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Sunday, 12.13.2009
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12.13.2009 20:57 - How I Finally Got Sucked Back Into Santacon
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The 12th Nutcracker Brigade, Sugar Plum Service, and 103rd Sleighborne prepare to deploy to to San Francisco Santarchy 2009. Photo by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) edrabbit. More here.
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| Sunday, 12.06.2009
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12.06.2009 11:37 - MungBeing #29: Expectations
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| Sunday, 11.29.2009
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11.29.2009 12:37 - To Send The World Another Step Behind
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I started running because I discovered I could.
I was maybe fifteen the first time I blew out one of my knees. I don’t remember doing anything in particular that time, but I got a prescription for some anti-inflammatory horse-pills and was told to change how I walked so as to balance out the strength of the muscles in my legs.
Three years later, I was sitting down on the bus with my girlfriend, I felt something go pop in my right knee, and I screamed. She looked at me, understandably, as if I was insane, but torn cartilage hurts. This time I ended up with several months of physical therapy and a cane.
In the fall of 2004, I was kneeling down to pick up a foam ball when I felt that telltale pop again, this time in my left knee. I could neither bend nor straighten it fully, and without health insurance it took almost two months to get the treatment I needed. I was lucky to be able to get a meniscal repair surgery through Medi-Cal. I was luckier still that when they sewed up my cartilage, it took. The success rate is only about 50%. I had about another two months of PT and crutches from there, and three months more with a cane.
You can imagine why I might have become reluctant about an activity like running.
This year, especially over the summer, hiking and backpacking and the occasional use of hamster machines at the gym had gotten my legs into reasonably good shape, but I’d still yet to venture onto the treadmill, let alone the track. Then came the day when I discovered I could.
I discovered I could run on the evening of Friday, September 4th, when I locked my keys in my car a mile and a half from home. In lieu of calling a locksmith, paying about $70, and possibly damaging the car, I decided to run home to grab the spare key before anyone unsavory might notice the keys were left in the car (in plain sight) and find that rarest of grails, a blunt object.
Fortunately, if disconcertingly, I was able to break into the house through a window without much trouble or causing any damage, although it was a royal pain keeping one hand free to toss the cats back inside while I climbed through. I also remained blissfully unarrested, but then I was under the age of sixty, not particularly cranky, and white.
Before heading back out, I changed my sweat-soaked shirt and sucked down a glass of water, my delight in that my gym bag and running shoes were still in the trunk of the car, and my deep joy that the return trip would be uphill most of the way.
Then something amazing happened: I did it. I might have been slow as shit, but I ran all the way back without stopping (except for one red light). And it didn’t even hurt.
When I talked to my doctor about it, she told me that running is far more of a concern for people who have ACL tears than meniscus injuries, so long as we still have cartilage. Build up slowly, she said, and ice my knees afterward if they get sore, but don’t sweat it too much. Except, you know, for the sweat.
Since then, I’ve been spending a lot of time at the trails in the woods around Lake Chabot. It’s hilly, which makes things a bit harder, but it’s quiet, it’s shady, and every now and then I stumble on a family of deer, or a rabbit, or pack of grazing goats.
Yesterday, I ran four and a half miles at the Hayward Shoreline, a strange landscape of serene salt marshes, high tension power lines, and unspoiled views of the San Francisco Bay. Charging into a brackish headwind while my feet got heavier and heavier, all I had to do -- all I could do -- was breathe, and keep on moving.
Which is pretty much all I ever do, anyway.
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| Tuesday, 11.24.2009
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11.24.2009 11:16 - Unabashed Studentry
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According to my credit card and the Dean, I’m now officially a college student. A freshman at thirty, and even at a community college this will put me in a somewhat unusual position (if less so this year), but looking back over the course of my life I’ve never been able to regret my lack of schooling with a straight face.
When I finished high school, there was simply no way that college was a good idea for me. I was not stable enough, I was not convinced that formal education was a good idea in general, and I didn’t feel like I needed it. For what my goals were, I turned out to be right: I crafted a creative and autodidactic life for myself, and I was able to make a living, if sometimes just barely. Perhaps a lot of this came down to luck and privilege, but it did indeed come down.
