Fuck exams, fuck south quad, fuck Monster energy drink, fuck the American revolution, fuck the university of Michigan, and FUCK all this other shit.
I just got around to seeing Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Jon Stewart. Saw both the unedited version and the cut version on the show. What struck me most about the unedited one was how subtle the editing on the shown version was. There were some major skips, but most of the scenes that were cut flowed fairly seamlessly in the edited version.
Just kidding. There is no hope here. The demands of college have pretty much determined that the most content I’ll be able to produce for any of the Chucksphere projects is the occasional emo rant or an extremely belated May Day Mystery post (I’m still working on December’s). However, I spruced up the blog by putting it on the front page, then spruced it up again by changing the pallete to something not retarded. The content, though, is still up to its usual level “inspiration.” Let’s take a look at how the Projects faired this year:
Chuck’s World O’ Wargames: LOL. Why do I still have this?
Small Island Nation: Moved to on-site Wiki, which was spam-botted into oblivion. No movement made since August.
The Wildcat Code: Hard to keep up with, due to the demands of college. Still haven’t gotten the December ad finished.
One bright spot: I now have a forum where I can voice my foreign policy opinions. I wrote a peice for the Roosevelt Institutue which made it to the front page, and there are many more to come.
This “holiday” is travesty and worthy of ridicule. All it does is remind certain among us that we’re going to die alone by giving all couples throughout the country carte blanche to be That Couple. You all know a That Couple, so you would know how much of a pain in the ass you’re all being if you weren’t stuck at the center of some romantic-holiday-induced black hole and are constitutionally incabable of seeing past the annoying-as-fuck-event-horizon.
By this point in my life I’ve pretty much given up on trying to find companionship. I got my hopes up quite recently, and poked my head out of my shell, but got knocked right back in there. Fuck You, world.
To celebrate, please enjoy these Joe Jackson songs.
MTV News has exclusively learned from Emmerich himself that “Foundation” will be a 3-D epic using technology similar to the CG motion-capture techniques used in “Avatar.” (MTV Movies Blog)
Why God why do these stories have to be special-effects extravaganzas? I mean, there are some parts that would be more demanding of special-effects than, say, an episode of Lost, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why a series that consists mostly of dialogue and exposition needs to be done in complete CGI? I think it’s a safe bet to say that these movies (there will be three of them) will probably diverge from their source material into some SFX-encrusted action-fest, like I, Robot. I’m sure the momentum of Dr. Asimov spinning in his grave right now is enough to power the entire Eastern Seaboard. (Roland Emmerich Fights Global Warming?)
If someone had asked me, I could probably have done it as a proper mini-series at about the same price per episode as an episode of Battlestar Galactica. But no-one ever fucking does ask me, do they? And now it’s ruined forever.
Also, a faux text-trailor I found particularly amusing. (Courtesty of the Straight Dope.)
I just* finished my third semester of college. I am not a happy man. Those two statements are far from unrelated.
*For certain vaules of “just.” I got out on the 21st.
Think about it. In nature, a lion (say) will go after the weakest member of the herd, removing it’s slow genes from the gene pool. As a result, the average wildebeest (or whatever) is now more able to evade the average lion. The lions are naturally selecting the wildebeests to be faster. Hence, an evolutionary arms race. However, we as a species have managed to do the opposite and artificially select our prey species to be slower, dumber, more docile, and easier to predate.
Exhibit A: the Cow. The cow as it exists today wouldn’t last a month in the wild.
Ray Comfort’s people are here at U of M handing out that copy of The Origin of Species. I declined. There is a perfectly good copy in the library.
Also, I’m not going to miss blogging for this month.
Yahoo! is dismantling Geocities, home of many a web developers first page. I never used it, because I couldn’t get it to load the one time I tried. So my first website was over at Angelfire.
SDMB thread on the XKCD tribute to the closing
And I’ve procrastinated enough.
