In the spirit of continuing publications in which I offer no original content–

Help me avoid another letter from the state of Washington threatening to make a generic label final and legal as it takes another two months to name one of the Pond subdivisions.

This is what I’ve come up with so far–

• Curly
• Perfidy
• Trout Fishing In America
• Chocolate Pie Heart
• Spock

But that is by no means a definitive list and we leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which the children came up with (hint, it’s only one of them). I am sure there are plenty I missed of which I should be made aware, my interstellar kittens.

The first thing I had read online back in the early days of the WWW, c ’92, was The Devil’s Dictionary; well, that and ASCII schematics for explosives but that’s another tale. This led to The Devil’s Dictionary X, née The Devil’s Dictionary 2000 (DD2K) in late 1998.

The The Devil’s Dictionary X is somewhat popular—moreso than this part of the site. It’s been linked and quoted on other sites a couple of thousand times and even in a national newspaper in Australia; hey, it is a country.

I think everyone has at least one good satirical or humorous definition inside. Go post yours and make me rich, uh, I mean, realize your dream of being funny for once in your life.

Julie

I think I’m pregnant.

Ashley

That’s great.

Well, I’m off to finish your bottle of Scotch.

Brought to my attention in the stirrups this morning by my gynecologist, Father Dan. The short version–

The explanation–

If you do anything, at all, the executive branch dislikes in regards to Iraq, they now have another unconstitutional power—all the others are holding up so don’t hope for anything else—to take away everything you own and ever will.

Kids… it’s just not funny anymore. 18 months to go, I believe. Of course, that’s just resetting the timer on another one of them… [read more]

We already established what horrific shots American cops are, with a short range, enemy hit rate of 3% + a friendly fire rate of 1%. According to the following, US servicemen have a hit rate of 0.0004%. Too low to measure really. The friendly fire statistics might be similarly low but they are also a bit hard to obtain. Just ask Pat Tilman’s family.

Via Reason.

John Pike, director of the Washington military research group GlobalSecurity.org, said that, based on the GAO’s figures, US forces had expended around six billion bullets between 2002 and 2005. “How many evil-doers have we sent to their maker using bullets rather than bombs? I don’t know,” he said.

“If they don’t do body counts, how can I? But using these figures it works out at around 300,000 bullets per insurgent. Let’s round that down to 250,000 so that we are underestimating.”

“US forced to import bullets from Israel as troops use 250,000 for every rebel killed”

Yes, I know they say the rounds are expended in training and such and such. Still it seems to work out to 30,000 rounds per weapon or so. I think it’s taken me 10 years to fire 500 rounds in training. Perhaps the Marines are engaged in a lot of wedding, or its soldierly facsimile, celebratory fire.

I was having a problem with my jQuery Ajax on another site. The request went fine but if the user left the page before the request returned, it would call the Ajax error function. Frustrating since there was not necessarily any error, just the request was getting stepped on before it could return as successful.

Took quite a bit of searching to get the clues to figure out what to do. Since I could not find it as a “complete answer,” I present it here for the next sucker who is getting an Ajax error when the user leaves the page. The solution bits are in bold.

I don’t know for sure it’s cross-platform but it works great in Firefox and the most recent Safari.

<script type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[
$(document).ready(function() {
  function doSomething (arg) {
    var myData = new Object({ "data":arg });
    var req = $.ajax({
                url: "/location/location/location"
              ,type: "POST"
          ,dataType: "json"
              ,data: myData
           ,success: function(json){ somethingSomething }
             ,error: function(xhttpreq,err){
                       alert("There was an Ajax error.")}
          });
    $(window).bind("beforeunload", function() { 
      req.abort();
    });
  }
  doSomething("info to send");
});
//]]> </script>

Behavior is to physical attributes in the realm of selectors what acceleration is to gravity in the realm of relativity. An indistinguishable force.

