The GOP is so out of touch with reality, it's like they're a cult. Either that, or they all got the memo that Osama has been in a cell at Gitmo for months now.

Well, I would have made the plane to Ft. Lauderdale except for the fact that the kid who was my ride to the airport didn't show until 15 minutes before the plane took off. The flight was at 8:45AM, and I hit the Southwest ticket counter at 8:43. The lady just laughed at me and booked me on the 10AM, no big deal.

Now I'm getting it going the other direction - my 8PM flight to Tampa is delayed until 9:45. The only saving grace (as you may have already deduced) is that the bar at this airport has wifi. God bless "Cruzan Islands Grille" at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, that's all I can say.

Eesh, I have to fly to Ft. Lauderdale in about eight hours. I should really be asleep already, but unfortunately my internal clock insists that it's still awake-time.

If I wake up sleepy and on-time, that'll be fine with me - the only thing that's going to be annoying is that it's one of those up-and-down flights that are less than an hour from tarmac to tarmac. I've finally got the hang of falling asleep on the airplane (as opposed to gripping the arm rests the whole time), so I'll awaken in a dead panic when the landing gear hit the earth as usual. The only saving grace is that I'm not travelling with my friend/colleague Matt, who is always highly amused when I go from peaceful repose to an impression of a man being attacked by ferrets upon touch-down. Too many times have I awakened on airplanes at landing time in a cold sweat, only to see him ROTFL.

Oh well, wish me luck.

Bruce Sterling is one of my very favorite writers, and every year he throws a party at his house in Austin during SXSW (which I haven't gotten around to going to yet). The last party he threw resulted in 600 people showing up. Although they were well-behaved, the police came to investigate a noise complaint - although the only sound was a shitload of nerds talking - and also, well, that's just a hell of a lot of people to have in your house. He recently gave an interesting security lecture about it.

People will do anything for a GMail account, it seems.

I posted this on MeFi a few days ago, but in case anyone missed it or hadn't seen it before - Oval Office Space. The guy who came up with this is a genius, although you have to have seen the movie Office Space to enjoy it.

'Backward masking' in pop songs. It's bunk, of course, but fun. People listening to a song backwards to hear so-called subliminal messages will generally hear what they expect to hear, i.e.:

• Satanic references in Led Zeppelin songs


• Underaged sexual come-ons in Britney Spears songs

If you are told what the 'message' is, you'll have no problem hearing it. Tomorrow at work, I'm going to test both of these out on a control group of people who don't know what words/sound-shapes to be listening for. The cool thing in my book, and I don't know why this surprises me, is that a recording of someone singing reversed still sounds like that person.

Torture as policy. Is anyone surprised that Rumsfeld knew all about what was going on at Abu Ghraib (and X-Ray, you'd imagine)?

I am very thankful that Kurt Vonnegut remains with us in times like these - check out his essay "Cold Turkey". Vonnegut is a great mind and a great American. It will be a sad day when he leaves us.

my laptop keyboard i broken. half the key on the left hand id of the keyboard don't ork anymore. of coure nobody ha replacement keyboard for ale.

Just read this older Wired article about a VR art-piece/game/experience called Osmose. I'd love to try this.

Best name EVAR.

Lightening it up a bit with Tsar - Yes, Tony pimps them constantly, but he turned me on to the band and I really think you should buy their first album. here's the link to check it out on Amazon. If you like buying music online and getting it like right then, you should know that I bought it from iTunes for like nine bucks, and you can do that too if you like. If you have iTunes installed, click that link and listen to the free sample for "I Don't Wanna Break Up". Any Cheap Trick fan should be there already.

The murder of Nick Berg - I'm not going to link to the video of it, but you can find it pretty easily if you want to see it - it's linked to from Salon's story today and from plenty of other places. I downloaded it earlier today, but couldn't bring myself to watch it. Maybe I couldn't bring myself to open the file because I was at work, and I didn't know what my reaction would be. I've seen horrible videos and photographs before, but I couldn't bring myself to watch the Daniel Pearl murder, and I didn't think I'd be able to watch this either.

