yesterday... | ...all my troubles were so far away

Tuesday, November 26, 2002

Funny is watching a geek go flying across the room with a knife in hand, attempting to kill a very small pig, while screaming "That'll do, pig!"

Thank you, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for making my world a slightly better place.
8:33:05 PM

National Story - canada.com network--Bush... "that idiot". Opps, another Canadian politico is caught with memo referring to Bush as "that idiot";
National Story - canada.com network [Blog Left: Critical Interventions]

A media firm advising the Alberta government called Bush "that idiot" in a memo talking about the "moron" story...and in their spin to recover from this, the firm says "George Bush holds a BS from Yale and an MBA from Harvard ... and cannot be fairly characterized as uneducated or unintelligent." So, what, no morons with rich daddies ever came through the Ivies before? That's PROOF he's not an idiot?

Regardless of whether he actually IS an idiot (answer: vehement yes), it's truly pathetic that we have a president whose intelligence is so low that there can even be a debate as to whether he's a moron. Cue the music...!
6:31:34 PM

Pardon.. Bush Pardons Turkey. Ratio of the number of pardons George W. Bush has issued turkeys to those he has issued human beings : 2:1 [MetaFilter]

(cue the music!)

God bless America...
6:27:04 PM

Had an interesting discussion at work today with a friend of mine. He's a libertarian, but doesn't really care to get involved very much. ie, he didn't vote this last go-round. He jokes that by voting, I've made myself complicit to the corrupt system. Of course, I point out to him that the opposite is true, but hey, that's not the point of this post. He can be a bit of a Bush apologist at times - he's repulsed by the name Kennedy, dislikes the idea of "liberals"...you know the type. I mention the Canadian Bush-is-a-moron incident, and agree with the sentiment. He's not quite so sure, so I need to back up my argument. Here are the reasons I can come up with off the top of my head.

  1. He could only manage a C+ at Yale while being the son of a rich and powerful legacy. I mean, c'mon - if he'd even asked someone else to write his papers for him, he'd have done better.
  2. He appointed John Ashcroft as Attorney General. Now, admittedly, there are two possible explanations for this horrible mistake: one is that he's an idiot, the other is that he's evil. There's no reason, besides stupidity or malice, for that appointment. In this case, I've decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's just dumb, not Satan's handyman.
  3. The thing he does with his face - you know the one, scrunching up his face like he either just ate something really unpleasant or is trying to read the teleprompted from a couple hundred feet away. Christ, hasn't anyone told him how he looks when he does that? I'd assume so - Karl Rove is about as media-savvy as anyone can get, so he's got to have told Bush. So why does he keep doing it? Answer: he's a moron.

Well, that's all I could come up with off the top of my head. Give me more - I want all the reasons, non-policy-wise, that we know Bush is a moron. True, the Ashcroft appointment could fall under policy, but as I said, that would prove he's just evil, which we'll assume isn't the case here. Most of his horrible policies could have been motivated by greed, owed favors to donors or family friends, or stupidity - that's not quite as easy to rule out as evil is.
6:26:00 PM

According to this story, at least 105 suspected terrorists were issued visas to enter the United States since last November. So not only is the federal government prying into our personal data, engaging in blatant racial profiling, and far more fun civil liberties-violating activities...but all that isn't freakin' working? This is a joke. This whole administration is a joke, and I have a very hard time understanding how anyone could take them seriously.
6:15:24 PM

a title!. "It is binding on all Muslims wherever they are, to consider the killing of the writer as a religious duty" Muslim leaders call for the head of the author who wrote that Mohammed would look for a wife among the contestants and subsequently sparked huge riots, killing 200 people in Nigeria. [MetaFilter]

What makes it even more disturbing is that, as The Raven points out, the guy who issued the fatwa isn't even a religious figure. He's a "Minister of Information". That's right - this Nigerian state's equivalent of Ari Fleischer issued a death sentence on a wiseass journalist. Wow.
5:23:41 PM

Nic Cage and Lisa Marie Presley are already getting divorced. This is about three and a half months after they got married. That's shorter than her marriage to Jacko, right?
3:42:03 PM

Tivo thinks I'm gay. My Tivo thinks I'm a gay pregnant man! This article documents the struggles that some people have gone to in order to gear Tivo's programming to their interests. As one man said of himself: " [I] often [order] cooking shows, which softens TiVo's view of [me]. "I don't want it thinking I'm an ax murderer,". [MetaFilter]

