Dave Williams' Web Log

01/01/2009:

> > >  They're probably okay if deep fried.
> >
> >   I've found that cat-as-pet haters typically react negatively
> > to cats' primeval instincts, being descended from lone hunters.
> > Some people just don't like it when cats don't instinctively
> > boost their egos by acting as if the owner is higher in the
> > pack pecking order.

Cats won't herd sheep, pull sleds, defend your person or property against intruders, fetch ducks, dig truffles, or escort blind people.

Fish, parakeets, hamsters, mice, and lizards "don't instinctively boost their (owner's) egos by acting as if the owner is higher in the pack pecking order" either. That's why they're pets, like cats.

Some dogs are pets, true. But a dog can be a partner, and no other animal can do that. Dog remains have been found with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon remains; we've evolved together.

01/02/2009:

> > It seems to me that there is very little new Science Fiction being written
> > these days. Most of the sfbc's flier is fantasy stuff like Discworld and
> > others.

Well-written fantasy can be quite good, but there's damned little of it, and I wouldn't want to have to subsist on it.

The guys I know who write full-time say the editors at the megapublishers are all achingly politically correct young women; a few years back one of them rejected a new book from G. Harry Stine "because this publisher (Pinnacle) cannot support contamination of the environment of space." Harry nearly blew an artery over that one...

01/03/2009:

It was worth $1.99 to see, but not much more than that. It had a comprehensible plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which are all good things, but it plodded at best and dragged at worst.

The main things of interest were the cars. It was set somewhere in the future, and the prop people did a nice trick by using the "retro" look. There were only a handful of vehicles, recycled through various scenes, but it was well done.

An Avanti, several Rover 3500s (with the triple hood scoops), a which looked like a slightly modified Alfa Romeo, and a few cars that were only shown at a distance or too briefly to get a good look, but sure *looked* like some of the larger Fiat sedans, though my first though was "Moskvich?"

One theme throughout the movie was mandatory piss testing; the protagonist had to put up with a faggot doctor who made admiring comments each time he had to pee in the sample cup. That reminded me of the old internet "piss test" list of companies that had mandatory drug testing. I guess it's so prevalent now it'd be more reasonable to keep a list of companies that *don't* require piss testing...

I'd like to see mandatory drug and alcohol testing for Congressmen, Senators, *and* their staffs - both state and DC. These are the people who make the laws that run the country; surely they can be held to at *least* the standards used for truck drivers or Wal-Mart checkers?

Not if *they* can help it, of course...

I view the piss test as proof that the employer considers me an untrustworthy dopehead whose word and performance is not worthy of consideration. Therefore, when a former employer announced their new piss program, I decided I owed them the absolute minimum of loyalty, and collected a shitload of office supplies I didn't really need...

You reap what you sow, and all that.

Makes me want to introduce some poppy seeds into the break-room coffee pot when testing time comes around.

01/04/2009:

> Economics is the only [so-called] science where 2 Nobel prize winners
> can hold diametrically opposite views and nobody calls them on it

"If your predictions are so accurate, why aren't you rich?"

If you're taking financial advice from someone who isn't at least a millionaire, you need to wonder why they're not doing so well.

01/05/2009:

> > So the IR thermometer would be nice,
> > except for the need to know the reflectivity of the surface.

I acquired it as an automotive tool, but I've used it for all sorts of things. My wife had abdominal surgery a while back, and I found that temperatures along the incision ran about ten degrees hotter than a few inches away, even though there was no visible sign of infection. She told the surgeon about that on a follow-up visit, and he went out and bought one for himself.

"Tools are good karma."

01/06/2009:

> > Which is a good link to a couple of delicate fabrications curently leaving
> > the Solar System (Voyagers, obviously) and quite a lot of instrumentation
> > and other oddities scattered about the Moon and Mars.  I think you have to
> > accept that achieving this demonstrated a certain style....?

Then NASA threw up its hands, abandoned the permanent space station and the Mars programs, and diverted most of its funds to maintaining its own bloated bureaucracy. The space program is close enough to dead so as not to matter.

