1% Inspiration

This Season's Huckabee?

2012-02-12T20:39:00.002-05:00

I am doing my best to avoid the Santorum surge (shudder) but there's just so much to go on to compare him to Mike Huckabee. They're both hyper-conservative sweater vest aficionados who have captured my attention during an election season for that weird combination of personal quirks that make me think they'd probably be great neighbors (as long as you're straight -Huckabee or white and straight -Santorum) but would just be destructive presidents (not to belabor this initial point but Rick Santorum thinks your rape pregnancy is a gift from god). Now if Santorum would just hold some goddamned fish or get photoshopped doing so we could really light this candle.

Anyway, since there is no way Rick Santorum can be this year's Huckabee until I see a photo of him holding fish, or some other form of wildlife, do not take this post as any indication that I will be following his case further but just in case you were wondering, if you are opposed to or uncertain of fracking, you are part of an ongoing campaign of environmental terrorism. So there you have it, from God's mouth to your ears, concern about earthquakes and poisoned groundwater = reign of environmental terror.

God this blog isn't funny anymore.

Mad Dog Fargo: Opinion For Hire

2012-01-08T20:14:00.000-05:00

I am not as interested in this particular election primary as I have been in the past for a number of reasons, principally becuase there doesn't appear to be any real drama here. Mitt Romney won this nomination two years ago and as much as the national media loves to play musical chairs with briefly surging competitors, none of them matter outside of their niche states. Also, John Hunstman, who stands out in this Republican field as both intelligent and not a jackass while the rest of the candidates are only one or the other (or neither), can't even get the 1 week swing in the polls that all the other unimportant candidates have gotten (or are getting presently - Santorum). There are people who aren't running for the nomination that poll better than him, which is unfortunate, because even though I have no desire to see a Huntsman presidency he does seem to me to be the only person who wouldn't immediately set about destroying all progress the country has made in the past 20 years. I'm as big a liberal asshole as anyone so this comment isn't necessarily meaningful but I really think Huntsman is the only Republican candidate who wouldn't personally poising my drinking water.

Despite my lower attention level, like most people, I love a good fuck up which means I was at my computer waiting pretty much every time Rick Santorum or Michele Bachmann spoke about anything and it slowly dawned on me that rubbernecking their media events had led me to what might be my dream job. I want to be the person the campaign goes to when the candidate says something profoundly stupid in order to spin it into a positive. Every campaign has one or several people who this task probably falls to but I think I could be better than most because I have very specific rules for engaging my services. 1) I cannot like the candidate as a person. 2) I cannot support any of their policies. I think working for someone I detest and disagree with would almost certainly improve my ability to manipulate language to defend them. First off, I wouldn't be disappointed when they said the dumb things I was trying to spin around. I already didn't like them, how far could my spirits fall? Secondly, I wouldn't have drank any of their policy Kool-Aid. I think the political actors working at this level in a campaign are too often ideologues who are going to fail to evaluate all the response possibilities, being too far stepped in the politics themselves. I, actively disliking the candidate and either indifferent or actively against their policies, am open to more ideas than someone hamstrung by their participation in the system. I would be a political mercenary, happy to exorbitantly charge my idiot clients for my expertise in getting them out of their self-made messes. And I'm not doing this to secretly work to sink the campaigns. I really do enjoy the thought process of trying to get around extraordinary screw ups. The concept of trying to manipulate the language used while operating under the incredible constraint of exact, idiotic, quotes is an awesome intellectual challenge and one I would love to have the opportunity to test.

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Animal Blog

2012-01-07T18:27:00.000-05:00

I swear I didn't post this story because of the Corgi, which is of course adorable.

I have posted this because...................

.........And the moment has passed. You see, dear reader, often times if I have a post idea and for an innumerable number of reasons either cannot or do not want to immediately post it, I email it to myself at which point it languishes near the bottom of my inbox with notices about my student loans and emails from friends that I am totally, one day, absolutely going to get back to only it's embarrassing that I haven't already, oh shit now there's too much to say I'm never going to do this until I'm too drunk to complete a sentence but I was listening to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack and I'm feeling sentimental so how's your life going?.

So the article is gone and a couple of halfhearted searches for anything related to the story have turned up nothing new to link to. My recollection of the story though is that it was going to be under the post title "Burying the Lede". This was funny partly because I believe the story author did bury the lede in the sense that the article (and original photo caption) privilege the angle on the dog finding its way home after an avalanche and don't bother mentioning that its owner died until a few paragraphs in. The other part of that post title being funny is that someone died in an avalanche. That's funny, right? I get that the dog finding its way home after tragedy is great and everything but given that this was the first I had heard of this I think the author should have upfronted the master dying, just so my heart didn't get too warmed before he crushed it.

Now I'm essentially guilty of the same thing, though to be fair my post is not about the avalanche but about me reading about the avalanche a month ago. Though I did almost put a picture of Ein from Cowboy Bebop at the top of the post so that probably cancels any good intention out. Does two Cowboy Bebop references in the same post make up for all of this? Yes.

New Slang

2012-01-06T17:49:00.000-05:00

Let me state emphatically that my New Year's Resolution is not to post here more often. That is unrealistic and all of the best life coaches from "Good Morning America" tell me that the first step in New Year's success is setting achievable goals, or they would have if I had watched "Good Morning America" any time in the last two weeks. I actually don't know that I've ever seen "Good Morning America" and I may be doing the show a terrible disservice by pretending to be able to predict their programming choices. (Update: Or maybe I'm not. http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/5-reasons-why-resolution-fail-143313427.html . Whatever. I'm clearly not their target demographic for this show and there are certainly a large number of people who find it helpful, or entertaining, or comforting and who am I to make fun of it? Maybe my New Year's Resolution should be to be nicer and more understanding of our differences, "Good Morning America". )

In previous years I have set a myriad of goals with various degrees of difficulty so that when it came time to calculate my success rate the easy successes would outweigh the difficult failures and thus Santa Claus would bring me pressents* instead of coal, or however this is supposed to work. *(I think pressents, as in gifts, should be spelled differently than presents, as in gives in the same way desserts and deserts are spelled differently. The extra "s" is for being more awesome than its homograph). This year I'd like to get away from that mostly because I'm not feeling particularly creative and because some of my previous "easy" resolutions, like look both ways before crossing the street, have proven more difficult than I intended in the past. I usually at least listen both ways before I cross the street but that means on windy days and in cities with lots of hybrids I'm as predictable as a squirrel. Could a Prius ever go back to it's electric setting once it's tasted human blood for the first time?

Anyway, so this year I'm looking for a single resolution that will address as many of my self-perceived problems as possible. In no particular order of importance, as attested by the presence of posting here at the front: posting here more often, losing some weight, being funnier, writing more in general, sleeping less, watching less television, and getting out of the house more. I'll spare you a more in depth analysis of these individually but as a package my New Year's Resolution seems perfectly clear. Cocaine.

Think of the time and resolution saving opportunities! All of those would have to have their own individual resolutions like eat better, exercise, study comedy, or hold my readers in less contempt. I've saved minutes not discussing those already and I'm not even on cocaine yet, not to mention all the time I'll save outside the kitchen preparing whole wheat carrot "meat'loafs and exercising. Cocaine could open the world to me by freeing me from my recently pawned television and any need to feed or clothe myself properly (weight loss resolution solved.) I'd be outside more often because I don't imagine you buy a lot of cocaine indoors and everything I've ever learned from watching "Cops" tells me that driving to pick up drugs is a huge mistake. Finally, since approximately 110% of productive entertainment, journalism, and blogging professionals are either on cocaine or an alcoholic, and two beer* makes me sleepy, I think it's pretty clear that cocaine is my white road to increased writing, both in general and here. (* Not a typo: Beer should be its own plural, like deer)

So Happy New Year, dear reader, and if you're around the train station at 3am and are looking for me just ask around for Dr. Stank.

A Plea For Attention From Bender

2011-12-28T18:15:00.000-05:00

I haven't been writing here much for a while, really over a year, and that's for a lot of reasons. Principal among them is the fact that my desk is just not a place I like to spend much time and that doesn't lend itself to much productivity in the blogging department as it is pretty desk-dependent. Maybe that will change now that I've upgraded my computer and monitor. Maybe it won't. Maybe there's some Feng Shui stuff I'm not taking account of, like I'd blog more often if I put some rocks in a cat litter box and raked them every once in a while. Or one of those electric waterfalls. Or a Scarface poster. Maybe I just need to clean a little and get the 6 months of mail and pocket change off my desk and spray some Fabreez around. I don't know how Feng Shui works. It isn't that I don't want to write here in general, I often do, more that the concurrences of means, motive, and opportunity have been decidedly rare.

Another factor is that some of my interests have shifted and a lot of my internet reading that used to be dedicated to strange animal news and Mike Huckabee has been taken over by cooking and environmental news (these websites are ruining my life at work), both of which I'm loathe to post about because they're either self-aggrandizing, preachy, or both. I've of course posted recipes before but that was mostly as a joke. Toast with cayenne pepper on it doesn't make this a recipe blog. Posting my experiments with baking all my own bread and figuring out pad thai does. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing when someone else does it but I feel that when I like a food blog its because of something else the author brings to the table beyond the recipes, usually that's experience, sometimes it's shit about their life that I find interesting, sometimes it's a style of cooking that I admire especially DIY stuff. But most food/recipe blogs are just self-aggrandizing crap where it isn't about sharing or community or even a love of good food but about showing people how great you are. "Look at me, I just combined 50 ingredients you can't afford into the perfect 18th-century Parisian style souffle! Now thank me for the recipe in the comments, mortals!". I know for a fact that when I baked my first good-looking loaf of bread I made everyone in three counties look at it. I would probably write that kind of food blog.

The other growing interest, and one that is not coincidentally tied to doing more home cooking, is environmental/green movement news. It isn't like I wasn't interested in this before but about a year ago when I first seriously started thinking about saving for a house, one of the first weird thoughts I had was about putting solar panels on the roof. That led to reading about pricing, which led to reading about effectiveness, which led to a discovery of the concept of "eco-bling," and a realization that while my heart was essentially in the right place - lower environmental impact coupled with a desire to be more self-sufficient- solar panels were probably pretty far down the list of things I could be doing to decrease the environmental impact of my life. It still starts with turning off the lights. Along the way I ended up reading about related issues. Carbon sequestration. Bike lanes. Fracking. The Farm Bill. Now I read about these things every day and there's clearly styles of the discourse that I react to positively and those I react to negatively. I like styles that are principally informative, that don't take too strong a political position and let the facts speak for themselves. That style also happens to be very dry and while lending itself well to someone like me who reads articles about the statistical differences between different sets of ancient garbage all day is not something that everyone wants to read and doesn't make for exciting blog reading. Further more to just repost articles from other blogs and briefly comment on them is precisely the blogosphere (shudder) circle jerk that I've always tried to avoid here. The other style, one I react to quite strongly in a negative way even when I'm in substantive agreement with the author, is authoritative and preachy, one where the one best way to do anything has been discovered by the author and you are a fool or a villain to do anything else. It lends itself to flowering rhetoric and long sentences filled with ellipses, clauses, and an nearly unending march of commas. That is clearly, already the style of this blog. Minus the preachiness, most of the time (at least I like to think). It's easy to subject my personal opinions into comments about an Octopus with a Rubik's Cube and not come off as heavy handed. It is more difficult to do so when it comes to comments on factory farming.

So I have spent some time writing about why I wouldn't want to post about those things but now I'd like to spend a brief moment writing about why I'm going to. For this blog to continue in any meaningful way, more than a handful of posts a year about why I don't post that often, it is going to have to relate to what I'm doing, to what I'm reading, and to how I'm living. I can't sit around waiting for the perfect idea (brain crack) or only posting what I think the average reader is going to enjoy or try to force a style that the average reader will find engaging. In the end I guess it is only reasonable to think that the blog would change and grow as I do but that doesn't mean I shouldn't respect the loyalty of the two or three people who have read this regularly in the past and think about what they've come to expect as I move forward. I enjoy writing here. It entertains me. It energizes me. Often it gets me to read things and track down information I would otherwise never be exposed to. I'd like to continue doing so and this post is just a way of explaining the situation of things change a little here.

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Oh, God. This Season's Huckabee....

2011-05-18T16:25:00.003-05:00

I'm not ready to set myself a google alert for Rick Santorum, for a variety of reasons, but if he's still in the campaign in a few months and not hopefully minding his own damn business for a change, then I might not be able to avoid it. He's too good at creating bad press for himself.

For instance, I would think the quote "John McCain doesn't understand enhanced interrogation techniques," is something that is probably forcing Santorum's spokespeople to drink themselves stupid this evening. Can you imagine how they're trying to parse that out? "What if we put the focus on the 'enhanced' part? Like, we could lead with something that says of course we know John McCain understands basic torture. What our boss was trying to say is that torture has come a long way since Vietnam, so McCain's experience just isn't up to date". Then they do 10 shots. While not quite a perfect structural or logical equivalent I would like to point out that, "James Brady doesn't understand enhanced getting shot," could be subbed in there and there would be no change in meaning or implication.

Except for all the pressure, the low pay, the general sense of impotence, of anger, and of impotent anger, associated with breaking into the political operative business, I think I'd really enjoy sitting around trying to either tear apart someone else's argument or support one of your own through the use of piddly little technicalities and linguistic sleight of hand. The thought exercise on my own is fun. It could be so much more when it counted and other people had to trot out my explanation and treat it as though it were totally serious and true and not just pulled out of my ass by moving words around in the sentence and associating it with widely held platitudes. Maybe if I just start prepping my "I'm not sorry Osama bin Laden is dead but we've got to focus on ______/Killing Osama bin Laden was awesome but we're trying to not look like a 9/11 Rudy Giuliani douchebag by bringing it up all the time" arguments now and get my game to a really high level so I can rocket straight to the top on a horseshit pile of my own making.

Feral Passion

2011-04-14T16:50:00.005-05:00

Before we get into anything, check out the article.

There. Now in case you were distracted by all the cute bear pictures, I’ll boil down the main points of the article. First, a woman was attacked by a bear while she was putting her trash out. The bear knocked her down and ran off with the bag of garbage (that’s from an earlier story on the same incident). She has some scrapes and her back is sore but on the whole, scraped, sore, and garbage-less is a pretty great way to leave a bear attack. Now the DEC is putting a bear-sized live trap in her yard to capture a bear so they can euthanize it and they’re not leaving until they get one. Any one.

Maybe the bear that attacked her, that’d be swell, but absent that particular bear the DEC is just going to kill any adult bear that happens to wander by. Potentially a completely innocent bear. A bear whose only fault is that it caught a whiff of the bear bait laid out there to draw it in and, after the long winter, couldn’t help itself. A bear that was just three days away from bear retirement. Or whatever. Just probably a bear that never attacked anyone.

I love that the DEC’s response to a bear attack is to just fucking kill the first motherfucking bear it lays its eyes on. I don’t know where I was going with this initially but after tooling around DEC’s website I’ve discovered its got a badass side to it I never would have guessed it had.

For instance, now I know that New York has a growing feral swine problem. And also that feral swine will kill and eat fawns, young livestock, and other small farm animals. And also that if you have a small game permit you can “shoot and keep feral swine at any time and in any number”. Just not with a rifle during non-rifle big game seasons and not within 500ft of a school which is fine with me because my preferred feral swing hunting method is throwing knives and I can’t go within 500ft of a school anyway.

I wonder if the people at the DEC who are in charge of all the animal killing get along with the people in charge of the animal conserving. It’s a theme I’m going to explore in my new movie “Feral Passion” about a mismatched pair of DEC operatives, one attempting to stop a feral swine invasion by tracking down and killing the feral swine king and another, who is trying to save the endangered species they share a habitat with and doesn’t trust the first agent’s methods. After all, he’s a renegade who would rather kill a thousand feral pigs than open his heart to the love of one woman. Or whatever. You’ve seen a movie.

Also it is soft core pornography.

This Season's Huckabee?

2011-03-30T18:55:00.005-05:00

This election season's Mike Huckabee? Not in terms of content, or character, or content of character as Mike Huckabee seems to be a mostly decent human being while Rick Santorum is some kind of unenlightened swamp troll with a heart made of black oil bound together by moral outrage. But he is entertaining in his pre-industrial revolution mode of thinking and all that's missing to capture my full attention is a picture of him holding fish. Or something like that. I'm not picky.

Anyway, I'm not committing just yet. Michele Bachmann has a strong resume herself and I'm not even ready to do research on the rest of the field. Since I'm not committing, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about this article. Also looking up facts and doing math would be hard this time of night and I'm nothing if I'm not totally unwilling to do any kind of work whatsoever.

Article.

Rick Santorum thinks that abortions are causing our problems with social security. He isn't all the way wrong although with absolutely no research I doubt that the sheer number of abortions (53 million in the last 38 years) relates directly to that many fewer working people. First off, right now 10% of those people would be unemployed. An unknown number of those fetuses would have been hit by cars or bit by snakes or had a serious chainsaw malfunction. Presumably with that many more people we would have had to at some point invade Canada and many would have succumbed to Canadian Syrup addiction.