My TiVo is insistent that I watch M*A*S*H. A lot of it. That, and bad cop shows, and stuff from Animal Planet. As best as I can tell, this is due to me recording Simpsons, South Park, and Sports Night, Law And Order (in all its varieties), and anything I can find relating to dinosaurs. It was grabbing me history documentaries for a while, but it seems to have gotten bored with that and gone back to M*A*S*H and the Crocodile Hunter.
1:24:34 PM

In a comment to this post of mine, Maxine (of Maxine's Radio Weblog fame. Go read it.) berates the Democratic party for not being liberal enough - which we all know I heartily agree with - and the media for not giving the left any coverage - which is painfully true. But what's still banging around in my head are her last two sentences:

"I am too old, too female, and too fed upo to fight this battle anymore. Let 'em eat sand."

I'm not criticizing Maxine for this, not by a long shot. Rather, this reminds me why I HAVE to fight this battle. I'm young, white, male, and well-off. I'm comfortable - I don't need radical change to the way things are in this country for my own sake, not in the least. If I were to follow the established political path for guys like me, I'd be voting Republican by age 40. Fuck THAT - ain't happening. But I need to do more than just sit here and spew punditry into the blogosphere - I don't expect I'm changing anyone's mind, just providing another voice in agreement. So what can I do?

Here's my problem - I'm easily bored. I'll talk 'til I pass out, but I'll lose interest in doing something pretty quickly. What is there that I can do that won't bore me, as dumb as that sounds? How can I use my position (not in terms of money, but the advantages I have due to my gender/age/race/profession/etc) to move the Democratic party to the left? The ideal would seem to be to work for a candidate - a candidate exciting enough to keep me motivated. But that's a difficult thing to find right now. There's no one on the local level. There's no presidential candidate I know who could even possibly get me that interested. What is there, then? Anyone have any ideas? Or am I just being pathetic?
1:20:47 PM

Boston.com.  The Democrats get their war on.  Their target:  Saudi Arabia.  Given that 15/19 attackers on 9/11 were Saudis this makes sense.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

OK, I'm just as disgusted by the US support for Saudi Arabia while we're going to war with Iraq, but I'm not exactly pro-war there either. Gutting our support? Yeah, definitely. But not war.

That said, I'm really enjoying the spread of "get [your|their|his|her|etc] war on" into the world. As memes go, that's a good one.
1:05:19 PM

"Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" tickets for sale (4) [Bureau 42]

...which means it's time to find a theatre around here that's going to do the midnight premiere on the 17th of December. Last year, I had to go in to Boston, to the Fenway theatre, to do this. I'm hoping that the Lowell Showcase Cinemas will be doing it this time - what with that being a 10 minute drive from my apartment and all. I should check with them and find out...
1:00:44 PM

Local kid picks up Sox. Boston Globe Nov 26 2002 6:12AM ET [Moreover - Boston news]

The new GM of the Boston Red Sox is the youngest GM in the history of major league baseball. He's 28 and 11 months. In other words, he's just about exactly four years older than me.

This means I still have a chance to get into baseball. =)
12:47:47 PM

New ape population found [BBC Science & Nature]

Ok, so really I'm just all about the picture of the orangutan. But it's pretty cool - they've found 2000 more of 'em in a forest in Borneo. This actually increases the total number of orangutans by 10%. That's sad - but this should really help preservation efforts.
12:29:54 PM

Fatwa Laid On Miss World Journalist. Plastic::Media::Dumb: Isioma Daniel - whose published claim that the prophet Mohammed would have been happy marrying a Miss World contestent, leading to riots in Nigeria that killed over 200 people - has been issued with a fatwa. [Plastic: Most Recent]

This whole Miss World situation (whenever I hear Miss World, I think Hole, which makes this all even stranger) can't be real. Seriously - this is way too bizarro to be real, right? And is it wrong that I think it's f'n hilarious? Anyway, best way to sum it up is a South Park quote:

"Dude, this is pretty fucked up right here."

Truer words have never been said.
12:21:46 PM

If you came by here in the last couple days, hoping to get your fix of Dreaming of China-blog-goodness, I apologize - I didn't sleep Sunday night, for reasons I won't get into, I've been having computer troubles, I've been busy at work, and I've accidently developed a life. I know, I know - neglecting the blog is not a good thing, but I do apologize. More to come over the day today - I've got to wade through a tremendous chunk of News Aggregator fun...
12:16:53 PM

the sun will come out... | ...tomorrow