perfidy

However well intended, however laboriously justified, if you look closely enough, you'll often find that the results of grand government plans don't always match the rhetoric. Or worse, that the rhetoric was, well, bullshit.

Take, for instance, the recent goofy shift in the timing for switching back to Daylight Saving Time. From Brad Feld's blog, "Feld Thoughts", have a look at his initial take on the DST firedrill just recently encountered, if not endured, by Americans. Mr. Feld said:

I wrote a post on March 12th titled Daylight Savings Time is Stupid. A bunch of people agreed with me, but some didn’t, suggesting that (a) I was missing the point and it was more fun to have light at night than in the morning or (b) the “authorities” insisted that we’d get GDP gains, (c) there would be big energy savings helping save the world, and (d) restaurants and stores would make more money due to sunny night shopping. Oh – and I also learned DST = daylight saving time, not “savings.”

After the event, about which a manageable but still non-trivial amount of media ink was spilt warning us of the second coming of Y2K (and ignoring completely, or being so misinformed as not to have known, what a complete non-event that was in the real world), Mr. Feld checked in with one of his colleagues, "Ross the IT guy", for a real-life opinion on the matter.

A minute spent viewing "Comments on Daylight Saving Time from an IT Guy" provides clear, if not definitive, proof that it was all a waste of time. An excerpt highlighting variance between dreams and reality:

DST change (Daylight Savings Time) has made no difference in national energy consumption and probably cost us more than it saved in lost productivity.

Big shock, that. No net effect, based on several sources with which Ross, the IT guy, checked.

Since we are all home the same amount of time we're all pretty much using the same amount of energy.

It seems so obvious in retrospect that you'd think it would have been just as obvious in prospect.

There is, I should note, a dissenting comment on Feld's blog. It's backed by nothing, of course, and refers to "volumes of research on this area, it's not just politicians spouting off", but I remain unconvinced this was anything but a complete waste of time. The cost to update all the systems required to put the change into effect was a one-time cost, and won't be repeated through all future cycles from standard to daylight saving time. But the benefits, unlike the costs, seem ephemeral at best, and non-existent at worst, and I'll continue to believe that until it's credibly reported to be otherwise. I haven't seen any stories claiming savings, and have seen several, in addition to Mr Feld's, claiming the opposite.

It reminds me of another current hot-button issue, about which many folks clamor for immediate action without having scientifically, accurately, or definitively assessed the cost of inaction, or the benefits of action. Or, failing that as an impossibility, admitting that those same costs and benefits are about as quantifiable as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin.

But I'll spare you any further flogging of that particular horse, since I expect Minister Buckethead will soon be doing that job better than I can. Stay tuned.

Oregon, oh Oregon. Wedged into the middle of Ecotopia, Oregon is not much good for anything. But, it is a state, and therefore we must perforce ridicule it.

• A great place and not just a game where everyone dies
• Not Every State Can Have A Personality
• Home of quality babes like Tonya Harding and Monica Lewinski
• Spotted Owl... It's What's For Dinner
• We’d burn witches in our Salem, but they’ve gotten canny
• Like Hell, but wetter and smaller
• When we say Beaver State, we mean the animal, perverts
• As weird as California but not as pretty
• Communism failed everywhere else because Salem wasn't in charge
• Ever Dreaming of Conquest
• No Taxes, No Pollution, No Visitors
• We're tolerant because there are no minorities here
• 54-40 or fight!
• Where rain lives
• Do Not Fear Our Giant Prehistoric Trees
• Give me Birkenstocks or give me Death!
• From Chief Joseph to Senator Packwood in one century
• The Oregano Dime Bag State
• The Beavers don’t appreciate your insinuations
• Nike means victory, except here, where it means sweatshops and overpriced sneakers
• Ore Ida Perpetua
• The Big Beaver Furrier’s Dreamland
• In Oregon, Where Shadows Lie
• Holding Back the Sea since 1846
• Land of the Setting Sun
• Rufis Labiis Volat Propriis - She flies with her own red wings
• Oregon: The Apathetic Sta
• West West Virginia
• Just do it. But not with the beavers, that’s cruel
• Oregon - Deprogrammers Welcome
• Jerry Garcia was here!
• Crunch all you want. We'll make more.
• Women not required to shave their legs and armpits
• The Big Ear State
• Beaver! Beaver! Beaver!
• Got Plywood?
• Home of Skid Row
• The Hard-Case, Soft-Head State
• We're not named after a musical instrument
• The Pruny Hands State
• Where beer was reborn
• Keeping Idaho from falling into the ocean for 200 years
• At least we’re not New Jersey, we think
• Where grunge went to die
• The hippies found us. Not the other way around
• I'm a lumberjack, but I'm ok.
• S. M. Stirling Hates Us
• Windsurfing is fun, but not a viable means of escape from Oregon
• Waiting for LA
• Come visit our hippie internment camps
• We don't let you pump your own freaking gas because you're a moron
• Packwood. Beavers. See a pattern?
• Whiter than Ohio, but not as white bread
• Who’d a thunk the Oregon trail would bring us here?
• 100% Beaver and British Redcoat Free since 1902

