JC's New Tat

Tech writer friend of mine just got this. One 3-hour sitting. You should've seen the fruity banana thingajig it covers up.

Cow Tse Tongue: "Cows Are One"

Human Skateboard Fridays

That's not Typing, That's Key Boarding

I read a lot of the internets. More than is healthy, more than's possible for most. Fortunately I have the attention span of a gnat on a Valium n' Tito's bender, allowing me to cruise great gulping volumes of content, sieving, sifting, tabbing. Et voila, a short list of my faves so far this year:

• If it's not Scottish...
• Crushed by Inertia, on conservative comedy
• Awesome is as Awesome Does (very girly-my house is full of 'em)
• Random Writer I like
• And Another
• And Another
• OK, Last One.
  

Web Head Doofery

I followed a link from Google News to an article in the daily Free New Mexican. The page was so full of garish, chaotic ads it felt like my eyes were running a gauntlet of Rockem Sockem Robots. Because I'm not used to ads on web pages, because I use Firefox with Adblock. When I'm forced to use IE on someone else's computer, I get a headache. How can they stand it?

So this site bewildered me. I immediately went to right click on one of the ads, to open up the menu option and "block ads from www.freenewmexican.com," when this popped up:



I read, then re-read it, paused, collected my thoughts, and within 45 seconds I had:

• JavaScript disabled, eliminating all popups
• All images, frames, and ads blocked
• The source code for the page I was visiting
• A list of all the scripts they were using
• The path to their cache, holding all the site's images (i.e. this)
• The screenshot above
• One of the "protected" images on my hard drive, to illustrate this rant.
  
  
  
  

Obviously this was a complete distracting waste of less-than-a-minute I'll never get back. But I couldn't resist. Some web dork pretending to be a lawyer dressed in a rent-a-cop uniform was standing in the middle of the street, frantically waving traffic away from a building. Wondering what he didn't want me to see, I drove a block, took two rights and pulled into the street, camera whirring. Turned out it was a 30' mural of a cat, so I kept going, splashing a puddle on spazmatron as I passed.

Limiting someone's ability to browse your public page invites your site to be exploited. What the hell are you hiding? What is so valuable that you have to disable your visitors' browsers? It's stupid, and the way we know it's stupid is, it doesn't work.

90% of people using the internets have no idea what the right mouse button does. Mac users don't even have one. So that popup can only be seen by those who can cripple it in 5 seconds (tools > options > content> disable JavaScript).

It's rude and insulting to paint your visitors as thieves and rule violators. Imagine browsing in a clothing store where they shouted their shoplifting policy at you every time you picked something up.

Message to web masters: Your fancy right-click JavaScript doesn't impress anyone. The few who can see it already know about copyrights, and if we want your crappy images they're ours for the taking.

Not that I don't understand; what else are you going to do, alone in your room, with your "Web Design for Dummies" centerfolds?

I'm Proud The Dixie Chicks Are From Texas

(Photo: AFP/Robyn Beck)

Last night, at the Grammys, the Dixie Chicks were nominated in 5 categories:

Record of the Year
Song of the Year
Album of the Year
Best Country Album
Best Country Duo/Group Performance

They won them all. That means they couldn't have earned more Grammys this year if their lives depended on it. Any one of those first three trophys is an artist's Powerball jackpot. Now everyone is going to want to get visited by the RNC's pretty little hate machine.

On the eve of the Iraq invasion, Natalie tossed the following out to her cheering fans at a private concert in London: "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas."

As Oges says on his Natalie-dedicated page at VirtuaLubbock.com:

If you've had the opportunity to look about virtualubbock, you'll see that we're all about freedom, creativity, courage, dedication to convictions, love, and happiness. I believe those are the best things we learned growing up in West Texas. I believe they are what America and Texas is all about. Because she lives those values in a true manner, Natalie is one of our great heroes.

