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I was outside a minute ago, watching the moon. Gibbous, almost full. Awesome. But what an idiot.

It does the same thing over and over again. It’s one stately dude. Obeys all laws. Big as all get out. But, snoresville, right? Same as the stars and the sun. I mean, I understand why the Egyptians and everybody else venerated them. It goes without saying that a God is someone who knows how to be huge and punctual. Everybody likes a punctual God. Is it just me, though, or is the whole punctual thing a bit overwrought? Is the whole predictability thing a tad tiresome?

The Moon’s spouse: “Rice Krispies? Again? How about a nice raisin bagel?”

The Moon: “No; no. Rice Krispies please. I think Rice Krispies would be just right. I like the way they snap.”

Maybe if shamans had been slightly more on the ball five thousand years ago we would just now be getting over the idea that the moon, the stars and the sun were frightful idiots. I wonder if things would be better now.

Probably not.

When I was 11 I had a teacher at Green Acres called Mrs Thornhill. Mrs. Thornhill had some sort of malady and went away for a couple months. Or maybe Mr. Thornhill had the malady and Mrs. Thornhill had to be home to take care of him; as I recall from 7th or 8th grade Mississippi History, Mr. Thornhill was older than dirt and spent half the class sleeping sitting up on the edge of his desk. Anyway: Mrs. Thornhill went away for a couple months, leaving us with a substitute teacher. Before she left, she assigned us all to do one book report a week. A week into her absence, I noticed that the substitute wasn’t demanding any book reports from us kids, so I did the only sensible thing a kid could do, which was to not write any more of them.

Two months later, at the end of the school year, Mrs Thornhill returned and handed out our report cards. I remember getting all ‘E’s and ‘S+’s, except for her class, for which I received a ‘U.’ “How could this be?” I asked her. “Well, you didn’t do 8 book reports,” she told me. “Yes I did,” I lied to her; “I just didn’t turn them in to the substitute because she didn’t ask for them. I can bring them in tomorrow if you want.” Tomorrow was the last day of school. “Okay,” she said. “Bring them in tomorrow.”

That night I wrote 8 book reports. The next day Mrs. Thornhill changed my ‘U’ to an ‘E.’

The moral of this story, my friends, is that kids today are simply too lazy to properly get away with things that we knew how to get away with in days of yore. My kids would no sooner write 8 book reports in a night than they would stuff live electric eels down their pants.

I weep for the younger generation.

I believe that in the future we’ll come together, liberals and conservatives alike under President Obama, and work toward making the country’s future a bright one. But in the meantime, all y’all Old Man Blinky/Sarah Palin voters can suck my dick.

I’m not for penalizing genius, and I’m not for penalizing hard work. Genius and hard work deserve to be recognized by money. I am for managing luck. I believe the unlucky should be made less unlucky. The only way to do that is by taking money from the lucky and giving it to those without it.

Take Bill Gates: a hard-working genius. And a very, very lucky man. What is he worth, 18 billion dollars? Some absurd number that I refuse to look up. I’ll allow a billion dollars to him on merit. Maybe he deserves a billion dollars. The other 17 billion should be ripped out of his hands and given to the people who got sick, or shot, or made astute bets on the wrong horses. Because when lucky gets out of hand, society gets a little closer to revolution.

Remember how a few years ago artists were employed to draw pastels of court scenes because cameras weren’t permitted in? I don’t know, I guess to protect the innocent, on the very off-chance that the accused were somehow found innocent? I think the same technique ought to be used in pictures inside the stock market exchanges. Because there’s bound to be one or two innocents among the perpetrators.

They’re always trying to make it relevant, or hip, or something. As far as I’m concerned, the idea of creation, godhood, underlying meaning of it all should be the bastion of the unhip. It’s painfully embarrassing to watch televangelists/charismatic preachers doing their thing, as if the idea is the kind that has to be sold, branded, or advertised. Part of its greatness is that it is a thing that does not need to be dressed up; it’s a thing that can only be diminished by doing that. People become more worldly, more sophisticated, more cynical with each passing minute and hour living in our world, paying attention to the things society makes us pay attention to.

The beginning idea is the one thing that can’t be touched by that. One should never become blasé or smug about the meaning of existence, like it’s a hula hoop or something. I won’t stand for it. That is why I race past the channels on the television that are passing out the Word. That is why the TV preachers outrage me. Don’t treat the final root idea like it’s a goddamn soft drink whose market share needs to be increased. How unbearably cynical. Don’t fuck with what should be an inviolable refuge against hype and cynicism.

Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009 | Wired Science from Wired.com

On Sept. 18, the news from CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, was that an electrical problem involved with a cooling system caused a helium leak that would keep the mammoth particle accelerator out of commission for a day or so. A couple days later, days stretched into two months: The machine would need to be warmed back up, which will take three to four weeks, before a full investigation could be done.

