I received an amusing spam today from an email address based at gmail-is-too-creepy.com in my Gmail account.
I’ll bet that “kvfmdtmb” didn’t know that I have all of my email forwarded to Gmail, but he/she/it still should be careful because “Gmail is nearly immortal!” Don’t worry “kvfmdtmb,” your crap is “Spam.”
I went to Mass in the university chapel last night, and while it’s generally a nice little space, some seats don’t have kneelers. So long story short, I pay $30K a year to go to school and I had to kneel on the floor. How’s that for a lesson in humility?
“I am, as far as I can tell, more or less a centrist, equally repelled by either extreme of the political spectrum. Indeed, I believe that the spectrum forms a full circle, with right and left merging, as they meet at their respective extremes, into luminous batshit evil.”
“You may have wondered why Cheez Whiz is called ‘Cheez Whiz’ instead of, say, ‘Cheese Whise.’ I sure haven’t, but God knows what’s going on in that head of yours. Well, there is a reason: truth in labeling. Cheez Whiz shares many of the same characteristics of real cheese, such as, uh, it’s orange, and I suppose you can eat it, if you’re into that sort of thing. But, as it isn’t actually actual cheese by any meaningful definition, or, more importantly, by the FDA definition, the good people at Kraft call it ‘Cheez,’ and don’t get sued. I don’t know what the ‘Whiz’ bit is all about. You can look it up yourself if it’s so damned important to you. I’m not your slave.
I bring this up because I think this is something that could be applied outside the food business. Take television. Now, a lot of people get upset about FOX News, because it isn’t really like other TV news. When you turn on the TV to watch the news, you expect to see some sort of clean-cut, professional-looking, middle-aged eunuch telling you more-or-less the important things that happened today. What you do not expect to see is Brit Hume bobbling his 50 tons of mutant head-flesh around, nor do you expect to hear the queer and implausible stories which emanate therefrom. You don’t expect that, nor should you, but there you are. But wouldn’t the whole problem be solved if FOX News just changed its name to ‘FOX Nooz?’ It’s not ‘news’ proper, but it’s vaguely news-ish, it has some newsy bits, and is even occasionally mistaken for real news. But it’s not ‘news,’ it’s ‘nooz.’ Different thing. So you have nothing to complain about anymore.
by The Poor Man [via Dead Parrot Society]
I wanted to add a little John Kerry button to this site, but I didn’t like the downloads at the official site. And what kind of web designer recommends using an iframe for an image anyway? So I made my own John Kerry button!
I used the flag from the official Kerry/Edwards images and added it to a button I made using the Kalsey Button Maker. I Photoshopped the two into one image, and voila! An attractive button to promote John Kerry for President. Just save the button, upload it to your website, and add the following bit of code to your page:
<div><a href="http://www.johnkerry.com/" title="Vote John Kerry for President"><img src="votekerry.gif" alt="Vote Kerry" width="80" height="15" /></a></div>
If you’re using the button, just leave a little comment to let me know—I’m curious to see where the button shows up. Thanks!
“And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam Hussein worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait [in 1991], but also when the president made the decision that we’d achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq…”
Dick Cheney, 1992 [via Matt]
Like 50 million other Americans, I watched the first presidential debate between George W. Bush and John F. Kerry on TV last night. I did not expect to hear any new platforms or any real debate between the candidates, considering the 30 pages of debate guidelines established by the two parties. Despite the inhibiting debate structure, I was really struck by the way Bush and Kerry contrasted when placed next to each other.
While both candidates stuck closely to previous statements, it was John Kerry who succeeded in articulating his stance on North Korea (initiate bilateral talks), the war in Iraq (focus efforts on training new Iraqi forces), and what he plans to do on the international stage (reestablish the ties that Bush destroyed). Dubbya only managed to stutter and fumble around for responses to several of Kerry’s pointed remarks while repeating his trademark talking points nearly every time he spoke. Although, Bush does get the points for making the more amusing facial expressions while his opponent was speaking; some were just beyond description.
Before the debate, I was one of the many voters that belonged to the “Anybody but Bush” party, but last night convinced me that John Kerry will be a better president than George Bush. At the very least, he doesn’t sound like a moron.
I just want to state that this will mark a new direction for this site. I attempted to record every aspect of my day, week, or month in past efforts. The end result was that my weblog was a mixture of three-week recaps and short essays. It didn’t have any real personality or cohesion. I want to try something very different now.
Rather than bombard you with every boring detail of my life or hit you with stale news briefs, I want to distill my daily experiences, readings, and ideas into highly-focused snapshots. Ocasionally, I’m bound to wander off the intended course, but I will try my best to refocus myself quickly. Also, I want to bring back the links I used to post in the sidebar. These snippets will usually focus on some website or article that I found interesting enough to share. These will be more frequent than the longer entries. I think that’s enough to restart.
