Which, as everyone knows, stands for "Welcome To Facebook", or "What's This For?"
Kidding. It stands for "What The Fuck?"
A quick story. When I took the job as the Fred Thompson Show Digital Content Manager, I made a few changes to the web site. One of them was renaming the site's blog, which was then called the "Site Log" - an abyssmal name if ever there was one. I suggested the name "Fred Head Blog" to replace it.
Now the more obvious name would've been to abbreviate it the "FTS Blog". However, I mentioned to the Powers That Be that this would be a horrible choice because "FTS" also stands for "Fuck That Shit".
It got named the Fred Head Blog.
My point being that I'm old, and not particularly savvy on every single web trend, but I still caught this and prevented a PR disaster.
Obama's team is legendarily hip and trendy and internet savvy, yet this flew right over their heads like an eagle on meth.
If they can't manage the details on a simple PR campaign for the most important Obama speech for the year, how can we trust them to manage the details on [health care, national security, the economy, tax policy... whatever... fill in the fucking blank]?
If the tigers in this cartoon represented white people and the rabbits were "oppressed" American racial minorities, the NEA would've provided generous funding for this.
But it's Chinese communist party leaders and Chinese citizens, so the left will pretend this doesn't exist.
Your Nanny State, which is banning incandescent bulbs and forcing you to replace them with these dim, expensive bio-hazards says:
* Have people and pets leave the room, and avoid the breakage area on the way out.
* Open a window or door to the outdoors and leave the room for 5-10 minutes.
* Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system (H&AC), if you have one.
* Collect materials you will need to clean up the broken bulb: 1) Stiff paper or cardboard; 2) Sticky tape (e.g., duct tape); 3)Damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes (for hard surfaces); 4) Glass jar with a metal lid (such as a canning jar) or a sealable plastic bag(s)
* Carefully scoop up glass fragments and powder using stiff paper or cardboard and place debris and paper/cardboard in a glass jar with a metal lid. If a glass jar is not available, use a sealable plastic bag. (NOTE: Since a plastic bag will not prevent the mercury vapor from escaping, remove the plastic bag(s) from the home after cleanup.)
* Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small glass fragments and powder. Place the used tape in the glass jar or plastic bag.
* Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place the towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.
* Vacuuming of hard surfaces during cleanup is not recommended unless broken glass remains after all other cleanup steps have been taken. (NOTE: It is possible that vacuuming could spread mercury containing powder or mercury vapor, although available information on this problem is limited.) If vacuuming is needed to ensure removal of all broken glass, keep the following tips in mind: 1) Keep a window or door to the outdoors open; 2) Vacuum the area where the bulb was broken using the vacuum hose, if available; and 3) Remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister) and seal the bag/vacuum debris, and any materials used to clean the vacuum, in a plastic bag.
* Promptly place all bulb debris and cleanup materials, including vacuum cleaner bags, outdoors in a trash container or protected area until materials can be disposed of properly.
* Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your area. Some states and communities require fluorescent bulbs (broken or unbroken) be taken to a local recycling center.
* Wash your hands with soap and water after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing bulb debris and cleanup materials.
* Continue to air out the room where the bulb was broken and leave the AC system shut off, as practical, for several hours.
* The next several times you vacuum the rug or carpet, shut off the AC system if you have one, close the doors to other rooms, and open a window or door to the outside before vacuuming. Change the vacuum bag after each use in this area.
* After vacuuming is completed, keep the H&AC system shut off and the window or door to the outside open, as practical, for several hours.
First off, let's get one thing straight: She didn't go to jail for trying to get her kid into a better school. She went to jail for enrolling her kid fraudulently. She lied on an official document and signed her name. That's fraud. That's a crime. I won't condone it, no matter how sympathetic the cause. Which in this case ain't all that much, because after she lied to get her kids into the school, she lied to get them free school lunches, too.
Put a PB & J in a paper bag, woman. It ain't that hard.
But the funny thing is, this whole form kerfluffle is NOT that big of a deal to fix. If I know anything about bureaucrats it's that they hate doing any more paperwork than they have to. I'm sure they wanted to just make this whole thing go away, because she played them for fools for 2 years - a bit embarrassing for the school. So I suspect that after they discovered the ruse, they called her in & told her she'd been caught. And I'll bet that if she'd just agreed to pull her kid out, never come back, and keep her mouth shut, the incident would've been forgotten.
So I'm thinking that after she got caught, she went off on some sort of Jerry-Springer, high-toned, wobbly-necked, don't-mess-wif-a-sister "I didn't do anything wrong" rant, and pissed off the paper-pushers who were trying to be reasonable.
So they threw her fat, idiot, loud-mouth ass in jail.
Which serves her right.
Because lady, if you want your kid in a better district, then move there like everyone else.
