perfidy

'Cause of the scary wordpress-eating-internets-worm, we are upgrading perfidy. Perfidy may behave oddly for a while. But since this will affect, by our calculations, as many as .001 persons, on average, don't worry too much.

When you're not sure you can hit a target in single-fire mode:

[wik] We'll never know now, as the video no longer exists.

This, more than anything I have ever experienced, makes me want to want to dig a hole and pull it in after me.

Watch the first minute or so, if you can, and then jump to 3:54.

Sheesh. I need more guns.

[wik] Ashton Kutcher as the face of the new order of the ages. Along with the obvious horror, a secondary horror is the staggering historical ignorance this little piece of unintentionally Orwellian theater demonstrates in its art design.

[alsø wik] Ashton Kutcher, I have always felt, represented something evil. I just wasn't sure until today what it was.

[alsø alsø wik] I for one would like to be among the first to welcome our Stepford Hollywood Elite Overlords. Non servium.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] My wife just suggested Non Servium would make a nice tshirt. So as not to implicate myself as a Satanist, we'd need to add a picture of Obama. Maybe done up Che-style, but I think the socialist realist depiction from that video would perhaps be most apropos.

[see the løveli lakes...] And really, wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër? Sweden seems almost Republican now.

2008 was a shitburger sandwich with a side of fries in many respects. Financially, it was a wash, and my work in the bowels of Customs and Border Protection was quite simply the worst work environment I have ever experienced. And I worked at a place where someone tried to kill me. Long hours of boredom and sociopathic coworkers were bookended by two hour commutes.

In a word, it completely fucking sucked.

But before our three remaining readers start dialing the suicide hotlines on my behalf, not all was crap on rye. For instance, there was the birth of my daughter Claire, which alone more than outweighed working for one of the tentacles of the Department of Homeland Security.

And all that free time at work gave me a lot of time to read. And my interminable commutes gave me a lot of time to ponder.

I wasn't really able to convert much of that to prolific blogging thanks to time constraints and the prejudices of the internet filters at DHS facilities. Which I hope to rectify, somewhat, in the near future.

Some of the fruits of my year of suffering are these:

I no longer believe that the entire community of astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists have the least fucking clue what is going on in the universe past where the air gets kinda thin.

I no longer have unlimited faith that democracy is the best system of government.

I think Velikovsky may have been right. Or at least on to something.

I drifted into these things sideways, really. While I am naturally a bit of a contrarian, (Okay, a really big contrarian. Shut up.) I have not made a habit of seeking out outre heretical thoughts just to make a spectacle of myself.

Since I was a kid, I have always read with amazement and delight all the breathless stories, describing all the remarkable, implausible theories modern science has come up with. Black holes, quasars, quantum strangeness. I ate it up and went back for seconds. And if it wasn't for beer, I might have actually been a physicist myself.

But in the nineties, I started getting a little dubious. Once, a friend of mine and I were attempting to explain the concept of Ockham's razor to a particularly dim and more than slightly drunk sorority chick. Why we thought that it was important that we should do so, and whether we thought it would do any good is beside the point. But in trying to find an example, we settled on gravity. We explained that mass attracts other bits of mass. You're sitting on a particularly large bit of mass. So it pulls you down. See? Simple. Can be explained by a few lines of equations, utterly predictable and nice.

But why is this explanation better than any others, she asked. Well, shit. Uh, imagine that there isn't any mystical force of gravity. Imagine that the only thing that is holding you in that chair is gravity trolls. Their job is to hold stuff down. There's trillions of them, and they, with infinite care, go around holding shit down. That's there job.

But I don't see them! Oh, we forgot to mention, they're invisible gravity trolls. You can't see or feel them. But trust us, they're holding you down right now.

Oh. But what about airplanes? she asked. Well, while the invisible gravity trolls are diligent, the curvy shapes of wings confuse them. They forget to hold them down. Helicopters work the same way. And, before you ask, hydrogen, helium and hot air make them drunk.

