Halloween comes and goes, people still boring and without Modern Cultural Reference
OK, just two quick things here. First, I think it's time for another hiatus. Why? Well, two reasons: First, I've been slacking off on this site again anyway. Second, I'm not going to have enough time to find a way to not slack off on it. Third, aside from my two regular visitors, there just isn't much reason. One of you can get your fix elsewhere, Mr. Brown. The other one can go read The Nation or Alternet or something.
Yes, I know I gave three reasons when I told you there were two. That's comedy. Look it up.
The other thing I want to tell ya about is this. Bush is going to win this election, hands down, no problems. With a vote tally of 277 to 261. These are the same lazy numbers that CNN came up with. And, unless I am just totally wrong, they are using the same slacker math. Just take all the states Gore won last time and factor in the net loss of votes in those states (only states that voted for Gore last cycle lost Electoral Votes following the Census. Odd, that) and then mix it all together and Poof! Instant election results. I don't really think there will be any surprises, at least not until results in the Midwest start coming in.
I reserve the right to claim I was misrepresented or high when I wrote this, just in case the entire state of South Carolina goes to sleep on Election Day.
Angst and futility; mix 'n match politics
Someone at CNN has a great sense of humor. Kerry targets Ohio geese, voters. Complete with Kerry in hunting garb. Wow! He really is a man of the people, instead of an elite Bostonian!
But, the other side isn't buying it. They know the truth: "Bush tells voters that Kerry is on the 'left bank' of society, opposing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage." Hmm. So this is what the best democracy in the world has to show for political discourse.
The Fall of Communism!
Well, ok, it is merely the fall of Fidel following a speech. Poor old guy broke a knee. Fucking commies.
I have the best sources
People wonder how I find all this stuff. Well, I have great sources like the ones who bring me this barnbuster: O'Reilly's being sued by a former employee! For Sexual Harrassment!
Editor's note: At this point, mat was taken aside for a moment and told that the O'Reilly story had indeed broken over a week ago and he had only learned of it lst night. What followed was a twenty-minute tirade that ended in his shipping two sources off to Cuba to take care of Castro's knee and dressing a third up to look like an "undecided goose." That third source was later shot by John Kerry for telling him he'd rather vote for the Worker's World Pary candidate than a Bostonian. In the ensuing chaos, three lesbians burned copies of Lynne Cheney's book Sisters and were later seen stuffing vibrators in O'Reilly's ears and rectum. mat is resting comfortably, having finally stopped babbling about "always being the last to know."
Excerpts from Sisters are available. Photos of John Kerry shooting my former source are not available at this time.
Depressing statistics
Just when you start feeling good about the world, you learn some horrible statistic and it all goes to hell. Like, about how one in four American children is below the poverty line or one in three Americans without health insurance.
Or, how this story about Preppy Punks I ripped from the New York Times has attracted half as many hits in one-third as many days as this site.
It's all in what people are looking for, I suppose.
Oh, and another depressing statistic: One in two students at Texas A&M don't give a shit about people without insurance.
Comedian rips veteran pundits new asshole; calls them hacks and then gets dirty
As I am beyond certain, you might have been told sometime in the past two days that Jon Stewart himself was on CNN's Crossfire Friday. And, in the fifteen minutes or so that he was on, he simply refused to play nice with Carlson and Begala. Long story short, he berated them for not actually behaving like a political debate show instead of simply two "party hacks" in a "political theatre" show.
Their responses were tepid and shot down fairly rapidly:
CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.Ouch.
STEWART: You need to go to one.
Obligatory Linkage: The clip can seen on iFilm, and is also available as a bittorrent. The CNN transcript, believe it or not, does contain Stewart's reference to Carlson as a "dick." I believe that is the first time that word's been used on CNN without referring to a member of government.
You just think you are *so* smart, don't you?
I now have something else I can mark off of the list of things that I am not trying again soon: installing a webserver with php support for a bulletin board on a windows machine. The server part was easy. Go get apache, blah blah blah. The php part was a bit more involved, and after figuring out that the Microsoft Installer version was crap, I even managed to add the correct lines to the Apache Config file to get php running as a module of the server. Sweet.
So, the bulletin board requires mySQL. OK, no biggie there, really. Except that database software is really, really, really weird. The syntax is almost like command line stuff, but more arcane. But hey, I was told I wouldn't need to know much about the database. Just create one and the bulletin board would do the rest.
It didn't. Over and over and over again. Nothing works. What's the problem? Who knows? The software doesn't kick out error codes, just the install page. Over and over and over again.
So, two days ago I thought I was smart.
Celebrate Spanish Dominance of the New World!
That's right, boys and girls, it's Columbus Day. The day that we celebrate the conquest of the New World by the Spanish. Let's take a quick peek at one Chris Columbus's journal entries after he landed, shall we?
"these people are very simple as regards the use of arms, as your Highnesses will see from the seven that I caused to be taken, to bring home and learn our language and return; unless your Highnesses should order them all to be brought to Castile, or to be kept as captives on the same island; for with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them..."
That is from the journal of The Man himself, and you can find it in any number of online sources. Of course, you will still find plenty of sources that simply state "Columbus was a great sailor." Ah, history.
Now for the weird stuff
In brief, a Canadian man died two years ago and no one noticed. This was due in large part to the fact that he had set up automatic payments of his bills, and one can assume there was direct deposit involved to. The Canadian site the story comes from calls it a chilling tale of what happens when technology overtakes our basic day-to-day details. And it's true.
Right Wing Obsession With All Things Ketchup!
