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I went to the mall this morning with the kids to see a movie. As we walked through the mall, we passed by a table at which there was one adult woman in her mid-30s and four children. One was a girl maybe six, the rest were younger. The woman had a laptop open at one edge of the table, and they were watching a video.

I'm not sure what video it was. It was a cartoon, and what I saw as I briefly walked by was two talking heads, facing each other, squared iron jaws jawing.

It was the URL at the bottom of the screen that gave me pause: "www.HentaiTheory.com" (no link; they don't need the advertising.)

I hope she got there by accident. I seriously hope she figures out what she's looking at before the kids do.
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I went to Nutrition Data, a reasonably helpful (usually) calorie and protein counter for all kinds of foods. I typed in "bacon," and it said,
Please narrow your search. Do you mean: Breakfast Cereals, Legumes and Legume Products, Poultry Products, Pork Products, Sausages and Luncheon Meats, Soups, Sauces, and Gravies, Fats and Oils, Baby Foods, Fast Foods, generic, Foods from A&W, Foods from Arby's, Foods from Back Yard Burgers, Foods from Burger King, Foods from Carl's Jr., Foods from Chick-fil-A, Foods from Culver's, Foods from Dairy Queen, Foods from Del Taco, Foods from Domino's, Foods from Hardee's, Foods from Krystal, Foods from McDonald's, Foods from Papa John's, Foods from Papa Murphy's, Foods from Subway, Foods from Wendy's, Foods from White Castle, Foods from Wienerschnitzel, [more...]
It's bacon! BACON. B. A. C. O. N. The meat of the gods, you stupid machine. How much more "narrowing" do you need?
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While Omaha and I were at Valley Medical, we discovered that they had free wi-fi. Which was totally fine until a friend of mine posted a link to Sex Positive: Changing society's negative attitudes about sex, and I tried to follow it. Instead of the site, I got "Access Denied, Category: Sex Education."

Sex Education is a reason for blocking access? At a hospital?

Especially since there were no filters, none at all, on my reaching any Tumblr site, my own included.

The stupid, it burns!

Teabonics!

Mar. 31st, 2010 11:10 am
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Spell check? Unpossible!


From: Teabonics: creative grammar and spellings seen on Tea Party protest signs and t-shirts.
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Oh. My. God.

Being a responsible geek constantly updating myself with the latest and greatest, I read a number of blogs and outlets, and while most of what I read is interesting eyecandy I also track back-end development stuff. IndieFlix is thinking about implement some third-party login features, and last week ReadWriteWeb had a good article entitle "Facebook Wants to be Your One True Login."

Being a good article, I bookmarked it on del.icio.us. So did a lot of other developers. Many developers also commented on it in their blogs. The article rapidly floated to the top of Google's index for the phrase "Facebook login."

And then, for many facebook users, the world ended. Here are some of the comments attached to ReadWriteWeb's article:
  • All I wanted to do was LOG IN TO MY FACE BOOK ACCOUNT! I don't like this new way! "If it an't broke why fix it?"
  • now that you have managed to mess up the whole system how do i get back to login?
  • Nothing like being taken hostage on our own computer :-(
  • Why wont you let me sign in?
  • i liked the old way better what advantages do we have with the new way takes to long to sign in fix it back
There were hundreds of these. In some sense, it's funny, but in another: these are the people who use the software I write, and they're all too stupid to know the difference between Facebook, Google, the Internet, and their own goddamn browser software.

No wonder phishing survives.

Seriously, follow the link to the article and read the comments. You'll be laughing your ass off, and then you'll realize that these people work in office buildings, process your insurance paperwork, take your orders at restaurants, and sometimes handle nuclear weapons. So sad. After about page 5 or so, RWW's big banner warning worked for most people and the stupid stopped, but... gah. 200 or more "Where's my Facebook?" complaints.

Man, I'm terrified I might have to share a polis with these people some year.
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Eating Sensibly
Eating Sensibly
You know, I love to mock the silliness that is advertising, especially low-level advertising copy like this. Let's face it: if you're eating these "veggie snacks" in lieu of real vegetables, you're just not eating sensibly.

Math Error
Math Error
And then you find one of these. I did the math: the price is also 25% higher. So it's not a bargain. This is an attempt to upsell you on a convenient method of blowing your portion control, and that's all it is.

Locally Grown
Locally Grown
And finally, this sighting at the local Safeway. "Locally Grown" bananas? In Washington state? Really? I looked at the stickers on the bananas. I didn't know there was a town in Washington called "Guatemala." Or is that in Oregon? I'm not as familiar with our neighbor to the south.
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Today, I have been beseiged by phone calls and emails from recruiters about this one job that's apparently opened up in Bellevue, and every pattern matcher on the planet is recommending me for the job. I've told one recruiter to go ahead and submit me, of course.

Along with the three mainstream recruiters from local hauses that I recognize, there have been three phone calls and almost a dozen emails from men and women with accents so thick I often couldn't make out what they were saying. When I could, their English was fractured and terrible.

But more than that, they were rude. It wasn't "Please send me your resume and a phone number where we can reach you." It was "Here are the job requirements. You meet them. Send me your resume now. Sign and fax us this PDF form that says you agree that we exclusively represent you for this offer." Uh, fuck you? I'm not going to send you my resume blind, you git, and if you double-submit me I'm doomed.