Why is there no gravity in space? Well, what do you think, invisible gravity trolls can breathe vacuum? How do satellites stay in orbit, then? Well, there's a long line of IGT's holding hands, and the last one is grabbing the satellite.

And so on. We spun out a massively baroque and ridiculous IGT theory of gravity. And then, we said that given the two theories that both explain the curious phenomenon of stuff not floating away, it's probably best to take the simpler one.

Anywho. Later on in that decade, we started hearing a lot about dark matter. And then more about dark energy. The universe, it seems, wasn't behaving right. The invisible gravity trolls were acting up - and a central bit was that galaxies were spinning as if there were much more mass than could be seen. So, invisible mass was proposed. Other problems arose, and dark energy explained these discrepancies.

It got to the point where cosmologists now insist, with their faces hanging out, that 96% of the universe is undetectable by pretty much any imaginable means. I started thinking, that smells like fudge, as in fudge factor. I started suspecting IGT's. But, not being a physicist, and not having anything better to put in in its place, I let it go.

Then I ran across Plasma Cosmology. The basic thought is that electromagnetism - a force which is 41 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity (that's 41 zeros) might just have something to do with how the universe fits together. For the same reason that a child's magnet can counteract the force of the inconceivably larger earth below it when it picks up a paper clip, electric and magnetic fields in space could have an effect on how stars, nebulas, and whatnot all behave.

They say, and I have come to believe, that substituting a gravity plus electromagnetic universe explains things better than a gravity only universe, and without resort to dark matter and dark energy - which had already seemed to me to be fudge factors more concerned with preserving theory than explaining what we actually see.

And that led in to a lot more stuff, which I plan on writing more about later.

But first, to get you started, read this introduction to plasma cosmology. It explains the basic idea in a readable way, and makes a good starting point.

By way of Boing Boing, there is this:

Seeing as there were bear sighted on my street over the Christmas holiday, I might need to get me one of them.

At least, I sure hope they do.

Growing up I always enjoyed Scandinavian mythology. To be sure I read alot of Greek tales as well and I found them no less exciting, what with the crazy monsters and the brave heroes and the beastiality. But the Norse tales were, I dunno, edgier somehow. That world was battle, broadsword, and blood on the ice, a far cry from the Mediterranean climes, vineyards, and olive groves of the Greeks. I knew what deep snow and arctic chills were about; I don't think I could have picked an olive branch out of a lineup. While the Norse tales were more challenging, due perhaps to their obscurity relative to the domination of Greco/Roman sources on subsequent publication, their telling always resonated with me in a way the Greek stuff never did. They were both fantastical, but the Norse tales will always seem more...real.

Which brings me to the Ragnarok, the final war of Gods and Men.

As best I understand the Norse cosmology, when men die they go to one of three places: Hel, a horrible place of shadow and icy mist reserved for that sorry lot who die in their sleep of old age, and from which none return; Volkvangr, Freya's hall, for folks who died in violence but not neccessarily in glorious battle, not sure what becomes of these folks in the end; and of course Valhalla, Odin's hall.

Valhalla was reserved for the bravest warriors who fell in battle. Odin's servants, valkyrie, would choose the greatest of the slain (and indeed may have caused their deaths in the first place, by "fettering" or otherwise crippling the hero at the critical moment- there is seemingly some overlap between conceptions of Norse valkyrie and the Celtic Morrigan here), and wing them to Valhalla. There, the spirits of the Earth's mightiest warriors fight by day and feast by night, training to serve under Odin's command at the Ragnarok. And even though Fate has foretold the result and the ramifications of the final battle and the end of the universe, no party- Men, the dread Jotun (giants), or even the Gods themselves- can alter it.

So where does that leave me?

I don't have a battle, even a metaphorical one, that would hope to qualify me for Valhalla. And I'm not going to be the guy who tries to get in, you know, by default. I'm not going to tell thousands of burly vikings that I should be included because, yeah, I didn't fight an actual battle but I *DID* improve the database interface between IT, Advancement, and Admissions and got 5's across the board at my last annual review because of it, which was kinda like a battle because Jean in IT is so prickly and it's almost impossible to get a meeting with Janet in the Business Office to finalize the budget.

