Recently in Rantings And Ravings Category

It's been hard to avoid hearing about the Fannie-Mae/Freddie-Mac debacle, and how our congresscritters are planning to bail them out. "It'll be the end of the world" they say, "too big to be allowed to fail," they say.

I say horseshit.

There was a wonderful quote on NPR this morning which talked about the inherent impropriety of corporations where you have "Privatized profits and socialized losses."

If we -- you and I the American taxpayers -- are going to be bailing out these two giants, who've been passing along corporate profits to shareholders for years instead of building up the capital reserves they needed then the shareholder interests are immediately forfeit.

But in reality. I'm all in favor of letting them fail. Yeah, it might have some repercussions. Yeah, the corporations in question will crap themselves hard and all that. But how many private entities are we -- the voting taxpayer -- going to allow to make really really phenomenally stupid business decisions, and then have us pick up the tab for them? We do it with the airlines, we've been doing it left and right with mortgage companies, and now we're talking about doing it to the tune of billions of dollars.

No. You made your bed, now lie in it. And maybe the next generation of investors will learn to research better when they invest their money in companies with unsound business practices.

CBS really needs to learn what every other broadcast network has learned:

• Live sporting events always run long
• The programming which follows live sporting events should be "flexible" in its timing... give that time to the affiliates for their local news, for example.
• If you're not going to make it flexible timing, then you certainly don't do your season premiere episodes soon enough after the overrun slot that you can't have stolen back the time from the commercial sponsors

As we sat down to watch our TiVo'ed copy of this season's premiere of Amazing Race, we realized that the first thirty minutes of the time slot was us watching some crappy 60 Minutes episode we didn't give a wet slap about. We were still in the 9pm-10pm time-slot when we noticed this, and nothing else had started recording, so we were able to quickly tell the TiVo to grab "whatever is on CBS from 9-10", and it grabbed everything starting at the beginning of the 30-minute live-window, from 9:07-9:37pm, but seriously, if we had decided to watch it like the next day, I'd have been pissed. (Heck, we already were a bit pissed, we missed seven minutes of footage of them traipsing about Ireland, and we'd been sort of curious to see if they went anywhere we did).

What adds insult to injury is that if CBS had "Clue One", they'd butcher their live 60 Minutes airing... it's fucking 60 Minutes... it's a whole series of 15-minute news pieces. Here's an idea, if the fucking NFL broadcast is running 30 minutes over -- chop two pieces out of the 60 Minutes episode and air them NEXT week. I mean seriously, we're not talking Quantum Mechanics here. You've got a program that you can slice up into manageable time-slices. Tell the on-air talent for the football broadcast "Get us to the nearest quarter hour", and then show however many segments from 60 Minutes are appropriate. If you insist that "60 Minutes" live up to its name, don't air it right after a live sporting event that you know will always run late!!!

Seriously, if I can sort this out, and I'm not in television professionally, you'd think that people who get paid to do it for a living would catch a ride on the Clue Bus.

If your "field test" can't tell the difference between methamphetamine and cat urine, then maybe it's time to scrap that field test. And maybe you shouldn't hold someone in jail for nearly two months while you sort out how brain-dead your field test is.

Via Reason: Hit & Run:

This is what happens when you try to videotape your neighbor's warrantless search and arrest in Portland:

The moral to the story? I'm not sure... but the complete and total abuse of force by the State (see previous post on Blackwater, see the "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" kid a week or two ago) are starting to get more and more common.

It's worth pointing out, at the very least, that these sorts of abuses of authority, attacks on civilians by the ruling powers-that-be, attempts to control foreign lands, etc., were pretty prevalent in the late eighteenth century. And it didn't turn out so well for the bastards, then, either.

I'm not, at all, advocating violent overthrow of the government (that, my friends, would be a crime). However, I'm not ashamed or afraid to predict it. Neither party has a great track record on this front (the Red Team has Iraq, the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo Concentration Camp X-Ray... the Blue Team had Waco, Ruby Ridge, and others), so don't look to "the 2008 Election Cycle" to solve all your problems. It's not going to.

It's going to come down to, eventually, the population getting seriously pissed off at its leaders in both parties, and voting the bastards out whenever they try that crap, or it's going to come to an American Revolution style showdown... and the verdict really isn't in, for me, as to which outcome is more likely.

(Title is a reference to the paint job on the Decepticon "police-car" named Barricade from the Transformers movie)

Take this situation from my old home town...

A sixth grade boy asks a fellow sixth-grade girl to go out. Girl's ex-boyfriend, and five other sixth-graders, hatch a plot to literally slash the boy's throat. They build little weapons out of the blades from pencil sharpeners and come up with a whole plan to isolate him from other people, surround him, and then slice his throat open to kill him.

The kids are suspended, put on trial, get probation essentially (WTF on the judicial system there), but then -- are sent right back to school with their fellow students the following fall (now).

The victim is positively scared to go to school. Go figure. He's going to private school now. Who's paying for it? His own parents, because the school district insists there's no danger. Other parents are scared for their kids' lives, and those kids are scared to go to school as well. No fucking shit, man, especially since they're too young to be allowed to carry concealed for self-defense. *grin*

What amazes me about all of this is how fucked up the priorities of school districts are.... You don't have to hunt hard to find stories of kids who were sent-home, suspended, or expelled, because their attire was "disruptive to the educational process" (read there, "it annoyed the old people"). Never mind that 99% of their fellow students probably wouldn't even have noticed or cared, it was disruptive, damn it.

But students having a real, legitimate, founded, fear for their lives from their psychotic fellow students? No, that's not disruptive! Those psycho-kids have, and I quote from the article:

[Superintendent] Rhau said the children involved in the plot deserve an education and a chance to move on with their lives.

How come that logic doesn't apply to those kids who occasionally have a piece of profanity on their shirt? Or wear some shirt that's got divisive political speech on it? Seriously, if the educational process is so important, so sacrosanct, that conspiracy-to-commit-murder can't be allowed to interfere with it, then someone needs to explain to me how a shirt that says "Meet me at 4:20", or "Impeach Bush", or even "Fuck The Police" is somehow fair game for denying the educational process to a kid.

If you ever needed concrete proof that the public school system is simply fucked up beyond repair and needs dissolution, this is it.

