A fool and his thread are soon parted.
April 2009 archive
Apr 01 2009
GBCW
Weeping! Wailing! Gnashing of teeth!
I have lost everything! Employment opportunities! Friends! Pantyhose!
I suffer in an agony foisted upon me by enemy shamans! Scottish African German and American shamans have brought me to a level of woe that cannot even be addressed by Tilex! Indeed, the very POWAH of CHEESE is ineffective before their mighty wrath!
Not only this, but the Vengeance(tm) of psychotic stalker exes and their Brotherhood has once again been manifested in my life! I am out three hours and a pair of pantyhose and I have no idea how I will ever recover from this trauma!
Clearly I should never have been so fucking lazy as to keep getting out of bed with a ruptured L5 vertebrae to take my 2.5 hour ride into the city for the exalted honor of carrying forty pound system backplanes in high heels for sexist Wall Street fucktards. The mere nerve of me to expect reward and praise (not to mention equal pay) for doing the right thing, I mean, really! I should have been home baking cookies for my man. Obviously I just don’t have the right stuff and never did. My four page resume is mere cotton candy. Oh, and I’m fat and over forty in a world where eye candy MATTERS. Well, ok, it matters to someone, I guess.
See, my problem isn’t that I was sitting in the same room with the entire New York City Sun Microsystems office when, as part of our orientation meeting for the move into our new offices in the World Trade Center, they played this movie clip.
My problem is that when I was sitting in another room with the same people in October 2001 in a hotel in New Jersey, listening to them cry and vent about the stuff they experienced during the 9/11 attack, I remembered that they showed this clip when we moved into the World Trade Center, and I was very tempted to stand up and scream at the top of my lungs, “FUCK YOU! GO HOME AND PLAY WITH YOUR KIDS!” to see if any of them remembered too.
Yeah. I guess that’s my problem.
And even worse… domestic spying continues apace, and I am made to hear the taunts of those who are (*ahem*) “competent” in that strange, secretive and sticky-handed existence through LOLCATS messages and the SCA Livejournal community!
But here’s what’s worst of all: for all their comparative (*coughahem*) competence, respectability, political correctness, good looks and (*coughahem*) “clean” hands, it would seem that none of my… hmmm, what should I refer to them as – compatriots? Co-workers? Cow-orkers? None of those People Who Are So Much Fucking Better Than I Am At Everything In Life(tm) can seem to actually SOLVE the problems of the creeping fascism, warrantless wiretapping, accountability for the Bush administration, restoration of Constitutional values, the looting of the Treasury, the spazzing economy, global warming, world hunger, or AIDS.
Oh, and we’re out of beer.
Alas! My life is clearly over. I have no reason to exist. I must flee or kill myself. Probably both. I’m not sure in which order. At least I will be in good company, I am sure my ghost will have some excellent conversations with Alan Turing.
Goodbye, cruel world.
Apr 01 2009
Health: PBS Frontline and Veterans – VA Updates
Below is a small collection of very recent reports of America’s Health Care and Veterans Issues and Care, coming out yesterday or within the last few days.
Once again the Frontline report is a must see!
Apr 01 2009
Muse in the Morning
 Muse in the Morning |
An Opened Mind VI
Art Link Planet
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Apr 01 2009
Wednesday Morning Science Supplement
Wednesday Science Supplement is an Open Thread
| From Yahoo News Science |
1 CT scan reveals hidden face under Nefertiti bust
By PATRICK McGROARTY, Associated Press Writer
Tue Mar 31, 9:11 pm ET
| BERLIN – Researchers in Germany have used a modern medical procedure to uncover a secret within one of ancient Egypt’s most treasured artworks – the bust of Nefertiti has two faces. A team led by Dr. Alexander Huppertz, director of the Imaging Science Institute at Berlin’s Charite hospital and medical school, discovered a detailed stone carving that differs from the external stucco face when they performed a computed tomography, or CT, scan on the bust.
The findings, published Tuesday in the monthly journal Radiology, are the first to show that the stone core of the statue is a highly detailed sculpture of the queen, Huppertz said. “Until we did this scan, how deep the stucco was and whether a second face was underneath it was unknown,” he said. “The hypothesis was that the stone underneath was just a support.” |
Apr 01 2009
U.S. bailout promises now at 90 percent U.S. 2008 GDP
This is not a joke.
The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.
Yes. According to Bloomberg News tally, 90 percent of America’s GDP is now promised toward filling the financial black hole.
New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.
Apr 01 2009
NY-20: I Voted Today
cross-posted at The Dream Antilles and dailyKos
At about 12:30 today, I walked across Route 203 and cast a ballot in the First District, Town of Austerlitz, Columbia County, New York in the NY-20 congressional election. I’m in the southern part of NY-20, right up against the Massachusetts border, and I’ve lived here for more than 20 years. I know that Murphy now has one vote.
Apr 01 2009
Obama’s “la mission civilisatrice”
In a fascinating article, Thomas Fuller an International Herald Tribune reporter, writes of Antoine Fayard, his maternal great-grandfather and a French colonial engineer “who built and designed roads, dams and canals across colonial Indochina.”
Fuller writes of his journey through Laos and Vietnam where he visited the locations his great-grandfather had been in the 1900s.
I knew where Fayard had traveled because our family had preserved his letters to his mother, photographs he took and a large and minutely detailed, hand-drawn silk map of what is now southern Laos.
Since reading Fuller’s article, “100 Years on, Tracing an Engineer’s Legacy“, I’ve mulled over the idea that maybe Americans have another lesson to learn from European colonialism when it comes to President Barack Obama’s ‘new’ strategy for Afghanistan.
Lessons from history are not always obvious. While Afghanistan is not Vietnam, I found some interesting parallels in the “civilian surge” part of Obama’s strategy with the efforts of French colonialists.