Here are 5 interesting facts related to Natalie's remark:

1) George Bush isn't from Texas, he's from Connecticut, and he went to college in Connecticut (Yale) and Massachusetts (Harvard), like the rest of his family. Now, his parents may have bought a house in Midland when he was 2, but all 3 of the Chicks are actually from Texas, born and raised. They're able to tell who is and who isn't.

2) Calls to radio stations ordering a Chicks boycott originated from the offices of the Republican National Committee and the South Carolinan Republican Party.

3) Clear Channel management eagerly allied itself with the RNC attack, at a time when it needed Republicans to relax media ownership limits (circumventing antitrust law). 5 Years before, Clear Channel CEO Tom Hicks bought the Texas Rangers off of George Bush, making him a multi-millionaire.

4) Sales of Toby Kieth's "Boot in the Towel-head's Butt" album (RNC/Clear Channel-promoted), in 2003: 1.8 million
Sales as of today: 4 million

Sales of Dixie Chicks' "Travelin' Soldier Anti-War" album (RNC/Clear Channel-boycotted), in 2003: 2 million
Sales as of today: 6 million

5) During the '03 boycott, not only did the Chicks sell out every city they played (making the Guinness Book of World Records for most successful female act in history, where they remain), they won four Grammys (incl. Best Country Album), two American Music Awards (Favorite Country Album, Favorite Country Band), and became the best-selling country artists ever. While touring under death threats.

If you order a boycott of a band, and then have a hard time finding one of their concert tickets or CDs to toss into a bonfire, because they're sold out, your boycott isn't going very well.

Is it a stretch to say that the Chicks actually were rewarded for speaking out against the Bush administration, and the Iraq invasion? After all, a recent song goes like this:

It's a sad, sad story that a mother will teach her daughter
That she ought to hate a perfect stranger,

And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge,
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better
shut up and sing or my life will be over?

Those lyrics won the Grammy for "Song of the Year."

Here's what Dubya had to say about the Chicks and the boycott (spoken with the same firm grasp of the issue as any other he's been forced to ponder as president): "They shouldn't have their feelings hurt just because some people don't want to buy their records when they speak out ... Freedom is a two-way street."

By "some people," he meant "RNC cudgels;"
By "don't want to" he meant "were told not to;"
By "buy" he meant "radio play."
And apparently by the last bon mot, he meant to say that if we act like we're free, we'll get chased down the street.

In the end, what happened was, someone from an old and respected West Texas family publicly remarked about the President. That it's shameful for a raised-right Texan to behave like Bush and his people. While graciously implying, to my awe, that he might even be from here.

I leave us with my favorite Dixie Chicks song that my kids and I will sing at the top of our lungs in the car:

Just look out around us
People fightin' their wars
They think they'll be happy
When they've settled their scores

Let's lay down our weapons
That hold us apart
Be still for just a minute
Try to open our hearts

To more love
I can hear our hearts cryin'
More love
I know that's all we need
More love

To flow in between us
To take us and hold us
And lift us above
If there's ever an answer
It's more love

NOOOO Reservations....really. He has none.

I watch (but have never read, until today) Anthony Bourdain. His visit to the Bushmen of Namibia was the best cooking show in the history of television, bar none.
So I was tickled to accidentally stumble on some guest blogging he did for Ruhlman.com, where he pares with his usual snark, this time about TV Chefs. For instance, on Rachael Ray:

'We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So...what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could--if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?” Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. “You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion--you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….” '



You can also read about the 3 breezy/cheesy novels he wrote, on his Web Site (hey, what do you want from someone who briefly attended Vassar?).

