boomer bust

there's still hope

A: absolutely nothing

Q: what caused a week-long lack of posts here?

A: a pinched wire

Q: what caused a week-long internet outage at my house?

A: Yellow Journalism!

Q: What's black and white and not red anymore?

There are those who say that a line of decency has been crossed by Newsweek and Tina Brown's portrayal of Michelle Bachmann, and there are those who say that the sky is made of tangerine gumdrops. I say to both sides today that turnabout is fair play.

he wasn't talking politics...

...but this sure applies (unfortunately):

A gift, at some level, makes you feel indebted to the givers. Some resent the debt. Then they denigrate the giver. Then they tell themselves it was never a gift at all, but something they were owed.

oh goody!

even more debt for us!

even the least of us!

:P

a series of jokes: 11

Two fish are sitting in a tank, and one turns to the other and says, "Do you know how to drive this thing?"

a series of jokes: 10

Q: What's green and looks like an iguana?
A: A blue bucket in disguise

it's alive

it's just momentarily ill:

...How far off are the puppet masters pulling the strings of the usurper in the White House and our deaf representatives from both political parities? We have come full circle…we are again but a collection of colonies wanting representation, but not getting it, needing protection from a foreign invasion, but having the invasion aided by those who should, but do not protect our borders.

Our national seat of government is under siege, our country is in dire straits, and we are without a pulse of representation, but the nation’s lifeblood is in her people, and the nation’s heart beats within our own breasts where the Constitution is indelibly written…and there is where it lives on, not in Washington.

read the rest

update: read also

"For years the guys in Washington ducked the tough choices, leaving them for the future to deal with. Now the future is here. The business-as-usual pols in Washington who created the monster say they can save us from it.... If we get out of the current financial jam, the politicians in Washington will drive straight for the next jam as fast as ever they can."

and this...

a series of jokes: 09

Q: What's red and looks like a bucket?
A: A blue bucket in disguise

a series of jokes: 08

Q: What's blue and looks like a bucket?
A: A blue bucket

quote of the weak

to which i say:

The worst six words you can hear at a party are, “Do you watch my talk show?” Talk shows, really, used to be called tantrums, played out by spoiled and fussy narcissists - their faces usually colored in the most lurid hues of red to violet. But now too many people are throwing tantrums, except now they call them talk shows and they’re telling us all how important it is to watch them. It’s like punching you in the eye and then forcing you to say "thanks for showing me all those pretty stars".

Talk shows are the most disgusting, narcissistic, time-wasting developments of the last hundred years (and I’m including the vuvuzela). Everybody ignored your tantrums in 1776, so you never did have the joy of some stranger handing you a cookie.

a series of jokes: 07

Q: What do a grape and a chicken have in common?
A: They're both purple, except for the chicken.

a series of jokes: 06

Two drugged-out hippies are walking along a train track.

One turns to the other and says, "Wow, these steps are really steep, maaan!"

The other hippie replies, "It ain't the steps that bother me, maaan, it's these low handrails!"

The first one interrupts him to say "Watch out maaan, the elevator's coming!"

a series of jokes: 05

Q: What's orange and sounds like a parrot?
A: A carrot

truth in advertising

"you don't bird me, i don't bird you"

a series of jokes: 04

Q: What do you call a fish with no eyes?
A: Fsh.

a series of jokes: 03

Q. What do Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and Jimmy the Greek have in common?
A. Same middle name.

on terror coverage

in the wake of the reports of the motives of the norwegian scum, news coverage of terror attacks clearly now has three mutually-exclusive options:

1. begin reporting on any or all motives of murderous scum, including leftism and islamofascism,
2. refuse to report on any or all motives of murderous scum, including rightism and perversions of christianity, or
3. remain blatantly hypocritical in their anti-american pro-islamist pandering

i expect they'll keep doing #3 as usual

a series of jokes: 02

Q: Why is the sky blue?
A: Because if it were green we wouldn't know where to stop mowing.

a series of jokes: 01

Q: Why did the chicken cross the Moebius strip?
A: To get to the same side.

a night of detours

i usually just drive home from work via surface streets, but occasionally take i35w (or 820) northbound. tonight i decided to take 35w, not knowing that its onramp from i30 was closed for construction. so i took the commerce street exit, and found a whole lot more construction & dead-ends downtown.

this may or may not have been my route...

sitting in the middle of sylvania (about where that dot is just north of yucca ave) and staring into my headlights was a black cat, to which i did not yell "you're too late buddy!" :D

turning gold into lead

"Reading the Declaration of Independence 235 years after it was written, it’s kidney-punchingly obvious that the United States government has become precisely the sort of bloodsucking tyrant against which the Founding Fathers revolted."

short form and long form

night shopping

if i had to register a domain name for the person behind me at the checkout tonight, it would be www.ChloeSevignyInScoobyDooPajamas.com

:)

i love it when people don't know how pretty they are...

