Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Liverpool trounce Spartak. Liverpool's Champions League hopes are boosted by a 5-0 win over Spartak Moscow. [BBC News | UK] Bah - beating the friggin' Moscow team isn't that impressive. Liverpool is still tied with Basle for second in Group B, so they've still got a fair shot at advancing -  I think. I'm still getting the hang of the process for Champions League. All I know is my boys Arsenal are undefeated and in sole possession of first in Group A, and Bayer Leverkusen (I root for them solely because of the name, I'll admit it) is tied with Olympiakos out of Greece and Maccabi Haifa from Israel...behind the damn bastards from Man United. Damn Yankees have their tentacles everywhere.

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posted by insomnia_lj at October 2 5:56 PM. 'Imminent threat', my arse. The U.S. will be attacked tomorrow! Lili is a Cat-4 hurricane with sustained winds of 145 MPH and gusts to 180 MPH. She's expected to be of Cat-5 strength tomorrow. (hint: they don't make them any stronger.) The first landfill is expected at Avery Island, (home of Tabasco sauce). New Orleans should be spared the worst of the storm, but Lafayette and Lake Charles may face catastrophic damage and flooding. Lili brings with it an anticipated storm surge of twelve to eighteen feet, which may be exacerabated by landing during high tide. Lili is the first hurricane to hit the US mainland since the category 4 hurricane Floyd in 1999. Floyd did over $1B in damage and killed over 40 people. [MetaFilter] This mofo is definitely a weapon of mass destruction - I bet the Iraqis launched it at us or something. Didn't it just come through Cuba? Must have been Castro who did it, then.

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Great bit from the Chinpoko-mon South Park episode (on Comedy Central right now): Stan's parents are watching the Chinoko-Mon TV show to try to understand it. Stan's mom say they shouldn't let Stan watch it, and then... Stan's father: "It doesn't seem that bad - it's not vulgar or violent or anything." Stan's mother: "But it's incredibly stupid, and that can be far more dangerous than any vulgarity or violence." Right on.

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Don Juan Wears Accuvues - Dorothy Parker Aphorism Now Scientific Fact. Plastic::Etcetera::Fashion: "Research on short-sighted students in a nightclub has found that swapping glasses for contact lenses seems to make people more successful with the opposite sex" [Plastic: Most Recent] Hey, I still find girls with glasses more attractive than girls without, so screw this research.
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...ok, watching West Wing - they've got a supposed House of Blues Rock the Vote show, supposedly in Massachusetts. Two flaws - there's one House of Blues in Massachusetts, and it's a LOT smaller than the hall they just showed the concert in. Nitpicking, but hey, what I like about the House of Blues in Cambridge is how small it is. The other flaw - Barenaked Ladies playing an American election-related event. They're friggin' Canadians, people. =)

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...and just to make it worse, I missed her show a couple a weeks back at the Paradise in Boston. Dammit! Marianne Faithfull is one of the ten coolest human beings alive. Her new album, Kissin Time, is amazing, with the best Pulp song since Different Class. She started out as the most beautiful woman in the world with an angelic voice, sitting on a stool scared shitless, singing Jagger/Richards' As Tears Go By. She spent the last half of the '60s as a celebrity, Mick Jagger's lover and more, until she dropped out of reality to be a junkie - by choice. Broken English was her return to the world of the living - the most evil disco album ever. I'd write more, but I'm watching TV. =)

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Marianne Faithfull is in a friggin' GAP commercial. It's not that I'm attacking her for "selling out" or anything - it's just strange. Very, very strange.
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The draft resolution revealed [BBC World] Other than timeframes and the threat of force, I can't see why the Bush Junta is so hung up on this resolution as compared to the ones already in place. Anyone with a better head for international diplomacy want to take a crack at it?
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Bargain Hunter White House spokes-hawk Ari Fleischer is in the soup for an impromptu remark he made yesterday. Noting that a war in Iraq would saddle the U.S. with a bill of about $13 billion a month, Ari suggested that there are more economical ways to meet our objectives in the region. "The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that," Fleischer said. Hey, and if money's the hang-up here, I'll send 'em the 67 cents if that's all it's gonna take to wrap this thing up. [The Raven] Hell, I'll throw 'em a fifty to go out and buy a handgun. I'm sure they can find one on the streets of any American city. =)