W. Ketchup! I don't really have a lot to say about this one.
The Republicans (in the guise of their Internets-happy lapdogs, the bloggers and the "independent" news sites), are absolutely insane with kethcup rage. A line in a New York Times story yesterday says that when John Kerry married Theresa Heinz in 1995, "the bride's son, Chris Heinz, teasingly daubed Mr. Kerry on the forehead with ketchup, to welcome him into the family and its tomato-based fortune."
Another source took that quote, minus the word "teasingly," and turned it into this story, titled "Kerry in Weird Heinz Ketchup Initiation Rite." Note the strange occult overtones that the story takes on. That's right, these people worship ketchup. Buy American, then!
Funny, did any of these right-wing goons have a problem with this woman when she was married to one of their own, Mr. Heinz himself? Oh, and you knew this was coming: the late Senator Heinz was himself a member of Skull and Bones.
You still wonder why I don't vote?
Sunday, Boring Sunday
If I were a football fan, then Sundays in the fall wouldn't be so bad. I could get me a twelve pack of beer and crawl from bed to couch and just have a blast. Instead, I wake up and giggle at Meet the Press, Face the Nation (warning! has one of those heart attack inducing flash fucks), and whatever gang of idiots Fox has. Then I'm just bored. Oh well.
I've been procrastinating for about a month and a half on setting up the 2004 Election section of my journal. Mainly, it's because I really have lost the urge to explain to people why I don't vote and why I don't think it matters if they vote. Long story short, we will still have to listen to both sides bitch and moan and while. And, I'm pretty sick of bloggers on both sides. Don't you people have jobs and families and shit to attend to? Seriously?
It's no big secret that I am a very left-field kind of person, politically. What makes it difficult for me to get involved is I also picked up a strong anti-authoritarian bent to my political self. Which means that I'm as suspicious of government help as I am of anything else. It's a hard thing to think about, and I can't think of many sites on the left that do a good job of it.
Fuck it. Maybe there's a good movie on HBO.
What is wrong with...
Well, it was going to be "What is wrong with the Internet," and whether I mean that as a question of a statement can be left entirely up to the reader, at this point. Wow, sidetracked and not even done with the first paragraph (mark the date).
It started out as a rant about the Internet, but it grew pretty quickly into a more general rant about shitty writers, shitty editors, and shitty everything else. So here we go:
My slow fall into a lazy anger began with today's headlines from antimusic.com, a site that simply grabs headlines from music biz sources (and some other places) and posts them. Fine, so it's like Google News or something. No problem. I'll even ignore the fact that they even use the ancient bad linking technique known as "Click Here..." and say that I clicked the link on the story I was interested in, which was "Poison Tops Worst List." Now, keep in mind that the blurb starts off, "Blabbermouth reports: According to the Detroit Free Press." Yes, we have already found three layers of obfuscation from source material.
But, it gets better. Like I said, I clicked the full story link and was taken to "Blabbermouth." Once there, I was amazed to find myself staring at pretty much the same damn blurb about shitty rock guitar solos. This time, though, there was no link to the Detroit Free Press. So, off to suckle at the demon's teat over at google and then off to the DFP. Wow. Guess what?
Their article is also a goddamn blurb, but now I find that the original article is in Guitar World.
Now, let's look at what's happened to the last fifteen minutes of my life. I've read a post on a site that says that site b is citing site c. But there's no link to c, only to b and b has no link at all to c. When I finally get to c, I find that now there's a mystery site d, which has the original piece. And guess fucking what? It's not online.
But wait, there's more.
All the blurbs so far have the headline "Poison tops list," right? Well, that's not true. It's not Poison, naturally, it is their crap guitarist CC Deville. And it's not even a Poison song named. But wait, it gets even better! The lead sentence of the blurb starts off talking about Ted Fucking Nugent, who came in at number seven. This is only barely excused by the fact that Nugent is ostensibly from Detroit. I cannot believe that even Detroit claims him. "Motor City Madman," fuck that.
All of these people should stop "writing" right now. Seriously. Go find a job somewhere that does not require you to put words together. This crap passed through an enormous number of hands and eyes. So, the question now stands, "what is wrong with the writing and editing skills of our beloved media?" The morons in Detroit who ran a blurb like that in their paper, the other morons who picked it up for Blabbermouth, and then the goons over at antimusic. Is it simply a case of reusing words over and over and over, even if they suck, just to have copy? We already have someone doing that in society, namely pop stars like Ashlee Simpson.
But, in the end, I fell for it all like a sucker. And learned nothing.
VP Debate: Still just two Ninnies
I'm not going to waste much time on this one. It basically came down to this:
Cheney: We are on the right track!Just ninety minutes of it, with some lively sparks only on the gay issue (namely Mr Cheney's Lickalicious Daughter) little else. Will the Democrats pull out of Iraq? No. They want more people, from anywhere and everywhere, in there. Will they help repeal PATRIOT? No. Willl they, in short, do anything truly "liberal" or "progressive?" No.
Edwards: We are clearly not!
And why are the media bending over backward in this election cycle to point out the supposed differences of these candidates? Sigh.
Other stuff...
Ok, totally spent too much time on that one. I am going to write a couple of "Why I Do Not Vote" pieces in the next week or so. This time, really, I promise.
Um. I guess that's it. Lousy update. Sorry. How about an animated gif to
make up for it?
Laugh at this poor
little girl, you evil bastards.
Oh, wait. One last minute addition: The nation's biggest cock tease of the week. Will she blow? Or not?
Obligatory Nonsense
Who the hell is mat
catastrophe?
About this "blog"
What is nihilism,
for real?
Is there an FAQ?
Are you
really this much of a prick in real
life?
Surfing in from a search
result and not finding it?
Obligatory Links Area
found weirdness:
The Cat With Hands.
and
something funny.
Archival Footage
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July --
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2003
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