But, I just did, and my reaction was different than I had expected. Actually, that's wrong, and I've just put my finger on my hesitation over watching it. I had no idea what my reaction to it would be. I didn't know if I would be sickened by the gruesomeness, depressed by the inhumanity of the murderers or... what? Well, my main reaction was anger.

Here's a description of the video. In the first shot, Berg is sitting in a chair, identifies himself, tells where he's from, and gives the names of his parents and siblings. It abruptly cuts to the photo we've all seen, of the disguised men standing against a wall with Berg kneeling on the ground before them. The man in the middle starts to read a lengthy statement. The harangue continues for about four minutes, at which point you realize that the audio and visuals are not synched - the audio has the speaker saying "Alahu Akbar", there's a pause, and then a horrific scream from Berg - a blood curdling scream, the scream of a man who suddenly realizes not that he is ABOUT to be killed, but that he IS being killed. On the video, the main guy is still reading from the paper, finishes, draws a long knife and pushes Berg over. The camera either moves position quickly or shuts off, moves, and starts rolling again, because by the time the camera settles into a clear shot, it is a close shot of the man speaking before sawing through Berg's neck. At this point on the audio track - which is behind by about 10 seconds, Berg has stopped screaming. I hope because he has died or gone into shock, and not just because his wind-pipe has been severed. I hope this, because those five pompous, cowardly shits take forever cutting through his spine and finishing the job. They're all chanting "Alahu Akbar, Alahu Akbar" over and over, but they fade off to silence when it becomes clear that the dude with the knife doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. There's a cut, and finally he's got the head off and is holding it up for the camera. There's another cut to a shot of the body with the head lying on the stomach.

Fuck. I have a couple of movie analogies which will be hurt by the fact that one of the movies I use is so bad, but I will go ahead - first off, in Kevin Costner's "The Postman", the brutal despotic warlord played by Will Patton has a great speech where he talks about what he and other people were before the world was devestated by nuclear war. He asks the plucky-yet-reluctant hero Costner what he supposes that he did before the eschaton. It's something to the effect of "Was I a general? Was I a leader of men? NO! I was a copy machine repairman!" IN Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Tina Turner, playing the despotic warlord Auntie Entity asks the plucky-yet-reluctant hero Mel Gibson what he did before the war. He tells her he was a cop, a driver. She answers "Do you know what I was? Nobody."

These guys aren't former Saddam elite guards. These assholes were probably cab drivers or electricians or the teenage children of such under Saddam. And the situation in that fucking shithole of a country is such that they get to play at being post-apocalyptic warlords who hand down justice. The fact that they killed some poor schmo who should have never been there in the first place would be lost on them - they have this bizarre consensual fever-dream of Americans watching this video and quaking in their boots. These guys are morons - first off, 99% of Americans will never see this video, and second of all, the ones that do will probably have the same reaction that I did.

And now, after much analysis, I get to how I reacted to seeing this horrible and despicable scene first-hand through the miracle of video. I was angry. I think that the guy with the knife wouldn't have been able to bring himself to punch Nick Berg in the face if he didn't have a mask, four buddies with masks, and a video camera trained on him. I think that without their masks and their guns, faced with an angry foe, these five guys would probably piss themselves and run as fast as they can.

I would bet money on the fact that these guys have tugged their forelocks and smiled at American soldiers out of fear. If the guy with the knife was unarmed, I bet that I, a man who hasn't been in a fight since the fourth grade, would be able to beat the shit out of him within a minute.

Adolescence for men lasts well into our twenties, and this is the extreme end of the grief that that can bring. For middle-class Western men, we get drunk, quit jobs randomly, smoke too much dope, cheat on our girlfriends, get in fights, etc. By the time we reach 25 or so, we've evened out a little bit. I suppose the best way to put it is that Western men all think they're going to become rock stars. The shitheels who killed Nick Berg all think that they're destined to be rock stars too, but their definition of a rock star is a guy who slaughters infidels. The wakeup call for Western men is that they realize that they're broke and don't have a girlfriend. The wakeup call for these guys is going to be a 7.62mm slug through the face, and in a culture that preaches what theirs does about martyrdom, that won't even be a wakeup call for their buddy that witnesses it and walks away.

I think the new Blogger redesign is pretty nice looking. Good job, gang!

One man's DIY project - digging a foxhole in his backyard.

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