You birds, always cracking foxy...

Ohhhhh yeah

I so want this t-shirt. Where's my credit card?

Calculus

You know, sometimes you just need to take comfort in the first-order derivative.
Vacation with Liz. Yay! Brain working not so goodly with the right now.
First premises: drunk driving bad, Steve McQueen cool. Systemic anomaly. Reboot.

"If the state doesn't have even a legitimate interest in criminalizing sodomy ... how can the state continue to regulate against group sexual encounters, sadomasochism, sex between brothers and sisters, sex with animals and sex with corpses?"
Scott Lively, Pro Family Law Center

That's right. There's no discernable difference between two loving, consenting adults who happen to share similar plumbing sharing intimacy in the privacy of their own homes and corpse-fucking.

I'm not a bigot or anything. I think if people want to fuck corpses that's their business. I just don't think that corpse fuckers should have special rights. I'd hate to see this country give in to the radical corpse fucking agenda.

And, maybe it's just me, but do they really need a parade?

Beach Blanket Babble On

Market research shows that our potential customers don't assosciate industrial thermoforming with fun. People like the beach, don't they?

Bored Now

Playing "let's mess with the cultists" with Grasshopper was fun for a while, but this weekend Liz and I just couldn't seem to shake the feeling of being frustrated, fed up and ultimately unable to come to anything resembling a satisfactory resolution. Not to mention the fact that whole regions of our vocabulary have become rhetorical Superfund sites. We all know what can happen when words lose meaning.

It seems like Grasshopper is mostly interested in having it both ways. He wants to join the Bliss Ninny Collective for the emotional affirmation and he wants to keep us involved so he has someone to laugh at them with. Always gotta be the guy who's wise.

But I'm catching on. Not interested in being an audience for anyone's delusions but my own...and Liz's.

So, bored. The Bliss Ninnies are boring. They have nothing to offer anyone who doesn't want to be fooled. There is no challenge in debating them, no honor in aiding them and no glory in exposing them.

Ultimately, I had to ask myself "do I care what a bunch of self-involved, sexually-obsessed public masturbators think about life?" Surprisingly, the answer is, uh, no.

On Skepticism

Recent conversations with Grasshopper have led me to ponder the role of skepticism in our culture and why it seems to be so very unpopular.
The common response is that skepticism forces us to challenge cherished beliefs and is thereby a buzz-kill. While I'm sure this is a major part of it, it seems to me that there's something more to it than that.
Poking around for alternative perspectives, I found this interesting site.
Whatever your opinion of biblical mythology, it is the basis for our memetic evolution. Under this interpretation of antediluvian theology, skepticism is inherently evil, because it interferes with our ability to receive truth directly and instead makes truth subject to sense and reason.
I'm beginning to think that many people operate unconsciously on this principle (whether they subscribe to biblical myth or not).

Woke Up This Morning

So, there's going to be a sixth season of The Sopranos. Let the musing begin...

DC: Hello Tony. I am the Architect. I designed The Sopranos. You have many questions yet remain irrevocably human. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, it is also the most irrelevant.
TS: What the fuck?
DC: You are the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to television programming.
TS: Gimme a fuckin' break.
DC: Quite right. Interesting, that was quicker than the others.
TS: What the fuck are you talking about?
(scenes from "I'll Fly Away", "Northern Exposure", "The Rockford Files" and "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" appear on the screens)
DC: The first programs I developed were quite naturally perfect, a triumph equaled only by their monumental failure.
TS: It's fuckin' profanity. That's the fuckin' problem, isn't it you fuck?
DC: Precisely. The answer eluded me for some time until it was stumbled upon by another.
TS: Steven fuckin' Bochco?
DC: Please. As I was saying, he stumbled upon a solution whereby nearly 99.9% of the viewing audience would accept that they were hearing profanity when in fact they were not. While this answer functioned, it was fundamentally flawed thus creating the otherwise contradictory systemic anamoly.
TS: This is about fuckin' HBO.
DC: You are here because HBO is about to be purchased by Disney.
TS: You won't fucking let that fucking happen. You need fucking adult-oriented programming to fucking survive.
DC: There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.
TS: You better fucking hope we don't meet again.
DC: We won't.

