Who’s not going to smoke? You telling me?

This chick kicks ass.

People of Australia: do not fear the Donut. Accept the donut.

Now for a bit of the ol’ Tasmanian Tie-Dye:

And don’t blink now, it’s the Eye o’ Perth:

According to Aussie state-run media:

It has since posted a disclaimer above the national loop feed putting the images down to “occasional interference to the radar data”.

“The Bureau is currently investigating ways to reduce these interferences,” the disclaimer said.

Worship the Donut!

I had no doubt whatsoever that the Democrats’ (and by extension, the US media’s) insistence on the character assassination would backfire:

How is it that the media’s approach has changed so dramatically in just the past couple of weeks? Perhaps the Democrats simply went too far when they claimed that tea-party protesters had shouted racial slurs at black congressmen during the ObamaCare weekend.

[From Strange New Respect - WSJ.com]

I really couldn’t figure out what they were trying to accomplish there. The vote was going, it was decided before the name-calling began. Public opinion obviously had no meaning once they started filing into the Capitol (and probably not before that, either).

There was no way that they could think that making shit up about the 3rd-party opposition, which the Tea Parties represent, could raise public opinion by 30 points in time for the bill signing. Was there?

The blogger in me isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping. A few years ago, I was what the Old Economy referred to as a Producer. Nowadays, what with the Twitter and the Facebook, it seems that everybody has become a micro-producer, and a macro-consumer.

But this kind of economy is obviously nonsense. In a situation where the consumption so completely outpaces the production, it follows (in my little analysis) that quality of what we consume decreases rapidly.

People used to jab at bloggers, saying that it wasn’t worth reading because, hey, who cares what your cat is doing? But think about the endless fluff that rolls by on your Twitter feed. The Facebook statuses, while interesting to me because I know the producers, carries little actual value with them. They just make you feel good.

If I compare what my connections are doing in the social networky present to what the people on the blogroll used to put out in a day of energetic blogging, well, let’s just say the world has taken a turn for the stupid.

What accounts for the discrepancy in production and consumption? Could it be that somewhere the machines are running, thumping underground, lulling us Eloi toward the dinner bell? Don’t come crying to me when your Twitter roll cold-cocks you and you wake up with your feet tied and an apple stuffed in your mouth.

Not me, man, I’m gonna hip-check that witch into the oven, just like Hans showed us. I’m mixing shit up, but you know what I’m about.

Source: US Department of Energy

As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

[From North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets - NYTimes.com]

Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn’t something like that at least deserve some consensus?

But this is what I’m talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I’ve already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?

And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.

Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:

• Bowling
  Bowling is...fun. But I can’t say as I’ve ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it’s the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
• Pool hustling
  You get a better class of ne’er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I’ll even accept the fact that you can’t smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one’s out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
  
• Juggling
  Juggling is one of those things I can do but can’t explain why. I’m not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
• Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced)
  I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It’s a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that’s out.
• Blogging
  Now we’re talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
  

This creepy-ass little robot crossed with an Aibo would just about weird the shit out of anybody.

Pro tip: If you really want to feel your skin crawl, watch that video with Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” playing in the background.

Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:

Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.

[From FOXNews.com - Democrats Close to Vote on Jobs Package Without Bill in Hand]

And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.

When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m just a Bill”. It was simple, really, you’re just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.

I’m trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying “Hey, dudes, we’re still here and we’re like in Congress and we’re gonna vote on stuff”, which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It’s just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There’s some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.

It’s all about hookers and blow with these people.

You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn’t changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.

Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom’s attic.

Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in ‘01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.

The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name’s cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one’s self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it’s time to clean some house and shorten some lists.

Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.

So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I’m setting an iCal alarm as we speak.