Cacti

Posted by Johnny at 2:16 p.m.

I'm not sure how much of this was written with serious intentions and how much is graffiti, but here is the conservapedia article on the cactus. (Conservapedia was set up to counter the apparently liberal bias inherent in Wikipedia. But what they mistook as a liberal bias is actually the use of "science" and "facts".)

The secularist view of the Cactaceae is that they are roughly two million years old, and that they have evolved exclusively in the new world. This view fails to explain, however, how it is that the Opuntia genus is native to the island of Opus, near Greece. Cacti are known for their high content of alkaloids, and have often been used in the sacramental rights of the Native Americans. Because of this, the early Catholic missionaries in the west thought the plants to be the work of Satan, and this is perhaps a preferable view to that of materialistic evolution since it is difficult to imagine how something like mescaline could have evolved by natural selection. Besides that, the psychoactive content of many cacti have inspired the writings of such ungodly men as Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman.

Several species of cactus are now endangered in the west due to "poaching" by collectors and invasive species. But, since Genesis suggests that man has been given dominion over all of the earth, the environmentalist concerns on this note are entirely inappropriate. It may also be that environmentalists, in addition to flauting the Word of God, are merely concerned about the effects that declining cactus populations will have on their supply of mescaline.

The Shaggs

Posted by Johnny at 2:43 p.m.

Song: My Pal Foot Foot


Song: Halloween

Subtle Line from The Office

Posted by Johnny at 9:45 a.m.

Jan and Michael are at a party, hosted by Jan's boss (Jan is Michael's boss). The two have just made their relationship public. Michael is making an ass of himself, which, surprisingly, turns Jan on so much that she drags him into the washroom for sex.

Michael, reluctant to have sex in a washroom, says, upon entering:

"Why are we going in the bathroom? I thought this is where you liked your privacy."

Brilliant.

Other highlights:
"And now, Michael the Magic, will attempt to escape from extreme bondage."

"I want the house, Jan. I want the picket fence, I want the ketchup fights, and the tickling, and the giggling."

(Jan) "Why is this so hard? That's what she said. Oh God, what am I saying?!"

Two Rants in One

Posted by Johnny at 10:53 a.m.

Tech as a Premise for Movie Plots
Andre and I watched "Man of the Year" last night and the premise was that a glitch in the computerized voting system allowed Tom Dobbs (Robin Williams' Jon Stewart-like character) to win a presidential election in spite of receiving < 20% of the vote. The glitch/bug involved handing the election to the candidate with the lowest alphabetical set of double letters in his last name (bb in Dobbs, gg in Kellogg, and ll in Mills). So in a race between Dobbs, Kellogg, and Mills, Dobbs would be the winner regardless of the actual vote count. (What about the ll in Kellogg?)

If you spend no longer than 1 second thinking about this, it seems reasonable. I spent about 2 seconds, however, and decided that it was incredibly stupid.

First of all, what exactly did this bug cause? Did it register 3 times as many votes for the candidate with the lowest double letters? Did it retain the actual vote count and just display the winner incorrectly? If the latter was true, one would hope that people would be rigorously checking the result logs to verify the reported winner; or even better, that the voting system didn't report a winner at all, leaving that up to statisticians and election officials responsible for interpreting the raw results.

Ok, forget what the bug actually did and focus on the bug itself. On the scale of mission-critical systems, I would rank a voting system slightly lower than air traffic controlling, life support, and traffic lights. For the sake of the developed world, I would hope that such an idiotic bug would NEVER make it into any system on this scale. In fact, this bug is so specific that it would have to be consciously coded into the system by a malicious employee. Not even incompetence could create something like this. And any software company creating a critical system like this who didn't test their system with production-scale data until a week before its release (like they did in the movie) should be put out of business forever, and its high-level managers should be sterilized.

Other than that, the movie wasn't bad - some decent political commentary.

"News"
I don't give a flying fuck about Britney Spears, so why would I want to know that she shaved her head? More importantly, why would I want every single media outlet, including celeb-obsessed friends, telling me how shocked they are that she shaved her head? WHO CARES? Similarly, what more needs to be said about Anna Nicole Smith's death than "she died due to blah, and the paternity of her daughter is in question"? We don't need to spend weeks analyzing the contents of her fridge and passing this off as news.

Celebrity news is not news. The root word of "news" is "new", which implies that for an event to be considered "news", something "new" has to have occurred. Personally, I wouldn't consider celebrities acting like spoiled idiots to be new in any way. Death is news, but it doesn't warrant hijacking front page headlines for weeks. The fact that this garbage dominates the media is further proof that the average person is an idiot and isn't worth my time.

Quote of the Day

Posted by Johnny at 10:21 a.m.

"Do you recognize a difference between a dollar and a cent?"

"Of course."

"Do you recognize a difference between half a dollar and half a cent?"

"Yes."

"Ok, therefore, do you recognize a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents?"

"...No. There's no such thing as .002 dollars!"

Yes, this is old, but you can hear the full transcript here, and check out the blog of the incident here.

Valentines Day

Posted by Johnny at 9:46 a.m.

Meh.

Award Acceptance - God = Good

Posted by Johnny at 12:41 p.m.

The Grammys suck. This year was no different. Here are the reasons that it sucked:

• The Police played "Roxanne". It was the only song they got to play.
  
• Earth, Wind & Fire was the backup band for Ludacris and Mary J. Blige. Backup band? Are you fucking kidding me? Philip Bailey got to sing for 30 seconds max before the other 2 clowns came on stage and he absolutely destroyed them (he's the guy who sang the high stuff in "Fantasy").
• Not enough John Mayer.
• Too much Dixie Chicks.
• The James Brown tribute should have been way longer.
• RHCP played that shitty-ass "hey-oh, this is what I say-oh" song. Write better lyrics! Fucktard.
• James Blunt.

