Famous people, you so weird
So Liz Cheney is running for office. And her sister Mary is a lesbian and gay married Heather last year. And they’re all having a three-way stand-up slap fight about gay marriage.
On Facebook.
So Dick and Lynne Cheney weighed in.
In a statement.
Seriously, in a statement. A statement. How do you release a statement? Is there, like, a Statement Tree you nail this shit to and all the journos gasp and run over?
Dick Cheney, I love you man, but this is so, so fake. Families don’t get into fights on the editorial pages, they get into fights over the Thanksgiving turkey like normal people. They pick up a phone. They send a Hallmark card with a pointed double entendre. This is Liz running for office as a Republican, when she is on the record saying tolerant things about gay marriage in the past. Pure theater for public consumption.
I hate political theater. I hate dynasties. I hate that the ruling class thinks I’m this dumb.
November 19, 2013 — 11:31 pm
Comments: 17
Don’t stare at the Angel of Death, honey
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Stoaty, how can you NOT be blogging the great liberal train wreck that is Obamacare?” I’ve soaked up every article I can find this week, I promise. I’ve enjoyed — I have so totally enjoyed — my Schadenfreude McNuggets Happy Meal.
But brain simply refuses to absorb the scope of what I’m looking at. Popular culture during and just after the Black Death (the Big One, 1348) is surprisingly free of references to the Black Death.
“Holy shit, dude — what just happened to us?” “Shhhh, dude. Shhhhhh.”
I mean, I’d enjoy this fustercluck a lot more if I could see how a healthy medical service will come out the other side.
Oh, I know what else you’re thinking. “Stoaty,” you’re thinking, “you’re covered by the NHS now. What do you care?”
Well. Yes. I’m covered. The NHS isn’t truly awful, though it is awful in parts. Perhaps some day you’d like me to expand on that. But it’s just not…
Okay, for example — by law, a doctor’s appointment is ten minutes long here. If you think you have an especially thorny medical problem, you can book yourself for twenty.
Well, the British Medical Association’s GP negotiating team has just renegotiated that bit. In case your doctor thinks you really only need five minutes.
Good weekend, folks!
November 16, 2013 — 12:00 am
Comments: 15
I don’t even…
Hmmmm…didja see this over at Jammie Wearing Fools? It’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz defending Obamacare on MSNBC. Just after 1:10 she tries to say “misled” and ends up saying “my-zeld.”
Now, that’s not a slip of the tongue. I get those ‘tard tongue moments all the time. “Misled” might come out as “mislaid” or “missiled” or “trombone.”
But not “my-zeld” — that’s the kind of thing that happens when you’re cold reading someone else’s writing and a word doesn’t register for a second. It’s a read-y slip, not a think-y slip.
So, did she have a teleprompter with the answers on? And if the answers are scripted in advance, the questions would have to be scripted in advance, too. You can’t write the answers until you know the questions.
I mean, on the one hand, MSNBC. But on the other hand, really?
November 7, 2013 — 11:36 pm
Comments: 27
Well, that was inevitable
Been getting a fair amount of these lately. You?
They’re obvious phishing emails. I mean, obvious because they were auto-exiled to the spam bucket. And I live in England, for cri-yi. They actually look pretty official if you open them up.
Oh, how I worry about getting old. Have a good weekend, all!
November 1, 2013 — 11:34 pm
Comments: 18
Just in time for Christmas
It’s a little backpack that sends tiny signals to one or other antenna, causing the roach to run left or right. Via Bluetooth.
I don’t think it’s a joke. They’ve got a Kickstarter going and they’re taking pre-orders (projected delivery: November 13). Only $99.999999! (PETA’s going to have a cow).
Still watching the O’care rollout with stunned amaze. I fully expected the insurance to be a big steaming pile of FAIL, but I honestly didn’t think they could fuck up the website this badly. After all, the IRS site isn’t too bad. I understand the Medicare site works pretty well. I know this administration is paranoid about outsiders, but surely that doesn’t include their brothers and sisters in government?
I honestly have a hard time understanding how anyone could lose control of a project on this scale. And then release it anyway. All I can think is industrial-grade arrogant combined with monumental stupid.
October 22, 2013 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 22
Wooowooooo!
The Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.
Oh, they are SO boned now.
If you haven’t run across it today, allow me to introduce you to Brooks’ Law:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
Which is exactly right, when you think about it. All those new people — no matter how good they are — have to come up to speed. The have to read the code, work out what’s happened so far and what’s gone wrong and plan a way out. And now the managers will have a much bigger team to communicate with. Think meetings, meetings and more meetings.
