Friday, September 29, 2006

Important Ministry Announcement

Lead Pipe CrueltyPerfidy

Throughout history, the hunt has traditionally been central to high culture.  Hunting rights were reserved to the aristocracy, and poachers were punished viciously for the least infraction.  Hunting was, among other things, a proxy for war training, a test of manhood, and a means of ridding the world of dangerous predators.  In modern times, as our feeble replacement for warrior nobility has moved on to other pursuits – literary criticism, cultivating effete mannerisms, the collection of third world handicrafts, posturing “interest” in obscure causes – the hunt has declined in importance.  Nowadays, hunting is largely the preserve of the descendents of those who were once hanged for snatching the King’s deer.  The hunt has now become hunting.  A blue collar pursuit, déclassé, and if noticed at all by the guardians of modern culture, regarded with little short of revulsion and nausea.

That this is emblematic of our decline as a civilization is clear.  It is also clear that something must be done.  In considering this matter, the ministers felt that in reviving the Hunt, we must attempt to recapture the best aspects of the Hunt of old.  It must be a test of courage, man vs. the most dangerous of beasts.  It must have an element of public service – we must, in killing, provide life and safety for the little people who are hungry and, indeed, at risk from the hunger of the wild.  The Hunt must refine those skills most useful in war, so that we, and those who participate, will be better prepared for the coming apocalypse.  Finally, it must offer up to heaven a sacrifice of blood, cruelty, torment and incense.

In pursuit of these aims, therefore, The Ministry of Minor Perfidy is now accepting reservations for the first annual Ministry Manatee Hunt and Barbecue.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/29/06 at 03:58 PM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Perfidy • Permalink

Um, Ick.

Lead Pipe Cruelty

I’m sure that people who invent new kinds of robots all have perfectly well-adjusted social lives, play some ball on the weekends, take the kids to the movies, get together with friends and cook up a big batch of corn smut chili. I’m sure that’s the case.

I’ve heard of robots that learn, robots that walk, robots that build cars, Real Dolls, robots that turn into cars, robots that act as companions to lonely people, and even teledildonics. All very exciting developments in the world of technology, except for that one of those things is incurably foul.

And I’m sure that the minds that came up with the innovation of making robots with soft, human-like skin are perfectly together people with sane minds and clean habits who have never even heard of that one incurably foul thing and thought that it needed to be a robot.

I’m just saying. I don’t know what’s creepier; a killer robot that mimics a person, or the weird shit that lonely people in their basements are thinking right now.

I think I need to go take a walk. And a shower. And a brain enema.


Posted by Johno on 09/29/06 at 11:53 AM
Lead Pipe Cruelty • Permalink

Friday Funtime Quizzery

Just So You Know

Wait...not prone to seething rants and anger...?  Well, I’m skeptical then of this quiz’ accuracy.  But since the code didn’t need to be unfucked, I’m going with it.


I am the sonnet, never quickly thrilled;
Not prone to overstated gushing praise
Nor yet to seething rants and anger, filled
With overstretched opinions to rephrase;
But on the other hand, not fond of fools,
And thus, not fond of people, on the whole;
And holding to the sound and useful rules,
Not those that seek unjustified control.
I’m balanced, measured, sensible (at least,
I think I am, and usually I’m right);
And when more ostentatious types have ceased,
I’m still around, and doing, still, alright.
In short, I’m calm and rational and stable -
Or, well, I am, as much as I am able.
What Poetry Form Are You?


Posted by GeekLethal on 09/29/06 at 10:29 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink

The Critic

Entertainment

From Thursday’s Washington Post:

THE NEW SEASON TV Preview
Look Homely, Angel
ABC’s ‘Ugly Betty’ Is Plainly Lovable

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; Page C01

“Ugly Betty” isn’t just entertainment, it’s therapy. Nirvana therapy. It’s happiness in a tube, or rather The Tube. It’s a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with no fat or calories. It’s tuning in to “The View” to discover they all have laryngitis. It’s Florida without those disgusting bugs.
...

