joe Matheson]

And Scarlett Johansson:

•     Ghost World (2001)  [Rebecca]
•     The Spirit (2008)  [Silken Floss]
•     Iron Man 2 (2010)  [Natalie Rushman/Natasha Romanoff]
•     The Avengers (2012)  [Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow]

And Bruce Willis:

•     Sin City (2005)  [Hartigan]
•     Surrogates (2009)  [Tom Greer]
•     Red (2010/I)  [Frank Moses]

And Jeffery Dean Morgan:

•     Watchmen (2009)  [Edward Blake/The Comedian]
•     Jonah Hex (2010)  (uncredited)  [Jeb Turnbull]
•     The Losers (2010/I)  [Clay]

And Nick Cage:

•     Ghost Rider (2007)  [Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider]
•     Astro Boy (2009)  (voice)  [Dr. Tenma]
•     Kick-Ass (2010)  [Damon Macready/Big Daddy]

And Ben Foster:

•     The Punisher (2004)  [Spacker Dave]
•     X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)  [Warren Worthington III/Angel]
•     30 Days of Night (2007)  [The Stranger]

And finally Samuel L. Jackson also plays 3 characters:

•     Iron Man (2008)  (uncredited)  [Nick Fury]
•     The Spirit (2008)  [The Octopus]
•     Astro Boy (2009)  (voice)  [Zog]
•     Iron Man 2 (2010)  [Nick Fury]
•     Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)  [Nick Fury]
•     The Avengers (2012)  [Nick Fury]

* Information gathered from Amazon's IMDb and Box Office Mojo sites.

--

Dave Maez
sellout:DM.upYP1ZArCc:0:0:Dave Maez:/us/SC/Greenwood:/bin/ksh

snmp hell

So I set about to learn SNMP today. I think I have the basic concepts down. All I really want to do is query every interface port on a Cisco switch we have for ifName, ifDesc, ifOperStatus, ifInOctets, ifOutOctets. I tried in perl with Net::SNMP first, but I don't want to use the OID, I want to use the MIB names. Then I tried plain ole SNMP, but the damn package is broken for ubuntu lucid lynx. Suck.

I then tried to look for some Python netsnmp examples. I'll be dammed if I can find a single code example. Apparently no one codes SNMP scripts in python.

I'm getting the nagging feeling that what I'm trying to do is stupid simple. I just can connect the dots.

Any suggestions from anyone? I'd prefer python or perl as due to work requirements, I'm bound to those languages. Yes, Dave, I know those both suck, but I gotta work with what I got. I guess I could live with a bash/bourne script, but it's got to be able to shove the In/Out numbers into an rrdtool database, and I'm pretty sucky with bash scripts. 

BTW - Yes, I'm still an electrical engineer.  I'm just trying to improve our departments IT infrastructure.

Jack Chick

So I saw someone had uploaded Jack Chick's "Happy Halloween" and I downloaded it with glee. Of course I had forgotten that most of these are available online: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0032/0032_01.asp.  My favorite section of the tract:

So these two dudes' friend, Timmy, died right in front of their eyes after having been struck by a car.  Their first reaction, "He's in Heaven right?"  Fucking assholes.  Maybe if you dicks had spent less time in Sunday School and more time in First-Aid, your "friend" would still be alive.  And of course their super-Christian mom knows just how to comfort and console her grieving children who blame themselves for his death: "Fuck no, that bastard is burning in HELL!"  Gee, thanks, Mom, I'll never get to sleep again... ever.

She loved that boy... but she doesn't anymore, she fucking hates Hell's tortured souls.  And, thanks again, Mom, for explaining that our friend, Timmy, was in your Sunday School class, since you force us to attend as well, we'd have never known that... Holy shit—Timmy's "worldly" friends are complete bad-asses!  He's like taking part in some real-life awesome version of Easy Rider.  There's a Satanic 1%er and a 30 year old pot-head!  How the hell was he cool enough to hang with these guys?  He must have been some kind of drug mule, since no one would ever believe a sweater-wearing douche would be up to no good.

