I’m so relieved Katrina didn’t decimate New Orleans as the media had led us to believe it inevitably would. The destruction was bad, but not as bad as the media outlets had predicted. My wife has family who live near New Orleans, so it was a relief to learn the hurricane weakened when it hit land. This msn article nicely captures the indomitable spirit of the Creoles and Cajuns who live down there. My heart goes out to those who must deal with the devastation.

I actually saw a story which claimed New Orleans was going to be the next Atlantis. Ugh. The media has officially become worthless in my eyes. They are a bunch of sensationalists who only care about ratings, journalism be damned. They specialize in scaring the shit out of the viewers to make sure no one changes the channel, and then to add insult to injury they rarely have any actual information to pass along. Just loads of speculation and hyperbole, coupled with a bunch of jackasses running around in goofy lookin’ ponchos.

As regular readers to this blog know, every so often I go through my bookmark tab and pass along links that aren’t interesting enough to warrant a post on their own, but are interesting nonetheless. These links we call leftovers…get’em while they’re hot:

First one’s a video clip: Watch as Jon Stewart eviscerates Christopher Hitchens during his Daily Show appearance.

I’m only posting this article because I love the sentence “The ninja got away with the victim’s wallet and a change jar. The wallet was later found on a nearby jogging path.”

Go here for a forum wherein users post their best abstract photographs. There’s some really beautiful work in that forum.

This link will take you to an article titled “Computer Stupidities” which has many short anecdotes about dealing with the computer inept. I very much empathize with the frustrated techs in that article. When I was in tech school we had a guy that was always bragging about how good he was with computers, and how smart he was, and blah blah blah. One afternoon he left his bag in the lab we were all working in, and we viewed that as an opportunity. We got out his notebook where he kept all his 3 ½ in. floppies, and we pushed the write-protect tab down on all of them. I should probably explain: with the write-protect enabled the only thing you can do is view the files on the disk. If you try to write to the disk in any way, the computer will give you an error message. Mr. Computer Genius thought all his disk had went bad and he threw them away. There had to have been over 50 disks in that notebook. We also put a virus on his computer. This was during the days of command prompts, so instead of a desktop you saw this C:\> and you had to type in commands. The virus mimicked the command prompt and would spit out whatever information you typed in backwards onto the screen. So, if you typed “C:\> cd dos” the computer would spit out “C:\> sod dc” We also disabled the CTRL X and CTRL BRK and we put the virus in his bootup so it loaded every time the computer was turned on. Man, I sure miss MS-DOS.

Ten Precepts from the Art of War That Never Made it Past Sun Tzu’s Editor.

If you’ve ever sat up late and wondered what the Harry Potter series would look like had T.S. Eliot written it…well, wonder no longer.

I would just like to repeat that in general people are really stupid.

Crazy Dog.

I don’t listen to terrestrial radio anymore thanks to XM, but sometimes I miss the beer commercials. This explains why I was so happy when I found this blog, which has online every Budweiser “Real Men of Genius” commercial that ever aired.

A brief quote from an excellent article: “The history of science is a history of unhappy people reluctantly changing their minds…The intelligent design people have never suffered such a crisis. They have never changed their minds based on new evidence. That’s because they started with the desired results and worked backward.”

Cat’s in the Cradle (I’’m listening to the U.K.J version, but any’ll do)
My child arrived just the other day,
He came to the world in the usual way.
But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay.
He learned to walk while I was away.
And he was talking ‘fore I knew it, and as he grew,
He’d say, “I’m gonna be like you, dad.
You know I’m gonna be like you.”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
,Little boy blue and the man in the moon.
“When you coming home, dad?”
“I don’t know when,But we’ll get together then.
You know we’ll have a good time then.”

My son turned ten just the other day.
He said, “Thanks for the ball, dad, come on let’s play.
Can you teach me to throw?”
I said, “Not today,I got a lot to do.”
He said, “That’s ok.”
And he walked away, but his smile never dimmmed,
Said, “I’m gonna be like him, yeah.
You know I’m gonna be like him.”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon,
Little boy blue and the man in the moon.
“When you coming home, dad?”
“I don’t know when,
But we’ll get together then.
You know we’ll have a good time then.”

Well, he came from college just the other day,
So much like a man I just had to say,
“Son, I’m proud of you. Can you sit for a while?”
He shook his head, and he said with a smile,
“What I’d really like, dad, is to borrow the car keys.
See you later. Can I have them please?”

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon,
Little boy blue and the man in the moon.
“When you coming home, son?”
“I don’t know when,
But we’ll get together then, dad.
You know we’ll have a good time then.”

