MyATMPinIs1234

Quote of the Day:

PA: Remember that awesome 'artsy' party we went to?
Me: Uh, that wasn't artsy -- it was Halloween.
PA: True

Mystery solved. For a long time I've had a poster in my apartment featuring a pregnant black woman wearing a button that says, "Nixon's the one." There has been a great deal of discussion over the years on exactly what this poster means. Was it a clumsy attempt by the Nixon campaign to modify his slogan to appeal to urban constituencies? Not bloody likely, given his employment of the "Southern Strategy" to defeat the oh so northern Hubert Humphrey. But could it be the work of a Nixon opponent seeking to make him look foolish? While this is possible, it would be a remarkable discovery since it is currently believed that the genre of satire was invented in 1975 by the folks at Saturday Night Live.

The guests to my home, at least those who had heard of Richard Nixon, were as perplexed as I was by this poster. Some of the discussions even got into even deeper subtext, arguing over whether Nixon's the one implied that Nixon was the father. Well the mystery is now solved. I stumbled across this, in a magazine that I've never heard of and certainly don't ready every day.

There was a certain mischievous charm to Democratic dirty tricks of yore. Legendary campaign prankster Dick Tuck arranged for very pregnant women to attend rallies for Richard Nixon and wave signs that read, "Nixon's the One." Earlier, Tuck dressed up as a railway conductor and signaled a train engineer to leave the station, even as Nixon addressed voters from the platform of that train's caboose.

Sometimes I wonder about things. For example, how did an S & M organization get into the pastry business? You see, I was playing around with the Google language tools, and found out, to my surprise, that Au Bon Pain translates into with the good pain. What kind of Ad Wizard came up with that one? I'm too scared to look up what Haagen Dazs means.

It's blood drive time. There's a catch, though.

The FDA prohibits donations by any man who has had sex with another man, even once, since 1977. There is currently no provision for donations by men who practice safer sex, who have had negative HIV tests elsewhere, or for monogamous gay couples. This is federal policy; the NYBC and University have no flexibility in applying these eligibility criteria. If you wish to discuss this further with someone at the NYBC, you may call 800-688-0900 and ask for a clinician. University is committed to helping meet the critical need for blood while remaining sensitive to its LGBT community and their allies on campus. Those who wish to advocate in favor of reevaluation of these regulations are urged to contact the FDA at 301-284-9930.

Well I'm in just under the wire. You see, my last massive gay orgy was New Year's Eve, 1976. I'm pretty sure we had finished up by around 11:30pm so we could prepare to see the ball drop and usher in 1977.

Note to gay people: The government has tricked you into wanting to do something altogether unpleasant by saying you're not allowed. Same with being in the military, and marriage.

You are "urged" to call the FDA if it is so important to you that someone can jab a needle in your arm and leave it there for 15 minutes while the substance that replenishes your organs with oxygen is slowly removed from your body. An outrage!

(Nothing in the preceding is intended to disparage anyone on the basis of sexual orientation, or any other legally protected status)

Yesterday's post about the anti-harassment policy got me thinking. It turns out, that most of the favorite schoolyard insults are not based on a legally protected status. So it's going to be business as usual for the Nelson Muntz's of the world. You are still allowed to tease people because of their height or weight, appearance, clothing, father's profession or lack thereof, intelligence, lack of intelligence, abilities in math/science/computers, membership in marching band, smell, size and shape of cranial protuberances, or [lack of] athletic ability. And for the older kids, there's always level of sexual development and amount of sexual experience.

It's really refreshing that kids are able to see beyond the contentious racial and gender issues in our society, and can focus on teasing about what's really important... the way people look.

There is a University, with which I may or may not be affiliated, that has a very comprehensive anti-harassment policy, a copy of which I may or may not have been recently emailed.

The gist of the policy is that you can no longer write or speak on university grounds.

Prohibited harassment is conduct based on race, gender, color, religion, age, national origin, ethnicity, disability, veteran or military status, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship status, or any other legally protected status.

Examples of such prohibited conduct when based upon a legally protected status include, but are not limited to:

• Verbal abuse or hostile behavior such as insulting, teasing, mocking, degrading or ridiculing another person or group;

There are no listed exceptions for artistic, scientific, or political speech. I seriously hope no students or professors intend on insulting or mocking George W. Bush on the basis of his role as Commander-in-Chief, because unfortunately, his military status is a legally protected status. I likewise hope that no one affiliated with the university intends on degrading or ridiculing John Kerry because of his being in Vietnam, because veterans are a protected status.

There will be no teasing other students whose wives (or husbands) make them skip the happy hour to go home, because marital status is protected. And in case you were wondering, although national origin is protected, regional or local origin is not, so it is still acceptable to make fun of Rochester.

Why did Dubya sign up for the Texas Air National Guard instead of going to 'Nam? The answer, in my mind, is clear. He wanted to be an Officer of TANG. What college frat boy wouldn't do the same thing? Mmmm...Tang.....