Fairness in Broadcasting

Earlier, there was much ado about the Fairness in Broadcasting Act. I don't see what was so bad about it. It might have actually resulted in some movies where:

• intelligent people live in rural areas, and city dwellers are poor inbred layabouts
• vampires were actually evil, not just misunderstood
• Michael Moore points out the better side of capitalism
• members of the clergy remain faithful and avoid doing evil
• animals do not make wisecracks
• the profits of Big Media were exposed by some plucky young oilfield workers
• characters are not defined by their ethnicity
• neighbors are not wacky
  
• the woman does not fall for the "bad boy"
• fruit carts and glass deliveries are safe from car chases
• the noble American military saves the world from corrupt environmentalists

It would also require the formation of several new cable channels - one to show movies where the husband recovers from the abusive two-timing wife, one to show obedient children and sensible parents, and more than one to show high-budget computer-animated documentaries about Young-Earth Creationism (preferably voiced by Morgan Freeman).

bad pun alert

in the interest of helping dustbury's commentors keep from gagging, i'll make my horrible pun here:

dustbury posted about odd and undescriptive color names - such as the mud-putty-hued "weekend in the country". one commentor said "dead salmon probably is not a popular item", to which i refrained from responding

...

...

...

"dead salmon is a very popular color in a bear market"

lbj

okay, maybe obama isn't the worst president in u.s.history (yet) - lbj created a trifecta of quagmires:

Escalation of the Vietnam War

More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense. It contributed to the wave of inflation that shook the country in the 1970s.

The Medicare/Medicaid complex

These entitlement programs are the biggest single financial problem we face. They dwarf all the Bush-Obama wars; they make TARP look like small change. They not only cost money we don’t have — and are scheduled to cost inexorably more until they literally ruin the nation — they have distorted our entire health system into the world’s most bloated and expensive monstrosity. Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government.

The War on Poverty

Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched.

inquiring minds want to know

no, not "how many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop" - these are questions for the brocko bomber:

How come you haven't made unemployment illegal?

Instead of making cars get 62 mpg, why not 62 million mpg? Also, do something about the gravitational constant.

Are you smart enough to create a problem so big that even you could not solve it?

Is this question racist?

Why do you need permission to be clear, and not need permission to bomb Libya?

When your economic advisors hold policy meetings, do they stuff a towel at the bottom of the door?

and many many more

happy 235th

"We shouldn’t limit our reading or understanding of this document for anniversaries such as today."

update: this should apply internationally...

not just "kind of a..."

...and in related news, mark halperin also apologized to viagra users everywhere, for comparing their... small problem... to the worst president in u.s. history.

...also, our previous president is still waiting for about 3,930,000 apologies.

one flipped beatle

john lennon, republican?!?

i'm back

physically, at least...

great society?

no, grated society.

on the road again

going on another cross-texas trip for the next nine days. so at least that's an excuse for posting sporadically...

a little bit before i leave: parker brothers choppers are building a tron light cycle irl

did i do thaaaaat?

i commented here, and two posts later lileks wrote this sentence:

"it’s not important to know what they mean, but it give a sense of period without saying “everyone wore hats like it was hat day in Hatville. I needed a drink.”

Come to think of it, I like that line."

coincidence?!?

...

...

probably...

and this is sadly funny

read em and weep

now that's sad

one of the few people who looks far better than their online avatar/banner illustration is having trouble finding and/or sorting eggs...

now that's funny

...and by funny, i mean pathetic

Iran's Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Ali Asghar Soltanieh has criticized the regulatory authority over its handling of Japan's nuclear crisis.

“The poor and slow response by the [IAEA] secretariat, and particularly the director general, with regards to the Fukushima nuclear crisis is really disappointing,” he was quoted as saying by IRNA on Wednesday.

...and in related news, an anonymous hatless spokesman stated that “The poor and slow response by the international community with regards to the Iranian nuclear crisis is really disappointing.”

Sharkey's Enforcers

is "to protect and serve" becoming just another ugly face of obama's "transparency in government"?

coronal mass ejection

of course the giant nuclear furnace we are orbiting has nothing to do with global warming

Sharkey's Gang

vdh notices a pattern:

"...Whether Strauss-Kahn or Weiner or Gore (or "U2 not W2" Bono or Geithner or Marie Obamanette or Fannie Frank or Schwarzenegger or Edwards or..., ad nauseam, ed.), the common denominator is arrogance and a sense of exemption from the rules and protocols...

...Collectively, they represent a self-appointed... global elite that oversees, (sanctimoniously) lectures about... the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state..."

previously, isaiah noticed a similar pattern...

Plessy & Ferguson

instapundit linked to this - i'll link to this:

The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution. It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds.

If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race.

the number "2"

the letter "u"

meaningless book recommendations

from personal experience, i'd recommend that you don't read books about quantum physics right after reading ecclesiastes...

finally, i get it

No, not a promotion. Today I realized that for many years, I have been misunderstanding one particular word.

When reading the sentence "Promotions are performance-based" in our company's policy statement, I assumed that the word "performance" referred to job performance, as in the proficiency in performing the duties and tasks of the position. But the recent promotion of an under-performing suck-up made me realize that in this context, the word "performance" must obviously refer to an acting performance, such as a charade, a patent-medicine sales pitch, or a dog-and-pony show.

it's a conspiracy

IMAO in Pajamas:

"Saying that man didn’t land on the moon, that Bush caused 9/11, or that Obama knows what he’s doing aren’t simply other opinions — they’re false and destructive ideas, and the people who cling to them border on mental illness."

read it all

the persistence of mysticism

via the Jungle Hut:

"If myth is a view of reality invented exclusively by the human mind, then by definition, atheism is a myth."

price gouging?

investigations probably aren't necessary, but if they happen, oil companies shouldn't be first...

forever lame

(i made this free to share. copy it as much as you like, just please don't claim it's your own work)

"april showers bring may flowers"

...but around here, may showers bring tornadic hook echoes on radar. One of those hooks passed directly over my house in north Fort Worth a little before 8pm this evening.

There was no tornado or hail at my house, just some weird start-stop-start rain and winds, and a great opportunity to video several layers of clouds going in every direction simultaneously.

Others were not so lucky; some nearby, some farther away.

"after a while he began to go mad"

lileks:

It’s said that the problems of humanity can be traced by the inability of man to sit alone in a room with his own thoughts; in my case it’s always been my inability to sit in an office for any protracted period of time, particularly if there’s a poster on the wall of a kitten depending from a branch: Hang In There ‘Til Friday. No! I will not! I reject your calendrical bromides intended to give the worker drones a cheap palliative and make them concentrate their life towards the moment when the obligation to produce ceases.

!!

unfortunate

at the restaurant yesterday, my cookie should have read "if incense is the only thing you smell here, suspect a cover-up."

let them eat arugula!

it's funny because it's true

Mike Rowe calls 'em

getting America back to work

(and maybe some of his words will not go ignored inside the beltway...)

transparency in government

...equals opacity as usual

offensive to moose limbs

(very very nsfw)

so i pulled down my post about the death of osama bin laden, thinking it might have been to offensive. iowahawk more than made up for that with these three posts.

unreasonable search and seizure

updates via makezine blog:

sony's database was hacked, again.

tomtom sells gps data to cops.

---

michigan police can scan your phone without your consent.

iphones & ipads track you automatically.

two more reasons i will never own any of those products.

"king of the world!"

not in the dicaprio sense, but in the cagney sense...

compare and contrast

something i have in common with lileks sr.:

"he’d rather drive. Really: he’s never happier. A wheel, an engine, a road..."

something i do not have in common with lileks sr.

