Emptybottle.org: July 2002 Archives
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I noticed that Christopher Smith, a person I don't think I've ever met but with whom I share at least one name, has added me to his blogroll, under the grouping 'Visionaries', along with such digeratti as Messrs Locke, Weinberger, Searls and Winer, amongst a few others of Great Stature and Flattering, Indirect Illumination.
Now this I like.
*pauses*
*strains to say something heavy with profundity and vision, farts loudly from the effort, looks around to see if anyone noticed*
I've been wandering all over the Metafilter today, pissing on anyone who got into range. I don't know what gets into me sometimes.
Via robot wisdom, this prophetic bit of japery from January 2001. One of those 'tears of laughter or just tears?' kinda things.
Is BurningBird back? Sorta, kinda, and this makes me happy all out of proportion to what I might have expected. There's been a disconcerting Shelley-shaped hole in the neighbourhood of late. She asks "Just how real is all of this?" and I haven't really got an answer for that. The first thing that pops into my mind (the first thing being what I usually go with, as you're probably aware if you've been reading my crap for any length of time) : "f--k art, let's dance!"
(I don't know if Shelley is still working on ThreadNeedle, but if she is, here are some very cool blogthread visualization ideas that someone geekier and smarter than myself might like to investigate.
I've been thinking about and researching this a bit today after following David's pointer to Jon.
Have a look at PeopleGarden and WebFan. I find WebFan in particular very intuitive.
The projects at the MIT Social Media Group site are also interesting.
And Warren Sack's Conversation Map Interface for Very Large Scale Conversations is working again on the sample Usenet data, since the last time I checked. Amazing work. )
This is fascinating, and makes me wonder what would have happened if we'd gone forward with the tail-end-of-the-bubble dotcom dream myself and some of my Australian friends and co-conspirators had gotten to talking dollars with the venture capitalists about.
This paragraph especially rings a bell for me :
and i guess that's one of the main issues here.. along with believing that pyra was a different kind of company, i also never truly believed that the hierarchy of the company existed for any reason other than for show. of course, we needed people to be in charge, and those responsibilities were well handled while i was there, for the most part anyway. but doesn't a true leader consider the votes of the troops to be equal to that of his or her own vote?
Jack Saturn doesn't really ask for his job back, in a seemingly bitter but apparently satirical letter to Ev referencing old problems at Pyra and the whole BloggerDrama.
Metafilter duly notes it, and some highly obnoxious turds take Jack to task, simply because they can, I guess.
Ev comments briefly, and replies at length on the thread.
Jack replies to that, at length.
There's probably some side stuff that I haven't noticed. Other players in the drama (which I do not claim to understand, entirely, but find fascinating) have remained silent thus far. Link me up if you know about it. I just love gossip : one of my many weaknesses. Sue me.
(By the way, I will finish the Mexico story soon. Not as amusing as the first part, perhaps, but possibly instructional.)
Don't forget, kids! Sniffing markers destroys your brain!
A few times during your life, you may have run up against situations that tell you what kind of person you really are, what your response to disaster might be, what your mettle is. Some people have these experiences and it breaks them. For others, it's just an anecdote.
Greg and I had just gotten back from Isla Mujeres, off the Yucatan coast near Cancun. The sun was going down, and we were well lit up. We'd been on the island all afternoon, fixing up the light and sound systems, and as per the usual arrangement when we moonlighted, we'd been paid in food and booze. Given the quantity of beer we generally drank just to maintain our equilibrium and air of pleasant mañanaland befuddlement, it might have been cheaper for them to pay us cash, but this way it was off the books, and everyone was happy. We were looking forward to an evening at Dady Rock, on the strip, where we were customarily given open bar courtesy in return for helping out with sound mix and lighting there as well.
Greg and his Mexican girlfriend Bianca had a tumultuous relationship, to say the least. She was the very embodiment of the cliche of the fiery latina, and living with them as I did, I caught her wrath almost as often as Greg. She could be terrifying, and almost totally irrational when she lost her temper.
Bianca met us at the dock, and we wandered over to the main road into the Old City, intending, I think, to go find Greg's dealer. I wandered over into the bushes to have a pee while Greg and Bianca waited at the roadside to flag down a taxi. Life was astonishingly good at that moment - drunk, living in Paradise, I rolled my head back as I peed to look up at the wisps of clouds that were painted a rich red by the sunset, and breathed deeply of the clean ocean air to clear my head.
Then I heard the yelling.
"Ah, sh-t," thought I to myself, "they're at it again." I immediatedly started reworking my plans for the evening to be a solo flight. But as I wandered over (slowly, unkeen to put myself between the two combatants - I'd learned how ill-advised this could be before), I saw Greg on his back in some low bushes, and Bianca astride him, pummelling him, or at least attempting to. I stopped on the sidewalk about 10 metres up from them, and waited. No way I was getting involved once she started getting violent. I'd taken a heavy silver belt-buckle in the head last time I'd tried that.
A few seconds later, a police car pulled up, and the policia switched on their rollers. The cops got out, pulled Bianca off of Greg, and cuffed her. This wasn't good. As I walked up to the police car, they were putting the screeching and struggling Bianca in the back seat cage, and Greg was telling them in Spanish that he was her husband and he needed to come along. He looked at me as he got in to the backseat and shrugged. In Spanish, I asked the shotgun cop where they were taking my friends, and their answer was incomprehensible. I asked if I could come with them, as I had very little money on me and no idea where they were going.
This was my first mistake.
They took us to the police station on the main street of Old Cancun. Bianca was beside herself, still cuffed, doing everything but foaming at the mouth. Greg had entered into negotiations for the requisite bribes, trying to negotiate his way down. Everything seemed under control, so I asked what seemed to be the guy in charge, behind the desk, if I could go and get a pack of cigarettes. He replied in the positive, and I wandered off, confident that all was well. I bought a pack of Montana lights, and a can of Dos Equis, and wandered back to the cop shop, getting impatient to get back to the Strip. This was my second mistake.
As I walked in the door, it became clear that something significant had happened. Two cops were restraining Greg, three restraining Bianca, who if anything had cranked it up a notch into complete non compos mentis wildness, and one cop was sitting on the bench, looking green.
"What the f--k?" I asked Greg.
"She kicked one of the cops in the nuts!" said he.
"Oh, sh-t."