When the far probes were launched, everyone expected we'd be following along not far behind, tearing up the scenery and abandoning our used landers and candy bar wrappers. Instead, NASA now concerns itself with ecology and ozone science. NASA's web sites are almost enough to make you cry; exactly *how* did their mission change to the study of South American tree frogs?

The far probes came to represent, not the beginning of something great, but the end of it.

NASA *has* the money, but the percentage going to hardware is in the single digits, and most of that is wasted.

01/07/2009:

> > For what it's worth I've always been puzzled by car mirrors requiring
> > the driver to look down to waistline level to view them.

For the rest of the world, mirror position is styling-driven. From the manufacturer's standpoint, there's no problem, since most people don't use the outside mirrors at all, and the inside mirror is only used for hanging strands of beads, ribbons, or other garbage to swing from side to side as they veer around in their lanes.

01/08/2009:

> > Arms sellers don't give a shit. They sell to both sides in a conflict
> > and make money from every gunshot and bomb blast.

In the 19'oughts, the Imperial Japanese Army had decided to upgrade their military, and Kaiser Wilhelm rented them a small chunk of his army to show them how things were done. The German-led Japanese troops, armed with the very latest artillery and goodies of the Second Reich, had a very hard time biting off one particular chunk of China. After taking heavy losses, they finally secured the area and found out the Chinese were also using Krupp cannon... of an even newer model than the German Army's supposedly state-of-the-art, virtually-new guns. The German officers were angry enough they traveled halfway back around the world, and fecal matter rolled uphill through the General Staff, the Kaiser's advisers, and (still steaming) to the Kaiser himself, who was Imperially pissed when it was explained to him. Then the fecal ball went downhill to Essen, where Herr Krupp had a very hard time talking himself out of that particular faux pas.

For a couple of centuries, England was a major seller of firearms and components. In the 1600s and 1700s, for example, gunsmiths all over the world would forge and bore their own barrels, carve their own stocks, and, often as not, fit imported English lockwork to finish it off. Those were precision bits for their day, and it wasn't cost-effective to try to duplicate them locally. In the 1800s the Germanic states began competing heavily in the world market, specializing in military contracts for complete firearms. Mauser-Werke and the others were enormous, and more or less backed by government money, and most of the smaller English companies went under, unable to afford the massive industrial overhead to compete with mass production. Some of the English manufacturers tried to compete that way, and might have done well, had the tightening of British gun control laws not taken away so much of their home market. In the international market, the pound was still the world standard, which made British products expensive in the export market.

01/09/2009:

> > Or ride genetically modified, zero emissions horses! But somebody here
> > will work out how to build a solar powered, 100 mph STV.

Not to mention, when you turn the car off, it just sits there doing nothing. Horses have to be cared for. I had to muck out horse stalls as a kid, and it's nothing I care to do voluntarily.

01/10/2009:

> > However, as an innovator, my main interest is in what we'll do after
> > oil.  It's perfectly true that major post-oil technologies, like simple
> > electric vehicles, are being ignored

Even when there is plant capacity available, getting the power to the user is a problem. For example, where I live, brownouts are so common I installed my first computer UPS back in the 1980s. The grid was built in the 1940s, figuring 40 amps per household - lighting only; no AC, gas heat, cooking, and water heating. Now, you can watch porch lights flicker all down the street when someone's air conditioner cycles. Arkansas Power & Light is history, replaced by something called "Entergy", which no longer has an office, or even a local telephone number; if you have a problem, you leave voicemail on a machine in Texas. "Entergy" is probably a front for some Guatemalan dope dealers, or something. They're not concerned about maintenance, and certainly not with upgrading the grid; we were without electricity for two weeks a couple of years ago, after an ice storm took out power across a big chunk of the state. Entergy has a monopoly granted by the state, as is normal for power utilities in the USA. It's not like they're going to get any competition.

Even if Entergy were to upgrade the grid, where would this electricty come from? Since nuke plants are evil and are being decommissioned, that leaves - you guessed it - oil. Big gas turbines and generators are cheap, so that's what most new installations use. And then there's coal, with its attendant problems. All the good hydro was dammed up decades ago, and what's left is unusable, mostly due to the efforts of the "environmentalists," most of whom apparently would prefer we slept outside and wore grass skirts, since animals have rights too...

We buy a bunch of hydro power from Canada, but that's not going to last forever. Canada is a second-world country in the sociopolitical definition (has natural resources, but not heavily developed). Sooner or later, Canada is going to need that power for its own use, and they're not going to sell it down here. Northeast USA is heavily dependent on that electricity, and I can see the potential for some strife in the future...

01/11/2009:

> If I want X job and it's not in my area or they aren't hiring for my
> position then I have to leave the area.  It's much easier to find a
> job in  whatever area and move towards it than to convince a
> business to move  towards you.

If you don't want to live in a rabbit hutch, your costs go up quite a bit. I'd also require at least 900 square feet of shop space; I'm straining what I have already. Then the lathes, mill, balancing machine, tire machines, welding equipment, and other tools would have to be moved, leveled, etc. Probably some wiring. I'd need space for the trailer, parking for at least six cars and four motorcycles, and I don't need any code enforcement bozos breathing down my neck.

Maybe places like that exist in some urban areas, but I bet you'd have to make a lot more money to move there. And then when that job peters out, as most do, you'd be looking at yet another move.

Kwai-Chang Caine walked all over the West with a bedroll and a flute, but he didn't have a car habit to support, either.

01/12/2009:

> > I remember watching a US round of FI on TV a few years back in which some
> > cars were sidelined by taking flying litter, McDonalds wrappers etc up the
> > air intakes where they stuck to the radiators and compromised the cooling.
> > The teams were diplomatic about it but I assume not happy.

Mine would have been to shut the track down, tell everyone to go home, and next time they see someone start to throw something out on the track, remember they're pissing away a $200 or better ticket.

01/13/2009:

> > It's nothing you don't see in every other major city across the land
> > with mixed cultures. Entire apartmnet complexes in Sunnyvale
> > inhabited by Indians (real ones, from India), entire neighborhoods of

There is nothing on the cover to indicate the target market of the magazine.

Opening it up and reading it, I discovered it was slanted toward what it called the "GBLT" (gay-bi-lesbian-transsexual) "lifestyle" population. The contents were pretty much what you'd expect - editorials, coverage of some events, ads, articles on "why aren't we accepted?" and venereal disease.

Now, the metro Phoenix-Scottsdale-Tempe area has, I'm told, a population higher than the whole state of Arkansas. It'd be reasonable to expect it'd have a higher number of gays, and that in urban surroundings they'd tend to congregate. What was unexpected was the degree which it seems to have happened; Echo makes Phoenix sound like San Francisco during Gay Pride week. Which I doubt, but anything non-gay doesn't seem to count for much in the magazine.

The first page is a block of ads from the "Arizona Gay Realtors Alliance."

Ads for gay lawyers, gay lawn service, gay auto repair, gay pool service, with their target clientele spelled out in their ads. Also gay youth organizations, summer camps, and similar organizations. Okay, I guess that's no different than businesses that target Christians, Jews, blacks, or other groups. I guess they all lump together, or it'd be "No, I'm a lesbian, I couldn't possibly consider a transsexual for my pool care needs" and they'd have to spell out exactly which GBLT each ad was targeting.

The gay restaurant ads bothered me a bit. Yeah, okay, we all sometimes wind up in places that make us uncomfortable, and I'd feel out of place if I knew.

Or my friends knew. "Hey Dave, what were you doing at (looks in the magazine for an example) Hamburger Mary's yesterday?" "Eh?" (watch the 'clueless' light shine brightly)

The thing that made me uneasy, though, were the realty ads. Shitloads of ads.

Gay gated communities, gay apartment buildings, gay condos, "Owned and managed to support our lifestyle." Uh, yeah. I could envision someone just moving to Phoenix, and they think they've found a place in a good neighborhood and close to work. But after they sign a 12-month lease, they might find they felt... awkward... around their neighbors.

Another thing of interest was, even after a cursory sweep of the ads, a whole *lot* of "GBLT" businesses, activities, and realty seems to be located on Camelback Road, which is conveniently shown in the little metro area map in the back of the magazine.

I'm not sure why this was sent to me, but I wouldn't want to break the chain, so I'll pass it off to a severely homophobic acquaintance and watch his head explode in paranoid outrage...