Tang. Tang. Tang. TANG. tANG. tANg. TANG!!!!!!!

Ok, I'll stop now.

TANG.

Judging from the debris on the street in front of my building, one of my neighbors finally decided to throw out their 5 1/4" floppy disks. It's about time. Maybe I should do the same next time I'm down in my old room at the 'rents' house.

And that reminds me... Remember how hard it used to be for kids to get porn? It was not an easy battle to convince my mom to buy me Leisure Suit Larry III (Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals), which sucked, but did allow me to occasionally see extremely low resolution, 16 color, cartoon breasts. And we thought it was the greatest thing ever. The extremes to which the 13 year old boys in my neighborhood went to obtain porn caused us to develop a resourcefulness that would probably impress veteran CIA officers.

That is why kids today are so obese. Pretty much the only thing that motivates teenage boys to expend effort is now available at the click of a mouse. It's not the food pyramid or McDonalds to blame. We ate fast food and coco-puffs all the time when we were kids. Free and easily available porn is the culprit! Not that it's possible or even desirable, but I bet if you were to get rid of all porn on the Internet, teenage boys all over the country would return to lean, hungry, porn finding machines.

Now you might be thinking that this is a load of crap, because obesity is also a problem for girls, lesbian toddlers, and blind children. The nice thing about blogs, especially blogs that nobody reads, is that the stuff you write doesn't have to be backed up by proof or even be true. In that respect, they're a lot like CBS news.

Can anyone put nine 5 1/4" Leisure Suit Larry floppy disks onto a CD-ROM for me?

This is going to be a very boring post, so you should probably not read it.

If you follow such things, there has been a lot of talk recently about making prescription drugs cheaper by importing them from Canada. No one seems to care that this is ludicrous. Setting aside the [overblown] safety concerns and [underblown] economic concerns, can anyone see what this would mean if many or most people had their drugs shipped from Canada? It would mean that the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry would no longer be under the jurisdiction of Congress and the FDA, but would instead be effectively regulated in Ottawa.

So why make all of the drugs make a round trip to and from Canada to get these lower prices? Why not just have Congress mandate that they will no longer be supervising the drug industry and they now have to follow all Canadian rules? This would save a lot of time and achieve the same result. And why not go a step further, and instead of using Canada, get our drugs from Mexico or India, where they are even cheaper? That would be great! We could get Sonia Gandhi to regulate our drug industry.

And I noticed that a lot of things are cheaper in Canada. We could just export and then reimport all of our consumer goods from Canada, and we would all save so much money! We could be as happy as the Canadians, who are obviously amazingly happy, since none of them ever want to move to the U.S.

I wonder if Bill Clinton is still in favor of being more like Canada, seeing as how he would now be dead if he were a typical Canadian citizen (where the average wait time for what he had done is 5.5 weeks).

I see from my site logs that most of you are still using Internet Explorer. That is unacceptable. You might as well just format your own harddrive and get it over with. Go download Firefox immediately. This advice applies to people using Windows machines only. If you are using a Macintosh, cut your hair and get a job.

Q. How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. None. That's a hardware issue.

I'd like to express my admiration for Herbert Saffir and Bob Simpson, inventors of the Saffir-Simpson scale for classifying hurricanes. These guys are world famous, being mentioned constantly each summer and fall during hurricane season. Not bad for doing about 8 minutes worth of work.

H: "Hey Bob, do you think the category 3 should be 111-130 MPH winds, or should it stop at 125?"

B: "Herbert, I don't give a shit. Just finish this up so we can grab lunch already."

H: "Ok fine dude. Let's make it 74-95, 96-110, 111-130, 131-155, and uh, anything above that we'll just make a category 5."

B: "Perfect. Tag it and bag it."

Like the guy that invented Cherry Coke, I'd like to induct Saffir and Simpson into the "8 minutes worth of work to define a career, Hall of Fame" based in Rochester, NY.

You may or may not have heard about the impending expiration of the assault weapons ban. This sounds like a really bad thing, doesn't it? I think it is a bad thing, for people who like laws that are ridiculous.

Presumably, the main reason why people would be in favor of such a ban, is to reduce the ability of people (criminals, terrorists) to kill innocent people. This is a legitimate position, but unfortunately the law in question does not do this in the least. There are two factors that make up the potential killing ability of a rifle, the size of the bullet (caliber) and the rate these bullets can be fired (action). Neither of these factors are addressed in this law (and fully-automatic, military rifles are already highly regulated).

The law is based solely on the appearance of the gun. It states that rifles that have at least two of the following features are banned.

1) Folding stock
2) Pistol grip
3) Bayonet mount
4) Flash suppressor
5) Grenade launcher

Has the law really reduced the number of people being bayoneted or killed with launched grenades? No, because there were none to begin with. Basically the law bans guns that look bad. It's like instead of having a speed limit on the highways we just banned red cars. Your position on guns should have no relevance in this debate. This particular law is a debate on stupidity.

