Assorted Interesting Quotes

“I sat in a Greenwich Village workroom with Bob Luff, the Chief Technology Officer at Nielson, as he pulled out gadget after gadget to show me what he’s up against.  Luff seemed to view the modern American home as a digital zoo where the lion is about to lie down with the lamb: radio is going on the Web, TV is going on cellphones, the Web is going on TV and everything, it seems, is moving to video-on-demand (V.O.D.) and (quite possibly) the iPod and the PlayStation Portable.  ‘Television and media,” Leff said ‘will change more in the next 3 or 5 years than it’s change din the past 50. ‘”

-Jon Gertner, ‘Our Ratings, Ourselves,’ The NY Times, 4/10/05

 "Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?" 

-Edgar Bergen

“The Inner Swine anti-terror program goes like this: 1. Survey size of the Universe, 2. Internalize the fact that you are an unimportant speck in the Universe, 3. Ponder what to have for lunch.

“The fact is, if some yob is going to pull the pin on my subway car or bus, well, there you have it. Nothing I can do about it, nothing you can do about it, and nothing the police can do about. An energetic and effective policy on the part of the various intelligence agencies might be able to prevent bombings by discovering plots before they're unleashed, but once the yobs strap on the dynamite and head out to the tube, fuck it, you're toast. Nothing you can do about it.

“You can, however, do something about lunch. Don't waste your energy.”

-Jeff Somers, ‘TIS Annoyingly Random Email,’ The Inner Swine, 7/22/05

Zipwise US Zip Codes

A Wholly Shallow Reason to be Conservative

Hat Tip to the Broward Libertarians

Peter Jennings: 1938-2005

Peter Jennings, the suave, Canadian-born broadcaster who delivered the news to Americans each night in five separate decades, died Sunday. He was 67.

Jennings, who announced in April that he had lung cancer, died at his New York home, ABC News President David Westin said late Sunday.

Despite his iconic status of Big Media, I always regarded him as my favorite of all the big-time anchors.

/rizzn

Other Bizarre Things in the News

I’ve been cruising blogs today trying to find other servers that have the same synchronicity issues our server is having through the AT&T network, and so I’ve been reading a lot more blogs than usual for a workday.

I found an interesting article from July 24th that’s already made it into the Wikipedia about Helen Thomas from homocon:

 Loony-left White House Press Corps fossil Helen Thomas has vowed to "kill herself" if Dick Cheney runs for president in the next election.

 Helen "I was a liberal the day I was born, and I will be until the day I die" Thomas famously quoted in 1993, to unanimous conservative derision, "A liberal bias? I don't know what a liberal bias is," yet when questioned regarding her thoughts of Condoleeza Rice, as well as the 2004 Presidential election, she screeched: "I tell you, the woman is a monster, a monster, a monster" and “My God, the man (Bush) is a fascist – a fascist, I tell you.”

Her Wikipedia entry backs up the claim.  In other bizarre news, Mel Gibson is apparently doing a film after reading Fingerprints of the Gods, or the even more fantastic Chariots of the Gods, and calling it Apocalypto.

The Passion of The Christ director Mel Gibson is set to helm action packed Apocalypto, which he also wrote, for Walt Disney Pictures, according to Daily Variety.

The project, which will be filmed in an obscure Mayan dialect, is set in an ancient civilization some 3,000 years ago. The title is a Greek term which means "an unveiling" or "new beginning."

Production is set to begin in October for a summer 2006 release. It will star a neophyte cast indigenous to the region of Mexico where Gibson will shoot come fall.

It's likely the film will carry an R rating, unless Gibson tempers the onscreen depiction of violent scenes he wrote in his script.

Gibson will produce along with Icon partner Bruce Davey.

I’m not sure what to think, although I can’t help but imagine this somewhat undermines the Christian integrity of doing Passion in the original Aramaic.  It seems a little disengenuous to create this film of titanic proportions to those of Faith, and then turn around and make a film using the same method about a pagan culture.

None the less, it does sound like a great project, and a lot of fun for nerds like me who are fans of dead languages.  I’m sure my ex-girlfriend is in pure ecstacy over this crap (my ex spoke three dead languages).  Speaking of liberal wingnuts in pure ecstacy…

…[a]ccording to The Hollywood Reporter, Eric Singer is writing Terminus, a political action movie that Basil Iwanyk's Thunder Road is producing for Warner Bros. Pictures. Set 50 years in the future, Terminus follows a burned-out and disillusioned war correspondent covering an insurgency who finds he can no longer stay objective.

"It deals head on with what some call insurgency, what some call guerilla warfare and what some call freedom fighting," Iwanyk said. "Today's scenarios are completely fluid, but by setting it in the future we can extrapolate how that world would look like. It sounds like it'd be ballsy for a studio, and Warners went for it because they believe in Eric and his take."

