| New Blog. Let's see how long I stick with this one.
I was approached recently by a representative of the Republican Party to produce advertising materials for their top candidates. What follows is my list of preliminary suggestions:
The Rudy Giuliani Armband. Really, if you don’t know what he’s about at this point, you’re either an idiot or just not paying attention.
The Mitt Romney 20-sided die. Consistency check… failed. (Five geek points if you get this one)
The Fred Thompson inflatable suit. Does all the thinking of the real Fred Thompson. Script not included.
The Mike Huckabee Pre-Thumped Bible. Get used to it, he’s going to win the primary.
The Ron Paul Constitution. All the 1776 goodness, with none of that bothersome nonsense about women’s suffrage or the abolition of slavery.
… there’s somebody else…
Oh yeah, I forgot John McCain. That’s ok, so did he.
What do we think?
- Nick | comments: Leave a comment   |
| | I mean, I know they're all bad. And it's long been said that the only person that can stop Hillary is Hillary. But in choosing a song by that horrible hack Celene Dion (and, as some have already said, outsourcing the song to Canada), she's done one of the few things that could torpedo her campaign. Quite frankly, I'm glad she did it - now Obama (my current favorite) and others have a much better chance to win. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| And, as always when people like him die, I'm conflicted.
I'll confess to my first reaction when I found out that he was "gravely ill", as I recall the exact phrasing being, was "ooh, is he gonna die now?" Gruesome, sure. Justified? I think so.
We don't celebrate deaths, generally speaking. Whatever the reason, something about the end of existence doesn't lend itself to "celebration", in the unrestrainedly happy sense.
Falwell was vile. Racist, homophobic, hateful, scaremongering monster. But is his death something to be happy for?
Yes. Or at least, I think so. The world is a better place without Jerry Falwell, and that's not up for debate. Most people have something good about them, something that makes them worthy of debate and discussion, with the idea being that they're capable of some sort of salvation. I say most people, I really mean almost everybody. There are a handful that refuse to be redeemable in any social sense, and Falwell was one of those.
Sometimes, there comes a case where I wish I really did believe in heaven and hell, so that I could be comforted by the notion that somebody truly gets what they deserve in some sort of afterlife. | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
|
As a sidenote, the guy in the video is actually a minor league baseball player, named Hank Conger. He's apparently a somewhat promising player, which makes this video even funnier. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Subject: | Whoa | | Time: | 11:06 am |
|
| Google's homepage feature is now labeled "iGoogle". I absolutely love Google's homepage, and I'm not even being paid or told to say that. RSS is the new newspaper, people. But, on to the somewhat more interesting stuff:
I've been hearing rumblings about an alliance between Apple and Google, with Wired Magazine calling Google the perfect backend solution to Apple's data storage problems. Google's CEO has joined the Apple board of directors. The iPhone has Google Maps right in the thing. So, this is more than just smoke.
I really wonder what this could lead to. My mind doesn't work with things this big, not in a business sense, and they don't really talk in the interview in a way that lends itself to specifics about what this could end up meaning. What are are all of you thinking about this? | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I watched some of the Rutgers women respond to Don Imus referring to them as "nappy-headed hos". They were offended, of course, and some of them had some pretty sharp words for him. On the whole, though, I was impressed with the style and class of their responses, and their willingness to meet with the man personally. I would not have been so diplomatic. My response might go something like:
"Our accomplishments this season were the victim of an attempted hijacking by some 90 year old race baiting bigot, who would like nothing more than to take race relations back to where they were in the '50s. That's the 1850s, for those of you scoring at home. We will settle for nothing less than his immediate dismissal, and we have nothing further to say on the matter. Good night."
See, here's the thing: Tony Kornheiser pointed out that there are "Morning Zoo" type shows every morning, in every market in the country, that do things every day that are a hundred times more vile than this. That's true, or at least I think it is. I, personally, listen to a podcast called Pacific Coast Hellway, that on a daily basis says things far more offensive than this. But, for example, his two-week suspension starts not immediately, but next Monday. This week, he is doing a fundraiser for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He has done this for years, and he is able to raise this money because his voice has a credibility that comes with 35 years in traditional media.
