Perhaps I should make more of this potential tagline:
MfBJN: Apparently, Your #45 Source for Samus Aran Naked on the Internet
Those whacky Googlers!
To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Perhaps I should make more of this potential tagline:
MfBJN: Apparently, Your #45 Source for Samus Aran Naked on the Internet
Those whacky Googlers!
It made a lot of goofy left wing nutjobs insanely rich. Of course, if they hadn’t had stock options, they would have been insanely middle class, being left wing nut jobs and all.
You know, if my start-up company experience had left me with fifteen million dollars, do you think I would be talking to a grief counselor about it? Heck, no, I’d be refusing to let Bob Cratchit throw an extra log on the fire. You know why? Because I am a capitalist. I like making money with money.
Imagine, cutting your own children out of your legacy to better a foundation or a charity! Egads!
I can only hope we get to see some of these unhinged (I mean “enlightened and philanthropic”) stock option millionaires pulled naked from their pickup trucks someday.
A schizophrenic article in today’s Chicago Sun-Times describes the steps New York has taken to drastically cut its crime rate and how Chicago, which is now less safe than New York, can apply the same methods, just not so harsh.
We start with a success anecdote from New York:
BROOKLYN, N.Y.–Ric Curtis used to watch from his window as dogs fought to the death in an empty lot across from his apartment.
Now the cheering gamblers and snarling pit bulls are gone and the lot has become a tiny, gated park with trees and shrubs.
The shootings, robberies and drug dealing that plagued the corner are mostly gone, too.
“When we first moved here in 1991, we put the baby to sleep on a mattress on the floor,” Curtis said. “We worried about a bullet coming through the window. Now we have two daughters and they sleep in bunk beds.”
In this gritty Brooklyn neighborhood called Brownsville, crime rates have fallen at a stunning rate in the last 10 years. In 1993, 74 people were murdered here. Last year, only 16 people were killed.
Hooray! Kids in bunk beds. But wait! Not everyone is happy:
To New Yorkers like Curtis in the city’s toughest neighborhoods, the streets seemed to get safer overnight. To others, like developer Bill Webber of the tony Upper West Side, the change was more gradual, and in some ways not as welcome.
“Of course, it’s because of Giuliani,” Webber said. “Sure, with my long view over 30 years here, I think the neighborhoods have become more secure…. In Times Square, the seamier elements have been driven away, like the peep shows. But some of us in New York do not think this is progress. I miss some of the grunge. If you take some of the friction out of urban life, it becomes less interesting.”
That’s right, people who sell property in expensive neighborhoods miss the texture of the gritty life-and-death struggles in the city. Struggles that occur in other neighborhoods, which inflate the value of his holdings in safe neighborhoods. That’s the other side.
No, wait, there’s another side:
He [a criminologist] came across “Hamp,” a 62-year-old addict. Hamp told Curtis that NYPD’s zero-tolerance policy has hit the neighborhood hard.
“They’ll bust you for the least little thing,” he said, standing in a trash-strewn parking lot. “They used to come out and say, ‘Good morning, how you doing, Hamp?’ Now they look at you like a piece of s—.”
Addicts like Hamp scrape together enough money to buy their heroin through a variety of hustles. They work as prostitutes, sell small amounts of drugs, and even sell the needles they get free from needle exchange programs.
“It’s been driven underground,” Hamp said. “The police will no longer tolerate addicts shooting up outside in parking lots and on park benches…. Right after Giuliani initiated it, they started going after open cans of beer and loitering.”
Over the past decade, Curtis said, New Yorkers have become less tolerant of criminals and more likely to call the cops.
That’s right, zero tolerance hurts criminals. It’s a pretty discriminatory practice, wot?
Don’t worry, Chicago criminals, because the Chicago city government is only wasting tax payer dollars to study New York policing methods. It won’t actually implement them:
But Cline and Crowl came to believe the New York strategy was not a perfect fit for Chicago. It would have to be customized to target street gangs–a much bigger source of crime in Chicago than in New York–and to maintain a reservoir of goodwill between Chicago police and the public.
Remember, it’s all about the feelings. Furthermore, the academics from respected Loyola University intone:
Arthur Lurigio, head of the criminology department at Loyola University in Chicago, said Chicago would be wise not to simply copy New York’s strategy.
