Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Fin

No point. Why bother continuing this POS blog.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Dogs Fart, Saucers Fly, Hearts Implant (isn't that haiku enough for you?)


BREAKING NEWS FLASH update! Dr. Wayne W. Dyer really got me in touch with the Tao!

My dogs have serious gas. Dogs and leftover dal are a bad combination.

Datajunkie is back in action with alien sweetness above.


This silicone heart temple implant was found via Modblog. Apparently, it is only a week old!




Oh, how could I forget! Remember to vote for the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Shakespeare Win-Win Winner!

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Pile Ignore Mode Progress Report

11/11/07 UPDATE!
Pile ingore mode returned. This is my office.

I don't even want to use that George W. toilet paper, but I don't know what else to do with it.


Dining room as of the morning of November 11.
Kind of pathetic when I came compare it to the August 28 photos. Since then I believe new boxes arrived from somewhere, because I eliminated two of them yesterday.



UPDATE: Intriguing taxidermy art discovered via Morbid Anatomy.
The image on the left is the artist, Sarina Brewer.









This is my dining room.
Haven't bothered with dusting yet, but this is my office previously featured with tons of crap here and there.
This is an amusing Bacchus Behave! suggestion...

My old books aren't in good shape, but they also aren't in nearly as bad shape as I feared...
More intriguing NSFW imagery can be found at Zillow Book.

Paintball for Jesus

MARIPOSA -- This is a mountain town where there's a Bible verse painted over a pizza parlor door and a local politician keeps a cardboard cutout of John Wayne holding a Winchester rifle in his office as proof of fealty to the NRA.

But a proposal to bring "Paintball for Jesus" to public land has some people riled.

"I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something in my upbringing as a Methodist, but Paintball for Jesus? God help us all. Seriously, this teaches bad habits of shooting each other," said Mariposa County Supervisor Brad Aborn, 71, the John Wayne fan who is a former Vietnam War Navy helicopter pilot....


...Church members have prayed over the issue and decided not to give up, despite initial resistance.
"It's just a matter of educating people about the world of paintball and our intentions," said Tomerlin, the youth leader.
In the proposal, New Life makes a point to say all other churches would be invited and included.
"So now we're going to have the Methodists shooting at the Catholics?" Aborn asked rhetorically. "What about the Presbyterians? There's not a Presbyterian church up here. How are the Presbyterians going to be represented in the paintball finals?"
Members of the church's youth group recently e-mailed supervisors, inviting them to a game of paintball so they could experience paintball personally.
"Good Lord," said Supervisor Dianne Fritz. "I'm 57 and fat. I'm not going to run around dodging paintballs."


What about the Lutherans? Don't they get to play too? Check out Paintball for...Jesus? for the complete article. Apparently there is a Christian Paintball Players Association you can join if this interests you. I wonder if there's a Paintball for Buddha Association...
What about Paintball for Radical Islamists?


Hat tip to wagga for this find.


In other news...


...Blogs are still reverberating, but Mr. McIntyre, Dr. Hansen and others familiar with the initial data revisions are clarifying what is, and is not, at issue.
One thing not in question, Mr. McIntyre and Dr. Hansen agree, is the merit of shifting away from energy choices that contribute heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Mr. McIntyre said he feels “climate change is a serious issue.” His personal preference is to shift increasingly to nuclear power and away from coal and oil, the main source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Mr. McIntyre and Dr. Hansen also agree that the NASA data glitch had no effect on the global temperature trend, nudging it by an insignificant thousandth of a degree.
Everyone appears also to agree that too much attention is paid to records, particularly given that the difference between 1934, 1998, and several other sets of years in the top 10 warmest list for the United States are so small as to be statistically meaningless...

Quarter-Degree Fix Fuels Climate Fight


Now, I need to stop surfing the web in pile ignore mode and return to those damn boxes.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

Funny Blog Comment of the Day


Anastasia said...
I don't recall seeing any nudity in comics as a kid, then again my local newsagent didn't have a huge array of comics, but the basics; the closest I came to observing erotic imagery would be the draped female form, but with obvious curves (breasts, nipples, etc).

