[the character of SARCASTIC GUY is read in a voice that it just absolutely dripping with sarcasm in everything he says]
DEREK: Great party, huh? I actually don't know anyone at the party, actually, I'm kinda new to the neighborhood, actually, but my friend Chris said "come to the party, I'll introduce you around, you'll know everybody by the time you leave the party." Chris knows everybody, and soon I'll know everybody! 'Course, Chris didn't show up. So I guess I gotta mingle. So here I am mingling! 'Course, mingling really isn't my game, I'm not really a mingler, per se, I was actually in the corner alone mingling - that means I'm not talking to anyone, actually. I saw you over here, I said "there's a guy by himself, why not go over here, I'll mingle with this guy, this guy looks like a mingler," so hi, I'm Derek, pleased to meet you.
SARCASTIC GUY: Well it certainly is a pleasure to meet YOU, Derek.
DEREK:...I'm sorry if I bothered you.
SARCASTIC GUY: Oh no, you're not bothering me, Derek, far from it. There's nothing I would rather do than just stand here and chat with you! Y'know - really get to know you?
DEREK: Look, I don't think there's any need to be sarcastic.
SARCASTIC GUY: Oh, I'm not being sarcastic! NOOOO! This is just a little speech impediment. I can't help it!
DEREK: Okay, I've obviously said or done something wrong to upset you, I'm just gonna apologize and be on my way.
SARCASTIC GUY: No, no, no, please stay. It's true. I've talked this way all my life. It's made things very difficult for me.
DEREK: Yeah! Right!
SARCASTIC GUY: Hey! Where ya goin'? Come back! I really wanna be your friend. I'm so lonely.
Re:An Example of a Short Sited Administration
on
New NASA Budget Woes
·
· Score: 1
AND the Bush administration has increased the budget for the sciences. Doesn't sound like bible thumping fundies to me.
The National Science Foundation has had its budget cut.
That's how spam email got its name; spam email is the least desirable kind of email; Spam meat is the least desirable kind of meat.
I thought junk email got named spam because it's always filling up your mailbox, just like spam the meat product. (you guys do have large quantities of processed meat products put in your mailbox daily, don't you?)
I think SPAM is actually pretty good if you fry the hell out of it and then throw it on an English muffin with cheese and a fried egg. I call this the "aorta-buster".
So let me get this straight; humans are controlling a cockroach that is controlling a robot? If they're going to tell the cockroach to turn left, why not just do it directly?
Don't you see? The LEDs telling the roach which way to go are controlled by another cockroach.
My opinion is that the ones working on it should coin a name NOT including the word "nuclear". The public is so brainwashed on the matter that whenever they hear ir red lamp in their mind turns on:/
NASA GUY: Today I'm unveiling our new manned space vehicle, powered by the Happy Fluffy Bunny Reactor Drive.
PRESS: Wow! That's pretty cool! How does it work?
NASA GUY: The Happy Fluffy Bunny Reactor takes radioactive elements and splits them, releasing radiation and large amounts of heat, which drives reaction mass out the exhaust nozzle.
PRESS: So its a NUCLEAR reactor!!!
NASA GUY: No, of course not! It works exactly like a nuclear reactor, but it's called the Happy Fluffy Bunny Reactor. All the bad news about nuclear radiation, nuclear waste, and nuclear contamination can be forgotten because we changed the name!
Human beings can do 100x more than a rover can and more efficiently. They can also easily handle unexpected events (such as this) a lot easier since they're not limited to 4 wheels and a camera.
Would a human really make things that much easier? I imagine humans would use some sort of wheeled rover to get around on Mars... and that could get stuck in a dune as well. I've been stuck in sand and mud a couple of times, and getting out can be a major ordeal, even without the constraints of a heavy space suit and limited oxygen.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Homo sapiens is a "mature technology"; we haven't undergone any large changes in 100,000 years except for the software upgrades. Robots are a technology that is in their infancy, and in the next 10-20 years will make major advances in their capabilities. Which makes it all the more remarkable when you consider that robots are currently ahead of humans in many departments. Maybe humans really can do "100x more than a rover, and more efficiently", but robots can travel to Mars and explore it for under a billion dollars, and do that now, and humans can't.