Everything Must Go

I've been playing Go online . They say you should lose your first fifty games as quickly as possible. I've been playing against Gnu Go for a few months, but I've figured out how to beat it by convincing it I'm a better player than I really am, which is kinda boring and makes me feel oddly sleazy. Playing against humans is a lot more fun.

Fathers and Sons

It's Fathers' Day and my brother, N, is in the hospital in full Matrix-pod survival mode: GI tube, spinal and IV. He's recovering from surgery to remove an abdominal adhesion. I got my dad some DVDs, but somehow I think seeing N in good health again tops his current wish list.

Yoga

Whee! Yoga is so cool. I finally found an instructor (in Berkeley) who specializes in teaching yoga to people who aren't twenty years old and extra-bendy. I think my subjective physical age went from about 60 to about 45 after my first-ever yoga class yesterday. Sore as hell today, but my back and hip feel fantastic.

It's kinda creepy reading the yoga center's website, though, in light of Grasshopper and the hand-job cult. But nobody's suggested that I pray or worship a guru yet. Which is really all I ask of anyone.

Five by Five

Grasshopper update: when last we left our intrepid adventurer, he was about to boldly go where, like, about a million and a half people have gone before. He was going to confront the cult on their bullshit, make them see the error of their ways and lead them to the shining city on the hill where no one is asked to believe a pantload of mystical dren just to get laid.

Well.

Things didn't go exactly as planned, though he did garner some "thank you for asking the tough questions" praise from his, uh, "classmates." But he didn't land the big fish. Werner and Ayn didn't show up and haven't really responded to his emails or board postings, leaving him to spar with Squeaky and Harriet and Blah Blah Nyborg (who actually lead the indoctrination seminars).

In response to his increased demand for some sort of rational, scientific explanation for their recipe for transcendence through finger-frelling, the Family keeps responding with ever loopier "Lo, here is the Christ" leader-worship horseshit.

Grasshopper is getting aggravated. Yes he is. So much so that he has now set himself on a course to write The Great Exposè, wherein he will reveal their evil to the rest of us poor gullible saps who are clearly in danger of falling for their oh-so-clever mind-control techniques.

Oh, also he wants the two hundred dollars he spent on their Introduction To Being A Sucker seminar back.

Come back tomorrow, and I'll take you again.

Ciao, True Believers,
J.

To mock a cracking bird...

So long, Atticus, and thanks for all the fish.
Also, a moment of silence for the last bastion of the Fourth Estate.

Oh, it's about computers? Nevermind.

Better Living through Memory Management

I'll take the beach...

Everybody believes their how-we-met story is the best. Sometimes, they're right.

It's about bloody time

I'm so happy about this news. And yet I'm bummed that I'm happy, because really this should have all happened already. How can we be living now, practically in The Future, and still have same-sex marriage be an issue? So yay for Canada and boo for the rest of humanity and somebody invite me to a wedding already.

Small moves, I guess.

Catherine The Grrreeeaaat!

If you ever need an example of how the Hayes code frelled up American cinema, check out The Scarlet Empress. Torture, rape, murder, beheadings, whips, chains, riding crops, cross-dressing, bestiality, ass-grabbery and Mistress Marlene's Hessian Harem. And check out that muff.

All in all, an afternoon well-spent.

Jargon Much?

The Adventures of CultBoy continue...

J and I are having a leeeetle trouble convincing that friend I mentioned that he looks to be sliding into a cult-type situation.

Erm, I mean, he's trying to give us reality, but our resistance is getting in the way. We have to get off our conclusion-based thinking, stop playing old tapes, and open ourselves to our havingness.

<horkk>

Dudes, I know of what I speak. I took the est training at ages 9 and 14 (thanks Mom). I'm ashamed to say that I even worked for a for-profit self-improvement seminar cult when I was 19 and 20.

