Monthly Archives: May 2004

Counteracting the Bloody Toe

All right, apparently the picture of my bloody stubbed toe caused a pregnant woman to toss her cookies and to swear off visiting the site for a few days until she was sure the offending toe had moved far enough down the queue that she wouldn’t see it first thing. Well, of course, the last […]

Read More

The Perils of Hide and Seek

Don’t ever let them tell you there’s such a thing as a friendly game of hide and seek. There are no friends in Hide and Seek. There is just hunter and quarry. If you’re not one, you’re the other. And if you’re the prey, you should expect to get bloody. Alternately, if you’re going to […]

Read More

Feed Me

Anyone who thinks writing a blog or journal is like feeding an ever-gaping mouth should try writing a book on a very short deadline. The Book of the Dumb 2 is on just such a deadline — it’s due in a couple of months — and so that means that that in order to finish […]

Read More

Meet the New Toy

I went out and bought myself a new digital camera yesterday: A Kodak EasyShare DX4530, photographed here by the Olympus Camedia C-21 which it is replacing. Which almost seems cruel, doesn’t it. Like the guy who’s being laid off being made to train the new guy who’s taking his job. Fortunately, they’re objects, without sense […]

Read More

Evaluating Stupidity

As most of you know, I’m spend a lot of my time recently banging out The Book of the Dumb 2 (“Now with 30% extra stupidity!”), and I imagine as most of you suspect, the task is not especially onerous, since there’s a whole world of stupidity out there. The hard part is not finding […]

Read More

Science and God, Part Mumble Mumble Mumble

Via Metafilter (which got it via Boing Boing, which got it via Slashdot), a really fascinating interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno, Curator of Meteorites at the Vatican Observatory. Among the number of things in the interview is a view of science as it relates to religion and to the appreciation of the universe, a few […]

Read More

DeLay, and the Frat Meme

Someone forwarded me a link to this story noting lawmakers’ general horrified reactions, and suggested I take special note of Tom DeLay’s reaction to the pictures, which is thus: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he thought “some people are overreacting.” “The people who are against the war are using this to their political […]

Read More

Because I’m a Technical Idiot

Does anyone else out there using the Mozilla Firefox browser have problems viewing Blogspot-based blogs? The problem I have is that after the first couple of paragraphs all I get is gibberish that looks like this (taken from this blog): Since Iraq remains under U.S. military occupation, it seems unlikely that the Iraqi police would […]

Read More

Iraq Prison Follow-Up

Some various follow-up thoughts on the Iraq prison scandal: * A reader was wondering what I thought about the comparison (made in this commentary in the NYT by Luc Sante) of how the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison appear more or less like the white folk in pictures from the first part of the […]

Read More

Rant Arrives

My personal copies of Rant: Collected Ventings 1999 — 2004 arrived today, and I thought I’d display a copy with a thematically appropriate face. Overall it looks pretty nice, although I would say the cover seems susceptible to humidity, so if you decide you’d like a copy of your own, be sure to store it […]

Read More

A Moment of Really Lame Introspection

Look, it’s me being all, like, pensive and grown up and crap like that. Don’t worry, it won’t last. I was going to write some massive retrospective of my life to date here, being that 35 is the Biblical midpoint of life, but I’ve tried starting it three times now, and even I can’t swallow […]

Read More

Torture

A German reader who was appalled at my suggestion last December that we make Saddam Hussein spend of the rest of his life in a box into which videotaped depositions of the victims of his regime were streamed endlessly (he thought it would be torture, whereas I would be more inclined to call it karmic […]

Read More

Shocking the Shockable Classes

Over at Electrolite, Patrick Nielsen Hayden is more than a little frustrated that the general discussion he wished to have about the utility of shocking the bourgeois has become a specific discussion of Ted Rall’s recent attempts to shock the said class, through the Pat Tillman cartoon and a column this week, which begins: “Now […]

Read More

Another Internet Milestone

I always wondered when the day would come when someone would auction off one of my book on eBay. It looks like today is that day. Actually, yesterday was — this auction’s already on its second day. Even so. The guy who’s selling it says of the book: “If you like the stupid criminals on […]

Read More

New Bathroom Reader

If you’re still looking for a gift for mom this Mother’s Day, allow me to suggest the Mom’s Bathtub Reader. This particular book was mostly written by Sue Steiner (which is why it’s her name on the cover), but I pitched in a few pieces on mom-related movies and music, and aside from that it’s […]

Read More

Rant: Collected Ventings 1999 – 2004

I’ve been muttering for some time about collecting up some of my most memorable rant-like Whatever entries into convenient book form, and since I won’t have another book out this year until at least September, now seems an excellent time to do it. So behold! Rant: Collected Ventings 1999 – 2004 — Five years and […]

Read More

%d