• The cheap-o carnival midway I went to today was awarding silverfish instead of goldfish. #

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• #Fringe just misspelled "Manhattan" in — whatever those 3D-in-the-environment titles are called. "Manhattan". Two ts. Hard one, huh? #
• OK, so there was a reasonable-ish explanation for the misspelling. And it — S02E15 — is maybe the best episode ever. #Fringe #
• Is there an actual argument as to why US #healthcare as passed is unconstitutional? I don't get it. I'm willing to listen. #hc09 #hc10 #

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• Um … duh? RT @rationalists Attention All Women: Religion Threatens Feminism: #atheism http://wp.me/pFwns-aO #
• Torn. But I suppose there's no reason why I can't listen to #PorcupineTree and a #BertrandRussell #audiobook SIMULTANEOUSLY. #
• I wonder if the #shortform is driving English to be more #AngloSaxon and less #Latinate. #

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Since everyone was so so so awesome with the last music survey, I thought I’d press my luck.  Two survey questions:

1)  What’s your dream rock band lineup?  I suppose, “with a reasonable amount of people”, “who you expect would work well together”, and (ideally) “are still alive”.

2)  Three favorite Beatles songs?

I won’t hide my answers until people reply this time.  Answers inside.

• Why in the world would there be a 9:30 p.m. screening of Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel? Odder than its HAVING BEEN MADE. #
• I love heroism, even in stupid, stupid, STUPID shows. #Fringe #
• I heard "#ScoobyDoo movies" used as a euphemism for #porn today. What? #
• Best. Show. Ever. But drop the ball, and I'll have YOU in fucking irons. #Lost #
• Have any of you ever heard a CONSERVATIVE begin a sentence "One in «n» «demographics» is…"? #

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I’ve gotten awfully flaky about these.  Sorry about that.

The family in this song will have to wait four years for health insurance, while an effort without power politics would have gotten them coverage sooner.  Just sayin’.

Unemployable

He’s got a big gold ring which says “Jesus Saves”
And it’s dented from the punch thrown at work that day
When he smashed the metal locker where he kept his things
After the big boss said “You best be on your way”

So this life is sacrifice
Jumping trains just to survive

Well, his wife and kids asleep but he’s still awake
And his brain weighs the curse of thirty bills unpaid
Gets up, lights a cigarette he’s grown to hate
Thinking if he can’t sleep, how will he ever dream again?

So this life is sacrificed
To a stranger’s bottom line

I’ve seen the light
I’m scared alive
Nearly dead

I’ve seen the light
Still alive

So this life is sacrificed
Was a dream that had to die

I’ve seen the light
I’m scared alive
Near to death

I’ve seen the light
Scared alive
I’m here to die
Here to die

Scared alive
Here to die
Here to die
Scared of life

All Vedder Tuesday

• I came to tweet three things, and forgot them all. #
• Trying to figure out how to rescue a particular chapter of my sci-fi novel with good ideas and incompetent prose and structure. "Burn it"? #
• I saw both "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and "Mother" tonight. Hurray for dark foreign films? #

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• Much-awaited package from Britain arrived. Yay! #
• In a bitter hateful pain-spiral-accompanied funk. #FuckItAll #

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• And everyone will say "I told you so," I'll just nod and sigh; but I'll make a run at something real and they'll never even try #Cruxshadows #

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• I just wrote to someone "I don't want to throw a gear into your plans." <<sigh. dumb. late.>> #

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• Trying to decide #WhatAll to delete to put complete #BobDylan on my 120 GB #iPod.  J.R.R. #Tolkien would do it, but I don't want to. Delete. #
• Gods I love #LeavesEyes. #IrishRain #w00t! #

