saturday matinee

I'm not sure the anthropomorphizing of the towers works for me. I feel kind of sorry for them, which isnt, I think, the response they want.

cover page

I've been listening to Daniel Johnston lately, and have been searching youtube for covers. These are some of the best ones, I thought, anyway.

quote for the day

The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That’s not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and ­Britain - with a rate among the ­highest - has 153....

This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.’s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

That something, of course, is the war on drugs.

Fareed Zakaria

Right here is why the movement towards privatization of Americas prisons is insane. We will never be able to reduce those numbers as long as there are corporations using their profits to pay lobbyists to maintain the Tough On Crime attitudes that got us into this mess in the first place.

sunday funny

saturday matinee

PROTEIGON from BURAYAN on Vimeo.

via

with a minor adjustment

Just change "Rick Perry" to any of the other names running in the GOP, and it works pretty much the same way.

linkage

- Why did the chicken cross the road?

- religious logic.

- Rick Santorum is not a good Catholic.

- half dog, half billy goat, or, did somebody put that dog up there, or did she do it herself?

- The Great Wall of Vagina. No, really. (via)

- Natural Swimming Pools. No chemicals! (via)

- Guitar wow. via

- It is no longer appropriate to refer to Republicans as "rats".

- T-rex Trying (via)

- 11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard. Unless they're mine. (via)

- Mark Jenkins, artist

- ranking: North America > United States > Economy (via)

- Lost subways: a map. Also, photos. (via)

- The Dunes of France... okay, one dune, but it's huge. via

- Break out the turntables and 45s! Waking Up Now is doing amazing things with Dolly Parton's voice. If I could just figure out how to download the song... (via)

- Explore Nancy Fouts' humor. via

- Are you and you partner's sleep types compatible? (via)

- How to Google

- Jan van Eyck's Ghent Alterpiece in 100 billion pixels. Detail! via

- A "game" for people who are tired of cell phones at dinner. (via)

- a life lesson.

- Cant help but notice that most of the homophobes who would murder their own children should those children turn out gay also are incapable of telling the difference between "your" and "you're". via

- Hubble images, courtesy of National Geographic. (via)

quote for the day

"You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."

John Green

meanwhile...

in an alternate America.

quote for the day

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Buckminster Fuller

sunday funny

what do you mean you dont read Frazz?

saturday matinee

Keith is an amazing talent as a musician, guitarist and master luthier. He designed and built his Medley 27-string guitar in order to play the music in his head.

(stolen from)

saturday funny

for SXSW

Back in the days of my youth, I went to college at the University of Texas At Austin. So I was there at the beginning of SXSW. Back then, it was a regional music festival, a chance for bands from Texas and the states around to try and be seen by whatever music executives* could be lured into town. It went on all over Asutin, and for $25 or so you could get a pass and see a lot of good music in a very short time. And when I say "see", I actually mean "see". Ordinary people could actually get in and watch bands, not just high-falutin' executives, famous musicians, and various other monied hangers-on. SXSW these days is pretty much an industry love-in, where the next big band, already chosen, brushed up and made ready for marketing is, well, marketed.

You'll need to embiggen this to read it, though you probably wont recognize many of the bands when you do, which was the whole damn point of the thing! I can assure you, though, it was great, which is why, like most wonderful things, the money arrived and fucked the whole thing up for everyone but the folks with the money.
But hey, listen up you oh so cool folks, so pleased with yourself for being at SXSW and hanging with the bands and being fabulous and all. I was there before it was cool, which in modern terms makes me even cooler than you. So suck it! Bwa ha ha ha!
By the way, if you want to see something more like SXSW used to be, you gotta head north these days, to 35 Denton, which, sadly is done for this year.


* i.e., those who couldnt be arsed to go to regular shows in scattered locations, and were pleased to have the bands come to them. I call that lazy, myself.

for my anniversary

I need to have the wife do this tomorrow morning

type this into google and search:

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5

dont let me forget

it's true

It's Truuuuuuuuuuue!

a dichotomy

So, I was reading a facebook post of a conservative friend of mine, who was "informing" everyone about a bus-drivers strike in Tempe and Pheonix, AZ. Seems the drivers "make between $12 and 22.50 per hour, have a 401k program, five weeks paid vacation, 11 paid holidays and the ability to accrue 60 sick days a year as well as five consecutive years of wage increases". Here were some of the comments from his less liberal friends:

- "Man! I don't have any of that!"

