To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
A minor league hockey team plans to spoof Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent hunting mishap by handing out orange hunting vests with the words, “Don’t Shoot, I’m Human.”
However, note again how the Cheney responded by not responding:
WE DEMAND THAT DICK CHENEY STOP HIS PATTERN OF DECEPTION AND IMMEDIATELY RESPOND TO ANY AND ALL SATIRE DIRECTED AT HIM! Anything less shows contempt for the American people and the media.
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Two researchers at MIT have created a man-control mechanism given the chickly name "loving cups" designed to control males:
Researchers have come up with a novel way to keep long-distance lovers in touch — high-tech wine glasses that glow warmly however far apart the pining couple are.
When either person picks up a glass, red light-emitting diodes glow on their partner’s glass. When one puts a glass to their lips, the other glass glows brightly.
Guys, they have couched this into some touchy-feely chick experience of shared love, communal libation, or what have you, but that’s just the hook. The real purpose of the contraption is to provide her with an alarm that alerts her to how much you drink. Sure, it’s a wineglass now, but soon it will no doubt be embedded in your favorite fraternity mug.
All I got to say is that these things should have an epilepsy warning associated with them, particularly if they’re going to blink every time I take a drink.
(Link seen on Electric Venom.)
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Is it that time again to discover that the game of Assassination is being played upon city streets?
A large-scale combination of “Hide and Seek” and murder is being played on the streets of major U.S. cities with water pistols.
“StreetWars: Killer” allows grownups to play out fantasies of being assassins, the Los Angeles Times says. The game began in New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that one of the founders, Franz Aliquo, “could use some psychiatric help.”
Party like it’s 1985!
UPDATE: UPI has also learned that some young people play games with paper and dice around kitchen tables while drinking copious amounts of Mountain Dew. Unconfirmed reports indicate that these people worship the devil!
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In an article entitled "Some Finding Perils in Online Real Estate, the New York Times finds innumerable ways to blame eBay for unscrupulous sellers who will unload crap properties on "investors" who will buy properties unseen and then will pay contractors recommended by the sellers thousands of dollars for repairs. For example, the New York Times offers this bit:
Sam Hoyt, a Democratic state assemblyman and co-chairman of the Buffalo mayor’s task force on real estate flipping, whose aim is to educate consumers on the destructive effects of the practice, blames eBay, saying it enables dishonest flippers to lure buyers.
Mr. Hoyt said he had repeatedly appealed to eBay officials, asking the company to make specific changes, like informing sellers that they must comply with New York State disclosure laws and requiring a copy of written sales contracts. But Mr. Hoyt said he had received little cooperation from the company.
“What eBay is doing, in my opinion, is immoral,” he said. “They have a responsibility to not facilitate activity like this.”
I mean, Buffalo has a task force on the problem of capitalists trying to turn a profit with property, and this publicly-funded entity has determined that eBay is immoral for posting real estate listings.
No doubt the New York Times has issued a retraction for all of the overly-optimistic classified ads it has run in its history.
But hey, the NYT is "even-handed," as we can see from the "opposing viewpoint"
Representatives of eBay say the company has few legal obligations to buyers of real estate on the site. “The people responsible for house flipping,” an eBay spokesman, Hani Durzy, said, “are the people selling these houses and the people buying them sight unseen. How these sellers and buyers are connecting is not as important as the fact that the buyers are not doing the proper due diligence when buying a property.”
eBay pretty much understands the physics of the situation: fools share the same negative electrical charge as their money, and the fools will inevitably cast off their excess dollars.
The paper, on the other hand, only understands that somehow, somewhere, something is not regulated or legislated, and its heroes, the legislatures and regulatory agencies of government, should do something.
We at MfBJN, on the other hand, turn to the sublime koans of Master Kuni, who meditated: “You took the box? Let’s see what’s in the box! Nothing! Absolutely nothing! STUPID! You’re so STU-PIIIIIIIIIIID!”
Because instead of trying to outlawing stupidity, we prefer that it remain a personal choice, punishable by mockery.
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I bought this book for $2.00 at Hooked on Books in Springfield late last month; it represents the second John D. MacDonald fiction book I’ve read in the last two weeks, and I need to pace myself. If I read too many of them close together, I find myself nitpicking them by comparing them to one another; if I read them interspersed with other fiction, their quality stands in stark contrast to most books.
This book details the story of Sam Brice, an insurance adjustor with a dark past who shelters for a night an escaped convict he knows. When the escaped convict calls upon Brice’s ex-flame for help in some plot, Brice wants to follow along, but a local deputy with a love of his own blackjack knocks Brice out just long enough for the plot to progress. Brice’s lover, Janice Gantry, disappears. And Brice wants to find her and to find out what made his associate into a convict and what that strange, brutal, reclusive couple in the large beachfront house have to hide.
