International incident, narrowly averted
Keys in the right pocket, knife in the left. I’ve done it that was since I were a wee slip of a lass of a weasel. It’s the things you don’t even know to worry about that get you when you’re a ferriner.
There was an airport-style security screening going into the building. The look on dude’s face when my NRA Commemorative Charlton Heston Three-Bladed Case Knife tumbled out told me “I’m going to have to talk to my supervisor” wasn’t a good thing. They huddled over my knife and hooted, like those monkeys in 2001.
It’s a perfectly ordinary American-street-legal pocket knife, but Supervisor told me if I were stopped for some reason by the police, I would automatically be arrested. It’s a knife. And it’s sharp — something a knife in London is not allowed to be. (I bit my tongue before I blurted, “my daddy always told me it’s the dull knife that’s dangerous”).
As it was under three inches and it wasn’t a locking blade (“my daddy always told me that a locking blade is a safety feature”), he wasn’t obliged to call the cops on me himself. But he did give me a talking-to and confiscated my deadly weapon while I was in the building.
It’s no joke. Under new rules, an arrest — even a small and stupid one — could get me kicked out of the country and barred from coming back.
Yes, today’s the day we had to drive up to sunny Croydon (think Queens) to the UK Border Agency in the aptly named Lunar House, so’s I could be biometrificated for my next round of alien papers. I left Uncle B outside. His tolerance for bullshit is extremely low. After I was disarmed, I went to the third floor to a great long room full of hundreds of green plastic chairs bolted to the floor and took a number. My number was 523.
The interview and biometrics were pretty prompt, but I waited for an hour and half while my fingerprints were checked against the ones I gave in November for my fiancée visa. They checked. I’m not approved for visa #2 yet, but it’s one more step in that direction.
I found Uncle B outside, looking splotchy and apoplectic after two hours of standing on a street corner in Croydon. Poor bastard. I didn’t have the heart to tell him beforehand he’d be the only white man in all of South London.
And my fingerprints? “In the permanent database” the helpful brochure informs me. Isn’t that swell?
May 19, 2009 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 25
Stupider than tacky, or tackier than stupid?
Did you see this on Drudge this weekend? Remember the thing where Hillary gave the Russian foreign minister a toy button that was supposed to say “reset” and in fact said “overstress”? Apparently, some in Russia aren’t absolutely positive it was an accident.
See, this is why you don’t let amateurs fuck around with this diplomacy stuff: there are some paranoid nutjobs with serious power out there. I read somewhere the State Department was pissed about this one. They’ve got tons of proper Russian speakers on staff (duh), but Hillary’s people don’t take advice. I thought she was smarter than that. I really did.
The wrong word? Stupid. Not writing the word in Cyrillic? Tacky. Actually, scratch that — the very idea of giving a foreign minister a toy reset button is prima facie tackier and stupider than fucking up the execution.
Seriously, can you believe the low-rentiness of these people? I thought the smarty pantses were in charge now. College boys. No more Texas goobers embarrassing us on the world stage.
So, what do heads of state give each other? Well, whatever it is, you can bet your ass it would look good in a museum. Gordon Brown gave Obama an ornamental penholder carved from the timbers of the anti-slavery ship HMS Gannet. Like that.
What did Obama give Brown? Twenty five DVD’s. Oh. So. Tacky.
DVD’s that won’t play in Britain? Stupid. Stupidstupidstupid. Deeeep stupid.
And her Maj? Giving the richest woman in the world an iPod? Stupid. Putting your own speeches on it next to the Great Moments in History? Tacky. Un-fucking-beLIEVABLY tacky. Britney Spears has a better feel for the tasteful and appropriate.
There’s more to sophistication than putting Dijonnaise on your arugula, sport.
May 11, 2009 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 21
Can one of you fiscal sooper geniuses explain something to me, please?
Twenty six years ago, before I was a corporate little Eichmann, I worked part time, minimum-wage-type jobs while I tried to establish myself as a freelance illustrator. My total income, including illustration work, was under $8,000 each of those years (yeah, wow, did I suck, or what?).
I got a little money back at tax time, but certainly not everything that had been withheld. In other words, I paid income taxes. Teeny, tiny taxes in proportion to my teeny, tiny income, but it still hurt.
So, ummm…what gives? Does almost half the population really not pay taxes at all now? Or are they counting benefits against taxes and calling it a wash? Or has everything changed since I were a lass?
Money make weasel doesn’t understand good.
October 20, 2008 — 4:40 pm
Comments: 38
Clown wars
“When she was arrested in Afghanistan last month, Aafia Siddique allegedly had in her possession maps of New York, a list of potential targets that included the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the subway system and the animal disease center on Plum Island, detailed chemical, biological and radiological weapon information that has been seen only in a handful of terrorist cases, as well as a thumb drive packed with emails, ABC News has learned.”
