When white people talk for a long time

The author of "Stuff White People Like"


And http://stuffaspergerpeoplelike.com/ like is eerily similar to my life.

Saturday link clearing roundup

• Visual thinking from the 1960s
• Schelling and the Nuclear Taboo
• Mexican cartels running pot farms in U.S. national forest - who says no one makes things in America anymore!
• The Pill makes women pick bad mates
• 'Peter Pan', 'Snow White' busted at Disneyland - People and their free time...
  

Least surprising headline ever

Report: Crack users with HIV engage in unprotected sex

Only in Atlanta

I went to the all night convenience store last night on a beer run after we ran out at the recording studio. Ahead of me in line was an obvious heroin addict (lots of track marks) wearing pajamas. Behind and to the side of me was was an attractive debutante type having a loud conversation on her cell phone. The heroin addict is having a loud conversation with the clerk about her kids (apparently it's a lot of work but they're worth it); the debutante is having a loud conversation on her cell phone that ended with "Some people have NO MANNERS!".

I savored the irony for an hour or so.

Link clearing blog post

• Garet Garrett - an early libertarian writer, I just added his Atlas Shrugged precursor novel to my amazon.com wish list
• This story about a black widow who has just recently been revealed

Jeff Carstensen was spooked when he learned his grandmother planned to buy him a $100,000 life insurance policy -- and name herself the beneficiary.


"She told me that people of our stature have insurance policies on each other," he said. "That way, if something happens to you, you take care of me, and if something happens to me, I take care of you. It was all too suspicious. So I got out of there any way I could, as soon as I could."

Saturday reading

• From George Will -

  America says to foreign producers: We prefer not to pump our oil, so please pump more of yours, thereby lowering its value, for our benefit. Let it not be said that America has no energy policy.

• Wilkerson on Global Warming
• Joel Splolsky on Architecture Astronauts - worth reading, especially in conjunction with John Robb.
• This is weird
• Inventions by year
  

Homeless James Bond

Via Soob, check out Homeless James Bond

Advances in child management

A wonderful technical acheivement

Conflict follows device that drives away teen loiterers
A wall-mounted gadget designed to drive away loiterers with a shrill, piercing noise audible only to teens and young adults is infuriating civil liberties groups and tormenting young people after being introduced into the United States.

Such wonderful times we live in.

Signs that democracy has run it's course

The candidates are appearing on wrestling shows.

The best graffitti ever

See it here. Just imagine the preparation involved...

The pink horse of the gold digger Apocalypse

Check out SugarDaddyForMe.com. It's where attractive young women meet wealthy men, online! It has the notable quote

Men want the younger and more attractive women. And, women, want the man with the bigger and more sheltered cave.

Just in time for Valentines day!

From this article from The Atlantic

Now, though, I realize that if I don’t want to be alone for the rest of my life, I’m at the age where I’ll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me.

Tuesday links

• Iraq vets take lemons and make.... something.
• Delphine LaLurie - very creepy
• Time management
• I do believe I'll be building these bookshelves
• Ron Paul - comic book president
• Putting Bush on Mt Rushmore - be sure to read this one from Scott Adams
  

Me and MasterChief

My visit to MicroSoft was interesting.

Amazing Time Savers!

I've been looking for this clip online for years now, and it finally made it's appearance. Check out Amazing Time Savers. You do have to watch it till the end.

Amazing Time Savers

An advancement in gender equality

While perusing my spam folder to make sure there were no false positives, I came across this little gem amongst the enlargement and Viagra ads

LADIES, bigger your asset now, give your mate a big surprise

SizeUpBreast is a safe all herbal formula that helps woman to increase theirBreast Size

- help with sagging problems
- has a powerful phyto-hormonal action that leads to the growth and
development of the areoli and consequently TheBreast size.

* if your are her BF/HUBBY, buy your girl this 100% safe BreastEnhancement Pill
* you will feel proud of having LargerBoobie mate

About time women got their share of annoying email.

What I like about India

They're quite weird, but in a self-contained, needs no explanation way, asking nothing of anyone.