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• #DarioArgento can be … excessive. Extremely. Yuck. #horror #
• I just said, "Look, I'm not going to argue with you" to my *cat*. I guess I'm "that creepy cat guy" now. #
• No idea he was such a hateful nut RT @Monicks Actor Stephen Baldwin Takes Christian Indoctrination to the Xtreme http://ow.ly/1nPOB #
• Email: "March savings at the #AmnestyInternational Store! Protect human rights in a bold and stylish way!" Um — #FAIL. #
• My #caffeine tolerance is now officially 0 mg. Sucks hard for a #coffee and #tea fanboy. #
• I hope #DoubleFalsehood ISN'T #Shakespeare. That Julio speech is doggerel. "… and ran amok", yeah? http://bit.ly/cpRpVN (Anyone get that?) #
• Probably 20 mg of caffeine, and I've been diaphoretic for three hours. #Fuck. Med interactions. #
• Accidentally apropos! RT @thebardbot @clanmackay and that, I hope, is an unmeasurable distance (The Merry Wives of Windsor: ACT II, SCENE 1) #
• Yeah, wow, that mis-fire (?) of @thebardbot ended up as eloquence. Immeasurably amok indeed. Um — anyone GET the "amok" reference? #
• One more: "and", "that", "I", and "hope" all show up in my tweet. Important hint to the bot's hashing algorithm. @thebardbot: message me? #
• Not clear on the referent, but flattered anyway! RT @jcarmello @clanmackay Hahahahahaha!! Thats gonna get repeated for sure!! Really funny!! #
• Do you know #EddieIzzard and #GrahamNorton EACH dose with both coffee and white wine before shows? Hmm. There's a hint here. #
• (Yes, you guessed right, I'm hypomanic right now.) #
• I'd like to buy Morty Abzug a sandwich. A nice one. He put much coolness into #watch. #linux #unix #MortyAbzug #
• Apparently, it takes 10^10^10 hours to master and burn a #DVD in #Linux.  And 20 gigs of real estate. #
• I haven't figured out where the parentheses in 10^10^10 go yet, though.  I'll know by … some time well after I die, I suppose. #
• Second time asking, but is there an app to see the overlapping followers of two (or n) twitter accounts? If not, I gotta write one. #

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Excerpt from “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History” by Mark Morford:

Hey, kids!  Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Black people?  Back in 1800 or whenever?  They liked being slaves.  True!  Many savvy, industrious Negroes actually volunteered for that fine, desirable position.  It was a completely balanced, fair, hugely successful system, until those damn liberals came along and ruined everything.  I know, right?  What a shame.

Do you know what else?  America was wholly victorious in Vietnam.  It’s a fact!  Kicked some serious enemy butt!  Mission accomplished!  Sure it was a little bumpy for awhile, but President Nixon, that great and wronged American hero, put us on the righteous path in the end, wrapped that sucker up beautifully and made America the noble Superman to the world.  Hey, it’s the truth!  You can look it up in your history textbook!

Of course the venom is justified.  But the best use of sympathetic venom is not to curl up and let it take hold but to stand up and find the antidote.

This is not the first time the issue has crossed the mcgees.org desk.  It did 8 years ago as Texas Textbook Bonfire.  But don’t just get pissed.  Get moving.  Write letters.  Better yet, donate to almost anyone in the “Sleeve” section of the mcgees.org sidebar.

Get moving, people.  Work now, snark later.

I’m trying to get this published:

A hellish blight destroys the land.  A dude from Maine recovering from drug addiction, his much younger psychic paramour, a retarded guy, and a preternaturally wise (but overly-sexualized) 11-year-old boy — all of whom smoke like chimneys — go on a road trip to combat it.

Along the way they discover a roving band of cannibals, identifiable because they have filed teeth.  The cannibals attack them with vicious homophobic slurs that are OK because obviously Stephen King does not agree with them.  The wise boy knows it’s no good, but the retarded guy battles valiantly, killing all but the biggest cannibal, dying in the process.

The ghost of some woman the dude from Maine read a lot about appears.  So does the ghost of his ex-wife.  They begin to battle.  In the process they wound the big cannibal.