There are two groups of flying squirrel, true flying squirrels and the independently evolved scaly-tailed flying "squirrels" in Africa. There are also the bat-like "flying lemurs" or colugos, and three different genera of gliding possum in Australia, each representing an independent origin of gliding. At least four lizards have evolved gliding: the geckos _Cosymbotus_ and _Ptychozoon_ (Kuhl's Gecko), the gliding lizard _Draco_, and another called _Holaspis_. Plus gliding has evolved at least four times in tree frogs, once or more in the flying fish, and perhaps most remarkable of all, there's the flying squid: they can spread their mantle fins and the web between their limbs as they jet out of the water, and glide over the waves.
Flying snakes, however, differ from all of these in one rather interesting way: they will actually move the airfoil while airborne, and appear to be swimming through the air. What's interesting is that the glide angle gets shallower when they do this. This suggests three possibilities: (1) this behavior reduces drag, (2) this behavior increases lift, or (3) this behavior produces thrust.
The last would be really interesting: if flying snakes can actually produce thrust while airborne (even if they can't develop enough thrust for horizontal flight), then they would be only the fifth animal group (alongside insects, pterosaurs, bats, and birds) to evolve true powered flight.
I listen on-line because there are are enjoyable choices not because there are many choices. I commute 2 hours a day by car and drive through 2 distinct FM markets. Scanning the FM band brings junk songs, brainless talk shows, and obnoxious in-your-face MP3 jockeys.
As an exile in the Great White North, I've come to depend on the internet for my NPR fix. I like the ability to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, and to be able to pause or rewind if I didn't catch something. However my university has a lousy internet connection so I really wish they would make programming available as MP3 downloads as well as streaming. If they do this I think they will find a big market for people to listen to NPR on iPods. BBC World is also available online, and I love how they just smack their interviewees upside the head with straightforward, no-bullshit questions instead of pandering to them like American TV news. NPR has just become amazingly good, however.
As for levelling the playing field, I don't know. My impression is that by increasing the number of potential competitors, then having brand recognition, funding, and recognition becomes more important, not less important. We're facing a similar issue with the rise of online journals in the sciences- in theory this should knock big-name journals like _Nature_ and _Science_ off their pedestals but in practice it's going to cement their position; with so many journals out there it will be increasingly important to get in one of the few that most people actually look at.
i can only imagine what idiots are out there that still believe the US invaded Iraq for oil.
Well, it makes more sense than a lot of the alternatives, like the idea that we invaded for idealistic causes like liberty and human rights and all that shit. If that were really the case, why has the Bush administration proven so reluctant to get involved in places like Liberia and the Sudan, where there's a lot of humanitarian issues, but no economic interests?
If you really want to get a measure of the character of a person, check out how they treat people who they have nothing to gain from. If you apply that same criterion to the United States, I don't think it comes off as very well. The United States' actions in Iraq are- well, at least were intended to be- self serving.
What those self-serving motives were, I don't know. Part of it, I think, was that after the fall of the USSR, the U.S. became the sole remaining superpower. The Neocons wanted to cement that position by knocking off one of the few guys who challenged us, acquiring strategically important bases in the Middle East, and using that position to ensure that America would continue to be able to access the cheap oil it needs to grow. The liberty of the Iraqis was like all the Halliburton contracts- not the main reason for invading, just a bonus.
I'm trying to picture a Trek/Seinfeld hybrid... Jerry would start out with a monologue, like "You know what really annoys me about phasers?". They would have a "contest" and a Vulcan would win, since they can go for seven years at a time without sex. Kramer would have to be the engineer, since he was always trying out crazy schemes on the show. And after a transporter malfunction, George would complain that "there was shrinkage involved!"
I mean, really? Every time they find a new one, the things just keep getting smaller. What's next, a piece of ejecta from another moon the size and shape of a '74 Chevy Impala? Might as well start naming the debris in the rings.
Well, everybody could get something named after them that way.
