(A Regretfully Abbreviated) This Week in Exemplary Human Behavior

This week, the Ministry was presented with one example of heartless circumstantial cruelty so profound, so overweeningly monstrous and yet so typical of the dim candles that humanity proudly calls their minds, that it takes center stage in a solo version of our celebrated series, “This Week in Exemplary Human Behavior.”

Spotlight Iran: She is a woman severe mental handicaps. She has a mental age of eight. As a girl, she was sold into sex slavery by her mother and passed from pimp to pimp, bearing her first child at age nine and enduring repeated rapes and abuses in the years since. She is now nineteen years old and will bear the emotional and physical scars of her horrible ordeal for life.

In their infinite mercy, the mullahs controlling Iran have looked into their hearts and consulted their Korans and concluded that the only balm for this poor girl’s tortured life is to sentence her to death for the crime of prostitution.

We of the Ministry, our hearts hardened and our faces perpetually ensneered, like sometimes to think we have plumbed the very limits of the chthonian depths of the perversity of the human spirit. It is stories like this, fresh outrages every week, that remind us that in truth we know jack shit.

Monday, December 13, 2004

Japan Key in Thwarting Giant Fighting Robots

The society that basically invented the giant fighting robot for amusement is now leading the R&D effort to combat them for real.  Should they ever come.  Which they will.

BBC reports that Toyota is perfecting wearable robotic vehicles.  The systems move about on wheels or legs and can operate over different terrain with astonishing agility.  Well, for 7’ exoskeletons.  No word yet on how the electromagnetic weaponry is coming along.

And besides the technology’s immediate applications in defending humanity from the mechanized menace, we also get yet another example of life:

Imitating art:

Tbanks to comment-spamming douchebags…

... comments have been turned off.  But fear not!  The pasty troglodytes with big foreheads, laboring away in the dim recesses of the Ministry’s poorly funded and unheated research labs have come up with what they promise is a solution.  Over the next couple days, the Ministry will be abandoning the battered and defenseless castle that is pMachine (which replaced the leaky and utterly defenseless shelter half that was blogger) and moving to the high-tech, art deco furnished, impregnable and ne plus ultra of security that is the Expression Engine underground bunker.

Until the move is complete, and the ministers are enjoying cosmopolitans, rob roys, and manhattans (or in Minister GeekLethal’s case, Budweiser) in the air conditioned elegance of the new Ministry underground lair; comments will remain painfully absent.  To you, our loyal readers, we apologize.  But think of the joy that awaits, when you will be able to comment without fear of inducements to offshore online gambling, interweb porn, or penis enlargement.

When the migration is complete, there will be announcements, mandatory celebrations and all the pomp and ceremony that typically attend great events in Ministry history.  So, have patience, and remember that we do it all for the children.  Somebody has to to.

Friday, December 10, 2004

Dimebag

There’s a post I was going to write about the murder of “Dimebag” Darryl, but didn’t.

I had a little intro about the first time I heard Pantera, in a barracks in 1992.  I tied that experience into broader themes in my life at that time and, after a re-read, had to cop that the intro was really just a vehicle to talk about myself and therefore highly inappropriate.

I planned to touch on the music, but had to be careful not to come across as a wanna-be.  I have some Pantera records, but to me Far Beyond Driven is still their new record; I don’t know anything about Damageplan.  Still there were some half-decent turns of phrase: Dimebag could “bring the sweet but never sacrifice the sledge” with his playing; or, how his sense of harmony and melody was never drowned by his heavy riffs- anything he wrote would never be confused for something by those two cute lesbos from Nelson.  I was even going to title the piece something like “Sure, the Vibe Awards but a metal show?!” to prompt an initial cynical snicker.

But I realized a couple things, and they were enough to derail the initial post. 

I realized that there will be no shortage of half-assed tributes in the coming days: from your local rock station that likes to think it really rocks and maybe played a couple Pantera singles in 1993 and now broke out the black scrim in the studio to be in mourning over the terrific loss of this guitar player that those jocks sort of heard of once and that their 14-year-old sons explained that they should express feeling loss over; to MTV, which will likely have some sort of extended commentary about Pantera or Damageplan and we’re all supposed to forget that MTV became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hip-Hop Marketing, Inc many years ago and couldn’t pick Darryl out of a lineup where the other suspects resembled NBA players.  There was other coverage as well, from Howard Stern, the most influential man in broadcast radio who didn’t even now who the guy was and made no apologies for it; and Howie Carr, right-wing Boston blowhard who spent an hour referring to the victim as “Dirtbag” and to Pantera as “Pantload”.  Carr’s a real hoot. 

So I think I did the world a favor by sparing it one more opinion, one more explanation of his contributions, one more defense of his existence, one more half-assed tribute.

And I realized something else.  As of this writing, three other people were killed by the gunman, and the shooter himself was killed by police.  But most of us were really only interested, beyond that initial five minutes, because we lost Dimebag.  That’s a goddamned shame, because it’s not about one picker from one metal band; another overdosed junky or ugly plane crash or singer who drank himself to death.  It was no accident.  It’s also about three dead fans, all gone for nothing and forever.  Because of one goofy fucker with a gun.  And who in one final “fuck you” moment to the world didn’t surrender to police but let himself be killed, denying us the satisfaction of his becoming some thug’s wife in prison. 

I’m upset that we normals have to share the planet with the unpredicatble and dangerous goofy fuckers.  And I’m disappointed that the kid just didn’t off himself, instead of all these other people. 

And I’m sorry.

And I guess that’s all.

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

This Week In Exemplary Human Behavior

In which attention is paid to the stupid, and makes the petty feel better about themselves.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Someone’s FINALLY Thinking of the Children!