Mmmmkay… When I walked into the house Thursday evening, Ugly Betty was what the girls were watching.  Aside from the fact that it was arguably too adult for my 11 year old to watch ("Too many icky parts!"), it was one of those painful 5 minute periods where I see a show and immediately tune it out as not worth any further attention.  A total piece of crap, even before the girls had a chance to vote.  Who gets off on watching the lead character be serially treated like crap by a bunch of hoes?

I had no idea, until they ladies stopped watching it, what the they were watching, and hadn’t even heard of this new show, Ugly Betty.  I thought, in the short time I saw it, that it was some spiced-up made-for-Disney movie, thus guaranteeing that it would be a one-time event in our house.  It just had that look to it.  Luckily, even though it was a series, not a movie, the girls were pretty merciless ("needlessly catty!”, “deep, evil plot twist at the end!”, “totally derivative of a bunch of earlier ‘Girl Meets World’ movies!").  It seems we won’t be cursed, in my house, with its ongoing episodes between now and its cancellation.

So there’s that.

But when I looked at what the WaPo section of my Google home page showed, I saw a story about a review of the series, excerpted above.  I took a look, assuming that whomever reviewed it would have roughly the same views as those on the softer side of my house.  Newp.

Gushing review.  “...therapy”, “Nirvana therapy”, “happiness in a tube”, “a pint of Ben & Jerry’s with no fat or calories”.

What the hell?  Who could possibly think such a thing?  And then I looked at the header over the review:

image

Well, never mind - that explains everything.

[Wik] Hey, for all I know, he’s otherwise a genius. (That is a “he”, isn’t it?) I’m only casting aspersions on this particular critique.

[Alsø wik] Of course I can make such a catty swipe, because I’m perfect.  Except for my yoooge head. He’s apparently got more hair than I, but he also has more chins.

[Alsø alsø wik] As la mia figlia would say “Woof!”


Posted by Patton on 09/29/06 at 01:26 AM
Entertainment • Permalink

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Filth and smut!

Entertainment

A good buddy of mine (who, it should be noted, would be amused and bemused if I were to say to him, “10-4, good buddy,” for he is not the sort of person to whom such an address is naturally directed, but still believes himself so in his more delusional moments) has hatched a biennial tradition that I’m proud to be part of.

Two years ago, for reasons unknown, the phrase “chicken cheesecake” became current among my good buddy’s crowd, mainly to refer to someone whose skirt (metaphorically speaking) was too long for them to successfully complete a manly task. A puss. A pansy. A milquetoast.

The phrase stuck around in my good buddy’s head long enough for him to decide it’d be a great idea to actually make chicken cheesecake and have a bake-off.

Blech.

I came in last in that competition, because I chose poorly. I made a nice three-layered Italian-style ricotta cheesecake, the bottom layer flavored with sundried tomatoes and herbs (basil, thyme, oregano), the middle layer being diced sauteed chicken, and the top layer flavored with a basil and spinach pesto. It was a nice red-and-green cross section that actually looked appetizing on the plate. Tasted pretty good too. Unfortunately, Italian-style ricotta cheesecake has a grainy texture very different from the smooth cream cheese New York model, and that texture in a savory application with big flavors absolutely killed me.

The winner was some poor schlub who’d made a poundcake with cream cheese and a couple pureed chicken breasts whizzed into the eggs and milk; you couldn’t taste no chicken in that! The runner up, my good buddy, made a yellow cake and festooned the top with shake and bake chicken strips. A cheesecake? Only in the broadest possible sense.

Clearly, I wuz robbed.

This year, the big event is a chili cookoff in which 40% of the score is original and creative use of ingredients. I feel pretty good about my chances; I’ve got one hell of a secret ingredient; corn smut.


Posted by Johno on 09/28/06 at 09:30 PM
Entertainment • Permalink

I’ll have a side of lobster

That Buck Rogers Stuff

Virgin Galactic unveiled a mockup of the interior of their upcoming sub-orbital craft, the SpaceShipTwo being designed as we speak by visioary aerospace genius but terrible nomenclator Burt Rutan.  This is sweet.  Eight people on a ballistic shot, several minutes of weightlessness for $200k.  Test flights are scheduled to begin in the spring of 2008, with commercial flights beginning in 2009.  What’s that, ten years for a small company to go from drawing board to successful prototype to commercial full rate production?  NASA should be hiring these people.  And, Brickmuppet should be buying me dinner soon.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/28/06 at 08:05 PM
That Buck Rogers Stuff • Permalink

Ministry of Minor Perfidy: The Movie

Entertainment

While enjoying a midnight snifter of umbilical blood and Asbach- a drink called the “Baby Hitler”, customary among Perfidians- I settled into my favorite wing-backed chair and, once satisfied my back was against the wall and there were still two exits from the room, I allowed myself to relax.

