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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "whitey on the moon" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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10:43 pm
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Back to the drawing board
Sigh...
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12:52 am
[Link] | Written on the whiteboard in my room is the phrase, "Que pasa, Jimmy Fuckstick?" It just popped into my head one day. I do not know what it was doing there. I liked the sound of it, though, so I wrote it on the wall.
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01:59 pm
[Link] | This was posted under job listings for "labor":
Do you have free time to be my Yoda?
Um.
Tags: wtf
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09:25 pm
[Link] | All together now: "The use of proxy fighters is, in the long term, self-defeating." Ask the Romans who got their asses handed to them by the Germanic tribes they armed and trained. Ask Osama bin Laden.
Tags: ohcripeswhatnow
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12:22 am
[Link] | Don't get me wrong; I feel bad for his family and all. But HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA:
Man killed for 'hogging karaoke'
Tags: humans
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09:39 am
[Link] | Neighborhoods Propose Printing Their Own Currency To Encourage Local Shopping
The idealist in me loves this idea, but the pragmatist wonders whether it would work.
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01:19 pm
[Link] | 10 Rules For Not Being A Complete Douchebag
Tags: public service
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01:05 pm
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Another one from the Uncanny Valley
"Carlos is a robotic everyman. He's not one of those fancy deep sea dwelling, swimming pool competing, publicity hogging, multiple kill, or planet exploring robots, just a regular robot doing his thing like us humans.
Carlos was a college kinetic sculpture project... homeless people live in extremely dangerous environments. Shouldn't there be automated equipment used by this strata of society? So, for this project I chose to implement an automated walking, homeless shopping cart."
(via MAKE Magazine)
Tags: technology
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07:29 pm
[Link] | An anti-piracy video-musical from 1990s! It’s called Don’t Copy That Floppy.
(EDIT: I can't hear the word "floppy" without thinking of the phrase "big floppy donkey dick". What does this say about me?)
Tags: folks i wrote a rap, minstrelsy
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12:30 am
[Link] | Happy Buy Nothing Day!
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12:52 am
[Link] | The Jesus Lizard are back together and touring!
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11:54 pm
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Smashy smashy
Crashing driverless cars into concrete at 70 mph. Woo!
Tags: good times
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10:49 am
[Link] | This year, I filed a bunch of tax returns from years that I had been missing, and I finally got my refund check in the mail this week. I was a little concerned, though, when I found a handwritten note from Hank Paulson attached that said "Please do not cash this until Monday".
Sigh.
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10:23 am
[Link] | South African prison tattoos. I wish I could rock that look.
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10:12 am
[Link] | Take home a Sex Pistols T-shirt for the low, low price of $1875!
Tags: commerce
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10:22 pm
[Link] | I just found this piece on the "ex-gay movement" in the evangelical community. Here's a choice quote: "...staff would lead clients in group sessions to trace out childhood trauma alongside lessons in throwing footballs, changing motor oil and learning how to cross their legs in a manly fashion. In much of the world of ex-gay ministries, same-sex attractions are thought to result from childhood sexual abuse or parents who failed to instill masculinity in their sons."
But this is the weird part: it was a footnote to this wikipedia page on Old Timeyness. WTF? Granted, I got there from the page on camp. But still. Do those Disneyland barbershop quartets have gay subtext that I didn't know about? Well, according to Wikipedia, "Old Timeyness is often campy and put forth as a sort of "ultra-corniness". At other times, it is used to invoke an era of integrity and quality that stands in opposition to inferior "newfangled" ways of doing things... Focus on the Family, a conservative right-wing evangelical organization, uses Old Timey lettering and imagery in its logo. The group advocates what it terms "traditional values" by supporting (for example) school prayer and corporal punishment while denouncing gay marriage and gay rights in general." (Emphasis mine)
Cultural conservatives like to invoke the myth of some idealized past: "This used to be a great country, a nice place to live, until liberals (or gays, brown people, or other bogeyman du jour) went and ruined it." Well, as Dan Savage put it in Skipping Towards Gomorrah, I am sick and tired of being told I live in a shithole. Savage argues that the Borks and Bennetts and Buchanans can't have it both ways: they spend hundreds of pages arguing that America has become a moral sewer, then wrap it up with a little boilerplate about how America is the greatest country on earth. That's the mythos Sarah Palin was trying (clumsily) to invoke when she talked about "the real America". Bill O'Reilly invokes the myth all the time. I AM FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF THIS BULLSHIT. I am getting mad.
A few years ago, I read a book* in which one chapter was entitled "The Stories We Tell Ourselves". That is the sense in which I use the word "myth": it is a story we tell ourselves to give meaning to our experience, what the pundits called "narrative" in this most recent presidential campaign. Let's look back a century or so at a narrative that hasn't aged so well: "The minstrel show presented a racial stereotype that was, by modern standards, offensive. But it is a mistake to assume that the popular appeal of the minstrel show was simply based on racism. The U.S. was rapidly changing at mid-century from agrarian to industrial, and American audiences yearned for a mythological south where even the slaves were happy. The minstrel show was the first in a long line of uniquely American entertainments that catered to national sentiment and nostalgia for an idealized rural past."**
I got into a debate on the subject of gay marriage a few years ago. The person I was talking to couldn't come up with a better argument than "Gay marriage is against the law. It should be illegal because it's always been illegal". Now, you know and I know, dear reader, that his reasons were, at their root, emotional ones. Fear and anxiety led him to cling to "tradition". But, as I pointed out to him at the time, it is a big, stinking fallacy to say, "that's the way it's always been, therefore that's the way it ought to be"***. If we follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, it justifies slavery and all manner of bad things. So, the next time you hear someone say a policy should remain in place because it's traditional, I hope your bullshit detector works.
*To Life! by Rabbi Harold Kushner.
** I don't have a full citation at my fingertips, but I'm pretty sure the book was entitled 200 Things Every American Should Know About History or something pretty close. (EDIT: Here it is.)
***It is one form of the naturalistic fallacy.
Tags: bad ideas, camp, fallacies, humans, minstrelsy, social conservatism, wtf
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11:28 am
[Link] | ( Emergency phone? Emergency phone! )
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09:00 pm
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A Fistful of Links
Welp, a contractor employed by the Scientologists killed a guy. Anonymous is gonna SHIT.
Bush political appointees with no technical background to be placed in charge of science policy. Oh hey great.
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective. Presented as-is, FWIW, I just deliver 'em, views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of this office, etc.
The Doodle Blog: "I draw most of these doodles during my 11:00am meeting at work." Strangely compelling.
Current Music: Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot - Bonnie and Clyde
Tags: engineering, humans, neither outraged nor paying attention, religion, science, work
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07:38 pm
[Link] | Recounts in some races, including the Minnesota contest between Al Franken and Norm Coleman, mean a Democratic 60-seat lead in the Senate is still possible. Technically. But there can be a hell of a spread between "possible" and "likely".
According to the article, "... in Georgia, a poll released Thursday shows Democrat Jim Martin within striking distance of Sen. Saxby Chambliss in a surprisingly close runoff scheduled for Dec. 2."
Not that Jim Martin?
Tags: legendary axemen, politics
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01:26 am
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Insert "I woke up married in Vegas" joke here
Mexican scientists synthesize diamonds out of tequila. Your whole life is leading up to this moment.
I couldn't find the primary source for this one, so couldn't evaluate it myself. After all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The popular press always fucks up science reporting.
(Edit: The university that reported the findings is here. I still can't read the original paper, because of the language barrier. It appears not to be the work of Joey Skaggs, though, FWIW.)
Tags: wow
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