(Contact Info: Richard Rhau, Superintendent, 845-247-6500)

Via IMDB News, although I'm sure it's just a feed from somewhere:

The Snickers ad that ran during last month's Super Bowl in which two mechanics munching at each end of a candy bar end up mouth to mouth and then register their disgust, offended not only gays but also religious conservatives, it turns out. The Smoking Gun website on Monday posted numerous complaints filed with the FCC over the ad. One wrote of feeling "violated" by the ad, writing "God knows, I didn't turn on the superbowl [sic] expecting to be tricked into watching gay sex." Another wrote that the spot violated "our religious beliefs and exposes our children to obscene and disgusting material they are taught are wrong." Other letter writers complained about Prince's performance during halftime likening it to gay porn. In all, the FCC received about 150 complaints about the telecast -- a far cry from the tens of thousands of letters that rained down on the commission in the wake of the Janet Jackson "Nipplegate" scandal three years ago.

First, is this the best the homophobic right has to send to do battle for television decency? People who can't differentiate between "two clearly straight men who accidentally kiss" and "gay sex"?

I understand that it's been previously established as a matter of law that "oral sex is sex", but I'm not aware of anyone anywhere in the world that categorizes "kissing" as "oral sex". If the ultraconservative freakazoids who write the FCC do, well, seriously, I'm forced to wonder if their significant others are really all that satisfied.

And, what the hell, dude? A commercial spot "violated your religious beliefs"?!!? Christ, every Sunday morning I see hours upon hours of programming which "violates my religious beliefs". I think that talking about a guy nailed to two boards up on a hill is disgusting, and I don't think children should be exposed to that kind of graphic imagery on television every Sunday morning, but you don't see me writing the FCC about it. What I do is change the fucking channel.

But now I'm actually seriously considering surfing the web every Sunday morning, and pointing out every time I see the use of a crucifix with some guy nailed to it and say "Hey, man, that type of torture is R-rated level material! Get that shit into the late-night hours where kids can't see it!" You should too. Let's start a letter-writing campaign to get the graphic imagery, and the shows which "violate our religious views" out of Sunday morning television. Put that crap on cable where it belongs: CNJN - Conservative Nut Job Network

As I commented to D last night, "I love the Grammy awards. They're an excellent reminder to me each year of how much I loathe and despise the state of the music industry."

Of all the live performances, there were really only two that I liked: Gnarls Barkley's rendition of Crazy, and the opening song by the Satan-Is-Now-Ice-Skating-To-Work Reunion of The Police.

Now, what clinched it for me -- what burned into my heart an absolute hatred for all things Grammy -- is the fact that they were only given a one-song set. Carrie Underwood? Three songs for her -- hell there was about fifteen minutes there where it stopped being an award show and just became a Carrie Underwood/Rascal Flatts concert night. Mind you that there's no evidence Ms. Underwood will have any kind of long-term staying power, she could be flash-in-the-pan gone in two years. Who knows?

Justin Timberlake? Yeah, he was on for three songs. I understand that the Boy Band Refugee is all the hip rage these days, but c'mon. Did we really need three songs by him?

Oh, and the clincher? "Whoever that random chick off the fucking street was"? Yeah, she got TWO fucking songs. Yeah, that's right. Some no-talent assclown off the fucking street got to do more songs than a reunion of The Police. What the fuck is that about? Some chick who - literally - the only people who know her name are her family gets more airtime than a band who literally defined music for part of a decade?

I wanted to walk away and go do something - anything - on the computer for hours, but I sat through hours of tripe hoping beyond hope that, well, since they're bringing performers back later in the evening (Justin and Mary J. Blige both did "repeat performances" hours after their original stint), that maybe they would close with some Police tunes or something. But, nope, no love for the Police.

So, that's it. I'm done. Next year, I'll just let D watch them on her own. Fuck 'em.

tv.yahoo.com has been one of the few Yahoo services that they had left well-enough alone with. The front page UI had some basic information, a schedule-grid for most of the major-networks for the prime-time period, and was an excellent resource for just going there "quick to see what's on TV tonight."

But, like all things Yahoo that don't completely suck, they're not content if they're not ruining it, so some product designers got their hands on it, and now if you go there, you will get "Yahoo!TV Beta". Unlike with Yahoo!Mail and others, though, there's no way to say "Let me continue to use the non-suck-ass interface as long as possible please."

What are the specific complaints?

1. The front-page no longer has a really convenient schedule grid.

   It used to have a prime-time schedule grid, in static HTML, that was infinitely useful. Wanted to see what was on for the entire prime-time window on the major networks? You don't even have to sign in, it's just right there -- useful. Now, you get this ... abomination... that only shows you like 90 minutes worth of TV, and instead of prominent placement "above-the-fold" where it's useful, it's buried down on the second page of the site so you have to go looking for it. Very un-useful.

   
   

2. The Ajax interface to the "regular" listings page is retarded.

   Alright, so let's go look at the "big grid", customized to my needs...

   

   This is after I've slid the little pointer-thing to something that "looks close" to what I want. So it'll start at 9:00. However, 8-9pm is in prime-time. Can I slide that bar back just a smidge so it'll show me 8-11pm instead of 9-midnight? Short Answer: Nope. The granularity appears to be that the shortest move to the left that I can achieve will move the bar so that the window shows 6-9pm. In other words, because they want it all to just be nice clean "three hour window segments", they've completely gimped the interface so that it's impossible to see "prime-time". Also, you can't easily even see "what's coming on from now forward?" For example, right now it's 8:10 in the morning. What do I see on the screen?

   

   Yeah, because I care so much about what was on from 6-8 that it I would gladly give up the ability to see what's coming up in order to know what I already missed. And, again, like primetime, if I'd like to see "from 8am-11am", I'm shit outta luck.

   Wanna know what's going to be on when you get home at 4:30 this afternoon? Yeah, you're shit outta luck, too. Have fun hopping back and forth left and right in their interface.
   

Anyone got any suggestions for places a guy can go to answer the simple question "what's on TV tonight?" without having to leap through stupid hoops to get the useful data?

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer has an article which says:

"In the last two days, we have taken a dozen baked pies," he said.

Pie filling apparently is banned from carry-on luggage, too. But the pies didn't go to waste. They were taken to the airport's United Service Organizations lounge, where soldiers passing through can relax and eat.

Wow... where to begin?

First, if the pies are so dangerous, and might be a threat, why aren't they being destroyed in a secure facility?

Second, if you're going to feed them to anyone, why would it be the soldiers? I mean, after all, aren't they the ones you should be shielding from this extremely hazardous threat?

Personally, I think it looks a lot like the following, teeny-tiny minor little clause to the Constitution has been violated:

Amendment V - ... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation ...