Case in point - Man in India Marries Dog As Atonement. If this was in Europe or America, There would be some symbolic flagellation, fake tears, and cries for understanding. In India, the guy just married a stray dog, no fuss, no muss.

Weird things on Craig's List

While I was uploading some large files I came across these two items on the "Women Seeking Men" section

Item One:

Hi. I am staying with friends outside Buckhead, BUt I have to move..I am 25 former Bad girl (was in trouble, not now)single. Looking to move in and COOK CLEAN DO LAUNDRY AND TAKE CARE OF YOUR NEEDS in xchange for rent and....I am very good looking..5'6" 111 lt brown hair green eyes. and for real...Race doesnt matter

Item Two:

I am seeking a professional man that owns his own business and calls all the shots. To describe my self a little, I am multi-ethnic, 5'5, 130lbs, carmel skin, white teeth, nice curly medium length hair, very intelligent, discrete and sweet.

I'm seeking employment, something 40 hours a weeks( I have a resume)
The beneifits are office sex with me, or a side relationship.
If you are serious respond with a place where we can interview(not a hotel or a house)and a job details.

I'm not sure which combination of sued/murdered/robbed/conned would result, but at least two of them seem certain. Does people post these things because they work, or is it just a cry of desperation?

For your Halloween reading

Via McArdle, the physics of Halloween Monsters.

In this day and age

Crew wins deadly pirate battle off Somalia

What I'm reading while uploading file...

• Monkey Attack!
• A long profile of David Simon, creator of the Wire, and Homicide, Life on the Streets
  
• This article and this one got a student newspaper pulled, maybe there's hope for this new generation.
• Advanced Flash techniques
  

People are strange

From the AJC; it seems that someone has been stalking Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor has gotten a restraining order against a Georgia woman he claims has made telephone calls and sent him explicit e-mails and disturbing gifts, including a petrified alligator foot and dead beetles.
...

Campbell said Keillor had misunderstood the letters, e-mails, packages and phone calls. She said she was never closer to his house than the sidewalk.

"I believe that he's paranoid, or some woman, his wife, is upset and told him he has to do something about it," she said.

Life is stranger than we can imagine. Garrison Keillor?

Three interesting things

• There are more World of Warcraft players than there are farmers (from Paul Krugman via MR)
• The reason the average car produces X many tons of CO2 (a figure I always found fishy) is due to the fact that the carbon bonds with oxygen already existing in the air, which never occurred to me until I read this article. The majority of the actual mass (the O2) comes mostly from the existing air.
• John Edwards, still not popular! It says good things about America, and the Democratic party that he's doing well. I suppose the Republican alternative to him is Tom Tancredo.
• From this BloggingHeads.tv - "John Kerry was a Democrat's idea of what the Republicans like". The Republicans seem to be making the same desperate mistake with Giuliani right now.
  

A weird story

Combining characters from The Departed, Mississippi Burning and Donnie Brasco. In real life no less.

Russian Weirdness

From the AJC (again)

Woman's 12th Baby Weighs Over 17-Pounds
A small Russian city just got a really big addition: a 17-pound, 1 ounce baby whose mother had already delivered 11 other children.

Tatiana Khalina, 42, delivered the girl by Caesarean section at a maternity clinic in Aleisk, a town of 30,000 people in the Altai region in southern Siberia, a nurse at the clinic said Thursday.
...
The Guinness Book of World Records says the heaviest baby ever was born in the United States in 1879. It weighed 23 pounds, 12 ounces and died 11 hours after birth. Guinness says they heaviest surviving baby was born in 1955 in Italy, weighing in at 22 pounds, 8 ounces.

The criminal side of over coming handicaps

From the AJC

Armless Gwinnett man involved in deadly fight jailed
A disabled artist known for painting with his feet was jailed this week on charges related to a deadly brawl with another man earlier this month.

William "Rusty" Redfern was booked into the Gwinnett County Detention Center Wednesday on a misdemeanor charge of affray, a legal term for fighting in public, and later released on $1,200 bond.
...
Witnesses said the men yelled at each other from across the street. Redfern, who was born with no right arm and only a stump for a left arm, then ran into Teer's driveway and head-butted him.