In direct response to the breast feeding magazine cover, it's now 2007, a near year after this post was posted, but I had to add that this issue has become a semi-issue in Australia. I'm not sure if the Bush administration has some influence, or rather, the religious aspect surrounding Bush. We have had a high increase of American Christian denominations spread their wings, to take root in Australia, and I can't say that I'm enjoying their commercial aspects (one of which, Hillsong) is a registered 'company' that is exempt from paying taxes, that is currently paying for prime time advertising on television, as well as paying for visual advertising on public transport.

I can't comprehend the sexualisation of breast feeding. In my mind, only the most perverted person would sexualise breast feeding or take issue to it, because it's not a sexual activity (in the sense of being pornographic or functioning for orgasm).

In Australia, networks have followed the American example, blurring breasts on television. Even a news segment on breast cancer detection blurs out the breasts of women undergoing mammograms (which is non sexual, and hardly comfortable), so I'm not surprised with the censorship in comics; it's insane.

Then they tell people that they live in a democratic society, where they are unable to choose.

My approach to the issue would be to publish the 'nude' version, and publish a censored version for the conservatives that are out there.

This visual censorship is like the parental advisory sticker on CD's; stupid. As if all parents shop with their kids when they buy CD's?




In other Groovy news, I found this amusing: "DON'T BE ABSURD! A COMPUTER DOES NOT MASTURBATE!"

Too Much Stuff

Breaking News Flash (update)!
Funny finds in one of the boxes:
As I understand it my dad really fell for the Burgundy Meat Loaf featured in Saucepans and the Single Girl. Bacchus Behave! was one of my grandmother's books (background story unknown).

One can still easily find the page of the favorite recipe since it's the only one with sauce or something all over it...

So they don't harm the books, my boys have been spending their time on the bed with their favorite stuffed animals.

While the cooking/cocktail books with family ties make some sense to keep, WTF was I thinking when I decided to pack a box of old Wired magazines and shit....? To the dump it goes. Woohoo!

This is my dining room.

This is my "office".
Having been recently reacquainted with boxes of crap I don't know what to do with (see dining room photo above) and would rather not bother with, I thought I would document it here so as to be held virtually accountable for pile management. Yes, it is boring blogging, but very few blogs aren’t boring. As you can see from the “office” photo on the left, I already had some pile ignore mode issues when I was presented with the latest re-additions. Anyway, I know there are (or were) some old first editions in one of the boxes, but I’ll have to go through all the others to find them. Unfortunately, they are mislabeled. I shall document my progress on this exciting venture.

Friday, August 24, 2007

New Hope for Enron's Electricity Bonanza

A federal appeals court revived California's request for at least $1 billion in refunds to electricity customers Friday, saying federal regulators who denied the repayments had ignored tapes in which Enron traders joked about gouging customers during the energy crisis of 2000-2001.
The ruling was issued by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which has repeatedly found that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission abused its authority or violated its own rules in considering the state's claims of multibillion-dollar overcharges during the energy crisis.

In other news, yes, I've been falling behind on the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin game...Michael Vick came to mind, but he pisses me off too much to find him amusing so I guess we'll pass this week.

Anyway, I'm feeling rather sad and depressed about everything and shall assume nobody could give a rat's ass one way or another. Thanks for your support nonetheless.
UPDATE: The REAL reason for my gloomy mood is my dining room full of storage boxes returned to me yesterday. There's nothing quite so depressing as stacks of boxes full of junk one doesn't know what to do with.

Vote for the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Shakespeare Winner!

Hey Kidz,
It's finally time to vote for the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to William Shakespeare winner! Woohoo! Win-win!


Thursday, August 23, 2007

dadanoias dice no?!

6 Degrees of Casey Serin UPDATE: Thanks to the looser W-2 and jury duty, it looks like the 6 Degrees voting process will be further delayed until I have a chance to get around to it. Feel free to continue submitting entries while you're waiting.


For reasons that may seem politically incorrect I never bothered much with "Spanish" (as presented in SoCal Montessori versions of pre-school - and would prefer not to find my mouth washed out with Irish Spring again), so I don't have a clue what she's saying (other than latin roots of the written word), but this Dadanoia chick is hot.
A translation would be SWEET.......

49 Dogs, Poms and Red Preppie Turtlenecks

Thankfully, Vick's 49 dogs have been spared for now...
RICHMOND -- It appears the dogs seized during the Michael Vick dogfighting investigation will be spared, at least for a while.

Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson approved an order Thursday afternoon ordering the U.S. Marshals Service to take custody of the 49 dogs.

