Sandhill Trek

Technology drives out thought...

Fiddling with listics (fiddlistics, fatalistics?) I haven't taken the time to comment on any of the good stuff or the bad that's happening all around us.  How about this breath of sanity from the Oglala Sioux:

"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty." President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, says "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

The Federal Elections Commission has exempted blogs from campaign contribution and spending limits. 

In a unanimous vote yesterday, the Federal Election Commission left unregulated almost all political activity on the Internet except for paid political advertisements. Campaigns buying such ads will have to use money raised under the limits of current federal campaign law.

Perhaps most important, the commission effectively granted media exemptions to bloggers and other activists using the Web to allow them to praise and criticize politicians, just as newspapers can, without fear of federal interference.

This one sounds great but it will probably bite us on the ass again as the army of the Republican christian faithful smurf hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contributions through PayPal to the zombies and vampires they have running the country.  They were just getting good at it in 2004.  Made the Colombian Cartel look like a piggy bank.  I can just see the money baling machines in the Football's basement, the Pundit and Instawife wheeling grocery carts of cash into Captain Blowhard's garage.  Well, even though the rank criminal minds of the Republican Party will corrupt it out of all proportion, it still has the odor of a victory for democracy and egalitarian politics at this point.  I'm thinking Atrios and Kos better stay out of light planes for the next few years.

And speaking of values and practices... how about those jokers at Pew?  Let's make a list of the ten worst sins.  Well, there's straining Aqua Velva through a loaf of french bread before drinking it.  Or, if you prefer something more psychedelic, there's always Robitussin from a brown paper bag.  But who are these people really?  Who the fuck did they poll to find out that

A majority of Republicans say 7 of the 10 behaviors are wrong, while a majority of Democrats say just adultery, underreporting income taxes and drinking to excess are wrong.

Should I be pleased that while Democrats and Republicans agree that getting totally shit-faced while balling the neighbor's spouse is indeed repugnant behavior, far fewer Democrats than Republicans consider homosexuality to be morally wrong.  Indeed, if you read it the way the newspapers are reporting it, you'll see that there is a moral equivalency between lying to spare someone's feelings and homosexuality.  Just so we're straight about this, if I get shit-faced and let your husband blow me, I should probably lie about it to spare your feelings.  This l'il white lie - I think - will reduce the overall rate of perceived fuckéduppédness to roughly one-third if you're a lady with a college degree.

I have to finish building that blog so I don't miss out on all this good stuff!

Googling Greta Gobbler

The uninitiated, reading this post first in a sequence of postings might fail to note that it is actually the most recent in a set of ever more meaningless items.  The reverse chronological nature of blog publication obscures the onset of insanity and argues for the reverse.  If you are presented with this page and read down in a conventional manner, you might think things are becoming more normal.  You would be wrong of course.  Things will never be normal again.  They are monstrously ab.  But to see this you would have to start at the bottom and read up, and just how many turtles deep do you wish to descend before you assign some arbitrary bottom condition?

Chris Locke observed that chat room conversations devolve to some kind of lowest common detonator or nonsense at best and that our "empowerment" through digital communications is wasted, abused, or at best misused.  The same author also said,

Never has mechanism managed to pass so successfully for subject matter. If word processing made us into unwilling typesetters, the World Wide Web and all its multifarious attachments have transformed us into some high-tech analog of the traveling vacuum cleaner salesperson. We are all selling to each other, constantly. Encouraging our mutually pointless traffic back and forth across a digital landscape more frightening than those that cradle Dali's melting watches, cluttered with flotsam-and-jetsam pitches, late breaking scoops on matters we could give a shit about, superfluous weather reports for people who no longer go outside, and ads for articles of increasingly unnecessary clothing.

Googling Grasshopper

Kung fu or wireless?

Jar gone...

barney: n.

In Commonwealth hackish, barney is to fred (sense    #1) as bar is to foo.  That    is, people who commonly use fred as    their first metasyntactic variable will often use barney second.  The reference is, of course, to    Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.

The Jargon Lexicon provides a few moments of weirdness, followed by a hollow feeling of incompleteness.  For example, while "packet-over-air" is fully explicated, the more common "backhoe fade" is not listed.

Live Blogging the Awards of the Academy

Manolo (who loves the shoes) will be right there, live blogging his little heart out!

Needs a caption...

Riots in the Packer Street...

It's happened here again following a blasphemous cartooning incident involving the sacred image of Saint Vince...  as the Iowahawk notes,

Over the past five years, the volatile Midwest has produced violent rage like the knockwurst output at Milwaukee's venerable Usinger's -- sudden, repeated, and in long unbroken strings. One of the principle catalysts was the rise the Uff Da insurgency, led by the enigmatic Pastor Duane Gunderson, who seek a unified Lutheran caliphate stretching from the Great Plains to Lake Huron, and the banning of non-Big 10/Pac 10 apostates from the Rose Bowl. Gunderson remains in hiding, but his influence was seen last year in the widely publicized Lutefisk desecration riots that rocked the Heartland amid the pancake breakfast holidays.

Still, outside of the Dells and a handful of violent outposts near its western Mississippi River border, Wisconsin remained a relatively calm exception to the Midwestern maelstrom surrounding it -- a fact that experts attribute to subtle differences in culture and religion.

"Unlike the ultra-extreme, radical Lutheran sectarians of Iowa and Minnesota, most ethnic Wisconsinites belong to the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod," said Joseph Killian, a Midwestern Studies professor at Emory University in Atlanta. "And if you add in three Super Bowl titles, easier access to beer, and walleye fishing, and you're going to have a much calmer and more stable culture." 

All that would change in November with the publication of four cartoons in a Texas office newsletter -- cartoons that today have brought this once happily beer-goggled society to the precipice of all-out culture war.

Bubble Wrap redux

That previous post was more of a draft.  Jeneane explains the Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day thing better than I could with all my lame hiphop posturing.  It's real and while today is almost over, the contest is just beginning.

You know that you love bubble wrap, so...

Think about it.  Foam popcorn, newspaper stuffing, or crisp poppable little percussion shots of air tightly bound in plastic paradiddle goodness?  What pops your bubble?

Male Problem

Don't look at this.  Brian said don't look, and I'm sorry I did.

Best Blonde Joke Ever

Thanks to Madame Levy for the link to [link removed at request of linkee].  (And Brian, don't over-analyze it, okay?)  Beth is a blonde.  I take these things very seriously.  I usually would not link to a blonde joke, nor would I tell one.  But this time, well...  it has to be done.

This one had me ROTFLMAO.

(update... we're rolling down the curtains on this one.  Major bandwidth problems all up and down the path)