Friday, March 04, 2005

IDDQDIDKFASPSPOPDNO_CLIP_ON

Entertainment

An oldie but goodie from Ace, a rundown of every g-d d-mn FPS video game you’ve ever played.

Now turn on God Mode and walk across that lava like a man!


Posted by Johno on 03/04/05 at 04:13 PM
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Thursday, March 03, 2005

You can’t write that ending

Perfidy Responds

Just a random thought. A couple Sundays ago I was languishing on the couch recovering from my latest bout of catarrh and watching the Great American Race, the Daytona 500. My wife, a wonderful woman whose interest in stock car racing is as intense as my interest in podiatry (that is, not at all), consented to watch the race with me. After many years away from the sport, it was surprising how much I remembered. I was able to speak relatively learnedly to my wife’s questions about pit strategy, driving, restrictor plates, cautions, etc. etc. Go me!

The ending of this year’s Daytona was the most exciting I have ever seen-- a thrilling full contact three lap sprint after caution, eventually won by the technically perfect but squeaky-clean driving of Jeff Gordon. In the course of this, I was reminded inevitably of the most tragic event ever to occur during the Daytona 500. I speak of course of Dale Earnhardt’s fatal crash in the last lap of the 2001 race.

Think about that for a second. Arguably the greatest driver in NASCAR’s modern history (not to take anything away from Cale Yarborough or Richard Petty) died on the last lap of a race that he’d won only once, that he dominated but always lost thanks to cruel twists of fate. You can’t write that ending.

My transformation into a Massachusetts Liberal wine snob continues day by day, yet this Ohio boy still gets a little choked up when he sees a “3” sticker on a pickup.


Posted by Johno on 03/03/05 at 09:20 PM
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The next big thing

Darwin Award Contender

... in interweb entertainment seems to be embarassing dance videos. Ian, AKA Loyal Reader #0064, emails this video of an Air Force Academy cadet getting his white-boy ya-yas out. If he is representative of the current crop of flyboys, I tremble for the future of the republic and beg for a Marine recruit to beat his ass ASAP please. (Large file warning)


Posted by Johno on 03/03/05 at 09:01 PM
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In All Fairness

Perfidy Responds

Buckethead has taken exception to my assertion that his prescience in supporting George W. Bush’s Middle East policy amounted to his drinking the kool-ade (or suckling the whiskey tit).

thanks also for your charitable description of my prescience in
re: to the growth of democracy in the middle east.  I wasn’t a far seeing visionary, confident in the desire of people everywhere to embrace freedom if they were only given the chance.  I just drank the koolaid.

Or suckled the whiskey tit. Don’t forget the whiskey tit.

In all fairness, Buckethead was an early and ardent supporter of Bush’s policies, and I am very pleased to see that recent events seem to bear him out. If in fact he comes out on the right side of history and I on the wrong, it wouldn’t exactly surprise me. He also deserves credit for not emailing me every time a Lebanese flagwaver farts with notes reading “I TOLD YOU SO” [which, to be honest, is his perogative]. His restraint is, in fact, admirable. Hopefully he will throw off his midwinter lethargy and begin regular posting soon, as my one-man-band routine is as strenuous for me as it is tiresome for you all.


Posted by Johno on 03/03/05 at 04:28 PM
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That’s My Name, Dammit!

Entertainment

Below the fold please find the complete list of 1,121 words and phrases banned for use on personalized jerseys at the NFL Shop. This post alone contains probably 1500 swears, which makes it worth $750,000,000,000 in FCC fines.

[wik] N.B. Although you may not currently order a custom jersey reading “MASTABATER,” “MASTRABATOR” or “MASTABATE,” jerseys reading “MASTURBATE” are not prohibited. Likewise, you may order a jersey reading “MEAT BEATER” but not “MEAT BEATTER” or “MEATBEATTER.” Me, I want one that reads “COITUS” or perhaps “ROGER.”

Now that George Plimpton is dead, am I the last living literate football fanatic (with, apparently, an untoward pension for alliteration)?

[also wik] Hat tip to Michele of A Small Victory.

[also also wik] Who the hell tried to order “SEX FARM?” And “NASTY WHORE,” “PUBIC LICE” and “EASY SLUT?” What the hell is wrong with these people?

[Wi not trei a holiday in Sweden thi year?] I will take this opportunity to point out that $750 billion is still only a tenth the current national debt of $7.7 trillion. Guess I have to try harder.


