“The experts looked at the evidence in the long-standing debate over which came first – the chicken or the egg – and opted for the egg.” [via] Too bad they got it wrong.
“… any skin that would normally be covered by a modest bikini must be swathed in an opaque covering. But the law doesn’t specify what kind of material must be used …” [via] Oops. Using latex to cover things … why not get a some temporary tattoo ink done that blends across the latex-flesh line too? [et]
Baldwin, Torres, Baccarin and Fillion together again! Well, sort of. Check out Justice League Unlimited: Season 1. Not only are the actors there, but lots of dialogue and themes echo things that were or could have been Firefly. (There’s a fair number of actors from Star Trek here also … and a slew of others, including Amy Acker and Juliet Landau from other Joss shows.)
Holy. Who knew that Juliet Landau is the daughter of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain? (Everyone but me, probably.) She’s a child of Space: 1999! Okay, that was short lived. I realized that being born in 1965, according to IMDB, she was born even before the 1966 start of Mission: Impossible.
“The actantial model, developed by A.J. Greimas, allows us to break an action down into six facets, or actants … In the actantial model, an action may be broken down into six components, called actants. Actantial analysis consists of assigning each element of the action being described to the various actantial classes. … The six actants are divided into three oppositions, each of which forms an axis of the description …”
For example, in Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) one could interpret the disappearance of the Wicked Witch of the East under Dorothy’s house, and Dorothy’s simultaneous appearance in Oz as a form of continuity. Dorothy fills the actant role of the Wicked Witch of the East, and even takes on the silver shoes to reinforce this identity. It is not Dorothy’s arrival, but rather the Wicked Witch of the East’s death that makes Dorothy substantivate – both real and important in Oz.
In fact, Dorothy goes on to defeat not only the Wicked Witch of the West, but also to banish the Wizard from Oz entirely and then installs her own puppet (Scarecrow) on the throne in the Emerald City. All of these actions could easily have been on the Wicked Witch of the East’s to-do list and completed by Dorothy.
Dorothy ends up, herself, banished from Oz and loses the silver slippers. This ending may have been the ultimate fate of the Wicked Witch of the East, if she had lived – to be banished to a mundane world without her magic powers.
Of course, Dorothy returns later for more mischief … but, by taking the actantial place of the Wicked Witch of the East, Dorothy appears to have both changed the story and made sure that it stayed the same.
“Call it Permanent Capitalist Multiculturalism, in which the business elite continually uses immigration to knock the legs out from under unions and working class solidarity. And to think: Some people still wonder why the Republicans have won seven of the ten presidential elections since the immigration liberalization of 1965!”
“We live in an age of disintegration. At the beginning of the 20th century there were 60 nation states. Today there are 190, most of them poor and highly unstable. The real story lies in the cities. Throughout the world urbanization, with all of its fickle and forlorn promises, has drawn people by the millions into squalor.” And: “True peace and security for the 21st century will only come about when we find a way to address the underlying issues of disparity, dislocation and dispossession that have provoked the madness of our age.”
“Typically, enforcers are big, lumbering snuffleupaguses.”
Wait. What? Which team in the NHL has a giant, imaginary four-legged mammoth creature? Or, do they all have one … and I just haven’t ever seen them? Hmm …
And, when does the exposé on backstage violence on the set of Sesame Street come out? Just who is Snuffleupagus checking into the boards and beating up to enforce …
Wait. Is Snuffleupagus a metaphor for gangs on Sesame Street? Does Snuffleupagus represents the underground economic producers in the Sesame Street ecosystem? Or, does Snuffleupagus represent a kind of extra-official policing of the neighborhood? That means Big Bird is a made-man, right? Big Bird is clearly the capo to whom Snuffleupagus reports. And all those times that Big Bird mentioned seeing Snuffleupagus was actually a veiled threat that the enforcer was coming to lean on someone that was behind on their kick-back or protection money?!
“Forcing store clerks to listen to the same holiday music over and over could be akin to torture and should change, a British noise pollution group said.”
I can attest to the fact that even as a decade has past since I worked in a retail shop that played the same music over and over, I still cannot stand to hear even a few notes of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. That damned music makes me bat-shiat crazy, even a decade later.
Even more crazy was that we were allowed to play whatever we wanted, as long as the store had that tape or CD in stock. However, if a customer requested something, we had to play that. So, of course, you can guess, just about every freakin’ customer requested that damned CD of Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
“The same two-bar bass line and harmonic sequence is repeated over and over, about 50 times in total. … Afterwards, the piece gradually returns to a less complex structure as the note values lengthen once more. There are some 28 repetitions of the ground bass in total. The canon is relatively simple and does not make use of any advanced counterpoint devices such as inversion, augmentation, diminution, etc.”
Repetative. Boring. Popular.
Torture indeed. Endless anything endless torture, I say, especially if it’s popular.
I don’t know about you, but where I am, there’s been the sound of chainsaws all day for pretty much the entire week, and even today on Saturday there’s no respite. Sure, it’s all about recovering from the crazy wind storm that blew in and killed the power here for several days, but it’s feeling like I’m living at a logging camp.