June Attacks in Iraq at All-Time High

Come on! We need to give the surge time to work. The fact that they’re fighting back is proof that we’re … uh, oh, don’t worry. September is almost here and then there will be no denying the problem.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!! Oh, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!! Oh, they’ll run out of denial juice. Oh, that’s the kind of comedy that kills and is either funny or drives you to militancy. You’re laughing, right? Only traitors don’t laugh.

Man accused of assaulting elderly woman with shopping cart

Accused!?! My gentle readers. Could this possibly be the face of man who would repeatedly run over a 72 year-old woman with his shopping cart, try to run from the store with $84 in stolen groceries, flee the scene, later lie to the police, and claim he was robbed and assaulted between the door and his car?

Please give him the benefit of the doubt. You simply cannot judge a book by its crazy ass cover.

“Full House” actress gets married

Her huge melons cited in editorial license to make news out of an idiot pun.

LA cardinal apologizes to plaintiffs

Cardinal Roger Mahony, leader of the nation's largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, apologized Sunday to the hundreds of people who will get a share of a $660 million settlement over allegations of clergy sex abuse. AP, Gillian Flaccus

How is it that raping kids only gets you a fine?

Let’s explain this in its wider context. Priests are raping and otherwise molesting children, usually homosexually. This happens everywhere the Catholic Church is and it happens all the time. Priests do not go to prison for it. They rarely even lose their priesthood. It remains “allegation” no matter how many thousands of victims step forward.

Now when they do it enough, in this case 500 people were raped/molested, to be caught, they pay the victims a fine via the machinations of the US Justice system.

So essentially, you have the church as a customer for child prostitution, the US courts and lawyers acting as pimps to negotiate price per act, and the victims as retro-active prostitutes. If no one goes to prison and the “service provider” and solicitor
are paid by the service seeker, that’s legalized child prostitution.

Not that I wouldn’t enjoy a million dollars but if someone raped me as a kid I would not take any settlement less than the guy going to the big house defrocked for a few years of real penance administered by a couple of guys from South Central named Cyril and Luis. And not to give you any ideas but if I ever sit on a Sleepers-oriented jury, I can assure the killer an acquittal or a hung jury.

Seven Week Old Infant Left In the Road In Lebanon [Ohio]

Around 2:30am, 9-1-1 dispatchers received a call that a naked woman was carrying a baby in the roadway on Miller Road Extension. The caller also told officials that the woman stated she was taking the infant to Satan. …The woman was transported to Bethesda Arrow Springs for a medical and psychological evaluation. http://www.fox19.com/ in Cincinnati

Do you know why they took her to the loony ward? Because people who believe in God and the Devil are insane. It’s just less deniable when anyone actually puts some real faith on display.

Singer Shot at Wyo. Bar; Husband Sought

Police were searching Sunday for a National Guardsman with sniper training who they suspect shot his wife to death while she sang with a band in a restaurant and bar.

I know the Hurricane Center doesn’t hit the mark well lately but how about this? I think it’s a much safer bet–

Whirlwind predictions

I predict bumper crops 10 years on.

Al-Qaida likely to attack US, intel says

It’s good to know we’ve all been cowering in the basement these 6 years for a good reason. Apparently terrorists want to get us and we must be warned!!!

U.S. no longer tallest country in world

Being hunched over in fear takes 4 or 5 inches right off.

accounting

don’t worry about this, there’s another department that takes care of it.

B2B

what we call our business stuff now.

