Dear Anderson,

You whined it up, Blue School, about all the unnecessary child starvation in Niger and Africa at large. How awful it was that the woman with the twins had lost four previous children to malnutrition. How terrible that 20% of the kids in Niger will die before age 5 when a few packs of formula and peanut butter could save them.

You didn’t stutter. You didn’t cough. You didn’t tellingly inflect an ironic syllable when you announced that every woman there is having 8 or more children.

The name of the miracle that will allow an already overcrowded, strained, violence prone, and starving north Africa to fill its miles and miles of dessication with millions more adults who will also have 8.5 children is Plumpynut. The nickname of the reporter who implicitly endorsed this course—without so much as one word about birth control, sterilization, or education—is Fucknut.

Dear Dr. Ryuta Kawashima,

Maybe in Brain Age 3 you could incorporate a technique to stimulate my prefrontal cortex in a way such that while playing your game I would not again miss my bus stop by a mile and a half.

The result of love without discipline is indistinguishable from that of hatred.

With a canvas like that why not go for the Mahābhārata?

/

And while we’re in the neighborhood, you can stop saying “double-u, double-u, double-u, dot” in front of all your websites. They all work without it except for five or six in the whole world which justly deserve to lose the traffic for having webmasters about as bright as you.

Update, 13 April 2010–

I don’t think there’s a man, woman, or child in America who doesn’t know how much I support the gay community. Which is why I’m proud to say I’m glad Senator Craig is gonna skate on his attempted Grand Stall Tryst charge. No longer a felony in most states.

In fact, I’m so much in favor of gay rights that I won’t rest until it becomes safe for a homosexual senator to drive right off a bridge into a pond where his younger companion in the passenger seat drowns. Only then will we have true equality.

What? Are you fucking kidding me? Am I the only person in the world who gets religious symbolism and omens? Of course it’s Pope John Paul II signaling from the grave. I believe the message he’s trying to send is, “Pack for hot weather.”

I can learn 50 keyboard shortcuts in a couple hours. Enough to use most of what’s behind any given application. I can forget them in a day too. Because of this I can play Medal of Honor for two weeks straight and then pick up Syphon Filter 2 and readjust to the different controller layout by the time I’m taking out the two snipers in the snow.

Right now, on some mail server far, far away is lodged an unread email I sent. It will sit there until the morning when it is POP’d or IMAP’d down. Right now it just sits there. I’m the only one in the world who knows what it says; who knows why my blood pressure—never varying in the ten years I’ve been checking it—is forty-five mmHg over systolic and twenty-three mmHg over diastolic.

I looked at my alias file from Amazon.com a couple years back for a piece. Of the several hundred commands my fingers could run through in two minutes flat I only remember two. One was “F6.” It was the shortcut key for sending an email via Emacs. It was so easy to press. Before you’d thought things through. Before you realized you shouldn’t be pissed-off. Before you remembered to spell check it. Before you considered the implications of a response. So easy to press. So impossible to retrieve that email.

I post this now to muddy the waters. Yes it is October 14 but only I know what time it is. Boiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

I wrote a nice little JavaScript kilometer/mile converter awhile back. I tried to be pretty explicit in the code to do everything step by step and all in JS. 31 lines of code. Not too bad for a calculator and shorter than if we didn’t use ternary logic.

I have been using jQuery a little for quite awhile now. I wish I had time to use it more. Every single time I revisit it I learn something new and see it is even better than I remembered. I rewrote the converter with it as an experiment. 9 or 10 lines of JS now.

The new code

<script id="kilo_mile" type="text/javascript">//<![CDATA[
// Remember! The jQuery lib must be loaded already for this to run.
$('<form><fieldset><legend>kilometer/mile converter</legend>' +
  '<input id="kilo" type="text"/>' +
  '<input id="mile" type="text"/>' +
  '</fieldset></form>').insertAfter("#kilo_mile");
$("#kilo, #mile").keyup(function(evt) {
         var update = evt.target.id == "mile" ? "#kilo" : "#mile";
     var conversion = evt.target.id == "mile" ? 1.609 : 0.6214;
            var val = new Number( $(evt.target).val() * conversion );
        $(update).val( isNaN(val) ? "Numbers only!" : val );
                        });
//]]></script>

The demo

[Update, realized the one I posted already appears in a comment, so replacing it.]

There's a word for a pacifist who is unable or unwilling to defend himself. Victim.

Stare at this picture for one minute without blinking. Now, quickly look at a white wall while you shoot yourself in the head for electing them.

Thank you for making NyQuil completely useless. No, really thanks a lot.