It’s a little bit like torture. I had a dream last night that I woke up to find that all the trees, as far as my eye could see, had been “cut down for public safety.” And, every time one of those chainsaws revs up, I have this fantasy about spotted owls swooping in with dynamite to save the forests.
Come to think about it, I can’t get the image of the animal rights terrorists out of my head. See, this image makes the clear connection between the activists as terrorists and the fear of a living planet to which the activists are allied. The meaning of this image is that if spotted owls could carry dynamite, the gun-tottin’ environment-rapin’ people in the world would be in serious trouble. Not only are the activists the enemy, but the entire environment is the enemy.
This is interesting to me because of all the folklore and myth about dangerous nature across cultures, but especially in the human versus nature story embedded in western culture. The myth is that the scary natural world is out to get humans, and humans have to fight back for their lives. The wild forest as a place of serious danger, and of magic, is a place to be feared. This is that place past the borderland, where the old woman of the forest, the Baba Yaga, lives.
Anyhow, over at Daily Kos, Wonkette is being called out for that post. But, you know, this is a post-modern world … so what if it’s not real? I’m sure I’ve seen the evil TV image before somewhere, but where?
“Freedom In Peril: Guarding the 2nd Amendment in the 21st Century, is a spectacularly beautiful graphic novel. Here, for example, is one of the biggest threats to the white suburban hunter: dirty hippies and their evil sidekicks: the dynamite-carrying owl, sinister pig, angry Wall Street bull, dire wolf, terror chicken and Land Lobster …”
It’s definitely got that Chick Tract kinda vibe, but there’s a surreal edge to this that reminds me of some of the better SubGenius illustrations. Man, the hippy chick with the cat tattoo (devil? looks like a cat to me) and the hairy legs is great … but, come on, that spotted owl with dynamite is awesome! This is some textbook dehumanizing the enemy, to be sure.
Mast, v. To produce a larger amount of offspring than expected, as a way to increase the chance of offspring survival against a likely steady predator population.
One strategy that trees have evolved is called “masting,” and involves the synchronized production of excess seeds. Because the predator population should be reasonably constant, a sudden burst of seeds should swamp the population of whatever might eat them, allowing more seeds to successfully start a new generation. By the time a predator breeds in response to the excess food, the seeds are gone, and the new offspring will be threatened with starvation.
I think the squirrels are being tipped off by the Octopi, evil alien intelligences behind the Goat-Squirrel-Mollusk conspiracy. Just another sign of the coming end times …
So, I’ve been called out via e-mail for “teh logic” in a previous post. Apparently, when I said, “You know, every chicken egg scrambled kills a baby chick dead,” it appears that I don’t realize that commerical eggs in stores aren’t, except in rare cases, fertilized. Well, yes, sort of. See that scrambled egg had the potential to be a baby chicken … and that’s a baby chicken that won’t be born, so it’s dead. And, if that baby chicken is dead, someone killed it. I think the people that eat eggs should think about that! It’s all about “teh logic” see? (Of course, at least those people eating eggs aren’t out carving pumpkins while they murder baby chickens.) Yeah, the thing about humor is that if it requires an explanation … not so much with the funny. I’ll try to do better next time.
“Maybe she ran out of pineapple and forgot to get more at the store. Or maybe her undershirt itches. Or maybe her gerbil is sick.”
On a lark, I wandered over to check on MST3K alum Joel Hodgson’s Gizmonics website, only it’s gone. Apparently, I haven’t looked for it for quite a while because it went down back in 2000:
“In the fall, regular visitors to Joel’s Gizmonics.com website noticed that it was suddently unreachable. A few days later it reappeared as the gateway to a pornography site, and stunned fans who looked into the matter learned that Joel was no longer the owner of the gizmonics.com URL. Feeling that the appearance at Columbia earlier in the year was an appropriate coda to the MST3K portion of his life, he had decided to let the URL lapse.”
“Succumbing to the Bush fantasy that freedom is fertilized by firepower …” – Robert Scheer [ via ] Nice alliteration.
“It’s not like we did anything wrong.” – Taco Bell dude [ via ] OMG, like, I’m so sure. Everyone’s doing it! Why single Taco Bell out for detention? … Well, yeah, responsibility for what we do is an important part of maturity. Taco Bell has some growing up to do, apparently.
Via an interesting article that reminds us all that “most searched” lists are PR driven, not data driven, “Business 2.0 BETA blog network” is this comment:
“They’re using search engines as navigation, typing website names or even URLs into the search box that automatically pops up in their browser.”
It’s a funny thing to me to watch people do that. They can’t remember an URL, even a short one, so they use search to find a place that they’ve even been to many times. A primary example for this is watching someone I know look for the This American Life page. Instead of remembering that This American Life is at www.thislife.org or thinking to head to the Public Radio International website … it’s easier for most users to skip over to yahoo and do a search for “This American Life” and sort through the results.
This kind of searching behaviour is, I suppose, similar to how I now behave with own documents. I use google to search through the papers I’ve posted to my website, and I use spotlight to search through the documents on my machine, and even use spotlight to get to applications instead of going through the finder.
