Let me be the first to say that if Senegal does not disarm these monkeys, the US will be forced to take our security into our own hands. Clearly a simple chimp can't be trusted with advanced weaponry such as this.
This will not be tolerated and if Senegal doesn't do their part, we will not distinguish between them an the terrorist monkeys they harbor.
Everything I needed to know about money, I learned from Eddie Murphy:
Billy Ray Valentine: Okay, pork belly prices have been dropping all morning, which means that everybody is waiting for it to hit rock bottom, so they can buy low. Which means that the people who own the pork belly contracts are saying, "Hey, we're losing all our damn money, and Christmas is around the corner, and I ain't gonna have no money to buy my son the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip! And my wife ain't gonna f... my wife ain't gonna make love to me if I got no money!" So they're panicking right now, they're screaming "SELL! SELL!" to get out before the price keeps dropping. They're panicking out there right now, I can feel it. [on the ticker machine, the price keeps dropping]
Now is the time to buy, people. Buy and hold. That's my motto. Go find the dog of the Dow that took a big beating today, whose long term prospects are still good and buy it. Chances are, people panicked today because of the craziness in China.
Remember those Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercials? "You got peanut butter on my chocolate!" "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" I loved those commercials.
Well, now I am having a techie deja vu from those days. Instead of PB and chocolate, this time it's TiVo and iPod. "You got TiVo on my iPod".
What am I talking about? Jack Bauer is on my iPod and he's fucking up terrorists, baby! How did he get in there? Did I pay $1.99? Nope, I TiVo'd him.
See, TiVo, unlike your cable/dish DVRs, supports a feature called "TiVoToGo". This allows you to take your TiVo'd shows (which are in MPEG-2 format with a binary TiVo header and a .tivo extension) off your TiVo settop box and put them on your PC. You can see where this could be handy if you are a business traveler, for example. In addition, a 25 dollar upgrade to that software will enable features that transcode this to different formats that are playable on other portable devices such as a Sony PSP or, yes, iPod. That's pretty damn cool and that's how I got Jack Bauer on my iPod. Try that, cable bitches!
My buddy Toast says, "I don't like watching TV on my iPod". This is, of course, a valid complaint. Going from today's monster screens to 2.5" is tough. Maybe on a long flight? Dunno. The true value, IMHO, is in this little guy.
A video cable for the iPod - twenty bucks. Hook this little doodad to your iPod's headphone jack and the other three ends to a TV, and voila! Mobile TiVo. That, my friends, is truly badass.
Once again, the three talented dudes from Rage Against The Machine are without a singer. I believe Gary Cherone is available. This is somewhat of a bummer as I have truly grown to appreciate Audioslave and it's interesting mix of inventive guitar and sublime vocals.
Here is an example of them at their best - Show Me How To Live
And with the early dawn Moving right along I couldn't buy an eyeful of sleep And in the aching night under satellites I was not received Built with stolen parts A telephone in my heart Someone get me a priest To put my mind to bed This ringing in my head Is this a cure or is this a disease
(chorus) Nail in my hand From my creator You gave me life Now show me how to live
And in the after birth On the quiet earth Let the stains remind you You thought you made a man You better think again Before my role defines you
(chorus) Nail in my hand From my creator You gave me life Now show me how to live
And in your waiting hands I will land And roll out of my skin And in your final hours I will stand Ready to begin
Good stuff, eh?
But, I'm not crushed. As I learned when Soundgarden broke up (one of my absolute favorites), in truth I am a Chris Cornell fan. That dude could sing the yellow pages and I'd plunk down 18 bucks on a CD. He is fantastic. And he has a solo album coming out on May 1st and I will buy that.
What of the rest of Audioslave? Meaning, the three dudes that used to be in Rage? I thought they never reached the musical peak with Cornell that they did with that grating dude named Zack. I always loved the music of Rage and just wished you could cut the singers mike. Rolling Stone has some ideas.
We nominate Sammy Hagar, Mark Lanegan, Ed Kowalczyk, James Iha or Peter Gabriel.
Clearly the first and last are jokes (I mean, I think they are). Lanegan is an interesting choice, because he's another singer that I freakin' love. I've always thought that Screaming Trees was a severely underrated band and Sweet Oblivion was an hidden classic. But his style hardly fits those dudes. James Iha sings? I didn't know that. Lastly, I think Ed is a really interesting choice. He's weird enough that what they came up with might be really interesting.