I’ll be writing the occasional blog post at the blog of Michigan’s Center on International Relations, a part of the Roosevelt Institute. My first speed-written article is here: Humanitarian Aid as Soft Power.
Funny story about this article. I was asked to write it before the IR Center’s meeting tonight. So, at 5:55pm, I sat down and pounded it out; took me an hour. Got to the meeting room at 7:10. That’s when I realized that the IR Center meets at 6. So I fucked up doubly. Ah well…
Title says it all.
On Wednesday the 23rd, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin debating renewing portions of the PATRIOT Act. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin introduced a bill recently to limit the potential abuses of power and invasions of privacy that characterize the PATRIOT Act as it exists. Feingold and his co-sponsors are looking to safeguard our basic constitutional rights in a way that doesn’t neuter our national security apparatus. Write your senators.
Text of the Bill (S 1686)
About a week ago, Paul Krugman had this to say about the necessity of the public option:
“Remember, to make reform work we have to have an individual mandate. And everything I see says that there will be a major backlash against the idea of forcing people to buy insurance from the existing companies. That backlash was part of what got Obama the nomination! Having the public option offers a defense against that backlash.
What worries me is not so much that the backlash would stop reform from passing, as that it would store up trouble for the not-too-distant future. Imagine that reform passes, but that premiums shoot up (or even keep rising at the rates of the past decade.) Then you could all too easily have many people blaming Obama et al for forcing them into this increasingly unaffordable system.”
—-Why the Public Option Matters
He’s absolutly right. With the idea of an individual mandate the most likely part of the reform package to pass, the public option is the only thing seperating a sensible attempt at healthcare reform from a massive handout to insurance companies. If there is no public option, there is no incentive for insurance companies to become more competitive price-wise, and yet they will still recive an influx of 50,000,000 customers.
I while back, I started work on a comprehensive May Day Mystery Timeline. It should be more than done by now, but various things got in the way, and the project grew in scope. As I combed through my notes to find my source material, I realized that my notes documents need some serious revision. That has made the project triple in size, and so take much longer to get through. I project that the project will be finished by the end of the month, but take that with a grain of salt.
In the interim, I’m going to post the addendum to the current note-set fairly soon.
[EDIT 13-September-2009 12:36am -- I uploaded the new notes documents to the index, and I submitted the following clues which can be found on the Contributions page.]
Letter [105]
The bottle cap ties into an ad from 2001.
“In Binary congruence with 3/8/89, Chemnitz has provided a zabra…for the initial transfer.” – ADW 17-January-2001
As Jessica Augustsson notes, Zabra could be a misspelling of “sabra,” which is both a type of boat or a Jew born in Palestine. In the context of the ad, it could either mean the furnishing of a small boat to transfer something that the Arbella is unable to, or the provision of a bottle of Sabra Chocolate Orange Liqueur as part of a transfer.
The question at the heart of this is: “Is this cap a clue to deciphering 17-January-2001, is it supposed to draw your interest back to that ad for some reason, or is the Orphanage just messing with you?”
Freaks 214
The “cancel” he is talking about is the cross-shaped marker-lines on this envelope (http://www.maydaymystery.org/mayday/offsite/delivery05202009/envelope.jpg) from ~20-May-2009 (the one with the bottlecap in it). While the Orphanage would point this out because it follows the cross shape they made with the stamps, it was probably the result of the cancellation machine being broken or something of that nature. Or, they could have a man on the inside at the Post Office.
Freaks 215
This email to you references a group called the Zion Rangers “walking through walls.” This could be a reference to ADW 1-May-2006, which includes a refernce to the book “Walking Through Walls: A Presentation of Tibetan Meditation” by Anne Carolyn Klein.
1-May-2009
To Anne,
I had the same reaction to that map that you did. However, I went to elementary school in Michigan, so I think the U.S. Map pattern must be fairly widespread, at least enough so that a cold-identification of the particular school in question will be all but impossible.
Never let someone you don’t trust have control over something important to you.
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