As I was finding my way deeper into the tech industry, I also found my way deeper into a drinking problem and a string of health issues. These are not the sorts of auspices one wants to begin schooling under, and in all honesty I never seriously considered it until after I had quit drinking.
Settling into truly full-time work in a professional career is a major undertaking, particularly when you discover that the job itself is making you miserable.
When attempting to switch careers from IT to development midstream, I had enough make up work to preclude any time for structured classes.
Now, however, things look nice and open. Sure, I’m still job hunting hard, still studying on my own course most days, and still working on my own projects, but it’s impossible to say where I’ll be when classes start come January. Why not get some credits under my belt? I may never get a degree, and I’m far enough away from one that I’m not worrying too much about the requirements yet, but there’s plenty to be gleaned along the way that I expect I’ll enjoy.
Despite being out of work, I’m only taking evening classes to avoid interfering with job prospects, and I’ve only signed up as a part-time student (thirteen credits) for now to avoid raising eyebrows down at the unemployment office. Since this will be my first time taking more than one class in thirteen years, starting off slow doesn’t sound so bad anyhow.
Now, where did I put that Trapper-Keeper with the sparkly dolphins?
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| Friday, 11.13.2009
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11.13.2009 13:59 - Stuck on the Bridge I'm Trying to Sell You
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As of yesterday, I am officially untrustable. I celebrated with a job interview, several horrible traffic jams, and a quiet night at home watching Strange Culture and finishing the hard guitar tour in Rock Band 1. These things all seemed like good examples of why one ought not to trust me, and goddam is Molly Hatchet ever a slavering hell-beast of excessive solo wankery. My original plan had been to head down to Big Sur and hike Double Cone with no one not to trust me but myself, but the job interview of course took precedence. I'd keep my fingers crossed, but you might mistake that for a signal that I was lying.
According to Google, I'm now old enough to know better. This had best not interfere with my climbing plans at Mount Diablo tomorrow. In fact, were I to heed such a transformation, my total recreational output could quickly be reduced to sitting in one place and breathing rhythmically. You know. Like my dad.
Wikipedia tells me this is the age at which Jesus got wet. I don't particularly feel like getting wet just now, thanks. Anyway, I never trusted that guy.
Most importantly, I appear to be old enough to run out of coffee. It's a drastic condition, a bit like early onset dementia, only somewhat more treatable. The aging connection will require further research; stay tuned.
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| Friday, 10.23.2009
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10.23.2009 21:32 - There and Back and Never the Same [Yosemite 10/08/2009]
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On Monday, October 5th, I was laid off from my job. I don't want to go into all of the details of how and why, but what's important to note is that I liked my job and hadn't expected to lose it.
On Thursday, October 8th, I woke up at two in the morning, took a quick shower, drank a cup of coffee, and hit the road to Yosemite. With no traffic, it's an easy drive from my house, barely more than three hours to the Big Oak Flat gate, which was unattended at that dreadful hour.
The only downside to doing the drive this way is that I was robbed of That View. If you've ever come into Yosemite Valley from highway 120, you know the one. You descend around a certain sharp curve on a steep grade, and by then you're starting to think it's just yet another in a long series, but then your eyes are pulled up from the road as if on puppet strings, and you see it: the Holy Shit This Place is Real and I'm Head Straight Down Into It Vista. Yeah, that one.
It's no small wonder that single car accidents are a leading cause of death in the national parks.
Even with nothing more than the moon to light the sky, however, I could see shape of my destination peak as clear as day, and my grin, as they say, was shit eating.
It's a popular hike. There's a reason I've never gone up to do it on a weekend. To give you some idea, all I had to do was follow signs for "Trailhead Parking," as though it were the only trailhead in a park the size of Rhode Island.
It was still dark when I got out of the car, but I left my headlamp in my pack and let my eyes adjust. I'd just have to take it off and put it away again in a few minutes anyway. An older couple passed me out of the parking lot as I was still getting ready.
"You guys doing Half Dome?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"I guess I'll see you up there, then."
"If we're lucky," they laughed.
It's a hard hike, as popular as it is, especially if you do it in a day: over eight miles out, and just over one mile up, then you turn around and do it all in reverse. If you haven't trained for it at all, you might be better off attempting the Boston Marathon. At least there you can always catch the subway.