I know the market's desperate, but geez, this is outsourcing human contact.
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Again with the talk radio! This one happened yesterday. Mark Levin, who for some reason I always imagine looks like the scrawny, evil rat from The Secret of NIMH, was out of his chair yesterday, and there was a guest host, Michael Barrett. He was ranting about how the "current generation" has thrown out the wisdom of the past, and has proclaimed:
Man, if you think marriage ought to be between a man and a woman, and not between two men and two women, you're not with it. If you think our country is great, you're not with it. If you believe we should support the troops, you're not with it. If you believe we should not write hateful things about women and should not put those songs on the radio, man, you're just not with it.
I was gobsmacked by the hateful idiocy contained in that rant. This is one of those classic "ascribe to your enemies all the qualities you perceive in yourself" rants that seem to be coming more and more out of the right.

Karl Rove famously described his strategy thusly. Find your own candidates greatest weakness. Now, accuse your opponent of it. He'll be so flustered with the idea that he'll have a hard time defending himself against it, it will distract from your own candidate's weakness, and it will give the press something to talk about. It worked well against John Kerry and Al Gore: both Vietnam Vets, both athletes, yet by impugning their physical courage and getting the press to talk about it, Rove was able to give his cheerleader and draft-dodger candidate breathing room to make alternative cases while Gore and Kerry flailed about, shocked and horrified that anyone would dare make such an attack on their patriotism.

Barrett's rant makes me think that the Rovian cancer has mestastasized within the conservative body politic. Because here he is, the conservative talk show host, advocating a hateful attitude toward his own country: most people, he says, are idiots. Hate them. Resent them. The 53% of Americans who voted for Obama are either hateful anti-Americans or they're pureblind idiots.

I believe we should give our troops all the support they need: most of that support ought to be dedicated to making sure they get home safely from the unnecessary war of choice. I believe that my country is great and founded on great principles: principles I desperately want my country to embrace and honor in the fullest. I believe that it was and always has been a mistake for the state to arbitrarily recognize the religious commitment called "marriage," and that there is room enough in our civilization for the odd 2% to have civil relationships that encourage fidelity and responsibility. I believe that respect toward women and men is a crucial part of our culture, and that the foul material heard in some radio doesn't deserve the attention it gets, but censorship isn't the answer.

But Barrett wasn't done with his rant. He went on to say,
Let me ask you something. They all say we shouldn't look to the past, but we should look forward. The past has nothing to teach us. Tradition isn't valuable. Let me ask you this: Are cars better than they were 30 years ago? Are your children safer than they were 30 years ago? Are parents better than they were 30 years ago?


Cars are better than they were 30 years ago. (1978? Holy cow, that was a crappy year for cars!) They're safer in an accident, they get much better mileage, and they require less costly maintenance. Fewer people die in automobile crashes than they did at any time in history.

Parents: in general, yes. They know more. They have access to more information. There's a better support system than ever in terms of education and community, if only you have the wherewithall to use it. If they let their children fail, they have fewer excuses than at any time in the past.

And yes, children are far safer than they were 30 years ago. Crime statistics universally show them to be safer now than in 1978, or 1968, or even 1958. The current generation is growing up healthier and just as ready to take on the world we're leaving them as we were ready to take on the world our parents left us.

When Barrett goes off like this, what he's really telling his audience is that we should hate our successes, and wish for the "simpler" time, when the violence and mayhem went on behind closed doors and in the back pages of the newspaper, and we lived in blissful ignorance of the agonies outside our little towns.

Barrett's anti-Americanism, his opposition to the progress we've made, is on full display in his words, and we shouldn't be afraid to call him on it.
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I have to remember to recharge my MP3 player more often. I've been stuck in the car several times this week listening to the radio, and flipping through the dial I inevitably land on a talk show, and in Seattle we have one liberal station, one sports station, three "socially conservative" stations and one "fiscally conservative" station.

I stumbled into one of the socially conservative stations and there was some caller on the line. She said:
I hate the baby boomers. They're the ones that ruined this country. Back in the sixties they did all those drugs and did all that damage to their body [sic], and now they're old and they want Medicare to take care of them and it's expensive.
I hate to break it to this still-adolescent mind, but the salient fact is that very few people in the sixties "did drugs" to any great extent.

But more than that, she hates the baby boomers for one reason and one reason only: they're getting old. That happens. Getting old is expensive. Bodies start to break down, start to fail, start to show the accumulated damage of a lifetime of living a human life. And she's going to be right there, fifty years from now, worrying about her own health and wanting the next generation to help her survive longer and healthier.

Hey, lady, maybe we should introduce Carrousel.
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This morning, for no reason I can recall precisely, I ended up on a "conservative T-shirt website," and as I was rolling through the inane collection of shallow "Great Nation" slogans and stupidies, I spotted this as the ultimate juxtaposition: On the left, images of their t-shirts; on the right, an ad column followed by one piece of site administrivia.

Dammit, why isn't this kind of cognitive dissonance painful?
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Fundies Say the Darndest Things.

An archive of various comments and discussions taken from the very brain dead among us. Enjoy. I mean, who can argue with comments like these?
I have to consult my brother but I believe I remember him telling me fossils can be manufactured in laboratories in a matter of hours.
Germs don't cause disease anymore than flies cause garbage.
What strikes me as odd that is, given the current state of genetics, no one has compared simian dna to homo sapien. The differences should be obvious and radical.
'May the force be with you' is used by witches when they greet each other..

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