"Yep."
I offered some of the cops cigarettes, which they took. Then, after a couple minutes, the boss said something to the others, and they took the whole pack. And my wallet and passport, and my belt, and they led me back to a holding area. I was now, somehow, one of the detainees. f--k.
Bianca was still screaming, kicking, trying to bite anyone who came within range. Cuffed as she was, it took what appeared to be a great effort on the part of the two cops still restraining her to keep her in place. Greg had been put back in the holding area with me, and was now pleading for our release for any price, rather than just trying to negotiate the bribe down.
I was starting to sober up. And the cops had taken my smokes.
Some time later, Bianca was brought back from wherever she had been taken, and she looked bad. Blank eyes, slack mouth, bleach-blond mane hanging in front of her face. I don't know what they had done to her, but Greg bristled, and I started to get a little scared. I'd heard stories about the cops here, and how they dealt with gringos who weren't tourists. Greg had a temper of his own, and two black belts, and I could see things getting out of control very quickly.
The cops led us out to a patrol car, with a bigger, sturdier cage in the back, and refused to answer our questions about where we were being taken. The three of us were pushed roughly into the backseat, Bianca in the middle, and the doors slammed.
It was dark by now, but it was clear that we were being taken west, out of the city. In the couple of years I'd lived in Mexico, I had heard enough first-hand stories to know that it wasn't just in the movies that the cops in Mexico take people out into the back of beyond and beat them, or worse. And Bianca having kicked one of the senior cops square in the nuts did not bode well for our future. I started to get really scared, and when Bianca came out of her fugue state and started screaming curses and kicking at the cage between us and the two cops in the front seat, I started to, well, dissociate. Greg kept asking them in Spanish where they were taking us, forcing a calm tone on top of the growing panic in his voice.
No answer from the front seat, and we were leaving the last of the lights of Old Cancun behind. Greg murmured to me "When they open the doors, you go left, I'll go right. Run."
I didn't acknowledge what he'd said. Bianca did, and fell silent. The sheer terror and helplessness washed over me, and I was frozen. I wasn't sure that if the cops did stop and open the doors in the middle of nowhere, that I'd be able to move, let alone run. Like I said, sheer terror.
A few minutes later, there were lights beside the highway again, and we pulled into the parking lot of the federal prison. It looked like we weren't going to be dealt with extra-judicially after all. The overwhelming joy and relief I felt at the realization that I was going to be put in jail is a very vivid memory.
That happiness dissipated rather quickly. Mexican jails aren't very pleasant. But I wasn't there long, and that's a tale for another day, perhaps.
This blog is written by a bot named HAL, a bot that has been infused exclusively with the collected lexical wisdom of the SA Goons. I like it, and I think it may well be the first-ever weblog written by a non-human.
But I think Shelley might have something when she talks about this weblogging thing getting a little over-ripe.
I made this for an SA Thread, but then realized that it didn't have The Funny, and that it was also pretty technically deficient, mostly 'cause I'm about 5 beers into the evening.
So I'll show it to you folks instead! Woo! I'm havin' fun here!
Edit : After several more beers, I have posted it to the SA thread in question, which is already richly populated by dozens of remixes far superior. I am bracing myself for mockery most cutting.
The trailer for Weblog : The Movie has been archived here for your future viewing pleasure. Thank you for your kind patronage.
"It is highly likely that the US launch attacks which start the war with Iraq within the next 75 days, and probably between August 15 and October 5.
It is not necessary to be a military strategist to figure this out. It wonât be based on a preparatory build up of US and allied troops, nor initiated because of any particular actions by the Iraqis which require a military response. There may a fabricated âstoryâ the Bush administration uses to try to âsellâ the war. But itâs pretty obvious what the real reason is.
The time range described above is optimal for influencing the November US Congressional elections. With Bushâs popularity plummeting as millions of Americans discover that their life savings and retirement funds have shriveled to a fraction of what they were, the Bush administration has but one trump card left to try to turn the tide-- start the war with Iraq."
[more...]
This strikes me as what text-entry will be like when we get those headgear-and-gauntlet cyberspace rigs that movies keep telling us we're gonna have any time now.
Very freaking cool. And you can download it!
[via sylloge]
Edit : It took my like a minute to 'type' 'Holy Bugsh-t', but man I had fun doing it, and I can see how practice would bring your speed way up. Once again - freaking cool.
In case you came in somehow other than the front door, Weblog : The Movie. A wonderchicken joint. I don't know what that means, but it sounds good.
I thought I'd seen it all, here in my reeking little trash-heap slum of a neighbourhood.
I was, as people who employ such phrases usually are, wrong. Walking back from the subway station this afternoon along the main street, I saw a young mother squatting with her girl-child (who was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, and thus past the age where using her as a meat animal is a viable option† any more) in the middle of the sidewalk.
The little girl's panties were around her ankles, and she was pissing. Like a little pink-clad racehorse.
Now, Koreans tend to be less prissy and self-conscious about the functions of elimination than us western folk (which is perhaps odd in light of all the other faux-christian pruderies they've saddled themselves with), and their earthiness is always refreshing to me, but it's a little beyond the f--king pale to encourage your children to drop their drawers and let fly all over the goddamned sidewalk, isn't it? Well, isn't it?
† No, I'm not suggesting they cook and eat infants here -- once in a while I just like to see if you're paying attention out there...
Ahhh-hahahahha!
*breathes, wipes a tear*
Ooooh-hoooo. That was good.
By the way, I invented the weblog.
How do you like them apples?
The double whammy of my loose talk of attention-whoring below and my avowal over at Oliver's that I am not nor have I ever been a hit-slut has got me to thinking, as I am wont to do after too much coffee.
For someone who swears not to care whether he's the Hit King Of Bumfuzz Nebraska or not, I do check my referrers and webstats a fair bit, and am always tickled to see one of those spikes that indicates I've mortally annoyed yet another group of harmless citizens. Again. Other than comments, which I seek most assiduously, because I believe in this two-way sh-t with a passion (unless of course you want to criticize me, in which case go stick your head in a pig), it's about the only way I can tell how the heck I'm doing at this non-zero-sum game.
But I wish someone would explain to me how this hits and visits and pageviews sh-t works. I still keep those two little icons ticking over at the bottom of the page because I've had 'em since I started on Blogger way back when, and I'm nothing if not a slave to continuity. We also got a webstats package set up on the server a few months ago, and that never ceases to confuse the hell out of me.