Posted by Johno on 03/03/05 at 03:57 PM
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Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Low Hanging Fruit is the Most Delicious Fruit

Partisan Politics

Sometimes the notion occurs to me that one of the founding principles of the United States - that regular folks should be represented by other regular folks - was a terrible idea. If you have faith that the general mass of humanity are smart enough to tie their shoelaces and not drink their coffee til it’s cool enough not to burn, that’s a brilliant plan. However, if your faith in humanity extends no farther than the conviction that people are in general pretty dumb, then the Founder’s great Enlightenment-driven zeal seems rather less well founded.

As the axiom goes, in a democracy, people tend to get the leader they deserve. While that might be a comforting thought to some folks, it fills me with the screaming horrors. Three vignettes from the past few days should suffice to explain.

Case the first: Sen. Tom Delay (R-Texas). Speaking about the Supreme Court’s hearings today on the display of the Ten Commandments in public spaces, he said “I hope the Supreme Court will finally read the Constitution and see there’s no such thing, or no mention, of separation of church and state in the Constitution.”

While this is in fact true in a strict actuarial sense, there is a mention of separation of church and state in the first amendment to the Constitution. While Tom DeLay gets points for effort, I strongly suspect that the Chewbacca defense won’t work on most members of the Supreme Court. Moreover, DeLay implies that the eight and one half members of the Supreme Court have not actually read the document they swore to uphold, when it’s perfectly clear that at least few of them did at least once.

Clearly, Texans are pretty dumb.

Case the second: Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Speaking about broadcast decency, Stevens said that his next trick as head of the Senate Commerce Committee would be to push for broadcast decency standards for cable and satellite entertainment.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Tuesday he would push for applying broadcast decency standards to cable television and subscription satellite TV and radio.

“Cable is a much greater violator in the indecency area,” the Alaska Republican told the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents most local television and radio affiliates. “I think we have the same power to deal with cable as over-the-air” broadcasters.

“There has to be some standard of decency,” he said. But he also cautioned that “No one wants censorship.”

Stevens told reporters afterward that he would push legislation to apply the standards to cable TV and satellite radio and television. It could become part of a pending bill to boost fines on broadcasters who violate indecency restrictions or of an effort to overhaul U.S. communications laws.

--snip--

Federal regulations bar broadcast television and radio stations from airing obscene material and restrict indecent material, such as sexually explicit discussions or profanity, to late-night hours when children are less likely to be watching or listening.

Stevens said he disagreed “violently” with assertions by the cable industry that Congress does not have the authority to impose limits on its content.

“If that’s the issue they want to take on, we’ll take it on and let the Supreme Court decide,” he said.

I’m not sure I understand. People pay for cable and satellite programming. I pay for titties and swears, and I fuck well know it. Is Stevens implying that the American people are too dumb to know what it is they are paying $50 a month for, that they are too dumb to know what they want? Well… I wouldn’t put it past them, but Ockham’s Razor applies here.

Alaskans must be pretty dumb.

Case the third: Rep. John Tierney (D-MA 6th District). Recently the US House of Representatives voted to raise the maximum fines that can be levied for showing boobies on TV or saying “shit” on the radio. That bastion of searingly intrepid investigative journalism, Rolling Stone, observes that for the same price of $500,000 per incident,

If the bill passes the Senate, Bono saying “fucking brilliant” on the air would carry the exact same penalty as illegally testing pesticides on human subjects. And for the price of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the Super Bowl, you could cause the wrongful death of an elderly patient in a nursing home and still have enough money left to create dangerous mishaps at two nuclear reactors. (Actually, you might be able to afford four “nuke malfunctions”: The biggest fine levied by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year was only $60,000.)

Why do I pick on Rep. John Tierney of the Massachusetts 6th when the vote sailed through the House 389-38?? Because I voted for him, and I goddamn well guarantee you my vote wasn’t cast so he could fritter away his days banning titties on the tube like a craven little sock puppet for the Moral Majority. Hey John! I’m a champion grudge-holder, and come 2006, I’m going to vote for titties!

Well everyone, the joke’s on me. People in Massachusetts must be pretty fucking dumb.

[wik] Gerard of the American Digest writes,

I take your point about the general attitude of DeLay, but I don’t think it is a dubious assertion to say that his reference to the Constitution *does not* take the amendments into account. As far as my own experience in discussion goes, when people say “The Constitution” they mean the entire document, amendments and all. As you are aware, the interpretation of the clause under examination in the first amendment is where the argument lies. To assert that DeLay means other than the whole document seems to me to be a weak read.