Seriously? She was carrying all that around in her purse? Was the thumb drive labeled “Shhhh…Super Secret al Qaeda Plan to Take Over the World”? Was she wearing a little black mask and pants and a striped shirt with “TERRORIST” written on it? Has any nation ever faced an enemy more cartoonishly slap-dash, underripe and just plain bug-fuck crazy?
Let’s take just one datum and think it through a little. The Statue of Liberty has symbolic importance to Americans, so I’ll give them that. But it’s on an island and access is controlled by the Parks Service. A search is involved, so you couldn’t carry much in the way of explosives. Not sure what explosives would do, anyway; the statue itself is a thin skin of copper stretched over a steel framework. Hard to damage. Maybe you could fly a plane into it (I accidentally did that all the time with Microsoft Flight Simulator). Might or might not work. Plus, small body count. In sum, not a very good target. So why even put it on a list, let alone walk around with it?
These fuckers are always being picked up with “maps of the subway system” or “lists of targets” — stuff that’s easily Googlable, perfectly innocent in isolation and make NO sense to be carrying around, unless the whole purpose is to buy yourself a world of hurt and look menacing in a headline. Honestly, when you’re just blue-skying your evil plans, it’s really, really not a good idea to write it all down and carry it on your person.
An earlier ABC News article quoted the Afghanistan National Police as saying she was carrying materials from the “Anarchist’s Arsenal” — bet you anything that’s our old friend the Anarchist’s Cookbook, helping angry Americans blow themselves up since 1971. How terrorized am I supposed to be by a pack of bozos getting their doomsday weapons out of a book you can buy on Amazon for twenty bucks? I think MIT ripped this chick off.
Staunch righty that I am, it would cross my mind that the government is making all this stupid shit up, until I remember how much of it there is. Like, remember this guy? Mohammed Taheri-Azar, former University of North Carolina student. Pleaded guilty yesterday to nine counts of attempted murder. Avenged Muslim deaths around the world by driving his SUV into a crowd of UNC students. Really, Mo? That’s your evil plan?
You know, you can give ’em all the education you want, but someday they’ll break loose and fly off down the road waving their arms and going “ULULULULULULULU!”
It’s like we’re fighting the Global War against Angry Pinwheeling Retards.
August 13, 2008 — 9:57 am
Comments: 21
Here, kid — go play with a nut on a string
Behold, conkers. Horse chestnuts. Allen brought them up. British schoolchildren once played a game where they threaded chestnuts on a string and took turns swinging one against another until one or the other cracked.
Apparently, the main thrill was getting your knuckles rapped with a near miss. Which is why I say “played” — HealthNSafety Nazis have outlawed them in many school jurisdictions. Or mandated — yes — safety glasses.
Wikipedia (where I nicked these nifty photos) has a surprisingly interesting article on the game, including trivia. Which is how you know a Brit must have written the article: International Conker Championship trivia. More lily-gilding than most Americans can manage.
Go read it. It’s too hot in here to excerpt.
Incidentally, sending me home with a pocket full of conkers every Fall, as Uncle B does, is muy illegal. You’re not supposed to smuggle nuts across international borders. I told him he’d made me an accidental scofflaw. And he said, “what’s a scofflaw?” And I had to explain that scofflaw is a bogus, make-believe word for people who broke a bogus, make-believe law.
July 8, 2008 — 3:42 pm
Comments: 9
The stealth fighter that almost torpedoed a weasel
The research and engineering company I work for really didn’t need Xtreme image processing technology to do boring old science. Computers that could do graphics cost gigantic bucks in the ’80s and, really, the ink-and-vellum we’d used for a hundred and twiddly-two years would do what needed doing just fine. The purpose of all that expensive computer graphics tech was marketing. It was worth a few hundred thousand corporate bucks for pie charts that made prospective clients go, “holy farging shift, what consummate geeks!”
So Weasel got excellent toys to play with.
We started with a turnkey business graphics system. Then, in 1987, when Photoshop was just a gleam in Thomas Knoll‘s eye, they bought me (me! Mine! Mine, I tell you!) a digital image processing system. Um, a thingie that did Photoshoppy stuff.
I had worked with photos for years before that, but even I have trouble remembering now what life was like before Photoshop. It was hard, slow and expensive to alter a photo in any way, and even the most skillful job usually looked like shit. People took for granted the accuracy of photos, because that was the correct thing to do.
All that changed with digital image processing, and I had a blast giving people their first taste of it. My workstation was a standard stop on the company tour. Typically, I would take a snapshot of the man standing in front of me and merrily erase his mustache, give him a third eye and make his ears the size of dinnerplates, in real time. Oh, to see the sweet innocence fade from a middle-aged businessman’s eye!