Timmy's thought bubble, "Nice rack.  She's a crazy Jesus Freak, but I'd still hit it."  What I find most surprising is that Timmy isn't going to Hell for participating in Halloween.  I'd have thought that was a one-way ticket in Jack Chick's eyes.

Someone should tell Jack Chick that the words "Hell" and "Devil" are proper nouns when used in relation to the Christian mythos.
Since Mrs. Baxter's God is insane, and let's "bad people" in Heaven over "good people" as long as they repent, I'd like to point out something: As someone who was raised with Christian brainwashing beliefs like Timmy, I know how easy it is to fall back on old habits when in grief. This is the third stage of the Kubler-Ross model.  As Perry Ferrel sung, "Hope is just another word for prayer."

Let's take a look at yesterday evening's events.  Timmy, Bobby and Dork-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named had gone Trick-or-Treating and were greeted by crazy people who take their Halloween cos-play way too seriously:

Let me take you through Timmy's 5 stages of grief as he ran crying from the crazy people:

1. Denial - "I cannot believe I went Trick-or-Treating with these fucking losers!  Oh God, there is NOT a turtle head poking out!"
2. Anger - "I better not shit my pants in front of the dorks!  Why was I spending time with these losers anyway?  I should have been gang-banging some bitches with my 'worldly' friends."
3. Bargaining - "Oh Sweet Jesus, I'm sorry!  Please don't let me shit my pants!  I promise to stop staring at Mrs. Baxter's tits."
4. Depression - "Fuck! This sucks!"
5. Acceptance - "Ow, I just got hit by a car—and I shit my pants."

Thanks to stage 3, Timmy is now in Heaven, so screw you Mrs. Know-it-all Baxter. 

So in the end, poor Timmy got to go to Heaven, and his parents got rich from suing those crazy Halloween people and that guy who was driving over the speed limit in a residential area.  Sadly, Mrs. Baxter and the two dorks ended up stock-piling weapons at their friend's compound in Ruby Ridge until the FBI "accidentally" killed them all.

Thanks for the funnies, Jack.

--
Dave Maez
You got a Benz, I got a busket: Gimme a dollar!

Re: [FiveQuestions] Retards (was: Evolving Language)

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:17 PM, Dave Maez <sellout@dharmadevil.com> wrote:

On 8/31/2010 8:59 PM, JZ wrote: 

PS - I don't get how people get so bent out of shape about words like "retard", changing the words doesn't change the meaning...

[then Dave wrote some great stuff about how the fervor over "retard" is really just some (heh, heh) retarded political correctness -- and that term is bullshit too, yo. Why do we have to be politically correct about some assholes who think they know how everyone else should act? ]

 

I think this is just another example of retards using a normal word to hurt others, and fucking it up for the rest of us because some other retards try to "fix" it. Like that retard "manager" I get every few years, who's such a pussy that he can't talk to the person whose behavior he thinks needs correction, so he sends a memo to everyone and vaguely, pussily talks around the problem. I guess those aren't all pussies, though: Edward 'Tiger Mike' Davis was most definitely not a pussy, but he did the same thing. With the memos. That's not a pussy, that's an asshole. Yes, there's irony in there, you retard.

Back to the matter at hand. See also nigger and other racial epithets, and, well, other epithets. That is, epithets started as words. [ if you're going to click on any link in this dopamine-fueled response, click that one, nigga ... what, what? Dopamine? Yeah, I'm talkin' to you, Substantia Nigra. ]

I think George Carlin expounded on this many times, as did Lenny Bruce. They blew it, though, when they argued from "they're just words." IMHO, words are the ultimate power of humanity. You can fuck your own self up if you tell yourself harmful things, and some of the most powerful dramas in human history are about one or more people fucking someone else over with words alone.