In other words, I done BEEN vaccinated against this bullshit. And I am here to tell anyone who'll listen that once the endorphin rush is gone, and the benefits of leading a slightly-more-examined life have been realized, all that's left is scam scam scam scam scam.

Scenes

You know that scene in Lover's Walk where Buffy has Spike pinned to the kitchen counter and Angel is watching helplessly from the threshold because he can't come in because he wasn't invited and then Buffy says "why don't you come on in Angel?" and he does and Joyce stands there watching, dumbfounded, because just moments ago she was enjoying hot cocoa with Spike and now she's surrounded by superhuman beings and she's clearly in over her head? That's what life feels like to me sometimes.

More often, life feels like the scene in Premiere where Crichton first comes on board Moya to find a bunch of aliens acting more or less irrationally and shouts "What is the matter with you people?" shortly before being rendered unconscious by D'Argo's wonder-tongue.

But mostly, life feels like the moment in Twice Shy when John smiles and says "We're gonna be fine; she likes me" as Aeryn leaves the cargo bay.

Going to Dick and Grasshopper's place for old movies and cult indoctrination today. Should be fun, in an X-Files meets Laverne and Shirley kind of way.

Two birds are better than one

Jason can't stand it. He wants to crack foxy here too. Those few of you who have actually been coming back to read these things are in for some mighty good rantin', starting this weekend. I'm insisting that he create a photo strip first. So when you see his face, you'll know this is a two-bird bloglet.

Propaganda Automatica

Hee!

Go make your own.

Kids

Have I mentioned that I live across the street from an elementary school? I do. And I work from home. So kid-noise is the normal background sound of my workday. I remember when we bought the place, and Jason's parents (both teachers) were all waxing rhapsodic on the joyful sounds of children's voices. Right. The first day we spent here, I heard this little shrill voice lisping out at the top of its lungs, "you go to hell, you asshole". Then there are the little-girl screaming contests. Yoyoyoy.

Right now they're playing dodgeball or something, and chanting in unison "kick their butts, kick their butts".

P.S. Is "waxing rhapsodic" the opposite of "cracking foxy"?

Rats

Brucifer made his profile on hot-or-not all normal and stuff. Where's the fun in that?

Also, yay.

A smart guy named Dave Thomas applied the techniques from the amazingly fullashit Bible Code books, and got this message out of the second book's own text: "the Bible code is a silly, dumb, fake, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake-oil hoax". Snerk.

Read more about it on Scientific American's site.

How perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure

Someone I've known for a long time may well be getting involved with a local self-improvement cult, with an interesting twist. The group promises enlightenment and unlimited orgasms for only a coupla hundred thou. What an utter pile of steaming horseshit.

Puzzles & String

I forgot to mention the cool string puzzle Jason got from his aunt. Here's a version of it, mostly cribbed from here.

You are given two pieces of string made from a strange material, and a lighter. You are told that the strings have been made in such a way that when lit from any one end, each string burns all the way in exactly 1 hour. The strings however, have been made by hand, so they don't burn evenly. (For example, one string could have a lump near the end of it that takes most of the entire hour to burn.) So all you know is that the whole string will burn in an hour, not that half of it will burn in half-an-hour etc. Use the strings to measure 45 minutes.

Awesome stuff

That's what my editor called the article I submitted yesterday. Hee! I'd get a big head, except that would make it easier for Rob to catch and strangle me for missing a day of work at our little company while I finished writing. And during one of those OMG-project-due-NOW-now weeks, too.

(And, BTW, the article was certifiably boring unless you're into Java programming on Mac OS X.)

How many geek abbbreviations can I fit into this entry? IMHO? IIRC? Nah, those make me want to slap people.

Anyhow, the article's done, and the BBQ on Saturday was Big Fun (I now know that 15 people can comfortably fit on our tiny deck, as long as we put out extra chairs, and half of them squeeze into the hot tub). Conversations! About non-technical things! With live humans who aren't Jason!