And if you want to lie on forms, just shut up and take your medicine if you get caught.
But don't try to pull a scam, get busted, then proclaim that your noble cause absolves you of responsibility.
From an article on a dangerous new drug which is still being sold legally [emphasis mine]:
Sarah first bought the drug ten months ago after she read on an online forum that it could help with weight loss. [...] Within months of taking her first hit, their happy, healthy, newlywed daughter had become a paranoid, aggressive agoraphobic, insomniac. She dropped from a size 16 to a size six.
If the goal of the article was to frighten people away from using the drug, maybe they should've skipped the part about what a phenomal weight-loss product it is.
On a personal note, I recently bought a Roomba, because I finally admitted to myself that the mere thought of vacuuming makes me feel almost as miserable as the actual act.
Happy to report that buying a Roomba was totally worth it.
The first thing I discovered was that it's impossible not to anthropomorphize a Roomba. Because of the semi-random, yet deliberate nature of the cleaning pattern, there's something oddly lifelike about it. And the way it goes into a spiral when it finds a pile of dirt makes it look like it's VERY happy to be doing its job. Sorta like the door in Hitchhiker's Guide. Finally, there's its quaint little habit of bumping into things like a nearsighted puppy. Just adorable.
Within a day, I'd decided to name it Thumper, and started referring to it as "he" (figure if it were a girl, it'd be more graceful).
Now I'm not sure exactly how labor-saving it is, because I have to set up the virtual walls to keep him out of certain rooms, and move some furniture & power cords out of the way, and push his little start button, and empty his little dust bucket, and clean the hair out of his brushes. But the good part is that these things only take a couple minutes. I can stand to think about vacuuming for a couple minutes.
And the other good part is that he happily cleans under furniture that I haven't moved for years and couldn't get a vacuum under if I wanted to. And I'd rather pee on an electric fence than fiddle with my vacuum's hose attachment, so that problem's gone, too.
Two cautionary bits before you run out & buy one. First, I went with a slightly pricier model just so I could have the self-docking charging station. But it turns out that I usually take Thumper from room to room & do one room at a time, so this feature wasn't really worth the cost in terms of added convenience. Second, it's only really useful if every room in your house can be temporarily depopulated. If someone is ALWAYS running around the kitchen or the living room, you might get sick of stepping around the little guy.
Anyway, this purchase started out as a long-shot. Figured it would probably just be an expensive toy that would - ironically - sit around gathering dust.
Because for me, driving is - and has always been - simply about getting from one damn place to another without breaking down or having to listen to mechanical noises that portend doom in the process.
I'll bet this car could do that.
And let's be honest, because we're all friends here...
It's a hell of a lot better-looking than a fucking Aztec.
And yes, I'm dedicating this one to blogdaughter Tammi of Tammi's Trail, because I've met her, and - no shit - she has this exact same magical power.
And to Writer/Director/Composer Kurt Kuenne: Wow. That is some of the best damn filmmaking I've ever seen. Not a single wasted shot, not a single unnecessary word of dialogue. Every tiny bit of everything either develops character or moves the plot.
If Hollywood tried to tell this story, it would be full of useless, boring parts that did nothing but pad the film out to the requisite 105 minutes.
The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn’t write.
For what it's worth.
My personal experience is that I have definitely been hestitant to post some things I've written, but after posting them, I've always gotten enough "I feel that way, too" comments to make me realize that posting was the right call.
Figure at least try it once. If it doesn't work out the way you hoped, don't do it again. If it does, well...
The argument in favor basically boils down to this:
If you were an African-American junior high school student named James, would you want to hear your teacher and classmates reading aloud?
The answer is: who gives a crap?
Look, yeah, it was awkward and uncomfortable for me when there was a Harvey in some story (which happened from time to time). Mostly I dealt with it by just cringing & hunkering down, while I waited in misery for it to end.
Afterwards, I forgot about it and moved on with my life.
Because it was just an English class. It was just school. It was just a story.
Suck it up & move on.
You, too, "African-American junior high school student named James".
First, Drew Carey called and asked for his glasses back.
Second, these aren't Drew Carey's glasses, since Drew's lenses actually offer some degree of vision correction.
Yeah, Katie's glasses are fake. You can tell because there's no distortion of her eyes or face when you look through them:
Here's what real glasses do:
Sorry, Katie, but even if you spent 6 hours in the make-up department getting a Sheldon Cooper costume slapped on you, you'd still be impossible to take seriously on an intellectual level.
Please don't insult us by pretending that some faked-up BC's are gonna do the trick.
Yeah, he's an annoying liberal, but - unlike, say, Bill Maher or Margaret Cho - he's a comedian first, and takes his humor where he finds it.
And in this case, it's the San Francisco Happy Meal ban.