No sir.

My only hope is that Asgard's army will need administrators. Maybe on some fateful day the valkyrie will come, desperately in need of a chubby douchebag administrator to help do some import and config work so Valhalla's database can talk to Volkvangr's, and thereby contribute to the final battle.

Because unless that's the case, I'm probably going straight to Hel.

[wik] Apparently, Zombies suck at keeping their websites up. I've adjusted the image so that it again displays, but no guarantees into the future

A taste:

luvs2cuddle

Tagline: "I enjoy long, slow, lumbering walks on the beach"

Interests: Lumbering, staring vacantly, cuddling

Dislikes: Sniper fire, barricaded windows, fast-moving automobiles

Note well the disclaimer, however:

Disclaimer: ZombieHarmony is for zombies only. We advise signing up for ZombieHarmony only if you lack a pulse, have limited motor skills, or feel an intense desire to feast on human beings. We are not responsible for lost or ingested loved ones. If you go on a date with a zombie, we cannot be held liable for contributing to the apocalypse.

Please date responsibly: bring a baseball bat or crowbar.

Today is the centenary of the Tunguska event, when something mysterious happened in remotest Siberia, leveling trees over hundreds of square miles, and leaving assorted caribou and bears and such dazed and befuddled.  People were slow to pay attention to this marvelous occurrence.  Perhaps we can forgive them, seeing as it happened so very far from fashionable and comfortable places, and anyway, just as we were getting ready to go, the whole damn World War thing started.  And after that was over, half the world turned commie, and screw that for breakfast, anyway.

So, the Tunguska event.  Something had a hate on for trees.  Comet, asteroid, methane gas, UFOs, or the mother of all lightning strikes.  (See some explanations here, at the fantastically thorough and accurate, all-encompassing and never to be sufficiently praised wikipedia.)

The impact (if it was indeed an impact) was on essentially the same latitude as St. Petersburg.  And several articles have pointed out that back in the sixties, the crack young staff of the Guiness World Records figured out that if the space thingy had been stick in traffic for four hours and forty seven minutes, then it would have been the capital of Imperial Russia and seat of the Tsars that would have been tatered, rather than some bog-soaked, mosquito infested corner of Siberian hell.

Think of the implications of that one.

Three years after the Russo-Japanese War, and the abortive 1905 uprisings.  But, before the rise of the Bolsheviks.  Losing St. Petersburg would have really gutted the centralized Russian Empire.  What effect would that have had on a) WWI, b) world Communism and c) the Moon Race?

Discuss.

Lately I've been thinking about how I might best avoid the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the event I went back in time 70-odd million years, either by design (time machine) or by accident (CERN's accelerator warping spacetime and hurling me back to the Cretaceous).

Howevermuch 12 gauge ammo you might have managed to bring with you will not be enough. The male T rex was 40+ feet long and every ounce of five tons; females even bigger. It would be like trying to kill a whale with a shotgun- I suppose you could do it, eventually. But imagine that the whale is not trying desperately to get away from you, but is instead bent on pursuing you until you are food. What are you going to do with your shotgun then? Look, when we're talking zombies, shooting your way out can be a valid option. When we're talking about dinosaur survival, I don't think firearms are the way to go.

So now what?

My thinking so far is that an animal as massive as a T rex must have had a similarly massive range. It is not hard to imagine a box 20km on a side, for example, that would encompass enough prey animals to sustain the beast. So that's something right there- you try to be the needle in this haystack, and that's really the natrual instinct of tiny mammals isn't it? Avoid. Hide. Dig. Burrow. Interesting that that's my initial thinking as well. This may be optimistic, but I don't think predators that size would be so hard to stay away from. A critical first step would be in indentifying what T rex liked to eat, and then staying the f*ck away from that.

Another bit that would have to be resolved quickly is understanding their mating habits. When they are in rut or pregnant appetites might be ravenous, even by dinosaur standards, bringing them into areas they may not typically go in their search for food. Similarly, we need to recognize possible nesting habitats, and stay out of those.

