Misdirection
I was going to play with Loughner’s mug shot, but I couldn’t deal. Never mind the smirk, that boy’s head is full of battery acid and rusty razor-blades and there’s nothing but a long lifetime of prison and scary meds ahead of him. Let him be.
Dupnik, on the other hand, has some ‘splainin’ to do. If Loughner had come to the attention of law enforcement many times — including the morning of the shooting — did they miss any opportunities to get him evaluated? Maybe not. I accept that — maybe not. But my mother used to say you could smell schizophrenia — by which she meant something about the behavior of a psychotic rings every THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG HERE alarm bell you’ve got. Apparently, anybody in Arizona can get anybody else carted off for a psych eval.
And Dupnik sure is yelping like a scalded hound.
January 12, 2011 — 8:28 pm
Comments: 39
A Public Service Announcement from Paul Krugman
Yep. Because restoring civility begins with accusing your opponents of mass murder.
I’m gonna have an outbreak of Tourettes over this. I swears.
January 11, 2011 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 35
Attempted incitement
If you weren’t on Twitter over the weekend, you’re smarter than me. The instant there were reports of a shooting in Arizona, the Left went ugly trying to pin it on the Tea Party. It was a wonder to behold. A giant steaming wonder.
I couldn’t take much. After a while, even the pushback from our side began to feel a little opportunistic, so I just shut Twitter down for a while.
This is part of a pattern since the rise of the Tea Party (helpfully recalled by Legal Insurrection): the Left blamed them for Bill Sparkman’s suicide, Amy Bishop shooting up the University of Alabama, the Fort Hood shooter, the IRS plane-crasher dude, the cabbie stabbing and the Pentagon shooting.
When every one of those perps turned out to be politically neutral or even avowedly liberal, the left stood down…but didn’t substantially back down. I finally worked out why (besides crass opportunism): they really and truly believe their own narrative. They are so absolutely certain-sure the Tea Party is inherently violent, whenever they hear a report of gunshots, they think to themselves, “well, finally. What took them so long?” They must be utterly bewildered when it isn’t true. Again and again.
Look again at my favorite picture of Nancy “Hammertime” Pelosi, walking through the Tea Party crowd carrying a giant gavel. She didn’t have to do that. As I understand it, Congress has a subterranean entrance to the building. She was hoping to start something (I can’t think why else she and Steny Hoyer would be holding hands with…John Lewis, is that?). Give that imaginary hair trigger a tug.
The awful thing is, Jared Loughner sure reads paranoid schizophrenic to me. Which would mean not even the shooter is responsible for the shooting on this one (I’m skeptical of the insanity plea, but not in the case of demonstrable schizophrenia…brrrr that’s an evil-ass disease). Still, his parents may not bear much real blame either. It’s damn near impossible to “get help” for an adult until he clearly crosses the line into batshit dangerousness.
Well, if this is true, maybe Sheriff Douchenozzle has some culpability.
January 10, 2011 — 8:25 pm
Comments: 25
It’s back!
As promised, the all-new Catsophone 2.0!
For those unfamiliar, the Catsophone is a theoretical instrument played by puffing air across a cat’s anus.
I have confessed before that I thought of the Catsophone in a dream, but I’ve never explained why I was dreaming of puffing air across a cat’s bottom.
I was lying on the floor watching television one day (for reals) when my cat Damien got between me and the TV and did one of those long feline stretches, the kind where their claws go forward and their backends go up in the air. Shoved his butt right in my face. So I blew air at him thinking it would startle him into moving.
He loved it.
He waggled his ass and started backing up into the stream of air.
I thought to myself, “Ew, little bastard. Creepy. I must never, ever tell anyone.”
It’s just us in here, right?
January 7, 2011 — 11:21 pm
Comments: 24
Heh.
England’s probably the only country in the world that issues warning labels in case of embarrassment.
Warning, warning! Danger, Will Robinson! Really awkward social situation ahead!
January 6, 2011 — 11:38 pm
Comments: 12
On her last day in office, Nancy Pelosi crashed my new computer
Oh, man. I’d been working all afternoon on a video, when the software crashed. Hard.
I’d load the program, it would sit there for ten or fifteen seconds. Then Windows would pop up and say, “there’s something wrong with this thing — seeya!” and shut it down.
I guess it’s an improvement on the Blue Screen of Death. I mean, the program didn’t crash anything but itself. But it sure was off-pissing.
Anyhow, I finally figured it out. There was something in the Nancy Pelosi folder that was freaking it out. When I moved the folder out of the default spot, it worked again.
Spooky.
I wanted to do a lot more with this, but spent most of my free time trying to fix the computer instead. Still, here’s my little goodbye to Nancy Pelosi on YouTube.
G’bye, Nan!
— 12:44 am
Comments: 34
Planning for Retirement
I made a short, stupid movie about the 112th Congress (click the pitcher, Sherlock).