Another cool thing we could do, because we did all our film processing in-house, was create nifty graphics and produce slides (remember slides?) while a meeting was still in progress. My favorite was the time we captured a picture of the client’s corporate offices from the back page of his annual report, and I used my P’shoppical skills to set the building on fire. I’m told several old guys in rumpled suits leapt up and dashed for the phones when that slide came up. w00t!
So this one time, shortly after we bought the image processor, we were in talks with Lockheed and the salesdude wanted me to make him a nice title slide beforehand. I was given a photo of a plane that was just crap. TOTALLY blurry and out of focus. I couldn’t believe it; it was the shittiest photo I’d ever been given to work with.
Scandalized, I set about cleaning it up. I mean, it was pretty easy to make out what the thing looked like under the blur, if you were a highly trained professional artard like what I am. And so, using my mad illustration skillz, I basically did a light, semi-transparent drawing on top of the photo. It was coming along pretty good, too — downright photorealistic-looking — when my boss walked in and shrieked like he was a little girl and I just dropped a frog down her blouse.
Yeah, see, the F-117 Nighthawk was still highly classified in 1987, and that blurry, deliberately fucked-up photo was the only one that had been officially released — and then only to Lockheed’s technical partners. Who knew? Not this weasel, for sheasel.
So, back in the days when photos never lied, what were my chances of explaining to the nice men from the FBI or the CIA or the Secret Service or whoever how I came by a nice, clean photo of their sooper-secret stealth dingus?
July 1, 2008 — 11:28 am
Comments: 31
Government kills kittens
I wasn’t going to say anything — who wants to be a harsher of mellows? — but Weasel finds herself with surplus spleen this afternoon. Stand back!
Remember these guys? There’s not much left of this happy family. Last Thursday, I found one of the kittens dead. As she seems to be a good and attentive mother, the Kitteh Man (whose name is Ed, I think) decided it was just one of those things.
Then another died on Friday. And another over the weekend. And another one this morning. They seemed strong and healthy…right up until they didn’t.
It must’ve crossed Ed’s mind that I might be the mad cat poisoner: I’ve been the one to discover all but one of the poor little blighters. (Oh, and let me tell you: if there’s any sight sadder than a dead kitteh, it’s a mama kitteh trying to lick one back to life). But it’s just that I show up first in the morning. I’m a first-shift Crazy Cat Lady.
Mama kitteh became more and more subdued and withdrawn, which I took for grief. But yesterday it was clear that she is ill herself. Kitteh Ed tells me she’s still alive, but very sick “in the back room.” He may be lying.
No clue what’s the matter. I’ve gone from cage to cage, handling every damn cat in the place, so if it’s something infectious…oh, that could be real ugly. But it hasn’t jumped cages yet. Ed, who has surely seen a zillion sick cats in his time, has no idea.
So! One left. The little dark dude on the top of the pile there. He was strong and loud this morning, but Ed said he wasn’t sure the fosterer would get there in time to save him.
So I’m, like, “okay…I’ll foster him.”
And he says, “you can’t. We can’t either. It has to be someone registered to foster.”
And I say, “well, what do I have to do to get registered?”
He shakes his head, “ohhh…you have to put in an application with the DEM and go in for an interview, and then they come out and inspect your place…” he trailed off and flapped his hands. It’s why they’re chronically short of people who can foster.
Oh, I know why the rules are there. Even with the best intentions, mishandling baby animals can be the functional equivalent of torturing them to death. But Ed could’ve worked out in five minutes if I’ve ever hand reared kittens (I have) and whether turning a kitteh over to me was better than the alternative (duh).
This is what happens when people believe that rules work better than judgement. If we trust people to behave professionally, sometimes they’re going to let us down. But pre-empting people with rules will let us down MUCH more often, because crisis is fluid but rules are blind and inflexible.
It’s nuts to think that more rigid rules mean fewer bad things happen. Hey, you know what? Government kills kittens.
June 17, 2008 — 2:58 pm
Comments: 23
Senate Underpants Gnomes debate global warmening
“This is easily the largest income redistribution scheme since the income tax.”
That’s from the excellent Wall Street Journal article on the Lieberman/Warner You Don’t Hate Unicorns, Do You? economic rape and pillage bill before the Senate today. Everyone acknowledges this one doesn’t have a prayer; they’re just softening us up for the real bill next year.
Because — back up and cover your buttholes, ladies and gentlemen — the next President of the United States believes in this shit.
Not global warmening — that’s just stupid. If people really believed that rubbish, they’d behave differently (I’m looking at you, Mister Gore). But there’s nothing a Senator believes in more passionately than sucking money out of the productive sector and blowing it into the hands of government, and this sucker would blow to the tune of THREE POINT THREE TWO TRILLION DOLLARS by 2050.