What I'm Doing Instead of Writing

Where:
Utility = preference for a course of action (the higher the utility, the greater the preference)
E=expectancy
V=value
G=sensitivity to delay
D=delay (how long the wait for payoff)

"On the top of the equation, the numerator, we have two variables: Expectancy (E) and Value (V). Expectancy refers to the odds or chance of an outcome occurring while Value refers to how rewarding that outcome is. Naturally, we would like to choose pursuits that give us a good chance of having a pleasing outcome. On the bottom of the equation, the denominator, we also have two variables. G refers to the subject’s sensitivity to delay. The larger G is, the greater is the sensitivity. Finally, D represents Delay, which indicates how long, on average, one must wait to receive the payout. Since delay is in the denominator of the equation, the longer the delay, the less valued the course of action is perceived."
-University of Calgary's Theories on Procrastination

The time it took me to explore this clocked in at the same amount of time it takes to write a full chapter.

Neo-Con Artists: Tired and Shagged Out Following a Prolonged Squawk

William Kristol and Bob Kagan's Project for a New American Century was an unfailing coin-op card shoe for the POTUS cabal's "War on Terror" house of cards. Apparently, they stopped having anything relevant (or believable) to say about the war they advocated after 2005, though:

PNAC Mideast/Iraq Articles
PNAC Global Issues

Think that was also when the cash infusions dried up? I'm going to go with "no." Fattest welfare teat in human history, that (see "Pinching Pennies," below).

It gets better: PNAC hasn't published a Mideast article from Kristol's Weekly Standard agit-prop rag in 2 years, either. And he owns it.

Putting the "What's New" back in New Conservative, baby. In their own words.

My favorite neo-con assessment, from December's BBC article:

"Neo-conservatism has gone for a generation, if in fact it ever returns," says one of the movement's critics, David Rothkopf, currently at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, and a former official in the Clinton administration.

"Their signal enterprise was the invasion of Iraq and their failure to produce results is clear. Precisely the opposite has happened," he says.

"The US use of force has been seen as doing wrong and as inflaming a region that has been less than susceptible to democracy.

"Their plan has fallen on hard times. There were flaws in the conception and horrendously bad execution. The neo-cons have been undone by their own ideas and the incompetence of the Bush administration.

"George Bush is about the last neo-conservative standing, Cheney as well, maybe. Bush is not an analytical person, so he just adopted the neo-cons' philosophy.

"It fitted into his Manichean, his black and white view of the world. After all, he gave up his dissolute youth and was born again as a new man, so it appealed to his character."

Here's to the death of the new conservative American century;
98 years early;
2 years too long.

Pinching Pennies 'til Abe Cries 'War'

I'm looking forward to this film (Austin Chron review here).

The best part of their web site is the running tally at the top
of the page: "The Cost of the War in Iraq."
$364 billion, baby.
If I gave you $1000 a day, you'd have a million dollars in about 3 years.
For a billion dollars you'd have to wait 3 thousand years.

What would you do if the Treasury handed you, in cash, 250 million dollars a day, for four years?

I decided I'd use it to fill the retirement accounts of presidential puppet masters. Everybody's doing it!


Know Your War Profiteers

Molly Ivins, Rest in Peace

Molly Ivins spoke at a Lloyd Doggett fund raiser thrown by my friends, the Mehtas, about 15 years ago. She was the flame-headed metapresence swaying through the room, tall as I am, with a half-smile on her face and a beer in her hand. Her speech was essentially one of her columns, and she was funny in an acerbic, curmudgeonly way. I was in awe of her, and too shy to go up and tell her, which I'll always wince at myself for. I've done what I can to read everything she's written, since I moved to Texas in the late 80s, and I will miss her.

From her last column, January 11, 2007:
"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there."

Three of my favorites:
"The United States of America is still run by its citizens. The government works for us. Rank imperialism and warmongering are not American traditions or values. We do not need to dominate the world. We want and need to work with other nations. We want to find solutions other than killing people. Not in our name, not with our money, not with our children's blood."

"One function of the income gap is that the people at the top of the heap have a hard time even seeing those at the bottom. They practically need a telescope. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt probably didn't waste a lot of time thinking about the people who built their pyramids, either. OK, so it's not that bad yet -- but it's getting that bad."

"I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas."