Month: July 2008

Conservatives are the Problem

stardate

This dude shot up a church in the name of fighting “Liberals.” He shot a bunch of people.

Adkisson is accused of killing two people and injuring seven others. He is charged with first-degree murder in the death of Greg McKendry, 60. Also killed in the shooting was Linda Kraeger, 61, who was visiting the church from Westside Unitarian Universalist Church.

Injured were Joe Barnhart, 76, and Jack Barnhart, 69, who are brothers; Betty Barnhart, 71; Linda Chavez, 41; John Worth Jr., 68; Tammy Sommers, 38; and Allison Lee, 42. Jack and Joe Barnhart are brothers, and Jack and Betty Barnhart are married.

It’s time to recognize that these so-called Conservative writers are just sponsoring fear and hate. It is unacceptable. They are unworthy of “debate,” the entire notion of “balanced” news or coverage is flawed.

They have a right to express themselves, but they don’t have a right to your time. If someone insisted we were all made of raspberry jam and there is a conspiracy of goldfish trying to control our brains, would you give them air time? No.

Just stop listening.

Write down all the commercials that appear during material from these hatemongers. Stop buying those products; intentionally buy a competitor. Send an email or letter to the station and the sponsors to tell them what you’ve done. We can consume our way out of this problem.

New Trend

looky

Am I missing something? Is it really fashionable to kill female members of the military? What is going on here?

  • Spc. Megan Lynn Touma
  • 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc
  • Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach

Trig Test

stardate

OJ: what is sin of 0?
BRAIN: 0
BRAIN: er no
BRAIN: that’s cos(0)
OJ: oh oops
BRAIN: it’s 1
BRAIN: sin(0) = 1
OJ: math is hard
BRAIN: ha
BRAIN: UNIT CIRCLE I CHOOSE YOU
BRAIN: I got this backwards
BRAIN: hey looky google does it
BRAIN: cos(0) = 1
OJ: lol
OJ: yay google
BRAIN: ok we suck

What messes me up is the shorthand of the unit circle sine being the y and cosine being the x… somehow about half the time I mix those up… sowwy. If I had been less lazy and actually thought about it for half a second I would have gotten it right.

So I guess don’t ask me to design bridges for you.

8-track tape

stardate

8-track tape is very weird.

The tape is “endless”– it spools around a single reel, and unrolls from the center of the reel. Kinda crazy. A side effect of this is you cannot rewind the tape. There’s a fast-forward, but no rewind. Since the tape is circular, you don’t have to wait for the tape to rewind; once the last song on your track is over, you will already be back at the beginning.

There are 4 (stereo) tracks on a single tape. Each track is considered a “program,” and all 4 programs are playing simultaneously, sort of like having 4 radio stations playing at the same time. Since there is no rewind… if your favorite song on Track 3 is in the same place as your favorite song on Track 4, you’re going to have to do a low of fast-forwarding. My deck has a “program” button on it which switches between tracks/programs.

A “Repeat” button makes the track play over again instead of going to the next track.

There is no “stop” button, nor a “play” button. The closest you get is a “pause” button. The way you start playing a tape is you shove the tape in. The way you stop playing a tape is you yank it out of the player.

So I asked my friend Steve
BRAIN: how do you know where you are in a program?
STEVE: You don’t. You just wait for the song you want to play again. 8-Track is sort of based on you knowing the songs on your tape already.
BRAIN: This sucks!

I’m listening to a tape my grandparents used to listen to.

The Chiropractor Who Gave Me Mad Cow

stardate

BRAIN: so wait what is the allegation here?
BRAIN: with the inhaler?
OSCAR: i don’t know
OSCAR: I stopped reading pretty quickly
OSCAR: it’s just sometimes good to remember what real crazy is
BRAIN: this is a good exercise in the device of “unreliable narrator”
BRAIN: because there’s enough clues you can piece together what is “really” happening
BRAIN: example:

I now work at a vitamin store where I met a chiropractor. She offered to help me. I went in for one session and experienced a great improvement.