Seems to me that by confiscating them -- and then using them as a food product for other people (e.g., consumption by others, as opposed to simple destruction) -- the private property has been taken for public use, and everyone who had a pie taken in Cleveland airport is due a check for the fair market value of the pies.

... so I could fire them if they didn't show up to work on Monday.

I just wish they'd stop calling it "A Day Without Immigrants", since they're trying to also sucker American "supporters" and students to join in.

Why are they doing that? Because the ones we'll really miss are the ones who are here legally, doing really productive work and making good on the American dream -- legally.

Nobody will notice if some shit-job doesn't get done for a day, and that "nobody noticing" doesn't make for good headlines.

As seen on JWZ's blog:

Seriously... maybe, just maybe, it's time to kick the entire public education system to the curb, when we have an excellent student, a straight-A student, a student who is pretty much what every teacher shows up in the fall hoping that they'll catch a glimpse of let alone teach... when such a student is thrown into suspension because her highlights are a little too red.

And seriously, look at that picture. Do you think those highlights are anything that could be considered "distracting"? The fuckwits in Marshall, Missouri think so:

An administrator at Bueker Middle School said the girl's red highlights were distracting to other students.

School officials said there is a rule at Bueker that hairstyles that are distracting to the educational process are not allowed.

So what has Kristen learned:

• She can be unique - just like everyone else.
• The ruling class are morons.
• The ruling class, as morons, will make idiotic rules.
• It doesn't matter how much you succeed, what matters most is that you conform.

If those highlights are "distracting" then I don't know how the hell I got through high school with that teacher who had the crazy-ass "half-brunette, half-grey" hair-do that every school has at least one of.

I was reading a CNN story about a guy who's going to jail -- essentially -- because he won't let the government into his finances to verify that some money he claims he "lost in international investments" was actually lost. You see, he was in the middle of a divorce, and his ex-wife claims he was hiding the assets.

But here's the trick, see. He tells the court "I lost it," but doesn't give them the authorization to go traipsing through the data themselves. In other words, he asserts his rights not to be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.

Since international money-laundering like the wife suggests happened would be a criminal act, the guy is -- quite rightly -- refusing to give the government the evidence it needs to convict him. Go. Fucking. Figure.

But, since he won't waive his fifth amendment rights, he sits in jail on contempt charges. His contemptuous act : not helping the government make a case against him.

Is there any constitutional provision still being enforced? No? Didn't think so, just checking.

Yesterday, a Federal Air Marshal shot and killed a passenger who was acting irrationally, refusing to follow the instructions of the law enforcement official pointing a gun at him, and - oh yes - had indicated that he had a bomb and intended to blow the airplane up.

There is now a hue and cry over the fact that the wife of this individual had been crying and screaming and pleading for the Air Marshal not to shoot him, saying he was "mentally ill" and "off his medication".

Excuse me? What the fuck? If he's mentally ill and gone off the reservation, that's more of a reason to shoot him, not less. Off their meds is when a person who is normally quite sane and composed may in fact do something completely crazy like, say, try to blow up a plane. There are two types of people who do that sort of thing ... cold and calculating people (Al-Qaeda style), and mentally-fucked-up people (Hinckley style).

We shouldn't let ourselves get caught up emotionally in the whole "his neighbors thought he was quiet and loving" type of nonsense. His neighbors probably very very rarely saw him go off his medication, too.

I'm the first one to gripe about the "jack-booted thugs" these days, but I have to say that given what the media has released -- which I should point out seems to be heavily biased in favor of the dead guy -- I have to call it a clean shoot.

OK, here's a note out there to blog authors in general, but especially to one particular blog author who shall remain nameless.

If you allow comments, it is not so you can have a nice echo chamber where only people who are willing to "toe the party line" tell you how smart you are. It's for reasoned discussion about the topic of the post. That means that occasionally people are going to agree with you, occasionally they're going to disagree with you. The real test of one's beliefs and convictions is not how many other people think they're good, but can they stand up to critical debate. In other words, if you tell me that "such and such is so," be prepared to back it up when someone says "no, I don't think so and here's why."

Especially if it's not even that they're saying "your conclusions are wrong" but are actually calling attention to your factual inaccuracies.

Silently dropping those blog-comments onto the floor isn't the answer. Although it may seem like the easy solution, all it really proves, to anyone else, is that your position can't be defended. Deleting the comments which point out your errors doesn't make you look smarter, it makes it clear that you're an idiot.

You'll notice that the only time I've ever "censored" blog comments is when they're spam, not when they disagree with me. People disagree with me all the time, I've got no problem with people disagreeing with me. The only times I delete posts are when it's spam, and when it's something like "You're a dick. Fuck you," or other similar drivel. Post an actual argument, even a poor one, and I let it through. Debate promotes a better understanding of the truth. Neither side of an argument is ever 100% right or 100% wrong. The middle ground is where the truth lies and only by listening to both sides can you get to that middle ground.

And I guess I just feel sorta sad that there's morons out there who don't get that.

Katrina is wreaking havoc in the South, of that there can be no doubt, and my hopes for safety and security go out to everyone down there.

Everyone, that is, except Biloxi, MS Mayor A.J. Halloway, quoted in a CNN article:

"This is our tsunami," Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway told the Biloxi Sun Herald newspaper, referring to the December 26, 2004, tsunami that killed more than 226,000 people in the Indian Ocean region.

"This is our tsunami"?!?! Seriously, dude, here's a fucking reality check for you.

There were 226,000 dead people in the tsunami.
There are, right now, maybe 100 people dead from Katrina. That's being generous. Mississippi is reporting 55 right now, Florida 10. I'll pad a little for reports not yet in.

If ten times as many people died in Katrina as presently did, it still wouldn't come close to the death toll from the tsunami.

If one hundred times as many people died in Katrina as presently have, you'd still be a far fucking cry from the tsunami's death count.

If one thousand fucking times as many people died from Katrina, only then would you finally have reached HALF the death toll as the Indian tsunami.

It's tragic that anyone died at all, but don't sit there and have the balls to compare your pissant little "under 100 dead across a thousand or so miles of coast" with "nearly a quarter of a million people dead".

Jesus Christ, that's like seeing a hundred people trapped in a burning temple and saying "oh, woe is us, this is our Holocaust!" ... it's just so completely on the wrong end of a completely different scale as to be laughable, insulting, arrogant, and self-absorbed, all wrapped into a single nasty package.

As seen on Jurist, a New Jersey court of appeals has ruled that a company with no nexus in New Jersey (as it was previously defined) now is liable for paying New Jersey taxes simply because it ships product into New Jersey.