01/14/2009:

On the hospital pain scale of 1 to 10, this would be a solid 8. 10 being the time my left leg was broken in three places by a DWI with a Buick, the knee and ankle were both dislocated, and the asshole paramedic just grabbed the foot and tossed it on the gurney, with my foot turned backwards. Nine would be when an intern removed both my big toenails with a pair of Craftsman pliers, then told me I was a pussy for breaking out in a sweat, wait until the shots wore off. The nurse with the hypo walked into the room right then.

I kept thinking of the time AB complained of an abdominal pain, and three hours after I took her to the doctor she was in the operating room, and barely survived. When the vomiting and sweats came, I took a bath, threw some clean underwear, a couple of books, and my MP3 player in my go-bag, put on a clean T-shirt, and schlepped out to the car in my house shoes and some sweat pants. 15 miles to the nearest emergency room.

An hour in the first waiting room, another hour in the second, a CAT scan, a pain shot, and "looks like you have kidney stones." Then they hustled me out the door like I was infectious.

Kidney stones, I can handle that. Not knowing was the bad part; I've known of too many people who died suddenly from burst blood vessels, burst bowels, appendicitis, and other sudden abdominal pains for it not to worry me.

Anyway, I don't see a urologist until Friday. Meanwhile, they gave me a little filter funnel to pee in, to see if it catches any stones. I guess they're little and there are a lot of them; first time the urine went right through, second time it just sits there and an occasional drop makes it through. Wonderful.

01/15/2009:

What's annoying is, from what I came across on the web, I should be in the "low risk" group for kidney stones. Ah, well, "low risk" isn't "no risk". Drat it!

01/16/2009:

The urologist gave me a pamphlet about the procedure. They put you on your back on a table and direct ultrasound at the stone. It takes half an hour or so. The pamphlet is written in PR-ese extolling the goodness of the procedure. However, reading between the lines, you'll be in the hospital all day, they'll put you under heavy anesthesia, you "might feel some discomfort", and then you'll pass gravel and blood. "Some bruising may be expected." And the doc said it only works 70 or 80 percent of the time, and sometimes it can cause blood clots. So, basically, it's pretty much the same as having someone knock you to the ground and kick you repeatedly in the kidneys. By comparison to passing a stone, that's no problem.... I was just annoyed at how artfully they tried to avoid saying it outright.

We start out with a launch sequence at Baikonur; a chapter that has no connection to the rest of the book, like a piece of another novel that got stuck in there by accident. Then we get introduced to a reporter named Kate, and many references to some previous happenings. Apparently Kate broke a story about "Wormwood", which we eventually find is a planetisimal that will collide with Earth in 500 years. Though they harp on it endlessly, it really doesn't have anything to do with the story either.

The rather thin plotline is about an industrialist who devises a way to see any other place instantly, or into the past. For some reason the whole world then absorbs itself in watching past events. Some stuff happens, some more stuff happens, and then the book sort of lurches to a halt from lack of interest. Not that I haven't ground through a lot of that sort of writing before, but it's annoying for it to come from the likes of Clarke and Baxter. And Baxter's heavy hand lies over all of it; everything he writes is depressing, and so is this.

Once I flipped the last page there was an afterword. They were kind enough to list some stories about viewing the past, and how they were inspirational in writing the novel. But the basic plot and technology were lifted straight from one of Asimov's short stories, and they didn't have the courtesy to admit it, though they listed a Bob Shaw story that is only similar if you stretch your definitions a whole lot.

Eventually I'll remember the name of Asimov's story and post it here; instead of 368 pages of irrelevant text bloat, you can get the whole thing in a dozen pages.

01/17/2009:

It has joined "The California Kid" and "Aliens" in my all-time favorite movie list.

According to others, the TV previews are highly misleading. I wouldn't know; I watched it with no idea what to expect.

Walter Kowalski spent three years in Korea and half a lifetime on a Ford assembly line. Now he's eighty years old, his wife and his friends are dead, his scumbag children are trying to put him in a nursing home, and his neighborhood has turned into a ghetto full of gooks. The country he once killed for has become something he doesn't like and can't understand. So he flies his flag from his porch, smokes his cigarettes, and coughs up blood, staring a thousand-yard stare at an alien world.