I think it was also Brooks who said nine women can’t make a baby in one month. Programming jobs can only be diced up in specific ways; you can’t just throw infinite smart people on the fire and put it out faster.
If these guys had ever, you know, actually DONE anything in their lives, they’d know good intentions and a can-do attitude don’t get the job done. Here’s Bruce at And Still I Persist on Lefties and wishful thinking. Good read, AND he got an NRO link out of it.
I’m hoping the website problems last long enough to disillusion a whole new generation on government, but not forever. Because nothing is going to help kill Obamacare faster than a functioning Obamacare.
Please god they get it up and running before the midterms.
October 21, 2013 — 10:26 pm
Comments: 22
*insert metaphor here*
Holy cow — I’ve just discovered that my current Photoshop will import video and snip it into frames for export as animated .gif. That’s…well, if you can’t see how unspeakably exciting that is, I feel sorry for you. I’m having fun, fun, fun.
Well, fun, fun, drudgery, fun. Even a little bitty animation like this runs to 110 frames and takes considerable fussing and fluffing.
This is a clip from an 1897 Edison film called Seminary Girls. In the full version, the headmistress comes in and gives them all hell. Please note, the girl with the longest hair — the one who has her back to us most of the time — is smoking a cigarette. Nice touch.
You can find the whole thing at archive.org (and you can lose whole days of your life to archive.org, fair warning).
October 15, 2013 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 20
Dang!
So Michelle O’s “Let’s Move” postage stamp series was pulled and will be destroyed because some of the children weren’t wearing safety equipment. Dumb. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how godawful ugly these fucking stupid things are (click the pic to see the whole set in color).
This isn’t loose. Or naive. Or graphic. Or playful. This is awful. It’s terrible. It’s shit. It’s just unspeakable. Who approved this crap?
It’s tempting to say that all government art is bad, but it’s not. I love a lot of classic propaganda art — the stuff that’s competently executed and way, way over the top. Bad guys, good guys — they all did some awesome posters back in the day. When I was a little girl, I secretly wanted to be a propagandist. Or a comics artist, before that became quite such a thing. Much similarity.
But this stuff, it’s just bad on all levels. What is it with this lot, that they see citizens as faceless nonentities?
October 10, 2013 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 28
A comedy in three acts
ACT ONE: Where we be at now. The Obamacare signup software totally doesn’t work. It is possible that nobody has successfully made it through the signup process yet (the media don’t seem able to find anyone, not for want of trying).
This is pure fun to watch, this part. In some ways, this mess is a trivial sideline to the abomination that is Obamacare (though I’ve never seen an IT project this big and this fucked up get fixed successfully, have you?). My goodness I’m enjoying it.
ACT TWO: When it gets rolling — however they manage to make it work — that’s when the fun begins. The people at the bottom and the people at the top won’t see much change — I assume — but there are chitloads of people in the middle who will find their costs going up (sometimes dramatically) or coverage going down or both. Who knows how many people fall in here, but it’s likely to be many millions of really, really angry people. Lots of people in this age and class believe they can’t do without insurance.
ACT THREE: This is when the youngest, healthiest adults refuse to sign up, in droves. Obamacare is absolutely dependent on these people to fund the system. But young, healthy people don’t need doctoring (by definition), don’t have much money and believe themselves to be immortal. If the fines for not having insurance are smaller than the premiums, you’d be an utter moron to sign on. After all, if the law says they can’t turn you away for being sick, why not wait until you’re sick to sign on?
And then…well, no matter what PR hit the Wacko Birds may take right now for being obstructionist, there will come a day when they’ll be happy to say they did everything in their power to stand athwart O’care shouting halt. Which is nice and all, but what does it matter, if our entire healthcare system is a smoking crater?
p.s. Really sorry for that illustration. Brrrr, that’s creeping me out, man.
October 9, 2013 — 9:46 pm
Comments: 20
Here we go…
Ted Cruz. Still getting the hang.
Pretty sure I’m on Team Cruz in this thing. I can’t predict how this Mexican standoff will turn out — likely badly for the GOP, but that’s true of every single option that I can see. The media will make sure of it.
So, what the hell? Why not look like bomb throwing maniacs. My mother told me, first promote the notion that you’re a little bit crazy, then people will always be a little bit careful around you.
September 30, 2013 — 10:05 pm
Comments: 17