All beside the point however. He is essentially right when he says that millions and millions of more people magically joining the system would bolster social security. Never mind that this opinion probably runs counter to his feelings on immigration. I'm not interviewing him on the subject presently nor am I scouring the internet for quotes but I doubt he's big on it. Not all tax bases are created equal. However if we accept Santorum's assertion at its base, that abortions are negatively affecting our ability to pay for social security, it is only fair to state that more abortions in the forties and fifties would have improved it. Following from that, eliminating abortion now on these grounds is only going to create a second top heavy population in sixty years. The country can no doubt support some population growth but unchecked population explosion over the next few decades will strain our ability to support those people. I mean, it isn't like we're doing a totally flawless job at supporting all our living people now. I guess we could just start Logan's Running it but Santorum and I are united in our opposition to 123rd trimester abortion.

Anyway, Santorum. Maybe this season's Mike Huckabee. Stay tuned.

Presenting Tilikum, the educated whale who think's he's better than you

2011-03-30T18:48:00.004-05:00

We've gone over this before. When a whale kills three people, you stop making it interact with them for your amusement. It's common sense. We don't let dogs get away with killing three people and keep them around as though nothing had happened. Schucks, if your dog so much as bites someone who deserves it there's a good chance it's getting put down. This is a whale that has, on three separate occasions, killed a human being and we just let it go on jumping through rings, eating fish, and living the good whale life. An orca is a huge animal and one killing could easily be explained away but not three separate ones. That is a pattern! It isn't like there's a nation-wide epidemic of show animals killing their trainers either. I would know. I apparently can't help but see these fucking stories and I know it's just this one murderous whale.

And what kind of audience could sit idly by and be entertained by this? Hopefully an ignorant one. The kind of people who would go see a thrice-murdering whale jump around and splash and still be pleased/maybe buy their five-year-old the T-shirt are not good people.

It is time for Tilikum to go. I'm not saying we electric chair the whale because majestic blah blah blah endangered blah blah blah who is going to keep the harbor seal population down blah blah blah Star Trek IV blah blah blah that would be a huge electric chair blah blah blah I know doesn't that sound awesome blah blah blah. We do need to consider other solutions though. I recommend exile. And not just any exile but like, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome exile. We take that thing as far away from it's natural habitat as possible and stick a bag over its head and capsize a horse or something with it. Just to complete the homage. The horse probably wouldn't have much of an effect on the situation. But horses are like ten for a dollar so it isn't that big a deal to toss one overboard. Anyway, so we release it and if it comes back to tear down Thunderdome around us then so be it. It'll have earned it.

Or I guess we could let it go back to doing exactly what it was doing when it killed those first three people. I'm not in charge of Sea World policy so I'm interested to find out exactly how many human lives one its animals is allowed to take before they stop showing how great it is at synchronized swimming, hoop jumping, and other non-murder tricks.

Higher Functions

2011-03-30T18:47:00.003-05:00

A little bit ago, while driving to work on a path I take multiple times a week, I finally read a sign for a Marriott hotel. Up until that moment I would have absolutely told you it was a Holiday Inn. That’s not a big mistake. It’s still a hotel. If you were looking for one I wouldn’t have accidentally directed you to a liquor store. I guess you wouldn’t be able to use your Holiday Inn points but let’s face it; Marriott Rewards is the superior hotel chain loyalty program anyway. I’d be wrong about it but that’s no big deal. I am wrong about lots of things most of the day. What struck me more was the reason why I had it wrong.

Everything about the hotel, its size, its shape, its color scheme, the circle your drive up to keep other people from dropping off their bags while you check in because you’re all too lazy to walk 50ft, everything about it summed up into a single image, tripped something in my brain that said “Holiday Inn”. Whatever part or sum of several parts that triggered the “knowledge of Holiday Inns” section of my brain allowed me to drive by it, nearly every work day for the last 5 months, without ever noticing that I was wrong or I guess, ever really looking at the building. And again, the problem is not that I misjudged the color scheme and didn’t realize that the warm southwestern yellows were Marriott and I should be looking for a soothing green for Holiday Inns, it is that I never had the chance to be right. One morning, I drove by a building and my brain said “Holiday Inn” and it stayed that way for months until I was stuck at a red light, wasn’t singing along to anything, didn’t have anything that needed to be done in the car, and the sun was at the perfect angle to make me look a little further to my right than I normally would. If those things hadn’t all happened that place would still be a Holiday Inn and who knows how long it might be before I’d find out I’m wrong.

I get why it happens and I’m sure in most cases it’s for the best. I guess it’s not bad that my brain put all the hotel pieces together without my active involvement. That’s some good extremely local outsourcing. And its’ great that every time I see a red light I don’t have to connect all of the dots that result in my foot hitting the break pedal. That’s a nifty little shortcut that probably saves all of us the inconvenience of the occasional crippling T-bone. There’s a lot of information out there and if some of it didn’t get channeled away from the part of my brain that’s wondering who sang “Wishing Well” (It’s Terrence Trent D’Arby) then I’d never get anywhere.

But it isn’t controllable. I don’t get to decide what my brain short cuts straight into and what it passes up the command structure into active thought. Those patterns have already been established by my brain and I’m sure it doesn’t just affect hotels. The very fact that I’m writing about things I don’t notice precludes me from offering any specific examples but I’d wager that I don’t need to hear or read all of most words. I know that I can’t competently edit my own text within a few weeks of having written it because if I remember it too well I just read what I meant to write and not what I actually did. I don’t know how many similar situations there might be. What kinds of things am I missing? What kinds of things am I misunderstanding? And it isn’t just that my brain wiring, upon receiving shape, color, and other stimuli, kicks the entire package over into “Holiday Inn”. It also conjures up all my pre-established thoughts and opinions about it, and the larger classes of things it belongs in, like hotels, hotel loyalty reward programs, work, time away from home, bad breakfasts, and, importantly, things I don’t like. So even when something has forced its way into active thought from passive pigeonholing, it comes through with the all the residue of that earlier thinking. There are things I probably dislike for this reason, rather than anything inherent in them. I suspect this is the general principal behind picky eating and racism but this is already text-y and I’m ill-equipped to discuss either. Suffice it to say, I see this as limiting my experience as a living being by potentially turning me away from experiences, whether they be foods, countries, music, people, or hotel chains that I might otherwise enjoy. Or worse, slowly start channeling my interests into only things I have experienced before. A friend, describing another friend, once said, “He only listens to music he’s heard before”. That concept is horrifying. I know that it is an eventual fact of my existence. Eventually I will listen to the last new thing I ever hear but I hope that it is as close to my death as I can reasonably manage.

But there’s the complication that my brain might be actively fighting me on this in an effort to make me more effective in situations I encounter most frequently. So can these patterns change? I am bordering on middle age and my brain has had a lot of time to establish patterns of thought. Is it possible that now I’m stuck with them? Will I be stuck, for the rest of my life, with the short circuits established from a poorly-traveled, poorly-read, poorly-experienced existence? I certainly hope not. I’m not saying I’m immediately going out and chartering a flight to the Holiday Inn closest to a Moroccan trance party but I hope that awareness of the problem will allow me to work around it in some cases. Knowing is half the battle, as they say in a kind of reference I am predisposed to like because of my upbringing. I don’t want every stimulus flying into my brain at the same high priority level and I’m not going to try to destroy all the patterns of my rigid thinking but a little more flexibility would be nice. It certainly seems like there’s a lot out there to do.

Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them

2011-03-30T18:45:00.002-05:00

I had an idea for a blog about blogs. Basically it would be the coffee table book of blogs but instead of a table it would go on your monitor and instead of a book it would be terrible. Essentially it would boil down to a review of other people's blogs and would be called either, "Anonymous Blog Copy Editor" or "Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers who Blog Them". Then I remembered that blogging about other blogs is redundant.

Creative Title

2011-03-30T18:44:00.004-05:00

For several years now, I think from probably before the recession, my bank has been doing its damnedest to get me to close my accounts. Its tempting to think that this is just because the one-time recouping on a $20 account closing fee is worth more than they’ll ever be able to make off my total assets because that would make me special and thank you, Bank, for noticing, but its hard to say that reducing their hours to a time when only people without any money can go to them is just about me. Another theory I’ll add to the pool of things I’d like to investigate but won’t and someday, through sheer weight of time, will simply assume to be true: I think my bank’s assorted middle fingers all started before the recession. It’s like they knew it was going to happen. I mean, of course “they knew” it was going to happen. This is first and foremost a conspiracy blog. But it might be interesting to see if that $8 a month fee they want me to pay for the privilege of allowing them to invest my money without earning interest could have predicted the recession and if so, next time my bank (or new bank) tries to bill me the service charges on their own investments if that means its time to close out and invest in gold, ammunition, and land on the moon so any forced relocation of our nation’s best and brightest to the new secret biodome colony (conspiracy blog!) would have to go through me and my impressive lunar land holdings.

Anyway, since my bank isn’t open during hours that I could conceivably get there without taking time off work I usually have to go during lunch. It’s about a two mile round trip from my desk and if I hoof it and go at off-peak hours I even have time to grab some pizza at my favorite pizzeria in the area. This is how I justify getting up from my desk and walking two miles to do business with people who would undoubtedly produce false evidence of my connections to Carlos the Jackal if it meant they could collect on some sweet, sweet, reward money. It is very good pizza.

When I’m there I always order two slices, which I eat all of, enjoy a brisk walk back to my desk and immediately drop dead from the tactical pizza strike on my insides. It is rare that I do something I instantly regret and feel bad about for hours afterward, so regularly. In the game of pizza, as in the game of proper bank and account selection relative to net worth, I simply will not learn. It isn’t like I don’t know what’s going to happen either, like as I come out of my food coma my serotonin levels increase and I can’t remember what that crazy dream was about anymore. I stand in line and think, “Maybe one slice will do today,” but never act on it. I mean, one slices isn’t enough slices. I would be hungry after that many slices. I presume anyway, as I have never ordered that specific amount of pizza. On the other hand, two slices seems like the perfect amount. It is exactly half way between 1 (too few) and 3(too many). It is like the Baby Bear’s porridge only that doesn’t make any sense metaphorically. It is like the savings account that’s interest rate does not compensate for fees relative to overall worth. Whereas, I am looking for a savings account that functions more like one slice of pizza and a garlic knot.

I feel like this was going somewhere.

Technical Difficulties

2010-11-10T22:24:00.004-05:00

Greetings Chums!

Once again this is Mayor Pedros, full-time Mad Dog Fargo wrangler and part time 1% Inspiration Ombudsman and I'm here to temporarily combine both roles in a manner most unseemly if you were inclined to trust the ombudsman side.

First, as wrangler, I am here to once again offer our sincerest of apologies for the lack of posting around these parts. It has only recently come to our attention that massive denial of service attacks have been hitting our servers based on a series of earth-shattering exclusive scoops related to international diplomacy. Just kidding. It has actually only recently come to our attention that massive denial of service attacks have been hitting Mad Dog Fargo's brain resulting in many months of inadequate posting.

If only I could get them to target my appetite. Am I right, ladies!

I assure you we are working our best to correct this situation but at this point in our relationship I have found it best not to pester him lest he continue to misbehave out of spite. For an ostensibly adult human being he has a bit of the Peter Pan in him, in that he mopes and whines like a child.

Secondly, as ombudsman, I am here to report on an exciting improvement to 1% Inspiration posts we're attempting to bring to any future posting, be it tomorrow or in three years. Too frequently, 1% Inspiration posts go along smoothly until the concluding paragraph when Mad Dog Fargo backtracks on much of the nonsense and intermittent hilarity he has written in the body of the post. These concluding paragraphs typically take the form of an underlying moral or assurance to the reader that Mad Dog Fargo understands that what he has been joking about is a complicated issue and not one that should only be reduced to a series of non sequitur anecdotes and movie references. Not every post has one but they're common enough that we've recognized them as a sort of hitch and not something we'd qualify as 'good writing'.

After a series of conversations with the honcho we have agreed to attempt to jettison these paragraphs like the dead weight they are, simply leaving it up to the reader to establish that torture is a serious subject and that Mad Dog Fargo is not comparing the act to respecting Jesse Ventura. Next year we plan on tackling the overuse of ellipses but until then we're happy to announce this particular baby step.

Happy reading if Mad Dog Fargo ever gives you the opportunity again and hope to hear from you in the new year.

Cordially,
Mayor Pedros

Like falling off a horse

2010-11-10T21:05:00.005-05:00

As an impressionable person who will do almost anything to be cool it often comes as a surprise to people that I have never been a smoker. I mean it is just unbelievably cool. Like on a scale from 1 to 10, smoking is Miles Davis and James Dean making out with each other. But it's also gross and not in a long term health kind of way. Sure, lungs that are thirty pounds of scar tissue each sounds pretty gross but as a non-smoker I am way more concerned with your breath. I'm not saying I won't make out with you if you smoke because clearly I will make out with whomever God asks me to, just that God doesn't ask me to go on too many second dates with smokers.

This has gotten away from me. Practice!

The Food and Drug Administration (another in a long line of government offices that sound like they'd be a way better time than they actually are, see ATF) is recommending that cigarettes sold in the United States now carry the graphic ads they've been running in Canada for a while now (link town). So half the front and back of the cigarette box will feature pictures of cancerous lungs, corpses, and your 9th grade English teacher amongst other things. Since their introduction in Canada, the smoking rate has dropped 20%.I don't know how much of that rate can be correlated with the pictures and not other factors. Smokers are paying more and more for cigarettes and the economy is bad. People could be quitting just to save money. Maybe I've just reached the point in my academic career though where I simply don't believe any number that isn't justified with 15, tight, peer-reviewed pages and 80 citations. If that's the case then I'm an asshole (bigger asshole) and I'm sorry, Canada. I'll stop doubting your numbers. Now that we're friends again would you just stop airing the Red Green show for fucksake.

That kind of got away from me again.

Anyway, horrific pictures are going to be added to cigarette packaging in order to get people to quit. There are lots of good reasons to quit. Your health. Your wallet. Your family. Making out with me. Lots of good reasons. This isn't one of them though.

You light up every cigarette knowing full-well what the long term problems associated with that are and you quit just because someone shows you a picture of some bleeding gums? What kind of smoker are you? Lee Marvin is going to rise from the dead just to ash in your Diet Coke.

Also, I know they're bad for you and I know they kill a million-billion people every year but at some point you need to either just ban them or let them go about their business as they see fit. All these little half steps toward banning cigarettes just makes the whole effort to clean up the health of the country seem a little petty. It is a public concern, don't get me wrong, smokers cost the rest of us money when they slowly let loose their grip on their uninsured mortal coil, but at this point it is also a legal business in the United States and should probably be allowed to advertise itself according to all of the relevant laws that govern harmful products and not new regulations specifically targeting a single one.

At least give them the back half of the box. On the front could be diseased lungs and on the back could be whatever the cigarette company wanted to use to keep people smoking despite the front. I recommend this:
Look, in the end there are clearly a lot of things about smoking that are terrible for individuals and terrible for the people around them and it makes sense to encourage people to quit but not like this. This just strays a little further into a sketchy-------------

INTERIOR: MAD DOG FARGO'S VOLCANO LAIR.
Mad Dog Fargo's naked, Adonis-like physique glistens with the sweat of exertion as he madly types the latest post in the blog that would some day save humanity from Mike Huckabee's ravaging horde. The noise of typing ceases suddenly and Mad Dog Fargo pushed himself away from his desk, 34 inch biceps effortlessly moving his ergonomic chair across the polished marble floor.
Mad Dog Fargo: "No. I promised myself I wouldn't do this anymore."
MUSIC SWELLS
Narrator: What does this mean? Find out next post (coming in January, in all likelihood).

New Slang

2010-11-08T23:34:00.004-05:00

Quantum Friend: Someone you like personally but whose internet presence is intolerable (or vice versa). Someone whose basic level of tolerability changes based on the forum of its measurement.

Post Quota: Waterworld Jokes

2010-06-09T16:23:00.003-05:00

Remember when all that torture stuff was going around and Jesse Ventura was all like, "give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney, and an hour and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders"? Or something like that. And for a minute there you thought the worst part of the whole thing was that you valued Jesse Ventura's opinion on something other than on what he thought of the Hulk Hogan/Macho Man merger or the various things he didn't have time to do (e.g. "bleed"). I mean, the torture not withstanding. The worst part about the whole torture thing, except for the torture, was that you temporarily lived in a world where Jesse Ventura made complete sense.

I think the oil spill has had its moment.

So now we live in the world, a real world by any meaningful way of measuring it, where Kevin Costner has something to say about an oil spill valuable enough that he was asked to testify before Congress about it.

I'm not saying the worst thing about the oil spill is that Kevin Costner was on CSPAN. The worst thing about the oil spill is the oil spill. But also Kevin Costner was on CSPAN.

