Intellectual Poison

Yeah, that about says it all but there's more. There was a film crew shooting an ad in San Francisco that called for the dropping of 100,000 bouncing superballs. Oh yeah, its even better at maximum resolution or even large!

There are more pics where this one came from but this is cream, so far as I could tell.

Really pretty amazing stuff. And all from a wee dollop of rubber, some color and gravity. Sweet! Thanks to Jay for the headsup!
Tags: SanFrancisco, superball, Flickr

Do you need a laugh? Do you feel guilty when you laugh inappropriately? Then the Flickr: Do Your Worst Pool is for you. Its a growing collection of awful self portraits posted by people who can laugh at themselves. And I did laugh out loud at several of the photos.

Have I mentioned recently how much I absolutely adore Flickr?
Tags: Do Your Worst, bad pictures, Flickr

It should not be lost on people that Kenny Rogers, the Texas Rangers pitcher who totally lost control and assaulted two cameramen during warmups a month ago had his appeal over 20-game ban rejected.

And now, here's where I get irritated. You can't publicly state that you're sorry it happened and accept responsibility for your meltdown AND THEN appeal your suspension. Somebody should explain what "contrite" means.

Appealing your suspension means you're not sorry, you think your punishment is too much and effectively proves you are a king sized asshat. And you sir, Kenny Rogers, are a king sized asshat. One, for losing control after like thirty years in the majors. Two, for saying the right thing and then doing the exact anti-thesis of that right thing. And three, I used to not really give a damn but now I hope you get jail time for assault because you're such an unrepentant Texas-sized douchebag.
Tags: Kenny Rogers, assault, asshattery, baseball

One of the things that I took away from this last weekend's Flickr Meetup is that there is beauty and art and something special in everything you see. There's something special to see in everything. Be it a smashed computer monitor dropped onto the railroad tracks or a simple track of footprints across wet sand.

This is a shot taken under one of the five bridges across the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz. It appeals to me because of the play between light and dark, the shapes each has and the beckoning blue sky reflected in the river ahead. And the one below is a trick shot, taken from a very low angle of some not very large rocks in my old neighborhood. I like shooting illusory images when I can because they take some time to figure out and, in the act of figuring them out, the rest of the world backs off into the distance for a few moments. And we can all use a few moments of peace from time to time.

Photography is becoming more than a hobby for me these days and I've really been enjoying the different mindset it requires. You can't just snap and snap and snap and expect to find something worth sharing without giving some consideration to what you're trying to say, what the message is or what you don't want to show. Or what distracts the eye from the message you're trying to convey.

The bummer thing is that I'm about to send my new digicam off for repairs so I will be downgrading my camera for a few weeks (unless I get aggravated and just buy the Canon SD500 which is what I really want right now anyway although I'm a little concerned about its lack of extensive optical zooming capabilities).

And then there are my contacts on Flickr, people like Rebekka who I will never meet in person but am a huge fan of her photos. And she's one of many many who stretches my photographic horizons on a daily basis. Deborah Lattimore is another who has a magnificent eye and the ability to capture that vision as she sees it. I could pretty much run down my contact list and find a great reason for viewing their photos. Some are beautiful people and I love seeing how they capture images of themselves, some are beautiful people who use their cameras like a paintbrush to create a scene, some are just crazy dog lovers like me. I would invite you to take a look at my ever growing Favorites page to get an idea of some of what I think are the best shots I've seen on Flickr. I say it that way because the volume of images being posted is far beyond my meager ability to view them all and I know that I miss an awful lot of the cream of the crop. But that's why there are groups where people can post their themed photos to a wider audience for viewing.

To all of my Flickrite friends, thank you for your support, your inspiration and your friendship. I know I've taken but a few baby steps down this road we call photography but I have intentionally been stopping to smell the roses and appreciate thier unique beauty thanks to all of you who have been reshaping how I view the world. There is beauty everywhere, we have but to stop and see it.
Tags: photography, Flickr, repairs, expanded horizons

Try to get a decent night's sleep with your 1 year old baby boy using your chest, arms and face for his kickboxing workout while he's asleep. I can all but guarantee that you will get about as much sleep as I did last night.