The success of the avoidance plan hinges on the things being solitary, and there's no way to be sure until you get there. It's possible they could operate as a team, or at least tolerate other individuals in close proximity at certain times of the year or under certain environmental conditions, the way crocodiles can. If that's the case, and you're hiding not from one scary monster but several, that's a more complex problem that I am not prepared to address at this time.

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.

Alrighty then. Go read this, and then - only then - click the more perfidy button to see the image. And then only if you want to. It's warped, sick, and wrong. I warned you. I also found it highly amusing, but then, I am sick, wrong and warped. If you don't look at the picture, I estimate that you will get at least 85% of the total humor. Your choice.

Thanks to Fist of Blog.

[wik] So 18 years later, I looked for this picture again and couldn't find it. Here's a link to the forum screenshots that are the original bit. I believe based purely on vague memories that there is another sequence of forum posts that have different images, including the one above in my original post. But no idea where those might have gone. In case of even more future bit rot, here's the screenshots I could find:

From Saturday's WSJ: (still subscription, for now)

Burns's Exit Complicates Nuclear Negotiations

Picture located, curiously enough, at the Republicans' Energy & Commerce Committee web site, so perhaps I'm not the first guy to have made this connection.

---

(There's more than one "Burns" affiliated with the story, so adding Monty Burns to the mix isn't a stretch)

Burns's Exit Complicates
Nuclear Negotiations
By JAY SOLOMON
January 19, 2008; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- The surprise resignation of the Bush administration's point man on Iran and India, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, injects more uncertainty into U.S. efforts to contain the spread of nuclear technologies.

In the coming weeks, Washington aims to cinch key objectives concerning both countries: a new round of United Nations sanctions against Tehran and a nuclear-cooperation pact with New Delhi. But those policy initiatives, particularly in the case of Iran, haven't generated international consensus, and U.S. and European diplomats say both initiatives, which were spearheaded by Mr. Burns, the undersecretary for political affairs, might ultimately falter.

President Bush named William Burns, U.S. ambassador to Moscow, to succeed Nicholas Burns beginning in April. (The two men aren't related.)

Nicholas Burns, who plans to leave the department at the end of March, is a career diplomat. Since Ms. Rice took the reins of the State Department in early 2005, Mr. Burns, 51 years old, has become one of her must trusted advisers.

In recent months, there have been increasing signs that Washington's strategies toward Iran and India aren't working. Mr. Burns has been particularly focused in recent weeks on pushing the U.N. Security Council to pass a third round of economic sanctions against Tehran aimed at forcing it to suspend its nuclear-development work. But many European and U.S. diplomats said it is increasingly unlikely that sanctions will be approved with any real bite -- especially since a recent U.S. intelligence report found that Tehran had scrapped its nuclear-weapons program in 2003.

The India issue has also tested Mr. Burns in recent months. Washington and New Delhi have agreed to allow the U.S. to share nuclear fuel and technologies with India in return for greater oversight of India's nuclear programs by the International Atomic Energy Agency and other international bodies. But communist and socialist parties, wary of a close alignment with Washington, are threatening to topple Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government if he ratifies the agreement.

New Delhi is negotiating a new safeguards agreement with the IAEA, which, once passed, could allow Mr. Singh to formally sign the nuclear pact in the next two to three months. But U.S. officials said they remain uncertain as to whether Mr. Singh will challenge his government's political partners.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com

Given the obvious obsession with affection for all things zombie-related around here, I felt it my civic duty to let you know about one of the t-shirts currently available at woot.

Go now and purchase. Do your part to educate the masses about the oncoming bloody onslaught.

[wik] @Buckethead: What if Buckethead Jr. was wearing a t-shirt ABOUT Zombies? Does that mean he'd be allowed to say bad words?

Good nutrition is just as important for the unliving as the living.

This morning, not 30 minutes ago, I helped a nun up a flight of stairs.