On the other hand one of the greatest things about the oil spill is that I just completed a post about Kevin Costner and an oil spill in the ocean and as far as I can tell did not make a single Waterworld reference. It was all worth it!

via BWE

Post Quota: A Thing That Happened

2010-06-01T18:06:00.003-05:00

In the whole business of Al and Tipper Gore getting divorced that's going down today (Al is going to have like 2,000 women named Rainbow at his door tomorrow) one article I read included a sentence that seemed so bizarre I have spent most of the day fact-checking it. I was convinced most of the afternoon that there had to be a comma missing somewhere. Maybe a verb was missing. Maybe it was the wrong family member credited. Maybe lots of things.

But no. This is a thing that happened:

Tipper Gore later became friends with the late Zappa's wife, Gail, and played drums and sang backup on daughter Diva Zappa's album in 1999.

No fucking way.

Tipper Gore just got a lot hotter.

Capture Quota: Moms

2010-05-09T05:50:00.000-05:00

For Mother's Day, proof that my Mom will be proud of me no matter what:

If it was hard to figure out, the facebook status update was mine, and the black bar approving of it was my Mom.

.1% Inspiration

2010-04-24T11:31:00.001-05:00

If pornography banner ads can point me to hot local singles in my immediate vicinity how come weather.com can't at least ball park my IP address close enough to figure out that when I type in my zip code I'm looking for weather in my area and not Berlin?

2010-04-23T12:34:00.006-05:00

I could have very easily posted about this before but its not like I have any recollection about what I have written here. Ask anyone who has had the misfortune of living with me, this space is very much like having a one-sided conversation with me and I clearly make absolutely no attempt to catalog and remember anything that comes out of my word-hole. And it's not like I'm going to go back and read any of that nonsense. That would be like talking to the part of myself that doesn't remember anything. That guy is an asshole.

So I'm presently unemployed, which makes you think I'd post here more often, but I'm unemployed and enjoying it and from a statistical point of view I am a gillion percent more likely to post here when I am not enjoying myself in some other fashion than when I am outside playing. Anyway, I am unemployed, which means I am getting the gym more often than usual (read: never). I usually go at about the same time, sometime in the morning up until about lunch, which means I cross paths with some of the same people all the time. I have gym friends now. People I only speak to or know at all when we are both at the gym. I occasionally spot some people, and it is both flattering and hilarious that they think I could do anything to prevent that bar from knocking out their teeth if they lost their grip or their muscles gave out. For my part I spend a lot of time doing extremely light reps and a bench press machine and then aimlessly peddle on a stationary bike while reading Science.

As much as I have people whose throats and teeth I would nobly try to protect from immense falling weights, I also have gym enemies. These are people for the most part I do not speak to. We are enemies of course, though I doubt they know it. I'm not Sun Tzu or anything but I think the advantage is mine if they don't know we're enemies yet. Almost all of them have an individual flair that makes me loath their existence without ever speaking to them but they can be broadly lumped into several categories for easier hating. If we can be gym friends then this list is a starting point for things we can unite against. If we are intended to be gym enemies though, then consider this a warning. Like I said, I'm not gym Sun Tzu, so consider this your last gift before I strike hard, strike fast, no mercy, other Karate Kid reference you.

You are using a machine for something other than its intended purpose: That machine is not for doing reverse crunches. That is what the floor mats are for. Get out of my way.

You are camping on a machine I want to use: I understand that maybe whatever you just did there was so exhausting that you need to spend five minutes resting and rebuilding your strength and sending 15 text messages but you could just as easily do that elsewhere and not clog up the machine for the whole time.

You are an old lady doing weird old lady exercises: I'm all for the elderly exercising in pools or power-walking around the mall or whatnot. Elderly folk need exercise too. They do not need to use the bench press to do what appears to be some kind of horizontal step aerobics routine for 10 minutes.

You are an old man doing weird old man exercises: In the past 100 years a number of improvements have been made in the way in which we exercise. For instance, there are machines that do what throwing bales of hay into a loft used to do. There is no need to mimic this with the 45lb plate while standing in the middle of the only open area in a gym. You got used to horseless carriages. You can get used to this.

You don't have sleeves: I understand that everyone needs to see your barbed wire tattoo/extra skin but the reason we wear sleeves in the gym is that your shirt serves the unenviable function of soaking up sweat and keeping some of it from getting on the machines. You are sleeveless, which while not causative is 100% correlated with not wiping the machine off when you're done, so this is extra important for you. I don't care how good you look. This is just my 1800s upbringing speaking but if you are a man there is absolutely no excuse to appear in public sleeveless unless your job involves swimming. If you are a woman there are plenty of other forums in which to show of your shoulders without getting your back sweat on me.

You are wearing street clothes: This is wrong for a couple of reasons, first and foremost is that your street clothes likely do not offer you the same range of movement as your gym clothes and thereby decrease both the quality and safety of your workout. The second is that it is gross. This isn't just related to how much you sweat. Maybe you are only there to do a couple quick moves and then leave and you aren't going to get your heart rate up that much. But the 10,000 people who used that machine without cleaning it before you had no such restrictions. Gyms are gross places full of gross people and now you've got that all over your clothes and you're just going to go back to work? Maybe if you were in great shape and the reason was you didn't care what time it was, what you were wearing, or who was watching, you were going to exercise. Maybe then I'd understand. But if you are wearing jeans and a button down shirt at the gym you are invariably Anthony Edwards from Revenge of the Nerds.

There are of course numerous other reasons we might be gym enemies. Do you grunt? Drop weights? Do you take things of racks and never put them back? Do you stand in front of the fan when you quite seriously smell? Do you look so funny on the elliptical that I can't help but stare at you and then you give me stink eye? As anyone who reads this blog knows, there could be thousands of reason I don't like you. I just hope this give you a little heads up as to which side you'll be on when the revolution starts.

Post Quota: Pirates

2010-04-01T09:38:00.003-05:00

Hey, pirates. Maybe you didn't know and I want to make sure there are no misunderstandings later. So, here:

Hope that helps in the future.

Free Punches

2010-03-25T09:30:00.005-05:00

At times I've contemplated starting another blog. Not abandoning this one, but starting something new with a tighter theme. For some reason I internally flirt with the concept that structure will improve my productivity even though all the outward evidence points to this being patently false. I mean, I'm in a college program and sometimes it seems I'm paying several grand a year for the privilege of quoting this all the time:

One of the blogs I thought about starting was going to be called something like, "Free Punches," and it was just going to be pictures of people who could do with a good punch in the face. There was also one were I immersed myself in the music of all the countries in the world in alphabetical order for a couple weeks at a time (would start in Afghanistan -- timely!). You can probably guess which one I'm writing about here.

These were mostly going to be people I saw on the street, there are enough anti-celebrity web-sites out there, though I don't think I would have been above occasionally posting one (Free Punch Post Quota). Several things kept me from making this so, the first and most important of which is that I am extremely lazy. The others are I suspected there would be some liability problems by posting pictures of folks about town and then suggesting that they needed a good punch and that I think it would be hard for it to not come off as extremely mean-spirited. Plus I would have to bring my camera with me everywhere and I don't even like carrying my keys.

I don't consider myself a violent person. I play violent video games and I watch violent media like every other male my age but that doesn't really translate into my real life at all. I haven't been in a fight since high school and though I've been close a couple of times its always been because of the people I was with rather than some aggression on my part. Hitting someone is so far down my list of fight or flight responses that I wonder if it were actually appropriate would I be able to do it (In the couple brief moments where I thought a fight might break out my response has generally been to stand real tall, hook my thumbs into my belt, and presumably - if the fight were to start - get punched). That being said I often think to myself, "that guy could use a good punch in the face".

This probably comes from a firm belief in extremely limited, non-state sanctioned, corporal punishment. Essentially, a good charley horse, applied sparingly, can be an extremely effective learning tool. I'm not saying we should bring back stocks or anything. This is the kind of learning tool that can only be applied by friends and occasionally (and hilariously), strangers. It works like the most basic of leveling mechanisms employed by our ancestors for probably as long as there have been Homo sapiens, when someone says or does something stupid, they are gently ridiculed or wet-willied for it. We wouldn't need a Godwin's Law if the first time anyone said, "You know who else liked that? Hitler!", they got punched, real hard, in the quad.

So, this was all to get to the image to your right; (this is not a photo of the person in question but a reasonable facsimile attained from the bowels of the internet)

If this man's friends really cared for him the first couple time he tried to leave the house dressed like this they'd have held him down until his belly was a spectacular shade of pink.

Note: Until the styles change (thanks GAP, for temporarily making plaid cool in a style I like to call: Upstate New York: Every Day Of Your Life) though my free punches blog essentially already exists here.

.1% Inspiration

2010-03-18T05:33:00.000-05:00

Today I used a paper towel to wipe the grease off a slice of pizza and then dunked it in bleu cheese.

Nature's Prozac

2010-03-11T15:09:00.001-05:00

Unfortunate Seriousness

2010-03-11T14:34:00.002-05:00

The most common kernel for posts here is that I have encountered something I don't like, or am dissatisfied by. This could easily lead to the impression that I spend a lot of my days angry about something, like contact lenses for animals or politicians using twitter but the reality is I don't. My reaction to most of these is best characterized as mild, temporary annoyance coupled with a sarcastic joke or two. Occasionally one of those jokes is even funny. In fact, post-adolescence I doubt I've been truly angry more than a half-dozen times, lets say an average of once every two years or so. I'm not really bothered by these outbursts and although they do occur a little to frequently they haven't occurred for undue reason. There is however a lower grade anger that bubbles up sometimes that is more problematic. It simmers lower and there is no cathartic outburst associated with it but can leave me in a state where sometimes I am more critical than I want to be about things totally unassociated with the source or the problem. At times I recuse myself from public because of a mean-spirited bent I notice in my own statements. It is not a state for clear thinking or speaking with people I care about. As a rule I don't post about things of this nature because it is hard to make funny about anything I take too seriously. While parts of most, and occasionally all, posts have serious sections I want the overall tenor of this blog to be relatively upbeat. I have lived a charmed life and have no justification for a pessimistic outlook on the world and I'd rather avoid the implication that I have one. Anyway, as much as this kind of feeling bothers me, I've never been able to void it from my system. So if I don't talk to you until I get a couple of Futurama episodes into me, blame this. I'm not eloquent enough or invested enough to do this justice. I'm angry and sad at the same time but its an anger and sadness removed from any personal experience to drive it into the forefront. Its the kind of thing that sits all day. Its a dirty secret, but I like people. I think we can be great. I hate waking up to news proving me wrong.

.1% Inspiration

2010-03-11T05:31:00.000-05:00

Another Catch-22 candidate as well: There is literally nothing I won't do to make someone stop crying, including making other people cry.

.1% Inspiration

2010-03-04T05:29:00.000-05:00

Possible Catch-22: You are the kind of program (I'm looking at you, Attack of the Show) that caters to people with webcams so you solicit opinions from those webcam-enabled viewers on a subject but people with webcams are exactly the kind of people whose opinions matter the least.

Capture Quota

2010-03-03T05:14:00.002-05:00

During the televised health care debate last week MSNBC ran a cycle of comments related to it on their home page. I took the time to save a few. See if you can identify which of the following doesn't belong:
Can we seriously give this metaphorical man on the street thing a rest. Its telling that the best use of this feature is from The Onion.

My name is Zhora and I'm an alcoholic.

2010-03-01T12:01:00.006-05:00

Every time I post about animals the expectations I have for my future happiness die a little. At this point I should probably just rename this blog "Weird Animal News" and give up on any hope of living amongst and conversing with people whose intelligence I respect.

Yet here we are.

Russian zookeepers have sent a chimpanzee, Zhora, to rehab because it is addicted to beer and cigarettes. Chimpanzees are rare, I get it. We need to preserve every one we can because their contributions to all the sciences related to understanding ourselves are too important to let their paws be used for magic spells in Indiana Jones movies. But rather than rehab, I have a significantly less expensive answer to the addiction problem.

You should get that chimp a copy of Chris Prentiss' Alcoholism and Addiction Cure. It only costs about 20$, 10$ if you get a copy for Zhora's kindle. The book, I'm led to believe, will help Zhora deal with the underlying problems that cause him to drink and smoke. Chris Prentiss doesn't believe in the "disease concept" so Zhora won't be saddled with any life-long labels (which might not be very long if Zhora has accumulated a lot of pack years on those lungs). Anyway, I'm just offering up this suggestion based entirely on a commercial I see 4-5 times during any given SportsCenter. Hope that helps.

Oh, you could also just stop giving it alcohol and cigarettes. That might work.

via The Awl

A List Of Things

2010-03-01T05:18:00.006-05:00

People To Call When You Need Things Done and you are not concerned with collateral damage:

-Gordon Freeman
-Jack Bauer
-Master Chief
-Joe Pesci (the person)
-MacGyver
-Any character played by Bruce Willis (except the dead guy from Sixth Sense)
-Odin
-Batman but he'd be pretty emo about the whole thing

Today In Questionable Content

2010-02-25T10:42:00.007-05:00

I'm just saying that when your pet whale kills once, shame on it, but when it kills three times, shame on us for allowing you to keep pet whales. Like, after the first time maybe you think its a fluke (I'm like Nero playing a whale-pun fiddle while Rome burns) but after the second person is killed someone in charge had to have thought, "Man, if we keep this whale and it kills another person we're going to look pretty stupid". Well, ta-da.

Look. We're all bad people. Some of us are bad because we make whale puns about a story where a woman died. Some of us are bad because we kept that whale around and made it do tricks after it killed two people. Generally speaking, I don't think anyone should be swimming around or within reach of something that needs to eat 500lbs of meat every day, much less goading it into performing for school children. I think swimming around with a 10-ton meat-eating double homicide convictee with no human sense of understanding or remorse is perhaps adding a degree of danger that is not commensurate with the reward. Whatever reward that might actually be. I don't know. I can't come up with reason why we need to train the apex predator of the ocean to wave to an audience off the top of my head.

I like zoos. I like seeing strange animals that I would never get a chance to witness first-hand in any other circumstance. Some of them do good conservation work, good science, and raise awareness about problems facing animals everywhere, too. To maintain these objectives and a clean, healthy environment for the animals, they need to make it entertaining for the public because like I said, we're all bad people and none of us do anything out of the goodness of our hearts. Fine. I'm not interested in animal shows but lots of other people are and are willing to pay to see them. I think we can all agree though, since we are bad people but don't like to admit it, that there is no need for the people running those shows to be in any mortal danger for our own entertainment. There are risks in everything but the rewards here don't seem to pan out.

.1% Inspiration

2010-02-25T05:28:00.000-05:00

Of all the time zones, I think Mountain is the worst.

Capture Quota

2010-02-24T05:35:00.000-05:00

Hey, MSNBC. I see what you did there.

Addendum

2010-02-23T13:03:00.003-05:00

While "researching" that last post my Google searches went like this:

Cockatoos
Cockatoos Price
Prices for Cockatoos
Banksian Black Cockatoos
Most Expensive Birds
Cost of Bird Meat
Cost of Panda
Cost of Organs
Cost of Black Market Organs
Cost of Black Market Children's Organs

And now I'm pretty certain I'm on some kind of list. If you need me next month I'll be lying low (non-extradition low).

Advice on Market Values

2010-02-23T12:34:00.004-05:00

So a woman in Louisiana has been convicted of selling two children for a cockatoo and 175$. She was sentenced to 15 months of hard labor, which is apparently something that still happens. I say she should have gone to the stocks! Cockatoos are expensive, expensive for birds, anyway. I mean more expensive than you should spend on something like a bird, which in my mind is no more than like $6/lb. In any case, birds are stupid and you shouldn't spend money on them or trade assets for them, especially if those assets are children because you are just throwing those little money makers away if you're trading them for a bird.

I guess there are some exceptions. While looking up the cost of the average cockatoo (I doubt this woman was really looking at a rare breed -- or could identify a rare breed) I found that Banksian Black Cockatoos can retail for around $20,000. That's a decidedly better deal for two children. If you're stuck on trading your kids for pets though you should go with something cooler, possibly endangered, like a panda or white tiger. Eventually those animals will grow up and you can turn around and sell them or rent them to zoos for substantial financial rewards.

I prefer to go in straight up cash, though, so you can maybe blow a little on a new TV and then reinvest in some stock mutual funds for long term growth. I'm not talking sex-trafficking because gross but little healthy child organs can go for a premium. Two full sets should easily net you around six figures, which is a much better plan than $175 and a bird that is going to just squawk and poop all over the place. You might as well have kept the kids.

A List Of Things

2010-02-22T05:59:00.002-05:00

Things I cannot do after thinking about them:

-Walk
-Use Turn Signals
-Parallel Park
-Spell
-Lie (effectively)
-Throw a frisbee backhand
-Floss

Post Quota: Rock and Roll Jesus

2010-02-20T10:15:00.004-05:00

In Indian (Asian sub-continent Indian) state has confiscated a textbook containing a picture of Jesus holding a beer can and smoking a cigarette. I'm linking to this mostly because I think the picture is worth a look (looks like some textbook writer lazily copied a picture from a Fark photoshop without really looking at it) and, read the article, but the truly confusing aspect to all of this is that the picture was in a cursive writing exercise book. What reason could there be to include any picture of Jesus in a writing exercise book, regardless of whether that picture is non-blasphemous or awesome.