The judge's order directs the Marshals Service to use "whatever means appropriate to protect and maintain" the dogs.

I wish Akubi would wear outfits like this, but he refuses to do so. Tanuki, on the other hand, will proudly walk about in the most absurd tight-fitted, sequined threads. He's quite the dandy.

Anyway, this is a brief break from jury duty and I'm not sure when I'll get around to this week's 6 Degrees of Casey Serin Win-win poll; therefore new entries will be accepted

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Spelunking, Stereoretro and Sweet Boots at Zillow Book

I've been in jury duty and offline most of the day, but managed to put some massive focused action into Zillow Book this evening.




Monday, August 20, 2007

No Deal MoFo!


F-You Michael Vick!
You should be sent to Iraq where you can have some serious personal experience with dogfighting (and tags) a-hole!
YOU, sir, ARE AN ASSHOLE!

Don't worry, be happy, itsallgood...

I really like this song though...

Saturday, August 18, 2007

William Gibson, Flesh Scar Nymph & Placeholder

While I was reading this article about William Gibson, I was reminded of how impressed I was with him when I met him several years ago. He was quite humorous and humble. It’s interesting the way meeting a writer in RL can ever so slightly change one’s perception of them – sometimes positive, sometimes negative (particularly the pompous ones).

In other news this Self-Actualized Flesh Scar Nymph found on Ectoplasmosis led to a number of disturbingly artistic future images for Zillow Book (NSFW)...


On a personal level, BM is not at the top of my priority list (I don’t even have more than one ear pierce on each ear let alone a tattoo), but when well-executed it has a certain aesthetic appeal.

Last night I had a very strange dream that still haunts me. Concerned that it might suggest something is seriously wrong with me I probably won’t share it here.

The rest of this space is reserved for further finds and musings unrelated to the current 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to William Shakespeare game.

Adding Oomph to "Organic": ...Hoping to cash in on the organic trend, all sorts of entrepreneurs, overseas farmers and conventional food companies have jumped into the business and are pushing the definitions of organic into new and questionable territory...

Friday, August 17, 2007

6 Degrees of Casey Serin – Casey to William Shakespeare

Hey Kidz,

It’s Friday and time for a new 6 Degrees of Casey Serin game!
Woohoo!
Yesterday’s post inspired this week’s challenge:
Casey to William Shakespeare.

Given the number of fools featured in Shakespeare's work, one should find plenty of gold nuggets! Win-win!


Since I chose Shakespeare over a Karl Rove replay, I'd like to share this inspiring passage from Thank God You Are Not Karl Rove with you:

...This is the moment we are in and this is the one that matters and it is just too delightful to repeat: You are not Karl Rove and I am not Karl Rove and therefore we can join hands right now, you and I, we can connect across this vast media chasm and via these very wires and we can, together, find a deeper understanding, a shared universal truth, a more profound coming together over the fact that, no matter how bad things might get, we will never have to be Karl Rove.

"John Draper was known as Captain Crunch..."

For the second week in a row Wagga is the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin winner!
Woohoo! Win-Win!

In case you missed it here's the award winning 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Cap'n Crunch entry:

wagga said...
John Draper was known as Captain Crunch
in the '70s for his ability to steal long-distance phone calls. The whistle he originally used
was a prize in the Cap'n Crunch cereal box. It's frequency was 2600 Hertz. He served time in jail for his exploits. He created a device known as the "Blue Box", which became a favourite of phreaks worldwide. He later went on to living in a van and also travelled to Australia, where he designed and wrote web sites to make a living. He is currently pretty much a homeless person with a laptop. Mr. Draper now lives on the margins of this affluent world, still striving to carve out a role in the business mainstream.

Connecting Mr. Draper to kc looks really tough, espcially as he (Mr. Draper) has held W2 jobs with Apple & Autodesk, among others.

Let's try this:

2600 Hertz plus kc's putative IQ gets us to 2731.
Aspeth's "12 Years..." gets us to 2743.
The first reported kc scam was the "Ponzi scheme" at age 14, now we have 2757.
And finally, kc was $2.2 million in debt. As a million is a small number, a simple float roundup yields 2.

Grand Total is 2759.
That number rings a bell, somewhere...

August 10, 2007 5:32 PM

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Branching Titus Andronicus

William Shakespeare's play that may or may not have been written by someone else...