The only redeeming factors were Christina Aguilera and Gnarls Barkley.

But the worst part of the night was easily Mary J. Blige's acceptance speeches. When someone starts off a speech with, "First, I have to thank my father, God, lord Jesus Christ," you know it's going down hill. Why do people insist on attributing their achievements to God? It just cheapens their accomplishments and deems them unworthy of praise. Thank your parents for their superior genes that enabled you to have a marketable talent, or thank yourself for working so hard to achieve your goal. If God existed, he wouldn't give a shit about you and you're worthless Grammy anyways, nor would he care about your lame music. Therefore, be proud of yourself and cut that humble bullshit.

By the way, I changed the channel at the first hint of the words "God," "Jesus," or "Lord." I even jumped at the word "father."

New Mission

Posted by Johnny at 4:18 p.m.

Text from this article:

If astronauts have had space sex, it would have been very difficult. First off, there isn't much privacy up there. A regular shuttle is about as big as a 737, and the two main areas—the crew cabin and middeck—are each the size of a small office. The bathroom is little more than a seat with a curtain, and there aren't any closed rooms where two people could retreat. The space station, on the other hand, has a little more room to operate. The three-person crew generally splits up for sleeping time: Two of them bed down in a pair of tiny crew cabins at one end of the station, and the third might jump in a sleeping bag at the other end, almost 200 feet away. (The panel-and-strap design of a space bed might not be that conducive to lovemaking.)

To summarize: has anyone had sex in space? Probably not.

People, this is a problem that needs to be remedied. How will we colonize new planets once we destroy ours if we haven't figured out if we can have sex in space? I mean, we can't travel at the speed of light (yet), so we'd have to send fleets of people whose future generations, conceived and birthed in space, will eventually make it to a new home. Clearly, the fate of our species rests upon the ability to conceive children in space, and if we don't find this out before it's too late, we might be gambling with humanity.

It was a tough decision, but I am willing to offer myself as a test subject for what might be the most important experiment of our lives. NASA, if you're listening, I am willing to become an astronaut to test whether space sex is possible. I realize that it will be dangerous, but it's for the good of humanity.

Of course, there's no point in me going up there alone; we'd need at least one human female to accompany me. Any volunteers?

The Only Reason to Watch Football

Posted by Johnny at 9:09 a.m.

The Superbowl halftime show: it usually has a washed-up band doing an unlikely duet with some shitty newcomer (Aerosmith & Britney Spears, anyone?), but this year, they finally did something right and chose Prince.

He put on a pretty sweet show, so if you have 12 minutes to waste, I'd recommend watching. He covers some CCR, Bob Dylan via Hendrix, and some Foo Fighters.

NOTE: I updated this embedded video to not use the YouTube copy. Hopefully this one lasts a bit longer.

"Miami Rain" via virtualmatter
Uploaded by virtualmatter

The Train Strikes Back: Crazy Preacher Lady

Posted by Johnny at 8:09 a.m.

I've finally encountered the Filipino lady that Kevin has alluded to; the one who stands on the train and preaches the Word of God™ to no one and everyone. Yes!

At first, I thought it was two people having a loud conversation, but then I realized it was one louder person talking about Jesus and God and junk. Everyone was looking at her funny, snickering, and occasionally someone would burst out laughing at something she said. She would go on unphased and remark about how we were all going to hell, unless we went to our local Christian store and *purchased* a Bible (for the low, low price of $19.95!). At one point I thought she was done, because she said, "praise the lord, amen," but she sure wasn't done.

All along I was making sarcastic remarks to Scott, the people around me, and even her, but she ignored me (bitch). If I was closer to her, I would have started asking her annoying questions, such as if I was going to hell for not believing in the concept of god and if it was worse to be a celibate atheist or a slutty Christian. But before I could ask, she started telling us that she couldn't be a queen in heaven because she was married and therefore a sinner. Too much information! And how can the human race continue if *marital* sex is a sin? I mean, come on woman.

Then this one guy got on the train and he was not at all entertained by this (unlike me). He tried telling her to shut up from afar and someone sitting down told him that they already tried pressing the help button but the train operator wouldn't throw her off. When the big crowd got off at 1st street, he walked over to her and started telling her to shut up and got into some kind of argument. She told him to go to hell and he started swearing and it just got ugly. When I got off the train, I saw her move into the seated area and he was following her.

When he decided to step in, it changed from an annoying, but entertaining conversation-starter into a potential incident - and that isn't cool.

I believe it was Evelyn Beatrice Hall, paraphrasing and explaining Voltaire's beliefs, who said "I disapprove of what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." If I'd gotten 8 hours of sleep last night, I would have remembered this quote and told it to Pissed Off Dude in defence of Crazy Preacher Lady. No one on that train wanted to hear anything that she had to say, and she was completely out of line by converting the train into Church on Wheels, but free speech still applies. Her sermon was in the poorest taste, but she wasn't assaulting anyone; her words were directed to no one in particular.

When he chose approach her and start telling her to "shut her mouth," that was not only in poor taste, but could have been construed as verbal abuse. She was obviously insane (for so many reasons), so what is harassing her going to accomplish? Yeah you might scare her into staying off of that particular train time for a while, but she'll still go back and try to save all the sinners. There's no stopping her - she's insane and on a mission from "God".

So today, I give out two massive thumbs down: One for Crazy Preacher Lady, who was talking about religion before 8am to a secular audience, and one for Pissed Off Dude, who chose to fight fire with brimstone.