Also, I thought cursive writing was dead, but apparently we just outsourced it.

via The Awl

Introspective Nonsense Brought On By Another Man's Affair (not what you think)

2010-02-19T10:38:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I said I'd go night skiing with a couple friends before remembering that I had an appointment to give blood in the afternoon. So, in case you were wondering, losing two units of red cells then skiing and drinking is exactly as awesome as it sounds. I'm traveling today but I'm predictably garbage this morning so I'm planning on laying on the couch until I absolutely have to move. This has afforded me the opportunity (that's probably not the right word) to watch several hours of live SportsCenter on a day when there are apparently no sports stories. I think there's an Olympics going on but maybe there isn't. I'm not a doctor of Olympics scheduling.

So I've been watching a lot of Tiger Woods coverage. Since out of the three people who read this blog, two probably don't know who that is or why its important, I'll briefly recap. He's one of the best golfers of all time and it isn't important, not even in the slightest.

He's apologizing to the public for things that he doesn't really have to apologize to the public for, or at least you and I wouldn't have to apologize to the public for. He is doing so on Friday, which conventional public relations wisdom tells you is a good day to release bad news. Also its a sports story, sort of, and recent exhaustive research tells me there is an Olympics going on and one might surmise that they would dominate sports news. Judging from my multiple hours of SportsCenter (one word, rogue capitalization!) watching this morning they would be incorrect. In any case though, this would seem to be scheduled at the perfect time to get as little media coverage as possible, though it could have been better had he spoke at 6pm or something. For my part, as someone who watches and reads a lot of sports coverage (to quote an obscure Gilmore Girls character: "It's all a waste of time but its how I waste my time"), dumping this apology on Friday is not going to limit my interaction with it. Despite my best intentions to avoid this as it is none of my business (and boring) I will probably watch another SportsCenter this weekend to get Olympic updates and college basketball highlights and instead get 75% Tiger Woods coverage. But what about other people? People who only skim the sports section or don't read it at all. This story bleeds into traditional news since Woods is such a famous person so its hard to totally avoid it if you read any newspaper. I guess I'm just wondering now if I'm the kind of person who will always know about sports figures marital woes. Am I committed through age and habit to the kind of media I'm already interested in? I am not interested in Wood's personal life but that is the side car to the sports motorcylce (am I committed to terrible metaphors?). I like new things but how often do I say, "I love this new band/movie/book because they remind me of band/movie/book I already like".?

I think I'd like to inhabit someone else's life for a little while. Just a little life tourism. I'm not upset with my choices and tastes and as much as I worry that I might someday grow into the kind of person who only likes things they've seen before. I'm confident I'm flexible enough to let some new stuff move in. I am concerned though about how much my ideas about everything constrain how I evaluate new things. So how do I get lots of new stuff? By not making any of my own media/activity choices for a while is an idea. Basically living someone else's life. I'm not certain how I go about making this happen, however. Its probably not as easy as just sitting down and reading Cosmo and watching silent films. I'm going to start though by more carefully evaluating decisions I make upon encountering things my history and habits tell me to avoid. I guess I don't really want to be a different person but I could do to broaden my horizons some.

This is all a way of warning you if suddenly this space gets used to review restaurants and Off-Broadway plays.

Are the new readers gone yet?

.1% Inspiration

2010-02-18T05:24:00.000-05:00

I just named my fists "Charles De Gaulle" and "Marcel Marceau".

Capture Quota

2010-02-17T05:14:00.000-05:00

I just saw a commercial for British Columbia tourism that included Ryan Reynolds, Michael J. Fox, Sarah McLachlan, and some other folks I didn't recognize and I was wondering if British Columbia literally pulled together every single famous person ever from their province for the promo. In searching for an answer to this I hit a yahoo answers page that answered two things. 1) No, they didn't. Many famous people from British Columbia chose to betray their province and not appear in this commercial either by being dead or not attractive. and 2) grammar should count:

Someone answered this with a long list of British Columbia celebrities but they probably shouldn't. Answering this question is only going to enable this kind of question.

Hey, You!

2010-02-16T05:23:00.001-05:00

Hey, You! is a recurring* feature of imagined conversations Mad Dog Fargo has with those around him.

Yeah, you. Guy with your Randy Moss Vikings jersey tucked into your khakis.

I normally try to mind my own business. I just dropped an order into the Indian place next door so I'm only stopping by to watch some basketball and have a beer while they get it ready. None of the games are good. I suppose that's part of the problem. I might not have noticed you over at the jukebox if there were something interesting on any one of the thirty TVs in this place. I mean, I would have noticed the fact that you tuck your football jersey in and are not an actual football player during a game but I might not have noticed your jukebox choices. Before we move on, what exactly are you trying to say with this look? "I'm a fan, dressing casual, but I'm ready for business should the situation arise. Also, I stand a lower danger of having my clothes caught in any heavy machinery that might be lying around."

Fine, whatever. You are wearing the mullet of clothing styles.

Now what the fuck are you doing at the jukebox. Your decision to tuck your jersey in makes me question all other parts of your life so let's discuss this. I've been watching your selections and they are terrible. Black Eyed Peas? For starters, you're like 50, have a mustache, and ARE WEARING A FOOTBALL JERSERY TUCKED INTO KHAKIS. You only know who the Black Eyed Peas are because of the Grammy's, which is like the Olympics for out of touch music. I don't know what underage girl you are trying to impress with this pick but you can buy booze for her so you don't need to try this hard.

Maroon 5? God, you are trying to pick up an underage girl. Or maybe an of-age girl but you don't know what adults listen to. Whatever. This band is fucking clown shoes. Good luck with this.

Meatloaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light. Fuck dude. This song is terrible. At least its from your generation. And about a guy trying to convince a girl to have sex with him so its right down your alley.

Shakira. Shakira? You are an adult male who tucks his outdated football jersey into khakis. You can't possibly like all of this shit and I don't think you even know what your underage fixation likes. You are just going through terrible music, alphabetically, and cherry picking (pun intended, dirtbag) the worst of the worst out from it. Come on. You have one credit left. Justify your existence to me.

Tesla, "Love Song". Okay. That song's pretty great. You go back to your booth of underage girls pretending to think your story about your Toyota getting recalled is interesting and buy them a round of vodka cranberries. They deserve it.

I hope to hell I'm out of here before your songs come up and the cops come.

*recurring in the same sense that any 1% Inspiration feature is recurring

A List Of Things

2010-02-15T05:28:00.001-05:00

How to get cast in a movie staring DMX:

Be on the downward arc of your fame
Be on the upward arc or your fame
Never really be famous
Be Tom Arnold

I Choo-choo-choose you.

2010-02-14T05:48:00.000-05:00

Post Quota: Addendum

2010-02-13T17:10:00.006-05:00

Also from the Times today, this:
It was sadder in the print version of the article but you get the point. I think I should be allowed to submit an invoice to the Times for anything I drink tonight after this.

But look, you can tweet all about it!

Adults!

Post Quota: Adults

2010-02-13T16:25:00.005-05:00

The New York Times published a story today about the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitri O. Rogozin. Ambassador Rogozin has a Twitter account that he apparently uses to connect with the world and make statements about his opinions on policy issues, most notably (from the article):

“The Americans and their allies again want to surround the den of the Russian bear?” he wrote in Russian. “How many times must they be reminded that this is dangerous?” “The bear will emerge,” he wrote, and kick them in the you-know-what. (Mr. Rogozin softened his own translation into English on Twitter, using the slightly more diplomatic “beat up.”)

Some other choice picks from his Twitter page:

-US destroys coca crops in Columbia because cocaine flows to it, but they safeguard opium poppy fields in Afghan because heroin flows to us

-Bulgarians are our brothers. But politically they can sometimes be promiscuous. In WWI & WWII fought against us but then changed orientation. Maybe they can now choose the right orientation too? You can't be mistaken 3 times in a row stepping on the same rake.

-What do the Georgians need so many weapons for? They'll abandon all of them once they hear first shot of the adversary

Most of his tweets (I feel like an idiot saying that word out loud and even more so typing it) are in Russian and I presume, awesomer. I reprint these few here as examples not so much to criticize their content (people with glass blogs shouldn't throw e-stones) as their forum. Ambassador Rogozin is an adult with what sounds like a very important job. Russia-NATO relations are important, aren't they? He is also commenting on (tweeting.....ugh) extremely important matters. I'm not a diplomat but tweeting your opinion on these topics from your position as an ambassador is a bit like drawing up a treaty with crayons and glitter. Yeah, your opinion is valid and informed but you've got orange popsicle all over your face. Look, you're an adult and a professional. You should not be commenting on worldwide important matters you are capable of influencing on a forum where three of the top topics are #WeAllHateMiley, #WeSupportMiley, and #WeHateMileyHaters. I love the internet as much as the next person but part of the responsibility of being an adult and a professional is that certain parts of the internet are no longer appropriate for you. For instance, I can't look up information about explosives anymore because of that thing a few years back and diplomats can't tweet their diplomacy in 146 characters or less.

Speaking of adults; New York Times - There is no need to edit the word "ass" out of Rogozin's comment.

I have solved the debt crisis

2010-02-09T10:31:00.006-05:00

You all know many things. Many important things. Things that matter. I'm sure that's true. Probably. Possibly. Look, what you know isn't that important. Right now, anyway. So let's move on and talk about what I know. I know, and you know (possibly) that the national debt is hovering somewhere north of 12 trillion dollars. I have recently skimmed "Personal Finance For Dummies" and have learned that carrying a lot of debt from month to month will negatively influence my credit rating. Carrying 12 trillion dollars in debt, even at gorgeous interest rates, is probably not good for my country's credit rating either. I don't want the United States to be surprised next time they try to get a loan for their own pizza place or coffee shop or aircraft carrier or whatever governments take out loans for. So we've got to take care of this and here's how we do it:

Step 1: Everyone in the United States needs to slip out of work during lunch and get down to a bank that exchanges currency. Depending on where you live, you're going to want to exchange your currency into that of the country closest to you, since that's where you're going to be doing most of your purchasing for a little while. Here's a handy-dandy map to help you out:
Step 2: I know precious metal prices are high right now but you're going to want to bite the bullet on this one and convert all of your long term savings into them. I don't mean investments, either. I mean you should literally have possession of as much gold, silver, and pieces of electrum as you possibly can as well as the firearms with which to protect said resources. Trust me on this, both the metals and the guns are only going to appreciate in value.

Step 3: Uncontrolled Inflation! We let the dollar do whatever it wants. Print trillions more of it and just drop it from airplanes into Lake Superior. I'm not talking 2% or 3%. I'm talking millions of percent inflation. Zimbabwe inflation. The office guess at Zimbabwe's inflation in July of '08 was 231,000,000%. Its a guess because it was impossible to follow the cost of any actual products. Hence why you'll be buying your Activia in Mexico.

Step 4: Pay off the debt! After hyperinflation the U.S. Dollar will basically be worthless. Every Canada dollar will be worth millions and millions of U.S. Dollars, which our debt is valued in. We convert a small percentage or our gold or pesos back into shitty U.S. Dollars and stick it to China, Japan, and all those poor private creditors who thought the U.S. Dollar was a good investment.

Step 5: Our dollar is basically useless now and we can't just keep on using other countries' money so we're going to have to come up with something new. Remember all that ammunition you bought to protect your gold? That's our new money! .22 rounds will be our change and .50 caliber rounds will be like our new benjamins!

You're welcome, America.

.1% Inspiration

2010-01-30T17:37:00.003-05:00

If telling the woman behind the Starbucks counter that her voice sounds exactly like the receptionist's from Office Space is wrong then I don't want to be, and was not not, right.

Explaining Everything Away

2010-01-25T12:48:00.005-05:00

How have you been?

I know I haven't posted in a while. July really, except for a rogue post in September. I want to assure you though that I have a variety of excuses to cover my absence.

August: Packed up my apartment for an impending move. Had a wicked bad case of poison ivy.

September: Moved. All month.

October: Living off the grid in India with girlfriend until an assassin accidentally kills her while targeting me. Return to Europe to seek revenge, discover more information about my past, threaten Julia Stiles. Also had wicked bad case of poison ivy.

November: Forgot how to read and write.

December: Spent the entire month shopping for Christmas. And by shopping for Christmas I mean drinking at the mall.

First Three Weeks of January: Got laid off so I've been filling my ample free time by doing as little as humanely possible with the notable exception of four or five days lost to Wii Fit.

So there. We're cool, right?

.1% Inspiration

2010-01-23T20:41:00.000-05:00

Dear President of Media,

Here is a list of words I never want to read and/or hear ever again;

Muffintop

Yours Faithfully,

Mad Dog Fargo

The hardest part was the arrows.

2010-01-23T20:33:00.002-05:00

once, I knew tenses

2009-09-17T20:00:00.004-05:00

I'm basically posting right now because I don't want my log on to expire. I don't know if that's something that happens with blogger but if it does I probably don't remember the answer to my security questions. This is what happens with security questions: I am asked a straightforward question, then I think one of two things: 1) I should leave a funny answer because its hilarious and I'll always remember that my fake first pet's name was Sheik Yerbouti or 2) I should leave a fake answer because it would take approximately three seconds for someone on the internet to find out my mother's maiden name or where I was born. Hence Q: What City Were You Born In? A: Samraong, Cambodia. Anyway. If there is a security question to this thing I probably won't remember my answer and I'd be too lazy to do anything more than guess at it until I was locked out and that would be the end of this. Then what would I do for 30 minutes every two months?

I didn't mean to write about that security answer stuff. It just sort of happened. I came here to post this (from xkcd):

If you ignore the part about sticking to a glass or two this comic basically describes my life.

The Final Frontier

2009-07-19T01:22:00.002-05:00

I'm not saying everything, but most things, when worded appropriately, can basically be decided by a show of hands from patrons still out and about somewhere near closing time at a bar. I'm not saying those drunk people should decide how to implement the policy their show of hands is creating, just that the less one person thinks about something the more likely they are to get to the popular (and/or right) answer and that process is more likely to work out the larger the number of non-thinking bar patrons there are.

So, to answer the rhetorical question set up in this article's title:

Yes. It is.

I believe I can drunkenly defend this second point (the one about space, not the one about drunken crowds usually coming to the correct conclusion) with one of the single most common questions between strangers, light night, at bars; "So what do you do for a living?"

"Landscaping. Its hard work but at least I'm outdoors."
"Oh, that sounds nice. I'm a fucking astronaut."

Also:

"This one time I snowboarded the perfect run down a double black diamond. And not one of those pussy east cost black diamonds. I'm talking Colorado."
"That must have been awesome. I've got something similar. This one time, when I was orbiting the Earth in my space shuttle at 5 miles a second I came in for a landing and hit a 300ft wide air strip from 200 miles above sea level."

Or:

"I've been trying to learn Spanish through Rosetta Stone!"
"I've been trying to train my body and mind to withstand the rigors of a trip to Mars."

Or one of the many variations on these conversations. My main point is that space is pretty fucking awesome - and I'm not even talking about actual science. We could but that involves a lot more research than finding out how wide a space shuttle landing strip is and my brain is totally off for the weekend, anyway. If we were going to discuss (when I say discuss I usually mean I research for two hours for no particular reason beyond this post) science I'm sure it would just get more awesome.

Look. We need to keep the space program at the very least so my, "I've been drinking with the former commander of the International Space Station" story is still cool. And honestly, even though I'm not one, I don't really want to live in a world where, "I'm an astronaut," doesn't immediately get you laid.

Career Change

2009-07-18T17:37:00.000-05:00

Just popping in to let you know (that phrase made more sense when I was still planning on taking a vacation and this post hadn't been sitting half written for seven days) that pending legislation in Florida I may have to change careers. From this article:

Florida officials, including Governor Charlie Crist, propose putting a bounty on the snakes' heads. But hunting elusive and barely visible pythons in the wild is difficult at best - though that hasn't stopped South Florida hunters and hunting clubs from tramping out to state wildlife preserves to whip up enthusiasm for python extermination and then posting trophy photos of themselves with 10- to 15-ft. snakes on the Internet. And any effective bounty program in Florida would require lifting the ban on hunting in the federally managed Everglades, something U.S. officials say they are considering.

If this happens I'm quitting archaeology to pursue my one true love; snake bounty hunting.

Regular old snake hunting is great, don't get me wrong, but when you start throwing in a monetary reward I become an even bigger supporter of snake genocide and would seriously consider getting in on the supply side of it for a change.

I figure to sell my tragedy to triumph story, one about a young boy who thinks snakes are kind of gross but somehow manages to overcome this to become the world's most successful and loved snake murderer, I'm going to need a sassy but loyal mongoose sidekick to teach me the ancient traditions of his clan of anthropomorphic snake hunters. His name won't be Riki Tiki Tavi but it should probably be something exotic sounding. No one takes snake hunting advice from a mongoose named Gary. Also, several of my relatives will have to be eaten by snakes. So, Mom and Dad, when the producers start sniffing around the Fargo estate asking questions about who got eaten when, you might have to lay low. Or maybe I could have been married to a snake only to find out that it was using me to funnel state secrets to the C.C.C.P. Betrayed, I funneled my energy into the only productive thing I could do anymore, knife-murder snakes.