My mind was pleased with the state of things: perpetual war; incurable pestilence; rampant poverty; and irredeemable sloth and corruption are all fundamental aspects of modern Man.  Across the Multiverse, even, Light has been retreating before Dark for millennia.  Good is out across the infinite Cosmos; Evil is cool, and Chaos is the new/old/new black.  It is in those circumstances that the Ministry thrives.  And so I was, by conscious reckoning anyway, content.
But as the coal-fired hemoglobin started to pull me under, my unconscious offered a disturbing realization: soon, very soon, there will be no new frontiers to conquer, no more people or species to corrupt.  Possibly even before the Third Millennium of the Son, all will be dark.  Evil will reign, but over what? 

Startled, I jerked from my semi-dream so suddenly that the vivid images and impending dread drained from my mind like water.  It was only with a bit of reflection, and a couple more drinks, that I was able even to recall even as much as I have.  One detail, though, was burned into my conscious and needed no further prompting to retain.  A vision as clear as the sun I so loathe.

It was a marquee.

And the marquee proclaimed: “The Ministry of Minor Perfidy: The Movie”.

And it was clear then that film was the last frontier for evil to continue to spawn.  Even after the final curtain for homo sapiens- as our civilization evaporates into supernova, or dread demon Thaoekilikhan devours us all feet first- there will be entertainment lawyers, studio executives, and armies of hacks still surviving, somewhere, like roaches.  And like roaches, they will do what comes naturally to them: making entertainment so bad it perpetuates the cause of pure evil everywhere.

The Ministry needs to make a movie.  The first biopic about a blog.  There is no script yet, but that’s rarely stopped filmmakers before.  I do have some ideas about casting though:

JohnO: Toss-up between Steve Buscemi or Charlie Sheen.

Buckethead: I’m leaning toward Lawrence Fishburne.

Patton: Maybe Billy Crudup; maybe Billy Bob Thornton.  Definitely someone named “Billy”.

Ross: Jet Li.

Me: Could go Carlos Mencia; if unavailable, get Lee Van Cleef back from the dead.


Posted by GeekLethal on 09/28/06 at 08:44 AM
Entertainment • Permalink

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

What’s next?  The gubmint gonna tell me how to piss?

Crazy Foreigners

Without putting too fine a point on it, yes.


Posted by GeekLethal on 09/27/06 at 01:20 PM
Crazy Foreigners • Permalink

I am become death, the destroyer of lawns

Holy Shit!

For reasons that seemed appropriate at the time, my wife’s online shopping excursion led her into one of the darker and stranger corners of the interweb.  She returned, scarred and weary, bearing this.  Mother Earth Shopping is offering for sale, The Scythe Book, 2nd ed. At first, I am intrigued.  Scythes, you say?  Until I read the blurb:

Instead of trying to find time to workout at the local gym, this book tells how you can get a healthful workout while silently mowing your property using a scythe.

Get in shape while (silently) looking like bathouse, squirrelbait crazy.  If I tried to mow my lawn with a scythe, I’d likely be arrested before I finished the front.  I wonder, if Mother Jones started to offer books together as packages like Amazon, what they would mate up with this gem?  How to make you own very large black cloak from pocket lint?  Death and You, Mythology and Holistic Home Gardening?  For every one indisputably cool thing that Mother Earth might have, there are a thousand of these boners.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/27/06 at 12:03 PM
Holy Shit! • Permalink

Look at me, I’m sooper sekrit

It'll Be a Cold Day in HellThat Buck Rogers Stuff

This will make some in the national security apparat have a quiet, secretive coniption fit.  Void Communications has designed itself a brand new, totally secure, self erasing communications system - one that will allow any two people to have a secure conversation that leaves no trace whatsoever of its existence.