Nothing to live for. Waiting to die.

The mall ninjas on the gun boards hate the movie. The liberals hate it too. The RKBA bozoids hate it. The politically correct sling terms like "racist." And from their comments, most of them were angry because the movie wasn't what they expected, either from the trailers or because it was done by Clint Eastwood. Much of their outrage is strange enough I wonder if there's more than one movie out there with the same name. Or maybe they were so busy trying to fit it into their preconceptions they didn't have any attention left for what was actually on the screen.

Don't piss around waiting for the DVD. Take your wife and your Dad and your friends, and drive to the theater. You guys know how critical I am about movies; you'll either like it like I do, or you'll exhibit bug-eyed mall ninja outrage. But it'll be worth it either way.

01/18/2009:

Of course, one problem is, you're limited to what's out there used. On the other hand, that seems to be a pretty accurate reflection of what bookstores actually sell. And 99% of it is crap, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Anyway, I picked up something called "Poker Game" by Fletcher Knebel, a guy I'd never heard of. Printed in 1983. It was about a computer-hardware company that had developed a new hardware encryption chip, but they discovered their mainframe had been hacked and they were trying to rush it to production before pirate copies hit the market.

By 2009 standards, tame stuff. But in 1983 this was all deep tech. There was extensive discussion of the encryption chip, which brought back memories of the "Clipper chip" controversy which hit ten years after the book was written.

In one scene, the system admin is telling the CEO why they can't actually tell if their intellectual property has been stolen; copying a computer file isn't like copying something on paper. They talked about passwords and logins and basic system security, stuff that's still valid today, and why the system was connected to the ARPAnet, and about security in a networked environment.

The admin points to a printout taped to the wall and says there are over three hundred computers connected to the network, and maybe thousands of terminals...

Unfortunately the author lost his way with the story, which bogged down into trivia and got a bad case of the slows before suddenly winding to a halt. Well, at least it made sense and had a beginning and end, even if the middle was a little fuzzy. That's better than a lot of Heavily Marketed Big Name Author novels I've read in the last few years.

Hundreds of machines on the net. The mind, she boggle...

01/19/2009:

>>>  Ride a flathead Indian across Russia?

>>  Why not?

> 3 words: Toilet. Paper. Shortage.

I imagine those places had, ah, a "fragrance."

> > They often have a spigot for flushing, but TP is strictly BYO.  For many
> > Chinese the idea of actually *sitting* on the toilet is completely alien
> > and unsanitary.

Unless I had a wall to lean against, I'd be SOL in a squatter. The surgeons didn't do much of a job on my left knee, as far as I'm concerned. That's one reason I've lost interest in any car sporty enough to require me to do a one-legged deep knee bend to enter or exit.

> > In many if not most buildings so equipped the drain doesn't have a trap,
> > either, so the room tends to, uh, stink a bit.

01/20/2009:

> > Everyone was used as cannon fodder in WWI.  I find it probably the most
> > fascinating of wars, it was so badly run that it's often hard to believe
> > that everyone just didn't turn around and shoot their own leaders.

The only tactic anyone seemed to know was to charge in the face of machine-gun fire, or sit tight under artillery fire.

I think the main thing that saved the officer corps from being fragged was that they kept their troops in total ignorance of what was going on, and where. The vast majority of Americans, anyway, were farmboy draftees, who didn't know how badly they were being screwed.

After it was over the officers gave each other medals, and the vets got screwed again, at the Bonus March. Not exactly a high point in US history.

01/21/2009:

> > If you knew how many times I had the UPS for an entire shipping office shut
> > down because someone plugged in a coffee pot or small heater. . .

Old IBM desktops had the usual universal-computer-plug (there's probably a name, and specific ISO and ANSI standards for it, but damned if I know what the correct word is...) on the back, to take a standard American wall cord. There was a second, female socket beside it, which took the plug from a real IBM monitor, which was supposed to plug in to the power supply. Most people had aftermarket monitors, which used a normal wall cord.