You know what would be a good business model? Selling people small moons, made to order. You could get them made out of whatever you wanted- say, silver, or gold or steel or marble, although something you could polish would be good because then you might actually be able to see it whiz overhead like you can with satellites. You could carve the name on it... name it after yourself, or name it after your significant other (hey baby, I bought you a moon, happy anniversary). They'd be inconspicuous unless you knew when and where to look.
If expendible rockets cost 3,000-6,000 dollars to get a pound into orbit, you could sell people moons for 10,000 dollars per pound, plus cost of materials and work, and make a damn nice profit. Of course, NASA has enough junk in orbit to track already so maybe they wouldn't take kindly to this idea.
Usage Note: Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir- prefix and -less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so.
Man, you must get ALL the chicks.
(Just kidding. This stuff gets on my nerves too. And I'm bothering to post on slashdot... which says everything about my love life).
Guess they don't have to, but it makes me wonder why the space program is so underfunded compared to the military.
This situation may not get better soon. 80 billion in spending was just approved for Iraq. We're currently spending about 1 billion a week, and there's no telling how much longer we're going to be there: historically, insurgencies have taken 5-10 years to defeat. At some point the Iraqi government will presumably begin to take up more of the burden, but it's still going to require a substantial American investment in troops and funds for a while. Meanwhile, we've got that lil' ol' budget deficit.
In this situation, the "space on a shoestring" approach sounds like the best hope. I don't know if the government is going to be able to afford much else.
What's fishy here is that a bill to increse funding for the Iraq war includes something like this.
Hell, the bill itself is a major issue in my mind. If you're going to fight a war, you should do it right, don't get me wrong. But the war itself is a major issue which needs to be questioned more. We're spending a billion a week and there's still no clear exit in sight. When will we have most of our troops out? A year from now? Two years? Five? Historically, insurgencies have lasted 5-10 years and nothing going on right now suggests we're close to the end of this fight. Nobody seems to have a clear plan on how the hell to end this.
This is as much an issue for civil liberties as the ID itself. Governments have historically used wars as pretexts for extraordinary measures to reduce government accountability and restrict civil liberties. So long as the Iraq War is ongoing, the government will continue to run over the Constitution and Geneva conventions with few consequences. I mean, would they be able to get away with this legislation without a war going on?
News is increasingly moving away from, well, news. You can see how far this has gone if you take about five minutes to surf the web and see just how little news value a lot of the articles actually have.
CNN.com for instance features two murdered girls: while tragic and newsworthy, it's not the most important thing going on in this nation by a long shot. It's just catering to a disgusting desire humans have to gawk at tragedy and misfortune, to rubberneck on the road of life. Then a bunch of empty blather about liberty from Bush in Georgia, with no news value: sure he's the President, who's important, but all he really says is he supports freedom. Who doesn't? Then celebrity gossip presented as somehow worthy of reporting.
MSNBC likewise leads with the quasi-news of the murdered girls and the Bush speech, and a bunch of fluff: runaway bride, Michael Jackson, diet plans, a Dave Matthews single(?).
But Fox News is where it hits the fan: a bunch on the murdered girls, the Bush speech, the "Runaway Bride", diet plans, Michael Jackson trial crap, Paris Hilton, Renee Zellweger, Paula Abdul and the American Idol "Scandal"... even calling the organization Fox "News" is a bit of a stretch. In the desperate race to the bottom, Fox once again leads the pack!
But the film's bluntest political statement comes when Anakin, lightsaber in hand, paraphrases George W. Bush's first State of the Union Address: "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!" Obi-Wan, representing the forces of good, doesn't flip-flop. His damning answer? "Only a Sith deals in absolutes!" Mark my words: somebody is going to put that on a bumper sticker."
I personally find comparisons between Star Wars and modern politics to be a bit of a stretch.
With the possible exception of the time that Dick Cheney used the force to choke Colin Powell. That, and Karl Rove's ability to shoot blue lightning out of his fingertips.
...and rolling down a very large hill on the way to NY from AZ I watch my MPG reach 100 (it wasn't very accurate for long but I just wanted to see the number reach 100.)
Screw hybrids- just think how much gas we could save if we made all the roads downhill!