Ohio, place of my birth. I love Ohio, really. I miss it, but not enough to go back on more than a temporary basis. Despite its virtues, Ohio is nevertheless easy to ridicule. It had a bad time there for a bit, and hasn't really recovered. So let's not make it any easier:

• Ohio: Pretty Much Over The Top In Suck
• Ohio - Almost As Thrilling As It Sounds
• The buckeye isn't the only thing with one eye
• It's more than just "hello" in Japanese.
• With an omnipotent universal supreme being of undetermined gender which may or may not exist, all things are technically possible!
• With God, all things except keeping our state motto are possible
• Safe for undergraduates since 1972
• At Least We're Not Michigan
• Ohio - The Fascinating Meat In a Indiana-Pennsylvania Sandwich
• Redefining "Average" for a new millennium
• We didn't know he'd grow up to be Marilyn Manson
• Stupid is the New Smart
• Hey, At Least Our Cows Are Sane
• Ohio - Shoddily Made Buckle of The Rust Belt
• Gateway to Hoosier Land
• Where the not-quite East meets the almost-Midwest
• We ruined it for everyone
• You Don't Have To Be Southern To Be a Frightening Hillbilly
• We know all about illegal immigrants. Ask us about Parma
• New Ohio! This next one will be dynamite, huge. You’ll see
• The Thingamabob State
• The Real Birthplace of Aviation, not those Lamers in NC
• Come on, the River Hasn't caught fire in almost a half Century
• The outstretched eastward facing phallus of the Midwest
• Rocky beaches, no riptide
• We have the worst medium-sized cities in the country
• Surf the North Coast!
• You'd think the home of Rock and Roll would be more… exciting
• We were prosperous, once
• You say "White Bread" like it's a bad thing
• Can you believe we almost fought a war to get Toledo?
• Best fucking Roller Coasters in the universe, baby
• I'll show you a Buckeye, Mister!
• No. That's not a satanic symbol. They're just stars for each of the 13 colonies!
• Ohio: Where one of your dad's friends lives
• We're actually quite lame, but you smell what I'm stepping in here
• Birthplace of seven Presidents, one of whom didn't even suck
• Go Indians... and take the Browns with you!
• Drew Carey doesn't even live here anymore
• Three yards and a cloud of dust
• Ohio, birthplace of the Drunkest, Fattest, Short-termiest, and Most Corrupt Presidents
• Rubber capital of the world. Like the tires, you pervert
• Ohio Thanks You For Your Pity
• Birthplace of the Hot Dog
• The Taft family started out fat and went downhill from there
• Birthplace of Three of the Five Greatest American Generals
• With God, All Things Are Possible -- and a little hush money to the governor doesn't hurt, either
• Don't Judge Us by Cleveland
• Hey, just stick with it. If plate tectonics holds up, someday we'll be in New Zealand
• Ohio: lots of nice, and largely dull, people.
• Tourism just hasn't been the same since 'WKRP in Cincinnati' was cancelled
• Don't Judge Us Until You See Indiana
• Tell West Virginia to move back to West Virginia
• A Good State
• Ohio: a Mohawk term meaning 'filthy, yet stupid'
• As Close to A Palindrome as You'll Get in This Country
• A million miles of boring
• The "Holy God This Is Boring" State
• Mayo Goes On Everything
• We almost killed Lake Erie once, and if it even looks at us funny, we’ll do it again
• Hey France, want it back?
• We're easy to spell
• Proud of Marilyn Manson, Marge Schott and Jerry Springer
• Home of the World Collegiate Cow Tipping Championships
• The old Northwest
• Cleveland's not as bad as it used to be
• We know the rules to euchre
• Soda? We say pop here, fucko.
• Screw this "Lake Effect Snow" Crap
• Ohio: Fat Ass Country
• Where people from Newark or Detroit can find a better life
• The Alabama of the North
• Ohio Escape Velocity higher than that of Jupiter
• German Humor, Appalachian Neatness
• The dropped Infinitive State
• Your broadcasters sound like us
• Tin Soldiers and Nixon's coming, We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio

[wik] Bonus slogans!

• Kiss your wife where it stinks: visit Ohio!
• More colleges per capita than any other state, as if that makes a difference
• Ohio: helping the gay small-business owner find somewhere else to live since
  1803
• George Washington's Back Forty
• Why they keep shootin at our presidents?
• Home of the Cleveland steamer
• North West Virginia
• Just passin' through!

Die Welt reports that the fat bastard Belgians are teaching their children that Ataturk, revered father of the modern secular Turkish state, was a total homo. Not surprisingly, initial response from the Bosporus is not receptive to this claim.

No time to translate the whole piece- feel free to work on it yourself and update as appropriate.

A corporate relocation firm has ranked the states in order of their putative business friendliness. All well and good, I suppose. I wonder if its any coincidence that the place of my birth ranked 49th, and the state of my current residence ranked #1. Probably not. Full list, for your perusing convenience, below the fold.

1 Virginia
2 South Carolina
3 Florida
4 North Carolina
5 Utah
6 Wyoming
7 South Dakota
8 Alabama
9 Georgia
10 Nebraska
11 Idaho
12 Nevada
13 Maryland
14 Oklahoma
15 Tennessee
16 Kansas
17 Washington
18 Iowa
19 Missouri
20 Oregon
21 North Dakota
22 Pennsylvania
23 Arkansas
24 Texas
25 Connecticut
26 Delaware
27 Montana
28 Massachusetts
29 Arizona
30 Mississippi
31 Michigan
32 New Mexico
33 Colorado
34 Vermont
35 Hawaii
36 New Hampshire
37 Louisiana
38 Indiana
39 Minnesota
40 Illinois
41 Maine
42 New York
43 New Jersey
44 Wisconsin
45 Kentucky
46 Alaska
47 Rhode Island
48 West Virginia
49 Ohio
50 California

North Carolina, birthplace of renowned presidents Johnson and Polk, and stuck with these slogans like lots of tiny, tiny albatrosses around its neck:

• We’re “Tar Heels,” because “Shit Heels” was already taken
• Tobacco is so a Vegetable
• Five million people; Fifteen last names
• We're part of Dixie. Don't let the “north” fool y’all
• If it weren’t for plate tectonics, we’d be in Morocco
• Let’s just be clear, our state is named for the King Charles who got beheaded, not the gay one
• The better, norther Carolina
• The first carton's free
• First in Flying Pirates
• You can't prove tobacco causes cancer
• Sure, we've got weird, blue-skinned, inbred mountain dwellers, but at least we don't still fly the confederate flag! Oh wait…
• The Scuppernong Grape State
• The Anti-Buccaneer State
• Gateway to Tennessee
• We're cheaper by the carton
• Join us in creating the Greater Carolina Co-Prosperity Sphere
• We’re moving to Virginia
• Under Chapter 11, thanks to the tobacco lawsuits
• Slavery, tobacco, as long as it involves the suffering of others, we're for it
• We're bigger than South Carolina
• The Turpentine State
• The New Jersey of the South
• We didn’t do any of the work, but we’ll gladly take credit for inventing the airplane
• Where white supremacy and NCAA basketball go hand in hand
• General Sherman Cheated

Interesting, and I'm half way there.