Its not that my little boy's mean or anything, he's just a very active sleeper and seems to end up beating on me everytime he sleeps in our bed. So, at 4 this morning, I gave up and moved to the couch downstairs where I got several more hours of fitfull sleep before it was time to walk the hound.

We need a house with at least four bedrooms so that we can have a guest bedroom as well as Graydon's room so that he can sleep in his space (and not kick me in the face all night) and our guests can not have to worry about displacing him.
Tags: sleep, lackofsleep

George W Bush via Rotten.com. Well done, lads.
Tags: rotten, George W Bush, George W Bush is a fraud, failure

So I learned a few things this weekend while enjoying my first Flickr Meetup in Aptos hosted by the magnificent lizhurley. The first is that sunscreen is important to apply to the tops of your feet. The second is that the sunscreen should not be expired or its basically like putting on sun magnifier. The third was that socks and sunburns are a really bad combination. But I'm getting better and really the only bad part is peeling the socks off at the end up the day.

Anyway, other good stuff I learned about at the Meetup, one is the flickr card generator that lets you give people a means of finding the pictures you've just taken of them. A very cool way of spreading the word about Flickr while also bringing some new eyes to your work. I also learned about some cool groups at Flickr that I hadn't been aware of. It was also a really fun way to get to meet some new people who also happened to be really good people as well. Very supportive, interesting and engaged in their world's. But, the downside is that I now have camera envy. Everyone else was carrying big iron, Canon Rebels, Nikon's, Lumix. I was the only one of the bunch with a pocket digicam.

But I'm actually in the process of replacing my little Sony p-200. I'm not going to an SLR though, I'm actually planning on going back to the Canon line. This time shooting for the SD500 because I miss the Canon form, miss Canon's really smooth and easy to use zoom and the controls. Not that I dislike my Sony, its just not quite what I want though I have been able to capture some excellent shots with it. So now I've gotta get Sony to fix it (tiny, tiny scratch or crack in the lens puts a big ol' blur spot in the middle of zoomed pics).

One downside to the nearly all day Meetup was that I didn't get a chance to go and visit with leblanc while she was down over the weekend. But that happens from time to time and I have no doubt that we'll get together again soon. I would have loved to have gone to the roller rink but my feets would have been most unhappy!

And now its back to the grind to get the workweek going. Lots of excitement happening and I have no doubt that there will be some interesting news this week. Notably, why did Alberto Gonzales give the White House a 12 hour window between knowing about the opening of a criminal investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame by Karl Rove and informing the White House of it formally? It couldn't have been so they could destroy evidence, could it? Nah, that would be awfully cynical of me.
Tags: Flickr, Meetup

If you just can't come up with a good name for your product, just add "Laser" or, better 'cause its all street, "Lazer". Yep, even if the product has absolutely nothing to do with lasers or light or anything even remotely connected to lasers.

The same applies to turbo too. Can't spice up the name? Add Turbo to it and instant cred!

I'm watching an informercial for the Singer Lazer Storm, a vacuum cleaner that does not, as the name suggests, have any laser armaments at all.
Tags: dumbmarketing, marketing

Note that I do normally post political things to IP Politik but I feel this is important enough to post here. Instead of blame laying, this is laying out the damage caused by the outing of just one CIA agent.
Its not a good thing to out a CIA agent. For any reason because its never confined to just the one agent, the outing compromises pretty much everyone that agent has come in contact with or is associated with in anyway. It takes years of work and turns it into quarter inch by half inch bits of uselessness.

The damage is real, the damage will harm us and our friends for years to come and yet the man at the center of the investigation, the man who's already been confirmed to be a main constituent of the breach and reconfirmed. He still goes to work everyday with the highest security clearance possible, his boss has shut down the traps and no one's talking about Rove at all. Nothing. Investigation, yah, yah, yah, investigation complete.

The message this sends is? George Bush's pal is more important than national security. His friend's well being is more important than doing the right thing and at least removing him from duty until the investigation is done.

And through it all, through this partisan nasty assholish exploitation of position and power, through it all, we are weakened. Our nation is weakened. Our credibility is further undermined, the US will screw its own so why would anyone want to try and provide us with intelligence information. It's like an eye has been poked out. Because of a grievance with her husband.