Some of the early clones had a standard AC outlet instead of the universal outlet. One day several of us were visiting the sysop of a local BBS, who ran a Fido system off a desktop at work. We're hanging around the office and the cleaning lady comes up, plugs the vacuum cleaner into the back of his computer (his desk faced the room, and she didn't have to bend over to find a wall plug) and proceeded to vacuum. We all just stood there and looked at each other. There wasn't anything wrong with it, but I think we all had visions of someone turning on the vacuum and crashing the system...

That was back in the days when power supplies lasted about a year before they crapped out, so we were all a bit sensitive on the subject.

They'd last six or seven months on my BBS, until I cut the back of the case and power supply out and put in a 5" Rotron blower. Yeah, it was noisy, but five years later that power supply was still working...

01/22/2009:

If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.
- Turkish proverb

01/23/2009:

> Bingo ! you have just knocked out the source of 30% of your oil imports.
>
> How long will it take to bring Venezuelan oil back into production ?

The United States of America can do or take anything it wants, and there's not a damned thing any other nation or current coalition can do to stop us.

Which is why you ought to be glad that we really *are* nice people, for the most part.

Next time you start burning flags and screaming "Yankee go home!", just remember we can squash your whole country like a bug, and it wouldn't even make a blip in our national budget.

01/24/2009:

The lithotripsy procedure itself was no problem. The pulses felt like someone snapping a weak rubber band against my skin. The problem was the hard-edged metal table they kept yanking and shoving me around on, and the bad disc in my back. After fifteen minutes they asked if I wanted anything for pain; since my back felt like someone had stuck a knife into my spine, sure. They fiddled with the IV and whatever they had put in flooded my mouth with a foul taste. I imagine if I picked up a dog turd and bit off a nice chunk, it might taste like that.

When the procedure was done I was nauseous, vertiginous, and had to be helped to a wheelchair. On the way back to the outpatient recovery room I asked what painkiller they had used. Morphine. No, they aren't going to bother to read the goddamned chart. I'm badly allergic to morphine. I got an anti-nausea shot, but I spent most of the next day sick from the damned morphine.

I'm a little sore around the abdomen, as much from the shoving and yanking as the procedure, as far as I can tell. According to the urologist they successfully disintegrated the stone. I've passed six liters through the little funnel so far, and not a damned thing in there. I figured I'd see chunks of something coming through. I'll ask when I see the doc in a couple of weeks.

The bills aren't all in yet, but the lithotripsy alone was $8,222. I'm figuring around $12K total, of which I have to pay a $1K deductible and 20% copay. Yee haw. And to top it off, it seems stones may recur in the future, for no particular reason.

I brought home some nasty respiratory infection from the ER; I'm going to have to make an appointment with my regular doc for that. Emergency rooms are full of sick people, and many of them are contagious.

01/25/2009:

>> The market didn't do squat about rolling back racism for a hundred
>> > >years after the Civil War; only government intervention did (often at the
>> > >point of a bayonet, sometimes literally).

> > I believe the market would have helped this issue, however government
> > prevented it.   [deletia]

Consider the heavy marketing toward the Hispanic communities today, in both English and Spanish. Heck, here in Arkansas, I see advertising slanted toward the local Korean immigrant population, which is considerably larger than the Hispanic group.

Back when advertising and marketing were relatively expensive, it made sense to target mostly the higher earning professional whites. Now advertising is cheaper than dirt, so you can hammer your target group practically all of their waking lives - even if you don't have a TV, you can't get away from the radios in public places, billboards, web popups, and stickers and signs plastered all over anything that doesn't move fast enough to avoid it. You want to target gay Vietnamese seal hunters? Just load up the media cannon and pull the trigger.

Back years ago when I was working at a startup ISP, I spent most of a day helping a blind guy get set up on the 'net. Upper management progressed from odd looks to pointed expressions to outright irritation as I continued to take time with the customer. Finally I got called in to explain myself; they'd been giving him the bum's rush before I intercepted him on the way to the door. I explained that our offices were less than five miles from the largest school for the blind in the USA, and that the campus had thousands of students, most of them adults. I knew that because of an acquaintance who taught there. The blind are *very good* customers; generally, you only have to walk one of them through a complicated technical problem once, and then they'll teach each other. That's as good as it gets for tech support! The blind tend to patronize businesses that make things easy for them, as we all do; the time it took to get the first few set up repaid itself many times over in sales, but it took a lot of work to convince the management types that just because these people were blind, they weren't broke, and their money spent just as well as anyone else's.

