Sharper Image’s new Ionic Breeze machine turns oxygen into oxygen! Amazing!
(The commercial I saw on TV also told me that it converted smog into oxygen. Mhm. Only if that smog already consists of oxygen or a reasonable allotrope thereof. Or is it magical?)
A bit late… but I’ve been out of town:
I am placing a link here with the link text Intelligent Design that points to the National Center for Science Education in hopes that future searches for the term will lead somewhere useful. The URL that’s being linked to isn’t quite at the top right now… but Wikipedia and skepdic.com are up there, too. So that’s nice.
Kevin Trudeau’s book of bullshit Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About is a bestseller? According to The Daily Show, anyhoo. People are stupidlyer than I thought. And I didn’t think that they were generally very smart to begin with. Even if it was rational for people watching the infomercial to believe that there were natural cures to diabetes/cancer/herpes that somehow hadn’t already been on the front page of the newspaper because there’s some sinister they keeping them a secret… shouldn’t it offend their sensibilities just a wee to have Kevin pretend to be the good guy (and he is not ), to hear him claim that they won’t let the secrets get out because “it’s all about the money”, and then to be asked to fork over $29.95 for the book (BTW, the cures aren’t even in the book — you also need to subscribe to the newsletter and mailing list for extra $$$ for those)? Let me tell you… I contemplated “losing” the copy of the infomercial that my TV station had more than a few times. Not only is Kevin Trudeau taking advantage of people, but he’s a complete and utter moron, and the infomercial is just bloody annoying. Possibly moreso than The 700 Club. Wait. No. Nothing beats The 700 Club. Not even Bill O’Reilly (speaking of Billy boy… I think I agreed with him for the first time ever when he spoke out against Kevin Trudeau recently).
This is my favourite part of the infomercial:
There are health freedoms in this country that are being taken away from us. There are more people sick today than ever before. There are more people that are overweight. There are more people that have diabetes. There are more people that have cancer. There are more people that have heart disease. There are more people that have migraine headaches. There are more people that have arthritis. There are more people that have virtually every major health abnormality.
Yes, Kevy. There are more people. Period. Point, plz? He sounds like enough of an idiot here even before anyone gets around to pointing out anything about better diagnosis or treatment of these diseases (i.e. nobody had epilepsy in the 16th century, when it was so obvious at the time that the symptoms were caused by demons (also the cause of just about every other disease, I’m sure), and that the cure was exorcism — that’s an increase in the number of cases of oh… infinity percent), or that people are also living longer than ever before… Yes, it’s so obvious. Modern medicine is failing us. Miserably.
Which reminds me how happy I am that I no longer work at Fox. I will never again have to watch 12 infomercials over a weekend, Fox News Sunday, or The 700 Club. We all know that I still will, because I just love getting myself angry… but I don’t have to anymore. I am doing a little dance of joy right now, but you can’t see it.
abc11tv.com: Is Someone Stealing Your Internet Connection?
Hells yes. I am stealing your internet connection right NOW, in order to read the article entitled “Is Someone Stealing Your Internet Connection”, and to post to my blog about stealing your internet connection. Sucker!
I don’t think I even mentioned that I was going anywhere… but you might have noticed a conspicuous silence. I’ve been out on tour for the last 10 days or so with Cyanotic, acting as official scantily-clad groupie / merch bitch. I’m still on tour actually… last day (not counting one more show about a week from now). I’m in a dressing room in Milwaukee drinking free beer and partaking of the delicious veggie and cheese trays while stealing me some neighbourhood internet. I’m so glad that people are stupid, and don’t know how to secure their shit. Connections named “default” and “linksys” have been my saviours this whole tour. The “rockstars” are out wandering the streets at the moment, so I have a few minutes to download RSS feeds (Candice, you n3rd) and enjoy some goddamn fucking silence (die, extroverts, die)… I’ll post more when I’m back in Indiana, where there is less free Stoli and absolutely nothing to do. Oh. Except find a job. Moving to Chicago September 1st. Somebody hire me. I can do er… computery things and televisiony things. They both kind of suck, but anyway. Job. Give. Me. Now. Candice. Broke. Going to sign off now, though… While I can still spell.