"There’s not a moment in his day he thinks “I could be on a computer, doing things.” Because he’s out, doing things."

dreamland 2

last night i dreamed i had to go back in time to rescue some artifacts from the early history of electronic music, including an analog sequencer and a laserdisc of wendy carlos' soundtrack to tron.

when i got to work today, bill and ted's excellent adventure was on tv, and an amazon order had been delivered to my desk, which included a dvd of both tron movies.

coincidence?
.
.
.
.
yes.

not stuck in an closet with vanna white*

I try not to dream-blog much, and I wouldn't have blogged last night's dream except for the way it... ended... you'll see...

---

At the beginning of last night's dream, my sister called me to explain that she and her husband had needed to fly to England suddenly for some emergency. She was in too much of a hurry to explain; she just wanted me to take her minivan to go pick up my nieces and drive to meet them there.

So I drove my car over to their house, but their van wasn't there. It also wasn't at any of the other usual places like their office, church, or anywhere else I could think of. After looking around town a little more, I stopped at a convenience store to use a pay phone. Just as I got out, their minivan pulled up beside the building and honked. My nieces and another girl were in the back, and Zooey Deschanel* was driving.

She had already picked up my nieces from school, so I got in the front passenger's side. As she drove, she told me that my sister had called and explained the situation: an anonymous call had been made to my sister pleading with her to mediate a crisis at a Unitarian church in Hirtshireville (not a real town as far as i know), England.

We drove for a long long time - through Bryan TX, Houston TX, Memphis TN, and Washington DC. The kids got very restless on the way, and we had to stop often.

(Of course, all of you know as I do that it would be impossible to get from north Texas to central England only by driving. My subconscious placed the town in an imaginary England vaguely in the vicinity of Newfoundland.)

When we arrived in the cathedral parking lot, my sister was just leaving, so my nieces went with her while Zooey and I walked in to meet with the assistant bishop. In a small office in the back, he explained to us that the previous bishop had retired, and one particular bishop wanted to take over the cathedral without any discussion, but the assistant wanted to confront him and force him to call for an election. Somehow, Zooey knew of a legal loophole to fix everybody's problems, but couldn't explain it to us (for our own safety) - we just had to hide out in the back while she fixed the problem. She walked out and the assistant locked the door and blocked it with a chair.


Then I woke up...


and went back to sleep...


and dreamed the entire trip again...


except...


...at various moments during the second trip, we discussed ways for us to improve the course of events for everyone involved. We remembered to pick up more games for the kids, we avoided a traffic jam in Memphis, we helped the assistant maintain his anonymity better, etc...

?!?!?!?!

---

* Weird Al is partially to blame for the title of this post. Dustbury's Zooeypaloozas are partially to blame for the dream ;)

p.s. the whole thing was g-rated

hijacked email

update: i just set up another email for comments from here. so i'm un-top-posting this.

---

somebody has been sending out spam using the email address i use for comments here, and hotmail has now blocked the account (frustrating but understandable).

1) i apologize if you get a spam with my address.

2) i won't be reopening that address, so if you sent anything since march i probably didn't receive it. please use comments here until i set up another address for hatless in hattiesburg.

3) this is not near as frustrating as a previous hijacking...

stating the obvious...

...in a world not inclined to hear such things:

Pastor Jones (notorious koran burner) lives in the United States, not Afghanistan; that we enjoy the protection of the First Amendment... it is not Pastor Jones’ fault that Muslims are so frickin’ deranged as to go all apesquat over the burning of a copy of the Koran and that their doing so pretty much proves his point.

update: see also

abu ghraib redux

the sequel is worse

changing meds

the black dog
got lost in the fog
and slept like a log

---

will try to resume regular posting when things stabilize...

chiropractic care

i have now personally seen chiropractors who believe in their profession at five levels. the numbers i assigned are according to hierarchy of belief, but are arranged for effect, not in chronological or numerical order.