“Chicago would have to be very selective in choosing elements of the New York model,” he said. “It does not make sense to import models of policing. Order and maintenance policing–the kind they do in New York–is effective if it is not too heavy-handed and construed as harassment.”
Lurigio said he would like to research whether complaints against New York cops have skyrocketed during the crackdown on crime.
“That’s part of the ‘New York miracle’ that does not become public,” he said. “I have a feeling there is an interesting story there.”
Whew! For a minute there, it looked as though Chicago was going to become safer, but fortunately, the Chicago city police are apparently more interested in public relations and possibly listening to nattering academics who make a living out of finding “an interesting story there” whether “there” is a Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the interesting story is “homoeroticism among heterosexual minority women” or there is “This city where children are killed in murderous crossfire” and the interesting story is “the pigs are mean.”
Both Heather and I have come down with acute cases of apotheosis. Symptoms include pantheon inclusions and raging delusions of grandeur. Unfortunately, there is no known cure.
Slate magazine urinates on a grave. Again. Most disappointing, it’s Christopher Hitchens relieving himself of some pent-up hostility this time.
Bob Hope might not have been laugh-out-loud, paradigm shifting, sticking-it-to-The-Man funny, but he was warm and amusing, eliciting a chuckle or two.
Remember, this is the second time I have taken them to task for disrespecting the dead. The first was Strom Thurmond. Guys, it’s one thing to disagree with someone when they’re alive, but leave your spite and your dismissive wit at the door of the funeral parlor, okay? Bob Hope was not Uday or Qusay.
(Link seen at Andrew Sullivan’s.)
Today, on FelonyWatch, we visit lovely Bloombertopia, where Augusta Kugelmas, pigeon lover, threw birdseed at an overzealous and power-mad park volunteer who wanted to stop Augusta from feeding the birds. Augusta has been charged with third degree assault.
FindLaw.Com indicates that this is not yet a felony in New York:
A person is guilty of assault in the third degree when:
Assault in the third degree is a class A misdemeanor.
Hopefully, an enlightened politico on his or her way up will soon recognize the danger thrown birdseed poses and will bump this up to a felony.
I’m Brian J. Noggle with FelonyWatch.
Don’t look now, but there’s a blogging virtual monkey trying to type the complete works of Shakespeare.
Don’t tell Frank J. about MonkeyNet becoming self-aware, or he’ll take it to DefCon 1.
(Link seen on NRO’s The Corner.)
When the Barenaked Ladies sing “If I Had a Million Dollars“, do they mean a million American dollars, or a million dollars Canadian?
Charter Communications announced on its investor conference call that it’s going to raise the rates for its Charter Pipeline cable modem offering because it can.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch story says:
Charter Communications Inc. is considering raising the price for its high-speed Internet service and eliminating its slowest-speed service to “extract more revenue” from its markets, Chief Executive Carl E. Vogel told analysts Thursday.
“High-speed data has been a wonderful business for us,” Vogel said.
It’s the most profitable product as well as the one requiring the least capital expense for Charter to deploy.
That’s right, little lambs, Charter needs a new pair of woolen socks, so give it up. It’s not passing on increases in its costs. It’s just extracting revenue from you.
Meanwhile, the Noggle household happily continues to pass on any Charter offerings.
Today’s Washington Post has a story about the New Zealish guy who’s doing a complete ASCII art remake of Star Wars. Unfortunately, the author makes the astonishing claim:
Anyone who’s ever come near a computer knows how to create little text “emoticons,” such as a sideways smiley face :-) or a winking face ;-), but Jansen has taken this idea to extravagant, or possibly insane, extremes. He’s tapped out whole “Star Wars” tableaux — hyper-driven spaceships, storming Storm Troopers, the famous bar scene — with nothing but dots, dashes, parentheses, asterisks and what-have-you.
Simon Jansen, the artist, is not taking emoticons to a whole new level. ASCII art is not an extension of AOL-inspired colonic stupidity. By making that claim, the author is denying we old-time geeks of our culture and heritage and represents a great deal of insensitivity duly worth of italics and sometimes bold!
After all, ASCII art has been around for much longer than AOL. Am I the only one who remembers Color 64 BBSes, with their medium res ASCII animations, and St. Louis’s own Dave Hartmann?
Techdirt links to a story wherein Snopes.com gets props for debunking the ‘Bambi Hunt’ story. Bravo, Snopes!
