Truth in advertising.

Dick Cheney tells it like it is (transcript available here)

Worst. Weather report. Evar.

Are you happy with the terms "system crash" and "blue screen of death"? Enjoy driving your overpriced Toyota, er, I mean Lexus? Maybe you shouldn't look over here.

Blind man goes on shooting rampage at old-age home.

Sound like a bad movie? You wish.

I've always liked words that sound innocent or that have both innocent and very guilty meanings depending on context. Examples include: sounds (definition, examples) and wands (definition, examples).

The best thing about these words is the in-joke character of them - in other words, to be offended by them, you have to know what they mean, and if you know what they mean, you're probably not going to be offended by them. Example: do a demo/presentation for a prospect. Create a new record of a person in your system. Enter their employer's name as "Acme Stuffed Toy Co." and their profession as "fluffer". See if anyone notices.

For advanced students: if someone does notice, and they're of the appropriate gender, and they giggle - ask them for a date.

I have a sneaking suspicion that reprobates has been infiltrated by HACKERS!

Need a new mobile phone? For your dog? Bling!

I saw the Pixies at DC's Constitution Hall on December 8 (bonus - check out their "leet" spelling of the band name); they rocked. What rocks even harder though, is a little outfit by the name of CDBaby.com. You see, the Pixies decided to cash in on all the aging hipsters' disposable incomemake the last 12 gigs in the tour available on CD (including the one I attended) and the orders were handled by CDBaby.com. When I first placed my order, they immediately sent me an email that looked like this:

From:   CDBaby Loves Ken <orders@cdbaby.com>

Subject: CD Baby Order #686634 - CONFIRMATION

Date: December 9, 2004 10:13:39 AM EST

To:   kcds@xxxxx.com

Reply-To:   orders@cdbaby.com



Ken -



Thanks for your order with CD Baby!



This is just a happy automated email to let you know a real person

will email you as soon as your package is sent, and you will also

receive a paper receipt with  your order in the mail.

... so that was cute, but then today, when the order actually shipped, I received this:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with

sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.



A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure

it was in the best possible condition before mailing.



Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over

the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money

can buy.



We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party

marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of

Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in

our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, January 21st.



I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did. 

Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'.  We're all

exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Yeah, yeah, the wonders of mail merge. But still ...

I'm ready to swear in President Bush. Here we go:

You fucking cunt. You fucking worthless shitheel. You stupid, murderous, arrogant, duplicitous, smug pig-headed moronic bastard. I fucking hate you and all your shitbag cronies stand for. I hope you fucking rot in that asinine "Hell" you and your retarded Christian fundamentalist turdbrained cretin friends believe in. Fuck you, and the stupid fake-cowboy horse you rode in on.

How was that?

Number 857 in an occasional series: Fun With Keyword-Driven Advertising, seen on a page about style sheets:



This is actually great news. I had a bunch of old style sheets I wasn't planning to use any more, and I would have just left them out at the curb with the rest of the trash, but someone told me the EPA won't let us just dump them in the landfills any more because of all the toxic chemicals in them, and so I was figuring I was going to have to call a specialist recycling firm and pay them a bunch of money but here it sounds like I can just sell them on eBay. Hey, where there's muck there's brass, right?

I suppose I have my parents to blame. After all, growing up, I was the only kid I knew whose parents had a kerosene-powered flame thrower in the shed (OK, so when you use it properly, it's supposed to work like a flame torch, but if you turn on the main supply without going through the pre-heating ritual, it shoots a burning jet of kerosene a good five to ten feet. More if you over-pressurize the beastie :-) In case you're wondering, it was used for weed control or, occasionally, to completely fuck the yard.

So now I have two torches of my own - a little Bernz-O-Matic propane torch for the kitchen (perfect for caramelizing the sugar on a crème brulée) and the larger Mr. Heater for outdoor use (or for making really big crèmes brulées).

I can't find any figures (Bernz-O-Matic are curiously mum on the topic) but the little torch probably delivers no more than a couple thousand BTU/hr. By comparison, the big burners on my gas cooktop produce 15,000 BTU/hr. Mr. Heater delivers a rather more manly 500,000 BTU/hr.

However, for really REALLY big heating jobs (or, perhaps, to caramelize a crème brulée the size of a tennis court), it's nice to know one could turn to the Akron Turbine Group for one of their trailer-mounted modified jet engine rigs that deliver up to 20,000,000 BTU/hr.

Mucho. Bueno. Pronto.

April 2004 - James Cantalupo, CEO of McDonalds, dies of a heart attack, after 28 years with the company, aged 60.

January 2005 - Charlie Bell, CEO of McDonalds, dies of colorectal cancer, after 29 years with the company, aged 44.