4) the skeletal system should be aligned so that the body can move properly

3) nerves pinched by a misaligned spine can cause pain (plus #4)

2) nerves pinched by a misaligned spine will prevent the body from healing itself properly (plus #3 & #4)

1) the *only* cause of *all* physical disease is nerves pinched between misaligned vertebrae (plus #2, #3, & #4)

5) skeletal system pain is a source of steady income (assisted by insurance, workers comp, and pamphlets about the other four)

can you fix a cfl?

this site suggests (in slightly-broken english) it is sometimes possible to fix a compact fluorescent lightbulb (via makezine)

Libyan No-Fly / Police Action / War / Airshow / ...?

so is this a bad time to bring up the phrases:

"warmongering cowboy"
"no blood for oil"
"dissent is patriotic"

?

at least when bush mobilized the armed forces, he had a goal in mind...

common ground

it's not often i agree with a leftist-socialist-labor site, but this is one: stop rfid.

and this post brings up problems surrounding "who owns science".

things to remember

two quotes from many via the jakarta globe:

"The timing is not right for political decisions and the spreading of panic," Slovenia's President Danilo Turk told reporters while on a visit to the Czech capital Prague.

"Please don't forget that there are people who are working to protect everyone's lives in exchange for their own lives," said one post on Japanese social networking site Mixi.

Japan Earthquake

Here's the "one-page" of information from USGS, more information on tabs, and a preliminary cross-section.

Here's graphics of the tsunami waves fom NOAA, and one high resolution map of the wave heights.

just raised that way

Viewpoint:

"Most people... agree that the behavior and views of Mr. Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church are contemptible and not deserving of the respect of decent people. Many commentators and cartoonists have reviled and mocked them in print, not just for their awful behavior at funerals, but for the beliefs they hold about homosexuality and American decadence.

But here's an interesting thing. The Westboro baptists are on the fringe of American Christianity, but they're roundly condemned for holding views that are actually in the mainstream of American Islam.

Whether it's their conviction that God hates homosexuals, or that God rejoices in the deaths of American soldiers, or that America is a fundamentally decadent society which deserves to be destroyed, there are a lot of devout Muslims in this country who would fervently assent to all of these."

just born that way*

There's a popular claim that homosexuals should not be ridiculed because they were "just made that way" and had no choice of their sexual preference. So why aren't homophobes accorded the same courtesy, since they were also "just made that way" and had no choice of their sexual aversions?

(*according to the world. some of us were taught better.)

the fall of civilization

maybe:

"The Unanswered Question remains "Why did this cultural collapse happen?" We know that it did, we know that the leaders of Western countries completely lacked foresight, insight, patriotism and concern for their national identities. We know they were willing to open wide the borders of their countries to allow in the hordes. We know all of this, and much more. But we don't know WHY. If the West hates itself, where did this self-hatred come from, what is its source? Was it the shattering events of '68 that brought about an irreversible rupture with the past? Yes it was, but we still don't know why the leaders and the people let it happen. We went to bed one night with our traditions still strong, our values seemingly imperishable. And we woke up in a totally transformed world, the world upside down as some call it."

or maybe not...

another video

...and the winner of the "best use of stock photos in support of environmentalism" category is...

fred vs paul

love vs hate

3/4 time in a bottle

at a chinese buffet today which i do not frequently... um... frequent, the background music was in a style i call "mantovani strings". that may be an incorrect name, but i associate those lush orchestrations of the soundtracks of the fifties through seventies with dad's easy-listening am-fm stations and eight-track tapes back when i was young. of the few oldies i recognized were "tammy's in love", "sound of music", something like "those magnificent men in their flying machines" and some french-sounding filler music that could have been from the 1956 "around the world in eighty days".

there were a few new additions though. in that same easy style were "the rose", "for your eyes only", some nondescript sitcom theme from the seventies, and chicago's "glory of love". but then there was the beatle's "hey jude" and berlin's "take my breath away" - both of which lost a lot in translation.

those reminded me of an ongoing expectation of mine: to someday hear ozzy ozbourne's "no more tears" in a commercial for johnson's baby shampoo, soundgarden's "i awake" for some motel chain's commercial, and nin's "down in it" in a department store elevator.

The Thin Chalk Line

One of the polite quotes from this article is:

"Instead of chanting slogans in Madison, maybe it's time for Wisconsin teachers to take refresher lessons from their non-union counterparts in the Lone Star State."

A less-polite question is: "Why do union teachers in Wisconsin hate black students?"

March 2nd

Happy 175th Birthday Republic of Texas!

i also declared independence exactly ten years ago, and that had mixed results too...

the downward spiral

in which i ask two questions that are answered at zomblog:

1) when will we realize that the militant left has no sense of decency?