Makes sense- the aerodynamic drag force is proportional to your airspeed, squared. You should get more than twice the drag at 90mph as you do at 60mph. So that's another thing that complicates comparisons between drivers.
Ideally, you'd want a sort of fish-shaped car to minimize the drag- a tapering tail is really important in reducing drag, since helps close your wake behind you. Problem is, who wants to be seen driving a car with a long, fish-shaped tail? Or trying to parallel park one? Other than Aquaman, of course.
Honestly, I do feel like a total mean prick bastard for posting this; I could have said the same thing and filed some edges off, I'm sorry. And a hypocrite, since in my life I've invested a lot of emotion in small animals, futile causes, and stuff that does nothing to help the starving Third World.
But what bugs me is that this society seems to have an unhealthy preoccupation with putting death off forever, at any cost. At some point we need to accept the inevitable. Where does it end; do we keep Fido hooked up to feeding tubes in a persistent vegetative state?
And what bugs me is that we seem to forget that we have so much wealth and power and there are so many who don't have jack. Many if not most pets in the United States have a higher quality of life than most human beings in the world: clean water, ample food, shelter, medical care. Isn't that screwed up? What would happen if we spent the same amount on helping other human beings as we did on pet food? It makes me want to be a communist... except they tried that already, and it didn't even work as well as this crazy system.
It's a mouse. In the wild, mice have to deal with an insane number of predators- cats, hawks, owls, snakes and so on. It's not a pretty world, and a mouse is unlikely to survive more than a couple years. The result is that natural selection only acts to increase the survivability of the mouse for the first couple of years. There's no point in selecting for a gene to help a mouse live to ten years, or even five years, because the odds of that gene ever being useful are pretty low when most mice get killed in a year or two. It's like Blade Runner: they live fast, but aren't designed to last very long. So you're engaged in a futile war against death, at best you'll put it off for a couple more months and then the mouse will get cancer again, or die of something else. There's a reason people research cancer in mice, and not, say, tortoises.
The other thing... WTF, its a mouse.
My family's dog died, he was a damn good dog, smart and with a lot of character, and I miss him. But he was getting old and if it wasn't kidney failure it would have been something else, soon, and I've accepted that. And there are people starving to death every day in Africa- and not to use that as an abstract rhetorical device, I've been there and seen them- shit, this nation needs to get a grip and get a fucking sense of perspective. They're just pets.
I don't enjoy killing animals- I find it disturbing, to be honest, to look something in the eyes and consciously end its life- but every once in a while I take up the invitation to go hunting and kill a deer or a snowshoe hare, because I just feel there's something hypocritical about being unwilling to kill animals, but being willing to have someone else do it for you and pick up the results at the supermarket. I figured I either had to be able to kill something myself, or become a vegetarian.
That being said, what really pisses me off is hunting wolves from aircraft in Alaska. Where the hell is the sport in that, I want to know.
It is well known that Lewis put obvious Christian allegories into the Narnia books. He didn't try to hide the fact.
I fail to see how this manipulates the reader.
I think they're great books, but I think what people are overlooking when they say, "oh it's obvious" is that they're children's books. It's obvious to adults where Lewis is coming from, but it sure as heck wasn't obvious to me until I finished "Last Battle": I was pretty young when I read it, so when I read a story about a lion I just assumed it was about a lion, not God or Jesus or whatever. I don't think it was Lewis' intention, but I still felt a little tricked- like an adult trying to sneak vegetables into my food when I'm not looking.
Think of it this way- how would you feel if you read a series of half a dozen fantastic kids books and found out at the end of it that the author was trying to instill Jewish or Muslim theology and ideology into you, or trying to get you to become an athiest? It's not the Christianity that people object to, it's being exposed to differing belief systems without knowing ahead of time that this is what's happening. It's the same reason fundamentalist Christians are flipping out about Harry Potter- they're afraid that someone is trying to package Satanism in a fun, attractive package and slip it past them. They're being paranoid, but Lewis really does have an agenda, and it's not necessarily obvious to the intended audience, even if it might have been when he initially wrote them.