You may recall that I taught retarded adults for five years. My first stint was an ICF/MR5 facility, i.e., high functioning, needed exemptions for profoundly retarded people, and they lived there. It had a professional name, but we employees called it Richard's Retard Ranch because the QMRP (and director) was Richard Jordan, who also called them retards. He was great; he knew and taught that retarded people have to be better than normal people, i.e., they have to try harder and be conscious of their retardation, because everyone else can tell that they're retarded and tend to stare at them and wait for them to fuck up. Because, you know, they're retarded and I'm not.

That was the really weird, mind-bending part: They knew that they were retarded, and they could, and did maintain the meta-awareness to manage it. As long as they weren't in a bad mood, or distracted, that is. You know, just like "normal people." Yup, retards lose it, too, and in those moments, they seem to be the most normal, because, like everyone else, they act like idiots when they're upset.

Anyway, we said "retard" because we felt we'd earned the right after having been spit on, shit on, punched, kicked, lied to, and manipulated by the "residents" (hey, look, more irony). Richard, on the other hand, had written a dissertation and regularly presented at conferences about how important it was to defuse the word "retard" with retarded people, and especially with their relatives. He was so grown up about it that he could be a child with the people under his care.

Finally, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMpsttlXye8&NR=1, "rih-TARD" vs. "REE-tard." I could swear that Alan pointed out that the latter would be spelt with two e's, though.

-- 

Brad Morrison, brad.morrison@gmail.com. Part-time retard, full-time sysadmin. Go ahead, try and tell the difference.

Retards (was: Evolving Language)

On 8/31/2010 8:59 PM, JZ wrote: 

PS - I don't get how people get so bent out of shape about words like "retard", changing the words doesn't change the meaning...

http://www.r-word.org/  -- That whole site is fucking retarded.

Seriously, when you call someone a psycho, the Psychopath Anti-Defamation League doesn't get all pissy.

The National Council on Disability isn't beating down the doors of the creators and maintainers of the GIMP.

The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association doesn't yell at you when you mention how fucking gay Kenny G is.

The NRA doesn't come down on male porn stars for their constant references to "shooting" their loads.

NAMBLA didn't make a press release about how evil South Park was for their Uncle Fucker song.

And it's not the retards who are making a fuss about it (because retards couldn't create a website beyond a FaceSpace profile), it's their parents.  My open letter to those people:

Dear Fucktard Parents:

Look, I'm sorry you wouldn't stop drinking during pregnancy, waited until your 50s to have a kid, or have fucked up chromosomes, but you need to stop being so retarded.  Yes, you have a very rough life of raising a mongoloid ahead of you; yes, your god most certainly hates you; and yes, I'm a cruel bastard who has probably just cursed my children to bare retardo fruit; but I'm still not gonna stop pointing out how fucking retarded something is, when it is indeed retarded.

Sincerely,
Dave Maez, (Retarded) Asshole

Evolving Language

So I was getting my schadenfreude on by watching clips of people hurting themselves, and I came upon this mediocre video of a kid failing at a bike jump:
http://www.break.com/index/bmx-kid-faceplants-hard-on-board.html

Now, the injury was nothing amazing, but what was amazing is when the youthz in the video suddenly switch from American English into Bad French, thus introducing me to the Chiaque dialect of backwoods Canada.  Super cool.

This reminds me of the awesome barrio Spanglish the kids in Houston excelled at.  My senior year homeroom class was with a couple of  Martinez's that loved to switch at random between Redneck English, Spanglish, and Mexican Spanish.  It was how I prepared my mind for the day by trying to guess the rest of their conversation through context.

I can't wait for a future when we're all the same shade of brown, and we all speak in a language derived from pidgin English mixed with techno-jargon.  Destroy 2000 years of culture.

Which reminds me of a really fucking bad movie, Idiocracy, that I wasn't able to watch all the way through because it was written by someone who was obviously a pussy who was bullied in high school, and all I could think was, "Get over it, already!"   But regardless of the inane plot of stupidity ruling the world (wait, that's happening now!) the concept of everyone speaking the same dialect of broken English consisting of slang words from youth subcultures was excellent.