Goodbye Audioslave. Potential not fully realized, but some sweet albums nonetheless.
A while ago I posted about Faux News' attempt to combat the Daily Show with conservative comedy. Click above to feel the hilarity (h/t Crooks and Liars).
I was right, the conservative view point isn't funny.
And when I say "center", I mean politically between McCain and Lindsey Graham. ArghGHGHGHGHHGHGH!!!!!!!!!!
Why did my fellow nutmegers vote for this lying bastid?
UPDATED:
OMF FSM... Toast just pointed me out this article in the New Yorker about Holy Joe. This portion jumped off the page at me(and right out of the monitor and did a little jig on my cerebral cortex - the emphasis is mine).
--- To Democrats, Lieberman’s most vexing quality is not his early support for the war—Clinton, Dodd, and Edwards, among other senators, voted for the Iraq-war resolution in 2002. It is that no development—not the absence of weapons of mass destruction, or the Administration’s innumerable and well-documented mistakes in post-invasion Iraq—has lessened his admiration for President Bush or his belief that the war has aided America in its fight against Islamic terrorism.
“I’ve had a lot of disappointments along the way here,” Lieberman said. “So why do I trust President Bush in spite of the mistakes that were made, consequential mistakes? Because having watched him, having talked to him, I believe that he understands the life-and-death struggle we are in with the most deadly and unconventional enemy, Islamic extremism. And that he has shown himself, notwithstanding all these mistakes, willing to go forward with what he believes is right for the security of the country, regardless of what it has done to his popularity.” ---
There's that word again. "I Believe". "He Believes".
That's the biggest thing Dubya and Holy Joe have in common. They're believers. At some gut level, they subdue their rational thoughts and replace them with irrational religious beliefs. Their religious beliefs cause them to be irrational about Middle East policy. Joe because of his understandable allegiance to Israel. Dubya because he's a nutty born again who thinks Jesus will return in Jerusalem and all the good people will be sucked up to heaven (I knew about the books, but they even make video games about this stuff - crazy).
When you look at these two infuriating men in that light, their actions (which are otherwise an unequivocal assault on reason) make complete sense. It also makes their potential to lead this country to ruin even greater. 2008 can't come soon enough.
Two of my favorite companies are working together to deliver downloadable movies to your TV.
This is pretty exciting. For one thing, this will skip the need for you to use a PC at all. In fact, a TiVo box is a PC (linux based). Most likely, you'll be able to use your TiVo remote to navigate to an Amazon based front end, select a show and buy it, just like Cable On Demand.
It explains a lot about why the "no brainer" merger of Apple and TiVo didn't happen. Apple clearly had it's strategy for getting content onto TV's with AppleTV. But there, you still need to surf the iTunes store, download it and then play it on your AppleTV. That's not nearly as easy as just using a remote, and it offers no DVR functionality. Who wants that thing?
The only other contender that I see for this space is Microsoft, who is rumored to be planning to use the XBox 360 as a platform to deliver TV content, probably by using the media extender functionality that allows your 360 to connect to your Windows Vista Media Center. Let's face it though, like all Windows stuff, it's gonna be big, slow and probably a bit messy. They'd love to have honest to goodness PCs attached to your TVs, but most people won't want that. And TiVo already has lots of boxes in homes everywhere.
If it were, then for one brief moment, I could be content in the knowledge that this lying bastard isn't my senator. Unfortunately, this typo won't change the terrible truth for us nutmeg-state-ers. Our junior senator is a douchebag.
* 4 ripe avocados, peeled, seeded * 1 tsp ground cumin * 1 ripe, medium Roma tomato, seeded, diced * ½ Cup minced sweet white onion * 2 serrano chilies, seeded, minced * ¼ Cup chopped cilantro leaves * 4 Tbsp fresh lime juice * Hot pepper sauce, sea salt, white pepper to taste
Instructions
1. Cut avocado in large chunks and mash coarsely in large bowl with a fork. Add remaining ingredients and blend gently - leaving some small chunks is fine. Taste and adjust seasoning with more pepper sauce, salt and pepper if desired.