- "[R]ight now they make between 12-22. They were offered a 1% raise per year for the next 5 years plus all the other perks.... Unions need to go"

- "RIDICULOUS!! Give me a break. Unions definately need to go. I don't get any of that either....However, I did choose to be self-employed."

Okay, let's ignore that a measly 1% doesnt even cover the normal increase in any year's rise in the cost of living. How about we move on to the fact that these are the same conservatives who talk about the "envy" and "jealousy" of liberals whenever there is a complaint about the high pay of CEOs or Wall Street pirates. How is it okay to begrudge some poor bastard who drives a bus (presumably because he belongs to a union), but it's not okay to complain about a well-connected company executive making 100s of times the pay of a typical worker?

Generally, I leave his posts alone, because I'm polite that way. It's Facebook, not Blogger, after all. At the same time, this kind of hypocrisy really gets on my tits. One wonders what'd happen if CEOs formed a union? Besides, I suspect that if I commented on his post, using the last line of the above paragraph, he'd simply deny that he'd ever said anything like that, and I simply dont care enough about him or what he thinks to go to the effort of digging up the proof that he has.

a thought

So, I've been thinking about this whole Limbaugh/Fluke flap a bit, and I think that maybe I've figured something out. Republicans have, when confronted with the misogyny that seems to permeate the GOP and conservative commentators, pointed to more liberal commentators like Bill Maher and their descriptions of some of the more prominent conservative women, such as Michelle Bachmann or Ann Coulter. And while they are perhaps correct to do so, it's curious that they only seem to do so when they are themselves are being attacked for their own harsh name-calling. As if, the rest of the time, they just dont care what's said about their women-folk, that it is only when they need a convenient defense for their own behavior that they turn to the Well You Do It Too defense, but are otherwise silent.

Maybe not, just a thought.

sunday funny

saturday matinee

Getting your bike in motion while someone is sitting on the rear rack is difficult because of the extra weight. You have to start moving your bike forward and then your passenger has to hop on the rear rack. The Dutch Side Saddle Hop - a three-step move to elegantly hop on the rear rack of a bike - makes it easy once you know how to do it.

(stolen - shamelessly - from The Presurfer)

By the way, check out all the bicycles everywhere. This obviously aint America.

vote

What have we learned from the primaries?

via

quote for the day

"Be careful not to do your 'acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven."

The words of Christ, as quoted in Matthew 6:1, The Bible, New International Version.

Now, if you look at the King James, it specifies the giving of alms, rather than the NIV's "acts", which could be used by those of us* who are more vocal in our protestations of how right we are with God and how wrong others are. But then, keep reading, and I think it's pretty clear that the NIV's translation works as a summing up of the tone of the Sermon (or at least part of it). And it fits in nicely with my own personal view that the commandment not to "take God's name in vain" has nothing to do with saying something like "goddammit", but is more likely to claim God's favor as your own without having any better proof of that than your own interpretation of what God "wants".




* and by "us" I mean "Jesus-'loving' Republicans"

definition

via

quote for the day

"Not only did Reagan's era doom capitalism, but his toxic legacy ensured that America will find it extremely difficult to remedy the crises that resulted from his administration. These range from the deterioration of public education that resulted from Reagan's budget cuts to America's crumbling infrastructure. These two factors alone will make it increasingly difficult for America to compete globally in the years to come."

Marc McDonald, "How Ronald Reagan Unwittingly Laid the Groundwork for the Death of Capitalism"

question

I've never watched "The Walking Dead", so I cant answer this myself, but if you change all the zombies into a metaphor for Republicans, does the show still work as written?

quote for the day

"I’ve never killed a man, but I’ve read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction."

Mark Twain

sunday funny

via

saturday matinee

stolen from The Omnipotent Poobah

quote for the day

"What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. Sotheby's history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bed-bugs and body-snatching and just about everything that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."

Bill Bryson in "At Home"

oh fuck no

Seriously. No. Fucking. Way. Ever.

via


Addendum:

Just showed this to my daughter. She says, doesnt that look like fun? I say, did you not read the text around the video.

No. No no no no no no no no no no no no. No*.



* FUCK NO!