I have a love/hate relationship with video, leaning toward hate. I had to work with it a bit back in the day, and I was always screwing up some codec or frame rate or something. The technical side makes me crazy. But the graphics side was pretty fun.
And now that I have an extremely good machine, I figured I’d poke a toe in the water.
January 4, 2011 — 7:08 pm
Comments: 31
I’ll teach you people to talk about food on my blog
Somehow, in the run up to the holidays, I missed this heartwarming story: they have (more or less) positively identified the head of French king Henri IV. It’s been banging around in private collections for a years without proper identification. They couldn’t get a clean DNA sample, so they identified him from marks and scars.
Henri was a good and popular king who was stabbed to death by a nutter in 1610. He was decapitated in the Revolution almost 200 years later. Nothing personal; the mob desecrated all the dead royalty they could get their hands on. A sort of posthumous guillotinage.
Interesting to me, when I was Googling around about the story, the amount of outrage commenters expressed that anyone would keep a body part as a knick-knack. Now, there’s an area where Western attitudes have changed mightily in a hundred years or two.
In the early 19th C, they had to box up the royalty at Westminster Abbey because people were snapping bits off the monarchs for souvenirs (yep, some of their majesties had been out on display before then). The churches around here are full of dessicated bits of jerky certified to be the hearts of knights and other benefactors. Don’t get me started on the toe bones of saints.
People aren’t keen on taxidermy any more, either. The shabby antiques markets we used to haunt up in London were full of beautifully-worked Victorian silver-mounted deer hooves and rhino pizzles.
Well, me neither. I grew up in a house full of taxidermy and medical curiosities, though, so I can’t work up any outrage. Disgust born of familiarity, but not much outrage.
Oh, except for the kittens.
Welcome back to work, everyone!
January 3, 2011 — 7:20 pm
Comments: 21
HAP-PY NEW YEAR!
Of course you cannot see me. I am camouflaged.
Uncle B wanted to get me a snuggy, but they were all pink and frufru and really not my style. So he found me one in camo.
A butch snuggy? Bit of an oxydoodah, innit?
Thanks for putting up with a week of lame posts, y’all. I just really wanted to hold onto the Christmas spirit for as long as I could, which meant paying no attention whatever to politics for a week. Next week, I’ll get back to Photoshopping boogers onto Obama and stuff. I swears.
And have a splendid 2011, everyone. Twenty eleven. That doesn’t even sound like a year. It sounds like a stupid made-up number.
Eh. Have a good one anyway!
In the spirit of new beginnings and all that, I’m going to update my WordPress software tonight. It’s been nagging me for a while. So if things are hinky for a bit, not to worry.
December 31, 2010 — 9:22 pm
Comments: 75
Merry Christmas, O Thief of Time!
More present blogging. I have a love/hate relationship with Sid Meier’s Civ series. It would be too simplistic to say I loved 1 and 2 and hated 3 and 4, but it’s not too far off.
Civ is basically two games for me. At first, it’s like an ant farm…exploring, building cities and then making them pretty with roads and farms and things. I interact with my neighbors as little as possible.
Then, when we get to modern-ish times, I look around at the rest of the world. If I’m lucky — due to chance and geography — I’m the most advanced civ on the planet. Then I end the game crushing my opponents like bugs.
Man, I loved that animation at the end, with the guillotine descending upon the heads of my enemies. More smiting!
Well, as of Civ 3, some a-historical lefty idiot got hold of the gameplay. All civs advance technologically at about the same rate (Huh. I guess Firaxis never heard of Papua, New Guinea). This totally ruined the “crushing my enemies like bugs” part of my fun.
Worse, the AI in Civ 4 was so aggressive, you had to build settlers like a madwoman and fling them all over the world or you’d be squeezed right off the continent, so that one even ruined the “ant farm” part of my fun.
So! Civ 5? Very, very pretty. Easier to learn and maneuver. So far, though, it seems to suffer the same aggressive AI and lack of civilizing unevenness.
Ah, but one of the best parts of the franchise is how modifiable it is. The early versions, the text and pictures were simply left lying around where you could get at them and fiddle. I discovered this quite by accident and had a stoat of a time with it.
I would replace my preferred ruler picture with my own face and called myself the Grand Exalted Queen of Clan Weasel or something. Then I’d change the conversations. Instead of, “would you like to trade iron for furs?” I’d make Bismarck say things like, “I say, what fetching panties, Weasel. And how jaunty they look on your head!”
This could be awkward if I forgot what it really meant, but totally worth it for the enhancement to gameplay.
Modifying the new versions is more complex, but there’s much more you can do. Firaxis is wise enough to encourage modding and provide tools to make it possible to get under the hood. There’s even a Civ Mod Wiki going. Stand by for weasel enhancements.
CRUSH THEM! CRUSH THEM LIKE BUGS!!
By the way, it’s clearly Patrick Stewart doing all the voiceovers, but he’s not credited on the box or anywhere else I can find. Odd. Must be a contractual thing.
— 12:14 am
Comments: 25