Those two did just fine, by the way, and passed me heading back down as I made the final approach later that day. At least I think it was them. It was still awfully dark in that parking lot.
I couldn't help but laugh a bit ruefully when a string of cars pulled in just as I set out on the trail. Sure, it was still the middle of the week, but this would be the last Thursday for at least seven months when it would be possible to summit Half Dome as a hiker. After Columbus Day, the cables come down.
Ah, the cables. Don't worry. We'll get to the cables. Well, I did, anyway.
The sky finally began to lighten as I walked along the flat valley floor to the trailhead, trekking poles slung over my shoulder so they wouldn't scrape on the pavement. I mostly use them to take some strain off my knees when descending, so they were of limited value here anyway.
I spent the first hour or so finding my pace for the day. After that, I stopped only when I needed a snack or a sip of water, when I needed to deal with my gear, when at the summit, or when the view wrestled me to immobility. I had to laugh a little at the speedy young things who kept passing me, only to let me plod on past them again while they took a rest. Aesop would've been proud. I mean, they still finished first, but hey.
The trail is steep and almost relentless, but I'd trained for it well. About three weeks before, the second day of a solo backpacking trip had taken me up over the shoulder of Tuolumne Peak, well over 10,000 feet about sea level in the northern part of the park. That had been a 13-plus mile day with a frame pack, almost 40 pounds with a full load of water. I'd never seen so many switchbacks in my life, and I'd had the good fortune to see them at noon under a cloudless sky. With the exception of the final approach on Sub-Dome and the cables, this really did feel like a walk in the park by comparison. Which, of course, it was.
Coming up on the shoulder of Half Dome, still just under the tree line, there was sparse snow on the ground, a remarkable thing at below nine thousand feet in early October.
From just off the trail ahead of the next hiker, one hundred yards away, there was a rich gray blur of startled motion across the frozen ground to a spot thirty yards uphill from me. I was still and silent, and until the next pair of nattering tourists came around the bend I had a view through the trees of a coyote in full winter coat, perhaps the most beautiful creature I've ever seen in the wild.
Emerging from the woods onto the bald granite of Sub-Dome, the bare eastern shoulder of the peak, I had my first view of the cables. I should probably apologize for the way I keep alluding to them without explaining. Would a picture help?
I thought as much.
The cables are kind of a thing. The cables are scary as fuck. People die going up the cables. People die going back down the cables. Throughout the afternoon people are doing both at the same time, and speedy young daredevils are passing them on the outside of the cables.
It's not that a whole hell of a lot of people are falling to their doom all the time there. It's not the nose of El Capitán. That, in effect, is the problem -- people seem to think it's safe, and nothing could be farther from the truth. It's bald, slick granite with nothing cut out but the post-holes, and the course you take up it is probably at an average angle of forty-five degrees. That middle section is certainly steeper.
As a burgeoning rock climber, I was not particularly nervous. I was, however, awed, and more to the point I knew enough to be scared shitless of this approach. That's why I had a harness, runners, and carabiners rated for 22 or more kilonewtons in my pack. Out of the dozens of people there that day, I saw maybe five others who had come similarly prepared. If you hike Half Dome, follow my lead. This page lays it all out pretty well, although I recommend taking two separate runners instead of just one.
Because I felt secure, I took my sweet time going up, letting people pass on their way down each take as long as they needed. I just clipped in to the right-hand cable above the next post, swung down under the cable itself, and sat down with one foot leaned on the post to give myself a nice rest and a beautiful view. It would have been a fun challenge to heave myself up all 400 feet of the final approach as quickly as possible, sure, but as one of the only people in the early afternoon crowd guaranteed not to fall I opted instead for helping everyone's climb as much as I could.
It's hard to do justice to the view from the top of Half Dome justice, either in pictures or in writing. There's all the rest of Yosemite Valley in clear relief directly below, and there's all the the strange, sculpted contours of the high Sierra peaks stretching out to every horizon, crags and domes and ridges like a collection of granite teeth and skulls, every one of them acknowledging that just maybe you'll get up there one day, too.