One more thing: when you call a group of women "nappy headed hos", you are saying that they are inferior because of the way they look, and in no small part because they're black. That is the only possible way that could be construed as anything resembling funny - what else can that possibly mean?
So, when he says this kind of thing, it's not coming from the voice of a morning zoo, something designed to be funny and offensive. It's coming from a person that has the ability to carry great weight. Yes, his show is sometimes very coarse, and maybe Kornheiser is right in saying that this isn't among the top 100 of gross or offensive things he says. But the reason the hammer should come down on Imus is because he used this power to attack a group of women that do not have the power to fight back, and that this is not the first time he has done such a thing. When you have the kind of power and influence that comes with 35 years of experience in mainstream media, you have an obligation to be honest, fair, and civil above and beyond your obligation to be funny or entertaining. And when you run afoul of that obligation, and do so repeatedly, you have to go. You just have to go.
Don Imus has to go. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| So, what's new with Nick?
Not much.
I never did tell you all what I'm doing, school-wise these days. So I'm going to become a paralegal, and I'll probably finish that up some time in the next 12 months or so, with an eye toward law school a little further down the road. I'm actually enjoying the classes, so far, and I think it's a nice way of addressing my past total indecision about where my life is headed past some thing that we kinda think of as education. Of course, this is me we're talking about, so that could change at the drop of a hat.
What else, what else... I've started playing with Joost, a little bit - it's kind of the internet version of TiVo, I guess. The problem so far is that there's just not a whole lot on there, and this is because the designers - the same people that brought us Skype and... Kazaa, I want to say, one of the big p2p file sharing services that got taken down - have decided to go 100% legit this time around. Good move, I think, but I can't help wondering if their plan is to get bought out by Apple and incorporated into the Apple TV setup. If not, Apple has eaten their lunch, and has access to far more than Joost can expect to bring in. Joost is a free service - what media company is far-sighted enough to post their shows on a free service, when they can use iTunes instead and make a quick buck? Big media doesn't take the internet seriously enough to actually consider the potential for things like ad revenue, which I guess is what Joost is after, and I don't see this changing any time soon, if the way they've really hesitated to embrace powerful new ideas like podcasting is any indication. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| "You know it's gonna be a weird day when it starts out by getting hit up by a prostitute." - based on a true story
"Kinda gives new meaning to 'eat shit and die', doesn't it?" - after informing a co-worker that the daily special ws canceled because it was to include spinich, and his wisecrack that it was actually named "e.coli salad".
"Hey, that's a nice shirt. What was it, a curtain? Drapes?" - I've got a handful of customers that I go back and forth with, trading insults. This guy was one of them, and to be fair, he started it.
"It must be the pigtails."
Just a day earlier:
"Have you tried a hammock?" - uh... I think I'm gonna leave this one alone. Guess, if you want to, but it has nothing to do with back problems, except maybe in a very much peripheral sense. And yes, it was funny, and just a little bit mean - she thought it was funny, anyway. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| An actual spam subject line: "Your dick is your weak issue because it is so small."
It's good to know that, after all these years of merely insinuating that I have a tiny, lifeless penis, they've finally come out and said it. Although I'm not sure how they'd know... | | comments: Leave a comment |
| http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71142-0.html?tw=rss.index
Do you have what it takes to create a LiveJournal? Well, ask yourself this question: Are you able to put words together? Not in complete, grammatical sentences, mind you. Are you able to take a word and another word and place them one after each other? Then you're set!
Still, if you want your LiveJournal to contain more than two words, you may want a little push in the right direction. Here are some simple LiveJournal guidelines.