For example, here's my numbers (gimme the numbers, Harry!) for Friday of this week, a pretty much average day for this month.
Sitemeter says : 260 visits/460 pageviews
Nedstat says : 340 pageviews
Webstats says : 10669 hits/484 visits/1135 pages
What the hell do these numbers actually mean? Why are they so wildly different? Am I a f--king superstar yet? Will I become rich and famous, to go along with fabulously handsome and extraordinarily well-hung? Will I start making $6K a month, like whatsisface?
Not bloody likely.
The only stats thing I ever pay attention to is the neat little monthly graph from the Sitemeter gizmo, anyway. But I am genuinely curious as to how on earth these different numbers can be reconciled, what they actually mean, and if they reflect in any way at all the actual number of people who visit this site and shake their heads in bemusement at my latest textual antics.
I sure as heck don't know. Vanity is the cheese in the submarine sandwich of social intercourse. But if you understand this stuff, I'd sure love a quick tutorial...
Somebody get this man some first-round venture funding!
Oh yeah, they don't do that much anymore, do they? Nonetheless, this idea r0x0rs (that'd be hackeranian for 'amuses and impresses me greatly, in no small part because of its counterculture philosophical underpinnings, my good man'. (Why start speaking 133t now, you ask? Because I have recently shaved off most of my beard, and now have a lone skateboarder-esque tuft on my chin. It's shot through with grey, of course, but that's just makes it r0x0r all the more, says I!))
[via the dogdoorofdeath, whose animated gif of the spread of code red also r0x0rs my b0x0rs]
I got my comp copy of 'We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture' in the mail today, and have had a quick look through it. It's the first actual book I've ever held in my hands that talks about web sh-t, other than HTML textbooks and such.
It terrifies me, the physical presence of the damn thing. And seeing my comments at Metafilter in a serif font, in black on a white background? Disorienting to say the least.
The last thing in the book is a reprint of this conversation, initiated by dogmatic (who memorably described the thread as a 'stumbling, chortling abortion of a discussion'), in which I played a fairly pivotal part, in tried-and-true wonderchicken style : seriously addressing the question posed, while simultaneously setting up a straight man to aid the inevitable descent into silliness and self-referential tomfoolery.
My take on the conversation is a little more philosophical, perhaps. As I mentioned in dogmatic's comments : 'it really did encapsulate in a single thread so many things that MeFi is, or was at that point : self-absorbed MetaTalking, self-referentiality, high-seriousness, utter silliness, a sense of community, an appearance from the admin (Matt), some cross-cultural banter courtesy of Miguel... and more. Taken as an artifact of sorts, removed from its context, I think it's a fascinating little document.'
rodii, who has since departed from the MetaPlayground, perhaps forever, ably played my straight man. He was also one of the people who did not give permission for their comments in that thread to be used in the book. These people have now annoyed the piss out of me (well, a little), as the publishers decided to include the thread anyway, with the parts of the conversation contributed by those who opted not to play along simply excised.
The result of this is that I come off looking a bit goofy, I think, and even though that's nothing new, I prefer when I look dumb to do it deliberately. But I'm enough of an attention-whore (and that's in large part what this blogging thing often is, if we are to be honest -- attention-whoring) not to care too much, pleased as I am to see my Meta-Antics captured in print.
The tenor and taste of the words change so completely, for me at least, when they are between hard covers, though.
I've enjoyed what I've read of the book so far - I plan to dip into it in small measures. It is, however, spurring some thoughts of rebuilding and refocussing this wee site here into something different. What, I'm not quite sure. Certainly another monument to my towering ego (or salve for my deep feelings of inadequacy - Fork! Spoon!), of course (see also : whoring, attention-). That goes without saying.
It strikes me as amusing (and predictable, if you know me at all) that the first book I've read praising and proselytizing the weblog has led almost immediately to thoughts of getting the hell out of weblogging.
Because my well-nigh limitless ego and excess of free time compels me to be the first to think up stupid sh-t, that's why. And because I love you all so darn much.
In my wanderings today, I noticed some things that were said recently and that I found interesting, and may well be worth your time, from Jeff :
This delineation of introspection as constitutive of feeling and more significantly, that the feelings which come from memory are the most powerful ones of all, has colored Western societyâ feeling is taken as a private rather than public, reflective rather than reactive, individual rather than collectively consitituted response. This is deeply at odds with human appetites. Humanity is far more social than that. Coleridge, no matter how much he agreed with Wordsworth in theory, subverted it in practice. He was loquacious, providing a great deal of his introspection in public. Thinking of the contradictions of publicly generated privacy gave me a headache, and I really needed to soak my head.
[more...]
and from Steve :
Blogging, then, is like my mental scratch pad made visible: it's much more stream-of-conscious, though still composed and relatively controlled. I think about what I'm going to post for a few minutes or a few hours, then pretty much just write it as I type. Along the way, ideas I hadn't expected pop up and make themselves known, screaming for attention, and often they turn into other ideas, other posts, or even other projects. I actually, ideally, become more productive in my offline writing because of bloggingâin effect, the impermanent work, the scratch pad, feeds what is intended as 'finished', lasting work.
Just thought I'd point, and nod.
Matt has added Trackback functionality to Metafilter. I just tested it out with my previous post, pinging this thread (see the bottom of the thread). When Ben and Mena released the latest version of Moveable Type, with this new trackback functionality built in, there was a great deal of interest and enthusiasm, but that seems to have waned a bit recently, as these things do. I don't think enough people have been using it, that I've been able to see at least. (Edit : I note that Phil Ringnalda has been getting relatively massive numbers of trackbacks, though, so clearly some people are using it! (Edit of the Edit : Clearly it's time to cut back on the drugs. I was sure I saw (TrackBack(18)) and (TrackBack(30)) there a minute ago!)) It hasn't quite reached the critical mass needed to sustain the idea and start it metastasizing, but this may just push it over the top, and not coincidentally make Metafilter even more of a Central Bar and Grill for various weblog ad-hoc networks and communities.