B2C

what we call our customer stuff now.

business need

a term without any literal meaning used as an idiom to say, “My VP is bigger than your VP.”

communications strategy

the written guides for how to write to each other; the longer the better as the more that you can communicate up front, the less they’ll read and the more you’ll be able to say, “I warned you about that.”

deadline

the chance for you to apply the hard won knowledge behind your liberal arts degree to decide how long it will take 5 guys on HB1 visas to finish and debug 250,000 lines of C++ while building it out properly on DEC, Solaris, and Linux boxes.

deliverable

what others are responsible for at such time as the PM indicates; see deadline, your mini-‌Ouija board and key-‌chain Magic 8-‌Ball for more.

dependency

programmer double-‌talk for “I’m too high and mighty to do that for you.”

documentation

the official record of what happened and how it all works; remember that the messenger makes the easiest target so keep it light—you can always assume the bugs and missed features will be taken care of in version 2 so there’s no reason to go into details in the current documentation.

feature set

a fancy way of saying, “We really don’t know what we need so just whip something up and we’re sure it will be fine.”

human resources

protection; job security; keep their senior manager in lunches and margaritas.

kickoff

the initial project meeting; as in football whence the metaphor is drawn, there will be somewhere around 11 huge, angry antagonists trying to take the project away and run it back, right through you.

milestones

successfully reached ones are résumé bullet points, the others are guidelines for personnel changes following the project.

P2P

what to say to hose down the programmers who bring up a partner’s failure to fulfill contractually obligated data delivery.

post-‌mortem

where you get your next raise; during this “20:20” part of the project you must make sure slippage outweighs milestones for other groups and the reverse for yourself; make these points orally! The documentation phase is long gone.

PowerPoint

that thing that whats-‌her-‌name will always help you with right before a presentation.

programmer

serf.

project

15 hours of meetings out of the 40 alotted to do an otherwise straightforward piece of work; fluff; filler; corporate pork.

project schedule

the thumb screws; punitive tightening encouraged.

quality assurance

the group that tests drafts of the project; while you’d expect them to have the most power, they’re actually the least well paid and easiest to replace, hence they are easy to bully.

risk management

the process of minimizing the impact of project set-‌backs and failures by ensuring the project manager is the least responsible for key pieces.

ROI

something to do with money; bring it up when the serfs get noisy about new hardware, adding team members, or extending the testing phase.

security

check the budget—if it’s not specifically paid for in there then this isn’t part of the project.

scope

the limits of the project; make sure to nail down your parts of the scope but remember that the technical managers rarely turn in a good or complete technical requirements doc so you’ll be good for blaming any scope creep on them.

scope creep

hostile feature negotiation.

slippage

retaliation.

software development engineer

what to call the serfs to their faces.

stakeholders’ meeting

the meeting of those who will be invited to the launch party.

status report

a frequently updated tallying of where things stand; like all writing based on actual events, it can be improved with minor dashes of fictionalization.

technical requirements

the badly written (step in immediately if it’s turning out to be any good) contribution to the project outline from the tech group manager; make sure the requirements are suitably vague so you can hang it on the techies if things blow up.

triage

the process of assigning priorities to the missed project goals; it’s best to get the low level stuff first because it makes the project look like it’s progressing rapidly; the big stuff will take care of itself and if it doesn’t, you can just point out that you didn’t have enough time.

user acceptance testing

the phase of the project where the shit can go sour—keep the QA and testing documents terse to help head that off.

UAT

something to do with European tax laws; let the biz dev people sort it out.

XML

what to say to rein in the programmers who start talking their RDBMS/UML mumbo-‌jumbo in meetings.

More at business and project terminology.

The Grithix, as everybody knows, is a Bombanat collector, not a letter collector. He had no use for someone else’s mail, so he did what anybody should do with a lost letter.

He mailed it!

One Monster After Another, by Mercer Mayer

The careful reader will note that the Grithix has just caught a Bombanat. This is not the Pied Bombanat of the sub-continent but a Letter-Eating Bombanat. An animal which subsists solely upon paper mail, and specifically prefers letters from little girls.

The Grithix, on the way home with his Bombanat, disposes of its natural food. The implication is obvious. The Grithix has no use for Bombanat food because the Grithix has no intention of feeding the Bombanat. It is on the way home to go in the killing jar.

My pangolin walker, Cort Fritz, sent me a link and I didn’t have the good sense to round file it. Now we all suffer. Lemme explain. … No, there is too much. Lemme sum up.