The cannibal’s guts rupture, and out pour a bucketful of lobsters.  The lobsters fall upon the dude from Maine, severing some body parts.  His paramour screams.  Then the lobsters all burst open and broods of spiders pour out.

But the wise 11-year-old has been pondering, and his cherished book, which contains Edgar Allen Poe in-jokes, holds the secret to defeat the evil ghost.  The trick is for the good ghost and the boy to drown her.  She drowns graphically.

The world, in the meantime, has largely recovered, most of the evildoers having died.  The dude from Maine and his younger love get married and go to start a family.  The boy, who has formed a weird father relationship with the Maine dude, stays anyway to think about his fate, evoking one last goodbye from the good ghost, who fades with a whisper.

(So, what did I forget?  The rule is that every trope has to have occurred at least twice in the canon.)

Until recently, my maternal grandfather raised chickens.  Niall loved collecting the eggs when we visited.  He would go from nest to nest to gather them, and put them in a basket.

Walking back to the house, he stumbled and barely recovered.  My mouth was open to say “maybe we shouldn’t put all the eggs in one basket”, and then thought Oh.  Huh.  That’s where that comes from.

[title reference]

Awake since ten minutes before the earthquake.  Suggestive, yes?  Likely random.

Listening to iPod shuffle.  The Doors, The Mountain Goats, Candlebox, They Might Be Giants, Flowing Tears, and Ace of Base have shown up.  And rocking the (legal) hallucinogens.  Good times.  Maybe back to sleep.  After I net the faeries for future pressing.

Let’s see how well my HTML renders sleep-deprived and spacey.

Niall story.  Nonna (my mom) asked Niall to read her the cornbread recipe aloud:

“One pee kay gee Jiffy corn muffin mix.  One egg.  One slash three cup milk.  Preheat oven to four hundred little circle high up.”

Niall story:

Niall:  What nut did you tell me you were allergic to, Daddy?

Joshua:  I’m not allergic to nuts.

Niall:  Which one did you tell me?

Joshua:  I’m not allergic to any nuts, Niall.  Why would I tell you I was allergic to nuts if I’m not?

Niall:  It was walnuts, right?

Joshua:  No.  You’re thinking of someone else.

Niall:  Oh, that’s right!  Cashews!

Joshua:  Niall, it’s wasn’t me.

Niall:  I’m pretty sure it was.  You told me you were allergic to walnuts.

Joshua:  People can be sure and wrong, Niall.

Niall:  [thinks]

Joshua:  Did you know that?  That someone can be sure and wrong?

Niall:  Yes.  [pause]  I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.  We’re going to have a nut-eating contest.  It’s like a pie-eating contest.  I’ll take all the kind of nuts, and you can eat them and see if you’re allergic to them.  So if you’re allergic, you should say so before the nut-eating contest.

Joshua:  I’m not allergic, Niall.

Niall:  OK, we’ll see if you’re allergic to any of them.  If you are allergic to any of them, I’ll give you a glass of water.  There will be lots of water.

• Friends say it's darkest before the sun rises. Pretty sure they're all wrong. #MountainGoats #

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Missed a week.  Maybe back on track.

You have no clue how hard it was to pick a song like this today.

Down

Down
Fell by the wayside
No getting out

Down
Cry me a river
Dried up and damned

The names can be changed
But the place is still the same

I am loaded, told that all’s for naught
Holds me down

Rise
Life is in motion
I’m stuck in line

Rise
You can’t be neutral
On a moving train

One day the symptoms fade
Think I’ll throw these fucking pills away

And if hope could grow from dirt like me
It can be done

Won’t let the light escape from me!
Won’t let the darkness swallow me!

Fuck Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Fuck him, fuck everything he stands for, and fuck the Hummer he rode in.  But I won’t let the darkness swallow me.  I’ll make it through this year if it kills me.

All Vedder Tuesday

It may be good for my mental health to listen to something other than The Mountain Goats for a while.