--
Dave Maez
Chicano like Ritchie Valenz - I don't speak a lick of Spanish, but I know all the words to "La Bamba."

Scott Pilgrim vs the World

Summary: Go and see it right away. If you have to wait for the next showing, all the better, because you can play games in the lobby.

Details: I don't know why I waited to see the film. The tipping point was hearing an interview with Edgar Wright--actually the introduction to the interview, where I found out that SPVTW was made by the same guy that made Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. If I'd known that, I'd have seen it on opening day.

Not since The Matrix have I consciously thought about the next time I would see a film. I saw it yesterday, I was one of five people in a 2:20 showing on a Saturday, and three of the other people were my kids. I actually couldn't care less what studio executives think about the money it's not making--I just think it's a phenomenal film, which is mind candy to anyone who's ever played video games. Beck wrote a lot of the music, also the film is about rock, and romance, and ... just see it. In the theater.

The introductory trailers were OK. By the time they started rolling, I was numb from the advertisements--which were from losers. How ironic: Movie theaters are going under IMHO, like newspapers and physical music recordings. The ads were for Jeep (Chrysler's red-headed stepchild), Sprint (hind tit in the mobile phone game), and Madden NFL 11 (a game way past its prime).

Still, once the movie started, it was all good. Awesome from the start. Never a dull moment. Several times I thought, I didn't get all that, I'm going to have to see this again. ... cool. Yes, movie theater prices are outrageous. I still say this one's worth it.

I think next time I'm just going to sit through 2 or 3 showings.

Music Midtown 2002 Smackdown

I'd been meaning to write up the events of Friday, May 3rd 2002 for a while now, and finally got in the mood to do it.

Midtown Atlanta has an annual outdoor music festival every spring called Music Midtown.  My mom and I decided to buy the full weekend tickets so we could attend all three days.  My mom's a hip-hop fan, I'm a rock/metal fan, and we're both classic rock fans, so the festival would work well for both of our musical tastes.

Friday was the start of the festival, so after work we drove down to the Alpharetta MARTA station and caught a train to midtown.  We arrived and wandered around for a while, not really interested in much since it was the first day, and nothing good really started until 10pm.

We walked past the "BellSouth/Z93" Stage and scheduled to play next was WAR.  We figured, fuck it, we'll sit down on these bleachers and wait for them to play "Lowrider" and be done with it.  However, to both of our surprise, WAR kicked ass.  Great funky music had us bopping and dancing all the way til the end when they finally played "Lowrider."

We were in good spirits after witnessing a surprisingly good show, and didn't even mind the rain that was continuing to fall in spurts.  We saw that Jethro Tull was playing next on the same stage in 30 minutes, and we were like, "Cool, we should get up closer to the stage for this." 

After securing our spots close to the stage we waited for about 20 minutes as the crowd gathered tighter around us.

There was a lady with her husband standing to my side smoking a doobie.  I gave her a smile and a nod, and she promptly looked away and kept on toking.  Bitch.  In my day we shared the wealth.  Oh well, I never feel good partaking in front of my mom, no matter how cool she is.

Then a group of about 10 Abercrombie wearing Frat guys and their girlfriends started snaking their way through the crowd and stopped right in front of us. 

My mother was a little incensed because we had stood waiting for 20 minutes to get a good view of the stage, only to have it blocked by a large group of six foot tall dudes at the last minute.  She told them to keep moving, and word came back from the front of their snake that they were trying, and both the Frat guys and their girls looked apologetic and embarrassed.

I thought, "Cool, at least these people are nice.  I wonder why they're not at the stage where Incubus is playing like they should be?" 

My mom, however, didn't seem to notice that they were politely trying to move through the crowd and taking a little bit longer to get out of our way because of this.  So she began to rage.

Now, my mom is super cool, and she's normally quite pleasant and happy.  Since I'm her son, and an asshole, I have managed to get her into a rage before, and it's not pretty.