Teer, 49, died minutes later. Police initially suspected Teer died from the head-butt. However, a subsequent autopsy determined that he died of a heart attack. Teer had been suffering from coronary artery disease, according to the Gwinnett County Medical Examiner's Office.

If you put your mind to it, I suppose you can accomplish anything.

Jury Duty Again!

And only two years after the last time.

And question #4 on the questionnaire (along with name, address, etc) is "Are you Hispanic?"

Weird.

Monday rapid fire

• Al Gore goes Geothermal
• Dallas Swat (it's a reality TV show apparantly) officer arrested for having sex with prostitute.
• Firefox Tune Up program
  

Double weirdness

• The quest for alternative energy seems to have caused an earthquake. In Switzerland no less. Overall it's cool though.
• The dirty car art gallery - a guy actually does fine artwork on dirty cars. See to believe.
  

The United States of Baseball and Florida

Here are two from Interesting Maps - the United States of Baseball and Florida. Note the White Sox.

Addendum to the Grateful Dead post

I came across this interview with Ann Coulter on JamBands.com, evidently she's quite the fan. Favorite Quote:

Moreover, I really like Deadheads and the whole Dead concert scene: the tailgating, the tie-dye uniforms, the camaraderie – it was like NASCAR for potheads

Most interesting fact

My collection of Dead tapes, by the way, was the reason I heard one of the Linda Tripp tapes before Ken Starr did. Tripp's lawyer obviously needed to hear the tape before turning it over to the prosecutor, but he only had an old 1950's tape player and couldn't get it to work and Ken Starr wanted the tape the next morning. He was terrified he'd hit the wrong button and erase the evidence. In the wee hours of the morning, it occurred him, a Deadhead himself, that he knew one person in D.C. who definitely had a tape machine. So, at around 2 AM, he called me and asked to come over to use my tape deck.

Friday in appreciation, volume III

I was in Chicago last week so I didn't get a chance to do the in appreciation post, but here is this week's.

This week's in appreciation is the Grateful Dead. While I'm not a huge fan of the music (I love Old and in the Way, and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band is quite good) they stand out as true American icons, especially for artists. Not only did they commit to a style of music and a style of life, they created it first. And seemingly with the attitude that it's better to have a small achievement than a great excuse (to paraphrase Hoffer). They spend 30 years doing what they wanted to do without asking favors or permission. Contrast that to the Live 8 and the Live Earth crowd and they become a marvel.

So, Grateful Dead, you get this week's In Appreciation.

A funny two

I don't usually read the contents of my junk mail folder, but the sender name sounded vaguely familiar so I took a look at it and see

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here (http://thoseeven.cn) are bad.

And check this out, from the Onion - I didn't realize they had a video news service now. HT: Captain Ed.

How to make Google Earth creepy yet funny

Check this out, From Slate. It starts a bit slow, but watch the whole thing

The Dark Tower

Since I can never find the link easily, here is the Coming Anarchy post on The Ryugong, the Dark Tower of North Korea.

The Jimmy Carter killer rabbit story

Subadei posted about the giant badgers the British have supposedly unleashed on Southern Iraq (and if they haven't, why are they holding back?) and I did a quick search for "Jimmy Carter Rabbit Attack" on Google and it returned 341,000 results! The more notable ones are

• News of the odd
• The Straight Dope
• and of course, Wikipedia
  

History rhymes in funny ways

While perusing coverage of the latest British terror plots, I came across the words "Doctor's" and "plot" in the same sentence. Being morbidly interested in Russian History, I thought of Stalin's final purge, happily stopped by his death, the Doctors' Plot, which is thought to be his pretext for getting rid of Russia's Jews.. I was looking over the Wikepedia entry on the subject and came across this little tidbit

In the course of his career, Stalin became increasingly suspicious towards physicians. In his later years, he refused to be treated by doctors, and would only consult with veterinarians about his health.