Which, by the way, is an incredibly and particularly cowardly attack when you think about it. What kind of a jackass goes after a guy's wife instead of the guy? Cowardly shadow puppetmasters. Seriously, that's just lame anyway.

And now we have ex-members of the secret service testifying about the real world damage caused by this short sighted and petty deliberate security breach.

There's a lot, lot more to this, the stories are coming out rather regularly as the media starts to digest the magnitude of what this ultimately stupid action will end up costing us. It isn't a stretch to say that these lies and the outing could even result in more attacks. Maybe the recent increase in attacks overseas are the result of this?

Using Google News is a good way to stay on top of the breaking information.
Tags: treason, broken promises, Rove, Bush, Plame, Wilson, CIA

This is a pretty NSFW post so read it with caution if you're in a place where people get upset about things like horse penis's and beastiality.
There are things that seemingly sound good in the abstract, a mountain of ice cream, all the tea in China, an honest politician. But, upon the reality of it, the fantasy is much more compelling and less painful and dangerous.

I'm not saying that this story, Man Dies After Sex with Horse, is necessarily something that sounds good in the abstract but it must have appealled to him because he paid to go to a sex farm in Washington to get buggered by a horse. I'm sure he'd fantasized about it for a long time before taking the plunge (sorry) and now he's dead. Keep it a fantasy and you're a live freak, live it out and you're a horse's dead bitch.

Now, a horse's penis is usually around two and a half feet long. And horses are rather large and very powerful animals. Human/horse sex shouldn't happen, our parts didn't evolve for it and it can result in a rather horrific way of dying. I would very much hate to be related to this man as I'm sure there is plenty of abject humiliation for anyone even remotely associated with this freak in heat but I wonder what his funeral will be like and how many years they will make jokes about him in his town? I'd say poor guy but he brought this on himself willingly. I will say, poor horse though because it didn't have much of a choice in the matter.

Also on MeFi this week, a site about how to safely approach sex with dolphins. No, I'm not making this up but I won't be linking to that garbage here. You can go and read the thread and get the link there, if you, for some bizarre reason, need to know how to safely engage in sexual relations with a dolphin. Why yes, it has been a rather strange week on the MeFi. But I did learn that beastiality is when the animal isn't given a chance to consent to sex and zoophilia is when the human is actually in love with the animal. Not that I care because, in the end, its still fucking an animal but its nice to get the terms properly.
Tags: beastiality, zoophilia, horse, dolphin, badidea, rectum? it DID kill him

Wow, I love it, I love it, I love it when someone does something so alarming simple and great that it should have been done by now. Yeah, that's what HotOrNot + Google Maps is all about.

Very impressive indeed. Check out Santa Cruz, just go south from San Francisco on the main map. Click on a thumbtack in a zip code and you can scroll the submitted photos based on your search criteria. Its pretty cool really. There are calls on MeFi to incorporate the Sexual Predator Database to complete the circle. And others called it Stalker-Tech.
Tags: googlemaps, hotornot, convergence

Yes folks, anytime you combine an energetic little kid with food then you have a potential for good fun, a helluva mess or a nightmare. This morning was a good fun morning but Graydon's been developing this lovely habit of taking the food and rubbing it into his head behind his ears. We're not really so thrilled with that particular behaviour but what can you do?

He has such a good time eating these days and its primarily because he feeds himself. He doesn't like to be fed anymore because he's such a big boy. But he gets frustrated with his little spoon and will usually just dive in and mash the food all around.

But not this morning, this morning he was in rare form, laughing and giggling and then he started hamming it up for my camera. This shot about kills me because he's just so darned cute it almost hurts. I do love my little boy so much.
Tags: cuteboy, food, happy, mess

You know the hoops and obstacles you have to deal with everytime you call a credit card company and have to grind through their phone system labyrinth? Like having to punch in your card number and personal information before being able to speak to someone and then having to give that person the same information you just punched in?

And then, if they transfer you to somewhere else, you have to give all of that information again?

Yeah, that could pretty easily be fixed by integrating the systems a lot better and it would be a helluva lot less of a pain in the ass to your customers, you know, the ones who pay your salaries? The ones who keep your tired old asses in business? Yeah, us.