Well, I believe in the Bears from Chicago. I see this being one of those Super Bowls that's crappy and disjointed for most of the first half, followed by a point explosion right near halftime and one of those second halves when the teams just trade scores (like the Pats-Panthers Super Bowl). And in those games, either team can win, right? So here are my predictions.
This is the reason that Google Video and YouTube are great. This is a 20 minute or so lecture outlining a case not just against Religious Fundamentalism, but Religious Moderation, too. There are about 10-15 ways I considered summing it up, but you're better off just watching it.
This, in combination with the minor hype surrounding the God Delusion, has me thinking quite a bit. I've always fallen into the "live and let live" camp. What does it matter to me if some hick wants to dance around speaking in tongues at Jesus Camp? I don't care. But that changes when certain things happen. Primarily the following two items:
1) Engineers fly planes into buildings - one of the things that always confused me thoroughly about 9/11 was that some of the terrorists were engineers and architects. College educated. See, I went to a pretty good engineering school and regardless of the particulars of your field of focus, the essential lessons are the same. When presented with a challenge, break down things into things you can quantify and things you can't and then use various proven techniques to break down those unquantifiable things into approximations of their quantity. The result of all that should be good enough to work.
You could think of it as an engineer basically saying, "I may not be able to get all of the math 100 percent accurate because there are just too many unquantifiable variables. But with good assumptions and hard work, I get close enough to 100 percent to get that rocket to the moon."
That's basically the engineering method, the somewhat intellectually lazier and more anal sibling of the scientific method. What it ingrains upon a young mind is general disdain for the unquantifiable (at least it did mine). Those are barriers to success to be worked around, not pillars to be leaned on. Religion is unquantifiable. It's not measurable. I never understood how an engineer could give himself over to something like that. Certainly not without serious doubt. Religion and Engineering are in direct conflict.
Clearly, there's something different about this religion thing. And as Mr. Harris states above, it's the lack of rationality. See, engineering solutions are only as good as their assumptions. And when "God Is Great" is your base assumption, every conclusion you draw is suspect. Furthermore, when that which is at a person's core is irrational, irrational behavior is what you should expect. Once you believe that God wants you to fight America, flying a plane into a building makes a lot of sense. And engineers are uniquely suited to make it happen.
2) When a very religious and intellectually incurious person is elected president. You know who I'm talking about. When Dubya got elected, he ran as a compassionate conservative and not being Bill Clinton. Uh, ok, whatever. When the election was stolen, I shrugged and thought, well, "if he's anything like his Dad, it'll be more annoying than awful. " Boy, was I wrong.
How was I so wrong and how is he so different than his Dad? Religion. Sure, Dad was a christian, but clearly not at the fundamental level of junior. Like most northeastern WASP-y types, it was most likely for appearance sakes than out of piety. If anything, his worst characteristic was that he had little or no moral compass. He had many jobs in government at all levels and could see all sides to every issue and you could just tell that he didn't feel strongly about any of it, but did what he calculated to be right. And those calculations were almost always based on money or politics, and that allowed much latitude for actions of questionable moral basis (Uh, Iran-Contra anyone?)
Dubya is a different beast. Every single thing he does, from tax cuts to waging war, is faith based. He believes that what he's doing is right, no matter what it is he's doing or how it may be going. That's why he's so goddamned stubborn. Once you accept that Jesus is the son of God, rose from the dead and that sometime later you were "called" to be the President, ignoring the facts on WMDs or the "progress" in Iraq is a breeze. When you've already done the hard part of subduing your rational side, the irrational comes easy.
So, how does Religious Moderation come into play? Mr. Harris demonstrates that above more aptly than I probably can. But essentially, it lends credence to irrational beliefs and ignores the ugly side of each religion that fundamentalists believe to literally be true. It creates a P.C. environment where we can't criticize religious beliefs because for some reason they have some inherent legitimacy and are mostly harmless. But believing in God on Sundays isn't harmless when it's one step from shooting doctors at abortion clinics or blowing yourself up in a market square.
It just isn't. So, I guess my days as a "live and let live" guy might be over. Oh yeah, and did I mention that I have two kids and my wife says she may want to send them to Sunday School?
UPDATED: Toast was all over this years ago. And yes, I was one of the people that made Toast nuts by saying he was showing the same level of intolerance as fundamentalists. My bad, dude.
