Damn it!
I just got an e-mail. Shrub is going to be in town tomorrow. In my town. At 12:30 pm, he will be in Canton, MI to make some sort of announcement. Unfortunately, I'm scheduled to work tomorrow, so can't go to greet him. This happens a lot. I'm always getting these emails about protests being organozed the day or week before...on days I have to work.

Mario Master
Back in the day, I thought I was pretty damned good at Super Mario Bros. 3. This guy blows away anything I've ever seen. He's the Mario Master!

Quote of the Day
If people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.
-Rush Limbaugh, 10/5/1995

Wish List
For Carla and my Secret Santa, I've updated my Amazon wishlist. There are several pages of items at prices including a lot of items under $25. Gift Certificates for Underword Comics and Games, Pandemonium Games or Stadium Cards and Comics are also cool.

Quiz
Cool idea for a quiz, stupid questions.

You are Ludwig II, the Swan King of Bavaria!

Born with the name of Otto, you became Ludwig at the request of your grandfather, King Ludwig I, because you were born on his birthday. You became Crown Prince at the tender age of 3, and soon after stole a purse from a shop on the basis that everything in Bavaria belonged to you. Tragedy struck when your pet tortoise was taken away; relatives thought the six-year-old prince was too attached to it. Your childhood was lonely and formal. Once, you were prevented from beheading your younger brother by the timeous arrival of a court official. From the age of 14 you suffered from hallucinations.

Despite striking an imposing figure with your great height and good looks, your speeches were pompous to the point of incomprehensibility. You became even more of a recluse, often spending hours reading poetry in a seashell-shaped boat in your electrically-illuminated underground grotto.

You are most famous for building three fairytale castles - Linderhof, Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee - at tremendous public expense. Declared insane and confined to your bedroom by concerned (and embarrassed) subjects, you escaped on 13 June 1886, but were later found drowned with your physician in Lake Stamberg in mysterious circumstances.



Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Finally, some good news
With news of the "Medicare Reform" (which is the same kind of "reform" that the Republican Party's idea of Welfare Reform is....), I've been feeling a bit of despair about the state of my country. Then, a friend emailed me this Free Press article.

Quote of the Day...err....Week?
Sorry for the silence folks. Most of my internet time lately has been taken up with email.

History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects and is affected by everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then, in perspective, that patterns emerge.
-William Manchester, "A World Lit Only by Fire"

Quote of the Day
I may have posted this one before, but its one of my favorite quotes.

In honor of the Massachussets decision and the conservatives who are in an uproar because the courts serve the cause of justice and not the tyranny of the majority:

After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?
-Henry David Thoreau

Cows
Found online:

DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows.
You are surprised when one cow drops dead.
You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized
And are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.


FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both. Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows
Most are illegals
Arnold likes the ones with the big hooters

The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002
I forgot that I was going to use this list to plan a reading list and try to pick up some of these and read them. I'm crossing out ones I have already read or attempted to read.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
   
   
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
   
   
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
   
   
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
   
   
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
   
   
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
   
   
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
   
   
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
   
   
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
   
   
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
    
    
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
    
    
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
    
    
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
    
    
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
    
    
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
    
    
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
    
    
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
    
    
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
    
    
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
    
    
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
    
    
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
    
    
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
    
    
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
    
    
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
    
    
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
    
    
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
    
    
    
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
    
    
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
    
    
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
    
    
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
    
    
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
    
    
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
    
    
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
    
    
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
    
    
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
    
    
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
    
    
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
    
    
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
    
    
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
    
    
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
    
    
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
    
    
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
    
    
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
    
    
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
    
    
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
    
    
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
    
    
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
    
    
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
    
    
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
    
    
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
    

Worst Fear
Myabe not the worst, but not close. I love my mom. I still wouldn't her emailing me all the time about what I wrote on my weblog.

Old School Geek

You are an Old School Geek. You most likely owned
an atari. You spent your allowance at the
arcade. A fun weekend would be playing D&D
while talking about your sweet new Apple IIe.


What child of the 80's are you?
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...but...but...I answered no to the "have you ever owned (or wanted to own) and an Apple IIe" question. (Only because I owned a Commodore 64 and thought it was much cooler.) I guess my other answers gave me away.

Television
I can't wait until next week's Angel. Drusilla!

Also, I may be the only guy around who liked last week's episode. I have a weakness for Luchadors (Mexican masked wrestlers). There's something so campy about them that you can't help but have fun.

Quote of the Day
No man can be actively nonviolent and not rise against social injustice, no matter where it occured.
-Ghandi

Quote of the Day
I know Principal Flutie would have said, 'Kids need understanding. Kids are human beings.' That's the kind of woolly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten.
-Principal Snyder, who ended up getting eaten himself

...also on a Buffy note, I'd like to point out that I said Carla is like Cordelia more in the good ways, not in the "We-hate-Cordelia Club" ways. Like Cordy, she is confident in herself and knows what she wants in life.

Four-eyed Geek
I went to the Optometrist this morning and had my eyes examined. For the last two weeks my eyes have been constantly twitchy. So, the "twitchy eye" got so bad yesterday that I decided it was time to do something I haven't done since I was a kid: have my eyes examined.

He prescribed a pair of glasses to use while computing and reading. My eyesight is still really good, although not quite as sharp as when I was a kid, so I just need the glasses to reduce eye-strain. It should help my eyes by reducing the amount of work they do to focus on words.

Carla and I haven't had a lot of money lately, so the additional cost of a pair of glasses isn't a welcome news but this could have been the cause of some of my headaches and the tough time I sometimes have adjusting to changes in light levels (going from brightly lit areas to darker areas and vice versa).