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It's My First Amendment Right To Watch Virtual Rape, Dammit!. Plastic::Etcetera::Sex:Pornography: There is a niche in the Internet porn market that has even some free speech advocates worried: rape porn and its accompanying spam. [Plastic: Most Recent] I've been getting email for 6 and a half years now, so far back that I don't remember getting spam at first. In fact, I remember working customer service at an ISP in the summer of '96 and getting a confused call from a user who had just gotten their first spam and were wondering why they were getting an email from someone they didn't know. Funny stuff. Anyway - back to the point. I can remember the various porn-spam types I've gotten over the years. I've never worried much about making my email address public. It started out with just text - "Come see me naked!" and the like. Something like three years ago, the porn-spammers went nuts with HTML. Suddenly, porn-spam wasn't so funny any more - there were PICTURES there. The shift to "teen" porn in the spam had happened a while earlier, though traditional porn star imagery still played a major role. In the last year or two, the kinks have taken over - a quick search through the trash in my email program finds group sex, bestiality, specific ethnicities, "mothers I'd like to fuck", etc... I only remember seeing rape-porn-spam in the last few months. These spams are very different from the others - they often don't have pictures, and they definitely don't have the professional design of many of the other porn-spams. They still seem to represent a very small portion of the total porn-spam, but it is disturbing. However, as long as the participants aren't actually being raped, I believe there is no legal grounds to ban rape porn. Just because we don't like it doesn't mean we have the right to censor it. I've had some nasty fights with friends (and girlfriends) over this kind of thing, but it's really not debatable - the First Amendment doesn't enforce community standards on speech of any kind. If the activity photographed is illegal, and really happened (ie, wasn't simulated/pretend), there are crimes that have been committed, a la kiddie porn, but not pretend rape. It may be distasteful, but so's Mein Kampf. The spam, on the other hand, should be restricted/banned/etc...I'm not up on all the of the legal means of fighting spam, but these rape porn-spammers should be targetted.

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posted by xmutex at October 1 3:25 PM. Mother Teresa "cures" cancer, on her way to sainthood. Clearly cancer sufferers need only to pray to Mother Terresa to cure cancer! This story forces us to deal with the most crucial of questions-- why is religion so goofy? [MetaFilter] Because if religion wasn't goofy, it wouldn't really be religion. I know this sounds all wise-ass, but religion, by definition, means you're taking pre-scientific worldviews and somehow forcing them onto the modern world. Square peg, round hole, yadda yadda. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto...the big six actual religions (Confuscianism isn't religion along the same lines as these six) all have their origins in ancient times, with very little changes to the core doctrine. The Catholic church, at least since Vatican II and in Europe and North America, has done an impressive job in faking it, as it were. The Vatican hierarchy doesn't actually believe that Mother Teresa cured cancer in a literal sense - but she has to have performed some sort of miracle to be eligible for sainthood. And it's pretty hard to conceive of a system of Catholic saints that won't eventually include Mother Teresa. So they reach for vague, tenuous examples of "miracles" that can't be disproved, and seem kind of possible - like the above.

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posted by condour75 at October 1 11:22 PM. Save me, Jebus! In the episode Missionary: Impossible, Homer is sent overseas to be a missionary. En route he cries out "Save me, Jebus!" The gag is, of course, that Homer is the last person in the world who should be acting as a missionary (that is, assuming that anyone should in the first place). Well leave it to the good people of the Internet to take this sacrilicious ball and run with it. And run. And run. In the spirit of good nerdliness, it behooves us to note that Jebus is, in fact, a real place. [MetaFilter] A friend of mine from college had the "Save me, Jebus!" line down to an art-form.

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UK rejects weapons inspection deal. The UK Government joins the US in rejecting a deal reached for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq without a tough new UN resolution. [BBC News | UK] Argh. 'cos, you see, we don't want to actually get rid of those weapons of mass destruction we gave Iraq, we just want an excuse to invade 'em. And since when has the UK just agreed to everything we said?
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I had my one-and-only recurring dream last night - one of a number of variations on the theme of escaping from bad people. I've had these dreams for 20+ years, and they're the only ones I often remember. They're not nightmares, not any more at least, but they still mess with my sleep pretty thoroughly...
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