Archive for September, 2006

Of want and need

Every time I come back to Louisiana, I’m struck with a bit of sadness when I look at the people who have, and yet still have their hands out. There are no more have not’s in this country. And the ones that are haves and have their hands out, are completely complacent in their intent to *not* increase their stature in this world. They will always have their hands out and do not know what it is like to have not.

Lets face it, we have not had the “have nots” since the great depression. We owe this to the great government programs which were meant to only be temporary and now are taken for gospel.

Why should I help someone who will not help himself? And why does that person and everyone else claim that they are a victim of the system, when it is the system itself that has given them the free home, free car, free food in which they have. Trek back 70 years and you will find that this abundance of giving did not exist. These people knew what hardship truly was. The people of the great depression, the men who committed suicide because they could not take the thought of looking at their families and not being able to provide for them. Today, some men would rather sit at home, and talk about how the government is so bad for them.

We celebrate the lives of great people every day, which brought our country to where it is, like FDR, JFK, and Martin Luther King Jr. But where are our leaders like them today? Where are the men who are not whining about not being treated fairly? Where are the men that will stand up and do something for themselves for a change? Who will be educated, up standing, salt of the earth men? When will this perpetual cycle of victimized burnt my lap coffee, smoked a pack a day sue the company for my own stupidity society figure out that the problem with this country is WE THE PEOPLE.

How many people out there can even complete the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence? Hell, how many can complete 2 sentences? Are our children even taught history at all anymore? Or is it turned into those politically correct story tales?

Do you ever wonder why we keep idolizing movies of WWII, and talk about how it was the Great Generation. Why we have movie after movie about a war and a generation that is nearly gone? It’s because that Generation was the last of the people who did for themselves. Our generation, generation X or Y or whatever you want to call us, have it all, we know not what it is like to come from nothing. We’ve never suffered from the problems they had. We’ve never had a common enemy, or had a common call to duty like that felt during WWII. Sure we’ve had 911 and an attack upon our soil by terrorists, but nothing like that generation. When an entire country was in a WAR economy, when everything was rationed in order to out manufacture, out produce, out ship the enemy. Neither have we as a generation, nor our parents had to experience that. And we idolize that, we wish to turn back the clock, and yet, not enough to give up our materialistic natures. Because that’s what we are.

What will it take for the world to come about, for the United States to come about and realize the true problems that need fixing, have to start here, with our people, not with some nation halfway around the world. They will continue to blow each other up, always have, and always will. We being there will not solve anything. Our press lying to us won’t solve anything either. But that’s neither here nor there.

Take stock, look around you, what is it around you that you really need? That you really just want? Do you need the push toy, the cube goodies, the digital camera, the 4 TVs, the satellite radio, the 45 pairs of shoes? You know women in WWII era painted lines on their legs so as to look like they had stockings. The rationing of nylon went to make material, and parachutes. Could you go without?

Ultimately what will it take for our country, and people to wake up? Kill the middle class.

What do I mean by that? Stay tuned for part II.

Say It Ain’t So, Screech!

Okay, I’m only going to say this once.

Under no circumstances, at all, ever, do I want to ever see the Dustin Diamond sex video.

That is all.

Out.

23-3.

I’ve just finished watching one of the best pro football games I’ve seen in ages, and it wasn’t ever even close.

The New Orleans Saints, long the nomads of the NFL, have returned home. In the process, they beat the Atlanta Falcons and improved to 3-0.

The Saints have come home. It’s not a huge step forward in the progress of New Orleans rebuilding. That being said, it was an emotional and moral leap forward for a city beleagered by the crushing reality of Katrina fo the past 13 months.

The Saints are home. And although not all is right with the world, a little piece of it feels right again.

Out.

Hey, Can Somebody Answer This For Me?

I’m just curious about something here…

When did ER begin to absolutely, positively suck?

Just wondering, is all.

Out.

Top Search Strings for Wetwired MIDGETS!!!