Now the outlook is even more bleak for eager physicists who have already waited decades for the giant collider to come to fruition, after a week of tantilizingly successful beam operations.

The warm-up period and ensuing investigations will bump up against the LHC’s “obligatory winter maintenance period,” according to a statement today from CERN. This brings us into early spring before commissioning can restart.

Do I have to say that this is also exactly what we’d be told if something super-freaky had happened when they first turned this thing on, something so super-freaky that they’re afraid to turn it on again? “Obligatory winter maintenance period.” Good one.

“Drinkability,” as a rating of a beer, has to be among the most egregious bullshit terms ever devised by man. Drinkability. Drinkability. In a peer-reviewed paper (a peer-reviewed paper), drinkability is defined as “A beer that … invites the drinker to another glass.” Stop. Right. There. STOP. Stop, stop, stop. Right. There.

Drinkability is the category a brewer uses to hype his brew when every other category one can use has failed him:

“The customers think our beer tastes like gravel. They say it tastes like watered-down gravel.”

“That’s one of the categories?”

“No, that’s just the write-in votes.”

“Have you asked about wetness? Or fizziness? Or foofarallitude? How does our beer do on foofarallitude?”

“It’s not looking good, sir.”

“Hmm. Have you asked them about its drinkability?”

“Not yet. What’s that?”

“I don’t give a good goddamn what it is, just ask them about it. They’re going to get tired sooner or later.”

“Okay. How do you want me to spell that?”

I hate people.

Thucydides wrote this around 430 BC describing how Athens and the character of its citizens degraded during the long war with Sparta, but it should send an electric thrill of familiarity down the spine of anyone living here and now:

“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as thoughtless acts of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfit for action.

“Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Any one who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and any one who objected to them became a suspect…As a result…there was a general deterioration of character… The plain way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.”

Thanks, George!

It bothers me when the subtitlers of a movie go beyond language translation and translate miles or feet into metric for me. For example, Tom Hanks didn’t say he was 322 thousand kilometers above the earth in Apollo 13, he said he was 200 thousand miles above it. That substitution–”322.000 kilometros” for “200,000 miles”– takes a liberty that I’m not comfortable with. And frankly, I don’t give a shit how many kilometers that is. It’s a movie, see; I don’t use that information for anything. Once I get past knowing that it’s a big number, I’m ready for the next scene. Thank you.

And now, the same screed translated into babelspanish:

Me incomoda cuando los subtitlers de una película van más allá de la traducción de lengua y traducen millas o pies al métrico para mí. Por ejemplo, Tom Hanks didn’ t dice él era 322 mil kilómetros sobre la tierra en Apolo 13, él dijo que él era 200 mil millas sobre él. Esa substitución–” kilometros” 322.000; para el ” miles” 200.000; — toma una libertad que I’ m no cómodo con. Y franco, I don’ t da una mierda cuántos kilómetros que sea. It’ la película del S.A., considera; I don’ uso de t esa información para cualquier cosa. Una vez que consigo pasado que sabe ese it’ número grande del S.A., I’ m listo para la escena siguiente. Gracias.

I was watching an episode of “Guess Who Married Your Mother?” or “I Married Your Mother?” or “Guess I Totally Bagged Your Mother!” a few minutes ago in the kitchen of this place in Miami I hang out in. The show was doing what all these shows do from time to time, which is to trot out an ex-star and have the “real people” played by the regular actors moon over him like he was the second coming of Christ Almighty. Or her, waltzing in as Mary. But in this case it was Patrick Swayze, so the Christ metaphor is probably the one to go with. Anyhow, it was one of those “Don’t look now, but PATRICK SWAYZE is sitting at the table right behind you.” “PATRICK SWAYZE? RIGHT BEHIND ME? [looks, swoons]“

The regular actors on this show play people who I assume are in their mid to late twenties. I play a person who is in his mid forties; I barely remember who Patrick Swayze is. I’m not sure I could pick him out of a police lineup unless he actually was the shit who knocked me down and took my wallet half an hour beforehand. The man flash-danced twenty years ago. Or danced dirtily, whatever. Since then he’s been in a string of piddly-ass movies. Or has had piddly-ass parts in slightly more than piddly-ass movies. The point is that the generation blankers on this show can’t POSSIBLY really know who he is, let alone adore him enough to suck his cock. But there they go.

Remember when Carroll O’Connor sucked Sammy Davis, Jr’s cock on “All in the Family?” Or when Gary Coleman sucked Nancy Reagan’s cock on “Diff’rent Strokes?” Sure you do. Is this a contractual thing? Or is it just somebody on the show asking for a favor, or (more likely) doing a favor for one of their old heroes who’s fallen on hard times? It’s probably that. That’s what it probably is.