Sick and tired of guns in our streets, performing horrible crimes and threatening the children, a group of concerned volunteers has formed the Coalition to Prevent Assault Weapon Violence.

Their site includes an informative FAQ and, most importantly, a bona-fide assault weapon monitor.  With vigilance, we’ll be able to see the warning signs in advance, before these instruments of slaughter can create more mayhem.

Doubleplus bonus points if someone can explain what an “assault weapon” is.

That’s treb-buck-ket

For centuries, before gunpowder dominated the battlefield, the trebuchet was the most powerful siege weapon known to man.  Essentially, the trebuchet is a gigantic seesaw.  A 250 pound rock projectile sits on one end, and on the other, an immense counterweight.  The longer, missile end of the trebuchet is winched down; and just like when you were sitting on the seesaw and the fat kid jumped on the other end, when it is released, the counterweight flips the missile hundreds of yards to (hopefully) hit the target. 

A group of enterprising engineering geeks have endeavored to create a trebuchet simulator.  With this nifty timewaster, you can adjust the mass of the projectile and the counterweight; and change the launch angle, counterweight height, wind and even gravity.  Test your engineering and medieval geekiness against the distance, power and accuracy challenges.

I had the opportunity to play with a very small but nevertheless very real trebuchet a while back, and this is almost as fun.  Though it doesn’t throw watermelons or footballs.  Thanks to A Voyage to Arcturus for the link.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Excuse my while I whip this out…

...which is a sorry excuse for a headline for an otherwise mundane and purposeless post. Wish me luck: tomorrow Mrs. Johno and I move into a new apartment. Only in New England can you move into a building almost two centuries newer than the one you vacate and still have the new one be nearly a century old. Well, in the US that is. Not much of a feat in Ing-a-lind.

Not much posting for the next short while. Not that you care. Buckethead, GeekLethal, and the infrequent but potent Ross will (will!) take up the slack, so in sum you will all get a few days without the weakest link. Advantage: readership!

Tonight is the big Target trip to stock up on shower curtain; waste basket; first aid supplies for tomorrow; etc. While I’m there, maybe I’ll pick up one of these. I love Target, and evidently Target loves me back. Hat tip to Loyal Reader #0017 (EDog).

The gathering threat

I am put in mind of Alan Rickman looking bemusedly at a dead comrade in a Santa outfit, reading Bruce Willis’ note in that weird stentorian Generic European voice of his: “Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho.”

Why?

Because of this article: “Army To Deploy Robots That Shoot.” The headline alone should be enough to strike dread terror into the hearts of all good (read:"evil") Perfidians, but the real kick in the all-too-human nuts is the article’s blithe assertion that the robots in question, Foster Miller’s “Talon” machines, “also can be mounted with a rocket launcher.” Oh, very nice. Why not arm them with meatsaws and pain rays too, network them all, and call it Skynet just for shits and giggles?

Moreover, CNet clearly lacks a keen sense of karmic retribution, because the header chosen for the article reads “Next year, the U.S. Army will give robots machine guns, although humans will firmly be in control of them.”

The fools! Don’t they know the first rule of Robo-Semantic Eschatologoly? To wit: “Any assurances that a given robot is in the control of humans will sooner or later be tragically invalidated by the advent of a superintelligent evil robot made so by one of the following: freak lightning strike; sponaneous software upgrade; sunspots; or co-option by secret robotic overlords.”

Just like you never say “so far, so good” in some situations, and absolutely never say “naw, she won’t get pregnant” in others, all humans must live their lives by this code or suffer the consequences: never say that the humans are in charge. 

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Europe is truly a foreign land

Can you ever imagine a lard shortage happening in the good old US of A? Fie on thee, Poland and Hungary, and your hog fat hogging lard lusting ways! Fie! England wants its figgy pudding!! Britannia wants its figgy pudding!!!

(Hat tip to loyal reader EDog)

Just Desserts

Loyal reader Mapgirl submits us this tale of righteous and accidental vengeance. It’s not that SUVs are evil, per se. No-ne-no-no-no! But they can be tools of evil when their drivers barrel through red lights while talking on a cell phone.  As a pedestrian who daily takes his life in his hands, whose least favorite sound is the screeching rasp of lock-braked tires losing their grip on pavement and whose least-favorite sight is the stricken rictus on the face of the driver of the vehicle attached to the foregoing sound as they look up from reading the paper/gabbing on the phone/changing the radio/eating Chinese food, notice they are about to end the life of yrs truly, and stand on the brakes in an effort to stop two tons of SUV in twelve feet of space thereby hopefully sparing the aforementioned life, I relish this tale of accidental retribution.

(And as a writer, I summarily renounce the foregoing sentence as a hopeless run-on.)

Hey Manghthua… iss Johno! How y’duuuin…sweet*hic*eart?

As Charles Bukowski once wrote, “One tends not to think clearly when one has been drinking.” A regrettably common manifestation of this tendency is the “drunk dial.” Ever done that? Ever consumed, say, three pint glasses (pint glasses) from a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi “Paisano” wine and picked up the phone? Ever called the last person in the world you should be calling, drunk or sober? Ever regretted being born afterward? Nothing just makes the hangover experience like trying to remember who you called, what you might have said, and how much you must now suffer in consequence.

Leave it to our good friends and andipodal neighbors the Aussies to come up with a solution to this serious and potentially humiliating problem. Virgin Mobile in Australia is now letting customers black out specific numbers from their phone before going out for the night as a guard against waking up single, fired or miserable. If I could give Australia a medal, I would.  Nice one, mates!