I don't know. I'll have plenty of time to work out the details when I'm canvassing the swamp.

post quota: No.

2009-07-16T21:08:00.001-05:00

Just, no.

No.

.1% Inspiration

2009-07-15T06:23:00.000-05:00

I feel like I achieved a moral victory today by tailgating someone for almost 10 miles.

Site News

2009-07-14T18:03:00.004-05:00

In an ongoing effort to actually write here rather than put it off until tomorrow, April, or 2012, I'm introducing a new post type; .1% Inspiration. .1% Inspiration posts are essentially the kernel of a longer post but without any of the over thinking, forced humor, and overused ellipses of a normal 1% Inspiration offering. Its like Twitter for someone (well, just me) who is too lazy to sign up for Twitter.

I may or may not keep up with it.

This is why I'm old.

2009-07-12T12:04:00.005-05:00

This morning I got up on my own at 5:30AM and then a little later in the day I went to watch my father run a 15k in Utica. The race is called the Boilermaker and it ends at a brewery, where instead of water tables they have trucks filled with kegs and people whose only job is to fill up cups of beer as fast as the tap will allow them and give them away for free, in large quantities, to anyone who asks.

My father passed the finish line about 9:30AM and I went into the post-race area in search of him and passed one such table. The following is the exact conversation I had with myself.

RB: Beer? Its like 9:30AM. Is that something I do? Is that something anyone does?
LB: Young people, idiot. Young people drink beer at 9:30AM.
RB: You're right! I'm a young person. I should probably be drinking beer.
LB: No, you've got things to do in the afternoon and if you have a couple beers now you'll need a nap.
RB: You're right again, left brain! What should I do?
LB: Well, as a young person, you are obliged to have a beer when it is offered.

Then I had half a beer, dumped the rest out, and went in search of the banana table.

Regardless of whether or not I had the beer, I'm pretty sure having this conversation at all means I am no longer young.

Also that I talk to myself way too much for someone my age.

What does that even mean?

2009-07-11T13:32:00.005-05:00

I'm sitting at my desk in the middle of a Saturday trying to actually log some hours at work for a change, which of course means I've come up with a ridiculous reason to type away here instead. The difference between the number of hours I sit in front of my computer "working" and the number of hours I end up claiming on my time sheets is pretty depressing.

Yesterday I bought water, which is not something I usually do. Tap will do quite nicely, thank you. I bought it more for the vessel than anything else, as there was a 5-gallon bucket of water nearby but I had forgotten my water bottle at home. Today, the bottle is sitting on my desk waiting until I have enough stuff to make the trip (around the corner) to the recycling bins worthwhile. One of the little beauties of summer is that I can leave all of this stuff on the desks of the people I share my office with until such time as they complain or it becomes a monumental eyesore.

Anyway, so I was about to actually work. I mean I have the word document open, even! Then I glanced a little to my left and the slogan for the water I had purchased jumped out at me, "Everything Else is Just Water" (See Below).

Okay. So what? Just water is what I wanted. This seems like an advertisement for other water companies. If I wanted something that was more than just water I would have bought that instead. But I wanted just water and now I'm forced to wonder what is in this product that makes it more than that. Quite frankly, anything is bad. The water is from Saratoga so I presume it is some kind of horse-related product. Jockey sweat, perhaps. If there's less than half a percent of the daily recommended value of jockey sweat (which I imagine is quite low) then they don't have to list it on the nutritional information on the back so who knows. It could be there. Something is or they wouldn't have to describe everything else as just water.

I think they should change their slogan. A water bottling company that includes jockey sweat in their product shouldn't have such a sense of superiority over other bottling companies. Instead of, "Everything Else is Just Water," they should change it to "Not Quite Water." Or, if they haven't been artificially inducing jockey sweat or horse spittle into their water they could say, "The Exact Same Thing as Everything Else."

Look, what I'm getting at Saratoga Spring Water Co., is that your slogan is awfully arrogant for people who fill up bottles with the most mundane of all human necessities. Don't make me come over there and talk to you and probably gamble at the harness track. If you are going to make me come over there though, could we do it on a Tuesday? That's 1.50$ Margarita night at the Racino.

Call me. We'll set something up.

Post Quota: Everything I Say Is A Lie

2009-07-08T18:11:00.006-05:00

You apparently cannot trust even my own updates on how often I will post so my advice to you is to check this site four or five times a day for the rest of your life and learn to live with maddeningly inconsistent posts surrounded by a lifetime of disappointment.

The Post Quota: link town

Its about Sarah Palin's poll numbers post-resignation. Don't read it. Or do. See if I care. Here's the small part I want to talk about:

You betcha Sarah Palin is still a viable presidential candidate! Even though the governor of Alaska dropped the bombshell last week that she was leaving her post, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds that her support among Republicans is still strong. In fact, her resignation seems to have even slightly boosted her among GOP constituents. According to the nationwide poll, close to 67% of Republicans want Palin to be "a major national political figure" in the future. And 71% of them say they would likely vote for her if she ran for president in 2012.

Palin's problem as a candidate is a lack of experience. Obama, as a candidate, had a similar flaw and so he ran as an outsider, someone with just the right amount of national experience, in an attempt to turn that lack of experience into an advantage and people just ate that shit up. Palin will undoubtedly turn the experience issue in a similar manner starting in 3....2.....1........(well, maybe next year - I bet the 2012 election stars sometime around May 2010). It would be disingenuous of the Obama campaign to fault her for this approach, given that it was their's first, but they will because this is politics and the only thing most people will remember about the 2008 election in 2012 is that there was an angelic choir and a glowing light and then they woke up 3 months later and GM was bankrupt. So, Palin will find herself in the same experience debate with Obama that Obama was in with just about everyone. How do you fix that?

follow the jump to read the rest

The obvious answer is to get more experience like, say, staying governor of Alaska for three more years. 6 years as governor of the country's largest (by area) state, field-dressing musk-ox and brewing gin in a shack two miles off any road, or whatever they do there, is no small amount of experience. With a world-wide instant media and the right people operating your long-term political future it is no problem to remain in the public eye while performing your day job, too. This is clearly not what they have decided to do.

So, why quit? The first thing her competition is going to bring up is that she's a candidate for president that couldn't handle the rigors of running the 47th smallest (by population) state in the country. They will hammer this point into the ground for months (until someone complains that its sexist -whether it is or it isn't, although some of it almost certainly will be). There is no way that she doesn't know this. I'm tossing up two possible answers, though I think the real truth is probably a combination of the two.

1) They intend to play quitting her job as an act of self-sacrifice, one which makes her only more qualified to be President and which solidifies her as the values candidate. Obama was hurting the people of Illinois by keeping his job during his campaign.
2) She is so bad at being the governor of Alaska that continuing to do so would doom her campaign.

Palin 2012 is already spinning this move as partly caused by the media constantly looking to sully her reputation. Who could possibly keep a clean record in the public eye under constant scrutiny? I'm certain this is true. Leading up to the campaign the scrutiny she will be under as the front runner will be significant and the media will make issues out of seemingly nothing in order to say "You betcha!" one more time (see above quoted text). But how is Palin's case different from the case of any of the other candidates over the last few elections, all of whom kept their national jobs? I admit to giving this little thought as I'm not ready to talk about 2012 just yet but the only answer I've thought of so far that she and her team were worried that the next three years of governing Alaska would be such a colossal clusterfuck that they've decided to cut their losses. That is not a confidence building platform. "We can't have you fucking up Alaska while we get the campaign for president in gear. Why don't you sit back and think about ways you could fuck up the whole country instead?"

I think I've made it this far without intentionally saying anything sexist so I'm going to close with: at least the goods news is that they'll keep on having excuses to make more Palin porn films. Hopefully that line doesn't bring any friends home with it from the field (it probably will)

Oh, wait:

3) Palin is the only person who knows about a secret, unstoppable, fiscal disaster/mass extinction of cute Alaskan animals and wants to get out before it can reasonably be construed to have happened on her watch.

Huh.

2009-07-02T20:41:00.003-05:00

I know I just said that I was taking a break from posting until late July but there is something I need to report:

At this moment, 9:30PM EST, Thursday, July 2nd, 2009; I have my shit together.

There is literally nothing I should be doing at this moment that isn't already done. Sure, I've got dissertation stuff on the horizon but there is nothing -- no matter how mundane -- that I can do now, that I haven't already done. My email is responded too. My room is clean. The dishes are done. The photos from field school are cataloged. My field notes are updated. The water is ready to go. My time sheets are in. My ipod is fixed. The recycling is taken out. My clothes are hung up. My plants are watered. My samples are being taken. My testing sieves are ordered. My credit cards and bank accounts are in good order. My shit with human resources is worked out. My toe is band-aided. My fridge has beer in it.

There is nothing else I have to do right now. This time is mine.

Every other night since I entered grad school there has been something else I should be doing. I often don't do it. If time is not given to you then you have to take it and I won't apologize for staying sane and (hopefully) not turning into a dick during grad school. But there's always that nagging guilt at the back of your head when you spend an hour reading a novel or watching Futurama reruns saying, "You should be reading/writing for school".

Not now. My dissertation is barely started but I can't do anything about that for a little while so I'm not sweating it. Every other thing that I think I should be doing though is finished.

Now what the fuck do I do with my free time?

Besides post here, of course, because I'm seriously on vacation.

Technical Difficulties

2009-06-28T20:40:00.004-05:00

In case you were wondering where your cutting and incisive commentary on which pop culture trend I'm bored with now went to (update; I totally forgot about vampires -- I figured it was self explanatory though since I'm not a 15-year-old girl), it has temporarily taken a back seat while I work two jobs. Jobs that pay me, or will some day pay me, in actual money. The actual money that affords me the leisure time to write here (and keeps me at a svelte 210lbs). Until I cut back to one job I'm afraid you'll have to live without my constant updates on what about Yahoo!'s homepage annoys me today. Think of this as your summer vacation away from me! I promise to think that way about you.

For those of you asking, "Didn't you just take a vacation from the site last year that lasted almost 5 months?", yes, yes I did. But I promise this time will be different, baby.

Look for posting to resume its regular, manic-depressive, schedule sometime in late July.

Until then, good readers, stay frosty.

Things That Exist

2009-05-31T11:37:00.005-05:00

I was in the math section of a Barnes and Noble today and this is a thing that exists:I'm down with making science and math accessible to the masses. I know gateway blah blah blag, bad test scores blah blah blah, falling behind other countries blah blah blah..... but isn't it about time that we, as a society, just totally give up on people who read Manga?

zzzzzzzzzz

2009-05-30T09:39:00.004-05:00

I pretty routinely argue with people even though I'm under the general impression that I don't enjoy it. Maybe it's that as a lifelong holder of minority opinions I rarely feel as though my points are being given as careful consideration as I am giving to the other side's (though I imagine the other side feels the exact same thing). I do enjoy trying to defend basically indefensible positions as an intellectual exercise no matter where I believe the truth may lie and in this way I assume I'm as annoying to other people in some arguments as they are to me in others. I've been thinking about this a lot lately as I'm attempting to reduce the percentage of arguments (and conversations in general) I'm involved in that I know ahead of time aren't going to go anywhere. This is probably 50% of the conversations I have in class. Since I can't control what other people say.......yet, the most effective way to limiting these is to pick out the ones where I am the aggressor. To this end I've divided arguments into four general types for closer analysis of my conversation habits, summarized below.

1) Disagreements over matters of fact phrased as matters of facts = we're cool
2) Disagreements over matters of fact phrased as matters of opinion = I probably tune you out
3) Disagreements over matters of opinion phrased as a matters of opinion = we're cool
4) Disagreements over matters of opinion phrased as a matters of fact = we fight with knives

To learn how to get Mad Dog Fargo to start a knife fight, follow the jump

There are obviously thousands of qualifications, caveats, and footnotes to these categories but they're here to serve more as illustration than as objective divisions of debate.

1) This is that rarest of arguments where someone is objectively right and someone is objectively wrong. I, generally speaking, have no problem being wrong, even publicly so. Which is good because if history is any indicator I have a long life of being wrong ahead of me. I am wrong the first time pretty much out of habit but that's fine. Wrong about facts is simple to fix and expressing them out loud is often one of the quickest ways of fixing them. Arguments of this type rarely last very long and usually don't bother me. In short, these are not the problem.

2) The second category is perhaps the fuzziest. The question, "What is the capital of Russia?" is a matter of fact. The answer, "I think it is Moscow," is essentially a statement of opinion on a factual matter and is less desirable than "It is Moscow." The capital of Russia is not modified in any way by what an individual might think it it is, whether they're certain or not, so the words, "I think," are entirely superfluous. However, both statements are expressions of fact as best the speaker knows it and as such are not what I'm talking about in this category. Let's call it Type 2A. The real problem for me in this category is what we'll call Type 2B and is the line of argument that goes, "I think Al Gore would make a bad president. I don't know why, I just do." The Mad Dog Fargo of however many years ago I actually had that conversation would have argued referencing facts like platform positions or work history. The only equivalent response to this statement without escalating the disagreement is "Well, I think he would," followed by maybe sticking out your tongue. This is deeply unsatisfying of course but not nearly as unsatisfying as entering into a prolonged disagreement on a factual matter with someone who refuses to address facts of any kind. An individual's personal feelings on a matter, including the election of a President, are fine ways to evaluate a situation but do not constitute an argument more than they constitute argument-bait. This is something I think I've learned to sidestep, in a way. Faced with the same opinion statement, the enlightened Mad Dog Fargo of the present would probably still argue it but would have totally checked out of the conversation by the second rebuttal. This is the kind of conversation where someone says, "Penis Cheeseburger Nipple Fart," and I respond, "I know where you're coming from but I'll have to respectfully disagree.

3) Category Three is my favorite kind of argument. This argument doesn't end, no one is wrong, and by two minutes in my only goal is to come up with the strangest way of justifying my point as possible. All conversations should be like this.

4) This is my problem category and is very well exemplified in a fairly routine conversation I have with other grad students. I'm fortunate that my program allows me to meet lots of people from all over the state, the country, and the world. They come from different cultures, speak different languages, and bring many different life experiences into the community but most of them have one thing in common; one of their favorite hobbies is talk about how much they hate my home. If this were expressed as a matter of opinion then I wouldn't have a problem with it. The sentence, "I think Upstate New York is a shithole," does not raise any red flags in my argument receptors. I disagree but there is little sense in arguing this point. Some people are just bound and determined to find the bad in their situation. However, the sentence, "Upstate New York is a shithole," means we will fight with knives. The following is a paraphrased version of a conversation I probably have 5 times a year;

"This place is so fucking terrible I can hardly believe it." Future-knife fight victim
"I love it when people come to my home and tell me how bad it is." - Yours truly
"Yeah, well, I'm from New York City." This is followed by a knowing glance as though their logic is undeniable.

Then we fight with knives.

My problem is never that they don't like the area. I think the obvious emotional component to my end of the argument is more based out of frustration from hearing the same line over and over than out of territorial imperative. I like the area but I don't think anyone else has any obligation too. There's a longer, secondary argument involved here where I believe that any area being good or bad in general is a fallacy and the expression of preference speaks more to the kind of person than the kind of area but this post is text heavy already and I read the same internet you do. If I'm going to keep your attention I need to cut down on the words and maybe throw up some banner ads from Adult Friend Finder.

The problem here and in all arguments of this type is that the individual is expressing their opinion as though it were an objective fact. Many statements like the one summarized above can fit into Type 2A and I don't have any issue with them. It is when the person on the other side is conflating their own opinion on something with a fact, as though their opinion on food, or movies, or locations were such a genearallly accepted maxim that it stands on its own as truth without further review. This speech habit drives me nuts. However, the problem is not with the person making these statements. The problem is with me. It takes two to argue and I can hardly expect everyone to follow my speaking rules, unless maybe I were to put them on a shirt I wore all the time, and even then that's almost like claiming its a privilege to talk to me (It is, even with the spittle). The two clear solutions are to either ask for further explanation without establishing a contrary opinion or to simply react less. There is no way of operationalizing the former without seeming dickish. I am often a dick but its rarely purposeful. No, the key is definitely the latter. Just shut up.

I'm certainly not claiming that these are the only categories of argument nor am I claiming that I am not guilty of some of the very speech habits I'm complaining about. I clearly make authoritative claims about matters of opinion all the time. Half of this site is making authoritative claims about matters of opinion. The other half is long, introspective, and ultimately boring posts like this one. But you stopped reading a while ago.

The moral of this story is that this post is why the jump html is here. YOU'RE WELCOME.

Formatting News

2009-05-29T22:30:00.005-05:00

Because of the length of once and future posts and to protect the casual reader from systematic unfunny I've been forced to experiment with html. This is always a dicey prospect. I'm attempting to make only the first couple paragraphs of some posts appear on the main page with a jump link to read the rest but who knows if that will happen or not. If you catch this blog in a mangled form, my apologies. I'll figure this computer business out eventually.

Update: The link to the full post is appearing even in posts I haven't truncated. This may be a temporary/permanent fact of our existence. I'll try to make sure to indicate when clicking on it matters and when it doesn't until I sort this out. Or one of you does.

No. Seriously. One of you fix this for me.