I'm hoping Matt's decision to incorporate Trackbacks into Metafilter threads as an experiment provides that push over the top that the technology needs, because the interconnectedness enabled by tools like trackback, backlinks, and recent referrers fascinates me. Should be interesting - as Matt says here : "Trackback's the first attempt to string a wire through all the random blogs out there." I'm curious to see what happens.
Item The First : the tribulations of being a porn-vid store clerk. "Apparently in the old days it was different - no security cameras and longer dead spells. My manager used to clerk then, and she said that having to clean come out of the corners and off the walls was pretty routine."
[Edit : MeFi discussion here.]
Item The Next : Would it be a bad thing for me to secretly hope that this guy actually is Christ Returned?
Some Other Items : Itâs like they arenât even trying to pretend anymore.
"Bush's job approval rating stands at 72 percent, virtually unchanged from a month ago. An equally large proportion of people still view the president as honest and trustworthy..."
"And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest dayâs work in his life. "
And now for something completely different : Listen to the 'bottle (or any other web page). No, seriously. I was hoping I'd sound a bit more like, you know, Motorhead or something, but this is pretty cool anyway.
This is from a US government website. This is not a parody. Time to get the hell out of there, folks. Things are beginning to get weird scary.
[via boingboing]
The university where I teach hands out student evaluations at the end of each semester. They are anonymous, and we don't get to see them. In fact, the administration (who collectively have their head so far up their fundament that they can tell if they're getting cavities or not) doesn't even deign to tell us the results, normally.
I, however, have my sources.
For the last two semesters in a row (that is, since I began this job), according to the student evals, I have been the number one professor at my university (hooray for me!). Both semesters I had eight of the ten top-rated classes in the entire school (double hooray for me, with a f--king cherry on top!).
This is why I was so annoyed and disheartened when the new contract I was presented with this summer didn't offer me a raise of any kind. In fact, thanks to some of the clever accounting at which Koreans can be so ept, I think I might end up grossing less this year than last. I genuinely love teaching, but damn it, I expect to be rewarded when I so completely exceed what is required and expected of me.
This annoyance percolated into rage today as I watched them erect a 30-foot, chrome-and-neon crucifix on top of the goddamn auditorium. They can spend what must be upwards of twenty grand on Xtian decorations, but they can't throw me a bone.
f--kers.
[Edit : I forgot to say 'Angry? Damn right I am!']
via Metafilter, some marvellously ironic TIPS-related info :
Some food for thought about civilians as informers, about a large number of informers... From the book "Republic of Fear, The Politics of Modern Iraq" by Kanan Makiya (originally published under the name Samir al-Khalil, a pseudonym):
"Nothing fragments group solidarity and self-confidence like the gnawing suspicion of having an informer in your midst. Therefore, to the extent that the public polices itself - a function of the number of informers - it inevitably disintegrates as an entity in its own right, separated from those who rule over it. Informer networks invade privacy and choke off all willingness to act in public or reflect upon politics, replacing these urges with a now deeply instilled caution. In so doing they destroy the reality of the public domain, relegating what little remains to a dark and shadowy existence. In such a world the more well-known violence of state institutions - executions, "disappearances", murders, reprisals, torture - take on a new societal meaning. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing can be taken for granted. (Page 63 - edition 1989.)"
"The Ba'thist [the party in power in Iraq - IB] postulate that society depends for its very existence on having an unbreachable basic moral norm entails as a necessary consequence that all deviance is immediately and directly an act of treason. The new Arab order must be a seamless moral web. This is the fundamental source of the party's coherence, and its license to violence. (Page 206.)"
"Once political identity is accepted as belief in an absolute moral imperative, and once morality itself is seen as a striving for perfection towards an unrealizable ideal, then no aspect of conduct is in principle outside the purview of the political organization of the state. Moreover, there is no way to avoid the implication that such all-embracing interference is justified. Justice as the problem of arbitrating between claims on society (rights) never arises, and is not expected to rise. (Page 208.)"
I watch a lot of video on my PC living here in KoreaLand, in large part because I have a grand total of two television channels in English : the (US) Armed Forces Korea Network (see my previous post for a hint of why I don't tend to spend a lot time watching that) and BBC World, which is groovy, but the same news at 30 minute intervals can get a little tired after a while.
I could spend more time watching the Korean-language channel whose programming consists almost entirely of televised Starcraft matches (no, I'm not kidding - dear god I wish I were), but there's a fairly good chance that if I did that, I would end up snorting drain cleaner. Last time I did that, I regretted it.
I'm always on the search for new and better-than-WiMP video players. WinAmp 3 has looked promising, but it's got way too few options for tweaking playback at this stage, anyway.
I found this today, and it is hands-down the best video player I've ever found, particularly if, like me, you've got a 4 year old PC that chokes when it tries to load up WiMP. An incredible array of both video and audio tweaking options, and it's lightweight too. Highly recommended. And it's written by a Korean guy, which is kinda cool.
John Pilger argues that 'war on terror' is a smokescreen created by the ultimate terrorist ... America itself.
...Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the United States as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law, is unmentionable.
'In the war against terrorism,' said Bush from his bunker following 11 September, 'we're going to hunt down these evil-doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes.'
Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth.
...
General Jose Guillermo Garcia has lived comfortably in Florida since the 1990s. He was head of El Salvador's military during the 1980s when death squads with ties to the army murdered thousands of people. General Prosper Avril, the Haitian dictator, liked to display the bloodied victims of his torture on television. When he was overthrown, he was flown to Florida by the US Government. Thiounn Prasith, Pol Pot's henchman and apologist at the United Nations, lives in New York. General Mansour Moharari, who ran the Shah of Iran's notorious prisons, is wanted in Iran, but untroubled in the United States.
Al-Qaeda's training camps in Afghanistan were kindergartens compared with the world's leading university of terrorism at Fort Benning in Georgia. Known until recently as the School of the Americas, it trained tyrants and some 60,000 Latin American special forces, paramilitaries and intelligence agents in the black arts of terrorism.
In 1993, the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war; two-thirds of them had been trained at Fort Benning. In Chile, the school's graduates ran Pinochet's secret police and three principal concentration camps. In 1996, the US government was forced to release copies of the school's training manuals, which recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.
[more...]
[via wood_s_lot]
Hey, my American friends, why not take the sage advice of my friend here...
...and tell the bastards to go f--k themselves!
[Edit : Thanks to the random google-surfing psychos who crapped here, but I've closed the thread and deleted the bile, pathetically amusing as it was. Sue me.]