The book contains the trademark MacDonald hero, the pulpesque-but-evolving heroine, brutal and disbelieving police, and the like. Unfortunately, it slides slightly into purple prose, kinda making it into the masculine equivalent of the romance novel, but it’s still worth a read. Looks like you can get this book more cheaply than I did if you click the link below. If so, more the power to you and more the loot to me. Mmmm, loot.
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In Missouri, some retail developers have mechanisms for levying surcharges on purchases within their developments. They can then use this money for things such as keeping up their developments, leaving the rent they charge the retailers available for more important things, such as their salaries and profit.
But the state is starting to look at this practice since, you know, these transportation development districts allow for the levying of taxes without accountability. The schizophrenic St. Louis Post-Dispatch cluck clucks the practice, which is odd since the paper lauds unelected boards pushing for taxes and conferring tax breaks for airports, sports teams, and myriad other things–so long as it’s not businesses who wield this ripe-for-abuse power, it’s okay with the Post-Dispatch.
But we here at MfBJN applaud Jerry Ebest, director of real estate for Dierbergs grocery stores, who tells the public it should just lie back and enjoy it:
“If you’re a consumer and you live very close to anybody’s store that is in your municipality, would you take time out of your schedule to drive to another city with a lower tax rate?” he asked. “My suspicion is you would not.”
Thank you, Mr. Ebest, for explaining how rising tax rates lift all boats.
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Dr. Michael Williams, upon completing his PhD, contemplates a career in technical writing.
Sure, it sounds like a good idea. If you have a freaking English degree and are tired of bouncing around retail jobs.
But a PhD? That would seem like getting a law degree and passing the bar so you can edit phone directory ads for attorneys.
Please, Dr. Williams, think of the starving English majors you’ll displace!
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After several years of quagmire, the United States thinks Iceland security forces are ready to defend themselves:
Iceland appears ready to take over some of the costs of its defense from the United States, which has long provided the nation’s only military forces.
Me, I predict civil war, because that seems to be the happenin’ thing to do.
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My beautiful wife gave me this book for my birthday, and as such, it adds nothing to my annual total of book expenditures. Woo hoo! Additionally, it’s one of John Sandford’s Kidd novels. I’ve read only one more (The Devil’s Code), but they’re pretty good hacker thrillers.
This one details how Kidd and LuEllen deal with the death of a fellow haker and the disappearance of the hacker’s laptop. The laptop contains enough secrets to blackmail half of Washington and maybe all of the hacker community. Kidd and krew have to avoid the Feds and the murderous thief to retrieve the laptop and get what justice they can for their friend.
So why do I like the books? They’re quickly-paced and are less dated than more realistic hacker novels whose close mapping to current technologies actually apply a date and timestamp expiration date to them. Kidd’s hacktions are described plausibly, but broadly, so we can fill in the blanks with whatever current technologies might solve his problem. I wrote an essay about this once, and I like to see it in practice. They’re paced well, too, allowing you to move through the action and the chapters quickly–and when you’ve got hundreds of books to read, you need every advantage.
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Remember, friends, I said that eating your private papers is the only way to dispose of things, especially since recycling facility workers pay a lot of attention to what you recycle.
Well, someone braver than I am has illustrated that credit card companies will honor taped-together credit card applications. That have the “change of address” box marked. And that require a cellular phone to activate the credit line.
If you’ll excuse me, your Shidoshi will now assume the meditative position of the fetus and will chant a healing mantra which only sounds like whimpering.
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Owen at Boots and Sabers asks:
We obviously need more background checks and bans to prevent these tragic deaths.
Massachussetts delivers:
Any individual who requires a machete for the purposes of cutting vegetation shall register the machete with the local police department on an annual basis and, upon payment of an appropriate annual registration fee as determined by the local granting authority, shall be issued a permit authorizing him to possess the machete solely for the purposes of cutting vegetation.
Behold the power of the blogosphere! Or, more importantly, the power of full time governments to enact satire as actual law.
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I bought this book used from Half Price Books in Springfield. I got it for $2.00 from the small discount section, but when I bought five books, I got the sixth one free. This, however, was not the free book.
This book represents a quick hit from the 87th Precinct series. Unlike many of the books, it focuses on a single crime: the stabbing of a teenager on a rainy night in the city. Carella and Kling, for the most part, focus on the atypical family structure of the victim and the illicit love that percipitated the murder. McBain deftly offers the reader multiple suspects to think of as whodunit and keeps you guessing. Or maybe I am just easily led.
With so many Ed McBain books spaced throughout my reading career, I’m never sure if I’ve read a book before, but with the McBain books, it’s never dull to reread the books. However, I had read this before, and I knew it from the one thing I took away from this book when I read it twenty years ago: The commissioner’s memo about unsigned memos. If you’ve read the book, you’ll remember.