Also, Discover Card signed me up for some bullshit called The Register three years ago, charged me $45 for it and never notified me of it. And then they just sent a "courtesy notice" that it was going to renew in September. Damn I'm sick and tired of credit card scams like this. And then the operator tries to scare you into keeping their bullshit value add extra revenue stream. Sorry but you can go fuck yourselves.
Tags: creditscam, creditcard, DiscoverCard

So there was a story in the news the other day about Chinless Joe and The Hilary getting their collective panties all wadded up because some modders had made it easy to make some simulated sex in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is, in my humble opinion, the best video game going right now (though I've heard God of War trumps it handily and has a mini-sex game in it as well). But it should also be noted loudly that this game is wholly inappropriate for anyone under 18 and probably for most people in any case regardless of age. But then, that's part of the fun of the game, being able to just go off and cause massive and escalating mayhem. It only makes sense that the sexual side of it would be deeper as well.

More Hot Coffee news. And now its appearing that the mods are also in the PS2 version of the game as well as the PC (ain't that an oxymoron now!) version.
Tags: GTA:SanAndreas

Get thee to the FLIPBOOK! (flash) and you too can create your own instant online flipbook.

My creation is called Pointed Karma. There are some much more impressive works on the site.

But then, I can make a sixteen panel instant flipbook with my digital camera in about ten minutes.

But I don't have to get out of my chair to do the online version.
Tags: flashfun, flash, flipbook

Now, this is one scary story, California has indicted 40 pilots for fraud after they falsified medical reports that would have grounded them. Things like schizophrenia and severe heart conditions, you know, the kinds of things that could end up killing several hundred people.

Fourteen of the 40 have had their licenses revoked and the other 26 may be suspended.

Folks, if you are working in a capacity where you are a caretaker for a whole bunch of other people and you have a serious medical condition that could result in you killing people, stop risking hurting other people! Stop thinking about yourself and think about all of those people you are putting at unnecessary risk.

Damn, it makes me want to give a breathalyzer to the pilot of the next flight I have to take.
Tags: pilot error, endangerment, revocation

Check out the Air Car to find out about a car that runs on compressed air. No gas, no solar, no wind turbines, just air and a once a year (vegetable) oil change to keep things moving smoothly.

And anything to get us off OPEC's teat is a step in the right direction. It ain't pretty but that's fine, use those nice big juicy engineer brains to get the internals working nicely and then they can hire a designer to make it sellable.
via
Tags: aircar

Ranting into the ether accomplishes nothing but neither does shaking my fist at repeated abuses of spelling and grammar. But at least a little mini-rant makes me feel a little better.

It seems like there's been a shift in the last few weeks from trying to basically not giving the first damn if what you've written is clear and spelled properly. Maybe its just the old school tool in me but take a damned second and check your spelling. Its not hard and it goes a very long way toward clarifying and supporting your position.
Tags: spellcheck

So, because I know the demand for insider HP knowledge (not Hewlett-Packard, Harry Potter) I spent most of the weekend hacking into J.K. Rowling's pretty Powerbook to see if I could find out anything new. And did I ever hit the motherlode! I don't want to waste all the goodies right out of the gate so I'll detail a little bit right now and add more as I can.

Here are the next six or seven or eight Harry Potter books with as much of a description as was available:
Harry Potter and the Regurgitant Sorority Girl - which must be about HP's fraternity years.
Harry Potter and the Hairy Potter - Based around a Mr. Hanky type of character and lots of scatalogical humor.
Harry Potter and the 8 Beer Funnel - peer pressure can be a bitch, or you can just wake up next to one or feeling like one.
Harry Potter and the Locked Liquor Cabinet - no summary available here.
Harry Potter and the Unlockable Bra - trials and tribulations of a horny young mage and one of "those" bra clasps that refuses to grant entrance to funland.
Harry Potter and the Locked Bathroom Door - in which HP learns about his own magical wand.
Harry Potter and the Pseudo-Gay Fraternity Initiation - spanking's not just for naughty little boys anymore.
Harry Potter and the LASIK Procedure - this one had several question marks where the summary would be so this is perhaps not a real story.
Harry Potter and the Freak Power Party - an homage to the late and great (and soon to be a cannon shot ash cloud) Hunter S. Thompson.

