"He should lighten up…I mean, my mom was a bitch too, but I don’t go writing songs about it."
– Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Eminem
Month: June 2003
Strom Thurmond Finally Dead
Big News day today. Strom Thurmond is dead, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas Anti-Sodomy laws, and the EPA is being told by the Bush administration to edit out hefty chunks of global warming data in its latest report on the environment in favor of findngs released by the American Petroleum Institute (surely an unbiased source).
Maybe it’s just me, but I have to ask, why is the American Petroleum Institute even making environmental reports? Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Isn’t that a bit like Philip Morris doing cancer research?
At least it’s OK to have gay sex in Texas. Not that I’m going to get involved anytime soon. This, coupled with Canada’s recent approval of gay marriages, makes it a banner year for the Liberal Humanist Commie Homosexual Agenda. Too bad the environment will probably collapse in a few more centuries…
Meanwhile…
Here’s to Strom Thurmond – we’re gonna miss you, you crazy bastard.
1902-2003
"I want to tell you, that there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."
Just So You Know…Some Popular Misconceptions
“Infer” means to receive an impression; “imply” means to send an impression. I infer from what you imply.
Referring to text layout – “justified” does not mean “aligned.” To "align" is to set something left, right, or center. To “justify” means to spread out the text to prevent jaggedy columns and line breaks.
Like the text of this page is justified and this one is not (see the ragged right side of the text).
Tomatoes are not vegetables and dolphins are not fish.
This makes a handy refutation for anyone who likes to say "walks like a duck, talks like a duck…" Well, looks like a fish, swims like a fish…could be a dolphin.
Use "its" the way you would use "his" and "hers." No apostrophes for possessive pronouns. Only nouns. The dog’s bark is loud. Its bark is loud. His bark is loud.
"Your" is possessive. "You’re" means "you are."
You’re a churlish boor if you’re not getting your grammar on, fool.
A Neat Internet Explorer Shortcut: Say you’re going to google.com. Type only "google" into the address bar, and then hit "Ctrl-Enter." This keystroke command adds "http://www." to the front and ".com" to the back and executes the request. Isn’t that marvelous?
And Now, Your Moment of Zen:
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
— Robert Frost
(side note about "temper." A temper is something that keeps you from getting angry, a limitation of sorts. A temper is not an angry disposition, it is the very opposite. If someone has a temper, that means they’re well in control of themselves. Having a bad temper means having difficulty restraining oneself. It’s like having a bad muffler; losing it means there’s going to be a lot of noise.)
Useless Links
Utterly random link #2. This shouldn’t be done. The facial expressions in every picture on this site read very clearly: “KILL ME NOW.”
Utterly random link #3. Go to this page and do a Find on "Rogers, Arkansas." Those crafty liberal, leftist, commie, pot-smoking hippies! Those meddling kids! But this is the best part. Some poor schmuck ranting about Hollywood and how he’s going to only go see movies by Bruce Willis and the Rock rather than go see movies featuring actors with whom he disagrees. God forbid he should make choices based on artistic merit. This guy must really feel unempowered by the world. Sure celebrities are mostly idiots (or worse, they’re normal people), but I’ll trust an actor before I’ll trust a CEO. And here’s why. Something I learned from an actor: Even the villain is the hero of his own story.
I’ve often wondered why Hollywood is so liberal, given that so many in La-La Land are so wealthy (I’d expect them to be conservatives after they’ve made money). But I really believe that good actors (not celebrities, since they’re by definition out of touch with reality) have studied the heart of man more thoroughly than most people. A good actor understands the motivations and churnings of the human animal. It’s not make-believe when a great actor is performing, it’s a work of art. A work of art that says, "here is Man in all his grandeur and folly."
Having worked as an actor (I actually got paid to act – I’m still not sure I was worth it), I’ve learned a great deal from the process of putting yourself in the shoes of another and trying to understand the reasons why people are the way they are. So perhaps by definition good actors have to have bleeding hearts.