Post Quota-let

2009-05-27T20:20:00.002-05:00

That's just racist.

Mad Dog Fargo Reviews Movies

2009-05-26T22:52:00.006-05:00

Mad Dog Fargo reviews a movie. Mad Dog Fargo reviews Terminator: Salvation. Mad Dog Fargo tells you several things about Terminator: Salvation. Mad Dog Fargo does his very best to ruin a movie for you. All of these are titles I could have used for this post. None of them would have been very accurate. Now, Mad Dog Fargo writes something in text the same color as the background. That would have been accurate.

Terminator: Salvation is a historic movie (only if its a documentary) in that it has the first ever successful cyborg-to-human open-air desert heart transplant. Performed by a veterinarian.

It is weird to leave a Terminator movie and think, "I guess it was alright except for the heart surgery scene".

And also many other things. But see it. Then we'll have something to talk about and you can stop silently judging me from across the room. Yes I've put on weight. The stress of this marriage is doing it to me. I don't know why we bother either. You know what, if it weren't for the little brat I would have been out of here years ago.

Now look who you made cry.

There! Look what I do for you. I write things about a movie many of you probably haven't seen yet and I don't even spoil it for you. You could be a little more appreciative.

One of the characters takes out a skynet drone with a tire iron. Sorry. I couldn't help myself. That was pretty stupid.

A solid morning

2009-05-24T10:52:00.005-05:00

This morning, after repeatedly referring (to myself, I'm the only one here) to the dozen eggs in my fridge as "a 12-pack of eggs," not because I was making a joke but because I honestly couldn't come up with another way of describing them, I started to pack for a trip home. It took me a little while to remember everything I wanted to bring but when I finally got it all together I put my backpack on, threw my laundry over my shoulder and started walking to the car.

I got about halfway before realizing that I wasn't wearing a shirt.

Now for the drive. This should be exciting.

UPDATE: The next morning I left my car at a friend's house overnight. I got up in the morning and walked over there to rescue it from the closed down Mammography Center parking lot it was in and decided to swing by a Dunkin Donuts (what America runs on, apparently) for coffee. When I got to the Dunkin Donuts I fished around for my wallet and discovered that I had neglected to bring my keys on this rescue mission. I'm guessing that's about 3 miles of stupidity.

DOUBLE UPDATE: I just spent 5 minutes looking for my wallet to discover it was in my back pocket. I'm going to just hide in my bedroom until this passes.

What is Art? A Ramble.

2009-05-17T00:33:00.012-05:00

Yahoo, which maintains my primary email and uses my messages to generate statistics about what is cool (really. but it has nothing to do with me), has posted a "news" story on its homepage about a 22-month old "art" prodigy.

They fronted the video (I had to search for that text link, assholes) with a controversy about whether or not the art is her own. The "expert" in the video (being a professional "expert," that is telling people what to like, should probably be considered at the margins at expertness, everyone does it but what kind of person decides to make a living off it?) mentions that he suspects that her parents have had some kind of influence on the final form of her paintings.

I'm not sure where to begin.

To say that parents have not had an influence on a 22-month old would be a controversy. Saying that parents were involved in their 22-month old's life is so exceedingly normal that it doesn't require mentioning. Imagine a news article about asthma that felt compelled to tell you that breathing was important to your continued existence.

Moving past that, let's assume that even beyond her parents' introduction of paint, canvas, direction, and rewards, the abstract paintings are entirely the work of a 22-month year old. Are they still art?

No. But that quibble isn't even remotely important.

follow the jump to read the rest of the ramble

I don't know much or care much about art. You could ask my art history professor but she undoubtedly doesn't remember me since I stopped showing up after an assertion, that, "Romans didn't know how to make rope," drove me off. So, trust me on this, I don't know much about art except that I rooted hard against Thomas Crowne for caring about it.

Here's what I do know; Art is not created accidentally. Art is intentional, both by the creator and the interpreter. It is impossible to create art accidentally because art's definition includes intentionality. Art cannot exist without a human mind behind it. If art is created then it is entirely the intention of the creator to construct it. If art is interpreted then it is entirely the intention of the interpreter to frame it as such. Art doesn't exist without someone to control how it is distributed and interpreted. Art without intentionality is nature. I would argue that nature can be beautiful, like art, but the random combination of genes is not artwork anymore than the Mona Lisa is the result of the random combination of genes.

This is all well and good. I'm not implying that anyone should suddenly change their opinion on what is or what isn't art. My simple intention is to say that to be art, it has to be intentional, and 22-month-olds cannot intentionally produce art. This, to me, means that the only people important in determining whether or not it is art are adults. Whether or not the parents influenced the child is totally irrelevant to the discussion. The argument, did the infant produce art, is inherently flawed since infants cannot produce art. Not to insult anyone's children but apes doodle in the dirt.

So, all that matters in the overall argument, is it art or not, is the perspective of the interpreter. An interpreter creates art not through inspiration or talent but through consensus and charisma. Though the end result is often the same the route taken is different. Art created by an artist can exist in isolation from other people. Art created by an interpreter exists solely through other people. Art in isolation is basically meaningless, except for the individuals creating it. There is nothing wrong with that. If your desire is to create art and not show it to anyone then it's still art and it's still meaningful to you. However, for art to be important to other people, important to an art community, important to "art," it must essentially be through interpretation. In "Art," in the broadest sense, the artist is probably the least important part.

What I'm saying is that the argument in the article isn't important, it just took me 500 words to express that.

Post Quota Saturday

2009-05-15T19:51:00.004-05:00

I've often thought that one of my greatest failings in life is that I have compassion for everyone.

Related Brevia: Do you know how hard it is to find a good picture of Dick Cheney? Google image search him. Even his publicity photos make him look like a jackass.

Post Quota: The Tipping Point

2009-05-12T18:39:00.002-05:00

Here is how I know zombie popularity has gone too far (linky):

There are a thousand different ways that should be awesome. The fact that it involves parasites, fire ants, and zombies all in the same thing should be ridiculously awesome. But its not. Because I'm done with zombies. You've ruined them for me, world. That's it. Somewhere Max Brooks just ejaculated in his pants. This zombie thing is only going to make him so much money and every article like this just extends that 15 minutes.

Look. I was like you three, four years ago. I was into zombies. My 2006 Halloween costume was "running for Congress in 2010 after earning fame during the zombie wars". I couldn't come up with a good costume. Shut up about it. But zombies are played out. You knew when hipsters started doing zombie walks it was played out yet you keep on with this. Knock it off. You're making it impossible to enjoy Shaun of the Dead ever again.

Zombies in 2009 are like the frat boy impression of Borat in 2007.

While we're at it; no more pirates or ninjas. Thankfully real pirates seem to have taken some of the steam out of their trend - so some good is coming from all that. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a spate of ninjas stabbing people in nursing homes lately so we're going to have to take care of that one ourselves.

Played out, guys. Played out.

This is my art

2009-05-08T11:56:00.005-05:00

I don't install facebook applications because most of them are stupid. There is no entertainment value in most people's lists of 5 cars they've owned or 5 things they hate but everyone else loves. Or at least most people don't attempt to make them entertaining. Or some combination of the two. Anyway, I don't install facebook applications out of some poorly conceived idea about not boring people. This is probably questionable thinking since in my own experience, facebook daily stretches the limits of what I can find entertainment value in. When someone posts a list of their favorite movies, I read it. I don't know why I read it. It is not something I would normally believe I would have any inherent interest in since most people tell the truth and the truth is inherently boring. But I read it. Partly because once you've learned how to read you can't not read when your eyes pass over strings of letters but also because somewhere, a little part of me is probably saying, "She owned a 1989 Ford Tempo. That's interesting". That part of me can go ahead and die and fall off anytime it pleases. So, the gist of this is that who am I to determine ahead of time what other people are going to find interesting. Maybe the world really does want to find out what "Five things I could grab without moving". But I'm a little too far into ignoring these applications to start doing them all now, so the world will have to move on without knowledge of my five favorite drinks or five things I think when I cross the street.

This boycott does however, occasionally cause me to miss out on something awesome. For instance, recently a friend did the quiz, "What dinosaur/weapon combo would you ride into battle on". That is awesome. She got triceratops/crossbow. Even awesomer. Since I don't install applications I didn't get to find out what the quiz thinks I could ride into battle on/with. Or even just read the other possible combinations. Because of this I've spent some time thinking about what combo I would like and I've decided; Brontosaurus/Sack full of hand grenades. I've put a depictition of what that might be like below.

The world is not ready for my art. That is code for, "I'm not much of an artist". In any case though, if you have to write, "THIS IS MY ART," on everything you do it might be an indication that you should take a class at the learning annex (lazy joke learned from the learning annex of lazy joking) or something.

THIS IS MY ART.

this post was kind of all over the place, wasn't it?

Post Quota: We're all saved! We must be.

2009-05-02T14:20:00.008-05:00

The economy must be fixed, because if it isn't, this (this), is one of the stupidest things I have ever read.

Let me spare you the article. Congress is trying to push for a playoff system in college football. Actually, it doesn't really matter what congress is trying to do to college football. The fact that congress is involved in college football, and they aren't gambling on it, is embarrassing enough. Here's my favorite part:

Yet it is unclear whether lawmakers will try to legislate how college football picks its No. 1 before the first kickoff of the fall season. Congress is grappling with a crowded agenda of budgets, health care overhaul and climate change, and though President Barack Obama favors a playoff, he hasn’t made it a legislative priority.

To sum up: Budget, Health Care, Climate Change, College Football Playoff System.

Anyway, now this is me.

Man that embedded itself freaking huge.

Update: embedded slightly less huge

Much later update: posted an actual working clip. To make this work your going to have to only hear and see the part Token is in. Or watch the whole thing. Its funny in context. No Lemmiwinks, mind you. But funny.

100 Days

2009-04-29T21:48:00.006-05:00

Has it really been 100 days? It seems like so much longer. I don't even remember what I looked like back then. Maybe I'll ask my parents. I wonder if Obama was ever sitting down in his office before the inauguration and strategizing with his advisers about the new problems they might face, after all, they didn't have Hillary Clinton's advisers around to do their thinking for them anymore. I wonder where on that list they created in my head were swine flu and pirates. My guess is it looked something like this:

34) Norm Coleman victory in Minnesota
35) Influenza, reassorted in pigs
36) Influenza, reassorted in history's greatest kung-fu masters (it could happen, totally. -Rahm)
37) Al Franken victory in Minnesota
~~38) France gets bomb~~
-France already has the bomb.
-Shut up! No way!
-Yeah, Napoleon or something.
38) Gray hair
39) PIRATES! FUCK YEAH!
40) I was being serious. Piracy in major shipping lanes in some areas of the world, while not a serious problem in the traditional sense, could be a source of public fear and scrutiny. It might be better to have a PR plan in place in the eventuality that an American ship or crew is involved.
41) All in favor of voting Dave beer bitch, say AYE-MATEY!
42) AYE-MATEY!
43) You guys suck. I'm going home. Give me my playstation controller.
44) Executive bonuses

Anyway (feel a long post brewing), I didn't watch the press conference because earlier this evening I walked to the gas station closest to me to pick up a six-pack of Miller Lite (we all celebrate the recession in our own way) and I was thinking a lot about how even though my job (the one I'm laid off from but might go back to anytime) is in a sector Obama's package is trying to stimulate pretty hard it still might not come through (hence the walking to a gas station at 10pm for beer). Then I got all nostalgic, which is one of my least favorite ways to be, but it got me thinking and when I actually think (this happens rarely) it occasionally comes up here. Here are my thoughts on some things from Obama's first 100 days:

1) I have seen way too much coverage on Obama's hair. There was a front-page story about it in the New York Times about a month ago. Its been on Yahoo!'s front page (I seriously need to change my homepage for all I complain). I'm sure I've seen it on a couple other media outlets too and who knows how many television networks covered this for all I watched them. They all attribute the change to the stress of his job. I'm not saying that I don't think the job is stressful, though I bet the nations best-paid therapists are on hand to help him with that. I'd just like to throw out a second possibility: now that he's been elected he's stopped using Just For Men. During the campaign, yeah, he had to look young and virile. Ready to impregnate (with hope) anything that crossed his determined glare. Afterall, he was running against Oldy McFootinthegrave. But we're married to him now, bitches. It don't matter what he looks like.

I bet, if he gets elected to a second term, that by the sixth year we'll be debating whether or not to put Young Obama or Fat Obama on the postage stamp (ask your parents).

2) The President's administration spent weeks leading up to the 100th day downplaying it's significance. They're right, in one respect. 100 days is an arbitrary length of time within which to evaluate someone. They're wrong if they think that arbitrary makes it less important. When 100 million people get together to vote on something its not strange for them to want a status report. 100 days is a nice round number. There will be one again at 6 months and a year. Spending weeks downplaying the importance of the 100 day review is loser-talk. It makes it look like the administration has got nothing to hang it's hat on. It makes it look weak. Walking into this press conference reluctantly is either A) a calculated move to lower expectations, which is weak or B) weak. The only way to deal with things like this is to charge headlong into them. Obama's supposed to be good on his feet. Throwing on a smile and owning it should be one of the strengths of this administration.

3) And about that; about all the teleprompter reliance and press conference (earlier ones -- I didn't watch this one -- beer. I'm sure you understand) hesitations. I'm talking right to the President here. I though you were supposed to be good at this, not just good by comparison. Remember a couple conferences ago when some jackass asked you about Alex Rodgriquez's positive steroids test in baseball? I think the proper response to that is: "Sit down and shut the fuck up." Try it, or a prime time variant of it. It's on me, Mr. President. Remember that 2004 Democratic Convention and early campaign Barack Obama that eye-humped America so hard he got to run for president despite almost no qualifications? Let's get that Obama back, okay big-guy? We all want the Obama, who when asked if he could run the country after just two short years in national politics, said, "yes I can".

Hasty Research Division: Appendectomies

2009-04-28T17:36:00.002-05:00

When I pulled my groin, I first noticed it as a generalized pain in my lower right abdomen, in the appendicular (I made that up) frazbok (I made that up too, it means region or area). When I thought about my appendix, my thought process went down this line:

1. Huh, I wonder if its appendicitis?
2. I can't have appendicitis. I don't have insurance.
3. I wonder what's the cheapest state to have an appendectomy in?
4. It's not appendicitis. You pulled your groin, jackass.

Since I don't have insurance though, and my prospects of getting it anytime soon went from bad to worse today, and I spent a long time hungover in front of my computer, I did some hasty research to help formulate a plan should I ever get appendicitis.

First off: National Average: $18,000

I can't afford that. That is more than I make in a year. For that amount of money I could have so much plastic surgery done that I could look like Mickey Rourke. For that amount of money I could have multiple people contract-killed. Or I could put a down payment on a house. You use your money your way, I'll use my money mine.

Then there was some good-ish news: Albany, New York: $13,300. The average for hospitals in my area is significantly less than the national average. This is still pretty expensive, though, and clearly not within my current price range.

Some other states and areas:
Minnesota: $13,500
Maine: $10,000ish
Newark, New Jersey: $28,600
Providence, Rhode Island: $13,700
Burlington, Vermont: $10,600

So, Maine is cheap but that would be a long drive with a gimpy appendix. For the extra three grand I might as well have it close to home. I also learned that under no circumstances should I ever have my appendix out in New Jersey. I think the U.S. State Department doesn't recommend travelling to New Jersey without health insurance anyway.

So, by this point, my plan would be pretty much like everyone else's. When I think I've got appendicitis, I'm just going to go to the nearest hospital. A little bit more digging though has added a new wrinkle to this.

Costa Rica, <$1,000

I never thought about outsourcing my surgery before but both Costa Rica and India seem to be offering me competitive rates. Now to figure out how to time my Costa Rican vacation with my future appendicitis. Pura Vida!

P.S. Apparently there is an entire sub-genre of tourism called Medical Tourism, where people plan on having surgery in a foreign country and then use the money they saved to see the sights. It's tempting to imagine this as coming out of a truely novel idea or a stroke of genius from someone who loved travel and needed a quicky amputation but it probably started more along the lines of, "oh, I have prostate cancer. At least I'll get to see Thailand before I die".

The Revolution

2009-04-28T17:24:00.006-05:00

Last week I pulled my groin. Go ahead. Make your masturbation joke. Every other single person I've mentioned this to has come up with an original and inspired comment on it so you've got a lot to live up to, though. Just kidding, every single person I've mentioned this to has slightly arched their eyebrow and asked "what were you doing?" in a knowing way, as though they wanted to imply something salacious but couldn't actually say it out loud. Every single person, in the exact same way.

The first couple of times I thought there was something wrong with me. I like infantile humor and it doesn't get much more infantile than enjoying the use of the word "groin" in a sentence, but I can find no humor in this. And it isn't because it happened to me, in the moment I can be pretty pissed off about getting hurt, especially when someone is laughing at it, but after the pain has subsided I can find as much humor in my own foibles as anyone. After about the 10th time though I decided that its probably because its too easy. In fact, I think I even made the joke to myself in my office when I first noticed it and didn't laugh. And I love my own jokes. I think that point should be abundantly clear by anyone who has ever read 1% Inspiration before.