Well, halfway into September, the search strings haven’t changed much, cause most of you are still looking for the same old stuff…

# Hits Search String
1 871 20.57% midgets
2 352 8.31% huge tits
3 222 5.24% huge breasts
4 189 4.46% blow up dolls
5 176 4.16% large breasts
6 144 3.40% mary cary
7 80 1.89% breasts
8 73 1.72% boob
9 66 1.56% 9/11/01
10 65 1.54% natural breasts
11 59 1.39% large tits
12 52 1.23% 9-11-01
13 52 1.23% carlie brucia
14 48 1.13% boob jobs
15 46 1.09% huge boob
16 43 1.02% natural women
17 42 0.99% britany spears
18 42 0.99% natural tits
19 34 0.80% huge women
20 34 0.80% the day after tomorrow

Time To Engage The Next Enemy: The American Family Association’s Chilling Effects on 9/11.

A while back, I wrote of the effects of a lobbying organization’s small numbers on the American People at large. That group, the Parent’s Television Council, had managed to begin a steamrolling of the First Amendment by the FCC through its paper campaign against CBS and the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime Show (which, I remind you, was offensive not for Janet Jackson’s floppy boob but because the show SUCKED.).

Well, it looks like they were only the start.

I now introduce you to Tupelo, Mississippi’s pride and joy- the American Family Association.

Who are these people, you ask? Well, they’re the latest group to decide what is and is ot appropriate for we simple viewers to watch on television. In August, they announced on their website that they would begin a campaign against a target so enfarious, so indecent that it shouldn’t be allowed on television- at least, not before 10 PM.

And what is this target, you may ask? What has so rankled this group?

9/11.

That’s right, 9/11. This is the incredibly well-made documentary by two French brothers and a FDNY firefighter whose entire house managed to survive the WTC collapse on Sept. 11. This moving, no-holds-barred film managed to capture video evidence of some of the most horrific acts of monsters followed by the bravest acts of humanity I’ve ever seen. The group has promised to put the “full efforts” of its 3 million plus members (their numbers, natch) into protesting the airing of this documentary, but it’s not for what you may think.

It’s not for the horrific imagery that the documentarians managed to catch truly by “luck,” though such a word would hardly normally apply. It’s not the subject matter at all, actually.

It’s the language.

CBS, rightly so, has decided that when this documentary airs (which it has now done three times as of this writing) it is to be aired unedited, and uncut. This means that firefighters can be heard using words such as “shit” and “fuck” as the events progress. They speak, as any of us would speak in that situation.

The AFA, apparently, has taken it upon themselves to see that this documentary not air last night in its unedited form. Fortunately, they failed. However, they have claimed that they would begin the protests today.

It seems, however, that this may have an effect that this group may not have predicted. It seems that the backlash has begun.

Last night, I watched the film in its entirety. I was moved by its honesty, and I was humbled once more by the sacrifice that so many made that day. Then, I was angered. I was angered that five years later, we still haven’t gotten the bastard.

I was angered that we’ve so monumentally bungled finding him while we let our efforts in the Middle East go to Hell in a handbasket.

I was mostly angered that the very freedoms that we cherish that were attacked that day five years ago haven’t been taken away by Extremists from half a world away, but have been usurped rather by religious zealots of a different cloth.

Make no mistake, our efforts in fighting threats of terror remain to this day the most important battle we will fight. But can we please, for the love of God, stop doing everything we can here to help along the removal of the very freedoms this country was founded upon?

Oh, and if Donald Wildman, head of the AFA, manages to find this through a websearch? Just based upon this alone as an example of your tolerance for Christian values?

Go to Hell, you unimaginably dense fucking prick.

Out.

Proof that God, Indeed, Has a Sense Of Humor.

It’s good to see that if there is a higher power, it has a keen sense of dry humorous wit.

Every so often, I go in and clean out some of the spam comments that come in. A couple of minutes ago, I found four of them, all for a poker website that shall remain nameless.