Seems like a good reason for businesses to simply say "We will not ship to NJ. Please move to a state that isn't as boneheaded as yours is. Thank you for playing."

Although, obviously, it's pretty tough for NJ to really enforce it (after all, with the company completely lacking in NJ nexus, there's no assets for NJ to seize or anything like that).

Also, the company probably should appeal...something about "interstate commerce" being the domain of the federal government, not the states themselves. I remember reading that in a document somewhere once...

On the way to work this morning, the "Check Engine" lamp lit on the dashboard. It occurs to me how much of a scam this whole check engine light is:

• It's designed so that the average, non-really-tech-savvy, consumer has no way to get access to the information it represents, or to reset it
• You have to get it reset to pass an annual state inspection in many states (including the one I live in).
• The dealer often charges a ludicrous fee - the last time I paid $149 - for them to send a guy out to the car, plug in the hardware, read the codes, and walk back into the shop. Seriously. At that rate, that box pays for itself in like 20 or 30 customers. After that, it's just pure ass-rapeage profit.

But it looks like I'll be driving the Jeep around for a bit, since I won't have any opportunities before GenCon to get the Miata over to either Middletown (where it got worked on last time) or Albany (closer).

Ugh.

So apparently, Congress has decided that they're going to extend the amount of the year under Daylight Savings Time by two months. Let us count the ways this is a dumb idea.

First, there's the fact that Daylight Savings Time's whole mantra "that you get more hours of daylight" is complete horseshit. An act of Congress doesn't change the shape of the Earth's orbit or the tilt of the Earth's polar axis. There's the same amount of daylight, it's just not necessarily convenient to the exact hours of working stiffs.

Second, why do we need more DST?

Third, imagine the costs of this.... the start and end of Daylight Savings Time has been hardcoded into the locale information of literally millions of computers all around the world. For this to work, they're all going to have to be upgraded to deal with the new date-ranges.

If you want to reform Daylight Savings Time, the reform is to make it go away. Seriously.

I got an e-mail earlier today, which said the following:

My email address is protected by Mail Authorization and Permission System (MAPS). You must register to email me. Registration is quick and easy and you need only register once to be added to my white list, thereafter you should have no problems emailing me. This is not unlike the authorization procedure in many instant messaging clients.

Ah, yes, yet another of those systems which say "Oh, look, I got spam. Here, why don't you sort it for me instead of me training my system to do it myself?"

So, in accordance with my long-standing policy of "Never register my e-mail address to allow legitimate mail to go through, and always confirm messages that are spam," I happily confirmed the spam-bounce Andrew was getting from one of my mailman mailing lists, so he'd get the junk in his mailbox.

He then sends me (or rather, the mailman owner address) a message telling me I've been "blacklisted" from his server (oh no!!) ... so I replied. Except this time I replied using my normal address, saying how those types of systems are bad by shifting the burden to innocent people instead of the recipient of the message, and explaining my normal policy stated above.

I then violated my normal policy by clicking that "yup, I sent this," so he would get my message.

His response to that was, first and foremost, to the "blacklisting", "You are now, asshole." ... then he calls me a "jerk off" and tells me to "Fuck off - talk to the people originating the problem, not me!"

I replied to him again, from a different e-mail address this time (at some point, Andrew will realize that I have about ten e-mail addresses in as many domains that I could use at will, let alone if I was to start using @yahoo.com or @gmail.com addresses). I explained to him that I was talking to the people originating the problem, because the problem was his misguided system which had sent me mail that I didn't ask for.

I wonder what new obscenities Andrew will send my way this time? Here's his e-mail address Andrew@DeFaria.com if anyone wants to help explain to him how stupid his spam-fighting strategy is. Updated: He sent me his vCard, so if you want any other information about him, feel free.

I went into the local Jiffy Lube today to get the oil changed in the Jeep and get its annual State Inspection before the end of the month. What I was confronted with when I got to the waiting room looked like a scene from a kindergarden, except with the authority figures removed.

There were three kids, an older boy and what appeared to be twin girls. By "older" I mean maybe eight years old. The girls were five. I know this because they told everyone. Over. And Over. And over again.

They're running around like three fucking banshees, screaming, yelling, etc. I saw the three kids go through no fewer than twelve coffee cups of water. (The process goes like so: One child decides they're thirsty, gets cup, goes to drinking fountain and proceeds to fill cup, slopping water all over the place in the process. The other two follow suit. Each of them takes like two sips of water and gives the mostly full cup to MoronDad, who sets it down and ignores it. Repeat this whole process several times until MoronDad has about a dozen coffee cups of water around him).

MoronDad and MoronMom are sitting in the waiting room. There's two of them, yup, it's true. Two people who ... well, we shouldn't say can't control their fucking kids, because I've got no idea, because they didn't even try. The entire time they were there, the MoronParents were filling out some paperwork or something for some pre-school or some shit, completely oblivious to the havoc their kids were wreaking.

Well, that's not true, occasionally, they'd notice something they were doing, but then completely act inappropriately. For instance, AnnoyingBratGirl#1 was grabbing coffee-stirrers by the handful and waving them all over the place, etc., etc. MoronDad's answer? No, not "throw those away now that you've had your disgusting little dirty mitts all over them". It was "put those kid-filth-covered stirrers back so people can put them in their nice fresh drinks and get whatever germs you've gotten all over yourself by crawling around on the floor for the last twenty minutes."

OK, maybe he didn't put it quite that way. In fact, he didn't even mention the germs or anything at all. He just told her to put them back. But that's what I heard in my head, honest.

About a half-hour into this ordeal, another woman walks in with her son. This is a mom who knows what she's doing. She's bought her son a brand new toy that doesn't require noise to play with it. A toy train with a couple other vehicles like a tractor or something. This woman has clearly been around the block and knows how to keep her kid from being an annoying pain in the ass.

Instantly -- and I really do mean instantly, they must be able to smell these things -- the three brats stop annoying some couple on the other side of the waiting room and make a beeline for the toys. Now, NormalKid is trying to play with his brand new choo-choo train, and AssholeBoy is grabbing it, telling the kid what to do, etc., etc.

MoronParents? Completely immersed in their paperwork, oblivious to what their kids were doing. I seriously thought about offering them crack cocaine right then and there to see if the parents would even notice...

For the next twenty minutes, this nice woman is now these annoying little brats' fucking babysitter. They take her kid's toys. She takes them back, and gives them to her son. They demand her attention. They (and this is funny) mock the quality of the toy that they are attempting to steal from its owner ("Look at this, this is all flimsy. This sucks," .. a direct quote).

