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I’m pretty sure that I know where I left it, but it is not here, so: Google Chat, email, Skype, whatever. But I won’t be answering my phone.
Since this incarnation of bachelorhood, I have felt not so much bachelor as vaguely pathetic. But tonight, I am relaxing with horror DVDs and TV dinners, watching with headphones on a computer monitor I needn’t share, with a drink, on the sofa. All I need now is to loosen my belt and belch — that, and pretend I’m drinking Pabst and not a mimosa.
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Frequently atheist arguments, when simplified enough for a blog post, end up squarely in “Shut up, you’re not helping” territory. And despite several misfires, I would recommend “It’s no mystery how Nonbelievers stay moral without God”, if only for the presentation of a false syllogism that seems to explain the believer’s logic:
1. If God does not exist, then there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail.
2. If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful.
3. If there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful, then people cannot be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
4. People should be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
Therefore,
[5]. God exists.
In these situations, I am often struck with the idea that I must be completely missing some subtlety — the conviction that in the argument, surely one of us is being a moron. But the justifications for faith really do seem pervasively fear-based. I run up against “If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful” all the time. My response is, “So?!” What bearing has an idea’s ability to comfort have on an existential claim?
I must — must — be missing something. I know there are several devoted readers of my blog of an Abrahamic bent, and I would be indebted for an explication.
The reflexive claim of religionists seems frequently to be “without the fear of damnation, I surely would rape, torture, steal, and murder.” Really? Seriously, have you thought this through? If it is only the fear of divine retribution that keeps you from commiting atrocities, would you be so kind as to stay the fuck away from me and my child? Or, at the very least, comment on this post?
Let me introduce you to Joose: a 700 ml can of a 9.9% alcohol concoction loaded with copious amounts of taurine, caffeine, and other fun stuff usually found in Monster Drinks. Let me save you the math and tell you that this is equivalent to three cans of Red Bull and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with, it appears, benzene, xylene, and embalming fluid added.
A day late for Towel Day, I observe with equal parts glee, horror, and pain that this drink appears to be the closest legal thing to a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. I feel like my head has been bronzed, wrapped in a smelly wet towel, and hit repeatedly with both sides of a cross-peen hammer. I wasn’t aware there were any beverages that gave you a hangover before you got to enjoy them.
Any or all of the preceding links may offend you with Flash animations, infect you with malware, or cause vermin to crawl out of your computer vents. Normally I’d vet that kind of thing for you, but I need to go lie down somewhere dark and quiet for the next week.
Overnight — literally, as far as I can tell — the PageRank of this site plummeted from ’4′ to ’2′. The latter is likely to be more accurate, but I had gotten used to the approbation of Google.
If Mika were still around, I would suspect her of going online while I slept, hacking into websites and deleting links to mcgees.org (she did, after all, send my secret guacamole ingredients to Alton Brown.) But, alas, she is not, and I am left puzzled.
Have I really not blogged about Nataly Dawn?
Dave turned me on to Pamplamoose, a collaboration between Ms. Dawn and Jack Conte (I still think Beat the Horse is their best.)
She is categorized as — self-categorizes as? — “independent”, which is as useful to me, taxonomically, as a section of the yellow pages devoted to “Limited Liability Partnerships”. But do explore: it’s highly rewarding. If you want to transition with something potentially familiar, here she is with a radio song, which she describes as “a social experiment … to find out what would happen if I wore eye-liner and sang a White Stripes cover.”
That sort of extreme self-awareness is the source of this post’s title, the immediate raison d’etre of this post. It’s from the introduction to her new videosong, an arrangement of a sixteenth-century French-language sonnet in the mold of Carla Bruni. She provides a translation in the sidebar — a translation of sorts, in that the way a modern French speaker would translate “Baise m’encore” has changed a bit over 400 years (you’re going to have to either trust me or go ask your mom.)
You can expect truth from the Boston PD in the case of zombie attacks. I had been wondering.