Weird!

Friday round up

• A look at where the I-Pod is made, it's pretty much all of East Asia
• A nice look at Electronic Medical Records
• Coming Anarchy does math
• Get your postal mail over the internet! This would solve a lot of problems for me actually.
• 72 year old Marine beats crap out of 27 year old pickpocket.
  

An odd sight

A couple of hours ago I made a caffeine run to a gas station I don't often frequent. There were four old men playing some kind of video poker. They all stared silently at the machines, much the same way my age cohort plays Halo or Guitar Hero.

Doesn't anyone ever outgrow video games? It would be nice if someone actually grew up. Granted, I don't seem to be, but other people should.

Saturday night reading

• CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry - I'm sure they have some sort of ulterior motive in this but it seems like a positive development.
• A private citizen owns part of a Georgia highway - He's not putting up toll booths, which is something I would do. Evidently the state tried to condemn it a while back but didn't do all of the paperwork.
• Robotic farm workers!
• While there is a GTD Outlook plugin, there is not a Vista compatible one, which is a bit ironic.
• Americans still don't trust the government. Wherefore art thou Barry Goldwater? Oh yes, we call you Ron Paul now...
  

Quick Friday roundup while uploading

• Cool new wind turbines
• A good article on insanity and Angela Yates
• Oil from Algae!
• 15 year old performs surgery in India
• The art of the doable to do list
• The greatest sidewalk artist ever
  

The first meaningful, non scandalous news from the Catholic church in a while

From Time.com

Joe Kennedy's First Marriage: Still On
The most controversial "marriage that never was" in recent U.S. political history is back. Sources tell TIME that the Vatican has reversed the annulment of Joseph P. Kennedy II's marriage to Sheila Rauch. The annulment had been granted in secrecy by the Catholic Church after the couple's 1991 no-fault civil divorce. Rauch found out about the de-sanctification of their marriage only in 1996, after Kennedy had been wedded to his former Congressional aide, Beth Kelly, for three years.

The annulment was the subject of Rauch's 1997 book Shattered Faith, which lambasted her ex-husband and was severely critical of the Catholic Church's proceedings, which made the marriage (which had produced twin boys) null and void in the eyes of the church. Rauch argued that Kennedy was able to unilaterally "cancel" nearly 12 years of marriage because of his clan's influence in the church. Kennedy argued at the time that the annulment was the right thing to do in religious terms.

Now that I think about it, it's been a couple of years since any Catholic priest molestation revelations have come to light.

Quick roundup while uploading

• A nice article on the Golden Section in design
• China and Demography from Coming Anarchy
• Making engines more efficient - using steam of all things - very cool
• Cutting Edge Designers
• Prediction Markets - nice graphics
  
• Woman jailed for testicle attack

  Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
  
  She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: "That's yours."

  
  

Ron Paul on the Colbert Report tonight

It should be an interesting matchup. We'll see if they touch on any of the unpopular things Paul adamantly believes in like abortion, the Gold Standard and his thoughts on the United Nations.

Cool site of the day

The Strange Maps blog - check out this one which juxtaposes foreign counties with US states in terms of GDP. The Tennessee-Saudi Arabia bit is surprising.

The weirdest thing I read last week

From Jim Thompson's novel, Pop. 1280 after the protagonist almost get hanged by an angry mob for rape

I figure sometimes that maybe that's why we don't make as much progress as other parts of the nation. People lose so much time from their jobs in lynching other people, and they spend so much money on rope and kerosene and getting likkered up in advance, and other essentials, that there ain't an awful lot of money or man-hours left for practical purposes.

The food chain takes surprising turns

Watch the whole thing, there's several twists and turns in this.

Sunday link round up

• A creepy collection of suicide notes
• Google used this camera to create their new "Street View" feature (which is not in Atlanta, yet).
• Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin explains why the lessening of racial majorities is a bad thing for diversity. Really.
• There's a new, free version of Refactor! specifically for ASP.net. It's pretty cool. When I installed it it deleted all of my toolbox snippets in Visual Studio, so be careful about that.
  