The facilities people who clear the snow-n-ice didn't clear the steps to their edges, meaning that she couldn't reach a handrail. Poor thing didn't want to risk going up unsupported, which is entirely understandable as she is just this side of 90. I happened to walk out when she needed a hand coming in, so there you go. I also confided to her that I almost took a digger this morning on my very own steps, so as not to let her feel any more frail than she already might.

So here's my question: which specific act of evil in my long career of prickiness might now be negated? It seems that in life's equation, I just got a +1 that ought to cancel a -1 somewhere else.

Maybe I can be made right with Vishnu for all the ants I torched with a magnifying glass. Maybe I can even get off the hook with the little green plastic god that oversees little green plastic army men; lord knows he'd want a piece of me. Then again, what if G-d is a god of war and conflict, for which there is a fair amount of evidence. This act today, then, might actually bring me backwards.

Talking to my mom the other day, we wondered if any city has suffered longer than Cleveland. It has been more than forty years since Cleveland has won a sports championship of any flavor. Boston fans have until recently been the greatest of whiners, bemoaning endlessly the decades that had lapsed since the Red Sox won a World Series. Waaagh, the curse of the Bambino, waagh, Bucky Fucking Dent, waaagh.

Of course, in the meantime, they’ve had several recent Patriots Super Bowl wins, and the Celtics once won eight NBA titles in a row, and that was in the middle of a 11 of 13 stretch. And even more of course, that’s completely aside of the fact that the Chicago Cubs had gone a full decade longer without a World Series win, and in fact never will win the World Series again.

A little research turned up a startling fact. There are 21 cities with at least three major league teams out of a possible four. (Only New York City has two of each, though once Los Angeles did. Cleveland had, for several years in the seventies, a “grand slam” – one team in each of the majors.) Of these, all but three have won at least one championship since 1990, and most have won one in the current decade. The three sad cities are Philadelphia, Seattle and Cleveland. The ‘76ers won in 1983, and the Super Sonics last won a championship in ’79. And Cleveland has been winless since the two days after Christmas, 1964 when the Browns beat the Baltimore Colts 27-0.

We’ve been suffering fifteen years longer.

But hey, surely there are other sufferers out there! Well, let’s be generous and roll in cities with only two major league teams. It gets only slightly tougher to complain. There are ten more cities with two major league franchises. Of these, Charlotte, Nashville and New Orleans have had no championships, ever. But – but! - in each of these cities, major league sports came to the city after Cleveland’s last championship: New Orleans just after, and Charlotte and Nashville within the last decade or so.

So they haven’t suffered longer.

Only one city has actually gone longer without a championship. San Diego, whose Chargers won an AFL League championship in ’63, one year before the Browns’ last NFL Championship. The Bills just miss, and squeak by with a ’65 AFL win. However if you, like my mom, consider the AFL to have been a minor league up until the beginning of the merger with the NFL – the first Super Bowl (technically, the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game that was later renamed Super Bowl I) in 1967 – then Cleveland is still the city with the most suffering.

ESPN agrees – a couple years back they voted Cleveland the most tortured sports city.

And I know from personal experience that this is true.

So says the heading at Long or Short Capital. The reason, below the fold.

Since I'm a master of the obvious, that's almost certainly the result of some funster fucking around at end of day. But still.

The wise men at LoS close with:

Recommendation: Sell through to the end times.

Marginally related, since I'm fake-blogging anyway, also at LoS:

The Cephalopod Story Strengthened

Did your mama hit you? Then you said it right.

Recently, my son has been exposed (as all children eventually are) to foul language, cursing, swearing, oaths, and the like. Surprisingly, little of this exposure has come from me. As responsible parental units, we have taken a moderate approach in discouraging the boy from dropping the F-bomb and its cousins. We don't freak out, we don't appear shocked and horrified; we just calmly beat the crap out of him, point out that it is impolite to say things like that, and that it is something that we generally don't do. This method has proven to be fairly effective.

The other day, I was watching a zombie flick late in the evening. The boy woke up, and we watched some brain munching for a bit. John pointed out, accurately, that there was a rather copious amount of bad words along with the brain eating. I explained that when people are scared, they often use bad words. (Screenwriters also use bad words when they are frightened by deadlines or being viewed as "inauthentic" or "not edgy.") This led to a discussion of the appropriate use of bad language.