That’s exactly my point. DeLay knows-- and everybody knows-- that the 1st Amendment is an amendment to the Constitution, and therefore is part of it.  But, my politician’s mind tells me that, if pressed on this, DeLay is able to justify his howler of a comment by arguing that the Bill of Rights is the Bill of Rights TO the Constitution, an appendage, and therefore not technically part of the original whole. That interpretation is correct in a strictly technical sense, but crashingly disingenuous in the colloquial. It would be like getting on someone for lying for saying “I buttoned up my shirt” by claiming that since they started at the top button, they had actually buttoned *down*their shirt.

I feel I’m giving DeLay the benefit of the doubt here. If he is in fact arguing that the 1st Amendment does NOT contain a clause prohibiting the establishment of a state religion and state endorsement of one religion over others, then he is either A) dumber than I ever suspected or B) thinks we’re all that dumb, and therefore is himself even dumber than that. While I know he’s pretty damn dumb, I prefer to hold out hope he’s being a mealy-mouthed politician rather than either A or B.

[also wik] Patton, a Texan, writes in agreement that Texans are, in fact, dumb. To plunder Raymond Chandler, down these dumb streets walks a man who is not himself dumb.


Posted by Johno on 03/02/05 at 02:41 PM
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Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Inapt

Perfidy Attacks

The Weekly Standard harrumphing its way through the “meaning” of Hunter Thompson’s suicide is good for a few howls if you’re into that kind of thrill.

If you don’t feel like reading the whoooole thing, here it is in a nutshell:

“Your “revolution” is over, Mr. Lebowski! Condolences! The bums lost!

[wik] I really hate to harvest the low-hanging fruit, but this is a weblog, for pity’s sake, and if we can’t have the low fruit we may as well go hungry! Peep this quotation from the linked article

It has long been argued that lasting literature is an impossibility without imitation and emulation, and that although young authors often produce works ridiculously imitative of their idols, real writers grow out of such mimesis to gain recognition for their own, individual abilities. But who can imagine a youthful talent beginning with an exercise in the gonzo style? Thompson produced no others like him, for the same reason Burroughs and Ginsberg generated no schools of novel-writing or verse. One may go further and say they had nothing to teach the young, except to emit a cacophony.

If the tone of the piece weren’t so stuffily self-satisfied, I’d be tempted to ask if Stephen Schwartz is high. William S. Burroughs an irrelevant writer? Sure, except for his enduring influence on the American literary scene. Granted, Pynchon, Roth, Eggers, Wallace, Franzen etcetera have their shortcomings and their detractors, but Bill Burroughs hardly represents a dead end in letters, unless you categorically dismiss all the major writers and trends of the last forty years as a dead end.

(This is not to mention the larger cultural influences that the Beats and Thompson have had. I surmise the Weekly Standard would also dismiss the film, art, music, poetry, and enduring references that their work generated as “cacophony,” which would only prove my point. I assume moreover that this means that stream-of-consciousness writing a la Kerouac is right out, since he was a beat too, which means that blogging as a practice leaps directly from Pepys to Power Line with no stops twixt the two. And then there’s poetry. Was Ginsburg really that irrelevant if amateur poets perform their own first-person primal screams at “poetry slams” nationwide, rather than their own reworked versions of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” over snifters? QED)

Leaving all this aside, this argument suffers from terminal laziness. To argue from this: “although young authors often produce works ridiculously imitative of their idols, real writers grow out of such mimesis to gain recognition for their own, individual abilities,” this conclusion, “Thompson produced no others like him, for the same reason Burroughs and Ginsberg generated no schools of novel-writing or verse” is self-negating. If to become an author in one’s own right one must reject one’s influences, then both the following are true: Thompson et. al. were successful authors, ; and any writers descended from Thompson et. al. have also successfully moved beyond mere imitation. You can’t use the absence of successful Thompson clones as evidence of his irrelevance any more than you can’t use the absence of successful Noel Coward clones as evidence of his!

But it’s unseemly to pick on the weak. I will sit tight and wait for the Standard to take down that awful jungle clatter the children call “hip hop.” How do you even call that guttural gibberish singing?!