Mother's Nature art found here




Stupidly funny bad acting version of the situation...

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Crunch-a-tize the Constitution!


Groovy find of the morning via ectoplasmosis...

YET ANOTHER UPDATE!
A related rss find of the day:

...Nothing wrong with that you might think. At least here in Britain. But in the Bible belt that is South Carolina, writing, and reading, about normal life, which in many people's eyes includes sex, was understood to be "pornographic". Her friendship with Grealy was far too intense, so intense that they had to be lesbians, didn't they? Despite being untrue, this assumption was more than enough cause for censure for some of the open-minded young women at Clemson, since, obviously, it was "not normal".

Patchett gave her talk, along with a bodyguard to protect her from angry parents and righteous 18-year-old boys - asking how often she'd cheated on her husband - and defended the students' right to read anything and not to be protected from supposedly "corrupting" texts. For, as she pointed out, if you start with her book, where do you stop? She mentioned, among others, Anna Karenina (adultery and suicide), The Great Gatsby (adultery, alcoholism, murder) and One Hundred Years of Solitude (incest). As I read the piece, I realised (having once taught a course entitled From Romeo and Juliet to Sleepless in Seattle, about the representation of love) that most of the books I had once studied, and taught, would be off-limits to the protesters at Clemson. Going to my bookshelves, I racked my brains about what I had studied as a teenager. I started Shakespeare with Othello (all that tupping), studied The Outsider in French (murder and nonchalance, which is probably just as much of a sin to some) and learnt all I needed to know about Freud and families by reading Sons and Lovers (where do I start?!). In fact the more I looked, the more I realised that in a world that considered Patchett's book as offering a "deviant sexual agenda", most of my secondary school and undergraduate syllabus would have to be banned. As would most of the books taught in the US...
UPDATE: The NSFW Shining Twins post may have freaked some people out a bit, so I've decided to keep anything beyond PG-13 over at Zillow Book (linky is NSFW BTW) and keep this blog wholesome all-American organic sweetness.

Also, for those who have sent Yahoo! messages I seemingly haven't responded to, Yahoo! has been eating my responses again.

Don't forget to vote for the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Cap'n Crunch Win-Win winner!

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Time to Crunch-a-tize!

UPDATE: Santa Flipper Clause's entry has been added. I'm not sure what a viola has to do with anything, but itsallgood.

Wait! We have a new (late) submission that should be included in an organic voting process.

Hey Kidz,

It’s time to vote for the 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Cap’n Crunch Win-Win winner! Woohoo!



Check out all of these super sweet entries!

Edgar said...
It's time to play, woohoo!

1) Cap'n Crunch had a breakfast cereal named after him.

2) The cereal stayed crunchy in milk.

3) Milk comes from a cow.

4) Casey Serin called his wife a cow.

5) Casey Serin, aka KC, should have his ass barbequed in KC Masterpiece bbq sauce, which, BTW, contains sweet molasses.
August 10, 2007 2:40 PM

Rob Dawg said...
1) Casey imagines himself a Cap'n of Industry.
2) Casey makes Cap'n Crunch look competent.
3) Casey and the Cap'n both dress funny.
4) The Cap'n and Casey both have strange diets.
5) The Cap'n is a creature of fantaxy and commercial exploitation.
6) Casey and Caseyworld™ are, well... you get it.

August 10, 2007 3:26 PM

NotAnOptimist said...
1) Casey needs to take a bath.

2) In a recent post by Akubi, we saw Toxxxy taking a bath with Fruit Loops.

3) Fruit Loops is a type of cereal.

4) Cap'n Crunch is also a cereal.

August 10, 2007 3:45 PM

wagga said...
John Draper was known as Captain Crunch
in the '70s for his ability to steal long-distance phone calls. The whistle he originally used
was a prize in the Cap'n Crunch cereal box. It's frequency was 2600 Hertz. He served time in jail for his exploits. He created a device known as the "Blue Box", which became a favourite of phreaks worldwide. He later went on to living in a van and also travelled to Australia, where he designed and wrote web sites to make a living. He is currently pretty much a homeless person with a laptop. Mr. Draper now lives on the margins of this affluent world, still striving to carve out a role in the business mainstream.

Connecting Mr. Draper to kc looks really tough, espcially as he (Mr. Draper) has held W2 jobs with Apple & Autodesk, among others.