2) where's all the people who shout "separation of church and state"?

driving me crazy

this is funnier than this

remind me...

why are we supposed to care more about lindsay lohan's and charlies sheen's... misadventures... than about the problems of some guy that lives downtown in an abandoned entryway behind a bus stop?

libya problem

after you read this nyt article, i'll ask one question:

BENGHAZI, Libya — Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces struck back on three fronts on Monday, using fighter jets, special forces units and regular army troops in an escalation of hostilities that brought Libya closer to civil war...

An international campaign to force Colonel Qaddafi from power gathered pace on Monday as the Obama administration announced it had seized $30 billion in Libyan assets and the European Union adopted an arms embargo and other sanctions. As the Pentagon began repositioning Navy warships to support a possible humanitarian or military intervention, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton bluntly told the Libyan leader to surrender power “now, without further violence or delay.”

i'd like to see all tyrants disappear, the violent ones like (q/kh/g)addafi quicker than others. but which law allows obama to seize his assets, and does that seizure constitute a declaration of war?

it's a free country

or not

those who are ruled can now communicate

the title is one comment from this article about worldwide upheaval:

"The fateful quarter-century leading up to the World War I was a time when the world of Privilege still existed in Olympian luxury and the world of Protest was heaving in its pain, its power, and its hate. The age was the climax of a century of the most accelerated rate of change in history, a cataclysmic shaping of destiny.

Sound familiar?"

it'll never happen 2

i wish there were some laws that would make our nations roads safer, or some kind of governmental authority to enforce safe driving - and i'm not talking about those few agents patrolling empty roads to collect a velocity tax.

"the fate of individual freedom in a neo-collectivist age"

Roger Kimball:

"At least since LBJ and his preposterously misnamed “Great Society” programs, the United States has been lurching down the collectivist path. The government has intruded itself in one aspect of life after the next, always with ruinous results."

crisis! crisis! git'cher red-hot crisis here!

"won't someone PLEASE think of the children getting lag-spiked on w.o.w??!!??!

if you can't say something nice,

say something funny

so basically

after my vacation around the sturgis area and having watched many american chopper reruns, i'm starting to think that biker culture - except for actual gang members - has mostly devolved into one perpetual "easy rider" cosplay.

a better valentines day thought

it's about time to revamp my previous practical valentines post:

Here's a great idea for Valentine's Day:

Give your "significant other" potatoes.

Let's take some time to rethink the common Valentine's Day gifts. First, there's roses. Their only purpose is to be pretty, and they only last about a week or two. Giving roses is like saying "My love for you is fleeting, and based solely on your appearance". Roses reinforce that message of fickleness by 1) twisting in the wind, and 2) wilting if not pampered. Roses also have thorns, and you probably do not want your significant other associating you with "pain" any more than he/she already does.

Next, there's chocolates. They may be well-received at first, but the risks of weight gain and health problems outweigh the benefits. Also, since 97% of the population is on some diet or another, the consumption of chocolate may lead to guilt issues about food. Those guilt issues could fester in other ways, and your "sweetie" may become addicted to guilty pleasures - anything from shoplifting to secret office affairs to drug smuggling - none of which contribute to a happy home.

Lingerie? No way! That's as insulting as saying "I don't like how your body looks - please cover it up." (Trivia: The word "lingerie" is the ancient French word for "paint job".)

Now think about potatoes. They last much longer than flowers, and are more nutritious and wholesome than chocolates. Potatoes are durable and do not melt in the sun. Even when left unattended, they will often actually sprout and grow. That part alone makes it a good symbol, but there's more! Potatoes are far more useful than almost any other gift (except appliances, which everyone knows should never be mentioned before Presidents' Day).

There are many ways to enjoy potatoes! You can:

• let them grow in a cup of water in your windowsill
• use them to copy simple graphics
• peel them, mash them, julienne them
• boil them, bake them, fry them
• make chips from them
• play games with them (okay, just two games, "mr potato head" and "toss")
• make a battery with them

Giving your loved one potatoes is like saying "I have many ways in which I show my love for you". You just can't do any of those things with flowers or candy (except for tossing them). Potatoes are roots, which reminds your significant other of the deep-rooted-ness of your love. And although potatoes may not be as visually attractive as flowers, they are still wonderful. The gift of potatoes says "It doesn't matter at all what you look like, I'll still love you".