Thursday link roundup

• Ala. Officials Probe 'Monster Pig' Saga

  State wildlife officials said Wednesday they want to know how the huge hog dubbed "Monster Pig" got into a fenced hunting preserve where it was chased down and shot to death by an 11-year-old boy.
  ...
  weighed 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet, 4 inches from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.
  ...
  Jamison was hunting with his father and the guides on May 3 when he killed the giant pig. He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

• Are you a good liar?
• Microsoft Surface
• Popular Mechanics how to videos
  

Quick link round

• Puzzles and Mysteries from ZenPundit
• The Captain America Syndrome at the Washington Monthly. - They don't actually call it that, but that's what they're talking about.
• This seems dirty, but it's mostly medical. Quite funny though.
  
• Yet more Stirling engines
  

Strange and funny

From the Wikipedia entry on Sam Peckinpah

Ray Bradbury tells the story of Peckinpah's long interest in filming Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. When Bradbury asked how Peckinpah intended to shoot it, Peckinpah said he would "rip out the pages and stuff them into the camera." Bradbury sold the rights to another party, and the incensed Peckinpah sent Bradbury a gift: a potted cactus and a jar of Vaseline.

Strange and funny

From the Wikipedia entry on Sam Peckinpah

Ray Bradbury tells the story of Peckinpah's long interest in filming Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. When Bradbury asked how Peckinpah intended to shoot it, Peckinpah said he would "rip out the pages and stuff them into the camera." Bradbury sold the rights to another party, and the incensed Peckinpah sent Bradbury a gift: a potted cactus and a jar of Vaseline.

How does the West expect to win...

When we have judges like this

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," he told a London court during the trial of three men charged under anti-terrorism laws.

Prosecutor Mark Ellison briefly set aside his questioning to explain the terms "Web site" and "forum." An exchange followed in which the 59-year-old judge acknowledged: "I haven't quite grasped the concepts."

Interesting bits of knowledge

About evolution in this case

Since records on the subject began in the mid-1800s, the average breast size in the US has increased from a 32-B to the current average of 36-C. This may be a result of better nutrition, healthier lifestyle, or the result of the aforementioned sexual selection.

Wednesday round up

• 5 Techniques for Enhancing Contrast in Digital Photos
• "Breeding dysentery in the ranks" - the best misuses of the English language in the Sopranos
• What journalists need to know about economics - quite good
  

Reason #93,843 for private schools

This is quite weird

Teachers Stage Fake Gun Attack on Kids
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

The mock attack Thursday night was intended as a learning experience and lasted five minutes during the weeklong trip to a state park, said Scales Elementary School Assistant Principal Don Bartch, who led the trip.

"We got together and discussed what we would have done in a real situation," he said.

The Japanese seem to be outdoing us in crazy

Check out the speech below. It takes a certain amount of gravitas to be against majority rule and run for office on the explicit platform of destroying the county, but you just can't hold back street musicians.

Crazy vegans and social evolution

This horrifying article appeared in today's AJC

Vegan parents guilty in infant murder
6-week-old died of starvation after being fed diet of soy milk, apple juice
The parents of a baby that died of starvation after being fed a vegan diet have been found guilty of malice murder, felony murder and first degree cruelty to children.
...
Prosecutors said it was a chilling case of murder by starvation, a painful and prolonged death. Attorneys representing Sanders and Thomas told jurors the first-time parents did the best they could while adhering to their vegan lifestyle. Vegans typically live free of animal products.

It's troubling in many ways; it raises the question of do we need an official (i.e. government) of raising children (no), and how could these two be so stupid as to not notice that their baby was shrinking?

The truly rare thing is how did these two avoid the self-appointed legions of women who see an infant as an invitation to ask the parents questions on every conceivable subject? It's not like you have to seek out child-rearing advice when it comes flying out of the woodwork in public places. I imagine it's decent advice too, just repetitive.

Perhaps it's an evolved behavior. Post-partum depression being common a society with an army of cooing watchdogs is the first line of defense against neglect or abuse.