The floor fights aren’t about whether this economic ass-raping is a good idea, but about who gets how much for what. John Kerry, for example, is concerned about the effect of global warmening on “crustaceans” — shitting you I am not — so Boston lobstermen are in. There’s $802 billion for low income tax relief, which is odd since low income households pay little or no tax as it is. Walking around money, I guess.
There’s $190 billion to train people for ‘green-collar’ jobs (has any government training program other than the GI Bill ever done anything good for anybody?) and another $171 billion for mass transit project (yeah, those always work). There’s half a trillion dollars allocated for “wildlife adaptation” (which I guess means shuttling hippies and spotted owls around the country in brightly painted school buses) and $342 billion for international aid (wait, don’t we do that already?). There’s ice cream and bouncy castles and…oh, what fun we shall have!
I’m guessing the point of this trial balloon of a bill is to see how we, who are about to be reamed good and proper, react. I suggest we do so.
June 3, 2008 — 10:14 am
Comments: 40
My daddy didn’t buy a cow, and I won’t either
Ten years ago, I bought a six-shooter in a little shop in Alexandria, Tennessee. Buying a gun is a wingnut bonding ritual; it involves telling each other progressively wingnuttier stories for an hour or two before getting down to bidness. Thus, the buyer knows the seller is an honest man and the seller knows the buyer isn’t a BATF agent trying to trip him up and nick his license.
Anyhow, the shopkeep told me that Al Gore, Sr, ran a crooked cattle auction in nearby Carthage. People would come from all over (“desert sheiks in robes and all kind of thing”) to pay way over the odds for an angus cow that they, like as not, never even picked up. One man, asked on the way out what to do with the grievously overpriced cow he’d just bought, shrugged and said, “throw it in the grinder, I guess.” He didn’t buy a cow, he bought a sitting Senator.
I didn’t think much of the story, but last time I was home, I remembered to ask my dad if it was true. His face lit up, “you bet it’s true!” When he came to Nashville in the ’60s to take a position in Democrat Frank Clement’s government (my dad’s a Republican, duh), somebody took him aside and told him, “Son, you’d better buy a cow.”
Al Senior was a slick, sharp, old school Southern fraud. His son is a different flavor of phony altogether. I’ve never met him, but he’s a sort of a FOAF. My impression? Sharp as a bag of wet mice; a cipher; a bozo; an empty vessel, hollowed out to hold his father’s ambitions.
Politicians have issues the way the Senior Prom has a theme. Ex-military men become the military guy, unchallengable on all things military. Ex-doctors are experts not just on medical issues, they are the compassion guy. Women and minorities are women and minorities.
Legislators without a built-in hook generally pick one at random (this helpful video explains the process). Al picked the environment.
I believe he is genuinely puzzled that anyone would take him to task for flying around the world to tell people not to fly so much. So what if one of his three mansions uses twenty times the electricity of the average family? Don’t you get it? He’s the Environment Guy. Except when he’s wearing an eyepatch — then he’s a pirate!
That was my rambling preamble for grassfire.org‘s Carbon Belch Day. Thursday, June 12th, turn on your space heaters, open a window, set fire to something (or someone!), fart, drive around in circles, eat meat, mow the lawn. Take the pledge! DO NOT BUY THE GORE FAMBLY COW!
May 29, 2008 — 10:47 am
Comments: 72
An equality of misery: the only equality government can guarantee
The downside of the new, expanded Moronosphere: I keep reading stuff I want to go back to and I can’t remember where I saw it. Here’s one I managed to find again, thanks to Andrew’s Dad.
You probably heard that Cuba is finally going to unban cellphones (legally, anyway — a lot of ordinary Cubans had cadged phones off tourists). Here’s the charming way the AP put it:
Getting through the day without a cell phone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba’s government limited access to cell phones as well as kitchen appliances, hotels and other luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of social life in communist Cuba.
Got that? To preserve relative economic equality, you must ban basic goods the rest of the world takes for granted. The equality of communism is an equal grinding poverty.
Why? Because you can’t make a poor man into a rich man by giving him money, but you can make a rich man poor by taking his stuff away and not letting him amass more. Rich and poor aren’t static qualities; they flow from attitudes and behaviors. The moment Cuba takes oppression away, some people — by fair means and foul — will manage to accumulate more than others.
You know the old saying: you could divide the world’s money equally among us and, five years later, we’d all be right back where we started. Me, I think there’d be some degree of permanent shift: good and bad luck are a factor in some fortunes. But the general principle holds.
You only have to look at the number of people whose lives are ruined by winning the lottery. Like these lumpen idiots who won £100,000 on a scratch ticket in 2006. They’ve pissed it all away, and now they’re back demanding government benefits.
That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the reaction of posters on the site where I read about it: many said government benefits are a right and lottery winnings are a windfall that is supposed to be pissed away on luxuries.
An attitude of poverty.
April 16, 2008 — 12:34 pm
Comments: 37