“PD” stands for “Police Department”. If you are the petrified parent of a teenager (tweenie?) and need help with more difficult ones such as “FMLTWIA” or why your kid always types “PIR” at lightspeed when you enter the room, look no further than Fox for assistance.
[link]
2003: Open a pack of Magic: The Gathering‘s set Portal: Three Kingdoms and find an Imperial Recruiter.
2005: Think about selling said card. Check value: $2 – $3. “This is breakable,” I think. “I’m going to hold on to it.”
2007: Think about selling said card. Check value: $2 – $3. “This is still breakable,” I think. “I’m going to hold on to it.”
2009: Think once more about selling said card. Check value: $86 – $130.
I guess someone broke it. I think I’ll sell it now.
Many — most? — know The Llama Song (Flash, audio, no automatic start)
And maybe a bit dated, but doesn’t “Barack Obama” flow off the tongue just as well? (Flash, audio, automatic start)
Maxim‘s Top 10 Hottest Women, 2009 edition, in ascending order by age:
And Akerman? We’re “close enough in age that [we] could not be siblings”.
As for weird and archaic standards — what would the corresponding list be for men, and would there be anyone younger than I on the list?
From a survey site:
In order to ensure quality survey results, our system has built-in checks that evaluate the quality of responses and the length of time our panelists take to respond to a survey. The lack of quality and/or short response times suggest that you have not read the questions thoroughly enough to provide thoughtful responses. Thus, we regret to inform you that your participation in this study is no longer necessary.
I guess I’ll pretend to be less skilled at thought and keyboarding if I want my cookie next time.
Here’s a weird one from the US Postal Service.
If you want the signature of someone to prove a letter was delivered, the minimum cost is $4.34, for a 1 oz. letter, as of this writing. According to the DMM, a letter must conform to certain characteristics, including a thickness “not more … than 1/4 inch”.
A piece of mail that is “not less … than 1/4 inch thick” is automatically a package, even if it’s in a normal envelope (presumably a mailpiece exactly 1/4 inch thick could go as either, although to what accuracy the measurement is required is not defined.) Now, a service called “Signature ConfirmationTM” is available for packages. A 1 oz. package can be sent with electronic Signature Confirmation for $2.40, or 45% less than a letter. The trick? Add a single packing “peanut” to the envelope. I learned this trick from a games dealer.
I’ve gotten into the habit of using Signature Confirmation for anything of reasonable importance, from shady rebates to returns of $400 hardware.
Income taxes fall into this range for me.
I sent a suitably-padded envelope of my California state taxes to the Franchise Tax Board with Signature Confirmation. Signature Confirmation is trackable at usps.com. Try my package: 4209 4240 9121 8052 1368 3160 5043 59. It gets “Processed through Sort Facility, April 16, 2009, 8:41 pm, SACRAMENTO, CA 95834″ and then — poof! — it’s gone.
This is where I learn the awesome fact that the USPS only guarantees delivery for Express Mail. The other services entail, I guess, delivery at their discretion. Like, if they’re not too busy or something.
I have a copy of my state taxes (electronic) — I plan to print out another, enclose a cover letter, a printout of the tracking information, and send it in, also with Signature Confirmation. I could, you know, spend $19.80 to send it Express Mail this time. Then they would “guarantee delivery”. Then, hey! If they lost it that time, I might get my twenty bucks back!
Problem: Attempt to watch Dollhouse
Attempted solution: Visit Fox On Demand
Result:
We’re sorry, but only the following operating systems are supported at this time: * Windows XP or Vista
* Mac OS X 10.3 or greater
I’ve been burned before by lack of backups.
Everybody has.
I’m more disciplined now. I back up everything.
Everything I can afford to.
My hugeish drive just died. It was first reported as failed reads. Then, a corrupt superblock. Now the IDE controller won’t even recognize it. I would have backed it up if I could afford another drive of equal or greater capacity.
Motherfucking son of a syphilitic whore.
