carlin is dead and it saddens me. he was one of my favorite comics and while i think ‘seven words…’ was groundbreaking, there are bits i love more. i think my love of carlin’s work comes from his ability with words. he was brilliant and will be missed.
while vic and i were dating, we spent the night at a friend’s house and i’d brought the freshly minted, at that time, complaints and grievances cd. we had been listening to it in the car and brought it to finish listening to before we went to sleep. all i have to add to this story is that laughing hysterically doesn’t hurt when you’re getting frisky. i honestly think if you can’t laugh during sex, then what’s the point.
i am and have always been a cat person. i’d rather have their aloof attitude than the pandering acceptance of dogs any day but between having an apartment with carpet and vic allergies it never really came up until now, after our last mouse incident, we decided it was time to get a cat.
we realised that most of vic’s recent interactions with felines had not left her snotty and swollen so we decided to give a short hair cat a try and with most things our new kitten fell into our lap. a co-worker had a stray deposit her litter in her crawl space, presenting us with an opportunity.
so without further ado, i present ‘Orion,’ so named by the boychick for the orange tabby in the original MiB movie, although i think our kitten is cuter.
not that it matters or anyone even noticed but i’ve changed hosting providers. i registered and hosted the domain with Hostway. i have no clue who they were outside the fact the bought Valueweb, the web host that i’ve used for the last seven years. Hostway sucks, there is no other way around it. in the first two weeks that i had the domain i had 10 days of down time, things came to a head during the Memorial day weekend when i spent two hours waiting to speak to a supervisor, after much bullshit he finally came out and admitted that the ticket on the mysql error that kept me from setting up the blog had been open for at least eight days. since memorial day it had been up mostly, but the underlying problem was never fixed and aside from a promised phone call after the holiday to say someone was working on it, i haven’t heard from them since.
i loathe crappy customer service and i loathe when they try to treat me like an idiot, which is why i moved all my personal domains to a new server, well i’m waiting to for the migration to propagate. which brings me to my other question why do hosting companies make it so difficult to terminate service. they’re like the new aolhell.
my new host is eleven2 and thus far the service has been exemplary, hopefully it will continue.
I have returned from a week in the wilds of northern michigan and i have proof.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
this year marks the seventh anniversary of douglas noel adam’s death, wear your towel with pride
yesterday marked the beginning of moustache may and that signaled the end of six months of beard growth. yeah, i hadn’t shaved since whiskerino began, it was kind of nice. anyway this year moustache may has partnered with fund-a-stache, which allows participants to raise money for the charity of their choice. i’m raising money for galaxy star drug awareness program, i’m not asking for much, i’m just trying to raise $500 in the next six months. click on the fund-a-stache link to donate.
oh yeah, here’s yesterday’s picture
would pay to see me keep it or would you pay to see me lose it?
Posted below are ten quotes. read, digest, discuss, repost.
- “Do you know the difference between a woman with PMS and a snarling Doberman pinscher? The answer is lipstick. Do you know the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist.”
- “The Quran teaches that [all Muslims have a mandate to kill Christians and Jews]. Yes, it teaches that very clearly.”
- “I believe that the Hurricane Katrina was, in fact, the judgment of God against the city of New Orleans…. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they are — were recipients of the judgment of God for that…. There was to be a homosexual parade there on the Monday that the Katrina came. And the promise of that parade was that it was going to reach a level of sexuality never demonstrated before in any of the other Gay Pride parades…. The Bible teaches that when you violate the law of God, that God brings punishment sometimes before the day of judgment.”
- “The military will have difficultly recruiting healthy and strong heterosexuals for combat purposes. Why? Fighting in combat with a man in your fox hole that has AIDS or is HIV positive is double jeopardy”
- “It [Gay marriage] will open the door to incest, to polygamy, and every conceivable marriage arrangement demented minds can possibly conceive. If God does not then punish America, He will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”
- “It is impossible to call yourself a Christian and defend homosexuality. There is no justification or acceptance of homosexuality…. Homosexuality means the death of society because homosexuals can recruit, but they cannot reproduce.”
- “Only a Spirit-filled woman can submit to her husband’s lead. It is the natural desire of a woman to lead through feminine manipulation of the man. …. Fallen women will try to dominate the marriage. The man has the God-given role to be the loving leader of the home”
- “I cannot tell you how important it is that we understand the true nature of Islam, that we see it for what it really is. In fact, I will tell you this: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.”
- “Gay sexuality inevitably involves brutal physical abusiveness and the unnatural imposition of alien substances into internal organs, orally and anally, that inevitably suppress the immune system and heighten susceptibility to disease.”
