ectoblog.com

I could stare at this for seconds on end. I guess I just like seeing Patrick Stewart blowing away kids. That’s my guess.

(gif taken off the main page to avoid overmesmerization)

CNN.com – Moussaoui: White House was my 9/11 target – Mar 27, 2006

Al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui told a stunned courtroom Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth plane on September 11, 2001, and crash it into the White House.

I haven’t really followed this story. But what I’ve read about Moussaoui leads me not to believe that he’s a co-conspirator in 9/11, but instead to believe that he’s one of a very special set of yahoo that thrives on wildly bone-headed claims that couldn’t possibly be true. I met someone like this while I was deck-handing; the most wonderful lies would fall out of his head every time he opened his mouth. He was going to law school. He’d just beaten a murder conviction. He’d won a million dollars in the lottery, but frittered it away on cars and women. He was Buzz Aldrin’s son. He was Buzz Aldrin. His blood-type was AspecialBpositive. That sort of thing.

Richard Reid, by all accounts, is clearly a yahoo of the highest order. While the fact that Reid and Moussaoui are buddies doesn’t prove Moussaoui is also a yahoo, it’s as near as dammit.

Next.

The Sound of Young America: Unearthed Monty Python Footage From 1975

www.badtoonrising.com

Last night and today the comment spammers have had a field day with this site. Wordpress, if it’s lacking anything, lacks an effective way of keeping the riff raff out while allowing real comments in. Until I find a decent plugin based on image authentication, the best thing I can do is hold for moderation any comment that has a link in it. I had been holding for moderation any comment that had more than one link in it, but that’s stopped working.

I mowed the lawn for the first time this year yesterday. I did as much of it as I could, since I ripped the crankline out by the root on the last crank. Luckily it started on that one. I didn’t use any more oomph than I usually do, but it was nevertheless the most gratifying breakdown I’ve ever had. GORILLA ARMS! OOMGOWAH! I suppose I’ll have to take it down to Jerry’s Lawnmower Repair this week for a general enema.

Because of school, our yard has grown Clampett-like. The neighbors, I’m sure, have looked at our yard once or twice this winter and clicked their tongues. Fuck em.

My mission this summer, though, is to mow my lawn exactly 4 days after my Seabee neighbor. Mrs Seabee is a tongue clicker. A very annoying person with few redeeming qualities. I guess she has one or two qualities that aren’t annoying. I guess. She hasn’t yet shit in my mailbox. That’s something.

So, to raise the stakes, I’ll mow exactly 4 days after they mow. That way, their lawn will look 4 days shaggier than my lawn for the bulk of the summer. That will surely be irksome.

It’s possible…probable… that she will escalate by getting her husband to mow the day after I mow. That will not work. My response will be to mow the day after they re-mow with a lower blade clearance. My lawn will look like the fucking eighteenth green at a public golf course, if that’s what it takes.

And it will be perfectly obvious to them what I’m doing, at least by the 2nd or 3rd week of summer. She will know that something sinister and ineluctable is happening next door. She will not win. I will grind her pride-of-lawn into a fine mulch beneath my workboots. Then I will use it as a fertilizer for my yard.

It’s the little things that make life worth living.

Paul Stiles, former bonds trader:

“It’s so painful to see. The sprawl, the greed,” he said in a telephone interview, speaking of the United States. “It’s like an inward collapse of what we once were. I can’t take it anymore. You see McDonald’s and it’s like you are getting shot.”

Mr Stiles is currently living with his angst and family in the Canary Islands, spending staggering sums of money he stole while working as a prostitute for Merrill Lynch.

from a NYT article by link from SlowPokeBlog.

I accidentally saw a piece of this show last night or the night before. I haven’t felt so much pain sitting in front of a television since… I was going to say “since the last time I watched I Love Lucy,” but there is no comparison. This show is so bad it made me frantic for the contestants, the judges, the producers, the public, and myself. It was 20 minutes of a baby shrieking in pain in a locked room, and I didn’t have a key.

FOR GOD’S SAKE SOMEONE HELP THAT BABY!

For inventions whose presentation doesn’t make one sick and afraid for humanity, see MAKE: Blog. For comments on MAKE: Blog about American Inventor, go here. The reviews are surprisingly ambivalent, which doesn’t make me frantic, but also doesn’t alleviate my fear for humanity.

I have to have this in place for technical reasons that are too mundane to go into here. It’ll be gone shortly.

Update: I need a plug-in that requires a password to access, that actually works if one inputs the password, and that doesn’t call attention to itself by putting a gigantic “Protected” header on the post. I’ve had 2 recent posts that I posted in order to set “last position” for The Map. I didn’t want to delete them after that function was no longer required because that deletes the comments, too. But there’s no simple way in WP to do that. The “Password-Protect Post” function actually eliminates access to comments even if the correct password is applied, which is blockheaded and in need of repair.