Key to Void’s Web-based VaporStream service is the fact that at no time does the body of the message and the header information appear together, thus leaving no record of the interaction on any computer or server. The message cannot be forwarded, edited, printed or saved, and, once it’s been read, it disappears; nothing is cached anywhere. No attachments allowed.

Responding to questions about the service’s utility for terrorists and other malcontents, DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley said,

“Good guys need confidentiality, too.”

While this has geek credibility, is certainly an impressive display of cleverness, and no doubt lots of powerful people with guns will be very pissed off - it’s kinda pointless, considering that maintaining any sort of anonymity or privacy in the coming age will be nigh on to impossible without extreme measures that will be indistinguishable from paranoia, or dropping off the grid entirely.  Neither course will be conducive to living a normal life, or getting dates, and therefore will be rarely followed.


Posted by Buckethead on 09/27/06 at 11:52 AM
It'll Be a Cold Day in Hell • That Buck Rogers Stuff • Permalink

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Scarier than Dick Cheney

Crazy ForeignersPartisan Politics

Another post long delayed is an update to my post on the laws of civilized warfare.  Or as Ken McLeod would have it, “Civilised Warfare.” Shortly after writing my piece, I was cruising around my internet neighborhood, and dropped in on the Maximum Leader.  He had posted a link to an editorial by one Sam Harris in the LA Times.  Mr. Harris is a liberal, and recently the author of a book that slams religion.  All of them.  (At least he is even-handed in his contempt.  Like the saying goes, you’re not a bigot if you hate everyone.) Normally I avoid reading the LA Times, so I would likely have missed this article if not for the intervention of our Dear Leader.

Now, one would expect that a liberal religion hater would also hold a typical package of left-leaning beliefs.  You would be wrong.  The whole article is worth reading, and you should be reading Naked Villainy on general principles.  But one bit bore directly on my post of last week.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

This summary is, tragically, far better written than my own.  But it again hits the point that unless we are to completely discard any sort of moral viewpoint of human action in the world, we have no choice but to view some people, groups, and actions as inherently better than others.  (The alternative is to view the world through a lens of expediency, which is what McLeod seems to suggest, despite his claims of compassion.)

Tolerance, compassion and fairness are virtues.  What liberals so often fail to realize is that they are far from the only virtues.  When we look out at the world we must make judgments, we must discriminate between the good and the bad.  If we lack the courage and confidence to look at someone and say, “That’s wrong” we have no compass for guiding our own actions in the world. 


Posted by Buckethead on 09/26/06 at 03:49 PM
Crazy Foreigners • Partisan Politics • Permalink

I’ll have the prime rib

That Buck Rogers Stuff

I meant to respond to this a while ago, but several factors have delayed my response.  (For those who are interested, they are, in order: laziness, work, children, getting ip banned from my own domain, and preparing the Epic New Jersey Post.) But late is often better than never.

So, Ken over at Brickmuppet blog now believes that he’ll be buying me dinner soon.  We made a bet some time ago that commercial manned spacecraft would be orbiting the Earth before NASA pulled its collective head out of it’s many-orificed nether regions.  He has changed his tune thanks to the announcement last week that Bigelow Aerospace will be orbiting a full-size habitat before decades’ end, and is working to ink three separate deals with Lockmart, Kistler and SpaceX to provide manrated launchers to move passengers to his new orbital hotel.  (Do you think it’ll have hourly rates?)

As Ken notes, this is big.  It does in fact solve the chicken-egg problem of having a destination to which manned, commercial launchers can fly to.  I would add that it is ironic that NASA’s nearly complete ISS notably did not solve this problem.  There is a space station in orbit as we speak, but it isn’t a destination.  Remember the hissy fit NASA threw when the Russkies were about to launch the first space tourist?  They don’t want grubby tourists stinking up their pristine space station.  No matter how much they may be forced by higher powers to encourage private space, they are at heart against the development of commercial space endeavors.

By spreading out the love on the launch contracts, Bigelow is (hopefully) preventing a commercial launch monopoly.  I really didn’t consider that to be a problem, considering the sheer numbers of .com billionaires in the game, but still good news.