Slashdot Mirror
DEREK: Great party, huh? I actually don't know anyone at the party, actually, I'm kinda new to the neighborhood, actually, but my friend Chris said "come to the party, I'll introduce you around, you'll know everybody by the time you leave the party." Chris knows everybody, and soon I'll know everybody! 'Course, Chris didn't show up. So I guess I gotta mingle. So here I am mingling! 'Course, mingling really isn't my game, I'm not really a mingler, per se, I was actually in the corner alone mingling - that means I'm not talking to anyone, actually. I saw you over here, I said "there's a guy by himself, why not go over here, I'll mingle with this guy, this guy looks like a mingler," so hi, I'm Derek, pleased to meet you.
SARCASTIC GUY: Well it certainly is a pleasure to meet YOU, Derek.
DEREK: ...I'm sorry if I bothered you.
SARCASTIC GUY: Oh no, you're not bothering me, Derek, far from it. There's nothing I would rather do than just stand here and chat with you! Y'know - really get to know you?
DEREK: Look, I don't think there's any need to be sarcastic.
SARCASTIC GUY: Oh, I'm not being sarcastic! NOOOO! This is just a little speech impediment. I can't help it!
DEREK: Okay, I've obviously said or done something wrong to upset you, I'm just gonna apologize and be on my way.
SARCASTIC GUY: No, no, no, please stay. It's true. I've talked this way all my life. It's made things very difficult for me.
DEREK: Yeah! Right!
SARCASTIC GUY: Hey! Where ya goin'? Come back! I really wanna be your friend. I'm so lonely.
The National Science Foundation has had its budget cut.
I thought junk email got named spam because it's always filling up your mailbox, just like spam the meat product. (you guys do have large quantities of processed meat products put in your mailbox daily, don't you?)
I think SPAM is actually pretty good if you fry the hell out of it and then throw it on an English muffin with cheese and a fried egg. I call this the "aorta-buster".
Don't you see? The LEDs telling the roach which way to go are controlled by another cockroach.
NASA GUY: Today I'm unveiling our new manned space vehicle, powered by the Happy Fluffy Bunny Reactor Drive.
PRESS: Wow! That's pretty cool! How does it work?
NASA GUY: The Happy Fluffy Bunny Reactor takes radioactive elements and splits them, releasing radiation and large amounts of heat, which drives reaction mass out the exhaust nozzle.
PRESS: So its a NUCLEAR reactor!!!
NASA GUY: No, of course not! It works exactly like a nuclear reactor, but it's called the Happy Fluffy Bunny Reactor. All the bad news about nuclear radiation, nuclear waste, and nuclear contamination can be forgotten because we changed the name!
PRESS: Oh, well, that's perfectly okay then. I'm sure nobody will mind!
Would a human really make things that much easier? I imagine humans would use some sort of wheeled rover to get around on Mars... and that could get stuck in a dune as well. I've been stuck in sand and mud a couple of times, and getting out can be a major ordeal, even without the constraints of a heavy space suit and limited oxygen.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Homo sapiens is a "mature technology"; we haven't undergone any large changes in 100,000 years except for the software upgrades. Robots are a technology that is in their infancy, and in the next 10-20 years will make major advances in their capabilities. Which makes it all the more remarkable when you consider that robots are currently ahead of humans in many departments. Maybe humans really can do "100x more than a rover, and more efficiently", but robots can travel to Mars and explore it for under a billion dollars, and do that now, and humans can't.
Flying snakes, however, differ from all of these in one rather interesting way: they will actually move the airfoil while airborne, and appear to be swimming through the air. What's interesting is that the glide angle gets shallower when they do this. This suggests three possibilities: (1) this behavior reduces drag, (2) this behavior increases lift, or (3) this behavior produces thrust.
The last would be really interesting: if flying snakes can actually produce thrust while airborne (even if they can't develop enough thrust for horizontal flight), then they would be only the fifth animal group (alongside insects, pterosaurs, bats, and birds) to evolve true powered flight.
As an exile in the Great White North, I've come to depend on the internet for my NPR fix. I like the ability to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, and to be able to pause or rewind if I didn't catch something. However my university has a lousy internet connection so I really wish they would make programming available as MP3 downloads as well as streaming. If they do this I think they will find a big market for people to listen to NPR on iPods. BBC World is also available online, and I love how they just smack their interviewees upside the head with straightforward, no-bullshit questions instead of pandering to them like American TV news. NPR has just become amazingly good, however.