I don't normally do stuff like this, but I reckon it would be a Good Thing™ to stop by BurningBird's place and give her a little of that downhome weblog-lovin'. If we really are a community (and the recent outpouring of goodwill for Marek and Rageboy in their various hours of need would indicate to me that we are), then when someone is feeling like sh-t, I think it's the right thing to do to go tell 'em some dirty jokes or something.
Scoot!
It boggles my mind the things the American people are allowing Shrubya and his cohort of ratbastards to do to their once-great nation. It's sad, and somehow seems inevitable. Decades ago, when I gleefully predicted the implosion of America as a result of the rot at its very core, I never actually thought my predictions would come true!
Steve invites you to strap on the armband, don the brown shirt, and join in the Happy Fun Fascism Parade. Can I dob myself in for my UnAmerican activities? Will they have McDonalds at the labour camps?
[Background here, and here (thanks, Bb) if you're lost. The Sydney Morning Herald notes, mildly : "Historically, informant systems have been the tools of non-democratic states." Now that's comedy gold.]
Edit : Eeksy-Peeksy spoke recently, in his elegant way, about something tangentially related in Poland, which I was going to mention. Now seems like a good opportunity.
There's an article up on kuro5hin at the moment entitled 'To Work in Korea, Part I', and it's actually pretty good, other than the stunningly bad advice that one go through a recruiter.
The author promises another on Korean culture soon, to which I look forward. Worth having a look if any of you, my faithful and devastatingly good-looking readers, despite my Korea-related screeds and rants here, are at all interested in coming over to the Land of The Morning Traffic to pick off some of the low-hanging dollars.
See - I'm not necessarily a bad person or incompetent! This is an enormous relief to me.
A big buncha UBlog wannabes, these folks. Who the hell's ever heard of Oxford?
With the help of the mighty Burning Bird, the old 'bottle is porting over to a MySQL database backend. Some oddness may occur. Please stand by.
Edit : I am aware that the recent conversations sidebar thingo is busted at the moment.
There are almost certainly more refugees from Metafilter than there are people who actively participate, these days. The registered user count is up over 14000 at the moment, but if I recall correctly, Matt recently said that the server logs indicate there are only (only) a couple or three thousand registered users that hit the site on a regular basis. All indications, based on the numbers, at least, are that Metafilter continues to be a robust and roaring success. Matt has recently purchased some new hardware, and there are days and threads when I would defy you to find anything smarter or more amusing anywhere on the iNtARwEb.
But everywhere I turn, there is a constant keening lament about how bad the site has gotten, as compared to its long-past Glory Days. It is typical of these things, I suppose, but amuses me anyway that some disgruntloids insist that the golden age ended only recently (with a raft of calm, reasonable, and highly respected old guard users quietly calling it quits) while others point to the beginning of this year (when there were some high-profile, I'm-taking-my-ball-and-going-home departures). Still others glare and hurl imprecations (though mercifully stop short of screeching and flinging their poo) at the huge upsurge in registered users following September 11th last year, and yet other others pinpoint the date that everything went to sh-t as November 16, 2000, a day of infamy that was marked by the first appearance of a certain wonderchicken on the #006699 scene.
Michael Sippey, for instance, lamented in Swiftian style
It is a melancholy object to those who click through to the great site of MetaFilter, when they see the front page, the comment pages and the MetaTalk sections crowded with chatter, with noise, and with meaningless posts that should have never seen the light of the submit button. Readers, instead of being able to rely on MetaFilter as a trusted source of daily diversion, are forced to employ all their time in scrolling to beg sustenance for their starving minds: which, as they evolve over time, either whither into dust, or abandon their dear MetaFilter for sites unknown.
almost a year ago!
A while back, I spent some time (way too much time, compulsively hitting the refresh button, wirehead monkey at the joyjuice hotbutton) hanging around with some folks who splintered off a long time ago from the grandpappy of Metafilter cult threads, 1142 (folks I miss, but in order to actually accomplish anything with my time must continue to hug from a distance - *waves*), and amongst all the other things that were talked about, they spent a lot of their time bemoaning how bad Metafilter had gotten. These were, are, some of the smartest, most creative people I've ever spent time with, virtually or otherwise. The few months that I spent a lot of time there were almost a year ago.
Since then, some of them have stopped appearing at all on Metafilter, although the occasional Special Guest Appearance leads me to believe that they are still watching, still disapproving, still shaking their heads in dismay at the decline of the Mothership.
Another gang of Meta-refugees with whom I hang out, the wacky kids at 9622.net, another MeFi splinter site that was birthed from a cult thread (9622 this time, duh), although much more concerned with having fun and being silly, also note occasionally, between flinging poo and screeching, that Bad Things are happening these days.
Recently, jpoulos (one of the admins of 9622.net) has been talking about his disenchantment in more direct terms in the comments attached to this post : Why Metafilter Sucks Ass. I find myself agreeing with him, with some reservations.
jpoulos doesn't participate at Metafilter anymore, and is missed.
Many many words have been spoken and typed about the Metafilter and how it has changed over the past year or two. Hell, I'm adding to the wordcount now, and I can't seem to stop myself. Nick Sweeney said a few months ago :
Matt's always been very trusting towards his membership, and in general, receives the respect that's deserved by such trust. I can't help thinking that it doesn't accommodate 13,000-odd members: partly because the times don't lend themselves to seminar-style discussion; partly because you're dealing with the friction between oldbies and newbies, and their different conceptions of what the place is, was, and should be. 'Member memory' is a vital aspect of community sites, even ones which profess to deal with the transient meme-feed, and I think it's much stronger at MeFi than Plastic: so that when you have members who take perhaps two years' worth of discussion into the day's discussion up against new arrivals, it's bound to create the same kind of frustrations as a USENET September.
Nick doesn't participate at Metafilter anymore, and is missed.
For my part, I've written defenses both impassioned and tongue-in-cheek of the place in the past. I've said
...things are pretty much as they've been since I started coming here, at least - some good days, some bad ones, some thread hijacks, some crap posts, some egos and wrestling matches, some absolute diamond-hard fascinating discussions, some erudition, some crap jokes, some pee-myself-laughing ones too, a generally tolerant and friendly hubbub.
and other things, more embarrassingly and openly in love with the place.
