Funny stuff…
I tried to make an early night of it, but people kept CALLING me. On the PHONE. Last one was the cut-rate electrician, who’s showing up in a couple of hours to re-wire my whole electrical box. With his two children in tow. Which means no electricity all day. Plus…children. Every time I hopped up for the phone, I took a generous hit off the industrial sized tub of Jack Daniels, sure an’ it’s a rocky, rocky morning chez Weasel.
So if I’m finding anything funny this morning, you can be sure it’s funny. Well, it is. No, shut up. It is. Tracey Ullman‘s back. She’s a naturalized American now, and she’s celebrating it with a sketch-comedy series on Showtime. I’m cracking up watching the clips. Yeah, okay, I suppose anybody can be funny in 20-second increments, but go watch for yourself and see if you don’t think it’s funny, Mister (or Missus) Smarty Pants.
Okay, I’m off. See you later, with my shiny new electrical box.
March 29, 2008 — 9:42 am
Comments: 66
Kids! Be the first one on your block…!
Sometimes, listening to NPR pays off.
In 1933, Leo Szilard patented the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard was a physicist and his patent was highly theoretical, but he tried to use it to gain clout in the Manhatten Project later. The government faced him down, but the issue was worrying. What if other scientists tried to control the project through the patent office? What about scientists in other countries?
So the government decided to file patents on the components of the bomb in the name of the individual inventors as the project progressed.
That presented a different set of problems. The whole project was extra-super-double-dog secret. Plutonium was called “copper,” the bomb was called “the gadget.” But patent applications are as clear and as explicit as the applicant can make them.
So the government invoked an obscure rule already in place: an application marked “secret” would be looked at by no-one in the patent office and filed away in a vault un-approved, forever pending.
Harvard grad student Alex Wellerstein has been looking up these old patents. Turns out, as individual components are de-classified, the individual patents have been granted and published. A lot of it is still secret, but thousands of techniques and methods and bits of hardware are now public.
One patent was issued 60 years after the application; that’s the longest he’s found so far. The applications are still reviewed annually. A lawyer for the Department of Energy told Wellerstein:
“Our feeling has been that a significant taxpayer investment was made to create the inventions and to prosecute the patents so that payment of the issue fee finalizes the effort to provide a property right arising from the government funding. Of equal merit is the recognition provided to the inventors. When the patent issues we make a small good faith effort to find the inventor or a surviving spouse and notify them of the issuance of the patent. When notify someone, they are usually deeply moved by the recognition provided for their long ago secret efforts.”
That’s kind of…touching. Of course, a lot of the old coots are dead now, but a tribute is a tribute.
You know what else is kind of touching? Right in the middle of the Big One, dubya-dubya-deuce, the government didn’t write any special laws or invoke any extra-legal war powers. The department that makes war knuckles under to the rules of the department that files papers. They’re building this huge fucking doomsday weapon in the middle of the bloodiest war in the history of man, and they’re worried about violating international patent law.
I don’t care what the lefties say, the American government makes a lousy supervillain.
March 28, 2008 — 9:23 am
Comments: 11
Be nice. It’s the law.
Okay, here’s the scenario: You’ve been on the job six months. Day after day, people roll their eyes when you make suggestions. They don’t invite you to social functions, or even team meetings. They’re rude to you, refuse you help when you ask for it. They don’t return your calls or answer your emails. In fact, you’ve seen them scuttle out of their offices to avoid you. They certainly never praise you or defend your ideas.
Naturally, you conclude:
A. Oh my god! Everybody here hates me and thinks I’m stupid. I’m an incompetent jerk! Mayhap I also smell!
B. Oh my god! This is an office full of incompetent jerks who just don’t get me and my peculiar talents. I’d better find a new job.
C. Oh my god! I can’t possibly leave this job and yet I’m being horribly persecuted. I got PTSD! I’ll stick it out for a few more years and then lawyer up, big time. Mine is a lonely struggle against evil oppressors, just like that civil rights thingie I hear so much about.
Yep. It’s C — at least, if you’re the New York Times.
I’m not making that up about the civil rights movement. If you watch the video at the first link, the lawyer who specializes in ‘bullying’ makes the comparison. It’s part of his standard boilerplate there outta be a law and I’m just the guy to make it speech.
The comment section is rich, too. I cut a little slack to the people who had long and successful careers and then land with a special asshole of a boss. It’s a shock at first, though they really need to butch up. If you haven’t had a genuinely obnoxious boss or co-worker, you haven’t worked much. My favorites, though, are comments like this:
I have been bullied to varying degrees at every job I’ve had. While I support and admire efforts to remedy workplace bullying and would benefit from these efforts if implemented successfully and thoroughly, I don’t hold out much hope. Bullying, especially in the workplace, where people are by definition vying for money, status, and power, is simply inherent in human nature. I wish I could say it’s just the dark side of human nature, but my view has become that a phrase such as “the dark side of human nature” is redundant. Human nature is dark, period. Sorry for being so negative, but my comment reflects my lifetime of bad experiences.
— Posted by Anonymous
Bullied at every single job he or she has had, so there’s something terribly wrong with — human nature! The entire species!
So, go back and read the list of behaviors that constitute bullying — behaviors these guys want to make illegal. Actionable in a court of law. Sue your ass off behaviors. If you had a real jerk of a boss or a co-worker, how many of those bullet points would constitute your only defensive weapons against the obnoxious attentions of an asshole?