I don’t mind favors being done for friends. Of course that’s a good thing. But when they’re not my friends, when it happens so publicly, when the favor involves me in the transaction somehow, then I start minding it. There should be a warning scroll during the show, to allow me time to change channels before I’m compelled to see things untoward: “Patrick Swayze’s cock sucked in the following episode, viewer discretion advised.” That sort of thing.

I’d never seen the show until it was on the inflight screens on a New Orleans-Miami leg last night. I happened to have some earbuds with me, so I tapped into the sound. Abomination! An all-around abomination! The acting, the directing, the writing–especially the writing–all designed to infuse me with hatred for those associated with this show. And by extension, all mankind.

The show is filled with so many cliches; so many cliches. The wise father who can be an idiot about the small things but knows the big picture; the wiser wife; friends and family, all wise in their own ways; the wise dog; and the single unwise, un-self aware antagonist lurching through the show that the others all will make wise in time.

From what depths of cynicism did this thing come? Because the writers, the producers, everyone, all had to be deeply cynical to allow this thing to waft over the airways. “Let’s make a Christian show,” they said. “Let’s make a Christian show that the people who write in complaining about real shows will watch.” So they called in their hacks and desperate has-beens and this thing, this rough beast, slouched toward Hollywood to be born.

The child actors! Make them sound like miniature adults, with miniature complex relationships with their miniature pals! And let there be huge, awkward spaces of silence when characters read the spines of books or gaze off into the middle distance as other characters leave and enter scenes! And let the bridges between awkward gaps be filled with soft little lighthearted jokes about milk! Yes, let that happen! And give some real people some lines, too, so that the painfully embarrassing shortcomings of the show can be refocused on them. And make them retarded! Christians love that!

I have this colossal hatred for 7th Heaven.

Earthrace - The Boat

In March 2008, Earthrace will attempt to set a new speed record for a powerboat to circumnavigate the globe running 100% biodiesel, and with a net zero carbon-footprint, in order to increase awareness of the environment and the sustainable use of resources.

“Net zero carbon footprint.” While I don’t want to detract from something cool–I like it when cool things happen– this phrase is beginning to really grate. This boat has a 3,000 gallon fuel tank. A non-trivial amount of energy went in to making it in the first place. It’s only “net zero” because the company buys carbon offsets. I could make a Hummer or a Boeing 727 “net zero” doing that.

You know, if *everybody* bought carbon offsets to reduce their carbon footprint to “net zero,” we’d still have a problem. I don’t care how many trees you plant, a 727 still does what it does.

Before someone says that I don’t understand the concept behind carbon offsets, let me just say this: I understand it. It’s a wonderful way to roll around in your cake and then eat it. It’s a wonderful way to keep doing what you’re doing with a clean conscience. I *understand* that. You gave at the office. You adopted the skinny televised black kid in Ethiopia. What you didn’t do was leave your Hummer at home and walk to the grocery store.

“Net zero carbon footprint.” Jesus Christ. The phrase is about to become absolutely meaningless as every damn company piles on with its own product. It’ll be like what happened to the word ‘retarded’ when it leaked out into the mainstream; psychiatrists had to come up with some other word. A perfectly descriptive term, ruined by squatters.

When a can of coke is advertised as having a “net zero carbon footprint,” the retardeding of the phrase will be complete.

King pardons Saudi rape victim - CNN.com

It’s funny how seriously the world community takes the kingdom. As if they have some sort of point, some sort of gravitas.

The need for the pardon defies all. The kingdom will not last another 50 years. So says the Great Curmudgeon.

In solidarity with Gillian Gibbons, I’ve decided to name my son’s old teddy bear Muhammad. Also 3 of my lawnchairs, the kitchen table, the old skillet that the teflon’s peeling from, the brown patch in the backyard, and the keys to my truck. These are all henceforth renamed Muhammad.

The stuff that collects under the couch between vacuumings I rename What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People? .

I swear I need some symbolic something to go apeshit over, too. I’m totally lacking in symbolic apeshittery. I feel kind of naked because the only response I have now to somebody else’s godly freak-out is a kind of bemused anxiety, which I’m getting kind of tired of, frankly. Thousands of screaming townsfolk marching on my house with torches and stones in their hands, and all I get is bemused anxiety to fend them off? That rarely works. So that changes now, Jack.