One of the biggest things that will fall out of space development of this kind is that it levels the playing field to a large degree.  “God created man, but Colt made them equal.” When space is no longer the domain of the super, or near-super powers, things will change to a very large degree, and quickly. 


Posted by Buckethead on 09/26/06 at 02:00 PM
That Buck Rogers Stuff • Permalink

Monday, September 25, 2006

Kiss Her Where It Smells

Just So You Know

Aah, New Jersey.  The moment you all (and especially Bram) have been waiting for.  The Ministry has spared no expense that we wouldn’t normally spare to bring you this very special edition of alternate state mottoes.  Our tireless and unsleeping servitors have scoured the interweb and the dark and loathsome recesses of their own minds for slogans for your reading enjoyment.  New Jersey?  Why not:

  • Kiss Her Where It Smells
  • The Oil and Petrochemical State
  • You Want A Motto? I Got Your Fuckin’ Motto Right Here!
  • Come for the beaches. Stay for the gambling, crack and hookers.
  • What smell?
  • Home of Jimmy Hoffa’s grave… somewhere.
  • Hey, Quit Laughing!!
  • All those chemical waste sites and Trump’s Taj Mahal, too!
  • You have the right to remain silent, You have the right to an attorney…
  • Tell ‘em Guido sent ya
  • Renaming it New Jersey didn’t improve things much
  • Not as quaint and charming as Old Jersey
  • The Suburb of not one, but two! pestilential urban shitheaps
  • The smell that grows on you
  • Land-filled with pride
  • Aaay! How U Doin’?
  • The Cancer Capital of The World
  • We’ll Show You What Exit
  • Where nobody leaves
  • The Funtime Family State for Families!
  • Frightening Sky Country
  • Ad Astra Per Hoboken
  • The Hobo State
  • I’m tired of living and scared of dying
  • The Too-Easy-To-Mock State
  • We Are Defensive About Our Faults
  • We are a byword for corruption
  • A toxic miasmatic wasteland
  • We don’t trust you to pump gas
  • It’s Jersey: “Got a problem with that?”
  • The New New Jersey: “Now with 10% less toxic waste!”
  • We’ll look the other way
  • The Hindenburg was just the beginning ...
  • All the charm of Detroit. All the culture of Phoenix
  • Please lie down with your hands behind your head
  • Our police force looks forward to meeting you
  • Rated safer than Lebanon
  • Come smell for yourself
  • Nearly Good Enough
  • A Deathtrap, A Suicide Rap - Get Out While You’re Young
  • The Fist of the Mid-Atlantic
  • Sure, our governor may have given his unqualified gay lover a high-salaried position instead of looking out for homeland security, but ... uh, I forgot where I was going with this.
  • New Jersey - Bend over and smile


Posted by Buckethead on 09/25/06 at 07:49 PM
Just So You Know • Permalink

Head Butts don’t always hurt

Crazy Foreigners

At least not permanently.  According to the WSJ, in a story last week, “Soccer Star Zidane May Have Lost His Head, But(t) It Hasn’t Hurt Him”.

Good for him.

Rash actions in the heat of the moment, particularly during a sporting event, seem easy to forgive.  Exceptions, of course, exist - think Woody Hayes’ attack on Clemson’s Charlie Bauman in the 1978 Gator Bowl.  Quite an embarrassment, and one he never really lived down. It differs both because he wasn’t a contestant, and because it was clearly a childish hissy-fit, unlike Zinedine Zidane’s head butt of Marco Materazzi, who, let’s be serious, probably earned it.

Seeing the story, however, reminded me of an idiotic picture that circulated shortly thereafter. Just because it was idiotic doesn’t mean it wasn’t funny, however, and the WSJ story provided a cheap excuse to post it, so I will:


image

(Note: That’s an animated picture, and I got tired of watching it move on our page, so click to see it in its native, full motion, form. It’s far less funny if the animation is disabled in your browser, to the point of “not at all funny")


Posted by Patton on 09/25/06 at 10:17 AM
Crazy Foreigners • Permalink

Sunday, September 24, 2006

You can learn something new, each and every day

Just So You Know

Speaking only for myself, this comes as a total shock.

So much so that I’m not sure I know who I am any more.


Posted by Patton on 09/24/06 at 11:32 AM
Just So You Know • Permalink
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