perfidy

The Maximum Leader the other day had a post about a proposed royal taxonomy of booze.  He proposed that Scotch is the king of booze, and... well, just go read it.  In reading it, I thought that it was a good idea, but the dear leader was channeling the French and it was poorly implemented.

I believe that there are in fact three warring states of booze.  The three kinds of booze do not generally get along.  Here's how I'd break it out:

The High Test Kingdom of Liquor, The Principate of Wine, and the Republic of Beer.

The High King of Liquor is certainly Scotch.  And many of the roles the Maximum Leader suggests for other distilled spirits are appropriate.  But really, the wines would never submit to the rule of another alcohol.  The Prince of the Wines (after a recent civil war) is the House of Cabernet from California.  They displaced the French Cabernets, who are now plotting in return.  The nobility of the Principate is largely the red wines.  The awkward bourgeoisie - putting on airs, but still with red clay on their feet, is the blush and zinfandels.  The yeomanry is the white wines, though some white wines still cling to noble titles like saxons in Plantagenet England.  The serfs are the box wines. 

The republic of beer is a low place.  The vast majority of the population is low income industrial workers, the proletariat of thin American style lagers.  There is a vibrant entrepreneurial class, though, of independent craft brewers.  Some of these have become successful, and have started aping the manners of the nobility of the Liquors and Wines.  There is also a large corporate managerial class, wholly owned by the large lager magnates, but who aspire to higher quality than they actually possess.  In a curious inversion of life in America, the darker beers are the more respected and wealthy.

In the mountains between Wine and Liquor, there is a barbarous, semi-independent state inhabited by piratical and impoverished fortified wines.  The high sulfate content of the soils there leaves life very hard indeed.

The Vatican has announced that belief in extraterrestrials - even the smart, ravenous and highly lethal kind - does not contradict faith in God.  While I could make any number of snarky remarks about the relative uptodateness of Catholic thought, Galileo, Bruno, the Inquisition, etc., I will simply content myself with noting that Monty Python knew this was going to happen a quarter century ago, and depicted alens coexisting with messiahs in Life of Brian.

The Vatican astronomer noted that denying that there is no life anywhere else in the universe is putting limits on the (presumably unlimited) creativity of God.  Sadly, the article does not go into more interesting territory - I'd like to see what Vatican policy is regarding missionary efforts to aliens, and whether the holy mother Church feels that the anal probing greys have souls.  Cause, if they abduct me, I'm killing them sumsabitches.  But I don't want to commit a sin.

And you euro-weenies better pray we don't have to do it again.  Because, you know, we might not want to.  We're tired, and we'd miss The Soup on E!. 

Well, not EVERYONE, exactly...just those of us who intend to make our living through our creativity.

There's a Bill sneaking its way through the government, called the "Orphan Works Bill," and it's absolutely worthy of Germany ca. 1935 (which, if you think about it, wasn't ALL that different than America ca. 2008). I'm parroting the email I received from my local writers' organization.

There's a reason why Google, Getty, Disney, et al are interested in seeing this bill pass:

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=CqBZd0cP5Yc

PASS IT ON

The Orphan Works Bill promotes theft of creative work, pure and simple. This bill, currently under consideration in Congress, will deny you the right of immediate ownership over the product of your own creativity, and therefore makes it increasingly difficult to make money--much less a living--from it.

Copyright law, as it is now, acknowledges that the work you create is legally yours--your own property--as soon as you create it.

The Orphaned Works Bill will deny that right of ownership. It requires that the creator of any work must pay to register that work before it can be legally deemed the property of the creator. It means you have to register with a private company to have it copyrighted. That means your work can be "orphaned" as soon as it's created, especially since such companies don't exist right now.

Should someone copy your work and leave off your name, it becomes "orphaned" especially when the copied work is copied again and again. These days, this happens all too easily. That repeated copying makes it difficult to discover who created the work in the first place--even for the "diligent" copier.

In addition, it pits million- and billion-dollar companies that want easy access to creative work against artists who can hardly make ends meet from their own work as it is. Why? Because it puts the burden of proof on the creator of the work, rather than the copier.

Worse, it seriously erodes the property rights of citizens of the U.S. as outlined in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution.

Write your senator and congressperson now. Find your state representative: https://forms. house.gov/ wyr/welcome. shtml Feel free to forward this e-mail.

"The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave."

- George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 1921.

It is important to understand English, I suppose. Either that or to get thicker skin:

I had a bunch of Euros I needed to exchange, so I went to the currency exchange window at the local bank.

Just one lady in front of me . . . an Asian lady, who was trying to exchange yen for dollars, and she was a little irritated.

She kept asking the teller, 'Why it change?? Why it change?? Why it change??' Then she continued, 'Yesterday, I get two hunat dolla fo yen. Today I get ony hunat eighty dolla?? Why it change?'

The teller shrugged his shoulders and said, simply and carefully, 'Fluctuations.'

The Asian lady glares at the banker, 'Fluc you white people, too!'

From today's Onion:

Beer Production Threatened By Climate Change According to New Zealand climatologist Jim Salinger, climate change may result in reduced malted barley, which would limit beer production. What do you think?

Fake responses included:

Heidi Marsico, Systems Analyst "Very clever, ‘Dr. Salinger,’ or should I say, Al Gore!"

and my personal favorite (no offense, Johno, wherever you are):

Hans Weinburger, Secretary "Could this limit the ability of my neighbor to brew his own beer, discuss brewing his own beer, boast about his talent for brewing beer, and browbeat his neighbors into trying his beer? Because in that case this could be a good thing."

...Unless you're involved in the publishing industry.

Here's what's going on, with Amazon.com playing the drunken frat boy to Print-On-Demand Publishers' ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.

And in case you're interested, yes it is affecting me and my book sales. My reaction is here, complete with a troll commenter whom I strongly suspect to have Amazon ties.

Maybe it WON'T be the robots that do us in...

I found this list of the Best Evil Robots we've ever created. Remember that when they come to destroy and enslave us. We made them.

Recent media reports indicate a confluence of such folk, participating in an eBay auction, and their leader, Mongo the Retard, apparently had $1,350 at which he was pissed:

Flakey sale nets Virginia sisters $1,350

Sat Mar 22, 8:25 AM ET

CHICAGO - Two sisters from Virginia sold their Illinois-shaped corn flake on eBay Friday night for $1,350.

"We were biting our nails all the way up to the finish, seeing what would happen," said Melissa McIntire, 23. "There's a lot of relief involved."
...

In the oft-simmering battle of relative state IQs, Virginia beats the state of the supposed buyer, I'd guess. Which is a bummer, personally, because he's from Texas.

Apparently, there wasn't room in the cornflake auction for all the retards, however:

Thousands stuck with fake art prints

Fri Mar 21, 5:20 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Take a second look at that signed Picasso print you bought on eBay.
...

"Hey, Cletus! Let's get on that there eBay and buy us some signed Picassos!"