From now on, I consider the act of shaking someone’s right hand an affront. AN AFFRONT TO EVERYTHING I HOLD DEAR. If I see someone, a Right-to-lifer or a Sudanese fringewit Muslim or who-have-you, shaking someone’s hand with his or her right hand, I reserve the right to call for their fucking heads. Because shaking someone’s hand with your right hand…why, you may as well have murdered puppies in my living room. Shat right there in the gumbo. The only way I’ll cancel the fatwa is if I get some serious fucking media play. The world has to realize the magnitude of the blunder before I’ll call it off.

While I’m at it, I also call for the heads of those people who haven’t named their various kitchen appliances or outdoor furnishings Muhammad. These people make my blood boil. And those who haven’t had an abortion or performed an abortion, who are high on my holy shit list? Death to them.

THE WORLD WILL ACKNOWLEDGE MY SYMBOLIC APESHITTERY.

Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.

The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.

And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.

Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.

Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.

We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.

Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.

And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.

In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.

I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.

That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.

I don’t watch much television. It’s not that I’ve become an unbelievably productive person because I don’t fritter all that time away in front of the tube anymore–I haven’t–it’s just that the bulk of my frittering is done in front of a computer instead. Don’t get me wrong; I’m still pretty smug about it regardless of the fact that I haven’t really benefited from it.

But there are reasons, I think, to feel smug about it, viz: I just finished spending an entire month in Dallas because I had to. I spent the bulk of that time in a hotel room. The bulk of the time I spent in the hotel room, the television was on, because it was sitting there not 3 feet away from the bed. So during the last month, I probably spent more time watching tv than I have in the past 3 years combined. And I noticed several things that one may not have noticed had one been watching television more or less constantly during that time.

One of them is that television news–all of it outside of PBS–uniformly sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean it’s not actually news anymore; it’s pre-digested opinions about people–personalities–who simply shouldn’t matter. It’s a vanilla milkshake, a naked pandering to the fail, the people who desperately want to be among the winners, who imagine themselves at the head table where nothing real matters anymore.

I saw several Dallas news shows, along with some morning news shows, Fox news (which you might think, and I would have thought a month ago, is kind of unfair of me to use to indict all news shows, but you and I would be wrong), and CNN. I saw Wolf Blitzer and Hardball and Tucker, 60 Minutes and 48 Hours and Face the Nation.

Do you know what I learned after watching all that? I learned that Britney Spears is totally fucked up. I learned that again and again and again. Everyone wanted to weigh in on Britney. Guests were empaneled on news shows so that the reigning talking head could canvas them on their Britney opinions.

Now, I care what Britney Spears does and says as much as the next guy, as long as the next guy doesn’t give a flying fuck what Britney Spears says or does. Me and him, we could not care any less. You could not underbid us on it. We simply don’t care what Wolf’s guests think about this. She’s some kid from Mississippi that got rich somehow; good for her, but that’s all we need to know.

What we do care about is the news. What is going on in the world? What happened in Sri Lanka yesterday? What’s Putin up to? How close we gettin on that frickin cancer cure? That’s what we want to know. But we don’t spend money the way the fail do, in clumps and gobbets that depend on the television for guidance. So (apparently) we don’t get television news aimed at us anymore.

Fox news… Fox news has been an evil tabloid since its inception, spewing vitriol and obnoxiousness 24 hours a day. But CNN? When did CNN become a tabloid? When did CNN begin to spew tawdriness and fail? When did that happen?

Okay, fine. Fine. Television is not aimed at me. I get it. But television is aimed at somebody, and it is huge and relentless. And it shapes people, and that shape is conformity, banality, and failure. I get it. So I’m smug, of course, but it’s not a happy smug.

Author Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84 - CNN.com

“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut once told a gathering of psychiatrists, according to the AP.

Smoking kills. You at 84.

CNN.com - Experts predict one more Atlantic hurricane - Oct 3, 2006
FORT COLLINS, Colorado (AP) — Hurricane expert William Gray downgraded his forecast for the 2006 Atlantic storm season again Tuesday, predicting one more hurricane, two more named storms but no intense hurricanes.

He also has an amazing 95 percent accuracy in predicting how many dumps he’ll take during any given day! His 11:30 pm “Daily Dump Forecast” is eerily accurate.

Bonehead.

Follow up to this and that.

CNN.com - Season’s hurricane forecast downgraded - Sep 1, 2006

DENVER, Colorado (AP) — Hurricane forecaster William Gray downgraded his expectations for the 2006 Atlantic storm season Friday, calling for a slightly below-average year, with only five hurricanes instead of the seven previously forecast.Two of the hurricanes will be intense, according to Gray’s forecasting team, based at Colorado State University.

“We have made changes in our predictions for this season in order to maintain our reputation for accuracy,” a spokesman for the team said.

In other news, the Ministry of Truth announced today that “Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy.”

Follow up to this post.