But I had never seen her this angry in my life, nor have I since; and I still don't know what caused her to snap.

She suddenly just started screaming at the guys.  Obscenities and vitriol poured out of her mouth to a degree that would have impressed R. Lee Ermey.  The girls backed up, afraid, and the frat guys gathered and approached her slowly with their hands up in apologetic gestures in an attempt to calm her down.  I was just staring at her shocked for the duration of this.

Then she did something that finally caused me to react.  She reached over and crushed one of the guys' $8 MGD tallboys.  It erupted like a geyser all over him and I'm sure his fingers were probably in pain after being caught in her vice-like death grip.  I immediately flung my arms around my mother to restrain her.  I was begging her, "Please calm down, mom.  It's OK!" as I tried to pull her back away from the frat guys.

By this point, she was foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.  My mom had obtained rage strength and lunged forward again, and reached out from under my arms, and crushed another beer can, dousing some more frat guys in another geyser of watered down American lager.

The frat guys were like, "What the Fuck!?!" and growing angry themselves.  This is when I was sure I was about to die.

Women never seem to comprehend that while they can pick a fight with men and social norms prevent those men from retaliating, they are completely free to retaliate against any male who is with her.  In this case, me.  My mom's anger was leading to my inevitable public beat down by a gang of beer soaked frat guys.

The entire crowd was staring at us in shock and disbelief, when my mother made her final attack.  Through clenched teeth she shouted, "GET. THE FUCK. OUT OF HERE." and reached up under my grip again, grabbed one the shorter guy's white baseball cap, and threw it down into the mud.

As I was bracing myself for the punch that I was sure had to be coming at me, the shorter one bent down, picked up his hat, looked at my mom and said, "What's wrong with you, lady?!   Fine.  We're just going to go.  You're the meanest lady in the world, and you're going to Hell!"

As they were about to make their retreat, my mom (like a character in a bad action movie) growled back, "I'LL SEE YOU THERE!"

Which caused them to hasten their retreat, since they wanted absolutely nothing to do with that psychotic woman.

The crowd reacted with mixed enthusiasm as I let go of my mom (for all the good that had done me), and stared at her in embarrassment and exasperation.  Some clapped for her (the only people she heard), some laughed at the ludicrous situation, others were frightened and embarrassed like me.

I received a tap on the shoulder from the lady that had been bogarting a joint, and she offered me a hit out of pity.

I asked my mom what she was thinking, and she simply replied that they shouldn't have tried to cut in front.  Then she started getting giggly from the shock of adrenaline. 

I sighed and waited for the Tull to begin playing while keeping my head down and trying to avoid the looks we were continuing to get.   After a few minutes Tull started, and a few seconds later both my mom and I remembered that Jethro Tull is fucking lame.   She had just chased off some poor college kids who wanted nothing more than to sit through this silly flute music, and all we wanted to do was listen to anything besides that crap.

Since the irony wasn't lost on either of us, we had to stifle our laughs, and wait three whole songs before making a big production about our pretend desire to buy drinks, and left as quickly as possible.

--

Dave Maez

Barking tree frog

So I almost smushed this tree frog in a porch umbrella. After I put him down he shat a ginormous poopy so I guess the experience was tough on him.

Do you have any corn?

http://webmademovies.etherworks.ca/popcorndemo/

Sometimes inspiring, sometimes corny, plenty entertaining. Apparently the story isn't just the content of this video, it's the medium:

Developers at the browser maker's Drumbeat project — an initiative that advocates new open web technologies — have created Popcorn, a tool intended to make web video every bit as interactive as the rest of the web.

I like the idea. But, hey, I also liked VH1's Pop-Up Video show. The demo isn't as "in your face" as I'd imagined. The enhancements are mostly elsewhere on the page, except for the subtitles. I've seen augmented reality and several other cluttered visions of what was first called "interactive television," but Popcorn keeps things pretty well spread out. It does seem to lag a little bit -- expected -- as it identifies locations and people, then looks them up on Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, and so on. I like how the list of sites is dynamic, i.e., that list is probably not comprehensive.