All my ripped music (500 CDs), my stamp catalogues, my audiobooks (including the one I’m in the middle of), and my backups of all my other drives, including ones I don’t even have any longer.
Solid. State. Drives. Now.
“Hey, little boy! My sense of decency has run off with my sanity. Would you like to get into the back of my van and help me find them?”
Also: The response “No Comment”, when it comes to mind-raping children, should be a felony.
I find profound, ephemeral beauty in elaborate sand castles that will eventually be consumed by the tides. I find profound, ephemeral beauty in dul-tson-kyil-khor. I am left puzzled and dumbfounded by a 3-D AT-AT cake that takes 60 hours to sculpt.
(mcgees.org’s 1200th post)
It is startling, the degree to which President Obama manages to be pitch-perfect all the time (OK, almost.) Even with great writers, his delivery at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, linked to above, is impossibly adept. Compare this with professional comic Wanda Sykes‘s sharp-intake-of-breath-inducing material. If Bush’s slide-show of his failing to find WMDs under tables and behind furniture was nauseating at the time, it is even more stark and hideous when compared to our current President’s remarks.
So while I laughed at the President’s self-effacing lines (“In the next 100 days, I will strongly consider losing my cool”), I thought the point would be over-stretched in Salon’s Obama is Spock — Salon just being Salon. And while I found the article, at times, wince-inducing with its metaphors, it is hard to resist an article that quotes a famous MIT figure that both are people who can “bitch slap you with [their] brain[s]“, Obama himself as saying “Issues are never simple“, and (OK, this one is pretty sketchy) a comparison of the Obama cabinet to the Enterprise crew. Read (or plod) through it, though: the payoff involves Leonard Nimoy, a sardonically-Vulcan observation, and a certain famous split-fingered gesture.
(OK, here’s another one for my youngish, hetero, male readers who are not at work. Others need not click.)
Eliza Dushku on nude scenes: “You have a better chance of seeing God than me naked.”
So, um, yeah.
Oh, and, yeah: The Alphabet Killer (2008) (two more).
(Yes, I know I’m posting like I’m fourteen. I told you you needn’t click.)
Given a choice between a free subscription to Popular Science that I’ll never get around to reading and a free subscription to Smithsonian that I’ll never get around to reading, which should I choose? I haven’t read either in more than a decade.
OK, even if you don’t usually follow video links, really check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWRyj5cHIQA
The skill of modern DJs with remixes and mash-ups seems literally infinite. Their willingness to undertake projects is just as baffling. How many hours — days — weeks — is it between “Wouldn’t it be funny if…?” to “Here it is!”? If it really is just a couple of hours, where did they get that kind of skill?
Note: Not Safe For Brains
Do read the comments.
Here’s one way to get me to click on your ad:
The shirts are crazily overpriced, which is sad, because, in addition to that one above, tons of them are fantastic, including ones depicting an argument between mathematical constants, consoling a dwarf planet, featuring friendly crocodilians parting, helping panhandle for a Montoyan cause, and trying a weirdly-semantic pickup line.
No kickback and, as I said, ridiculously overpriced. Still tons of fun to browse.
Passing the Torch — contributions still courted. Advertisers, heads-up: the page gets shloads of traffic.
After my discovery that notebook PCs cannot swim, followed by difficulties with the power regulation in the outlet I was using at home, followed by buying a new PC, followed by that PC being stolen from my truck, followed by getting a new PC donated from a good friend, followed with tons of compatibility problems with Ubuntu, followed by the running of the bulls in Pamploma, followed by assorted escapades involving peanut brittle, Daniel Boone, and a titmouse named “Slinky”, I am back online, albeit with a really lousy video card, and shuffling through all my accumulated emails.
Your patience is appreciated or, failing that, please resend urgent messages if I didn’t respond the first time.
Worst. Definition. Ever.
assignation, sense 2, The New Oxford American Dictionary: the allocation or attribution of someone or something as belonging to something.
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