After a long - and perhaps justified - hiatus, the Ministry educational series, “Know your state mottoes” returns with that most statelike of states, New Mexico:

• I am become death, the destroyer of worlds
• Lizards make excellent pets
• We have reservations
• Yes, those are crosshairs on our flag, why?
• We may be new, but we’re not New Jersey.
• We’re the bomb
• Alien Welcome Center
• Like Old Mexico, Only Less Old
• We are TOO a State!
• Turquoise, Turquoise, Turquoise
• Just Deserts
• Bam!
• The Complimentary Bolo Tie State
• More than Just Sand, Rocks and Heat. Okay, Just Sand Rocks and Heat
• Soon to be Old Mexico
• It’s a dry heat, but then so’s the inside of an oven
• Really New, unlike faux new states like New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey.
• Almost as many nuclear explosions as Nevada
• It grows as it goes
• Birthplace of the fucking bomb
• Everybody is somebody in New Mexico, and therefore nobody is anybody
• Better than the Old Mexico
• The Elephant Butte State
• The Potash State
• Home of the New Mexico Cutthroat Trout
• You did make a wrong turn at Albuquerque

[wik] One of those mottoes is the actual state motto of New Mexico. Can you guess which one it is?

[alsø wik] I think it explains a lot that the most famous New Mexican short of Smokey the Bear, John Denver, is from Roswell.

[alsø alsø wik] In some isolated villages, such as Truchas, Chimayo', and Coyote in north-central New Mexico, some descendants of Spanish conquistadors still speak a form of 16th century Spanish used no where else in the world today. Like the Millunjins from West Virginia.

I guess it might be in certain areas, but it's instantaneous, when compared to something like that reported in this UK Telegraph story:

Two female students had heard Mr Safronov's body land and reported that he was still alive. They rang emergency services and were told to ring back in 30 minutes if the journalist was still moving. By that time he was dead.

[wik] Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

[alsø wik] Unrelated memo to myself: Don't even think of pissing off Vladimir Putin.

All these years, I've never really given much thought to them, and have remained uneducated about wolverines.

What, to my wondering eyes, should appear the other week but an article insert in the Economist of Feb 15th (really, just a sidebar), including a picture of a wolverine. Who knew they looked so much like beavers? Or would that be better stated as "fat-assed ferrets"? Silly me - I've always assumed it was just a small wolf. Not being from Michigan, I guess it's OK for me to have had such a gap in my knowledge. It's a shame that the online article omits the picture of the wolverine, as it was truly a nasty looking bugger. None of the first couple hundred wolverine pictures available in a Google Image search, after omitting those 90% which seemed to be related to the X-Men movies, came even close to capturing the bugger's nasty buggerishness.

Oh, and that article? (sorry - subscription only, near as I can tell, though how it classifies as "premium content" is a bit beyond me). It's about the proposed rebranding of Canada, and is entitled "Tenacious, smelly—and uncool". No, they weren't talking about Canada in the title, they were talking about what a poor choice a wolver-rat would be for a national symbol.

Close your eyes and think of Canada. Perhaps the picture that comes to mind is one of a country of cold winters and civilised prosperity. But Stephen Harper, the country's Conservative prime minister, has another idea. This month he suggested that the national image was best captured by the wolverine, a sort of weasel.

That seems odd. Wolverines have some unpleasant habits. They emit a foul-smelling musk and eat carrion. They are close relatives of skunks and their name translates as “glutton” in French. But Mr Harper was thinking of their reputation for aggression and tenacity in the face of much larger predators. Canada is no mouse beside the American elephant, but a wolverine next to a grizzly bear, he said. “We may be smaller but we're no less fierce about protecting our territory.”

The Economist goes on to remind readers that it's already suggested new symbology for Canada, back in 2003 - a moose wearing shades. So yeah, that's rather cool - a lot better than a nasty smelling sharp-clawed mole-like creature that eats carrion.

[wik] What? Ohio State fan? Moi?

Unlike my earlier post, which was an apparently futile attempt to forestall further posts from The BirdMan, this one's for real.

A bit of background is in order. Katy, Texas is one of the western suburbs of Houston, fast becoming the demographic center of the metropolitan area due to its inexorable growth. Pretty much all by itself, it's caused a massive construction project to widen Interstate 10 to something like 14 lanes from downtown to the west side.

Along with that growth has come a bit of highly-localized strife, the most recent installment of which can be found in this article from yesterday's Katy Times:

Baker Rd. pig races go “Daily”

By Nick Georgandis, Managing Editor

Thursday, February 8, 2007 1:56 PM CST

“The Daily Show” correspondent Rob Riggle, a alumni of “Saturday Night Live” and an improv comedian, holds a sausage-on-a-stick and can of beer while conducting an interview with a patron at the American Pig Race Friday night on Baker Road.

