perfidy

Like Buckethead, I decree Queer Eye For The Straight Guy excellent. It's edu-tainment!

Did you know that Carson (the queeny fashion guru) graduated Summa with a degree in Finance? Holy crow! All that and fashion sense too!

Buckethead has been dominating this forum of late, and with good cause. "Real life" has intruded on my behalf, and posting will be light.

Company. . . Right Face! March!

I hereby notify all and sundry that I am gloating over the fact that reality forced Johno to admit that conservatism is the new hip, cool, rebellious thing for those wacky kids to be doing. As a side note, I find it ironic that whenever a limousine liberal hollywood gashead tries to parody the right, it ends up being adopted by (at least some) as a badge of honor - because they didn't really understand the right to begin with. Examples include the Tim Robbins entire movie Bob Roberts, and the "Greed is good" speech from Stone's Wall Street.

My father suggests that I change my nom de net to "Buickhead." I guess it wasn't enough for me to wear a buick tshirt to his party last weekend.

Pythagosaurus has pointed out that correctly, "thingie" is only used as a euphamistic term for the human male wang. Therefore, when referring to events in the wide world, the only correct usage is "thingy."

Don't let people tell you I never admit when I'm wrong.

"thingie" is dead, long live "thingy!"

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on Harold Bloom, here is a memo.

Dear Mr. Bloom:

You may be the only man in the English-speaking world qualified to write a book called "How To Read." That is a remarkable accomplishment. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean you should do so. Most of us learned how to read in elementary school, and Oprah is helping the rest along nicely. Nice of you to try though.

Thank you for your time.

Yours sincerely,
Pythagosaurus.

You ask, you recieve. Bush is in general a conservative. And he is certainly vastly more conservative than android-American Gore, or any of his likely opponents in the next election. I was upset by his trade policies, when he went protectionist. I am upset with the prescription drug thingie. (Thingie!) I am bothered that he has not increased the size of the military. The tax cuts are insufficient. The airline safety agency is a nauseating joke, and the Homeland Security agency... sheesh. Arguably, this is because I am more conservative than he is.

While I have been occasionally frustrated, especially on matters economic; overall, I am happy with his performance in the war on terror. This is the overriding issue in this time, and I support him and the administration. The mudville nine have so far offered nothing that looks like a real foriegn policy.

I also support the administration because Rumsfeld is fucking awesome.

I also support the administration because it irritates people like Hesiod.

Brad Templeton has compliled a history of the word spam. Joe-Bob says, "Check it out."

Also apropos of nothing, I don't own a gun, but I am feeling happy today to be the owner of every Stevie Wonder album recorded between 1972 and 1976 plus a killer live version of "Fingertips, part 2" from 1963.

Apropos of nothing, I am feeling happy today that I own a Savage Arms 1300 12 gauge double barrel shotgun and a Kimber custom .45.

Buckethead,

Being a linguistic descriptivist, I feel that whatever usage of "thing(y/ie)" butters your bagel is the one to use. Other usage would suggest both "thingie" and "thingy" as correct, since each is used interchangeably as a diminuitive: "bootie" and "booty" for baby's shoes, and "kitty" and "kittie" for small cat, for example.

But beyond such heady concerns, "thingy" is undoubtedly the correct term. "Thingie" is just wrong.

Sages and scholars are locked in frightfull combat over this issue. What is the correct usage? Is it "thingy" or "thingie." Enquiring minds want to know.

"Pythagosaurus"

Came across this one in a compendium of stupid things that have appeared in college papers. I laughed so hard I almost had a seizure.

I'm thinking of changing my pundit alias to "Pythagosaurus." Rawrr! I smash you with logic and reason!! Rawrrr!

Who gave a hand with the HTML for the new category images.

I've been drinking vodka this evening. Please excuse me, for it gives me Russian moods.

BILIOUSNESS - Jaundice or other symptoms associated with liver disease; may also have been any upset leading to vomiting bile or just vomiting
BLACK JAUNDICE - Wiel's Disease; Black Water fever (deadly form of malaria)
BLACK POX - Black Smallpox
BLOODY FLUX Bloody stools
BREAKBONE Dengue fever, Infectious fever endemic to East Africa
CORRUPTION Infection
EEL THING Erysipelas
FRENCH POX Syphilis
KRUCHHUSTEN Whooping cough
LOCKJAW Tetanus or infectious disease affecting the muscles of the neck and jaw. Untreated, it is fatal in 8 days
MORMAL Gangrene
RICKETS Disease of skeletal system
SCRUMPOX Skin disease, impetigo

I have noticed a disturbing trend lately. Names of diseases no longer sound like disease names. Long gone are the days of scurvy, gout, consumption, scarlet fever, yellow fever and plague. Now we have antiseptic acronymic disease names like AIDS, SARS, HIV, CFS. We have even ruined good disease names like herpes by adding -simplex I and the like.