This is a long-winded way of saying, try harder America. In these tough economic times we need a humor stimulus-package. And I'm not talking about that ventriloquist they've got on Comedy Central all the time now. That is not funny. Stop laughing at him. Seriously. I'm talking about a back to basics, face to face humor stimulus package. The kind of humor garnered from telling dirty jokes in inappropriate places. The kind of humor you get from taking an extra second to come up with something creative and new. The kind of humor you get from not just going back to the old "your mother" well (though, in response to the groin pull -- "yeah, your mom wore me out last night too" would be acceptable). They won't all be winners. Sometimes it doesn't stick to the wall and you've got to throw it back in the pot for little while. This is nothing to worry about. The important thing is that we try and that we work at it. The kind of humor I'm talking about can't be read on the internet or plagiarized from excess TV watching, though I'm hardly recommending that you stop doing the former. It can only be found in the day to day interactions of a people struggling to cope with lost jobs, lost savings, and lost confidence. It'll be hard work, America, but I'll work hard if you work hard. We can get it back. One joke at a time.

Some people grow into people that only laugh at things they know. These are the kind of people who enjoy ventriloquism, family comedies, and Larry the Cable guy. They only listen to music they've already listened too. They go places they've already been. Only eat things they've already eaten.

These people are the enemy. Some may be converted. Other neutralized. But they fight every day to keep you and me from experiencing new things. Remember this when the revolution comes....

Post Quota: The Pitch

2009-04-24T10:13:00.002-05:00

I did not view the articles at the bottom of this list. They are videos and if I wanted to watch the news I wouldn't be on the internet. Moreover, what could I possibly get from learning the facts of those two stories that I haven't already imagined?

What if that woman had been saved from the bear by paragliding police officers. Paragliding kung-fu police officers. With afros and a night job playing trombone in a jazz combo in Miami's hottest night club. With children they're raising on their own and love more than life but just don't understand sometimes. With a quirky group of bear-hating friends who will do anything for each other.

With fucking pathos.

Hollywood, I'm waiting.

Cooking with Mad Dog Fargo III: Breakfast of Champions

2009-04-14T19:27:00.018-05:00

Mad Dog Fargo's "Get-em up and Go!" Toast

This recipe is perfect for children who don't want to eat anything before they go to school and as a result are sluggish in the mornings and less than all-they-can-be at class. Its a modern twist on that old classic, toast! Just follow these easy steps:

Step One: Own a Toaster.

I cannot stress enough how important this is to the overall process. You don't want your sluggish children operating a gridle first thing in the morning. It will also help to have bread in the house, otherwise you'll have to get up way ahead of your kids to go get it. If this is the case, let them go to school without. They can take one more for the team, can't they?

Step Two: Toast the bread.

This will take several minutes to do correctly. Take this time to think about all of the things you could have done with your life before you had kids. In the long run though it may be best if this is the last time you think about Italy, the Peace Corp, and running a bed and breakfast.

Step Three: Butter the Bread.

The butter or margarine you use is unimportant to the final flavor of the toast so feel free to skimp. Buy an Aldi's brand that's mostly sawdust. Use soy butter (pictured) so when asked about it your kids' friends will make fun of them. Use any kind of substandard material that will serve as a binder in the last step. Household caulk, tasty caulk, may function well in this role (untested -- do not use caulk).

Step Four: Add the Get-em up!

Cover the toast in red pepper. See, by adding the butter you've done little to mute the exquisite flavor of the pepper but kept it from flying all over the place like it would on dry toast or worse.

Step Five: Enjoy

Serve with grapefruit, hot coffee, and other parts of a well-balanced child's breakfast and you can kiss your children's sluggish mornings goodbye!

Nutrional Information:

Calories: 300?
Fiber: 6g? Probably varies by bread
Copper: 11. But 11 what?
Get-em up and Go: Fuckloads
p.s. the formatting for this entry took waaaay too much of my life.

What did I say?!

2009-04-12T18:17:00.002-05:00

Okay. You clearly weren't listening.

Everyone, Obama's dog's name is "Hot Carl".

Now get out there and make it happen.

A thing that happened

2009-03-28T23:14:00.003-05:00

This happened on my facebook profile:

Names have been redacted to protect the extremely nerdy.

I would be remiss though if I didn't mention that my initial quote came from this site and that this picture is currently my favorite thing on the planet.

Post Quota: Freedom Hating Edition

2009-03-27T16:21:00.005-05:00

Apparently there is some ado about the owners of the tower going up in place of the former World Trade Center changing the name of the tower, heretofore known as "Freedom Tower". According to the article, many people including the editorial staffs of the New York Daily News and New York Post, are upset with the New York and New Jersey Port Authority for changing the name to One World Trade Center (the address it will have and the name of one of the original towers).

Putting aside any thought I might have about whether or not the Daily News and Post's opinions on this matter have anything to do with sales of their paper, I would like to get to what I think is the single biggest difference between me and those reacting negatively to this change.

"Freedom Tower," is a stupid fucking name.

It's like if after an earthquake where the Golden Gate Bridge collapsed they rebuilt it and called it "Unshakeable Bridge". Now if you were to call this, "Robocop's Penis Tower," then you might be on to something but "Freedom Tower," sounds like it was the first thing out of someone's mouth and then everyone at the meeting started drinking and never got around to coming up with something better. I can see the man with his feet up on the desk saying, "I don't know......uh.....what if we called it.....uh........The Tower of Freedom," all the while absently dabbing at a mustard stain on his shirt. Three hours and a six-pack later they had spent too much time talking about how disappointed they were in their children and bam! Freedom Tower is born.

I'm not saying One World Trade Center is all that great a name either but at least it doesn't sound like a place name in a mass market fantasy novel with thinly veiled references to actually wanting to fuck a dragon.

image credit

A good procrastination should feel like you're inserting lots and lots of commas into the sentence of your life

2009-03-10T23:00:00.006-05:00

Um....Yahoo?

We need to talk about this:

I'm not here to comment more generally on your new habit of linking directly to blogs instead of to news articles as one might surmise from some of your headlines. Instead, I would simply like to point out that your timing in publishing this little bit of not news might be just a hair too late. I'm not saying the ship has sailed on Chuck Norris facts. Internet memes never really die. They just cease to matter too all but the most annoying of people. I'm sure, if I wanted, I could still find my way to a hamster dance animation. But I don't because I'm a constantly evolving mind and I need new ways to distract myself from the crushing despair of everyday life that learning French has instilled in me.

This got me thinking, maybe the internet is like a language. I've read that learning a language is easier as a child. Children's brains aren't all bogged down in rules that control the way we think and so there's no particular reason why a ball can't be a ball and a pelota while in an adult's brain its a ball first and a pelota second. Someone just coming to the internet, who had not grown up with it, might have the same difficulty, having to learn a whole new set of rules, likely subordinate to the rules that govern the rest of their life, about what's interesting or relevant or necessary. In a case like this, upon discovering a meme like Chuck Norris Facts, they may not be able to distinguish it from other memes. Like learning a new tense, the internet has a time dimension that doesn't operate in the way you are used to understanding everything else. A book being out for three years isn't old. A TV show out for three years may not have hit its stride. A movie out for three years might still be on your to-rent list. An internet meme at three years is spoken of in a historical tense in the same way one might discuss a very old photograph and speaking of them as though they were in the present elucidates the same reactions one might recieve upon asking another person what decade it was. As time goes on the memes are steeped deeper into history they become some of the esoteric facts the internet community uses to establish a social connection with an increasing larger number of people and knowledge of these facts provides a way for some to evaluate authenticity and establish credibilty or dominance. Like learning a new language, like learning a new culture, it can sometimes be intimidating for new members to gain access to knowledge and understanding of these paths to authority and there are likely to be mistakes along the way. But for the uninitiated, there will eventually be new memes to enjoy, archive, and store for future authority claims of their own and while ridicule is certainly an efficient way of aiding in the encoding process for the new rules, one rarely ridicules honest effort in learning and utilizing those rules.

So, Yahoo!, I'm sorry for my first paragraph. As you are clearly new to this whole internet thing, I should not have ridiculed your attempt to join in the conversation. I guess what I'm trying to say is, welcome to the internet, Yahoo! Try not to get rickrolled while you're here.

nothing lost in translation

2009-03-09T18:16:00.007-05:00

When I was not learning Spanish all those years ago I remember having to translate sentences and paragraphs about a lot of pretty normal things. I'd write sentences about los perros verdes and talk about things in el cuatro or la biblioteca or other things mentioned in Adam Sandler's "The Beating of a High School Spanish Teacher".

In the book I'm working through for French right now I'm onto paragraphs and this, to the best of my ability, is the translation for the last one I did:

This end of the world will operate without noise, without revolution, without cataclysm. As the tree looses its leave by the puff of wind in autumn, so the earth will be seen to successively bring down and destroy its children, and in this eternal winter that will envelop her, she will not be able to hope for a new sun, nor a new spring.

Anyway, it went on like that but I'll spare you the rest. Now this is me:

I'm going to leave work now and be miserable to other people and possibly troll for meaningless sex with strangers I can't look in the eye.

image credit

Uncollected Thoughts

2009-03-08T18:44:00.003-05:00

I learned today that I'm the kind of person who waits until the evening and then pulls someone else's newspaper out of the trash.

This must be that green revolution all my hippy friends talk about.

Autruche

2009-03-07T01:00:00.002-05:00

When I search for a website that doesn't exist, why doesn't Road Runner (shit, now you know my ISP!) take me to a site where I could register that website? Given the rapidly decreasing number of simply named websites I would think that even www.ostrichdong.com would still be valuable in some way.

Incidentally, the guide I'm using to attempt to learn French seems to think that ostrich is an important enough word to include in the third chapter (autruches). I haven't learned a lot of basic terms yet but I've got ostrich, supple, and peony down.

Doubly incidentally (awesome Englais), there's no need to know why I was searching for ostrich dong.

Critical Mass (not the bicycle thing)

2009-02-28T10:37:00.004-05:00

I see a lot of adds, especially on Yahoo! properties, for the apartment complex I live in. This seems to be a case of tailored adds gone a little too specific. I already live here. I can't possible be more here. And don't think this is going to butter me up to pay more rent when the contract comes up in a couple months. I read the newspaper. I mean I do the crossword and KenKen and occasionally my eyes glance past the business section. I know rent is falling everywhere on the planet and I have no intention of stomaching your yearly rent increase.

Bigger problem: When Redhawk and I first moved in here, parking wasn't bad and our neighbors were pretty nice. The family upstairs was loud but knew it and didn't care if we were loud (and also cooked awesome smelling food). The other two apartments had people in them but I never saw them. Then the family moved out and one of those other people died and now Dan Citrine across the hall has birds I can hear in my bedroom with all the doors closed, the woman upstairs just leaves her garbage out by the front door where skunks and squirrels get into it and drag it all over the place, and the couple directly above us, in addition to having the heaviest footsteps possible for a pair of people who can't weigh more than 140lb, call the cops and apartment management on us so often for noise that I'm not sure I can play music in my bedroom. These minor trends within my building seem to be reflected across all of the buildings as well because if I try to park after about 5pm I have to go around the block and get in line with all the used Jettas and old-style civics that the new, probably college kids, tenants drive.

There is no point living here, so far away from any goods or services, if I'm going to be surrounded by assholes anyway and have to park around the block. So what I'm saying is, stop advertising this apartment complex on the internets. We're at critical mass for douchebags as is.

march of destruction

2009-02-25T09:39:00.002-05:00

As part of a general mood I've been in lately where I feel like I should have less stuff, I've decided to remove both of the desks in my bedroom from my life, to be replaced with folding tables. Yesterday I took the first one out to the dumpster (the second one probably won't go until I get my job back) last night. But the dumpster was kind of full so it wasn't going to fit in whole.

The point is: I don't have enough opportunities to kick something into pieces.

I'm pretty sure that if everyone kicked a desk into pieces once a week there would be no war. Unless we went to war for more desks.

More than you ever needed to know about how I take notes

2009-02-18T13:29:00.004-05:00

Sorry for the lack of attention to this space the last few weeks but I've been (gasp! elderly dowager faints) working on my dissertation. And picking up French. I need to pass a French exam in April and since I've never taken any french it seems like I should get on top of that. Anyway, since I've been focused on actually doing work rather than attempting funny on the internets, this is going to be a work-related post.

My article reading method is as follows: I read the article, highlighting what I think are the important parts along the way. When I'm done reading I go through the article a second time, focusing on what I highlighted, and taking notes that digest the basic points of the article as well as my own thoughts on how it connects to other articles, my own work, and any questions or criticisms I might have. All of this is in the hope that the next time I need to refer to the article, I can reread my notes and get the point without rereading the entire thing. When I feel like I agree with the overall point of the article, I try to see it from the other side and often write critical notes. When I disagree with the points made in an article, I usually go out of my way to find a way to make them work. This works for research pretty well but in class it often results in me arguing ideas I don't agree with and totally unable to muster a defense for things I do but shut up. This is how I learn.

I've never liked reading off a computer screen, even though I do it a majority of my day sometimes, and I think I comprehend things better when they're on paper, in my hands, and I have the ability to scribble notes in the margins as I go. On a computer screen my eyes tend to glaze over and then all of the sudden its 8pm and I can't account for my day. In a very non-green fashion, I print out almost everything I need to read and buy books instead of borrowing from the library. All of the single articles I print out are put into manila file folders and I take my notes directly on the jacket so I don't have to open them up in class and spread papers all over the place to access my notes. Normally, the end looks something like this (apologies for low quality, black and white scan):

Yesterday though, I was reading for a class I'm sitting in on (to jump start my brain after six months off) and came across an article that I couldn't understand. I wasn't having a good day reading as it was. It was just one of the days were I didn't have it. I can't explain why but the day would have been better spent playing Fallout 3 and saving the work for another time. I often come across articles that I don't understand all or part of but after reading them a couple of times or referring to other works I can get into them. Sometimes even that doesn't work but I know that if I wanted to spend 20 hours versing myself in chaos theory or car repair or plate tectonics or you get the point I could train myself to understand it. I've never before come across an article that I don't think I could ever understand. Three readings of this article yesterday did not even allow me to formulate a plan to access its mysteries. I got halfway through it and realized I had highlighted pretty much everything because I wasn't sure what was important and what wasn't. When I talked about it later to Redhawk I described the experience in three ways: 1) It was like reading the text of what the Hybrid in Battlestar Gallactica says, 2) It was like reading a William S. Burroughs novel before he pieced it all back together, and 3) It was like reading the script for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 as described by the Ask a Ninja guy. I've since decided that the best way to describe it would be to say it was like reading a scholarly article written as an homage to David Lynch's "Lost Highway".

After failing to read it twice, I saved it for the end of the day and read it again while having a beer, hoping that this would help. I gave up again but still had half a beer left so I took notes on the jacket anyway and this is what they look like:

As you can see, I don't know what William S. Burroughs looks like so I drew a clown.

Uh Oh.

2009-01-28T23:58:00.004-05:00

Sometimes when I go to the grocery store I buy SpaghettiOs. Unlike most other foods of this nature, SpaghettiOs can vary from can to can or perhaps I just have a more sensitive pallete than the average SpaghettiOs consumer. I think the company spends more money on cans with a cartoon theme over plain, so I prefer Dora the Explorer O's (they used to be Sonic the Hedgehog O's) over the standard packaging. I also think cans where the sauce runs soupier than average tend to not taste as good so I try to get cans where the sauce is thick.

In the supermarket, plain (without meatballs or hotdogs) SpaghettiOs are on the bottom shelf. Because they come in tin cans, there is no way to see if the sauce is thick or runny ahead of time. This means to get the cans I want, I squat down in the middle of a grocery store and shake all the cans of SpaghettiOs next to my ear until I find a couple that sound right. It only occurred to me today, after leaving the store, that the reason all of those people in the aisle were staring at me is that looks totally ridiculous.

But as an adult that regularly eats SpaghettiOs I'm accustomed to a certain amount of ridicule.

Post Quota: This Just In

2009-01-23T10:58:00.002-05:00

Role of New Y0rk State senator given to younger, prettier, actress.

Dear New York Mets

2009-01-19T18:33:00.003-05:00

YOU'RE WELCOME.

image credit
I don't own photoshop, image created here

UPDATE: Just spent way too much of my life fixing the colors.

Um, Fantasy Island?

2009-01-14T18:24:00.004-05:00

How do you write an obituary about Ricardo Montalban and not even reference this:

Get back to me on that.

image credit

Mad Dog Fargo: Presidential Dog Search Consultant

2009-01-13T14:33:00.007-05:00

According to people who clearly need to be downsized out of a job, you and your family have narrowed your choice of First Dog down to two breeds: Labradoodle and Portuguese Water Hound. I'm not a dog person. They're needy attention whores that do their best to trap you into the kind of codependent relationship where one half picks up the other's crap and the sex is illegal, at best. I prefer my independence and not having to carry around plastic bags anywhere I go. But even as someone who doesn't really care for dogs I can tell that both of these are terrible choices.