Do take quizzes. The best quizzes are the ones that tell you what you are. You fill out a bunch of questions and find out that you're Adm. Adama or Princess Daisy or a crowbar. This is important because not only do they fill space -- your main goal as a LiveJournalist -- but how can anyone know the real you unless they understand that of all the Pokémon, you're Charizard?
MORE AT THE LINK!!! | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| Nothing new, really. Or, stuff that's "new", but not exceptionally notable. Or... shit. I can't explain it, it just feels like I'm doing a hell of a lot of nothing lately.
The quarter ended at my new school - pretty sure I got A's in all three of my classes. Woot.
Personal - nothing new. I still oscillate between reasonably happy and vaguely disappointed with the way things are going. Maybe that's normal, who knows. I still have this feeling like I should be "doing something", and I still don't have a clue what it is that I should be doing.
Except... that. That WILL be done very, very soon - I've waited way too damn long already. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| All classes 6:00-9:50 PM
Tuesday: Intro to computers
Wednesday: Critical thinking
Thursday: Intro to law
Should be easy... then again, that's what got me into trouble last time... | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I was going to do a podcast over the past few days, but I can't talk for more than five seconds on end without coughing, so that's out. So, I'll go off on my little rant here, instead.
By the way, this guy already beat me to most of it, and he's far funnier than I am anyway.
The topic of right-wing outrage this time of year, as it is every year, is some perceived "war on Christmas". What strikes me this year, though, is that the people attacking Christmas the hardest are the people who claim to be defending it. I'll explain.
"Massengill" Bill O'Reilly, who attacks "secularists" nightly for "pushing the phrase 'Happy Holidays' onto the American public" sells Holiday ornaments for a Holiday tree on his own personal website - or I'm told. I wouldn't do myself the mental damage of actually going to his website, but I have it from multiple credible sources (which is more than * had for going into Iraq. I guess this means I can wage a war against... but I digress).
Then, there's this gem from CNN. Apparently, these churches hate the baby Jesus so much that they cancelled their services on his birthday, which just happens to fall on a Sunday this year. What this means, of course, is that they don't get to use the "make the holiday about Jesus" argument ever again - not that the argument made much sense in the first place given the pagan origins of what is now known as Christmas and the consumerism that has come to define the holiday, involving the kind of blatant show of wealth that Christianity was supposed to frown upon.
I was going to open the show with a sound clip of Sam Seder's brilliant dissection of the rhetoric of these right-wing nuts when it comes to "war". Since, obviously, there will be no show, I'll post the unedited quote here: "Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money." | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| How the hell is it possible for some people to have their heads buried so far in the sand that they just repeat whatever gets told to them? How is it that the vast majority of Republicans now support torture? How is it that the United States became a state that openly practices torture, and sends "suspects" to countries that torture for exactly that? And for god's sake, how is it that, when the light is flashed upon them and the legion of rats scatter, there are still some that defend them?
The only answer I have is that these are people who, actively or passively, want an absolute dicatatorship here in the United States. Their authoritarian mindsets like "strong" leadership, right or wrong, and are willing to jump through any hoop necessary to prove their "loyalty" to the regime. They want a Big Brother, a benevolent despot on whom they pour their affections even as he kills and tortures their own families. They want perpetual war, a cause to believe in, even if they don't know what the cause is. They want an Emmanuel Goldstein - an enemy, always an enemy, and they want him alive and free so that they can hate him for that much longer.
I used to think these people were just ignorant, that if they were shown the light they would come join us. They're not ignorant - at least not in the sense that they don't understand what's going on. They understand, at least on some basic level, and at the end of the day, this is what they want, and they're willing to accept any crime, to have any sense of their own decency violated, in order to get it. When they say, "America, right or wrong", what they mean is "Authority, right or wrong". And it frightens the hell out of me that these people are the base of our current leadership. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I expect very little to change.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that I started work this week. Having to be there at 7 AM blows, as does the job, but at least I get paid for it, as opposed to dog sitting and random task-doing for free at home. | | comments: 10 comments or Leave a comment |
| |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rant_factory's journal