I felt this urge boiling up inside me to say as loud as possible, "Excuse me, but can anyone tell me why the fuck this nice woman has been elected to be the babysitter for these fucktard kids whose parents are assholes?"

But I lacked the strength of will to make that big of a scene. I must be getting old and mellow or something.

So, I did the next best thing. Her car was coming out at the same time as mine. So I had the desk clerk get her paperwork and do it immediately after mine. I plopped down my credit-card and paid for her oil change. When she looked at me with this incredulous look and asked, "Why?!", I didn't bother to keep quiet when I said "Well, you've done such a fine job babysitting the kids of parents who can't be bothered to control their own kids, that I figured you deserved a break."

Turns out she was most worried that her son, who apparently can be very possessive about toys, was going to haul off and beat the crap out of the BratPack. I offered her an additional $20.00 if she could convince him to do it. :-)

I noticed the scowling looks from the MoronParents as I'd called them on the carpet in a way for their completely inappropriate lack of parenting skills, but who cares? Seriously, I can get behind forced sterilization of people who won't control their kids, especially after today.

Here's hoping that lady's day got a little brighter, anyway.

So he's being all gracious about it, and not pressing charges after a prankster squirted him with water from a squirt-gun at a movie premiere.

I feel so much better knowing that the lead half of TomKat is such a magnanimous man that he will let slide the despicable and vile act of anointing him with maybe .5cc of common tap water. I mean, seriously, the nerve of those folks! Everyone knows that only Evian, blessed by the holy leaders of Scientology, is ever allowed to touch The Disciple Cruise. Even the rain is specifically forbidden from falling on his head. If a scene in a movie requires him to stand in the rain, there's a lot of water blessing going on that day, let me tell you.

It was fucking water, you pompous, self-righteous ass. A guy squirted you with water, not like hydrochloric acid or something. If that's the sort of thing that sets you off, it's no wonder that whole marriage thing didn't work out for you before.

Dick.

Today I cleaned out my freezer. I decided everything in it must go.

Of course, that may have to do with my coming home to find the freezer door wide open, and everything inside it at room temperature.

Near as I can tell one of the cats, probably G'Kar, was scrambling to get up onto the top of the cabinets (or into the cabinets over the fridge), and pushed the door open with his rear legs. And it happily stayed open all day long.

Ugh. So much for that ice cream I planned to eat this evening.

I was reading this article which indicates that a new dollar coin (actually a collection of them, featuring the visages of U.S. presidents) is forthcoming.

The article laments -- over and over -- the radical "unacceptance" of the dollar coin by the American people, but then there's like an epiphany as the article says:

Supporters realize that the dollar coin is the Rodney Dangerfield of American money. So they make clear that any new coin would augment -- not replace -- paper currency.

You morons! The reason it doesn't get support is precisely because you don't eliminate the paper currency version. Why would a vending machine company expend the effort to retool all of their vending machines when they know people will have dollar bills? Why would coin-dispensing products like some cash-registers retool if they know the coin will be the red-headed-stepchild?

The fact of the matter is, so long as there is a paper dollar bill, a dollar coin will never be popular, because none of the places that we use our ubiquitous dollar bills will accept our dollar coins. If you want the dollar coin to be "popular" it has to also be "useful". If you want it to be "useful", you have to convince the various third-parties to retool in order to accept it. They're never going to do that unless they know people are going to have to use dollar coins and so that they'll have to accept them.

Seriously, this isn't rocket science, is it?

An Indian tribe, the Seneca-Cayuga Tribe of Oklahoma, has started making tentative plans to build a casino in Saugerties, in a huge tract of undeveloped land directly adjacent to the exit from the Interstate.

It would, obviously, be a huge boon to the town. There would be plenty of people visiting Saugerties. No matter who says otherwise, people don't gamble 24 hours a day without stop. They go to restaurants, they like to go to shows, they like to shop. All of these things are things which would directly benefit the economy of the ghost-town that Saugerties has become.

Public reaction, so far, seems to be in the "how dare they" category, with the public railing against town officials for even considering the idea. They rant about the "evils of gambling", the "rampant prostitution that goes hand in hand with gambling", and no end of other crap.

Saugerties seems to think, somehow, that "in its present state" it offers some huge attraction to people to live there. Here's the reality check for you, are you ready? It doesn't.

Is it because of the high-tech schools and great educational system? Nope. While I will give kudos to many if not most of the actual educators in the Saugerties district, the schools themselves are horrid.

Is it because of the booming tourist economy? Nope. Let's face it... Having HITS there running events 37 days out of the year (call it 10% of the year) isn't going to sustain the entire town's economy. Having a Garlic Festival three days a year isn't going to sustain the economy.

Is it because of local industry and job availability? Hardly. Saugerties still seems to be living with this delusion that they're still as conveniently located and easy to get to as it was when IBM Kingston was still around. Again, the harsh reality check: They're gone, they're not coming back, and the sooner you adapt rather than simply repeat how close you are to stuff that you're actually far away from, the better.

As I see it, Saugerties' biggest problems are:

• It has historically been dominated by the senior citizens and retirees of the community. While that's great and all, it is far too easy for retirees who have less than 10-15 years left to go, to hold things back for the rest of the people who might want to live there for another 40 or 50 years. Anyone who has tried to influence a School Budget to get passed knows that one of the blocs you had to sway was the Senior Citizens' Home on Main Street (yes, it really is on Main Street), and that it was a tough sell.
• With IBM Kingston gone, and nothing of any significance replacing it, Saugerties has little to no job market to speak of. This means that youth who go off to school have very little reason to return to their home town.
• It is a little over an hour's drive to Albany from Saugerties, it is over 30 minutes from Saugerties to Poughkeepsie, where you could catch Metro-North into NYC. In other words, it is hell and gone from places with lots of commuter jobs. As a bedroom community, it is no longer "convenient" to a place to work elsewhere. Combine that with a lack of industry in the town itself, and you have a recipe for disaster.

I like my hometown, I really do. It has a great small-town feel to it, and preserving that feel is the right thing to do. BUT, by the same token, you cannot become so affixed to the idea of "don't change anything because it might change our town's feel" that you are unwilling to explore changes which might be able to do both. You can have a casino near a small little New England-style village, and have them co-exist peacefully. In fact, with proper marketing, you can have more than enough money coming into the town to be able to preserve that feeling for much longer.

Eventually, the town will have no choice, and will have to start accepting "whomever comes calling" because they will have run out of money, people will have run out of jobs, and things will just be at the point of no return. It is far better to get something in town that you can at least see large potential upsides to, than to be desperate 10 or 15 years down the road and have to settle for something far worse than what you passed up.