Labradoodle: This is a cross between a labrador and a poodle with an uncreative name that sounds more like a competitor for Spirograph than an actual dog breed. To start: Poodles are ridiculous and why start with a dog that is going to be at least 50% ridiculous, genetically? To continue, poodles are territorial and bark like nobody's business. Annoying yappy dogs are much more Paris Hilton than they are Leader of the Free World. You might as well get one of those robot dogs in the front display of KB Toys that just bark and do back flips. Keep it in batteries and it'll be exactly like your labradoodle except it won't shit on your floor.

Portuguese Water Hound: This sounds like a probably disgusting sexual act (unless you're into urine themes......or worse) and nudity and pissing are probably not the kind of associations you'd want to engender in a fledgling presidency. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks that but if you pick this breed of dog I will do my best to spread that around and suggest publicly that you name the dog "Hot Carl". This is also basically a poodle with a different name. So you'd have to deal with same barking nonsense as you would with the labradoodle (just writing that word makes me feel stupider).

Overall, both of these breeds would constitute bringing a small-medium sized furred sack of annoying characteristics into your house. They'd bark at everyone they didn't recognize and potentially cause international incidents by eating foreign dignitaries' shoes. And neither one of them does anything. Sure, they were bred to hunt rabbits or something but that was a couple hundred years ago. Now they're bred for cuteness and perfect fur. If you dropped these dogs off at the rabbit enclosure of a zoo they'd probably starve to death and then be eaten by rabbits. They can't tow anything either. What if you suddenly have to get around by cart or dog sled? Finally, a poodle doesn't scare off any kind of criminal and if history and movies have taught me anything it's that the White House needs a dog that will scare off criminals.

My Suggestion- Irish Wolf Hound: Why not get a dog that says, "Don't fuck with me. My dog will eat your organs in between meals composed primarily of America's enemies". The Irish Wolf Hound doesn't have to jump or drag an assailant to the ground to get at his throat. It's already there! Trained properly, the Irish Wolf Hound could be both extra help for the Secret Service and that pony you can't buy your kids. Your younger daughter could probably saddle and ride a fully grown one of these. Plus, if negotiations get tense with a foreign ambassador or a international crime syndicate breaks into your house to steal priceless presidential treasures this dog could come in real handy. Admittedly, this dog strays a little into Bond Villain territory but let's face it, that's a ton better than spoiled rich whore or sexual deviant.

image credits here, here, and here

Post Quota. Minimal Equus Jokes Included.

2009-01-11T15:04:00.007-05:00

First Post Quota of the New Year:

Yesterday, while trying to watch football, the local station kept on teasing the fact that there had been a shootout on the interstate near where I live but never bothered to cut to any news to explain what had happened. I turned it to another station and they also teased it for about half an hour before finally reporting on it and it turns out it was kind of boring. Probably not for the people involved but if you're going to flash, "Interstate closed due to shootout involving state troopers," I want explosions. Or at the very least more than one nutcase in the back of a cab. If I didn't know better I would think this was just some advertising tie in for the premiere of 24.

This is not about that shootout. While I was waiting for news about the shootout I had to sit through about 15 minutes of weather reports (its cold and going to snow -- congratulations -- you've identified the symptoms of winter) and at several points the broadcast discussed some local people who are trying to get the penalty for cruelty to horses (not cruelty to all animals, just horses) increased to a felony.

This is all in response to the arrest of a man who stabbed a horse to death with a knife last month. I regret to say I couldn't find the news bit about getting the law changed, that has eluded me for about an hour but the google search "horse stabbing" turns up some fun reads and a fair number of pictures of Harry Potter's ass (minor Equus joke).

Never mind the part where these people consider cruelty to horses more important to legislate against than cruelty to other animals. My total bafflement at everyone's love of these animals is another matter (I was once told they were, "the dolphins of the great plains." Ugggh). What is more important to me right now is the cause and effect sequence of events both past and future.

Cause: Man is probably crazy > Effect: He stabs a horse to death
Cause: He stabs a horse to death > Effect: Tougher legislation against cruelty to horses
Cause: Tougher legislation > Effect: Future nutcase rethinks decision to stab horse?

I'm guessing that the kind of person who stabs a horse to death is probably not someone who spends a lot of time thinking ahead and carefully considering the possible legal ramifications for their actions. They're probably thinking, "I can't believe God saw me having sex!". Or another crazy person's thought that wasn't borrowed from a lazy reading of Equus five years ago.

linky

An Open Letter To Yahoo.Com

2009-01-07T10:30:00.002-05:00

Dear Yahoo,

Despite your somewhere between generic/inoffensive and poor advertising I still use your service on a daily basis. To truly capture my demographic (Male 18-49) you should consider television advertising that includes more explosions, possibly life-threatening injuries, or suggested nudity. Have you thought about a commercial where Lawrence Taylor blindside tackles Tony Hawk while cheerleaders engage in some kind of water fight? Get back to me on that. I'm willing to direct for scale.

I am writing today because I have a couple problems with recent updates to your flagship website and email service. I have used the same yahoo email address since very near the inception of the internet, or rather, the inception of the usable internet sometime around 1996. This means I go to yahoo.com or read yahoo related items almost every day, and usually multiple times on any given day.

I am writing openly because you are the most visited site on the entirety of the internets (see supporting evidence below, via Alexa.com) and I hope to give a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves (mostly the Chinese). I am writing on a blog because like most Americans I like saying much more than I like doing and by publishing anonymously on a blog I can have my cake and eat it too.

Problem the First!

What is with video headlines that don't have any corresponding text article?

What if I want to read about this civil injustice? My family could be using titanium drivers and going deaf and I won't be able to read about it because you want me to see a couple extra advertisements! I don't care how attractive the fake reporter is. Some people want to watch video. Fine. They can have it. I would rather read a full article. Why won't you let the children read?

While I'm on the subject or reading, most of your science articles just summarize the abstract of a paper in a popular science journal. I could reword the introductory and conclusive paragraphs of Science articles but that doesn't really make me a journalist now, does it? You might as well just write a title and then link to the original online article your reporter read at 5am after a night of heavy drinking and a deadline due.

Now, speaking of full articles, Problem the Second!

What on earth makes you think I will click all the way to an article and not want the whole article to be there?

Why do I now have to click an extra button to read the entire thing? Do most people take the time to go to an article with the intention of reading just the first two paragraphs? Maybe you've got this dream about an inverted pyramid of information and occasionally the good journalist out there still provides it but most of those articles you collect are just as informative at the end as they were at the beginning (regrettably -- remember the days when you just had to read the first two paragraphs? I do too. It was World War II and I was fighting the Viet-Cong to save Kwanzaa from the ultra-Martianists).

In any case, making me click another link to read the full text of the article I already clicked to read is bush league. I thought you were better than that, baby.

Finally, and no picture to support this because this post is already taking up lots of inches on my front page, what happened to RSS feeds internal to yahoo mail? That was the only way I could read some websites at work where the filters are pretty strict. They have a specific filter against me using google earth. That means anything else on the internet that is even remotely entertaining is also blocked. I'm unemployed for a while so I'll give you some time to work on it.

Thanks for listening, yahoo. And if you feel like thanking me for my advice then Fantasy Baseball starts in about a month and I'd appreciate it if you could send a few more HRs my way.

Yours in Christ,
Mad Dog Fargo

Christmas and New Year's Summary Post

2009-01-07T09:59:00.004-05:00

As these things happened I had more to say about them but for a variety of reasons, principle among them extreme lethargy (I think your mom gave me mono WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! I'm even writing lethargic jokes!), I did not commit them to the internets and now I don't remember most of what I was going to say.

Christmas: Remember that post about getting my fingernail buffed and wanting an Ipod dock? Well Brother and Sister-in-Law Fargo got me an Ipod dock. This blog is finally paying off! Ka-Ching!

Ka-Ching looks kind of racist when you write it down. I also at one point entertained doing a google image search for the term and posting an appropriate image but most of the first couple of pages were pictures of Shania Twain. At first I thought this was some kind of universal phrase fans knew for describing what she looked like but some research showed that it was actually a song lyric instead. My truth was more entertaining.

New Year's: Last year's resolutions were all dismal failures so at first I thought I'd go a little easier and resolve not to play video games 40 hours a week. That was going to be difficult at first since I'm unemployed and apparently have forgotten how to read but eventually when I got a job again there would be no way to sustain an average of 40 hours a week of game play over the course of the entire year. It was basically fool proof.

Then I decided that it was kind of a cop out and I should at least try something interesting. That's when I saw it. My great white whale. My impossible dream.

My New Year's Resolution changed to, "Grow Sam Elliott's Mustache". Sure, the only way I'd be able to ingest anything without looking ridiculous (more ridiculous) is through a straw or bottle but that wouldn't be so bad. I get a lot of my calories that way already and it'd be great for when I have to renew my license in a couple months. But the Mustache (you capitalize the M when referring to Sam Elliott's) didn't seem like quite enough to truly be a bold resolution so I've changed it slightly to, "Become Sam Elliott".

My New Year's Resolution is like the hairiest reenactment of "Singe White Female" you could possibly imagine.

image credit

Funny Thing About The Weekends

2009-01-07T09:36:00.004-05:00

Well, I'm unemployed again. Unemployment means I've spent the last five days trying to find this particular image on the internets as I feel it aptly describes my situation. This image wasn't on the internets, as far as I could tell, so I had to screen capture it myself and in so doing watch most of Season 5. This is what unemployment means. This is also by way of saying that I have absolutely no excuse for not having written here. I went through the same thing last year and though hopefully this year it isn't for nearly as long, the previous go around was a period of unprecedented productivity for this space. If productivity is measured in pictures of Mike Huckabee holding fish.

I'm pretty sure it is.

So, if you ever feel like doing something late on a Tuesday night or in the middle of the day on Thursday or any time really, I'm available, and probably not recently washed.

Mandatory Educational Programming

2008-12-16T17:48:00.001-05:00

In the last few weeks I've seen maybe a half-dozen or more articles about how Obama still smokes. Don't read those links. I'm just adding them as support for the argument presented in the first sentence but since this is the internet supporting materials are totally unnecessary and you should feel no obligation to follow them.

1) Who cares? Why does this warrant any news coverage at all. Can't that beat reporter be used to write about something that matters? "Former smoker occasionally has cigarette!" Got a real story there. The man was just elected to one of the highest pressure jobs on the planet. I'd rather he didn't have to make decisions while suffering from nicotine withdrawal, thank you very much. Some of what I've read indicate that he might not be a good role model if he keeps on smoking but quite frankly if, "he smokes," is make or break for you on whether or not you can look up to a president you may need to seriously reevaluate your priorities in life. No one is surprised by cigarettes anymore. Everyone on the planet knows that they are bad for you but they are legal, he is a responsible adult, and if he wants to smoke them, as long as he is not ashing on babies or in my drink I couldn't possibly care less.

2) What is the obsession with the health of the president anyway? The chances of one dying or even becoming seriously ill, since they are given the best medical care on the planet, are pretty low. Just look at history. Sure, 8/44 presidents (18.6%) have died in office but take a closer look:

4 Presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy) died of acute bullet to person. Their prior health is irrelevant.
William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia and was a healthy teetotalling individual up until his illness. "Doctors" tried to cure him with miracle drugs like opium, virginia snakeweed and actual, live snakes. This would be a list of 7 if Harrison had the foresight to not be born in 1773.
Zachary Taylor died of acute gastroenteritis (from unpasteurized milk and cherries), or possibly arsenic poisoing, and was a healthy individual up until his illness.
Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack and there are some indications that he had a history of heart trouble leading up to it. Also maybe he was poisoned.
On the other hand, the eighth, F.D.R., died after a long period of ill-health but did so during the beginning of his fourth term and until someone declares themselves emperor for life we're not going to have to worry about that.

So, in a brief review of presidents, precisely 2 died of any long term health issues and only one (2%) died of a predictable illness within his first 2 terms. And even Harding would have stood a better shot with modern medicine and somebody on his ass to lose some weight. Practically every president up until the modern age drank and smoked and none of them died from it.

Now I'm not saying it wouldn't be a health improvement if Obama quit smoking. I'm just saying it doesn't matter one way or another. As long as he doesn't tamper with the smoke detectors in any white house bathrooms there is absolutely nothing about his smoking habit that will affect his presidency in any way. The same goes for all the other health bullshit you hear about during elections: McCain is old and had skin cancer. Clinton loves cheeseburgers. George W. Bush used to do coke years and years ago. None of it matters. Stop bothering me about it, New York Times.

Plus, he kind of makes smoking look cool. Maybe I might try it.

Now lets talk about what Michelle Obama is going to wear to the inauguration!

image credit

Basket Weaving

2008-12-14T17:58:00.003-05:00

I used to know this guy who grew his own trees, stripped his own bark, invented his own smoker machine, and finally used all of this to weave high quality, durable baskets of various sizes and shapes that people loved. I don't think I have any way of getting in contact with this man, in a short period of time anyway.

I was just thinking, "You know what my mom would love for Christmas; a gorgeous looking basket woven by a friend of mine".

Could one of you get on this for me?

My Scarlett Thumbnail

2008-12-10T15:51:00.003-05:00

Its the holiday season again (link to old post about holiday season: someday I hope to be able to blog here using entirely recycled posts from similar times in previous years. Look forward to when Mike Huckabee runs for President in 2012. Note to self: this might also work with the sent email folder) and this year I'm trying to actually get my shopping out of the way early so there's no need to go to the mall with the rest of the herd on a weekday night the week before Christmas or, god forbid, a weekend in December. I've narrowed myself down to about 6 people who are actually getting presents this year so I think if I spend a little time brainstorming, polling the significant others of the various parties, and ultimately buying everyone amazon.com gift certificates it shouldn't be too bad. Everyone else is getting a notarized copy of my 2008 W-2 and a promise of a present the very next time I am not laid off the week after Christmas.

For the brainstorming part I decided to wander around the mall immediately after work on a Tuesday so I wouldn't have to deal with most of the crowd, maybe get the prices for some of the ridiculous crap no one wants from Brookstone, and possibly buy myself an I-pod dock (hint hint). Almost immediately upon entering the mall I was approached by one of those people that operate the carts in the center of the aisle. She was attractive and perhaps I made eye contact for a split second too long because she actually asked me a question, which my determined scowl and pace usually deter.

"Is there a special woman in your life?" she asked. Having made eye contact I felt it would be rude, even for me, to not offer at least a cursory response and besides, I thought I had a fool proof answer. "No," I said, smiling inside because I had beat her at her own game.

"What about your mother? Isn't she?" she continued, no doubt smiling inside with oily self-satisfaction after slowing my pace. This is where I failed. I should have responded, "My mother is dead." Instead I thought she was challenging the specialness of my mother and half-angrily replied "Of course she is, what of it?"

I then proceeded to involuntarily have my right thumb buffed by some "magical, must-have", in the words or someone who earns a commission by selling it to me, emery board thing with multiple sides. She used three of the sides on my thumb. I don't know what the fourth was for, maybe I wasn't ready for it. In any case, this left my right thumbnail bright and shiny and pretty clearly different from all the rest of of my fingernails. I might as well have had black nail polish on it for how it stood out. So I guess the system actually works pretty well (Mom, if you read this and this is something you might want, then I'll go back and not have had my thumb buffed in vain). I wish I had a picture of this to show you but my digital camera is broken (hint hint).

After getting a price for the system and the name of the woman trying to sell me on it I moved on to the rest of my shopping but for the rest of the time I was wandering around the mall I was accosted by every cart operator in the place; Verizon, Sprint, Hair Extensions, Piercing Pagoda, even the Calendar a day guy, it didn't matter. They all wanted a piece of me. By the time I had reached the other side of the mall I must have had short, awkward conversations with a half dozen vendors trying to sell me things I didn't want.

At the opposite end of the mall I put it all together. There was another cart for the exact same thing. One at each entrance of a linear mall. They are there to mark suckers. That buffed right thumbnail was a scarlet letter that said, "I will put up with your crap." Those cart vendors must all be in league with each other in some kind of cosmetic-based Yakuza. With all of this in mind, I offer the following advice so you do not suffer the same fate as me, to be forced into a half dozen less than 10 second conversations with strangers:

1) Do not make eye contact
2) Do not acknowledge any girlfriends, female relatives, or even basic needs for yourself
3) If for reasons beyond your control your thumbnail is buffed, be prepared to wear gloves
4) Buy me that I-pod dock

Dispatches from the Field: Oswego Graffiti Edition II: The Greatest Graffiti of all time

2008-11-27T09:40:00.007-05:00

This took me a little while to get posted but I present unto you, the greatest graffiti of all time:

There is no scale here but its around 10' by 25'. I wonder what goes through someone's head before they create something like this. Does it start with the paint? I don't know what I'd think if three cases of spray paint fell off the back of a truck and landed in my apartment but it might be "Original Metroid Mural". I don't know. Three cases of spray paint have never fallen off a truck into my apartment. Perhaps the person that created this is just a really, really, really big fan of the original Metroid and too big a pussy to get a Samus Aran tattoo.

Whatever the reason I think we can all agree that the world is a better place when there's large-scale original Nintendo based vandalism in it. I hope the next place I work has Kid Icarus based performance art.