There was some other stuff in there but who's interested in seeing JK Rowling naked anyway? I hope this helps everyone plan their next seven or eight years of their life, you can send your preorders to me and I'll be sure to let you know when any of these titles become available.

[Update: I read a pretty startling stat today and had to share, J.K. Rowling is bringing down more than 100m pounds a year now because of her Harry Potter books and merchandising. That is a pretty insane amount of money and tells me that hey, maybe I should be looking more into writing the few kids books we've mapped out. Just a question of getting the art done and finding some outlets to sell the books.

A hundred million pounds a year seems higher than it should be but I guess they sold 7 million copies of the Half Blood Prince in the first day so maybe that's not so nuts.]
Tags: Hewlett-Packard, HarryPotter, JKRowling, preview, sneak peek

There are certain unspoken rules that the world runs by. Pretty basic things that you try to live around, like don't eat food you find on the sidewalk. Or, don't send email with your credit card info and social security number.

One of those rules got broken this weekend. The one that states, thou shalt not make use of public restrooms at Target or KMart or (in case hell has frozen over and the only store left on the planet is) WalMart. Why?

They are nasty, there's no other to describe them. Yes, they clean, yes, they clean them like four times a day or more (I didn't stop to check the signoff sheet on my way out) but all the cleaning in the world is not going to even begin to mop up the utter nastiness of the public restroom.

And not even that shred of tissue paper you lay down between your delicate posterior and whatever swarms of germs were left by the last occupant will do anything to lessen the near overwhelming sense of wrongness that is dropping the tail in the public space.

I don't think Grand Central Station could have been busier than that bathroom. I stopped counting after the fifth person entered after me. And then there was the conversation about whether or not the bathroom had been cleaned this shift yet. And then there was the mystery plopper who settled in next door and then having to listen to the uncomfortable silence punctuated by the unmistakable low grunt and plopping splash of a successful contraction.

No, there are places that no man should have to go and a public restroom like those at Target are on the no-squat list. And don't even ask about gas station crappers, they're only good for shooting up and passing out and puking, barely.
Tags: target, restroom, crapper

There are all kinds of banner ads on the internets today advertising an exclusive Podcast (there's a redundant phrase if I've ever heard one) of Pauly Shore! Woooot! I mean, come on, the guy was comedy gold only ten to fifteen years ago. Okay, well, he was good for a chuckle ten or fifteen years ago. Okay, he was only marginally funnier than a turned off tv set. Okay, he was marginally less funny than a turned off tv set.

Okay, nope, I really couldn't be bothered to give a damn about an exclusive Podcast of Pauly Shore. Now, an exclusive Podcast of someone who's actually done something of value or is an interesting person, that might be worth tuning in for, or downloading or whatever the cool kids call it.

Truthfully, I'm not a fan of Podcasts. It seems like another way to clutter things up with more useless crap. Only you can take your useless crap with you instead of having to read it at a computer. So maybe that's the nice part. I don't know. All I know is that the few podcasts I've downloaded and listened to made me think of mental masturbation more than anything else. That the podcasters were getting off on having other people listen to them. I'm sure there are some really incredibly podcasts out there that I'm missing out on. But there's still plenty of other stuff to do see, read, react and enjoy on the internets without podcasts adding to the clutter of it all.

That said, I wouldn't mind the ability to audio post to IP every once in a while.

And, oh yeah, Pauly Shore is like a lobotomized Carrot Top. No less annoying but a hell of a lot dumber and just as ugly.
Tags: podcast, Pauly Shore

Combine a hot summer day with a hose, a dog and a 2 year old and you've got instant fun. A friend's sitter plans fell through this weekend so we were called in as backup so she and her little sister who was visiting could go sailing for the first time for both of them.

So we had our hands full with two little boys but they were great fun and had nearly nothing but smiles all day long. This was taken while Graydon napped, we got about a half hour or so of fun hose time in the back yard and I shot about 90 pictures of the event.
Tags: summertime, playing

Okay, its well after the end of the workweek now so I can post again. No, the press release didn't get written but we found the hook and that's the hard part so it'll just about write itself on Monday.