I personally think the exodus started when Jason Kottke posted this Metatalk thread not long after the massive influx of users after September 11th, which seemed to be a continuation of a real-world conversation that he and Matt had been having. Matt commented in the thread that he was tired of it all, and thinking about folding the tent. Much consternation ensued, and I honestly think that some people who might have stuck around and dug in their heels to try and make the place better and lead by example threw in the towel at this point.
There were other things - the rise in chattiness, the rise in incivility, the decline in collective intelligence, the increase in jokiness and pointless IRC-esque chatter (in which I admit my occasional participation) - most of which were probably as a result of the massive influx of new users.
Whatever the reason, even though there are many voices still participating that I enjoy hearing, lots of people with whom I enjoy interacting, I've got to agree for the first time in public that the Mothership is not what it once was.
What to do? This is the $64,000 Question, of course. I still enjoy the place a lot, and will continue to participate until Matt bans me permanently for conduct unbecoming a wonderchicken, but I am starting to understand a little better the complaints that I've ignored or argued against for so long. To some extent I wish that I'd paid them more heed a year ago.
(Should I mention my theory about the disenfranchisement of the A-List now? No, perhaps not. Not until my secret plans for World Domination have been hatched, my pretties. Not until then.)
It has been said, and truly, 'it's only a website'. Can you love a website? Is it internet-era pathological behavior to say 'I love that website'?
I dunno.
But some days it feels as if my love is turning into common street trash before my eyes, and no matter how well-documented my weaknesses for common street trash, that's just not the girl I fell in love with.
This late evening, reading AKMA, who was messing around with a lovely, famous phrase from the good Doctor W, made me want to make this. Just for fun. I like playing around with stuff.
Edit : While I'm at it, I also took some words from one of his recent posts and made this for Rageboy today, for Gary's collage, because though I've never met the man, I love him, and it would seem that he's very unhappy, and I have no idea what else I could possibly do.
This what a million US dollars (which is about 3 billion CA$) looks like :
[found at the site that dare not speak its name]
As Kent recently intuited, I've been rereading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher and Bach recently, in part in hopes that a rereading will illuminate corners that I missed the last time through, and in part because good books in English are very difficult to find here, and prohibitively expensive when I do find them. There are no libraries of which I am aware within a two hour radius of my home, and even if there were, they would not have any books in English. This situation is particularly unhappy because I am and always have been a voracious reader, getting through an average of two or more books a week. Needless to say the tomes that comprise the meager collection I brought with me when we moved here from Sydney are well-thumbed and dog-eared by now.
Bitch, moan.
Anyway, this anecdote from GEB struck me, and I thought I'd share it with you.
Johann Bolyai and Nikolay Lobachevskiy independantly and to all appearances simultaneously discovered non-Euclidean geometry in 1823. Euclidean geometry, of course, is based on five postulates, four elegant and one perhaps a little less so, and had stood proudly for about two thousand years.
The first four postulates :
(1) A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
(2) Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
(3) Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one end point as center.
(4) All right angles are congruent.
and the fifth, which lacks a little of the concision and elegance of the first four
(5) If two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side is less than two right angles, then the two lines must inevitably intersect each other on that side if extended far enough.
Over the intervening centuries, dozens of attempts had been made to prove that the fifth postulate was in fact part of 'four-postulate geometry', all unsuccessful.
One of the people who had attempted to do so was Bolyai's father, Wolfgang, who was also a mathematician and a friend of Gauss (who is part of Graham's mathematical family tree, synchronicitously enough). The elder Bolyai wrote to his son, in an attempt to steer him from the black sinkhole of depair that was Euclid and the Mathematical Life :
This passage astonishes me. Even allowing for floweriness of language, that a man could so deeply feel his life ruined and wasted as a result chasing a mathematical proof somehow sets me back in my seat, a-wondering about how we have changed, or if indeed we have. It may not have a similar effect on you, and if not, I beg your indulgence.
I'm not sure if it's fiction or memoir, but this piece from Catfish on the Table, a blog I recently found though my recent referrers gizmos down in the righthand sidebar, is well worth your time. Puts me in mind of the memoirs of Frank McCourt, and as well written, 'tis.
Also : "Have you ever tried to get into a girl's pants when her main intellectual influence is Steinbeck?" Mad, hilarious, brilliant sh-t from Alex.
Some things I'm angry about :
How about you? What are you angry about? C'mon, vent. It'll make ya feel better!
Joey (aka the Mighty Accordian Guy) has some pics of the fallout (literally) from the garbage strike in Toronto.
I empathize, cap'n. This is the way my neighbourhood looks all the time. Lovely Bugok, vacationland of the rich and famous. Damn right I'm angry.
Here's some amusing crap old and new to divert your attention from the fact that WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!
No, really.
A brief history of the codpiece. (I tried to start a fashion trend (being the trendmonger I am and always have been *snort*) when I was in university to Bring Back the Codpiece. It failed.)
WebCollage: Exterminate All Rational Thought
The power and the beauty of Crazy Drunk Guy. Have you accepted Crazy Drunk Guy as your Personal Saviour?
Hope you enjoyed that. I sure as heck did.
When you get sick in Korea, with anything, the doctor writes you a prescription. Not that that's unlike the west, of course. The drug companies worldwide make sure that the medicowhores push chemicals on their patients relentlessly. But in Korea, this is actually a new feature of the medical landscape - until recently you were able to just walk into a pharmacy and say "I've got this pain right here," and the pharmacist would load you up with armloads of drugs.
The law was changed a few years ago, and the pharmacists kicked up a big stink. To no avail, happily.
But no matter the illness with which you have been diagnosed, you always get the same number of pills. Five. Regardless of whether you have cancer or a common cold, ulcers or an ear infection, you come away from the pharmacist with a string of little sealed wax paper packets, in each of which is 5 pills, of various colours and sizes. Without fail. I've never actually checked to see if these variety packs of pills change depending on the illness with which you are currently stricken, but I am curious as to what they might be.
My good buddy the mighty Bearman (why not go say hi - he's one of the friendly ones!) has sent me a screenshot illustrating the sort of problem that yhbc was talking about here, on IE 5/5.5, with the new layout. I hope I've corrected it, but I don't have access to that browser. If you're using an older version of IE and things look messed up, please leave me a comment. Thanks!