At this rate, the next CEO will be 28 years old, will have worked for McDonald's his entire life, and will choke to death on his hamburger in October of this year.

MSN clearly don't think driving in Norway is a good idea.

Does your WAP feel left out when you rock out? What about your microwave oven or your garage door opener? Your tweeter is no good to them, even if it's a supertweeter. No, you need an Ultratweeter!.

CD's not sounding quite right? Fix them once and for all with an Intelligent Chip.

Or maybe you should check out the other offerings from these audio wizards. No home entertainment system is complete otherwise!

While checking my memory on the origin of the term "Winchester Drive" I came across a definition that makes a rather interesting parallel at the end.

Soon to be heard in a porn movie near you: "Hey baby, what are ya gunna do with that Winchester on?"

Man, I'm sure glad the Bush administration has shaken up the intelligence community. Now, from the people who brought you the "slam-dunk" for WMDs in Iraq - this amazing piece of prognostication. Wow, these guys really think outside the box. I say they're well worth the $30B a year!

Also, not wanting to be outdone by the spooks, it seems the US Army has its own brand of top boffins on the case. Or at least, they did over a decade ago.

Clever, witty, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny - here is a collection of art that I really get. Does that mean maybe it's not really art?

Ah, the glamour of the sex industry.

Behold - the website advertising the services, and the shift diary of the associated back-office operation.

So exotic, yet so mundane.

Small brain + large magnet = things you shouldn't do with an MRI.

In case anyone is still labo(u)ring under the misconception that the "Hummer" H2 has anything in common with the original Hummer H1 - this should help clear things up. (Hint: It's a Chevy Tahoe with a body kit)

OMFG!!!11 ROFLMFAO11!!!eleven!!!

You can read the article here, or, if you don't have time, here's the synopsis: Use Internet Explorer, and your computer will catch fire, fall over, and sink into the swamp (or as Farkers say "your computer will a splode").

Seriously, you know something is mighty f'ed up when the security firm reporting the problem has to invent a new category of super-ultra-mega-critical alert.

The Republican party, looking for votes, started a number of years ago to court Christian fundamentalists, who had, up to that point, largely disengaged from American politics for various reasons, primary among them being the Government's role in the legalization of abortion, and what they viewed as the Government's betrayal of their right to free speech by banning prayer in public schools (never mind that these are arguably two sides of the same piece of legislation, namely the First Amendment to the US Constitution)

As a free thinker and atheist with an aversion to nutcases, then, I have naturally gravitated towards the Democrats - not that the Democratic Party is always correct in everything it does, but at least the Dems don't seem to suffer from the same blinkered "we shall brook no dissent" groupthink that seems to come from the Repubs.

Now, however, more than ever, it seems that the Republican Party has a problem that it largely brought on itself in the shape of the demagoguery and outright fascism and statism espoused by its more devoutly religious adherents. Lew Rockwell, Libertarian and big thinker, has more here.

My own analogy is that the Republicans' search for votes has been like that of a body-builder looking for ways to "bulk up" and get muscle mass. The Repubs, in courting the Christian religious conservatives, opted to give themselves small, fast-growing tumors in strategic places - in their biceps and triceps, delts and glutes - to make themselves "bigger" and "win" the contest aka the election. Well guess what - the tumors have metastasized, and I'm not sure there will now be much of a body left once the cancer is excised. Even supposing that surgery is even an option any more.

Annie, get your gun.

H. David Dalquist, creator of the alumin(i)um Bundt cake pan, has died, aged 86. Why should Reprobates give a shit about this? One reason, and one reason only: the popularity of this cake pan took off only after it was used by a Texas housewife in her contest-winning entry to the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off, and this was her recipe.

It's been said that an infinite number of monkeys using an infinite number of typewriters will eventually type out the entire works of Shakespeare. Usenet and chatrooms have made that pretty obvious, but if you want to see real proof of the power of random character generators just turn to the lowly Cabbage Patch Doll.

Sometimes the stories just write themselves: Go to Argos' web site, and search on the word "chav".

Followup: The result of the above search is the display of some goldie lookin' chains; in fact, since the first item is priced at a thousand quid, and is still only 9 carat, I'd guess it's more than just goldie-lookin'. Anyway, this now enables me to talk about the band Goldie Lookin' Chain, the best white suburban rappers stuck in a 1983 time warp ever to come out of South Wales. I just got their Greatest Hits, and, man, they are funny as shit.

Coxsuckers

Courtesy of a those crazy Swedes there's now a handy place to store your gaseous emissions while you work on them. Finally!

I'm proud to say I live only a short 30 minute drive from the place where this incident occurred.

WTF?

More joy of keyword-driven ad placement:

Someone keeps stealing my letters ...

Hypercube visualizer. Ouch. Now, if only I could find something to make sense of the Timecube.