I have been a fan of Snopes for almost five years (since I worked at my first “sit down in front of a computer” job). I use them as a resource to debunk e-mail forwards that I get and just to keep abreast of the latest foolishness on the Internet.
Bravo, David and Barbara Mikkelson! You’re better than the World Book, werd.
Look for the Snopes.com IPO coming soon to a new-and-improved Internet bubble near you!
MSN has a list of signs you’re going to be laid off. While somewhat descriptive, it’s obvious that a writer, and a “business” writer, composed this list.
You want to know if you’re going to be laid off? Let your Paranoia Shidoshi, who has been laid off before (schnuck those schuckers), guide you.
You’re facing impending layoff if:
What to do?
As previously enumerated, you can:
Or you can start sending your resumes out now.
I didn’t see this in the “Armed Citizen” column of America’s First Freedom, but apparently, according to MSN, the actress Gabrielle Union (of Bad Boys II) once exchanged gunfire with a robber/rapist.
Is she the NRA? If not, why not?
The first time I read Steve Chapman’s piece in today’s Chicago Tribune, entitled “Eliminating death penalties for drug use” (registration required), I misunderstood its contents.
The title, of course, does not refer to state-imposed death penalties. Instead, he’s talking about some of the unintended consequences friends of the White Lady suffer. Heroin addicts swap needles and give each other a bunch of neat blood-borne diseases. They overdose, too, in increasing numbers. These aren’t death penalties, they’re just the unexpected results that can occur when you use the human body in ways not explicitly covered in the documentation.
When I first read it, I thought Chapman was talking about whacky enabling behaviors, like hypodermic giveaways, but I should have known better. He’s simply talking about making it legal to buy as many hypodermic needles as you want and making the antidote to overdose, a non-addictive and non-enjoyable drug, into an over-the-counter medication. These subsidary things are only illegal because heroin is, and because in the national War on Drugs, some collateral damage is acceptable.
So Chapman’s comments are really applicable. Read them more carefully at your first glance than I did.
The Professor links to a piece by John Scalzi. Scalzi’s critical of workshops for writers, which are more often than not touchy-feely confabs for consumers in the ever-profitable writer-wannabe market. I understand the feeling.
On the way to my Writing Intensive English (appropriately enough, acronymed as WINE) degree, I enjoyed many workshop-centric classes and extra-curricular activities. As you can imagine, my style was much like that of Gene Wolfe, the protagonist of the Scalzi posting. Blunt and acerbic, I pointed out flaws in the other writers’ work.
Hey, if they cannot take it from a peer, I didn’t expect they could take it in the cold, cruel world of publishing. Besides, if I broke their hearts and drove them into a Business Administration degree, I was thinning the herd and eliminating potential competition early.
Funny, I haven’t had much more publishing success than they did anyway. But at least I had fun.
In a story on FoxNews.com entitled Hip Hop Artists Rewrite Dictionary, Jennifer D’Angelo fawns over variant spellings used by hip-hop and rap artists, such as Nelly (“Hot in Herre”), Mya (“My Love Is Like … Wo”). and Christina Iwannabareall (“Dirrty”). She goes so far as to assert:
Every generation invents its own slang (think of the ever-changing synonyms for “cool.”) But this crop of artists is changing the spellings of already established English words.
I beg to differ. Ms. D’Angelo is forgetting:
Song Title: | Artist: | Year: |
“Tip Toe Thru’ The Tulips With Me” | Tiny Tim | 1968 |
“Gimme Dat Ding” | Pipkins | 1970 |
“Tuff Enuff” | Fabulous Thunderbirds | 1986 |
“C’Mon And Get My Love” | D-Mob featuring Cathy Dennis | 1990 |
“Nothing Compares 2 U” | Sinead O’Connor | 1990 |
Source: The Billboard Book of One Hit Wonders> |
Song Title: | Artist: | Year: |
“Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” | Rod Stewart | 1979 |
“I Gotcha” | Joe Tex | 1972 |
“Outa-Space” | Billy Preston | 1972 |
“Pop Muzik” | M | 1979 |
“Use Ta Be My Girl” | The O’Jays | 1978 |
Source: The Billboard Book of Gold & Platinum Records |
Song Title: | Artist: | Year: |
“Betcha By Golly Wow” | The Stylistics | 1972 |
“C’mon Everybody” | Eddie Cochran | 1958 |
“Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” | Stevie Wonder | 1974 |
“Every 1’s a Winner” | Hot Chocolate | 1978 |
“Lawdy Miss Clawdy” | Lloyd Price | 1952 |
“Rockit” | Herbie Hancock | 1983 |
“U Got The Look” | Prince | 1987 |
Source: The Heart of Rock and Soul |
So D’Angelo has discovered a trend in song titling that has extended back 50 years at least. Perhaps she should have gotten a government grant of some sort to unearth it.