Not set to be released until 2007, this gem of a picture is sure to get all those same liberal-minded folks up in celebration as The Day After Yesterday Before Tomorrow did. I guess we can thank Michael Moore and Roland Emmerich for proving to the studios that there is a spot in the American movie-going experience for political studio pictures.  Thanks, jerks!  I can just imagine the summer of 2007 and 2008 are going to be as lousy with liberal political flicks as the last two summers have been with poorly done comic book flicks.

Finally, I recieved a bizarre joke from a young lady named Rachel who works for us at AACS.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a joke forwarded to me that I haven’t heard before.  Maybe this one will be new to you, too.

Little Zachary was doing very badly in math. His parents had tried everything...tutors, mentors, flash cards, special learning centers. In short, everything they could think of to help his math. Finally, in a last ditch effort, they took Zachary down and enrolled him in the local Catholic school. 

After the first day, little Zachary came home with a very serious look on his face. He didn't even kiss his mother hello. Instead, he went straight to his room and started studying.  Books and papers were spread out all over the room and little Zachary was hard at work.  His mother was amazed. 

She called him down to dinner To her shock, the minute he was done, he marched back to his room without a word, and in no time, he was back hitting the books as hard as before.

This went on for some time, day after day, while the mother tried to 0understand what made all the difference. Finally, little Zachary brought home his report card. He quietly laid it on the table, went up to his room and hit the books. With great trepidation, his Mom looked at it and to her great surprise, little Zachary got an "A" in math. 

She could no longer hold her curiosity. She went to his room and said, "Son, what was it?  Was it the nuns?" Little Zachary looked at her and shook his head, no.  "Well, then," she replied, "was it the books, the discipline, the structure, the uniforms? WHAT WAS IT ALREADY"

Little Zachary looked at her and said, "Well, on the first day of school when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew they weren't fooling around."

That is all.  As you were.

 /rizzn

Bizarre Server Problems

We’re having some bizarre server problems at the moment.  For some reason, every 60 seconds, the server times out for 60 seconds.  After 60 seconds of downtime, the server reappears in a continuous ping.

Traceroutes to and from the box show nothing out of the ordinary – nothing is pinging abnormally large amounts of milleseconds. Very puzzling.

I’ve been talking to the Planet about it for a couple hours, and they seem to want to blame it on Comcast.  I keep showing them how the problem exists somewhere in the Texas part of AT&T’s network, but they keep saying Comcast.

/rizzn

Global Warming will Kill Us. Kill Us Every One.

(Scroll down for updates)

Once again, hurricane season is upon us, and it’s a wonderful time for all the sensationalists to come out of the woodwork.  Matthew sent me an article from CNN that was cross-posted in From The Wilderness today as well. According to some scientist’s intuition, it would seem, the world is indeed ending due to global warming.  That’s right, hold on to your butts, it’s the end folks.

Marine biologists are seeing mysterious and disturbing things along the Pacific Coast this year: higher water temperatures, plummeting catches of fish, lots of dead birds on the beaches, and perhaps most worrisome, very little plankton -- the tiny organisms that are a vital link in the ocean food chain.

Is this just one freak year? Or is this global warming?

Apparently, all over North America, ocean water temperatures are a few degrees higher than normal.  This means the circle of life is disrupted at the microscopic levels, and the effects are cascading.  The CNN article is actually fairly balanced, when you consider their track record on trumpeting wacky theories in the past.  The essentially use the concept of global warming as a backdrop and bias by editorialization, asking rhetorical questions that only the eco-liberal will understand and “know the answer to.”  They never really come out and say that there is a direct connection to the theory of global warming and warmer ocean waters this year.

Nor do they actually go over what could be indicative patterns in the water temperature history.  Does it have a history of going up and down?  What is the drama of it’s ups and down.  Is it following a trend?  I mean, these are the same people that put on four hours a day of stock graph analysis, can’t they at least mention something or other about a trend in this supposed herald of all our doom? Me-thinks that would kill the suspense and the horror, and thus make a less sensational news story.

I wouldn’t mention any of this except that there is a glut of Eco-Stories today.  Given that it’s hurricane season down here in SouFla, it gives all the local and national outlets an opportunity to talk about how if we don’t die from the lack of zooplankton in the ocean water, we’re going to be destroyed by killar hurricanes! The Miami Herald today proclaimed that Climate Change May [indeed] Be Fueling Storms.

The accumulated power of Atlantic hurricanes has more than doubled in the past 30 years, with a particularly dramatic spike since 1995, and global warming likely is a major cause, according to a study to be published this week.

Though a connection between global warming and hurricane ferocity might seem logical, the report by a reputable climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the first to draw a statistical relationship between the two.