It was under this post.

That right there? That sound you’re hearing? It’s the sound of irony redefining itself once more.

Out.

Company of Heroes Fan Site

I’ve launched a new site and its in the final design fixes stages and adding content etc. The site is Company of Heroes Unleashed or http://www.compofheroes.com It will contain tutorials, strategy, tactics and general tips on playing the new RTS game. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, do so.

Happy Fuckin’ Birthday. (Yes Pylorns, in THAT voice.)

First off, a big thanks to Pylorns and the gang for taking me out this past weekend for my birthday, which I celebrate today. We drove down to Houston, spent the day at the Museum, ate at a really good and fun restaurant in Galveston, and it was all quite fun.

That being said… I’ve just about had the worst night I’ve had in a really long time. It involves a lot of personal family stuff, which I’ll dive into at some point- but not tonight. I just want to get through tonight without going absolutely insane.

28 years, and I still don’t get this fuckin’ world sometimes.

Out.

The EU hits the moon with a lot of money

Europe’s spacecraft hits the moon
DARMSTADT, Germany (AP) — Europe’s first spacecraft to the moon ended its three-year mission Sunday by crashing into the lunar surface in a volcanic plain called the Lake of Excellence, to a round of applause in the mission control room in Germany.

Hitting at 2 kilometers per second, the impact of the SMART-1 spacecraft was expected to leave a 3-meter-by-10-meter crater and send dust kilometers above the surface.

Observatories watched the event from Earth and scientists hoped the cloud of dust and debris would provide clues to the geological composition of the site.

“That’s it — we are in the Lake of Excellence,” said spacecraft operations chief Octavio Camino as applause broke out in mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. “We have landed.”

Minutes later, officials showed off a picture captured by an observatory in Hawaii displaying a bright flash from the impact.

The spacecraft is at the end of a three-year mission that scanned the lunar surface from orbit and tested a new, efficient, ion-propulsion system that officials hope to use on future interplanetary missions.

Launched into Earth’s orbit by an Ariane-5 booster rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, in September 2003, SMART-1 used its ion engine to slowly raise its orbit over 14 months until the moon’s gravity grabbed it.

The engine, which uses electricity from the craft’s solar panels to produce a stream of charged particles called ions, generates only small amounts of thrust but only needed 80 kilograms of xenon fuel.

The craft’s X-ray and infrared spectrometers have gathered information about the moon’s geology that scientists hope will advance their knowledge about how the moon’s surface evolved and test theories about how the moon came into being.

In a scare on Saturday, mission officials said they had to raise the low point of the spacecraft’s orbit by 600 meters by using its positioning thrusters to avoid the 1.5 kilometer-high rim of a lunar crater.

Had the orbit not been raised the craft would have crashed one orbit too soon, making the impact difficult or impossible to observe.

SMART-1, a cube measuring roughly a meter on each side, took the long way to the moon — more than 100 million kilometers instead of the direct route of 350,000 to 400,000 kilometers.

But the European Space Agency did it for a relatively cheap €110 million ($140 million).

The spacecraft has also been taking high-resolution pictures of the surface with a miniaturized camera.

Search Google back 200 years

This is pretty cool:

Ye olde Google News: Stories from the 1700s
Under new service, users will be able to target specific dates or view coverage of an issue over time, although not all articles will be free to view.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Google News is getting a sense of the past to balance out its relentless focus on the present.

Google Inc. (Charts) has added the ability to search through more than 200 years of historical newspaper archives alongside the latest contemporary information now available on Google News, the market-leading Web search firm said Tuesday.

“The goal of the service is to allow users to explore history as it unfolded,” said Anurag Acharya, a top Google engineer who helped develop the news archive search.

“Users can see how viewpoints changed over time for events, for ideas and for people,” said Acharya, who also built the Google Scholar service for academic researchers and once was a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Archive Search instantly generates a timeline of stories on a particular subject over the years, allowing Web surfers to target particular dates, or to observe how coverage of an issue has evolved over time.