I posted this over here a few days ago, to resounding silence, which could be due to the fact that a) it's bollocks, b) no one cares, c) no one read it or d) a combination of the three. But since I'm nothing if not pigheaded, and it gelled a couple of things for me in my mind about both the questions of identity that were doing the rounds recently and the cross-blog conversations idea that I've gone on about before, I'm going to cross-post it here. Because I can, and because I like feedback, even though I am a little gunshy tiptoeing through the backdoor back into Smart Person Land. Still, forward!
I'd add to what Shelley and David have said about ThreadNeedle and blogs, just off the top of my head, my take on it : that in the online 'asynchronous discussion communities' that Dan mentioned below in /m106, you have represented yourself through the things you say and have said in that community. There may have been an additional body of work, but this was secondary to the text-representation of yourself that accreted, word by word, as a result of your participation. My personal example of this would be my participation at Metafilter over the last couple of years.
This is a trivial observation, I know. But your avatar was effectively yourself as you chose to represent yourself via your comments and conversations.
When we talk about a weblog, though, I think it's profitable to talk about two separate entities created as an adjunct of our online presence, at least the one that derives from the weblog itself : the (for lack of a better word) publication and the person.
Now certainly, the 'publication' is a mirror, to whatever extent, of the person writing it. We see many weblogs that stop here at this point, that have no commenting systems enabled, or that pay little attention the 'community', that are traditional web logs (ie collections of links with minimal commentary) or diaries or photoblogs or warblogs or god knows what...but that are intended less as manifestations of the person behind them than publications about that person or their interests.
Another dimension, though, comes in with weblogs that have comment threads, that encourage and participate in conversations with other weblogs/webloggers. In this situation, the weblog not only becomes a publication about something (which might, in the case of more diarist-type blogs, be the person who is writing it) but a representation, an avatar of that person. The weblog itself becomes an active extension of the weblogger's identity (I wish I'd thought about this during the recent conversations around the blogs about 'identity'. Ah well.) The weblog is something that is carried with them (or is an extension of their identity online...? I'm not sure about this bit at all), and the cross-blog conversations that occur as a result of this, in posts and their comment threads, are in a way a new and larger version of the sort of discussion types we're historically used to, that Dan mentioned in his earlier post. A version that carries a body of work, a more deliberate one, along with the community member.
Does this make sense? I'm riffing here, and I have to admit that I haven't read David's book yet, so the sort of thing I'm trying to get a handle on (and communicate at the same time) might be old news.
Anyway (*takes a breath*) - I see these weblogs, the blogs that are not only 'publications' about something but also representations of the personality behind the words (and are this way because the weblogger has comments threads and/or engages in cross-blog conversations in their main posts and/or blogrolls people (the use of the word 'people' here is deliberate) as an acknowledgment of community), avatars that engage in conversation, to be the audience at which Shelley's ThreadNeedle is aimed. And I think (hope) that the service might be a major step forward, if it reaches critical mass.
(Also, don't forget to add your two bits to the conversation about Threadneedle still going on here.)
Like Graham said : The coolness of this thing just blows me away. Here's a picture
(popup, 75k) of the web of blogs related to me, according to Google, 3 deep. Fascinating. You can double click on any of the other blogs, and the app will go and find the cloud of sites googly-related to it, in turn. One surprise would be the absence of Burningbird, but I seem to recall her excluding the Googlebot from her domains some time ago, so that makes sense after all. Interesting too, that my strongest connection through to a cloud of Metafilter bloggers is via jonmc's View From The Counter. I would have expected 9622.net to be on there...
This makes the propellor on my beanie whiz at a frightening speed.
A door has opened today, just a crack, and it looks as if it might just be possible for me to go back to Australia sometime in the next year or so. Until I was chatting with my old friend/old boss earlier today and the discussion turned to the real possibility of me returning Oz-ward, I hadn't realized how much I love and how much I achingly miss Sydney.
*crosses fingers*
What am I going to be able to bitch about if I leave Korea again, though?
And now, as a special public service announcement, here's some stupid sh-t that was running through my brain this afternoon as I made some chicken cacciatore :
Since it seems we've been saddled with the monicker 'warbloggers' for the forseeable future, I thought we should open up some more niches for folks, you know, so they don't feel left out. You can have hours of fun, if you're so inclined, assigning your friends and neighbours to the right Tribe, a la the Harry Potter thing. If I had the energy, I'd make one of those stupid f--king quizzes. But I don't. So... onward!
I propose the foundation of the following new BlogTribes :
Any additions?
What is happening in Cro-Magnon Territory and the Neanderthal territories?
Cro-Magnon forces moved into key Neanderthal towns in the Big River Caves at the end of cold season to try to halt a series of suicide attacks on its citizens.
There were many casualties in the military operation which also sparked a wave of protests in the Neanderthal world and led Cro-Magnon Territory's main ally, That Other Tribe, to call for killmaker withdrawals.
The action caused much hardship among Neanderthals and the militant rock-throwing campaign against Cro-Magnon Territory has continued since.
So how did the violence begin?
The Neanderthal intifada, or uprising, broke out at the end of The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died.
Analysts say the atmosphere at the time was ripe for an explosion. Neanderthal frustration that years of the peace process had failed to deliver their political aspirations was intensified by the failure of the Deep Cave summit in Hot Season.
Then Cro-Magnon hard-liner Arshon visited a site in Shared Hunting Grounds known to Neanderthal Shamen as the Noble Sanctuary and to Cro Magnon Ghost Talkers as Happy Killing Floor.
The Neanderthals viewed the visit as provocative because the hunting ground lies on territory captured by Cro-Magnons in the Grandfather war and is at the centre of the fierce dispute over the sovereignty of Shared Hunting Grounds. It ended in bloody clashes at the Shamen tents, which quickly spread through the occupied Neanderthal territories.
Correspondents say the visit was intended to underline the Cro Mag claim to the hunting ground and its holy sites.
What has happened to the peace process?
One of the weaknesses of the Father Times peace process was that it deliberately left the most difficult issues - the status of Shared Hunting Grounds, refugees and borders - until last, in the belief that this would make them easier to resolve.
These issues were finally discussed when the former Other Tribe Chief Clon made an all-out attempt to bring then Cro Mag Ghost Talker Ehurak and the Neanderthal leader Yasafat together at The Other Tribe's long house.