Let's try this:

2600 Hertz plus kc's putative IQ gets us to 2731.
Aspeth's "12 Years..." gets us to 2743.
The first reported kc scam was the "Ponzi scheme" at age 14, now we have 2757.
And finally, kc was $2.2 million in debt. As a million is a small number, a simple float roundup yields 2.

Grand Total is 2759.
That number rings a bell, somewhere...

August 10, 2007 5:32 PM

Ogg the Caveman said...
Well, normally I'd go for the most indirect and convoluted thing I can come up with. However, I've clearly been beaten at that game today. Since I have no chance I'll just go for the cheap shot.

1. Cap'n Crunch is a breakfast cereal.

2. So is Froot Loops.

3. Casey could fuck a Froot Loop without breaking it.

(I had a friend in college who was nicknamed Froot Loop for that reason.)

August 10, 2007 6:46 PM

Gypsy Pete said...
Casey is a cereal fraud who eats cereal all day I suspect.

August 12, 2007 7:53 AM

Santa Flipper Clause said...

Ho Ho Ho - It's Santa Flipper Clause

1. Cap'n Crunch dresses as somewhat of a fruit

2. Cap'n Crunch should not be allowed near children

3. Cap'n Crunch does not have a wife (that I know of)

4. Cap'n Crunch lost money flipping pancakes

5. Cap'n Crunch has no car

6. Viola --- Casey is Cap'n Crunch

Santa F. Clause
August 14, 2007 6:00 PM

Green Algae in the News


From The Beam of Light That Flips a Switch That Turns on the Brain
...“If I were a fish, and somebody poked me in the side,” (in this case, with a fine glass tip), Dr. Isacoff said, “I would escape.” But when the translucent fish were strobed with violet light, the overstimulated creatures no longer detected being prodded. Blue-green light reversed the effect.

One advantage of the Berkeley approach, Dr. Isacoff said, is that it can be adapted for many types of proteins so they could be activated by light. But for the method to work, scientists must periodically douse cells with the glutamate string.

In contrast, Dr. Deisseroth’s laboratory at Stanford has followed nature’s simpler design, borrowing a light-sensitive protein instead of making a synthetic one.

In 2003, Georg Nagel, a biophysicist then at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, and colleagues characterized channelrhodopsin-2 from green algae. This channel protein lets positive ions stream into cells when exposed to blue light. It functioned even when inserted into human kidney cells, the researchers showed.

Neuroscientists realized that this pond scum protein might be used to hot-wire a neuron with light. In 2005, Edward Boyden, then a graduate student at Stanford, Mr. Zhang and Dr. Deisseroth, joining with the German researchers, demonstrated that the idea worked. And in separate research published last spring, Mr. Zhang and Dr. Boyden, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, each found a way to also silence neurons: a bacterial protein called halorhodopsin, when placed in a brain cell, can cause the cell to shut down in response to yellow light....

Monday, August 13, 2007

Neo-Dada Art and vintage "stuff" of the Day

While I was investigating fishnets for my other blog, I discovered Brancusi7's intriguing collage images.




Woohoo!

How about another 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Karl Rove game?


Don't forget to play the current 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Cap'n Crunch game!

UPDATE: While reading the Rove Resigns NYT comments I discovered someone else with exactly the same response (other than the hyphen):

40.August 13th, 2007 9:02 am

Woo-hoo!

— Posted by Caz

The BBC comments are rather interesting as well.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

The Shining Twins


Vista sucks big time, so I'll

leave you with YouTube version for now (and go about Hating on the POS OS on my own). Apparently, I'm blocked from uploading the hotties on my own f-ing system.


Saturday, August 11, 2007

Edith the Egg Lady has her Day in the ongoing Insanity Machine!

BREAKING FLASH! New Church of the SubPrime blog!
Now we will return to our regularly scheduled 6 Degrees of Casey Serin to Cap'n Crunch game.




Burger King announced a cage-free policy in March that would be phased in gradually, with the eggs accounting for 5 percent of its total by the end of the year. But even that modest goal may be difficult to fulfill, said Steve Grover, a company vice president.

“We knew there would be a supply crunch,” Mr. Grover said. “We’re going to be able to make our commitment this year, but we’re going to have to watch that very carefully as we go forward.”