If and If Not

One line of this just popped into my head, so I expanded on the idea to rewrite the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling from a pessimist/realist viewpoint:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
You should start looking for a better job.

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
Congratulations! You'd be a great politician.

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
Try running on the Republican ticket.

If you can dream, and not make dreams your master;
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim;
Stick with the thinking.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
Ask your doctor for some anti-anhedonia medication.

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
You'll have no problem watching CNN.

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
Stop, learn from your mistakes, and move on.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
Please seek help for gambling addiction.

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Try out for the next season of "Survivor".

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
You must be living under a rock.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Instead of "Survivor", try out for the track team.

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you're a fictitious character,
And do not have to suffer fools like I do!

a valentines day thought

"We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the bridge and Second Hall. Frár and Lóni and Náli fell there bravely while the rest retr . . . Mazarbul. We still . . . but hope u . . . Óin’s party went five days ago but today only four returned. The pool is up to the wall at West-gate. The Watcher in the Water took Óin - we cannot get out. The end comes soon. We hear drums, drums in the deep . . . They are coming"

prayer, no; knives, yes

where is "zero-tolerance" when you need it?

theocracy?

i never would have guessed...

baby it's cold outside

coast to coast

it'll never happen

but it's an interesting idea:

"(Let the US buy Mexico) and en masse, move Israel to the Yucatan peninsula. It lacks the Biblical back-story, but it gets one of the USA’s stoutest allies out of the middle of the Musselman basket of snakes, lets those hunyaps rip each other’s guts out."

p.s. i'd never heard the word "hunyap" before, but i can guess what it means. the closest sounding word i knew was "honyock", which means an otherwise intelligent person who does something uncharacteristically stupid.

i just don't know what to write

neither did Dennis Upper.

egypt interests

update: Lileks on the abysmal coverage of the riots in Egypt:

"Here’s the problem:

I can’t stop watching the live feed on Al-Jazeera. I’ve watched dawn break on Liberation Square in the last half hour, watched Molotov cocktails arc across the screen, the thin bands of “pro-Mubarak protestors” – goons, in other words, security forces in street garb – heaving stones at the protestors...

Nothing on DirecTV covers the story. Nothing. CNN at this moment has Piers Morgan – who? WHO? – interview Baba Fargin’ Wawa about something or other, which is like cutting into the news of the Iranian revolution to grill Hedda Hopper about her favorite interviews.

Oh, update: CNN is now showing a video of events in Cairo at 4:45 AM, because they’re replaying the Piers Morgan show. I don’t know what Barbara Walters is saying about it, and I couldn’t care less.

Okay, I turned the volume up. She was talking about the protests but now she’s back to discussing her early career... I have a dish on the roof talking to a satellite in space, and I can’t pull down one channel covering this. I wonder how many other people are stabbing the remote, thinking hey, I’d like to see the story covered. It’s got to be somewhere between these 47 juicer informercials and preconception-reinforcing talk-shows.

...National and international news has to be updated hourly, or it’s still fishwrap. Without the added functionality of, you know, actual fishwrap."

---

update & bump: here's more insight

this is one of the few articles i could find that was more concerned with the big picture of what's currently happening in egypt than that country's internet cutoff.

office space

You mean there's someone else out there who has to deal with unfair complaints from co-workers? Inconceivable!

Lileks handled a banal assignment with intelligence and humor, and...

"...received a substantial dressing-down for not following orders and carrying out my assignments, and held my tongue throughout. There are moments in life when you sit there and take it, because there’s only one response possible and it would just spoil everything, forever, permanently. The sort of response that burns working relationships down to the ground and salts the earth.

I actually replayed that event in my head today, and tried to remember what I wanted to say. I was glad I did not say it. But let’s just say that was the last time I got assigned to a banal, straight-news story that involved going out and talking to someone.

Ever unloaded on someone at work? Come to think of it, I never have. The few times someone’s taken me to task I’ve either taken it because I deserved it, or because I’m not an Escalator. My instincts are to de-escalate, perhaps because I fear what would happen if plain truths were spoken with bounteous gusto. Or maybe because I’m chicken. Or maybe because I don’t care. A man can live with two out of those three."

My instincts are also to de-escalate, for similar reasons. But, his "moments in life" are my "at least twice a week"...