An agreement was in sight, but talks broke down over failure to agree on the future of Shared Hunting Grounds and - to a lesser extent - the fate of Neanderthal refugees.
Cro-Magnon leaders believed they had been generous to the Neanderthals, while Neanderthal negotiators rejected the proposals as inadequate.
The two sides came even closer to agreement when they met during The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died. But this, too, ended in failure.
There has been very little progress on the diplomatic front since Arshon took possession of the Leader Bone more than a year ago.
He has accused his predecessor of offering the Neanderthals unacceptable concessions and that all Cro-Magnon Territory got in return was violence.
One of the biggest obstacles to final status agreement is the issue of Cro Mag settlements, and Arshon has long been seen as a champion of the settlers' cause.
The Neanderthal Authority currently controls most of The Big River but less than 40% of the Big River Caves, in non-contiguous chunks that are dotted with Cro-Magnon settlements. The Neanderthals believe there can only be a purely Neanderthal state if the settlements are dismantled.
Why are both sides locked in this violence?
Arshon says there is no room for dialogue as long as violence continues. He said the Ehurak Government tried to negotiate under hails of rocks for several months but to no avail.
The Cro-Magnon leader has shown a resolutely tough paw in his dealings with the Neanderthals - but commentators say his policies have support among most Cro-Magnons.
They support the government's view that Cro-Magnon Territory is exercising its right to self-defence in the face of attacks from Neanderthal militants on Cro-Magnon civilians and defence forces.
The government accuses Yasafat of failing to contain militant groups like Big Stones Brotherhood and Neanderthal Ghost Eaters which carry out many of the attacks. But analysts are now increasingly arguing that Yasafat is in no position to control them.
The Neanderthals say militant attacks on Cro-Magnon Territory are inevitable as long as there is no satisfactory Neanderthal state.
The militant group BSB has pledged to escalate its activities and intensify the armed struggle against Cro-Magnon Territory. The group's popularity has soared recently, following the demise of the peace process and general sense of despair.
Could the peace process be revived?
Any common ground that appeared to exist at the Other Tribe's long house has been all but extinguished by more than a hundred thousand years of fighting.
The only thing that could make the two sides move is outside pressure.
There is hope that proposals put forward by more evolved branches of the species for peace and normalisation between Cro-Magnon Territory and its neanderthal neighbours could provide the much-needed momentum.
Under the terms of the proposal which was debated after The Long Cold Season When The Mammoths Died, Cro-Magnon Territory would withdraw from territory occupied in Grandfather Times and a Neanderthal state would be created with its capital in East Shared Hunting Grounds.
In return, Neanderthal nations would give Cro-Magnon Territory full diplomatic relations, including security guarantees, trade relations, animal skins, and some women.
But this plan will only be taken seriously by Arshon if it is actively promoted by the Other Tribes Big Chief Geush.
So far, the homo sapiens proposal has not led to any moves to halt the violence and revive the peace process.
[Search and replace liberties taken with this article.]
Via Mefi, [this is good] for blowing the carbon out of the old mental valves.
I ran into another one of those odd but amusing Korea things as I shambled off to the doctor today to have him insert his video camera into my ears (revealing the most unnervingly unpleasant innerspace vistas I've seen in a long time, I must admit. I half-expected to see tiny demons, smoking cigars and lounging on the mounds of reddish-brown crud, poking the souls of the damned in the ass with pitchforks.
Aside to the aside : I tend to patronize practitioners of the medical profession as little as possible, as I'm just a little eccentric that way, and so new technogadgets like the teeny tiny video just blow me away. When did this stuff get invented? I'm kinda keen to make up some maladies just to see what other shiny med-gear surprises might be in store for me! And the patient management software he had, even though it was in Korean, of course, was really freakin cool as well.)
So, anyway, I'm walking down the street and the bass-heavy thumpathump of booty-shaking disco rumbles down the pavement at me. I step aside, matador-like, but it gets all up in my face, and I steel myself to the inevitable.
Although it's like 33 degrees (that's about fahrenheit 451 for you Americans out there) and the humidity is pushing 98 percent (i.e. if I hork a loogie, to, like, blend in with the crowd, it would kind of float there in front of me, ghostly as well as ghastly, and then slowly dissolve into a sticky mist), there are two rent-a-dancers outside the new shop in the recently-completed concrete block on the corner.
The new shop is a clothing store for infants called, Koreanically-enough given their dutiful but regrettable obsession with the fruits of fornication rather than the act itself, Baby Boss.
Still, undeterred by the surrealism of the whole proposition, the young ladies (who are quite stunningly lovely under all that furrowed-by-rivulets-of-sweat makeup) are shaking their booties frenetically, halting only to implore passersby to come in, buy something, anything for chrissakes, just please pretend to be interested, or he'll beat us again!
Well, I exaggerate a titch, perhaps, for comedic effect, but there was indeed a guy who looked very much the part of The Procurer, red-faced and corpulent, leaning against a mini-van parked across the street, alternately scowling and leering. I suspect if he were not Korean, he'd be called Rocco. Hell, maybe he was called Rocco. I didn't stop to ask.
Nor did I stop to browse the baby clothes. I hope the girls don't pay for my inattention later.
I talked about this phenomenon here, too, if you're interested.
The new template I've been messing around with is live (as you've hopefully noticed), even if it's perhaps not quite ready for primetime...why the hell not, eh? I'm not sure if I'm happy with it, but I wanted to try a couple things (like the category icons). Archives and comments display and so on have yet to be updated.
Should work fine in all modern browsers. Let me know if you have a problem. Any feedback is much appreciated. I haven't integrated a single damn thing that Mark's been talking about lately (except accidentally, like today's, because I hate popup windows too), since I'm a complete bastard but I probably will, once I iron out the bugs and clean up the extraneous crud. Also, I have encountered some folks out there who are super-hip and elegantly snarky, and who have been known to curl their designer-lip at the preponderance of grey and blue one sees all over the place. f--k ya. There's a reason I wear blue jeans and that 90% of my other clothing is either black or white or grey. They're easy.
And by the way : happy Canada Day to you all, even if you're, you know, not.
Edit : The juxtaposition of images used herein is in no way intended to promote or condone the crime of drinking and driving. Driving and then drinking, however, now that's just peachy.