As for levelling the playing field, I don't know. My impression is that by increasing the number of potential competitors, then having brand recognition, funding, and recognition becomes more important, not less important. We're facing a similar issue with the rise of online journals in the sciences- in theory this should knock big-name journals like _Nature_ and _Science_ off their pedestals but in practice it's going to cement their position; with so many journals out there it will be increasingly important to get in one of the few that most people actually look at.
Well, it makes more sense than a lot of the alternatives, like the idea that we invaded for idealistic causes like liberty and human rights and all that shit. If that were really the case, why has the Bush administration proven so reluctant to get involved in places like Liberia and the Sudan, where there's a lot of humanitarian issues, but no economic interests?
If you really want to get a measure of the character of a person, check out how they treat people who they have nothing to gain from. If you apply that same criterion to the United States, I don't think it comes off as very well. The United States' actions in Iraq are- well, at least were intended to be- self serving.
What those self-serving motives were, I don't know. Part of it, I think, was that after the fall of the USSR, the U.S. became the sole remaining superpower. The Neocons wanted to cement that position by knocking off one of the few guys who challenged us, acquiring strategically important bases in the Middle East, and using that position to ensure that America would continue to be able to access the cheap oil it needs to grow. The liberty of the Iraqis was like all the Halliburton contracts- not the main reason for invading, just a bonus.
I'm trying to picture a Trek/Seinfeld hybrid... Jerry would start out with a monologue, like "You know what really annoys me about phasers?". They would have a "contest" and a Vulcan would win, since they can go for seven years at a time without sex. Kramer would have to be the engineer, since he was always trying out crazy schemes on the show. And after a transporter malfunction, George would complain that "there was shrinkage involved!"
The Borg meant to augment her with silicon but accidentally used silicone.
Well, everybody could get something named after them that way.
You know what would be a good business model? Selling people small moons, made to order. You could get them made out of whatever you wanted- say, silver, or gold or steel or marble, although something you could polish would be good because then you might actually be able to see it whiz overhead like you can with satellites. You could carve the name on it... name it after yourself, or name it after your significant other (hey baby, I bought you a moon, happy anniversary). They'd be inconspicuous unless you knew when and where to look.
If expendible rockets cost 3,000-6,000 dollars to get a pound into orbit, you could sell people moons for 10,000 dollars per pound, plus cost of materials and work, and make a damn nice profit. Of course, NASA has enough junk in orbit to track already so maybe they wouldn't take kindly to this idea.
Man, you must get ALL the chicks.
(Just kidding. This stuff gets on my nerves too. And I'm bothering to post on slashdot... which says everything about my love life).
Whoever the hell this Madisen character he is, he's just aiding the terrorists by saying things like that. We should ship him off to Guantanamo.
This situation may not get better soon. 80 billion in spending was just approved for Iraq. We're currently spending about 1 billion a week, and there's no telling how much longer we're going to be there: historically, insurgencies have taken 5-10 years to defeat. At some point the Iraqi government will presumably begin to take up more of the burden, but it's still going to require a substantial American investment in troops and funds for a while. Meanwhile, we've got that lil' ol' budget deficit.
In this situation, the "space on a shoestring" approach sounds like the best hope. I don't know if the government is going to be able to afford much else.
Hell, the bill itself is a major issue in my mind. If you're going to fight a war, you should do it right, don't get me wrong. But the war itself is a major issue which needs to be questioned more. We're spending a billion a week and there's still no clear exit in sight. When will we have most of our troops out? A year from now? Two years? Five? Historically, insurgencies have lasted 5-10 years and nothing going on right now suggests we're close to the end of this fight. Nobody seems to have a clear plan on how the hell to end this.
This is as much an issue for civil liberties as the ID itself. Governments have historically used wars as pretexts for extraordinary measures to reduce government accountability and restrict civil liberties. So long as the Iraq War is ongoing, the government will continue to run over the Constitution and Geneva conventions with few consequences. I mean, would they be able to get away with this legislation without a war going on?