It was great, great of you. So few people understand how intertwined terrorism and tweakers are. I commend you for your courage to stand up for what’s right—to slip your riders in—no matter how ineffective it renders the only cold medicine that was once worth taking.

From an increasingly shoddy 60 Minutes we learn this week that the terribly benighted, undervalued, underutilized Interpol aided 4,500 arrests last year. They farm out arrests, not having much in the way of an executive arm, so you can think of their arrests as RBI. With a staff of around 600 this means that the dedicated members of Interpol can each boast nearly 8 arrests a year. If only regular police officers in plain old countries could each make half as many arrests!

Ron Noble, the secretary general since 1999, informs us that his struggle is to make the world understand that Interpol is up against a billion dollar problem with million dollar budgets. My struggle is to make Ron understand that all the money in the world can’t stop a reasonably intelligent individual bent on killing a few hundred people from tossing a Molotov cocktail into a nightclub with bad exits. Because the simplified—and not coincidentally more accurate—version of the puzzle is we’re up against a hundred dollar problem with a billion dollars worth of beggars and cowards in the way.

Wisconsin deputy sheriff kills 6

Well, thank God only cops and soldiers will eventually have access to guns so we’ll all be safe from being shot by some random maniac. Good thing regular folk won’t be armed. They might shoot a deputy or something.

I’m fuming. Wrathful. Gnashing my teeth. Shaking with the fury. Why? Because now you won’t believe me.

I do a little creek work as well our younger readers know when they are straight and writing college applications with the help of Google, a spell-checker, and a couple of purchases at CollegeApps.com.

There are often little safe areas at the tops of the local creeks. Almost like mini-estuaries. Places where the mellower animals like the Pacific chorus frogs and certain benthic macroinvertebrates can keep their hearth and remain safe in inclement weather.

Staring at the gastrointestinal chart at the pedeiatrician’s a few months ago I noticed how similar the appendix is. It’s at the confluence of minor and major “water” ways. It’s a small, safe eddy, out of the unpredictable currents. I knew that was the answer. It’s where the beneficial gut flora and fauna can hide to return quickly after a bout of Norwalk or a big dose of quinine or whatever. I told a couple people my theory but I didn’t post it here because I wanted to come up with a clinical procedure—probably just do it checking historical medical records of the snipped and the whole—to prove it. I was sure I was right and I wanted to show off the fact that I solved this without the benefit of medical school.

I didn’t, so now you’ll take me for a liar but I do have something to add so you can watch documentaries and talk to a physician with a bit more discernment.

It’s expensive to drag physical parts around. To grow them, to support them, to continue to produce them when they can even cause fatal problems now and then. Of course the appendix has a use. Anyone who ever tells you something in nature is superfluous should get out of the biology game and get into theology where his talents and gift of insight firmly seat him.

If, in the course of an investigation, after arresting or detaining someone innocent, the words, “Sorry about that,” actually have a chance of meaning a fucking thing.

It’s been out of the news for awhile and it never even should have been in the news because like most carny sideshows, it’s a fake, but Rasputin’s cock is the stuff of legends even if the original turned out to be a dried sea cucumber and the one in the photo might not be human at all and if it is, it’s not even his. The Rotten.com summary of Rasputin’s days is a good primer for the old pump. Witness how hard some souls are attached to their bags of meat. Further consider that it is invariably those who enjoy the meat for the sake of meat and not for the soul which refuses to vacate the premises even under frenzied, concerted urging.

The only thing I really wanted to say is that my penis is of no historical importance¹. I wanted to title this piece, “My secret sorrow, #16” but like they say in Sunday school, “Don’t bury your lede.”

What?

Dedicated to my butcher, IOZ. Stick that in my Tennessee!

1. You’ll live about 10 years longer. Won’t that be fun.
2. You’ll be able to understand and empathize better with your family. Won’t that be fun.
3. You’ll be able to remember every stupid thing you said at the party when you were totally uncomfortable being the only sober one there. Won’t that be fun.

No reason to rub it in any further I hope. Vodka is hardest to smell on your breath and, generally, the more expensive the alcohol, the more gently the morning after goes.

For those of you thinking about moving to Seattle, I want to clarify. This is an awesome town. But you’ve heard that before. The clarification being this picture is representative of Seattle mornings and afternoons every single day from September through March. See also–

Seattle

1. Jet City—hereafter minus jets.

2. Seatown—neither a town nor on the sea.

3. the Emerald City, take 2—somewhere between rain drenched poppy fields, androids, and electric sheep.

4. eight months of winter rain and unemployment dying to teach your sorry Midwestern ass that Seasonal Affective Disorder is all that stands between you and meeting Kurt Cobain in person.