(Times photo/Nick Georgandis)

Those in attendance at Friday night's installment of Craig Baker's “American Pig Race” on Baker Road paid little heed to the camera crew at first - after all, members of the media have been no stranger to this part of town over the last couple of months. But when “The Daily Show with John Stewart” correspondent Rob Riggle decided to conduct an interview with one patron while simultaneously gnawing on an enormous sausage-on-a-stick and taking sips from a can of Busch Beer, there were plenty of double takes, pointed fingers and whispers from the 100-plus member crowd.

Craig Baker, a local businessman, owner of Craig Baker Marble Company, Inc., after whose family the road is named, is in the middle of a tiff with the Katy Islamic Association (K.I.A.).

Baker has stated that in late September, Yousuf Shaikh and Kamel Fotough came to his business to introduce themselves, then advised him that his business would not go well alongside their proposed mosque and Islamic Community Center, and that he would be wise to vacate the area.

Further detail, from an earlier story in November, 2006:

Craig Baker owns pigs. He's the guy behind the second big yellow sign on Baker Road. That's the one announcing Friday night pig races. "What does it matter, I can do whatever I want with my land right," asked landowner Craig Baker.

Sure can. But aren't pigs on the property line racing on a Friday night a little offensive to a Muslim neighbor?

"The meat of a pig is prohibited in the religion of Islam," said Katy Islamic Association member Youssof Allam. "It's looked upon as a dirty creature."

Yeah, there's that and also that Friday night is a Muslim holy day.

"That is definitely a slap in the face," said Allam..

Now before you go thinking Craig Baker is unfair, or full of hate, or somehow racist, hear him out.

Baker has long roots here. His family named the road and when the new neighbors moved in, he tells us, they asked him to move out. "Basically that I should package up my family and my business and find a place elsewhere," said Baker. "That's ridiculous, they just bought the place one week prior and he's telling me I should think about leaving."

This being Texas, and even though Houston lacks all the cowboy hats, boots, and big belt buckles of Dallas and other prototypical Texas towns, KIA isn't getting much sympathy so far. Instead, their alleged attempt to control use of someone else's land has gone over like the proverbial "turd in the punchbowl" ("like a fart in church"?). I wonder what the Koran has to say about either of those?

In any event, Comedy Central will reportedly be airing the episode at 10:00 Central Time, next Tuesday, Feb 13, 2007. I expect hilarity to ensue.

[wik] Other opinions on the matter exist, of course. I didn't say "any" I said "much".

[alsø wik] I'm thinking there's a chance that this isn't really a site affiliated with the K.I.A. Someone get the WIPO on the phone, pronto!

[alsø alsø wik] Let's not bullshit each other, however. This isn't a social or land demarcation issue - Baker gives every impression of disliking Islam, period. Which, he's totally free to do, in AmeriKKKa, no?

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Am I the only one who thinks Mr. Georgandis was snarkily opportunistic in his choice of photo? I wonder what she'd just said to him?

Reuters reports that in the aftermath of the recent round up of hundreds of illegal undocumented aliens workers, known to me as scofflaw foreigners, some people in California are fearful. Why are they fearful? Let's hear what Rosa Maria Salazar has to say. She is a cook at a Salvadoran cafe in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles:

"We're terrified. The police could come for us at any time and deport us."

As an aside, she made the above comment in Spanish. Reuters helpfully translated. But why is Rosa Maria frightened? Because, well, she's an illegal alien. She is here in this country illegally, and she is working illegally. I am sure that Rosa Maria is a nice woman, hard working and eager to make a better life for herself. No doubt that was difficult in her native Guatemala. But I am not overly moved by her terror. She has every right to be concerned that agents of our government will come and send her away, because, that's their job and she is a utterly and completely legitimate target for their scrutiny. She's breaking our laws just by being in Los Angeles.

This Reuters article is full of not so sly bias toward the "victims" of this latest sweep. Observe:

The 55-year-old undocumented worker from Guatemala is among many Hispanics deeply shaken by recent immigration raids at the heart of Latino communities in southern California.