But, it’s interesting to me that I retain information about actual URLs. For example, I still remember that the URL for Ultima Online is www.owo.com even though I haven’t played that game since … when? Nine years ago? Or, that the old URL for O’Reilly was www.oro.com (which gave me a turn because they appear to have given that up, because it’s now some Japanese site.)
I think from a user standpoint, the URL address bar should simply be a search input. I really don’t like the way that new browsers separate the address and search inputs. Why should a user have to pre-parse their input and decide which field to use? I realize that I miss the autosearch feature from IE, which is a bit of a shock to care about IE at all, but using a question mark in the address field turned the input into a search. That was nice. In Firefox, I can set up a keyword “?” which does a google search. Why can’t I do this in Safari’s address field? (Apparently, there’s an add-on that does add keywords, extending Safari, in the way that the old Mail.app was extended on NeXT, called Saft, but it costs money.)
Noticed a post “Slashdot | Apple Closes iSight Security Hole” which talks about iSight being used to maliciously spy on a user. But, this isn’t new to Mac OS X hardware. In fact, it’s a problem that’s been around since the black box NeXT days.
When I worked at and ISP that used old NeXT machines, I used to tape a wad of paper to the mic on the monitors because it was not unheard of that someone could listen in to whatever conversations were happening in the room. This was a security hole that existed when a machine was configured to allow remote machines to display their application windows on a local machine.
I used to farm TTYs from other machines, primarily in sales because they didn’t use many terminal sessions, because there was a kernel limit on the number of TTYs a machine could use. So, I would remotely run additional Terminal.app instances on remote machines but display the windows on mine. This was so I could stay logged in to all the various terminal servers at the same time. Half of my screen used to be filled with tiles for open terminal sessions minimized.
So, I had my machine configured to allow remote apps to display on mine, and that’s the way the security hole worked. As a precaution, I taped a wad of paper over the mic. Funny to think about it now, but I had no reason to trust it wouldn’t happen that I would be listened to that way. When you work for an ISP started with Russian mob money …
Even funnier, in a sad way, is that the next ISP had a group of immature wannabe gangsta geeks who were just as likely to do stupid and unethical things, too.
Ah, the warm memories … actually, more of a burning … in my stomach.
In a post to TESC Crier, there’s a note about a phishing scam that targets Washington State Employee Credit Union members:
Two new email Phishing scams are targeting WSECU members. The email appears to come from WSECU. In fact, it comes from an fraudulent source shown as (Inbonline@wastatecu.org) The two e-mail subject lines are: Enroll in “Challenge Questions†Authentication Now and Changes coming to online banking!
Phishing isn’t new. Banks being the target isn’t new. What strikes me about this is that the bank isn’t a national bank. It’s a smaller bank, on a more local scale. So, the scams are moving down the food chain toward the small banks, apparently.
This, to me, seems like a big deal because the smaller the scale of bank the more damage, overall, a service interruption could become. And, the smaller the bank, it seems to me, the less Internet fraud detection and recovery infrastructure there will be in place.
On the other hand, the smaller the bank the more likely there will be clues in the scam that give it away as not being genuine. At some level, the social engineering used by these scams requires that the individual not recognize there’s something wrong. So, the larger, more formal, more distant communication from the institution usually is, the easier that is to spoof. However, for smaller, more personal banks, one would think they would have more unique communication styles, perhaps more personal, that, if missing, would offer a clue to the individual that there’s a problem.
But, it’s still very interesting to see that a smaller, more local bank is being targetted by phishers. I suspect that the availability of e-mail addresses for the state colleges and universities, harvested from websites and list archives, makes state employee credit unions an easy target.
If the trend were to continue, I could imagine that Evil Personâ„¢ might harvest e-mail addresses off of local Olympia blogs, like Olyblog, and try phishing with fake e-mail from even more local banks, like South Sound or even Tulip. There’s a point where one might pass the point of diminishing returns, but then there’s also the fact that for every local bank here, there’s banks in other places on the same scale … so there’s an economy of scale to phishing lots of smaller banks, I suppose.
It will be interesting to see how the push of spam and phishing goes – if it goes more and more local, more and more targetted.
What if instead of random text, a spam tool used keywords or maybe even just the target e-mail to google up some related text and parsed that into the e-mail? It would be like being spammed by a million monkeys on typewriters, and could become a really surreal experience. It would be like personalized engrish, or a daily personalized message from Wm. S. Burroughs! Now, how cool would that be?
“The combination of a new design nuclear propulsion plant and an improved electric plant are expected to provide 2-3 times the electrical generation capacity of previous carriers, which in turn enables systems like an Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System …”
Can we start a petition to name the first one of these “Galactica”?
“Cairo worked so well to suppress competition and distract from the quality of the products Microsoft actually shipped in the 90s, that Microsoft reused the same strategy in the next decade.” A trip down memory lane: cairo, taligent, pink, and even a mention of BOB! “Fraud as a business plan,” indeed.
And since there’s a nice graphic of the yellow brick road on the previous link: “The lion costume made of real animal skin and worn in the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz sold at an auction Friday for $700,000 US”