It’s Ron
The Incredible Moses Leroy returns. Leave it to the guy who made my favorite record of the last two years to come back with an ultra-spiff new website.
IML is really just Ron Fountenberry. There seems to be a real band around him this time, but it’s his brainchild. I’ve discovered that the new record features some work by Roger Manning, Jellyfish‘s keyboardist, and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto. This is particularly amusing to me because now I can put 3 degrees of separation between Jellyfish and De La Soul (Miho was on Handsome Boy Modeling School with Prince Paul, who produced De La Soul). IML’s last record, Electric Pocket Radio, is utterly fab – every song is its own genre. Click that link and you can get it for as low as $7 from the good people at Djangos.com.
Meanwhile, Utterly Random Link #1 in a continuing series.
Female Trainspotter Wanted
Why is it that, by and large, men are more fanatically geeky about things? Comic books, music, computers, Star Trek, mathematics…each demographic has a population whose female participants are far outnumbered by the males. Do we obsess more? I have no shortage of male guitar geek friends, but I have no female guitar geek friends. That are heterosexual anyway (congratulations, Trina – you’ll always be exceptional). I do have two or three women with whom I exchange album recommendations regularly, but I can’t really have in-depth conversations about irrelevant minutiae with them. And really, I guess irrelevant minutiae is what I’m talking about. Trainspotting.
For those who don’t know, trainspotting is a hobby of many Brits who wander around UK train stations and keep track of train serial numbers in an effort to catalog the trains. I would imagine there’s a certain romance to this, although it’s not something I think I would find appealing. However I certainly relate to the collection of useless data. So the term "trainspotting" gets applied to any brand of hobby where the participants are obssessed with something.
Oh the tiny joys of irrelevant minutiae. Band member names, album credits, Ibanez catalogs….my brain is host to inumerable bits of information that I’ll likely never use. Sadly, there’s not even a trivia game worth watching or playing to which I can apply my vast stores of obscure knowledge. I think I get it from my father, who can tell you just about every tune that ever made the record charts pre-1965.
Failed Attempts at Humor #1
This just didn’t turn out as funny as I thought it would. Plus it’s a web geek joke, so not content with simply being lame, it’s also esoteric. Nevertheless, I feel it has a right to exist. I mean, we let these people run around freely, don’t we?
Sucka MC’s be Bitin’ my Rhymes.
Today at work I thought to myself, “I wonder if anyone has ever taken content off my company’s site and presented it as their own?” So I grabbed a pretty unique sentence of my own composition from my company’s site and plugged it into google.
Sure enough, a company in Reading, PA, not only bit my content, but basically jenked the whole shebang! This is actually somewhat exciting to me as it means that A.) I’m writing stuff worth stealing and B.) we may well lay down the smack on them. So don’t go pester them or anything.
In other news, the weekend was spent in Memphis hanging out with Chris and Heather. I plumbed the depths of Shangri-La Records and came up with Dweezil Zappa’s first record, a Chet Atkins album, a collection of Bach played on Moog synthesizers, and some classic hip-hop 45’s: Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” and Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks.”
I also got to meet a new friend. Turns out she’s even cuter in the 3rd dimension. Sadly, we had but an hour or two together, so we could not fully consummate our tryst. Or something.
Gregory Peck 1916 – 2003
Here’s to Gregory Peck. A Man’s Man. Smoother than I’ll ever be.
Weatherman’s Hell
The meteorological quirks of this state never cease to amaze me…5 minutes ago I went to the bathroom and the weather was all grey, rainy and Seattle-esque….when I got back, it was sunny and clear.
Last night I went for a run around the neighborhood and the world was yellow-tinted. I love that – I feel like I’m in a 70’s B-movie. The sky was an orange silk quilt of clouds. By the time I was heading home, the sun had almost set and I felt the temperature drop 10 degrees as the lightning started and the grey clouds took over.