Posted by Johno on 03/01/05 at 05:54 PM
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Really, it’s all about the President

Crazy Foreigners

Vlad Putin has reformed the Komsomol, the “Stalin Youth” of the old USSR. Well, not exactly. This time, they’re called “Nashi” ("ours"), and their job is to beat up crowds when they forget to Love their Leader.

But I’m sure it will all be okay. Remember, George W. Bush looked into Putin’s soul, and saw a good man. A gooood man.

[wik] Josh Chafetz goes to some lengths to explain how Bush is dealing with Putin. I’m not convinced, but Chafetz makes some creative arguments I cannot dismiss out of hand. 


Posted by Johno on 03/01/05 at 05:08 PM
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A Simpsons Quotation for Every Occasion

Perfidy Responds

This no comments BS is really, well… BS.

GeekLethal’s cockleswarmer about the VA’s “no money down” home loans remind me of the ol’ Lionel Hutz classic:

Hutz: All right gentleman. I will take your case. But I will require a thousand dollar retainer.
Bart: A thousand dollars!? But your ad says “no money down”.
Hutz: Oh, they got this all screwed up. [corrects ad with felt-marker to read, “Works on contingency? No, money down!]
Bart: So you don’t work on a contingency basis?
Hutz: No, money down! Oops, I shouldn’t have the Bar Association logo here either. [Hutz eats ad]

I’m convinced that buying a house or car is a form of psychological torture, and it is a poor reflection on human nature that car salesmen and mortgage brokers exist. In a just world, they would not. Then again, what would we do with all our sadists...? You can only have so many prison guards and DMV staffers.

(Thanks to snpp.com for just bein’ them.)


Posted by Johno on 03/01/05 at 04:42 PM
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NO MONEY DOWN! (except for $10,000)

Just So You Know

As many loyal readers know...alright, as BOTH loyal readers know, there is a multitude of benefits that come from military service. 

Some benefits are genuinely and immediately useful, like the GI Bill or Army College Fund; some more abstract, like learning how to lead or, if you’re a slack-dick, at least learning how to follow properly.  Other bennies are too grim for many to consider, such as survivors’ benefits from life insurance or, under certain circumstances, burial at Arlington National Cemetery.  Yet more are just fucking cool, like never, ever getting a speeding ticket while in uniform, or having chicks dig you. 

But one in particular I’ve learned is not all it’s cracked up to be: the VA mortgage guarantee.  Assuming your credit history and income are in order and you can get a mortgage in the first place, the VA will back 100% of the purchase price.  In other words, qualifying veterans can buy qualifying homes for no money down. 

Thing is, you have to find out the hard way that this program has nothing to do with other up-front costs or fees.  Now, I was a soldier and then a student before I got my first big-boy, grown-up job.  In essence, I didn’t make a penny beyond my immediate survival needs between 1989 and 2000.  So I figger, “Super, I’m a veteran and can buy a house with enough dough to make the payments on it.  That 20% down is for suckers.  Sweet!”

Not so fast, stud:

-Expect to have at least 3% of the selling price on hand.  Unless you have cash money to put down, even 3%, few sellers will take you seriously.  And if the seller has other offers, from people who can put 10%, 20% down on the spot, you’re not competetive.  So, in this part of the world, have at least $6,000 for that.

-Plan on $600 for mandatory inspections and appraisals. 
-Plan on at least $800 for 1 year’s homeowner’s insurance prior to closing.

-Figure, conservatively, $6,000 cash available at closing for attorney’s fees and any other fees levied by the bank or other activities.

-And don’t forget establishing that escrow account for property taxes! (in my case, $2,700)

So this “100% financing”, while technically factual, doesn’t actually mean that you can buy a house without having alot of cash at hand.  Like, $10,000 to throw at mortgage officers, lawyers, and bug inspectors without even beginning to apply $$ toward the sale price. 

I can’t honestly slag the program, because without it I’d be back in a condo, and I would rather eat BOTH pairs of my size 10 (UK) 8-eyelet Docs than deal with the boneheaded foolishness of condo associations. 

But hey VA, it might be nice if you let folks know that no money down kinda doesn’t really mean no money down. 


Posted by on 03/01/05 at 03:49 PM
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Lest You Think I’ve Lost My Edge

Partisan Politics

Dubya got a richly deserved smackdown yesterday from a federal judge (whom, ironically, he had appointed to the bench), who ruled that alleged “dirrrty bomba” Jose Padilla should either be charged with an actual crime, or set free.