I’ve long since retired and my son’s moved away.
I called him up just the other day.
I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind.
“He said, “I’d love to, dad, if I could find the time.
You see, my new job’s a hassle, and the kid’s got the flu,
But it’s sure nice talking to you, dad.
It’s been sure nice talking to you.”
And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me,
He’d grown up just like me.
My boy was just like me.

And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon,
Little boy blue and the man in the moon.
“When you coming home, son?”
“I don’t know when,
But we’ll get together then, dad.
You know we’ll have a good time then.”

I didn’t now this, but Pat Robertson has superpowers. Yup, according to CBN he is able to leg press 2,000 lb. with the greatest of ease.

I wonder if the protien shake which grants him his abilites also gives him the power to kill a yak from 200 yards away…with MIND-BULLETS! That’s telekinesis, you know.

You’ve probably already heard the story, but yesterday Pat Robertson stated on television that he believed the U.S. should go into Venezuela and “take out” Hugo Chavez.

If you haven’t seen the actual broadcast of Pat Robertson going insane, go here to watch the video clip.

People are making a really big deal of this, and words like “hypocrite,” and “batshit insane” are being thrown around with abandon. While I don’t disagree with either of those terms, I’d like to think that most people with an ounce of intelligence already knew that Robertson had no interest in teaching the way of Christ. His behavior was fairly consistent with my opinion of him. He uses his ideological platform to influence his viewers and encourages them to make political changes under the auspices of religion. His actual motivations may or may not have a damn thing to do with religion (I’m votin’ may not).

Pat should be taken for entertainment value only. Get a couple of drinks, maybe some nachos, and settle in with the 700 Club for some laughs. Take a shot every time Pat prays for the death of a Supreme Court justice; take two every time he equates feminism with “witchcraft.” You’ll be drunk within an hour.

Pat is to the televangelists what Robert Novak is to the world of punditry.

I think I may have to build a computer that’s not hooked up to the internets, because I get side-tracked too damn easy. I have so many projects that need to be finished, and what am I looking at? Debates on I.D. and the divide between children who like comic book movies but don’t read comics. And now you can add blogging to the list of things which keep me from being productive.

I might as well share since I’m already posting.

I’m not going to get into a political or theological discussion on teaching intelligent design in schools, because to do so would admit that I.D. was a theory worthy of intelligent discourse, but many people have seen the admittance of I.D. into schools as the proverbial foot in the door. This guy wants to see the theory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster taught in schools, and has gone so far as to mail letters to Kansas School Board to get the curriculum instituted.

This guy wants to present the case between Norse mythology and Evolution. As you may have noticed on the site, science doesn’t fare well in the debate.

I’m a fan of all forms of entertainment, but I also feel the pain of the literati who are so often ignored in popular culture. So many times the source material for movies or games or television shows comes from a written text, and unfortunately the written word has never been less popular. Accordingly, the written source material gets ignored in favor of its more visual brethren. Peter David has a nice little post regarding this trend.

Just so you know, David has written books, comics, and scripts so his views are biased, to say the least.

You can read my views on literary elitism in my March 10th post.

I work out all the time and do good to maintain, and Carrot Top can find time to bulk up, in spite of all the time he must spend curling his hair.

Unfortunately, because of the pervasiveness of spammers, I’ve had to enable some control settings on the comments. When you comment from now on, you’ll have to type in a word that appears on your screen to log-in.

My apologies to the handful of people that comment here.

And to natalie335trae: Stay the hell off my blog you low-life.

By now everyone’s heard about the stampede in Richmond over 1,000 Apple iBook laptops. Apparently, over 12,000 people showed up, and instead of doing something logical like handing out claim tickets to the first 1,000 people, the sale turned into a riot. Go here to see a slide show of the event.

I had heard the term “digital divide” before, but I never really understood exactly what it meant until I heard about this catastrophe. When people are willing to fistfight, urinate on themselves, and hit other people with folding chairs for the chance to purchase a laptop, there is a definite divide in the have’s and the have-not’s. Computers and high-speed internet access has become such a ubiquitous aspect of my life that I wasn’t able to see that others are not as fortunate as I (or as you, my blog reading friends). The ability to receive and transmit vast amounts of information has become a valuable commodity, and those that don’t have access to said information obviously want it very badly. The computer and internet access has moved from being a luxury to being a necessity, and an information war of sorts has begun.

Whew! To balance out the seriousness of the last paragraph you should download and watch this small video of a newscast, in which a woman explains she had to “kick people in they balls” in an attempt to get one of the laptops. I swear, the media will find the funniest person to represent a group of people.