I finally got around to watching Da Ali G show that aired a few weeks ago, which ended with an 'interview' of CBS News' Andy Rooney. As one would expect, Rooney had no idea what was going on and basically went nuts, correcting Ali G's grammar and being totally rude. That's fine. Andy Rooney is an old dude, and he shouldn't have to put up with crap.

But what is unacceptable is the fact that CBS News, Andy Rooney, his staff, and everyone else that knew about this interview did not know about Ali G. How can these people claim to be journalists if they have no idea what is going on in American pop culture? Are there no interns working there? Maybe the staff hates him so much they decided not to tell him. But really the worst part is that journalists are supposed to investigate things and be inquisitive. It's clear that no one involved even took the .17 seconds required to (Results 1 - 10 of about 268,000 for da ali g show. (0.17 seconds)) google the guy.

I want a job at CBS News. I figure I just need a little more work on my writing, because I already have the other requirement: being totally out of touch with reality.

Reading the newspaper today I came across this line:

Roger Kimball's "The Rape of the Masters" (Encounter, 186 pages, $25.95) is labeled "art criticism" on its dustjacket, but it might be better classified as a "cri de coeur."

What the frick is cri de coeur? Is this something I should've known, and this post is just making me look stupid? I will admit, my French vocabulary begins and ends with Dijonnaise. Also, what in the world is "art?"

NASA is worried about Hurricane Frances. Any damage to the 3 remaining space shuttles could really put a damper on their attempts to restart the space program.

"If there were serious damage to one or two of the orbiters or the facilities needed to process and launch the orbiters, I think it would raise a very large question about the continuation of the shuttle program," Logsdon said.

The only thing I'm wondering is, if you design a space shuttle to withstand re-entry to the earth's atmosphere at Mach 25, why would 140 MPH winds be that big of a deal? You would think that when the craft is going so fast it rips apart air molecules causing it to be surrounded with 3000 degree plasma and strong shock waves -- that would be even worse, right? What about the frozen Russian space turds flying around to and fro up there?

My friend's condo was 20 miles from the eye of the last hurricane to hit Florida, and he put down the storm shutters and everything was fine. I suspect his house would be in worse shape if for some reason it were to enter the atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour.

I would like to make a suggestion to the women that work out in the weight room of my gym. Go home and don't come back. I say this not because I don't want the women there (I do), and not because I don't think working out is important, but because it pains me to see people engaging in a complete waste of time.

When you search the entire place for a machine that works out the smallest muscles in your body, and then proceed to exercise with the intensity of someone in deep REM sleep, you are just wasting your time. Even if you were to greatly strengthen the anterior head of your hip adductors, what is that going to accomplish? Do you think this is going to 'tone' your thighs or increase your metabolism? Do yourself a favor and lift something heavy that requires using large muscle groups. You will not get too big. That would require a different endocrinological makeup and consumption of more protein than your daily Tasti-D-Lite.

Put it this way...you don't train for a marathon by walking one block and then going home, so why would you put the same amount of effort into weight training? Do it right.

And to the girl that asked me what muscles the machine she was on worked, I hope you were hitting on me, because about 2 feet from your face was a diagram of a flayed man with the muscles that machine worked highlighted in red.

To this day, many in the black community think that O.J. was framed and is innocent. They wouldn't care if a bloody Hertz #1 Club Gold card with his name on it was found at the crime scene.

But when it comes to Kobe Bryant, my informal polling of black acquaintances and my impression of the black community's attitude (before yesterday) is that Kobe fucked up and is probably gonna go down hard. This despite any evidence to support his guilt. Don't take my word for it, the case against him was so weak that it got laughed out of court yesterday. And I don't buy the fact that it was because of his fancy lawyers -- the case didn't even go to trial.

But frankly I don't care who is innocent and who is guilty. I just care when common sense gets abused.

New York City Protestors

Some of these people are protesting the most bizarre and obscure things. I've often had the urge to go up and ask them what their protest has to do with the price of tea in China. Not so last night, when I came upon some people protesting the price of tea in China. Ok, not really. But I did see a group of people protesting Water Privatization.

Also, thanks a lot for shutting down my street (and access to my apartment) for 2 hours while the police arrested you. I hope the public water was worth it.

Update: Best of the Web saw the same water girl protestor.

Interesting money making scheme:

1) Raise child without training or common sense
2) Send him to college
3) Child drinks too much and drowns
4) Sue school
5) Profit!

You might be wondering what the college has to do with anything. Well they apparently had the nerve to try and combat drunk driving by providing a 'safe-rider' shuttle program. It's getting hard to keep up. This whole time I thought driving drunk was the bad thing, not trying to prevent people from driving drunk. I haven't seen the 2005 model year cars yet, but I assume they will have beer coolers installed to accommodate these changes.