- “Only 1 percent of the homosexual population in America will die of old age. The average life expectancy for a homosexual in the United States of America is 43 years of age. A lesbian can only expect to live to be 45 years of age. Homosexuals represent 2 percent of the population, yet today they’re carrying 60 percent of the known cases of syphilis.”
appalled? if not, then move on now. if you are, sit for a spell. quotes 1 – 7 are from pastor john hagee and rev. rod parsley. why do they matter is more important question. you see as the obama campaign continues to get flack for statements in or out of context by rev. wright, these fine gentlemen are apparently john mccain’s spiritual advisors and theoretically the same rules should apply. right?
i’ve never been big on team sports because fundamentally i’m not a people person. i was also the fat kid for a while so i didn’t get picked for shit. at the onset of puberty i got tall and thin but i’d already been burned so i took up distance running and i like it. you kept your own counsel and you were entirely motivated and driven by yourself. i like it so much i ran and 5k and 10k races, the one thing they don’t tell you about road running is how much it destroys your knees. and that when i stopped besides this long before the ipod when sony walkmen was still ridiculously expensive and the only thing accompanying your run was the sound of your own laboured breathing. this weekend was the country music half and full marathon and i’m seriously considering participating next year. i don’t have anywhere near the body i had in my late teens and early twenties and my knees are likely to hate me for months after, but i’ve never done a half marathon and i don’t have to run all 13 miles. we’ll see.
when i first started this post i was planning on talking about the sports that i watch on television and some how got sidetracked. i am first and foremost a formula one fan. forget nascar, forget irl, this is a good as it gets in motor-racing. i get up early or stay up late to watch races and qualifying, i’ve stuck by my team through thick and thin although during my current fandom, my team has done pretty well. there are two comparisons i like to draw between formula 1 and all other sports particularly in the last year. the first was the patriots got caught and fined for cheating about the same time as mclaren (one of the premiere teams in f1), the patriots fine? $500K and a first round draft pick. construed by most as a slap on the wrist. mclaren’s file? $100M which includes a portion of their tv revenues as well as their race winnings and forfeit of their constructor points for the season (effectively putting them in the worst garage at each event). f1 doesn’t operate in half measures.
the other comparison was the weekend nascar got cancelled in richmond because of rain, f1 was racing in japan, wait for it, in the rain. open wheel racing, 20 odd inches off the ground races in the rain, but stock cars can’t race in the rain, there is a disconnect somewhere.
i am also without shame an oakland raiders fan. i have been for over a decade. i’d never seen a game, i’d never seen a uniform and all my information about the team was based on the writings of hunter s. thompson and i was hooked. i actually watched the superbowl in ’01 i think and wrote about it here (somewhere in the archives, too lazy to look) for the singular reason that they were play. ‘football’ amuses me, because i grew in a country where we play rugby which makes this bunch of well padded athletes look like a bunch of pansy waists, but still i’m fascinated by this team run by a man who marches to the beat of his own drum come hell or high water.
i despise modern art. i think most of it is onanistic garbage foisted upon the public by failed artist and bitter art major in the form of curators. i believe that art should communicate and enhance a shared experience, anything that requires detailed notes, a press release to explain the artist’s vision or has the word ‘installation’ is problematic. . i’ve been to the tate and the tate modern in london and i believe that the tate modern was a cruel joke that went something like this:
“good grief, we’ve got all this tripe we’re too ashamed to show with the real art. plus it’s costing us an arm and a leg to store it.”
“i know, let’s create a new modern space, put all that crap in there and charge people to want to put their eyes out.”
i started this entry yesterday before the furor about the insemination/abortion art project started up and now that it’s come out to be an elaborate hoax and the press release itself was the project, i have even less respect for project or the ‘artist.’ in fact this ‘event’ sums up why i loathe modern art. i don’t need to be told how i should feel about art, i shouldn’t need to have it explained to me. i suppose i shouldn’t make such a blanket statement, i love photography. i could spend hours at a photo exhibit, looking at light and texture and photography is a modern artform and like any other artform has it’s own pretensions but it doesn’t require a pre-determined set of responses.
think about all the great art you’ve seen – how much of it required some detailed explanation? or did you just see it and appreciate it.
next january will be three years since i got my green card, time flies when you’re having fun. although i have my green card, i can’t vote.
after many years of writing in none of the above on various ballots in elections in trinidad, i find myself in a position that is truly frightening. i don’t even have the option to voice my dissent in a public forum. isn’t this how the boston tea party happened? the people were tired of paying unreasonable taxes without having a voice. some friends of mine just moved from DC back to Trinidad and i was meaning to ask them for their tags so i could put one on the front of my car. i think the thing that burns me is my inability to make a contribution to in any form about where my taxes dollars are spent.
i’m not about the handout. not to anyone, the bear sterns bailout pisses me off just as much as the people on welfare for years. i firmly believe there should be a cutoff point for welfare, what do you mean you can’t find a job. in the last three years there have never been less than four W-2s delivered at the end of january, in 05, i think we had an all-time high of seven and two 1099s and these were concurrent jobs. maybe that’s why there’s a problem in the labour market, we’ve got all the jobs. and the concept i’m paying to bailout a privately held billion dollar company makes my blood boil.
and i wonder how many people are in the same boat i’m in, i’d be curious to see actual numbers. what percentage of taxpayers are non-citizens? what percent of the tax burden is carried by these people, especially considering all the people in specialty industries on H1B visas?
in january, i’ll have had my permanent card for three years which makes me eligible to apply for citizenship. on the face of it, it’s another $600+ to the USCIS, plus whatever documentation they require and the indeterminate wait, a trip to Memphis for an interview and the quiz. it will give me the right to participate in government – local, state and federal and as i understand it i wouldn’t have to give up my Trinidadian citizenship however the downside of this is an issue with the tax system that that forces citizens to pay taxes when they live abroad. how is that fair or right to pay tax on income in the country of residence and the country of citizenship? basically you’re paying a premium to be a US citizen.