The only decent new disease name is hemorrhagic fever. We need to come up with better names for our diseases. Names with bite, names that sound like you are slowly dying in agony.

The fact that no person or news agency other than PBS' Frontline has been honest about the very simple reasons for going to war with Iraq, and that removing a dictator with things that go boom wasn't one of them. There are reasons, and then there are excuses.

Being told that it's a-okay to have me teaching part-time, but that I might be overqualified to work as a full-time instructor during the course of the interview for said full-time position. The fact that I won't get the full-time position because they'll probably give it to a jug-head who has no business being in a class-room as a student, much less a prof.

Realizing that other, similar colleges might consider me overqualified while knowing that the next step up will most likely consider me underqualified.

Referring to Hispanics (a term that the U.S. government invented) as though they were a single ethnic group. If that's the case, then the whole of the European continent, Britain, Ireland, the near east, and north Africa are all peopled by members of the same ethnic group.

Speaking of Africa as though it were a country and not a continent.

The scratch in my eye that keeps reopening to leave me in blinding pain every morning, including the one I had the aforementioned interview.

Not to sound like a populist demagogue, but banks have my goat at the moment.

The sad lack of free alcoholic beverages distributed by the government to people who work part-time and have difficulty acquiring full-time employment, or unemployed people with no employment, in a poor economy with a national unemployment rate over 6%.

Just the unemployment rate by itself, and that people are having difficulty paying rent and buying food, much less a luxury like booze.

Dealing directly and extensively with people I dislike, especially pain in the ass co-workers.

Women who turn their noses up at men who make less than $100,000 a year. That's roughly 98% of them in this town. The other 2% are already married to guys who make less than $100,000 a year, leaving me pretty much out in the cold.

That the odds of being shot, stabbed, or bounced repeatedly off the front windshield of a speeding taxi attempting to swerve through traffic with its passenger side wheels on the sidewalk are better than experiencing even moderately good fortune.

That by next year, the only good show on HBO will be Six Feet Under. An excellent series, but my life has so little. How 'bout just one more season of The Sopranos after this next one, Gandolfini? What do you say?

Finally, the very last thing that's annoyed me lately, television commercials where one character pretends to accept the meaning of a word or phrase spoken by another character except the second character deals in reality and the first character has his own language and lives in his own little world. Like the one where that rich asshole who made his money the old-fashioned way he inherited it and never worked a goddam day in his privileged life in the pickup with his gold-digging wife and whiny children with a sense of entitlement, hauling a fucking boat, the total monetary value of both vehicles being more than most people will see in their entire lives represents himself as a trucker to an actual trucker and the rich jag-off thinks he's a trucker because he has a fucking pick-up!

I almost feel better. Except something else will piss me off tomorrow, and I'll be back where I started.

Buckethead, budget cuts are only half the picture, and the cuts could always have been vetoed by Jeb if he so desired. Furthermore, Pres. Rice in her one term, for all her talk of interstellar security, seemed more than willing to extend the already thin Fleet beyond its capabilities with police actions on every podunk world this side of the Coal Sack. If they weren't already committed in so many systems, it might have been easier NOT to get involved in rearguard actions against local enemies. I think THAT is the very nexus of the problem.

Need I remind you that since Pres. Clinton (shudder) took office, more than twenty new ships of the line have been sent toward the Coal Sack? Need I remind you that it would not now be too late, that those ships would not be all but lost, if it had not been for Bush/Rice's neo-interventionist, Imperial, very hands-on domestic policy (sending our own troops against New Scotland!! Seriously, now!!) sapping the once-mighty strength of the Murcheson Fleet.

There might be hundreds of people I would rather have in charge than our current President, but not even Washington, Jackson, or Grant could do anything more than delay the day our skies blacken with the shapes of the filthy, three-armed menace that will so soon erase us from the face of the Universe.

[moreover] "A Mote In God's Eye" might be pretty good, but Dan Simmon's "Hyperion" and its sequels beats it all to hell on all fronts.

Despite the pleas of the Bush/Rice administration, the budgets for the Murcheson fleet were reduced by the house budget committee (chaired by Clinton? Daschle lacky Rep. McAuliffe) to fund hive rat studies on Makassar. Just like them to underfund the fleet they are so willing to send on peacekeeping missions all over local space, instead of protecting us from the deadliest threat we know of.

It's bad enough being outnumbered by aliens who are stupid. But when you're massively outnumbered by aliens much smarter than you, it's a bad day.

[moreover] I mentioned this novel in my top five science fiction books list back in May. You should have read it by now! Lazy slackers.