Weighing in at 175 pages, it’s a quick read or re-read, and you can’t do much better than McBain.
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I admit, I bought this book shortly after it came out in 2003 and am the last cool kid on the block to have finished it (As a matter of fact, Heather read my copy of this book in 2004 either soon before or soon after we met Virginia Postrel). As you all know, Ms. Postrel is the former editor of Reason magazine, the Libertarian bible, and blogs at The Dynamist in between donating portions of her very body to people.
That said, remember, gentle reader, I am studied in the mystical and uninspiring arts of philosophy. Ergo, I understand the differences between aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and all those sorts of branches of philosophy. I’ll admit, too, that I’ve skipped over the branch of aesthetics except for The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand. As a hard-bitten, realistic philosopher, I, too, have given aesthetics short shrift in my contemplations. However, as a hard-bitten, realistic software tester, I know that a difficult interface can render otherwise functional software as unusable. So I appreciate the importance of styling, but I also rankle at the elevation of aesthetics to a comparable value to actual function.
So forgive me my inherent bias here.
Postrel makes a good argument that people like pretty things and that visual and tactile pleasure offer a value comparable to other values, and that when consumers make choices, sometimes they’ll trade off other values to get visual and tactile pleasure. Also, given the march of progress, consumers get to pick sets of values (low price, functionality, AND beauty) or get to combine sets of values (low price AND beauty, functionality AND beauty) in ways they didn’t before, where they can trade something for beauty. So the world is becoming more custom and more pleasurable not strictly at the expense of other, more concrete values (but sometimes at that expense).
So I’ll call the book thought-provoking. Postrel makes her points and has done her research. I rankle when she puts beauty on par with functionality, and feel that she too easily discounts that beauty can still be artifice that hides low quality or poor functionality. She, of course, espouses a free market where rational customers buy from reasonable companies, but I’m a bit cynical and think that a lot of unscrupulous companies will try to deceive inattentive customers. In the aggregate, I suppose it will work out, but I’m not ready to elevate look and feel to the level of other things in the products I buy.
But I’m not letting the people I work with off the hook in products we build.
I’d like to take a moment to comment on the style of The Substance of Style. I didn’t actually care much for the prose of the book. The chapter titles were non-specific and the actual topics meandered. I found some of the references repetitve. The book seems more like a long essay stretched than a full book. But fortunately, you don’t read this book for the sound of its language but for the argument it makes.
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Not John Carpenter’s The Thing, not Benjamin Grimm, not the Addam’s Family hand.
The Volkswagen Thing.
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How can you tell if a seller is "motivated"?
He or she has a For Sale sign in the front yard of the property for sale!
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Damn egoists putting their lives above society!
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Come on, use your head. Mad Cow disease disrupting the supply of beef, and avian flu causing people to fear the chicken? Of course this is the work of the National Pork Board, who wants to make use of its slogans “Pork: The Only Safe Meat” and “Eat Pork and Live.”
Or are they the work of Hamiburton in an insidious plot to starve Muslims?
(That would be much funnier if I didn’t have this fear that actual riots and deaths might occur on account of my satire.)
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What else can we infer, since he blows up their levees:
A levee break in the southeastern corner of Sonoma County has flooded part of state Highway 121 and may be threatening a half-dozen homes and a winery on surrounding farmland, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The levee, built on private property near the Sonoma Creek, broke just before 8 a.m. Monday, flooding the property owner’s vineyard and possibly threatening six homes and another vineyard about a half-mile south of the site, according to CHP Officer Gerald Rico.
If the affected residents are not flown immediately to Houston for long, government-paid hotel stays, I demand a Congressional panel!
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Apparently, the Air Force has had its Crossbow Project orbital popcorn maker for 15 years.
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No, not that Diner.
Every Sunday, I take my sainted mother out to breakfast. Well, perhaps “take” is the wrong word, since she usually drives us there in that new little roller skate of hers (I, of course, encouraged her to invest in a car I’d want to inherit, years hence, with low mileage) and she mostly pays for breakfast. So every Sunday, I go with (or perhaps sponge off) my sainted mother to a small diner in historic (if you count the outlot of a new strip mall as “historic,” but someday, it will be, when we’re all living in underground catacombs or in orbit, how we’ll long for strip malls) Oakville, Missouri, for breakfast.
But I digress. Over the course of my many hundreds of dozens of trips to that diner, I’ve learned valuable life lessons that have made me a better man, husband, and father. To whit:
Well, I just have the ill luck to have been born in relatively stable years with great opulence. Some generations get real-life lessons from wars and depressions and real adversity, I get red pepper nuggets in my coffee.
And, sonny, when I was young, we liked it that way.
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