As examples, he cited the 1969 Apollo moon landing or events with long histories such as the Palestinian conflict.

Archival search adds historical and chronological dimensions to Google News, which since it first was launched in 2002, has allowed people to use keywords to search for the latest news from recent weeks in thousands of publications.

Starting immediately, users of Google News will find a News Archive Search link as an alternative to searching the wider Web or zeroing in on breaking news. The service is offered in U.S. English only, initially.

News articles in a number of other languages can also be uncovered, including Spanish.

Users who are purely interested in historical comparisons can go straight into the archival search feature. When Google users search for certain terms on general Google search, historical links may also appear as part of Google’s standard search results.

Archival news links are clustered around themes and according to date in chronological order as far back as digital news sources exist — decades or even several centuries. Users may choose to search the archives of specific publications.

For now, it has no plans to embed advertising links alongside archive search results, although sites with historical news may choose to feature advertising or charge subscription fees for access to the relevant items.

By simplifying how Web users locate historical news sources, the news archive search feature could also serve to spur media companies to provide richer access to archives, few of which have been digitized or made widely available to date.

Sources range from free news articles on ad-supported sites such as Time Warner Inc.’s (Charts) Time.com and The Guardian or snippets of articles available for a fee or via subscription, from newspapers like The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. (Time Warner is the parent company of CNNMoney.com).

Results are based on relevance, with no favoritism shown to any of Google’s partners, officials said. It is also taking a hands-off approach to how it may make money from the feature.

Participating news aggregators include Factiva, AccessMyLibrary.com from Thomson Gale, HighBeam Research and LexisNexis. Factiva is a joint venture of Dow Jones & Co. Inc. and Reuters Group Plc. Reuters is not directly offering its news through the archive search of Google News.

“It is another sign of Google learning to work with and enlist the content owners,” said Danny Sullivan, an industry analyst with Search Engine Watch.

The media industry initially resisted moves by Google to make online news or photos available through their search systems or to tape video broadcasts off the air and scan copyrighted books from some of the world’s great libraries.

But over the past year Google has convinced many of the world’s biggest media companies that Google’s search systems can offer a path to new revenues for content owners.

MDA Telethon

Please donate today if you can, at www.mda.org.

Out.

Steve Irwin Dead

Steve Irwin, known popularly as the Crocodile Hunter, died Monday off the coast of Australia while filming a wildlife documentary. He was stung in the chest by a sting ray, and doctors believe the barb pierced his heart.

Irwin’s death has been falsely reported on several occasions due mainly to his history of dangerous stunts involving wild animals, especially poisonous reptiles. He also achieved a certain infamous notoriety after taking his new born son into a crocodile pen.

If asked, I would not have guessed death-by-stingray as they’re usually docile creatures and rarely attacks unless taunted, cornered or provoked. However, when I heard the news this morning, I was not at all surprised. Irwin has been provoking and mishandling animals for many years now.

By all accounts, Irwin was an incredibly nice man, passionate and caring.

That being said, it is important to note that his handling of dangerous animals should only be replicated by those intent on getting severely hurt. Those people that enjoyed his show, especially children, should be made aware of what happens when you treat nature with careless abandon.

Enthusiasm and a winning personality, it seems, are not adequate protection from blatant stupidity.

An Open Letter to 20th Century Fox.

To Whom It May Concern…

Tonight, I went and saw the 10:10 PM showing of Idiocracy at Tinseltown 20 Theater, in Austin TX. I went in full faith that I would be seeing a cinematic work.

I am hereby requesting that my money be refunded for my ticket and for the purchase fee from Fandango, for a total of $9.25. I feel that you defrauded me by making me believe that I would be seeing a comedic movie tonight, when in fact I felt that my sense of humor had been violated in a most aggregious and undue way by this cinematic turd.

Please reply soon, or I shall be forced to mock this film openly and as vicously as possible.

Out.