I imagine that most of those frightened Hispanics are also illegal aliens. American citizens of Hispanic descent really don’t have to worry, now, do they? Should we be concerned that criminals are “shaken” by police patrols?

The-seven day Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweep, dubbed "Operation Return to Sender," targeted jails across five counties in the Los Angeles area, where police took 423 of what they called "criminal aliens" into federal custody for deportation, after being held on charges unrelated to their immigration status.

And look, more than half of the people rounded up were already rounded up, albeit for other crimes. Is the Hispanic community, and indeed concerned citizens throughout this great nation expected to weep for shame because 400 people already in jail are deported? Sheesh.

Federal agents from seven teams also fanned out in local communities, where they nabbed 338 undocumented immigrants, more than 150 of whom were classed as "immigration fugitives" -- foreign nationals who ignored final deportation orders.

And of the other half, almost half of them were not merely here illegally, but were actively running from immigration officials. These aren’t the grey masses of illagals, people who are in this country but under the radar. These are people who we have specifically told to go home, and for some reason are still here. Why were these “final deportation orders” not accompanied by a Federal Marshall and a plane ticket? Of the others, these undocumented immigrants yearning to be free, well they are 188 out of an estimated 2.5 million in California alone. It’s a start, but hardly a solution.

"We hadn't seen anything like this here before, and it came as a shock," said Antonio Bernabe, a community worker who runs a day labor program at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Why the fuck would this come as a shock to you, Antonio? The fact that we haven’t enforced our laws for decades might have lulled you into a false sense of security, but the writing has been on the wall for a little while now. And why aren’t you in jail for helping criminals evade justice?

"The police didn't just take people with deportation orders, they took anybody ... guys who were just hanging out in the street and even from a Jack in the Box restaurant ... and now people are afraid to go out," he added.

Well, damn, that’s just like, terrible. They took anybody who wasn’t here legally. How… fascist.

"We used to feel secure here," Nicaraguan electrician Manuel Salomon told Reuters as he sipped coffee in a Mexican bakery in the city. "But it looks like that honeymoon is over."

I certainly hope so, Manuel. I hope that you get arrested and deported. And then I hope that you turn around, and make your way back to this country legally.

This article, and many like it, are ridiculous in the euphemistic treatment of this issue. Calling Manuel, or others, “Undocumented Workers” or some other truth dodging phrase does not erase the fact that they are people who are breaking our laws, and have been showing contempt for laws since the moment they slipped across the border. They are illegal aliens – a nicely accurate phrase that has almost completely disappeared from the major media. I am not against immigration. I do not hate Hispanics. I am against illegal immigration, and I think that most people on this side of the issue realize that they are different issues despite the efforts of some on the other side to conflate them.

"I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've traveled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won't fall down." -- Mitch Hedberg

Newsweak is reporting that Iraq's economy, despite all the bombings and blood and death, is booming. According to one measure, 17% this year and projected for 13% next year. Amazing, really. I would imagine that a fair chunk of that healthy growth rate is the result of starting small - the first part of the growth curve is easy. Still and all, the fact that things are getting together enough for this sort of thing to happen is encouraging, especially in the face of the constant reminders that things are very, very bad indeed.

Via an email from a friend in Florida this afternoon, I found that there's been a brouhaha about road signs in Austria. Witness the map below, specifically the city a couple clicks northeast of the center of the map:

Allegedly, folks keep stealing the signs at the entry points to the city. Knowing Ken as I do, I decided it might be a good idea to attempt validation of the story, and found an initial reference to it, from back in August, 2005, at marijuana.com.

It doesn't particularly surprise me to find a site called "marijuana.com" so much as that I've never had occasion to notice it or that it was basically a pretty lame place. I guess that the site's proprietors are restricted in their ability to really do much with such a unique domain name, given the illegality of marijuana pretty much everywhere in the US. But, that aside, further research showed this, at answers.com {ellipses mine}:

Fucking (IPA: /ˈfʊkɪŋ/—the "u" is pronounced like the "u" in English "put") is a small settlement (population c. 150), part of the municipality of Tarsdorf [2], in the Innviertel region of western Upper Austria, located at 48°02′59″N, 12°50′59″E, bordering Bavaria. [3] It is near the city of Salzburg. The village is known to have existed as “Fucking” since at least 1070 and is named after a man from the 6th century called Focko. “Ing” is an old Germanic suffix meaning “people”; thus Fucking, in this case, means “place of Focko’s people”. [4] {...}