I wonder about what seems to keep happening to companies that do one thing really well -- or at least, really lucratively -- and then say, Wow, let's branch out into something else! and then they die this horrible death, usually from starvation, and everyone just looks on, agonizing in blog posts about how great that company was, analyzing where they went wrong, and wondering whether the tools that this dying company developed will still be supported.
Oh, well. Good luck, Mozilla! We hardly knew ye, anyway.
-- 
A duck walks in to a bank, right up to a teller and asks, "Do you have any corn here?" The teller answers "No, we don't have any corn here." The duck turns around and walks out.

The next day, the duck walks back in to the bank, goes to the same teller, and asks, "Do you have any corn here?" The teller answers, "No, we don't have any corn here." Unfazed, the duck turns around and walks back out again. 

The duck repeats this for several days with the same teller. One day, the teller answers, "No, we don't have any corn here, and if you come in here and ask me that one more time, I'm going to nail your beak to the counter!" 

The next day, the duck walks back in to the bank, right up to the teller and asks, "Do you have any nails here?" The teller answers "No, we don't."

"Well, in that case", says the duck, "Do you have any corn?"

Propaganda Techniques of Bigots and Rednecks

So last Thursday, I was on some internet forum reading a thread on the Arizona immigration law.  I had already censored myself once, since I had gotten carried away before remembering that arguing politics on the intertubes is as pointless as arguing politics IRL.

Anyway, as I continued to peruse the thread, I noticed some bigot using the phrase "race card."  What a fantastic term.  Its use enables the bigot to pretend that pointing out racism is somehow a logical fallacy. 

Example:

Bigot: They need to just strip search every Arab who goes to the airport.
Normal Person: Umm, racial profiling is not only illegal but morally wrong and has been proven to be ineffective.
Bigot: Oh, there it is.  Somebody's always gotta pull out the race card.
Normal Person: What?

The same putz then ended his post with a hyberbolic metaphor/simile that wasn't analogous to anything being discussed, in an attempt to make the other argument seem as lacking in common sense as their little fable.

Jeff Foxworthy should actually have a joke for this: "You might be a redneck if all of your arguments end with a ridiculous metaphorical one-liner that has no bearing on the situation at hand."  Hmmm, doesn't seem to have the right ring to it.

Example:

Bigot: We need to waterboard the sunsabitches.
Normal Person: Umm, no, besides being cruel and illegal, torture has been proven to be an ineffective means of obtaining information.
Bigot: Horseshit.  If'n there's a deer tick on yer willie, ya don't hump a bear to get it off.
Normal Person:  What the hell does that even mean?

--

Dave Maez

God Hates Kansas

Judge: State ban on protests at military funerals unconstitutional

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/08/16/missouri.funeral.protests.ruling/?hpt=T2

So the gist is this:  That crazy Westboro "God Hates Fags" Baptist Family Church was picketing military funerals with their hilarious signs, and Kansas passed a law banning protests at military funerals.  A federal judge has rightly overturned the over-broad law, and Conservatives are up in a tizzy since they only care about civil liberties when it applies to them.

Again, this is why state's rights are stupid, because states are (somehow) even dumber than the federal government.  We just shouldn't let morons like Kansas be able to pass laws at all. 

The simple solution would have been to send a cop to these funerals -- where they expected protests -- and arrest the protesters for disturbing the peace.  The crazies can then try to argue free speech and be shot down since holding up a sign that says "Thank God for IEDs" in front of the grieving friends and family of a dude killed by an IED is not protected speech.

But no, these fucktards had to go pass an unconstitutional law where no law was even required, get it shot down, and make a federal judge who is trying to preserve our civil liberties look like a jerk in front of all uneducated Americans.  Thanks a lot, Kansas.

--
Dave Maez
sellout:DM.upYP1ZArCc:0:0:Dave Maez:/us/SC/Greenwood:/bin/ksh