Quote of the Day
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.
-George H. Bush, A World Transformed

For J&K
Loving is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction.
-Antoine de St.-Exupery, Wind, Sand and Stars, 1939

To keep marriage brimming
With love in the marriage cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it,
Whenever you're right, shut up.
Ogden Nash, "A Word to Husbands," 1962

Quote of the Day
Almost nobody means precisely what he says when he makes the declaration, "I am in favor of free speech."
-Heywood Brown, "The Miracle of Debs"
New York World, October 23, 1926

Fox News: Fair and Balanced Legal Action
Fox News proved how fair and balanced they are when they tried to sue Fox Television for a Simpsons parody.

The parody news ticker at the bottom of the screen had such lines as "Do Democrats cause cancer?"

Columbus
MN Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke states on the MPR Midday Radio Program, 11/4, that there is no connection between Columbus and Native American Genocide, and argues that children's lesson plans should supress any such connection. She does not acknowledge that Columbus's advent to Indian lands initiated policies of genocide for the indigenous people of North America.

Of course, Columbus didn't want genocide. He enslaved them....but he only killed the ones who resisted. Much better.

....and since when did any children's lessons teach anything bad about Columbus?

Quote of the Day
Angel: I watched you, and I saw you called. It was a bright afternoon out in front of your school. You walked down the steps... and... and I loved you.
Buffy: Why?
Angel: 'Cause I could see your heart. You held it before you for everyone to see. And I worried that it would be bruised or torn. And more than anything in my life I wanted to keep it safe... to warm it with my own.
Buffy: That's beautiful. Or taken literally, incredibly gross.
Angel: I was just thinking that, too.
-Buffy tVS 3.8 "Helpless" (The one where Buffy loses her powers)

....and while looking up the full quote, I also found this one from the same episode:

Xander: You know, maybe we're on the wrong track with the whole spell, curse and whammy thing. Maybe what we should be looking for is something like, erm, Slayer kryptonite.
Oz: Faulty metaphor. Kryptonite kills.
Xander: You're assuming I meant the green kryptonite. I was referring, of course, to the red kryptonite, which drains Superman of his powers.
Oz: Wrong. The gold kryptonite's the power-sucker. The red kryptonite mutates Superman into some sort of weird...
Buffy: Guys? Reality?

Proving what a huge dork I am....and how big of dorks the writers of Buffy are: They are both right. Apparently, Oz reads pre-crisis (before 1986) Superman and Xander reads post-crisis Superman.

I wonder if anyone has ever counted how many times BtVS references Superman. It's probably not as often as Seinfeld did, but it does come up a lot on the show.

Buffy Quiz
(Via Palladia)
I'm not Giles this time, I'm....

Angel

"I could see your heart. You held it before you for everyone to see. . . . And more than anything in my life I wanted to keep it safe, to warm it with my own.""

What "Buffy" Character Are You?

Quote of the Day
I stopped posting daily quotes a while back. I think I may start again.

I'll kill you AND the night!!!
-Leon Belmont in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence

Hey, I didn't say I was going to start posting good quotes. I think this may be one of my new favorite video game quotes. I am sure it sounded really cool in the original Japanese, but it seems to have lost something in the translation.

I beat Castlevania: Lament of Innocence after only a few days. It may be the easiest Castlevania yet, but there are all sorts of extra things to find and a hard mode (called "crazy mode"), so I'm still playing.

Curing Chronic Shortness

A co-worker was telling me about this, and I found it online. The FDC has autorized the use of human growth hormones to cure shortness! What the hell!? Is it now a disease to be different? Just how short is too short? So far, that's up to the doctors and the parents willing to spend the money.

Gunslinger
The new Stephen King book was released today, so work has been pretty busy. No time for posts.

Radio Buffy
"It's like watching scenes from Buffy in no particular order without the picture."

I'll have to check this out sometime at home. It sounds amusing.

An alternative word for an American?
It just occured to me. There has been talk for years about what citizens of the US should call themselves since American could applie to anyone in the Americas. Unitedstatians sounds silly. How about Unioners? I guess Yankee will always be teh obvious one, but since it is often used as a derogatory name overseas (and in the south), it's a tough sell. Maybe as tough as Unioners.

News
I was watching the news this morning and they were talking about the attack on the helicopter that killed the 16 soldiers. The reporter said how while many attacks have been made on our helicopters with heat-seaking missiles and other ground-to-air missiles, this was the first to hit and "now it has become dangerous for our troops in the air as well as on the ground." Now!? Didn't you just say that these attacks have been happening for some time? It wasn't dangerous then?

Why does the news have to try to make everything sound like "the turning point." It's not like they had to try and make this sound important. Sixteen more people died, fighting in Bush's war. That was tragic enough.

In other news, they were talking about the Mississippi Governor race on NPR this morning and the Republican candidate has been blasting the incumbent Democrat....for the poor economy! The Republican is blaming the Governor for the job losses. Last I checked, this was a national problem that certain Republican so-called president has done nothing about. If they start taking governorships away from Democratic governors by playing the bad economy card, there is something truly twisted going on there. (OK, they already did start in CA.) Hopefully we'll see how well this burns them in the presidential election.

By the way, I also heard on NPR recently that Michigan has been one of the hardest hit with job losses in the union.

So Sayeth the King
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
-Elvis Presley

Him

You are HIM! You're unorthodox, for a bad guy, and
you take a long-term approach to your evil
schemes. You know that a creepy voice can be
more evil than a big scary laser gun, though
this often puts you in conflict with other
villains. The forces of good always beat your
short-term fiendish schemes, but you will get
them in the end. You have plenty of time.


Which Powerpuff Villain Are You?
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