I walked on over to the Diving Board, lay down on my belly, let my face hang down over the edge, and took a breath so deep--
I let the crowds half their Valley-view and cell phone reception tests and trundled off northwest down the gentle slope of the plateau. I found a big enough rock that I could almost pretend I was alone behind it, and ate my lunch gazing out over Liberty Cap and beyond.
I did not merely feel blessed, lucky, or proud to be there. I felt privileged. It's more than luck that led me to live in Northern California, giving me easy access to this place, or the physical condition to make the trek through it. It's more than hard work that gave me the ability to pick up and go when I had the free time, with a vehicle that could charge up Old Priest Grade Road without overheating and a wallet that could handle an extra tank of gas for a day's frivolity. It's a lot less, however, than divine provenance that made me one of the relative few who indeed made it up there that day.
On the way back down the cables, a stranger introduced himself and asked me to stay close behind him and provide moral support. Down is a lot less tiring, sure, but either you're walking down a slick granite wall face-first, or going backwards (side-stepping is actually best, but this takes most people, myself included, a while to figure out). Climbers will tell you: up hurts, sure, but down kills. I was happy to oblige, and we both made it back to Sub-Dome without incident (although a bit of sliding toasted the soles of my hiking boots and even popped their bindings).
As I was putting my harness away in my pack, he told me why he'd been quite so nervous. This wasn't actually his first trip up Half-Dome. Six years earlier, he'd gone up with some friends. A storm moved in while they were on the summit. He said it took them two hours to get down the cables.
Storms above tree-line: bad news. Storms on Half Dome: not even worth contemplating. There's a reason you see signs like these on the way up there.
On the way back down the trail, I realized I'd made an error in judgment. When I'd reserved my campsite for the night, I'd expected that I'd be exhausted from the hike, so I'd reserved the site closest to the trailhead. This meant I had a spot waiting for me on the thickly touristed Valley floor. While the real schmucks I'd encountered on this hike had only been a small minority, they were a vocal enough one to make me rethink my desire to wade through such a teeming pool of humanity.
As my poles clacked onto the paved lower section of the trail, less than two miles from the car, the sun finished disappearing for the night. By the time I was back to the valley floor proper with just over half a mile to go, it was completely dark, with no moon in sight. Once again, I opted to leave my headlamp out of the picture. My eyes were adjusting well enough, and the poles helped make up for their deficiencies at ground level.
The way back to the trailhead lot led me right past my campground. The sounds of acoustic guitars and bickering families led me to a decision. I popped the trunk, changed into my street clothes, popped a caffeine pill hidden in the glove box, and drove on home. I walked through the door at three minutes before midnight. On the way, I spotted a gray fox and a ringtail in my high beams, as well as four deer, only one of which required the full force of my brakes. Always assume something is waiting just out of sight around the corner when driving in the mountains.
Twenty-two hours. Seventeen-plus miles of hiking, with two-plus miles of elevation change. Three hundred and seventy miles of driving. One hell of a way to turn the week around and remind myself that, yeah, I can make it up there. All I ever really need to do is hit the trail and find my pace.
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| Tuesday, 10.06.2009
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10.06.2009 12:17 - Walksies
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Hello, free time! I think I'll go take a walk up Half Dome before they pull down the cables. Anyone care to join?
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| Monday, 10.05.2009
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10.05.2009 18:03 - Screw-Job
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Just got laid off.
I will keep the details away from public fora such as this, but suffice it to say I am severely nonplussed at the moment. At least I have continued to delve into my chosen lifestyle of full-time dark comedy -- had I stayed in the "safe" path of my previous position at VMware, I would have been let go along with ~85% of my coworkers in California-based support just last week. Pro tip: Never consent to train your replacement.
Thus many of the big plans that had been coalescing around this household are now on hold, at best. With any luck they won't stay that way for long.
To that end, I am making it known straight out of the gates that I am looking for work, preferably continuing to code in Java as at this last gig, with bonus points for working with GWT or similar frameworks (ETA: Huge bonus multiplier for a chance to work on -- not just with -- anything open source again). I'm also known to dabble in Python, and perfectly happy to learn to learn pretty much any language you might toss my way (except, say, Visual Basic, but let's at least try to be reasonable here). In my life as a pre-developer, I coalesced pantloads of experience in virtualization, networking, storage, Linux, *ix, and Mac tech. Windows doesn't leave me totally clueless either, but, hey, you know.