The settlement’s most famous feature is a traffic sign with its name on it beside which English-speaking tourists often stop to have their photograph taken. The sign is the most commonly stolen street sign in Austria.[5] Significant amounts of public funds are spent on replacing the stolen signs. In August 2005 the road signs were replaced with theft-proof signs welded to steel and secured in concrete to make the signs harder to take. [6]

Stories like those below are pure click-bait:

• Brits steal carloads of Fucking Austrian roadsigns
• The Village of Fucking
• What’s the Fucking joke?
• Welcome to Fucking Austria

There's a huge difference, I'm reminded, between "Welcome to Fucking Austria" and "Welcome to Fucking,Austria". In the extended entry, for the morbidly curious (such as me) who enjoy seeing newspaper stories full of f-bombs, a picture of an article describing one of the periodic outbreaks of this menace to municipal stability, along with a picture of the most frequently stolen road sign in Austria, if not all of Europe.

A map of the internet. Sweet.

Behold the glorious Chingrish of actual English Subtitles used in films made in Hong Kong.

1. I am damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way.
7. Take my advice, or I'll spank you without pants.
8. Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?
10. You always use violence. I should've ordered glutinous rice chicken.
11. I'll fire aimlessly if you don't come out!
14. I have been scared shitless too much lately.
16. Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected.
18. How can you use my intestines as a gift?
19. This will be of fine service for you, you bag of the scum. I am sure you will not mind that I remove your manhoods and leave them out on the dessert flour for your aunts to eat. [sic, of course]
20. Yah-hah, evil spider woman! I have captured you by the short rabbits and can now deliver you violently to your gynecologist for a thorough examination.
21. Greetings, large black person. Let us not forget to form a team up together and go into the country to inflict the pain of our karate feets on some ass of the giant lizard person.

From a WSJ dispatch delivered to my inbox 5 scant minutes ago:

Big Pharma Catches a Chill

Fears that Democrats will tackle drug pricing caused shares of pharmaceutical companies to slide, even as analysts cautioned that Democratic control of the House is unlikely to bring much immediate change for the industry.

My initial thought was "Good". My next thought, really just an amplified version of the first, was "Fuck 'em". But defining "'em" isn't necessarily as easily done as you might think.

A wise reader could intuit that I don't own any pharmaceutical stocks. That wise reader would be wrong, as it turns out. I own shares in Pfizer. But my view of Pfizer or any other pharmaceutical stock is separate from my view of the the economic relationship between the citizens of the US and their drug pushers. There are good companies with bad stocks, and vice versa. I presently like Pfizer's stock, but may not continue to do so. I don't like the industry, however.

If, by some freak of useful government action in the 110th Congress, our legislative overlords were to attempt to remedy the fact that US citizens pay exorbitant prices for drugs, I'd be hugely in favor. Do I think the drug companies make too much money? Nope, not overall. Do I think they make too much money from US citizens? Yep.

Part of that is the fault of some combination of drug company marketing and a peculiarly American desire to do with drugs what others do without. But a meaningful part of the mismatch is an indirect subsidy levied on Americans to pay for rock-bottom prices granted to other countries' citizens. No, it's not done out of the goodness of the drug companies' hearts - they negotiate prices with virtually all of their customers. All, it seems, except those in the US. The fact that they don't generally have to negotiate much at all inside our borders frees them to enter into aggressively negotiated deals elsewhere without shedding too many tears.

If it takes an act of Congress to get the rest of the world to pay the market rate, then so be it. If this results in other countries' citizens paying more for their drugs, then tough shit (though I'm sure there's a drug for that!). And if that market rate, or market resistance to it, has some initial detrimental effect on the drug companies, so also be it. A large component of the differential between US health care spending (as a portion of GDP) and that of the rest of the world is comprised of us paying for their drugs.

I hope the "analysts" referred to in the Wall Street Journal article are wrong. Godspeed, Pharma-bashers. 

One of the biggest failures of this administration, and indeed the last several administrations going back to the time of my birth, has been an unforgivably lax approach to the problem of our southern border. And now, a candidate for the House of Representatives and former contestant on the reality show The Apprentice has pointed out in a, well, colorful way just how lax it is.