“I hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us.  I hope we come up with a failsafe plot to piss of the dumb few that forgave us … I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow; I hope it bleeds all day long.  Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises.  We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong … I am drowning.  There is no sign of land.”

Checking my email just now, I have new messages from Amnesty International, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, three different NPR mailing lists, the Center for Inquiry, Think Atheist, Pearl Jam, and the eBacchus wine site.  I am such a fucking cliché.

• I made a smart-ass joke yesterday about "They're both still alive?!" about The Two Coreys. Corey Haim died today, and I feel like a jerk. #

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• #Ubuntu just provided an "Important security update" to *sudo*. Not cool. Not something you want vulnerable. Buffer overflow? I hate #c.   #

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In France, youth binge drinking (15 – 25 year olds) is experiencing a major rise.  A proposed solution?  Give university students wine tastings in lunch cafeterias to teach them how to respect and enjoy wine.  “Why is there sexual education and not viticultural education? You can learn wine too.”  This is being supported by a well-known gastronome and a former director of the Sorbonne.

Actually, that’s a very very French solution, yes?

This weekend I’ll be finding out if I can boot a Powerbook off a USB flash drive with a bootable FAT32 primary partition that’s an Ubuntu live CD running VirtualBox with a Windows XP disk image.  The end result of that would be running Windows on a Mac, but I have no idea if that will work.  I don’t even know what the hard/impossible step(s) might be.  Something something x86 instruction set something something hardware abstraction layer something something I have no idea what I’m talking about something something laser beams.

• Anyone else feel that a hard-boiled #egg is more filling than a scrambled egg?  Why would that be? Just water content? #
• Sob story: 120GB #iPod, only 8GB left, and that's only studio albums; no #concert recordings. 120GB is apparently only 314 days of music.   #
• In related #iPod woes, what do I now do with >100kg of #CDs? Can't ethically sell them, can't logistically store them, & hate trashing them. #
• With #Amazon's new "Media Library", their exhaustive record of my purchases goes back to *1999*. Not sure I like that. #
• is so fucking mad right now that he feels like throwing up and can't even be distracted by junk food TV on Hulu. I hate people. All of them. #
• .@tallyhall Los Angeles please. #TallyHall #
• RT @AtheistHitSquad Waterproof? http://ow.ly/1e0ll (This argument NEVER OCCURRED TO ME, and I feel really dumb now.) #
• #Tangerinegate http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/comedy/2010/03/tangerinegate-by-robert-popper.shtml #
• has now chilled out, having immersed himself in dumb Twitter memes, attempts at cleverness, and mockery of theists for half an hour. #

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• If any of my #Facebook friends receive money solicitations, they are from a hacker, not me. (mcgees.org on FB) #
• Given that the Web really is [mb]illions of monkeys on equivalent keyboards, how long until we get our own Hamlet? (Probably not new joke?) #

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My Facebook account was attacked in a method detailed in this online story.  Except, in my case, my password and email address were not changed — although they should have been.

If you hear of a Facebook friend in London without a penny, take a moment to check their story — it’s most likely a scam that’s seeped into the social network … Facebook user accounts have been hacked, opening them up to scammers who then use it to send live chat messages to their friends asking for help…

The messages claimed the person was “on a trip to London, but had been mugged, and was now marooned without passport or cash somewhere in North London”.

I was able to change my password, log off, log in again, and post a message to my peeps that the hacker was not me.

Now FB has disabled my account, presumably to make sure everything is fixed, as the story linked to above mentions.  This means that, most likely, that Facebook is either monitoring IPs or IMs.

Have I mentioned how much I fucking hate Facebook?

• People who use "#herbal" and "#homeopathic" interchangeably frustrate me. That's like confusing "Prozac" and "distilled water". #
• Watching Polish subtitles again. Line: "… Nobel prize for jerk-offs." HAD to learn this. Translation: draństwo. Round-trip: meanness.   #

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