If only my last name started with any letter that comes after Q! In Indiana, those with last names beginning with the letters R through Z have their vehicle registration date on or after August 31st. P-Q have a registration date of August 15th. I will be moving to Chicago at the end of August. I just paid my Indiana registration, and will be forced to pay again in Illinois within 30 days of my move. This is just more proof that the BMV is evil.
Imported my old Blogger entries. It wasn’t fun. Had to go into MySQL and delete all of the imported entries a few times because the formatting settings in Blogger were causing nastiness to my layout. And then I realized that I never gave titles to my posts. Argh!
Also set WordPress to notify me when comments are moderated. It’s a useful thing, really! Some comments had been sitting around for quite a while.
And I don’t have links in my sidebar set to ‘block’ in my CSS anymore. Internet Explorer was adding whitespace to my link lists because of it, and I couldn’t find any good way around it (because I’m lazy), and I don’t think there’s any way to get WordPress to stop sticking tabs into the lists it outputs. Methinks I’ll switch back to Movable Type one of these days.
is not “you all”, or even “youse”. It’s too bad that the same word is used to refer to one person or to thousands of people, but that’s the way it is. Learn some grammar. Deal with it. Two year olds are cute when they say “I runned” or “look at the mouses!” You all sound like idiots when youse say “if you all would’ve told me that youse wasn’t going to wait, I would’ve went home”.
Motherfucking fuck! I’ll admit that I probably mix up lay/lie or futher/farther once in a while if I’m not thinking, but… What the bloody hell!? I met many elementary school teachers last year while working as a school portrait photographer, and I have concluded that grammar is doomed.
Note to self: do not have children unless they will be living in Canada (or at least not in Indiana, or in any other part of America that I have ever visited), or unless I have enough money to send them to private school (provided that I can find a private school that will not shove religion and intolerance down their throats).
Also note: the word “height” is spelled “height” and is pronounced… “height”. HEIGHTH IS NOT A WORD.)
It’s just too hard to be properly amused by the claims of kooks when they don’t include proper references to the texts they’re blowing way the hell out of proportion or misinterpreting. I know that half of the time they can’t provide references because they’re just making the shit up from scratch (or they’re communicating with demons or with extraterrestrials) (okay, that’s exactly the same thing), but the rest of the time, citations in correct ASA format, plz.
I’ve never been fond of them, except when employed by Douglas Adams.
I don’t have any particular reason for my distaste, I just find them generally annoying. But here’s a good argument for avoiding them (if you didn’t already clue in to the danger after all of that Gulag nonsense): if you use a simile or metaphor, some idiot out there is going to take you literally. Case in point — this is what Hoagie had to say yesterday after someone made the mistake of using a simile to describe materials found on Tempel 1:
Now, examine carefully Chick Woodward’s extremely tantalizing statement: “[the] silicates … might even be similar to the beach sand here in Hawaii ….”
Why choose THAT particular comparison … unless you meant it?
“Beach sand” is a highly specific, very weathered end product of a long history of planetary sedimentary processes … which can take place only on highly evolved, Earth-like (or, Mars-like) planets (with lots of flowing, liquid water)! To make that specific comparison, as a scientist, one can only think that Woodward was directly hinting at the “exploded planet hypothesis” itself … but without naming it as such–
This is where I bash my head into a brick wall. Repeatedly. (Actually, it got a good chuckle out of me. That and a whole lot of head shaking.)
P.S. If there’s anyone out there that abuses italics more than I do, it’s this guy. And please, Richard… quit it with the scare quotes. If there’s one thing I hate more than similes or metaphors, it’s the incorrect use of quotation marks.