“The court finds that the president has no power, neither express nor implied, neither constitutional nor statutory, to hold petitioner as an enemy combatant,” Judge Floyd wrote.

The judge said he had no choice but to reject the president’s claim that he had the power to detain Mr. Padilla, who was arrested in May 2002 at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago and was later accused of having planned to detonate a radiation-spewing “dirty bomb” in the United States as part of a plot by Al Qaeda.

”To do otherwise would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country’s constitutional tradition1,” Judge Floyd wrote, ”but it would also be a betrayal of this nation’s commitment to the separation of powers that safeguards our democratic values and individual liberties.”

‘bout right.  War is not a blank check. 
Posted by Johno on 03/01/05 at 03:39 PM
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Some Sort of Correction Is In Order

War

All two of our regular readers (now dwindled to .0035 readers thanks to an extended four-way hiatus) will remember that back in the heady days of early 2003 when George Boosh was banging the war drum fast and hard (and with such a big stick!), I repeatedly voiced my opinion that I wasn’t sure Iraq had anything to do with anything. At the time, the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue (which-- let’s not rewrite history-- was repeated an awful lot of times by Those In Charge) didn’t carry a lot of water with me, though on strict technical grounds I was willing to grant Bush and Condi and Donald the whole “repeated violations of UN resolutions” thing as casus belli.

But frankly, no matter how many resolutions were broken, at the time I just didn’t see the point in libervading Iraq. Not that I thought it was a bad idea or morally “wrong"-- I simply didn’t trust Bush and his crew that Iraq was a vital part of the War on Terror thingy, and I trusted them even less not to fuck it up. Iraq seemed more a sideshow, a distraction from the important things, old business between a tinpot dictator and the son of a man he one tried to have killed.

Now, two years later, I have a little crow to eat. Iraq continues to be a near-total mess (and please don’t come back at me with the “most of the country is stable” line… I know that is technically true, if by “stable” you mean “the same mess it usedta be.” But the light switches still don’t work, and cars continue to explode.), but elections have been held that failed to fall apart as a total sham. That’s great. Better yet, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and even Egypt seem to be at the start of something good. Iraq may not have had any WMDs, and Saddam sure didn’t have anything to do with the attacks on the US, but in a grand strategic sense, I am now willing to accept that Iraq makes long-range strategic sense in the so-called war on terror.

For now I’m only going to snack, have a crow amuse-bouche, as it were. Everyone’s got a long row to hoe to get anywhere worthwhile yet, but so far the beginnings look good. If you told me two years ago that Iraq would have held uneventful elections and Palestine looked willing to come to the table, I doub’t I’d believed you. But that’s what has happened.

So, from the bottom of my heart: Mr. President, I’m sorry I doubted you and your grand plan. It actually looks like it could work. Now: you better not fuck this up. And hey, lay off the demagoguery at home. You get cocky, you get a boot in your ass.

[wik] ... and now some clarification is in order. I have this problem sometimes where, in order to make sure I say precisely what I mean to say and no more and no less, I weigh my thoughts down with about fifty pounds of hedgings, yes-buts, and preemptive objections. Unfortunately, the effect of this is generally to obscure the elegance of whatever it was I was saying in the first place.

With that in mind, here’s the shorter version of the above post: I still don’t like our President much, and his foreign policy vis a vis the Middle East sure scared the hell out of me (still does!). But, now that it looks like his actions are in fact partially responsible for the still-embryonic new fashion in democracy and not blowing shit up in the Middle East, I welcome the opportunity to be proven wrong. Let freedom reign! (whatever the eff that means, you half-articulate sham-Texan Connecticut cracker.)

[also wik] Via email, Buckethead graciously points out that “one of [my] beloved [sic] cobloggers also predicted this outcome,” namely him.  Well, yeah. B drank the Bush Admin kool-aid like it was Guyana 1978.

[also also wik] It occurs to me that comparing Buckethead’s early-and-often advocacy of our President’s policies to the behavior of Jim Jones’ followers is a bit crass. Well, this is more crass: “Well, yeah. B clamped onto the Bush party line like it was a whiskey tit fulla Booker Noe.”

[Wi not trei a holiday in Sweden thi year?] Or this: “Well, yeah. Hey, B: try not to get that stuff in your eye when you’re done. I hear it burns.”


Posted by Johno on 03/01/05 at 03:27 PM
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