Cartel, a new pop rock band, did a Dr Pepper / MTV marketing stunt wherein they were sequestered in a “bubble” to write music Real World style. For this they were hammered by Bob Lefsetz, an independent critic whose self-described “intense brilliance” has kept pace with his hair line through the years. A man who has deep insights to offer young musicians like–

MAKE IT ABOUT THE MUSIC FIRST! Bob Lefsetz, intensely capitalizing music critic

Mr Lefsetz posted Cartel’s singer/lyricist Will Pugh’s response to his drubbing.

The response is made of powerful sincerity and awareness not usually seen in kids–

…the industry and music for that matter is not one iota comparable to an era such as the 70’s… ever since all those bands became popular and started making labels the juggernauts that they are today it’s been a downward spiral to this point in time…

We will gladly accept all the fans that will have us … They only care what’s coming in their ears and that’s what we’re about.

Fuck selling records … We want people to know that we will write rock songs and ballads and shit you probably haven’t heard before … with no strings and no puppeteers doing the work for us. Listen to the record and decide then what to do with us.

Will Pugh of Cartel

This elevated my soul for a moment. I remembered, to a piloerection, what it felt like to be writing music with a band when I was younger. How badly I wanted it. How sincere I was. How much we all knew we were it and there was nothing but a bunch of posers and music hating A&R guys in the way. The response seemed almost to describe a fictional band from one of my best short stories—It’s Just a Spring Clean for the May Queen.

Eagerly I went and listened to Cartel. I read all their lyrics. I watched videos. Now I will, as Will has asked, decide what to do with them… [read more]

You want political power, ladies? Try WAND. Peace, justice, and power flow from it. If you don’t receive peace, justice, and power initially, use WAND repeatedly. You’ll find it just sometimes takes a little longer for it to come. To you.

In this case it is affixed with an org. You’ll want summa that too, I think.

On January 12th [1910] last, Ashley Pond died at his home in Detroit in his eighty-third year. By his death the University has lost one of its oldest and most distinguished alumni… [read more]

Wasp nest.

As part of a settlement agreement with my 2nd ex-wife we’ll be keeping it a bit light around here for a little while. I’m sorry but it’s the only way I can keep custody of the chinchillas and daddy needs them for some weather related Santaría. I’m doing it for you, you know.

Saw a claw on the creek bottom. They lose them all the time so I thought it was a loose one. I tried to pick it up and it pulled back. Fished him out after lifting the rock he was under.

No, I did not eat him. Just another lucky day for him. Just another tricky day for you.

Point! George W Bush 4,000 dead, Osama bin Laden 2,974

As of right now—yes, you heard it here first!³—the military dead count for the anti-terror adventure is 4,000. Bin Laden et al didn’t even reach 3,000. Another gravestone milestone brought to you for your own good by your benevolent leaders. Happy Independence Day! Missed it by that much.

Okay, okay. I know bin Laden can count the World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, and the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. That only brings up the American body count by about 35. On the other hand, if we consider contractors and journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan we can easily add another 250 to Bush’s tally. So let’s not fight in front of the round numbers. Instead we’ll bask in their majesty and magic. The more zeroes queued, the fewer faces of the dead we’ll be able to visualize. Just think about how innocuous 1,000,000 dead Iraqis sounds. And 5,000,000 refugees sounds positively genial in its incomprehensible vastness.

Perhaps the diligent hounds of FOXNews will be so kind as to trot out to Arlington to frottage the name on the gravestone following MMMCMXCIX so we can all thank him or her for dying to protect American freedoms like habeas corpus and the spirit of dissent.⁴

Were you aware that you could get Ann Coulter’s pen drippings for free!? Who would’ve imagined? Such quality, clarity, thorough research, incisive analysis. How could she possibly offer it for free? I’d expect to pay a hundred dollars for a subscription.