The difference, of course, between then and now is that some people, including some educators, are trying to legitimize these alternate spellings in written communication. In the name of self-expression, of course. However, half of written communication is expressing what you want to express. The other half is conveying that meaning so that the reader can understand.
Hence, variations in song titles are okay, because the actual communication is aural; that is, the recipient gets the benefit of a beat you can dance to and inflection. However, in written communication, standard spelling, syntax, and semantics alone convey all meaning, so if you’re busy “expressing your individuality” by writing gibberish and higherglyphics, you’re losing readers. Sorry to dent your self-esteem.
So what’re my points?
The illuminated state of Illinois has clarified, according to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, that:
“No” always means no, even when someone says it during the middle of consensual sex, according to a new state law.
The law clarifies the issue of consent by spelling out that people can change their mind even while having sex. If someone says “no,” the other person must stop or it becomes rape.
So during those coital communications, take care in choosing your words for communication with your partner. Such inappropriate questions as “Did you hear the doorbell?”, “Is that your husband’s car pulling into the driveway?”, or simply “Do you like that, baby?” might lead to you committing rape.
Remember to phrase the questions as true/false (“True or false: You like that, baby.”), short answer (“What did you hear just then that sounded like ‘ding-dong’?”), or multiple choice (“The crunch of wheels on gravel was caused by, a) your husband returning home, b) your husband’s assistant, Johnny ‘Cheeks’ Moreso, arriving to pick you up for your shopping trip, c) my frightened-but-strangely-excited imagination, or d) both a and b?”).
Note: | Some might say I am misinterpreting the written communication this article poses. An article written by a journalist I assume to be calm and rational, an article covering a law composed by reflective and deliberate legislators, an article I read while sober and reasonable. If I can misinterpret this written communication in the best of circumstances, how absurd is it then to criminalize a potential misinterpretation of a spoken communication composed and delivered while in the throes of hormones, passion, and/or quite frankly oftentimes a bunch of booze?
Also, does the application of the term “bad boy” or “bad girl” assign criminality? |
Everyone knows that Frank J.’s Nuke the Moon tee shirts impart extra chutzpah, moxie, and other worthy attributes upon wearers, but sometimes the finely-tuned magic can go disastrously awry.
For example, the one that Rachel Lucas got is apparently defective, and dangerously so.
Can’t you see she’s leaning to the left!
In Waukesha, Wisconsin, they’re throwing the new book at a guy who surreptitiously videotaped girlfriends nude. Well, not nude, since that’s art. They were naked. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports:
Avello was charged with two felonies in February for possessing the tapes without the women’s consent and producing them while each was “nude in a circumstance in which she had a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
A possible legal problem arises since the videotapes were made in the late 1990s, and the law that they’re rolling up and spanking Avello with was enacted in 2001. Obviously, this would be an unconstitutional application, ex post facto, of laws. But this is a CINS (Crime Involving Nakedness or Sex) situation, so it’s important to chillingsworth this guy, lock him up for a decade or two, deprive him of rights to vote and own guns, and put his name in an extra bad database registry.
One of the State’s men says:
Assistant District Attorney Ted S. Szczupakiewicz disagrees.
“I don’t believe that time and place is relevant at all under the law as it existed in November, when the tapes were located and, according to the state’s position, found to be in Mr. Avello’s possession,” he told Binn.
There you have it. Ex Post Facto overruled by an ADA. Thanks for coming up with the idea, founding fathers, but it’s so eighteenth century.
Just in case you bump into a judge who disagrees, Mr., uh, Ted, you can always charge Avello with not having a business license.
The Professor links to an article about the drive of Iraqis to learn English. It’s a neat piece, but here’s the most telling quote:
”We have not seen anything from the United States of what they promised,” he said. ”I want to help them help me.”
This particular Iraqi wants the United States to provide him with fresh water, electricity, phone service, and who knows what else. He wants the United States government to help him personally.
Sounds like these people are well on their way to the American form of government already. For whom can he vote to receive the best goodies?