So now the latest horseshit to be foisted upon us is that somehow teachers using red ink for correcting papers is "harmful" and "bad".

Seriously. From an education system where it is the minority who actually can get through their thirteen years with any actual "aptitude", this is the sort of crap they waste their time and energy on?

"It's taken a turn from 'Here's what you need to improve on' to 'Here's what you've done right,"' Powell said. "It's not that we're not pointing out mistakes, it's just that the method in which it's delivered is more positive."

What a load of shite. Maybe the problem isn't the color of the ink, but the pandering to "being positive" instead of pointing out the errors the students are making. Stop making them try to feel good about themselves for the 14% they got right, and start getting them to work on the 86% they got wrong.

Teachers have been using red ink for years. One might even point out that back in the days when people didn't care about "making students feel good about themselves", our educational institutions actually produced people who could find their own country on a globe, or who might actually be able to tell you what the formula is for finding the area of a circle, or if they couldn't, they could at least make change for a purchase without needing the cash register to tell them.

I have friends who are teachers, so I know that the problem isn't "all teachers", but the fact of the matter is that if the system is going to pander to these "feel good" things, it's only going to get a lot worse before it gets better... and while it gets worse, you can expect to see a lot more jobs going elsewhere to countries that are serious about educating their young, not about coddling them.

... you could just go to a doctor when you needed to, and didn't have to worry about "in-network, out-of-network, referrals, primary-care-physcian" horse-shit?

So after taking close to the LD50 of Advil, I decided to call my Primary Care Physician (who I am scheduled to see next week for a full physical as my first visit), to see if I could come in today, and maybe get "some good stuff" to ease the pain.

Turns out my doctor can't see me 'til tomorrow. No joy.

So I decide to look for a local urgent-care facility that is in-network. Nope. None. No joy.

So I call my insurance company to see what my "out of network" coverage is. None. No joy.

But she transfers me to an in-house nurse, who goes over all my symptoms, etc., etc., and decides "well, the only thing you can really get is to contact your primary care physician again, and have him talk to you over the phone to prescribe to you like a day's worth of pain killer or muscle relaxant for the neck."

So back I go to the doctor. Call them up, ask to speak with him. He's not in at all today. I explain what my insurance company said. They're like "well, he won't be available until tomorrow."

"There's other doctors there, can I speak with one of them?" Apparently not, since I haven't been into the office yet, they won't actually let one of the other doctors phone-prescribe me what I need.

What the fuck is the point of medical insurance, if the whole process makes it impossible to use it? And what's up with doctors who actually can't fit in patients during the same day? Are we supposed to schedule in advance when we need medical attention?

Makes one kinda want to go postal.

I don't care how much it's raining, and how desperate you are to get to your car without getting too wet. If you're so stupid as to run out in front of a moving car without even looking, so you could make a beeline for your own vehicle, then maybe -- just maybe -- the world would have been better off if I had hit you and removed your chromosomes from the available pool.

I had to drop off my bundle of paperwork to the accountant this morning, so he could do up my taxes. Since I was going in a little late anyway, I added five minutes to my commute and swung by the Sheriff's office, intending to pick up the pistol permit paperwork I've been meaning to get. Turns out, the administrative staff has Good Friday off as a holiday.

Then, this afternoon, I call my doctor's office to set up an appointment for a routine physical and find out - lo and behold - they're closed early for the "holiday".

Seriously, what the fuck? It's not like this is some holiday where friends and family gather together to have a meal in celebration of some guy getting nailed to a pair of sticks and hung out to dry. Why is this a holiday? Are there really businesses saying to themselves "oh, we've GOT to give them Good Friday off, or they'll just take the day off anyway and there'll be nobody here..."

It's 100% purely a religious "holiday". It would be interesting for someone for whom Christianity was not their religion to try and make a legal case for being denied government services because the government office had closed on account of a religious non-event. It actually sounds like a pretty clear violation of the establishment clause to me. Wish I had the time and money to raise a stink about it.

CNN reports about how a judge ruled on a Wisconsin case that discusses something I've talked about from time to time. In the case in question, a high school honors-calculus student was told he had to do schoolwork over the summer, as part of the class curriculum. Failure to do so would, obviously, be detrimental to his grade. The student sued, saying that the school year as determined by the state is 180 days, and those days in the summer ain't a part of that. (and, hopefully, his argument was worded slightly more poetic)

The MoronJudge in quoted by CNN:

"Had the Larsons done a bit more homework," he wrote, they would had learned that "the people of our state granted to the Legislature ... the power to establish school boards."

Had the MoronJudge done a bit more homework, he would have realized that his ruling now sets a hugely dangerous precedent:

• Tired of getting yelled at for failing too many students, the local school board can now set the bar lower, requiring only a 45% to pass a class
• Tired of working long school years, the school board can happily lower the number of school days in a school year from 180 to, say, 50.

The states set standards for a reason. If this was a case where some school board was saying "people who get a 45% should get a diploma" the judge wouldn't even think of saying something as hideously stupid as "this is what school boards are empowered to do," he'd be pimpsmacking the board around. Instead, though, since all it does is affect "some snotty kid who is refusing to conform and do what he's told like a good little clone", the court can wield it's power with impunity.

This reminds me a lot of last week's episode of West Wing, where a group of middle-school kids demand that the voting age be abolished, and how they rightfully point out that the system is designed to subjugate them, take their money, borrow against their future, and give them no say in any of it. Nobody has to worry about offending "the juvenile constitutency" because they can't vote you out anyway.

If kids could vote, you wouldn't see shit like this.

There was an interesting post on New (Sub)urbanism about how the city of Chicago spent $270,000,000 on a huge piece of artwork for the city, but somehow managed to not make it a "work for hire" so that they actually owned the copyright on the artwork (thus making it in the public domain as a government financed product).

Instead, the artist still owns the copyright and has to be paid a tithe every time you use an image of it in any commercial context (apparently, because they're stopping professionals from taking pictures of it, demanding that they show their permits to do so).

Anyone who thinks copyright law doesn't need a serious overhaul, please step forward now, your Kool-Aid is ready.

Ya know, I occasionally get people complaining about when I vent about stuff. These are the people, and there's really only a couple people who are really bad about it, who tell me to mind my own business, or various types of snide comments about "why do you care?" or "why don't you stop ranting about stuff?" etc., etc.