Nope, this post is to celebrate two nice baseball events. The first happened last night in the Giants quality win over the sparkle and fade LA Dodgers. The Giants franchise became the first in Major League history to record 10,000 wins. That's impressive and I'm glad they beat the Yankees.

Which brings me to the second shout out. And its to the Boston Red Sox who bounced back from a come from ahead loss yesterday to the Yankees to beat the holy tar out of them again today. They recorded their second 17-1 drubbing of the Yankees this season! And any day that ends with a thorough ass-whooping of the most overpaid team in sports history can't be all bad.

And the last one is for Rafael Palmiero who should hit his 3,000 hit either tonight or tomorrow. Actually, he just did it right now so hot damn!

And, the real last one, how about that A's pitching? Harden throws a perfect game into the 8th last night. That's pretty cool all on its own but add in Barry Zito's no hitter into the sixth right now and the A's staff have seriously come alive along with their bats.
Tags: Yankees, Red Sox, Boston, New York, baseball, Rafael Palmiero, Barry Zito, Athletic's, Oakland

Things are breaking, I need to take some time to get them unbroken again. Why not go and play with these, WeBoggle and Planarity instead?
Tags: broken

Picture in picture isn't new but, by using a parallax barrier superimposed on the LCD, the Sharp Dual View LCD displays two full screen images (Yahoo jpg) simultaneously, you see one or the other depending on your viewing angle.

This could be the end of the battle for the remote control. And no word on the conniptions something like this would give to a PVR.

Tags: lcd, technology, pictureinpicture

Schwarzenegger making millions as muscle mag editor and that's no conflict of interest at all, it just means that, when he's supposed to be the Governor, he is, at least some of the time, not acting as governor and is, instead acting as an editor for some steroid hyping muscle mags.

The conflict is that this meatheaded fool doesn't recognize that governing the state is a 24/7 job. Its not a 9-5, go home and tell your wife what she can and cannot wear job. Its not a go hobnob with your Republican asshat pals in Texas or where ever they send you on the campaign trail, its a do your friggin' work here type of job.

And no, it doesn't help that I think mags like Muscle & Fitness cause as much harm as help. They present an ideal that is unattainable without the use of steroids. Check out the cover of any of their magazines (with a few exceptions) and you'll see someone who's injected, ingested or otherwise taken in substances to add bulk unnaturally. People do not, naturally, have 24 inch arms, its beyond ridiculous to pretend they can or do.

Arnold's admitted to using steroids, he writes for a magazine that sensationalizes over-bulking of bodies, may still advise on the President's Council on Fitness and is, most sadly of all, the governor of my state. I don't see how he can adequately govern the state with all of those other responsibilities and time sucks.
Tags: conflict of interest, Schwarzenegger, California

Nope, not more politics and calls for Karl Rove's treasonous head. Nah, that's handling itself just fine right now and the more Shrub digs his heels in the more he looks like he's trying to protect a traitor to the American people.

No, this morning's post is about a smaller blood sucker, ticks. In the last week, I've pulled four of them off Nande from our morning walks in the slough. This morning I pulled one off her while we were still down in the slough as it had just hitched a ride.

The side effect of pulling ticks off of her is that I develop a strange paranoia that there are ticks on me, hidden in my hair or in the middle of my back where I can't reach them. I know there aren't any there intellectually but tell that to my skin and the hairs on the back of my neck that stand up or the sensation of little feet across the nape of my neck.

Its nasty because ticks are nasty little creatures, ugly and built for one thing, to extract blood from a host so they can make little ticks and start the process again.

All it means is that I'll be hitting Nande up with the new dose of Revolution mid-month rather than at the end of the month because pulling ticks off my hound is a serious drag and gives me a lasting case of the heeby-jeebies.
Tags: tick, tick season, slough

This is a direct link to the meat of the recent "press conference" in which the press brought their brass balls and Scott Mac brought his stonewall. Its still absolutely priceless, Scotty on Rove (QT), click here for other options and the main link to the post at Crooks and Liars. By the way, I just got word from my wife that Scotty may be quitting soon so that his mom can launch her political career and so that he can start the process of rebuilding his dignity and honor, you've got a long, long road ahead there, Scott.