CNN.com for instance features two murdered girls: while tragic and newsworthy, it's not the most important thing going on in this nation by a long shot. It's just catering to a disgusting desire humans have to gawk at tragedy and misfortune, to rubberneck on the road of life. Then a bunch of empty blather about liberty from Bush in Georgia, with no news value: sure he's the President, who's important, but all he really says is he supports freedom. Who doesn't? Then celebrity gossip presented as somehow worthy of reporting.
MSNBC likewise leads with the quasi-news of the murdered girls and the Bush speech, and a bunch of fluff: runaway bride, Michael Jackson, diet plans, a Dave Matthews single(?).
But Fox News is where it hits the fan: a bunch on the murdered girls, the Bush speech, the "Runaway Bride", diet plans, Michael Jackson trial crap, Paris Hilton, Renee Zellweger, Paula Abdul and the American Idol "Scandal"... even calling the organization Fox "News" is a bit of a stretch. In the desperate race to the bottom, Fox once again leads the pack!
I personally find comparisons between Star Wars and modern politics to be a bit of a stretch.
With the possible exception of the time that Dick Cheney used the force to choke Colin Powell. That, and Karl Rove's ability to shoot blue lightning out of his fingertips.
Screw hybrids- just think how much gas we could save if we made all the roads downhill!
Ideally, you'd want a sort of fish-shaped car to minimize the drag- a tapering tail is really important in reducing drag, since helps close your wake behind you. Problem is, who wants to be seen driving a car with a long, fish-shaped tail? Or trying to parallel park one? Other than Aquaman, of course.
There's no duct tape on Mars. Haven't you played Doom 3?
Honestly, I do feel like a total mean prick bastard for posting this; I could have said the same thing and filed some edges off, I'm sorry. And a hypocrite, since in my life I've invested a lot of emotion in small animals, futile causes, and stuff that does nothing to help the starving Third World.
But what bugs me is that this society seems to have an unhealthy preoccupation with putting death off forever, at any cost. At some point we need to accept the inevitable. Where does it end; do we keep Fido hooked up to feeding tubes in a persistent vegetative state?
And what bugs me is that we seem to forget that we have so much wealth and power and there are so many who don't have jack. Many if not most pets in the United States have a higher quality of life than most human beings in the world: clean water, ample food, shelter, medical care. Isn't that screwed up? What would happen if we spent the same amount on helping other human beings as we did on pet food? It makes me want to be a communist... except they tried that already, and it didn't even work as well as this crazy system.
The other thing... WTF, its a mouse.
My family's dog died, he was a damn good dog, smart and with a lot of character, and I miss him. But he was getting old and if it wasn't kidney failure it would have been something else, soon, and I've accepted that. And there are people starving to death every day in Africa- and not to use that as an abstract rhetorical device, I've been there and seen them- shit, this nation needs to get a grip and get a fucking sense of perspective. They're just pets.
That being said, what really pisses me off is hunting wolves from aircraft in Alaska. Where the hell is the sport in that, I want to know.
I think they're great books, but I think what people are overlooking when they say, "oh it's obvious" is that they're children's books. It's obvious to adults where Lewis is coming from, but it sure as heck wasn't obvious to me until I finished "Last Battle": I was pretty young when I read it, so when I read a story about a lion I just assumed it was about a lion, not God or Jesus or whatever. I don't think it was Lewis' intention, but I still felt a little tricked- like an adult trying to sneak vegetables into my food when I'm not looking.
Think of it this way- how would you feel if you read a series of half a dozen fantastic kids books and found out at the end of it that the author was trying to instill Jewish or Muslim theology and ideology into you, or trying to get you to become an athiest? It's not the Christianity that people object to, it's being exposed to differing belief systems without knowing ahead of time that this is what's happening. It's the same reason fundamentalist Christians are flipping out about Harry Potter- they're afraid that someone is trying to package Satanism in a fun, attractive package and slip it past them. They're being paranoid, but Lewis really does have an agenda, and it's not necessarily obvious to the intended audience, even if it might have been when he initially wrote them.