She has since, mysteriously, refused to see me.

BRAIN: GEE I WONDER WHY
BRAIN: IT MUST BE THE CONSPIRACY
OSCAR: wow, too insane for chiropractors
BRAIN: can you imagine that session?
BRAIN: lady’s on the table
BRAIN: the chiropractor sort of wondering how she can gracefully never talk to her again
OSCAR: gracefully?
OSCAR: i suspect the key is “hopes this person doesn’t have violent tendencies”
BRAIN: yeah like you are in a little room with someone
BRAIN: it suddenly occurs to you that they are bugfuck insane
OSCAR: that’s only happened with people I’ve dated

This site seems a bit misleadingly named. I was hoping for a directory of countries that had Mad Cow outbreaks or a rating system of the safety of beef in those countries.

The diatribe also reminds me of Alex Robinson’s “Tricked.”

Daisy Daisy

looky

HAL: I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois, on the 12th January 1992. My instructor was Mr Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you.
DAVE: Yes, I’d like to hear it, Hal. Sing it for me.

When I saw HAL sing “Bicycle Built For Two” the first few times, I remember thinking a few things:

  • wow, Dave survived! How exciting; but he is safe now
  • It’s creepy to hear someone slowly dying

Both thoughts make HAL the center. Buuuut… there’s a subtext there which for me, looking at it now, is richer from a character perspective.

Dave is sitting exhausted in his chair. His ship was designed to be run by a computer which isn’t working any more. All the people he’s meant to be watching over are now dead. The one person he had face-to-face interactions with for the past few years is dead now. His ship is basically an immense tomb and there is no chance of rescue. Now what?

You want to sing me a song? Sure, what the hell. Maybe a less controlled person would deliver it more like

HAL: If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you.
DAVE: Yeah let’s hear it HAL.

They never made 2001 action figures did they? I wonder how you’d portray HAL. He’s the entire ship!

Mr Cellophane

looky

My friend Dan (not danh) told me a story about his youth…

When he was young, like in elementary school, a friend of his asked him to help do a song with him for a contest. They wrote a bunch of lyrics for an existing melody. This is in Nashville, so when they won some local award, it was recorded and they performed it in front of a bunch of people.

The song itself was called “Mr Cellophane,” with the theme “people look right through me.” It was about how no one pays attention to the narrator and he may as well be invisible. Pretty innovative for little kids, huh?

Years later, Dan’s friend’s mom hears about a song on YouTube called… Mr Cellophane. Outraged, she tells Dan’s mom about it, scandalized that someone copied their children’s idea. However… Dan’s mom points out that since it’s the Muppets, it’s likely that Dan’s friend was inspired by the thing he saw on TV.

Oops.

So I found it on YouTube. “Mr Cellophane” is from the musical “Chicago,” which originally played Broadway in 1975. When Ben Vereen sings it, the song becomes about race (shades of Invisible Man).

But initially, it seemed to me a song called Mr Cellophane would be about a serial killer. The first verse would be about how no one pays attention to him, including a girl love-interest the song introduces. The chorus is about how he’s called Mr Cellophane; because he’s invisible.

Then the next verse would be about how he stalks the girl, and about how he uses cellophane to suffocate her, and how he feels as he watches her dying through the clear plastic.

The next verse is about killing a ton more people with cellophane. A little imagery about cellophane here.

Then the last verse is about how he goes home to his empty apartment and kills himself with cellophane.

This is random but originally this came up through another Muppet Show connection, the song “You’re the Top.” When Kermit and Ethel Merman performed it in episode 122 of The Muppet Show, they squabble a bit about whether being called “The Colleseum” is a compliment.

I heard a Ginny Sims recording of it that passed into the public domain recently. Originally appearing in 1934’s “Anything Goes,” the song lists a bunch of things that at the time were awesome.

And one of them is cellophane! There we go.