What do you think will end up happening here? Should Rove quit, be fired, be tried for high treason and be executed if/when he's found guilty?

I doubt he'll be charged with any crimes but I would be very surprised if he keeps his position in the Bush regime. Bush put himself between a rock and a treason charge by publicly stating "Anyone involved in the Plame affair won't be part of the Bush administration" or something to that effect.

[Update; Bush just said in a news conference that his administration would cooperate fully with the investigation and, in doing so, they would not comment until the investigation is over. Nice little piece of work, Shrub.]
Tags: treason, high treason, ScottMcClellan

How about a pool on stilts as a result of Hurricane Dennis? Note that its still full of water.

Which reminds me of a big old concrete dome house from last year's hurricane season. If I happened to live down there in Hurricania, I'd definitely be pursuing some sort of house along those lines. A place that sheds winds, is too heavy to float and would be safe in all but the end-of-times style hurricane.

And the coming hurricane season leads to another question, choosing between hurricanes in the south or earthquakes out west or, heck, winter up north? Earthquakes don't come every year and we haven't had a significant one here since I moved out here ten years ago. Some small shakers, sure, but nothing like Loma Prieta. Hurricanes come most every year, most years more than one and they are great media, really great. You can see them coming from three hundred miles away and its easy to send a reporter to go stand in the rain near it and report that its raining and really, really windy.

And winter? Winter is a relentless pain in the ass for months and months on end occasionally punctuated by moments of brightness like sledding on fresh powder, playing hockey on a pristine backwoods pond, snow angels and getting super heated in a sauna and then rolling in the snow. And driving on snow is fun if you don't have to get anywhere quickly, its even more fun if you just pull into a parking lot and play with the emergency brake alot. I just don't really like winter all that much unless its in week to week and a half doses like Thanksgiving or Christmas, but not both.

Anyway, I hope people came through Dennis alright and that the rest of the season is gentle. But at least you won't be suffering alone or won't know it's coming. Me? I'll stick with the earthquakes because we get free sun, sand, surf and smokin' hotties around town.
Tags: hurricane, earthquake, winter

It is becoming increasingly clear that Karl Rove committed an act of treason against the United States in outing Valerie Plame several years ago. Bush publicly stood by him then and is standing by him now. Which is nice and all and I appreciate loyalty but this fucking douchebag is a treasonous asshat. What does that say about you when you keep company with people like him? You are a sympathizer to treasonous asshats.

"If anyone in this Administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this Administration." (9/29/03, White House press briefing) Which is to say, since Karl Rove is obviously involved in "it", he should be fired and tried for his crimes. Will he be fired? Not just yet. The heat's gotta get hotter so that all the rats start jumping and feeling the burn before they'll cut ties and set his ass adrift in a sea of treason, lies and partisan hackery.

Rove is poisonous now and yet ol' Shrubya stands by his man like a retarded coondog. Good for you, Bushie, stand a little closer so that you go down with him. And the worst part of it all is that he outed Plame because of a greivance with her husband, what a cowardly little prick he is and now he's going to pay with his reputation and job.

And to anyone thinking of playing the Shoe-on-the-other-foot argument and switching Democrat for Republican and expecting me to back down from it, hell no. I don't care that this is a Republican being punished for his crime, I care that this is someone who intentionally tried to weaken my country and that makes him a traitor to the United States, not Republican, not Democrat, traitor.
Tags: KarlRove, Karl Rove, Plame, traitor, treason

You think I'm joking? You don't think there's such a thing? Neither did I but its real, its real big and it had some real power.

Check out the Lake Berryessa Glory Hole, in all its insane coolness.

Who else wants to throw stuff in there just to watch it whoosh away at warp speed?

Apparently, when the lake's water level was low enough to dry out the glory hole spillway, some enterprising (and mildly retarded) skateboarders went out to play around in the hole. It'd be fun, I'm sure but I would never be able to shake the sense that the water was rising rapidly and would soon start spilling down the tube.

I bet the engineers had boners all day long when they got the glory hole spillway approved though!
Tags: glory hole, spillway