 'The large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effect of global warming,'' scientist Kerry Emanuel wrote in a study that will appear in the Thursday edition of the journal Nature. Copies of the article were made available Sunday.

Anyone who doesn’t have a habit of reading scholarly papers would tend to be alarmed by this seemingly expert opinion.  I, on the other hand, have not only read quite a few ‘scholarly papers’ but have had close personal relationships with the scholarati.  Let me say to you that the typical scholarly study writer in tertiary fields of study tend to be as full of bs, bias, and opinion as the next guy, and if you want to put stock in a scholarly ‘study,’ you had better read it for yourself.

I’m not in any way saying these studies are easy to do, but often what happens is they start out with a thesis, and then they cherry pick factoids, graphs, opinions and other nuggets to ‘prove’ their point, instead of investigating a phenomenon and reporting the results of their findings.  As a result, these agenda studies (as I like to call them) often contain sources with shaky foundations at best.  Many times the researchers haven’t even based their findings on primary sources.  During a debate, one time, I was quoted a study citing the fallibility of abstinence based education.  The outlandish claim was made that more people who are taught abstinence (as opposed to those who aren’t) catch STDs.  I read the study, went through the sources, and as it turns out, the source quoted by the source quoted by the source quoted by the study was an opinion paper (and the number was based on pure speculation), not an actual fact.  Since it was several generations deep in studies, it was being passed around as a complete fact.

There were a couple more articles on the same subject that showed equal ineptitude in explaining the facts, by CNN and the New York Times.  But even after this blog post thus far, the question remains in all our minds, what’s up with this global warming thing.  Are we going to die or not?  According to the Oregon Instutitute of Science and Medicine, probably not.  According to Arthur and Zachary Robinson, both chemists at the institute, there is a closer correlation between between solar activity and global temperatures than carbon dioxide activity and global temperatures.  Kind of makes sense, in a way.  The largest nuclear furnace for light years is the biggest factor in the temperature of our planet.

Naahhhh, it’s to obvious.

/rizzn

Update: I need to start doing this before I post so that I can incorporate this into the actual feature, but I did a technorati search after I posted, just to see what everyone else is saying.  I’m just about done laughing now … I just want you all to read these headlines, and see if you get as much of a kick out if it as I do.

People, we are facing extinction.
Global Warming – “For those out there that believe that Global Warming is a myth please come drop by my Bedroom cause I think it might very well be the warmest place on the planet….”
Ode to Key West – “it's finally happened. Global warming is out of control, making hurricanes more... say goodbye to the residents of Key West, who are soon to be destroyed by the vicious hands of global warming…”
My basic core values and beliefs – “GLOBAL WARMING: It's very real, the Republicans have tried to hide it and deny…”

Keep it up fellas.  You crack me up.

Site Outage, and Bill Maher can Stay Swiss

Sorry  about the outage this morning, folks.  I forgot to pay my NS bill this morning.  It’s the only domain I have hosted on the expensive DNS services known as eNom.  I need to switch them to goDaddy, so I don’t have to pay 30 bucks a damn year.

Bill Maher has officially jumped the shark.  I watched his “I’m Swiss” HBO special last night.  It’s sad, really.  Bill used to feign being in touch with his more conservative fan-base at least, but these days, his routine has become filled with entirely anti-Christian rhetoric.  I think there were three points in the whole routine when I even cracked a smile.  I didn’t laugh the whole time!  He would preface every tirade with “I’m not being partisan” and then call the majority of American’s idiots.  Maybe I’m strange, but I don’t call that comedy.

It’s really soured me on the idea of Portland, OR, as well. A few of my friends had been talking about how swell a place Portland was, and even had me thinking about a possible move some time in the future.  He had a theatre that was half filled with people from Portland (the people very strategically placed so as to make it look like a sold out crowd), all of them cheering wildly at every atheistic/anti-theistic statement Billy-boy made. It was actually sad, in a way.

I mean really … Hollywood wonders why middle America thinks there’s a culture war?  Their idea of comedy is to rip on Christians for two straight hours.  Am I alone when I implore “WTF?!”

There were about two entertaining bits in the whole special, but they were definately not worth wading through two hours of insults without punchlines. 

For entertaining political commentary, look to someone like Lewis Black.  He’s intelligent, makes fun of both sides, and his jokes have a payoff!  Bill Maher used to do this, too, but he seems to be comfortable just yelling.  The Daily Show, for all it’s anti-Republican banter is still entertaining.  A spoonful of sugar has always helped the medicine go down.  Bill Maher would do good to remember that, instead of pandering to a juvenile form of his liberal base.

/rizzn

Update: I did a technorati search on Bill Maher, and it seems that the conservative bloggers stayed away from this performance, but even the liberals found it unpallatable.