And with that, I shall proceed to put the "incoherent, garbled, high-decibel ranting" back in "funemployment."
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| Thursday, 09.17.2009
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09.17.2009 12:34 - Open Letter to a Senator on the Baucus Plan
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Dear Senator,
As a constituent, I am writing to express my simultaneous strong support or health insurance reform and grave concerns over the Baucus plan. This legislation - penned by an aide who only just left a lucrative WellPoint position[1] - does very little to solve the problems present by the current health crisis facing America, and merely expands and locks in the profits of the existing health insurance companies, an industry which has proven itself, in fact, detrimental to the health of America.
The proposition of mandatory payroll deductions toward private insurance, with fines for those who do not comply, amount quite literally to a tax paid to private for-profit entities. There can be no ethical justification for such a system unless the profit component is removed and full taxpayer - not merely investor - oversight is in place. While it is true that this would likely expand the number of Americans who have health insurance, it would almost certainly only aggravate the fact that nearly 80% Americans who go bankrupt over medical expenses do so under the so-called care of profit-seeking private insurers[2].
What America needs is the strongest possible "public option," if only because we have already been robbed of what might be the only coherent, logical solution in the guise of a single-payer system, and the Baucus plan provides nothing of the sort. I urge you to work toward a genuine solution for making Americans healthier, not merely for making insurance companies more profitable.
Kindest Regards,
Starchy Grant
1: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/09/08/liz-fowlers-plan/
2: http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml
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| Wednesday, 09.16.2009
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09.16.2009 18:12 - Wherein I Commit the Sin of CapsLock, But Come On
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| Wednesday, 09.02.2009
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09.02.2009 20:33 - Life Within a Raincloud
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| Friday, 08.28.2009
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08.28.2009 20:17 - Notes from On High
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At the mountainside lakes, ten thousand feet up, we still have our masks. We still can't even quite figure that much out. To pull out the knife and snarl would only be Halloween.
Upper Graveyard Lake
John Muir Wilderness
8/21/09
Two vertical miles from home, above the treeline, under a new moon and after the rain clouds have blown on, there are enough stars out to see everything. Not only the big dipper, the milky way, and one's own camp site come into sharp relief, but how those One-God folks all came and could only have come from the lowlands, and just how temptingly easy -- but wrong, I tell you, wrong -- it would to reinterpret Carl Sagan's "we are made of Star Stuff" bit along semi-mystical lines. He was right, you know, and I need neither science nor mysticism -- only a mountain lake on a clear night - to prove it.
Upper Graveyard Lake
John Muir Wilderness
8/22/09
Some days, it seems, the mantra becomes simply, "Fuck the trail." Some days you live to regret it. On the other hand, here we are, and the only trail I can see was dead wrong.
Peter Pande Lake
John Muir Wilderness
8/22/09
[Some sort of "proper" write up of the five-day backpacking trip to the central Sierras to follow. With pictures even. For real this time. --ed.]
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| Thursday, 07.30.2009
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07.30.2009 22:40 - TwitBak: An Open Source Twitter Backup Client in Development by Your Truly
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A few weeks ago, some spam started showing up on my Twitter reading list from people trying a new Twitter backup service that gives you the option of either paying them a membership fee or spamming your friends. Gee, I thought, that's obnoxious, and began looking into what alternatives were out there.
As it turned out, none were too appealing. Another service required you to follow their account and get spammed yourself. Another site lets you download the resulting CSV file, so there's no service as such, but you have to trust them with your username and password. (Which, by the way, you should never ever do, no matter how cool a service is being offered, even if you change your password first then change it back right away. That's long enough for your account to be highjacked.) Some of the fancier Twitter clients construct an archive as they go, but so far as I can tell there's no stand-alone backup client, let alone one that's cross-platform, free, and open source.
So I started making the damn thing myself. So far, so fun.
I'm using Java, partly because it's an easy way to provide portability, but largely because it's what I've been working in at my day-job, so it provided the lowest impedance to getting started. I might port it to Scala down the line, but that's just because I've been looking for an excuse to learn Scala.
After my third full night of coding, I've got my user data and my 3000 or so tweets, direct messages, mentions, and favorites all pulled down into a 700k uncompressed JSON-formatted text file. The whole process usually takes under 30 seconds, and I've never bumped into the rate limit set by the Twitter API, even when I leave my regular Twitter clients running on my laptop and my phone.
Now all I need to do for version 0.1 is slap a GUI on it. And that, you see, is something I've never done for a desktop app.
So I turn to you, o geeks of LJ: what framework is a geek to use?
Poll #1437577
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2Which framework do you recommend for the TwitBak GUI?
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| Thursday, 07.23.2009
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07.23.2009 21:39 - Reposted from Facebook, Which I Trust Implicitly
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[Starchy Grant] Google: ChromeOS privacy will be "essentially the same" as current online Google apps... #OSCon
9 hours ago · via Twitter · Comment · LikeUnlike · View Feedback (1)Hide Feedback (1)
[professormass] So, in other words, not private at all.
[Starchy Grant] Not in the sense that, say, a bathroom is private, no. Unless that bathroom has a peephole. But that peephole somehow blurs your face. And you still get to flush, and keep the exclusive rights to your liquid and solid waste products, but of course those waste products are first chemically analyzed so that you can be shown ads for just the right air freshener. And if you happen to live in China, say good-bye to the fun half of the magazine rack. And the thought-provoking half. Basically anything that isn't Xinhua.
He (Chris DiBona) said more specifically that the office-type apps would probably be the model, so the curious should probably look here.
Methinks Amazon + Orwell should have taught us everything we need to know about why not to trust any one corporation as a central authority over our devices when it is at all possible to avoid.
[Starchy Grant] Or so says cell-phone owning gmail-addicted little moi. And it's an Android-based phone, at that.
[Starchy Grant] And of course Facebook, where I am writing this, is in no way the least bit evil. I for one welcome our new socially hyperconnected overlords. OK, I'm done now. Really.
P.S.: LiveJournal and Twitter have of course earned my trust a thousand times over by being thoroughly transparent, open, and accountable.
Cough. Cough.
What?
Fine. Have it your way. I'm building my own social network. On 3" x 5" index cards. Privacy policy? Yeah, it's called a rubber band.
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| Monday, 07.13.2009
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07.13.2009 13:48 - Comets? Meh. Cubicles? Oh, yeah!
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Visiting a classroom in 1980, Bolden told the committee, "I could ask, 'How many of you want to be an astronaut?', and every hand went up.... When I go to a school today and ask that question, I may see three hands, and all of them want to go into business."
--New Scientist, NASA nominee says agency has lost its lustre
Let's forget, just for now, the self-evident sadness of a generation that refuses to dream of the stars. Let's ignore too the awkward phrasing of the quotation (and especially the grindhouse imagery it might evoke). Let's instead take a moment to ask ourselves: what has become of our national consciousness that business has become a desirable end in its own right, and not merely -- at its very, rarefied best -- an admirable means?
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| Thursday, 07.02.2009
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07.02.2009 09:10 - Lodged in Translation
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Poll #1424227 Dream Soup
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 11Which line generally begins the better dream sequence?
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| Friday, 06.26.2009
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06.26.2009 11:17 - Jichael Mackson's Neverland Oil Ranch
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 "Michael Jackson's death has been the best news that the regime has had, since it has so overshadowed coverage of the brutality in the Western media."
--Persian caller to the BBC Is she right? Does it matter?
I think that we all have our own interests and obsessions, cultural and otherwise, perspective be damned, and there's no point in being made to feel guilty if we get carried away now and then. The effect of this, however, on a media ruled entirely by commercial interests can be to create a feedback loop where all reminders of a more salient sense of perspective get lost.
Of course, there's always something like this going on; do we as a culture care as much about innocent Tamil lives lost as innocent Persians? How much attention span do we tend to keep reserved for the suffering and dying Iraqis, Aghans, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Sudanese, or Congolese, to name only a few? If only the slimmest of a slim minority of us will take any action regardless, at what threshold of airtime does it begin to matter anyway?