Now, to these people, I have to ask a very serious question: If you come to a site entitled "Derek's Rantings and Musings", where the first thing that's mentioned is "Rantings", how can you try to act all disappointed about there being occasional rantings about things I find (bewildering, annoying, crazy, stupid, etc.)?

If you come to a site that specifically says it's going to include rantings, and have the balls to complain that there's ranting, then one seriously has to question whether you are perhaps visiting a site that you shouldn't be visiting. If you want to talk about a specific topic and say "hey, I think you're wrong about this particular topic and here's why," that's one thing. But people leaving comments that are essentially "dude, you whine too much, knock it off" make no sense to me... what did those visitors to the web site have as their expectation of what they'd find?

Doesn't seem to make much sense to me, that's for sure.

I have friends who are moving. They're moving about 2000 miles. They're driving themselves. They've got a 24 foot truck, which will be towing one vehicle, and a second vehicle being driven behind that.

There are things people do when they move that I simply can't fathom. They've hired a crew to come load their truck for them. Now, I'm going to let slide the whole "why are you moving yourself in the first place?" rant that the first paragraph would segue nicely into for a few minutes, because there's something about the present situation I want to touch on first.

They're hiring loaders... but yet, they still plan to "help" load the truck themselves? Isn't the whole point of hiring a team of loaders for several hours so that you don't have to touch a goddamned thing? If they're going to get themselves tired out running up and down stairs with shit, why are they spending money on loaders?

I won't even get into the "why are you stringing three vehicles together like this when you could just drive one vehicle, have movers move the second, and let a moving company follow behind with a truck full of possessions a couple days later" rant, because, well, that part just speaks for itself.

Four words. Are you ready?

Global. Warming. My. Ass.

I've always disliked the vending machine at the office. Although I think it's cool that it dispenses dollar-coins for change, it's got some of the goofiest design decisions. For example, it's entirely possible for a soft-drink bottle to drop down in such a way that it stands up on its bottom, preventing the door from opening.

At least in those situations, though, you can do the "rock the machine side to side until it tips over" game. That's not frustrating, that's just annoying.

Frustrating is putting your money in. Selecting "E7" for Coke, and having it say "Please make another selection"... when you can see that there's product in there. This vending machine has sensors all over the place, to make sure stuff doesn't get "stuck" (e.g., if the candy bar does pass the light sensor, it'll keep corkscrewing a little at a time until the candy bar DOES fall), but it can't figure out that there's a six-pack worth of Coke in there, and I'd really like it to dispense one for me?

I shipped out some (belated) Christmas gifts to a friend of mine in Canada yesterday. It amazes me how much paperwork is involved in sending stuff that, were I just driving it to Canada, would be simply be dealt with as "No" in response to the "Do you have anything to declare?" question.

Further, the chick at the UPS Store kept trying to downplay item values, even though I know it's not going to come into play because I'm nowhere near the "customs limit" for gift value.

UPS: What's this?
Me: Chocolate
UPS: Value?
Me: About eight dollars.
UPS: How about two?
Me: It's really eight.
UPS: I'll put down two.
Me: *sigh* ... whatever

Ordinarily I wouldn't use Brown, I swore off of them, but my "I'll pay for good service" thing only goes so far... The other carriers only offered overnight solutions (in the $80 for shipping range) as opposed to ground service ($14-15 range)... (although I discovered later, FedEx could have done it as a ground service, it just didn't appear on my rate-quote tool because I hadn't fed it the right arcane checkbox combination or something like that)

How can there be so much paperwork for something that doesn't actually meet the minimum valuation that you have to worry about for import? Who thinks this stuff up, the Department of Bureaucracy and Red Tape?

I think it's absolutely great that Amazon, and eBay/PayPal, and Google, and Yahoo are making such efforts to either collect directly for (in Amazon's and eBay's cases) or direct people to various NGOs which are trying to help the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. It's proof positive that people can come together and make a difference. When I checked a few minutes ago, Amazon had collected over four million dollars for the effort from its users.

The challenge I put forth is this: This country, here has its share of problems. We have homeless people, jobless people, poor people, you name it, all of whom could stand to benefit from exactly the same kinds of help you're offering people on the other side of the planet -- they need food, they need shelter, they need clothing, you name it.

I challenge these sites to put as much effort into collecting "relief" for their neighbors as they have for those people on the other side of the planet. It's not nearly so sexy from a PR standpoint, but just as needed.

For the record, I'm not holding my breath.

The AP is running a story about how Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to drive a vehicle to the South Pole, is all up in arms about how there is an "ice highway" being built to the research station now situated at the Pole.

Describing Hillary's objections, New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff said:

"He spent weeks battling against the elements to get to the pole and it was an enormous achievement.

Now you've got the concept of a marked route that takes away the challenge and the adventure of getting there and that is anathema to Ed."

Man, and I thought Hillary was an explorer, being the first to get to places like Everest's peak and the South Pole... Now I realize he's just an egomaniac. Can you imagine if Lewis and Clark had cried foul over the creation of established routes west? Or if Columbus had gotten back to Europe and cried out, "No dammit! My crew and I suffered horribly to reach the New World, how can you want to make ocean travel back and forth routine?!" There isn't an astronaut alive, I don't think, who believes that their risky trips into space are anything less than preludes towards allowing mankind to do so on a regular basis (even if the space policies of the last twenty years or so make that seem unlikely in the short term).

Seriously. What an asshat.

MBNA is running a promo for the NY Yankees credit card, where you can get a hand-signed 1999 World Series program, inscribed, The Last Home Run Of The Century.

From 1999? Not unless everyone else in MLB went into the world's worst fucking slump throughout the entire year 2000.

Didn't we establish all this several years ago? Seriously, were these people just asleep then or something?

CNN points to a story discussing how Green Arrow's sidekick, Mia, is going to turn out to be HIV-positive. It's going to provide a motivator for her, blah blah blah.

It's being written by Judd Winnick, best known as "that guy on the Real World who got really attached to Pedro the AIDS patient, who has a liberal agenda the size of the Mountain Time Zone".

Here's one thing you almost certainly won't see covered... every time Mia gets into a fight she's got a decent chance of breaking her own skin (or, more likely, being punched herself by a Bad Guy), and having blood spray everywhere.

You know. HIV-tainted blood. The kind that if it mixes with a non-infected person's blood, say via direct contact with the guy who punched her in the first place, can cause that person to become infected as well.

I'm betting that "spreading HIV via crime-fighting" isn't going to be on the list of topics. Well, not unless someone from DC Comics reads this and goes "Oh, shit, what the hell were we doing let Judd write activist-comics for when he hasn't got a clue how it'll destroy the character and either force them into early retirement or make them accept that they're passing the virus on to the bad guys".