Ya know, the Daily Show crew makes this look effortless, like the material just writes itself. Kudos, though, to the unsung production team for taking the raw footage of this interview and editing it to add comedic timing elements that make it funny, while still honestly presenting what this short-bus bureaucrat actually said.
The guy was a nutjob who thought that the government was trying to control us through the use of grammar.
When the fuck has Sarah Palin ever cared about grammar?
Still, not the point.
Giffords had this coming to the same degree that every public figure has it coming. The thing is, the attention, publicity, adulation and press coverage that comes with having a high-profile job comes with a price. That price is that crazy people see you, obsess over you, and may decide for no good reason (since they're, you know, crazy) that YOU are the cause of their problems and must be removed.
Is the attention worth the risk? I don't know, ask John Lennon.
That's why I try to keep a low profile. For me, fame ain't worth the hate mail, the death threats, and the well-armed lunatics with mommy issues.
Full disclosure, I served on board the Enterprise from '87 to '91.
These are very hard to find. Apparently the uncensored versions violate YouTube's fine print, and I'm not digging around the virus-laden back alleys of the internet to find the uncuts, so you'll have to settle for this censored crap:
My take - it's cheesy, tasteless, morally-questionable sketch comedy. On the offensiveness scale, it probably falls somewhere between Kids in the Hall and MadTV.
Should the XO have been doing this?
Oh HELL yes!
The XO is basically as useless as the vice president. His whole job is to stay out the way until some Jap in a kamikaze plane crashes into the Captain, at which point he takes command of the ship.
That, and he's got this fancy blue-tiled hallway outside his office, the constant waxing of which gives the Marine contingent something to do between security drills - which consist largely of barging into rooms unannounced, pointing guns at people, and yelling at them to get on the floor.
Anyway, entertaining the troops is as good a use for the man as any.
The comments at the second video are largely supportive in an "ok... what's the big deal?" sorta way. Except the occasional snooty civilian who tosses out crap like this:
Seriously, we are talking about the Commanding Officer of a warship that is powered by nuclear reactors and carries planes capable of delivering nuclear warheads and entering ports around the globe. This man does not meet the criteria and does ot deserve to be in command.
Yeah, and these warships are staffed with men. Mostly young, immature, and half of whom can't legally drink in their own damn home port. If they've got a frat boy sense of humor, it's because they're about frat boy age.
And if they've got a locker room sense of humor, it's because they live in a thousand-foot-long floating locker room.
Oh, and they're on-call 24/7 for the duration of the deployment. It's not like they can go home at five o'clock and tell the needs of the Navy to go fuck themselves. YOU try living at the office building where you work for 6 months and then talk to me about maintaining a sense of decorum at all times.
Then there's this guy with a big ol' stick up his ass:
The problem I see is that the XO, second in command on a major warship, is acting like a frat boy clown. When you are at that level of command you cannot be just one of the guys. It's the same as the non-fraternization rules: you cannot be buddy-buddy with men you may have to order to their death.
Yes, you can. This ain't Dilbert's office with some pointy-haired boss that no one respects, staffed by neurotics with chips on their shoulders who are free at any time to quit and seek employment elsewhere. This is the Navy. You can't leave the job. You can't even leave the ship. So to make life tolerable as you count down the days until your contract with Uncle Sam expires, you do a lot of mental compartmentalizing, because as I mentioned, you can't physically separate yourself from your job. And you make distinctions between personal and professional behavior. If you're laughing and joking with an officer, and then suddenly some shit goes down and he barks an order at you, you follow it. Play time's over. You respect the rank and do what you're told.
So, no, that argument doesn't really wash.
And this one:
I know in my heart the vast majority of our military has respect for themselves and for our countries image so this is not the norm.
Dude... I got some REAL bad news for you. This is COMPLETELY typical of how our military members amuse themselves when not actively engaged in protecting the rights of YouTube commenters who put them on inhumanly high pedastals.
I'll give this guy the last word:
This humor is found on every ship in the fleet. This Navy is very good at what it does. Leave it alone and let do the job you are unwilling or unable to do.
Via Hot Air, Vanity Fair says that it cost the Congress over a million bucks to read the Constitution because they were in session, but not working:
I took the total FY 2011 costs for House salaries and expenses and House office buildings, then added half the costs of joint House-Senate expenses, the CBO, the Capitol Police and the Capitol power plant. Then I divided that sum by 205, the number of days the House was in session last year, then divided again by 24 (the number of hours in a day) and multiplied by 3 (the estimated length in hours of members reading the Constitution).
Ok, fair enough.
But to make it even fairer, let's look at how much Congress SPENT last year (well over 3 trillion), and run the same process.
I get about $2.27 billion that DIDN'T get spent in those same 3 hours, so I think America got the long end of the stick on this one.