It's worth mentioning that the caller to the BBC went on to briefly detail that the King of Pop was known and will, if more abstractly, be missed by many in Iran as well. I only hope they quickly reach a place where such obsessions can eat up as much attention as they desire without getting drowned out by the terror in the streets.
Image: Marjane chooses an Iron Maiden bootleg over "Jichael Mackson" in Persepolis.
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| Sunday, 05.31.2009
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05.31.2009 14:39 - TERRORISM: UR DOIN IT RONG
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Hey, Operation Rescue, did al-Qaeda offer its condolences to the victims and condemnation to the perpetrators of the attacks against the Great Satan on the occasion of September 11th, 2001? Did the KKK wander around ol' Alabama opining hatred of the mongrel races but, whoa, wait, hey, those lynchings last night were a horrible, terrible shame, even when they still had the robes on? What I'm getting at here, in case it hasn't penetrated the two kernels of half digested corn that pass for neurons in you walking turds, is that terrorism is simply more effective when you not only take ownership of but exalt in the part you play in it. Don't be such self-righteous, whinging, childish, petulant pussies that you successfully put the other guy's life on the line then pretend innocence. Fucking wimps. This is your moment of pride; spend it firing an AK-47 into the air, not hiding behind a cross. That way we can at least see you for what you are without having to squint.
And to anyone who might suggest that this wasn't terrorism, I might suggest that you have some very fucking basic reading to do.
Thanks to akiko for the screenshot.
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| Tuesday, 05.05.2009
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05.05.2009 09:19 - The Existentialism Babies [Pilot Treatment]
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It became something of an inevitability that young Jean-Paul would expand on the material presented at story time. On one Wednesday morning, for example, after listening carefully straight through to "fin," he raised his hand and, when called upon, he elaborated: "I don't know why we say now that the story is ended. It might take several more months -- even years -- before Bunny Foo-Foo is to die. Why, within a matter of decades, I expect every character in the tale would be dead."
"Why yes, Jean-Paul," said the teacher, "it's true that everyone dies. But we don't have to talk about that truth every time we talk about life, now do we?"
"Teacher, why are some of the other children weeping? Did they not know--? Would they have preferred to look forward," he said ironically, "to an eternity of, of this?" He waved his hand at the crowd of sniveling faces around him with a sneer.
"Somebody's awfully cranky today! Why don't you go have your snack?"
"Yes, I choose to do just that. Thank you for presenting me with the idea."
The next day, they heard the tale of Goldilocks. At the end, surprised that the bears would forego such a tasty morsel, Jean-Paul of course raised his hand.
"How would you care to enlighten us this morning, Jean-Paul?"
"I merely wish to declaim," he said, "the crushing sense of confusion the bears would continue to feel over having wasted good food without reason. Even within the constructs of any moral artifice they may have seen fit to have guide them, Goldilocks was not only an invader but a tasty one. I tell you that I have never been conflicted to find pain au chocolat sleeping in my bed!"
Simone giggled, and smiled at him. Later, he resolved, he would pull her pigtail for this infraction and possibly attempt to kiss her.
"Moreover," he said quickly before the other children could comment on their inevitable marriage and reproduction, "I feel it is very clear that Goldilocks was not in any way fulfilled by this experience, although she was literally nourished. No, the poor child, it may be many years before she has the good fortune to find a true sense of freedom, and where? On her deathbed!"
"Teacher," said little Albert, "I admire Jean-Paul's inimitable grasp of the fundamental problems of the human condition, but does he have to be so mean about it? He's making me very, very, very, sad."
"Oh, Jean-Paul," said Teacher, "go drink your juice!"
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| Thursday, 04.16.2009
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04.16.2009 10:23 - Here's to Another Day in the Bullshit Factory
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I arrived at work this morning to find a copy of this book sitting on my desk, an apparent gift from my manager:
Without even cracking the fucker, I can safely say this is far more terrifying, hideous, hilarious, and sanity-shredding than the copy of At the Mountains of Madness I was reading on the train. Next time, I'd prefer an equivalent amount of cheese, thanks. Whatever the hell it is you're trying to say, if the alternative is managese, I say say it with cheese.
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