Talk about "bad decisions"... Yikes.

I've talked about this before, but I can't help myself. Because a part of me wants to figure out exactly what it is you're supposed to do with people who are, without a doubt, among the most inconsiderate people on the face of the planet.

Last Night:
Derek: Hey, I'm bored. Come hang out.
George: Can't. Got a job interview at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, so I need to get to bed at a decent hour.
Derek: What's on your agenda for tomorrow?
George: Nothing.
Derek: Then come over after the interview. You can catch up on West Wing [he's been watching my season box-sets, trying to come closer to being caught up].
George: Sounds like a plan.

Noon today:
Derek: Hey, what happened to you?
George: I had to come home. The wife is doing some stuff this morning.
Derek: You going to come over and watch the game? [ 1 pm game ]
George: Yeah, I should be there a little after first pitch.
Derek: Cool.

4 pm:
Derek: "A little after first pitch"? You think you'll make it before the end?
George: I told the wife I'm heading out before 6.
Derek: Gotcha.

7:30 pm:
Derek [to George's wife]: Hey, where's George?
Wife: He's sleeping, and told me not to wake him.

.... Seriously. What a fucking asshole. I pissed away an entire fucking day waiting for this dick to show up. The sad part is that he's not intentionally rude, he's just, I dunno, too clueless in the realm of common sense to recognize that "if he tells someone he's going to be somewhere, maybe just maybe they set aside time for it, and gave up doing other things."

I've half a mind to invite him over one night and just go out and let him show up here while I'm not around. Make him drive down and back for nothing.

The local grocery store is observing "moments of silence" today at the various times things happened -- when planes hit particular locations, etc. New York City is having a "reading of the victims' names" ceremony thing, and all that.

I think we, as a country, need to decide something. It's a fairly simple decision: Is 9/11 worthy of being treated as a national holiday of remembrance?

My complaint is not that people are planning elaborate ceremonies or anything like that. My complaint is that places are doing so because they feel like they have to, because everyone else is. Whoever "stops doing it first" and "moves on" looks like a callous jackass.

I think if we're going to continue to have this societal expectation that "people take time out to remember" on 9/11, and take moments of silence or whatever, that we should just make it a Federal Holiday and that will be that. "Remembrance Day" or something, I don't necessarily care what you call it.

I guess I'm sick of people not moving on. If, as a society, we're going to have this be a regular thing indefinitely, let's formalize it and make it "real". Personally, I don't care which it is, but sitting here with forced-by-guilt rituals kinda annoys me.

How can this be illegal?

Woman goes into store with clearly fake novelty money of a George Bush $200.00 bill. (note that there is no such denomination, note that the pictures on the back of the bill are clearly quite silly).

Store clerk exchanges novelty note for $200.00 worth of merchandise.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see the problem. The customer did not misrepresent that the novelty note was money, because clearly there is no $200 bill, and George Bush does not appear on any of our currency. If the clerk accepted the Funny Money, it was simply a barter for goods. "One Funny Note in exchange for some Pretty Clothing"

We should not be protecting people from their own stupidity, I'm sorry.

As Jeremy pointed out, Friendster -- a "community-driven site" -- has fired one of its employees for (gasp!) being part of the blogging community.

Like Jeremy and many others, I took this as an opportunity to cancel my friendster account, and put as my reason for cancelling "you fire people for blogging." Maybe they'll get the message after a few dozen people do the same.

I don't want to name names, but there's people I know, who are probably extremely happy not to have taken job offers that Friendster made to them.

Much was made a few months ago about McDonalds getting rid of super size french fries, about how they were trying to be good citizens, preventing people from gorging themselves on fries, etc.

That story came out in March, but my local McD's only just finally stopped selling the super-sized potato product. Now, I order from McDonald's probably about once a week, give or take, and I'm a pretty boring person, so I know what the various things I order cost.

So I was a bit shocked to find out that my "usual order", with "large" fries substituted for "super size" fries, cost the same amount.

In other words, McDonald's did away with the larger product, and bumped the price up on the smaller one to what the larger one used to be. I'm effectively paying the same amount of money and getting less.

Now, here's the kicker where I become a sage of wisdom (or a moron). I predict that within 18 months, McDonald's will have an ad campaign centering around "you demanded them back, and we now comply, super size are back!" ... but they'll be back at a higher price point, since their price-point is now the large.

Any takers?

I want to rant a bit about the Olympics this year.

First, what is this crap that every single athlete has to be wearing Adidas gear, including (perhaps) athletes who sought sponsorship from Adidas and were turned down? Apparently, Adidas is the primary sponsor for Athens 2004, so all athletes, regardless of their actual sponsorship, must be displaying the logo of the corporation who has really done absolutely nothing for them. How wrong is that?

Second, NBC is completely boning things with their HDTV feed. I love that the NBC/HD feed is 24x7 Olympics, that's great. But why the fuck is is super-delayed? I mean, for example.

Closing Ceremonies

• Live - August 29th, 2100 Athens Time / 1400 New York Time


• NBC Standard-Def Feed - August 29th 1900 New York Time (five hours delayed)


• NBC Hi-Def Feed - August 30th 0400 New York Time (14 hours delayed)

Now, seriously, is NBC really attempting to shoot its own HD ratings in the foot? Show the fucking HD feed, at the very least, at the same time as the Standard-Def feed. I'd prefer live, but what the hell is this "you can watch it nearly a day later, and only at 4 in the morning". It's the closing ceremonies for heavens' sakes, it's not like it's women's badminton or something.

The venues are beautiful. I love the architecture and the design of the facilities (what I see on TV anyway), but... what the heck happened to attendance? I mean, I know at past olympics you felt lucky if you managed to get tickets to a prelim round, and were a god if you can get tickets to a final. I think I could fly over today, walk in, and buy tickets to final-round events, because there's hundreds or thousands of empty seats in these arenas. Not sure what the problem was there, but that's a travesty.

OK, I'm done with my rant.

I have absolutely no idea who this is, but the conversation he/she/it tried to have with me is too funny not to share. This is literally a random person IM'ing me out of nowhere, I'm not in a chat room or anything like that.

s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: hi a/s/l if you dont mind me asking?
dredd: wtf are you talking about?
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: age/sex/location
dredd: who the fuck is this?
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: um just someone who asked a question
s4v3_4_h0rs3_r1d3_my_t0ngu3: sorry for bothering you
dredd: go away