The boy played with the envelope a little.

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm scared." No, not really.

"Okay, just when there's a spider." Nope. If it's dark. If my sister sits on me. If mommy doesn't buy me a toy. If I see Brittney Spears. If...

Well, I wanted to watch the rest of the movie. "It's time to go to bed, and not use bad words."

"Well, I'll just use bad words when I'm being chased by zombies."

"Son, you have my permission to use any bad word you can think of, as many times as you want." His eyes lit up with the possibilities.

"But only if the zombies come, and not before." Despair. "Now back in bed."

I was reminded of this incident when I ran across this little gem, from someone who takes a rather opposite approach to swearing for the very young:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to call him a “ball-draining cum junkie”. She should be able to deflect all those silly little schoolyard taunts by tossing off a casual “Lick my ass, fucktard.”

And if some boy says she has cooties, I want her to fire right back with “Yeah. Well, we’ll see how easy you say that when my cock’s in your mouth.” This doesn’t make any sense, of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

[wik] I realized, just as soon as Johno pointed it out, that my post was mysteriously truncated. In reconstituting the post, I realized that the text at the link is different from the quote above. Sometime between Thursday, May 15, 2003 4:55:06 PM and earlier this afternoon, Jeff Vogel bowdlerized (a bit) his own text. This is the new version on his website:

For reasons that are not yet clear to me, a lot of parents we know are worried about their children learning cuss words. This is a truly charming display of futility. In the world we live in, even the most sheltered Amish child will have learned enough swear words to cuss like a longshoreman or the Irish by the time it is five.

So I am approaching the issue from a much more realistic perspective. I am not going to waste energy keeping Cordelia from swear words. Instead, I’m going to skip a step and just make sure that she is able to use them in more colorful ways than her schoolyard chums.

If some dirty little sprog says she is a poo-poo head, I want her to be able to lash out with an uninterrupted spray of obscenities, most of which will have no meaning to either her or her opponent. The enemy may not understand why he has just been called a “fucktard,” of course, but hopefully it’ll confuse and distract him enough for her to really put the boot in.

I see this as simply giving her the skills she needs to function in a complex and ever-changing world.

How disappointing, and how glad I didn't empty the trash after I deleted the word doc that contained the original.

Nobody's posted about zombies in a few days, and I just happen to have something here.

I spent a day in Legoland, California this past week, and was frankly astounded at their Miniland - a place where they have used some 40 million bricks to make stunningly accurate recreations of real-world places. You could spend hours looking at their Las Vegas Strip, New York City, New Orleans, and more, and still not see everything.

However...

With the obvious pride in attention to detail, a few things jumped out at me (or crawled, or shambled, as the case may be). I shall let the pictures do the talking from here on out.

It is a good day to be a Cleveland Sports fan. I have proof. Cleveland is often slighted by the national sports press - most recently, ESPN devoted nine minutes to analysing the aftermath of the Yankee's defeat in the first playoff series and mentioned the Indians not once. Granted, the possible demise of Joe Torre's storied career is significant. But really. The Yankees lost, the Indians won.

Between episodes like that, and the constant pain of watching highlight reals where, seven times out of ten, the victims of the highlighted star is a Cleveland team, it gets kind of annoying. Even when Cleveland teams do well, we still get ignored.

Yet, today was a good day. Looking at my Google News page, I scrolled down to the sports section, and look at this:

All three of the featured stories are about my teams. (Counting OSU as a Cleveland team, which is fair, I believe.) I've never seen anything like it before, and unless the NBA moves its opening day back to October - which is not totally implausible, given that their post season stretches into July - will never be topped.

Despite living more than a year quite contentedly without cable, I have summoned the cable minions to my home, because I think, hope, that I will have cause to watch the World Series this year. I may even buy a bigger tv.

[wik] I will note, however, that they still couldn't bear to put up a picture of someone in a Browns uniform.