01/26/2009:

> What was the first seven single you ever bought, and what was
> the first 12" LP you ever bought? (If you don't know what I'm
> talking about, piss off, 'cos you're too young.)

The first LP I bought was Boston's first album.

The first 8-track was Kiss' "Destroyer" album.

I'm not sure I ever bought any prerecorded cassettes.

The first CD was Ozzy Osbourne's "No Rest for the Wicked."

The first DVD I ever bought was the movie "Heavy Metal." I'd waited for it to come to video ever since the night I saw it at a drive-in in 1982. There were problems with the rights to the soundtrack, or something, and it never made it to VHS. When it made it to DVD in 1996 or so, I went down and bought it, and then went out and bought a DVD player to watch it with.

"Back home, I'm nobody. But here, I'm Denn!"

01/27/2009:

> ps. I too use PCL but I don't own a gun. ( no need, I've got a dick)

01/28/2009:

> Please do - I love those things. I particularly enjoy grammatical
> malapropisms (like "he is taller than I") that result from people
> employing non-existent grammar rules (or misapplying existing ones) to
> sound posh.

Not all of these textbooks agree. I ran into that moving across the country with my parents when I was a kid. "He is taller than I" is both correct and recommended in some of those books. I specifically remember this, because I got sent to the principal's office for arguing about it with a teacher who had marked "and me", as I had been taught in my previous school, as wrong.

"Standard American English" is defined by a handful of Noo Yawk textbook publishers, and is spoken by no one, including Noo Yawk textbook publishers.

Going to school in both Florida and Tennessee in the late 1960s, I was taught that "tomatoe" and "potatoe" were correct alternate spellings for "tomato" and "potato." It took me a while to realize that the media morons who were savaging Dan Quayle about that were actually serious. They were probably all Noo Yawkers, and had no clue the rest of the country might do things differently.

01/29/2009:

> I was a little kid an didn't understand it, but yes, I do remember.
> In the 50's the argument for nuclear power is it would be
> practically free, an the only costs would be maintaining the
> transmission grid.  They were also pushin the idea of a total elec house.

And hell, if they'd been allowed to build all the nuke plants they were planning, it probably would be that cheap, and we'd have our air conditioners turned down to "snow" and be tooling around in our electric cars.

However, the Evil Atom is still even eviller than the Evil Petroleum, and the whackos are still waiting for solar-powered cars. (windmills are now bad, since They Kill Birds...)

I think I'll just wait for Ed McMahon to drop off my check for ten million dollars; that's a hell of a lot more likely than the magic "energy" the nutballs think is going to happen Real Soon Now.

01/30/2009:

> Current cost of Iraq is almost $362 BILLION. I wonder how close that would
> have gotten us to Mars? Alone with all of the funds that we could have used
> all of these years.

Part of the problem, I suspect, was the policy of "for all the world." Congress likes to see *some* return on its money, either in their personal pockets, personal prestige, or occasionally even for the benefit of their constituents. The military-industrial complex that would build the hardware are already being taken care of by the Iraq funding, so there's no benefit to anyone to allocate additional money for some space thing, particularly if "all the world" is going to horn in after the US pays for it.

I would suggest a simple policy change - fuck "the world", fly to Mars, put a big American flag on it, and tell anyone who bitches to get their own planet... quick, before we take them all.

My next step would be to move the entire bureaucratic apparatus from the District of Columbia to Mars, which would greatly reduce the crime rate in various eastern states, and then we could just turn off the radios and ignore them, though we might have a party when the pressure dome over the Internal Revenue Service had an inexplicable failure...

01/31/2009:

> What should be done? Thats harder to answer for me. I fully
> believe in freedom of the press. However, helping, aiding,
> and abetting the enemy goes beyond what I believe is freedom
> of that press.

"Freedom of the press" now means "free to commit treason, to publish lies, to slander the innocent, to ruin people's lives, to print anything at all without having to submit proof or worry about legal retribution."

That's not *quite* the same thing.