I just saw Cars is getting released on Blu-ray. I thought that Disney, their distributor, was doing plain old HD so I assumed Pixar would too. I assumed this meant a long, drawn-out, uncertain, and bloody struggle over which format would win.

Guess other people are noticing how much money the Xbox loses.

Just in time to save the day night. This picture was taken 10 minutes ago. First owl I’ve seen in 7 years here. Great night to show up.

HR 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007.

1.3% of House Democrats voted against this. Specifically, three of them. Here are the ones who voted for it. Specifically, the ones you voted for.

Gary Ackerman, Thomas Allen, Jason Altmire, Robert Andrews, Michael Arcuri, Joe Baca, Brian Baird, Tammy Baldwin, John Barrow, Melissa Bean, Xavier Becerra, Shelley Berkley, Howard Berman, Robert Berry, Timothy Bishop, Earl Blumenauer, Dan Boren, Leonard Boswell, Frederick Boucher, F. Boyd, Nancy Boyda, Robert Brady, Bruce Braley, Corrine Brown, George Butterfield, Lois Capps, Michael Capuano, Dennis Cardoza, Russ Carnahan, Christopher Carney, Kathy Castor, Ben Chandler, Yvette Clarke, William Clay, Emanuel Cleaver, James Clyburn, Steve Cohen, Jim Costa, Joe Courtney, Robert Cramer, Joseph Crowley, Henry Cuellar, Elijah Cummings, Lincoln Davis, Peter DeFazio, Diana DeGette, Rosa DeLauro, William Delahunt, Norman Dicks, John Dingell, Lloyd Doggett, Joe Donnelly, Michael Doyle, Thomas Edwards, Keith Ellison, Brad Ellsworth, Rahm Emanuel, Eliot Engel, Anna Eshoo, Bob Etheridge, Sam Farr, Chaka Fattah, Bob Filner, Barney Frank, Gabrielle Giffords, Kirsten Gillibrand, Charles Gonzalez, Barton Gordon, Raymond Green, Raul Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, John Hall, Phil Hare, Jane Harman, Alcee Hastings, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, Brian Higgins, Baron Hill, Maurice Hinchey, Rub?n Hinojosa, Mazie Hirono, Paul Hodes, Tim Holden, Rush Holt, Michael Honda, Darlene Hooley, Steny Hoyer, Jay Inslee, Steve Israel, Jesse Jackson, Sheila Jackson-Lee, William Jefferson, Henry Johnson, Stephanie Jones, Steve Kagen, Paul Kanjorski, Marcy Kaptur, Patrick Kennedy, Dale Kildee, Carolyn Kilpatrick, Ronald Kind, Ron Klein, Nicholas Lampson, James Langevin, Tom Lantos, Rick Larsen, John Larson, Barbara Lee, Sander Levin, John Lewis, Daniel Lipinski, David Loebsack, Zoe Lofgren, Nita Lowey, Stephen Lynch, Tim Mahoney, Carolyn Maloney, Edward Markey, James Marshall, Jim Matheson, Doris Matsui, Carolyn McCarthy, Betty McCollum, James McDermott, James McGovern, Mike McIntyre, Jerry McNerney, Michael McNulty, Kendrick Meek, Gregory Meeks, Charles Melancon, Michael Michaud, R. Miller, Harry Mitchell, Alan Mollohan, Gwen Moore, James Moran, Patrick Murphy, John Murtha, Jerrold Nadler, Grace Napolitano, Richard Neal, James Oberstar, David Obey, John Olver, Solomon Ortiz, Frank Pallone, William Pascrell, Edward Pastor, Donald Payne, Ed Perlmutter, Collin Peterson, Earl Pomeroy, David Price, Nick Rahall, Charles Rangel, Laura Richardson, Ciro Rodriguez, Mike Ross, Steven Rothman, Lucille Roybal-Allard, C.A. Ruppersberger, Bobby Rush, Timothy Ryan, John Salazar, Loretta Sanchez, John Sarbanes, Janice Schakowsky, Adam Schiff, Allyson Schwartz, Robert Scott, Jos? Serrano, Joe Sestak, Carol Shea-Porter, Heath Shuler, Albio Sires, Ike Skelton, Louise Slaughter, Adam Smith, Victor Snyder, Hilda Solis, Zackary Space, John Spratt, Fortney Stark, Bart Stupak, Betty Sutton, John Tanner, Ellen Tauscher, Gene Taylor, Bennie Thompson, John Tierney, Edolphus Towns, Niki Tsongas, Tom Udall, Christopher Van Hollen, Nydia Velazquez, Peter Visclosky, Timothy Walz, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Maxine Waters, Diane Watson, Melvin Watt, Henry Waxman, Anthony Weiner, Peter Welch, Robert Wexler, David Wu, Albert Wynn, and John Yarmuth.

Credit for the catch belongs to UFO Breakfast Recipients, Vichy Democrats.

what does it mean when someone is dismissive of your pain?

Context. Context. Context.

A) Are you barely ambulatory after a recent major accident, surgery, or death of a close relative? It means the person is dickweed. Fuck him. Better, send me his email address and I’ll talk him into suicide.

B) Are you going on about something that happened more than six months ago that didn’t physically harm you seriously or put you into a psychiatric hospital? Let it go. You need to move on. The person in question might be trying to help you do it.

C) Are you whining and misting up about health problems you brought on yourself with diet or inactivity, or something you wouldn’t give a flying fig about if you didn’t see it in the news every day? It means you’re a loser and you’re going to continue to lose until you take the variegated clues life has been piling on and extract your cranium from your rectum. Sympathy is a show with a limited run. Pain is there to tell you to do something about it. Either do something about it or shut up.

The “yer mamma is so fat” jokes require a degree in ancient literature to understand.

Zimbabwe inflation hits record high

And Will Smith officially has the the widest hatband in el Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Culos Sombreros.

Poll: Some Germans see good in Nazi rule

Let me guess. About 32%?

Poker game led to Pamela Anderson’s latest marriage

Tripping and falling on a semi-erect pecker at Central Casting expected to lead to knot #4.

Scientists narrow optimism area in brain

And they expect to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

Too much support may hamper kids’ development

Well, that’s excellent. My kids have nothing standing in their way.

The horribly depressing story of Oryx forced into child prostitution as a young girl in southeast Asia made me long for a happy ending.

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.