March 26, 2008 — 12:27 pm
Comments: 60
Finally, a brand that has meaning
So Ace finally notices my pathetic link-whoring attempt fifteen months after I first touched lip to his backside, and where am I? Offline, that’s where. Stupid dead cablemodem.
Actually, I stopped using the moronblogger icon myself when I moved off of WordPress. I decided it was over the line. My understanding of ‘the line’ has always been hazy, but wherever it is I’m pretty sure it has my footprints all over it.
Billy had escaped into the wild by then, adopted by morons everywhere. God speed, little ‘tard!
Today, morons are busting out all over. Conservative Belle is putting together the official moronosphere blogroll (dang! I’ve got a lot of sidebar updating to do) and Sinistar of Double Plus Undead is doing regular moronosphere link roundups.
You know the neat thing about the moronosphere? It actually means something. If you like AoSHQ, you will probably like many of the spinoff blogs. They mainly share the same sense of bedrock conservative values wedded to crude arm-flailing pinwheeling utter drooling retardedness.
Y’all know ‘moron’ was a technical term with a specific meaning, right? Sez Wikipedia:
Moron was originally an English scientific term, coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry H. Goddard from the Greek word moros, which meant “dull” (as opposed to “sharp”), and used to describe a person with a mental age located between 8 and 12 on the Binet scale. It was once applied to people with an IQ of 51-70, being superior in one degree to “imbecile” (IQ of 26-50) and superior in two degrees to “idiot” (IQ of 0-25). The word moron, along with others including “retarded”, “idiotic”, “imbecilic”, “stupid”, and “feeble-minded”, was formerly considered a valid descriptor in the psychological community, though these words have all now passed into common slang use, exclusively in a detrimental context.
Mental age: eight to twelve. ‘Bout right.
March 25, 2008 — 11:35 am
Comments: 37
Spitzer: cold feet not an option
So, it turns out somebody working for Republican operative Roger Stone dropped a dime on Elliot Spitzer. Or, more accurately, dropped an email to the FBI. Stone got his information from ”a social contact in an adult-themed club.”
Per the Wikipedia entry, Stone is the one who organized the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot” — remember all those dudes in natty suits hammering on the doors where the Florida recount was happening? That thing. He recently founded an anti–Hillary Clinton 527 called Citizens United Not Timid, acronym intentional.
The thumbnail biography makes him sound a bit of nutter, actually.
Anyhow, there’s old bad blood between him and Spitzer, apparently. Chris Matthews accused Stone on-air of leaving a threatening message on Spitzer’s dad’s answering machine, referring to the former as your “phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son.”
I don’t find the story all that interesting, but I could not possibly walk past this datum:
“It is also my client’s understanding from the same source that Gov. Spitzer did not remove his mid-calf length black socks during the sex act. Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information.”
It’s those little details that breathe life into a drama, you know?
March 24, 2008 — 2:50 pm
Comments: 22
Still proud
Athens, Tennessee. A young man attempts to pledge his undying love by spraying it on an overpass of I-75.
“Myers said when she arrived, Clark was standing at the railing holding the rope with his friend dangling below. She told Clark to put his hands up, but he said he couldn’t let go of the rope.
She said Musnicki tossed the can of red spray paint and tried to escape, but got tangled in the rope. She put Clark in her car and drove around to the road below, arresting Musnicki after he was helped down by a passer-by with a ladder.”
Yeah, you laugh. But I bet both these fine lads got a little something for their trouble. Arrested spray painting “I love you” on a bridge abutment? That there’s romance for you.
March 21, 2008 — 1:32 pm
Comments: 13
Toxic retardedness
Have you read Horatio Alger? He’s a lightweight, pleasant read, in the way of so much Victorian popular fiction. Good people thrive, bad people get smoted and not too too much drama along the way (not like that hot-headed Mister Dickens and his plot devices).
Horatio Alger stories are often described as “rags to riches” stories. It would be more accurate to describe them as “rags to middleclassness” stories. Here’s the plot to every one of them: be honest, cheerful, helpful, thrifty, don’t drink, work hard, look after your mom and you will prosper in America.
It’s satisfying because it’s true.
Add “don’t have any babies you can’t afford” — new for 2008! — and it still works today.
That’s the only part of Pastor Jeremiah Wright‘s sermonizing that really shocked me. All that frankly retarded stuff about the CIA engineering the AIDS virus to bring down the Twin Towers in Pearl Harbor…eh. Heard it before. But I had no idea anybody other than Goth teenagers and hardcore Marxists were arguing against middleclassness.
PEOPLE! One in a million of us, through some combination of good luck and natural gifts, will become rich. The rest of us get to choose between poverty and middleclassness. I’ve sampled both; I recommend the latter.
Apparently, another document at the Trinity United Church of Christ website clarifies: it’s okay to pursue middle-incomeness. Middle-classness is
Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us”.
I’m not sure what this means. Even if you prosper, don’t you dare be happy? If you work hard and succeed, don’t start thinking you’re better than people who don’t? No matter how far you go and how well you do, you have more in common with ghetto blacks than white people in your tax bracket?
Hey, you stay bitter, now! Is that it? How far is that going to get you?
Happily — judging from my neighborhood, which is mostly composed of upwardly mobile immigrants in many shades of mocha latte — most people come to America to chase middle-classness with everything they’ve got. They take real good care of their lawns and are unfailingly polite to the nice white lady on the corner.
Yeah, that would be me.
Did you know Horatio Alger, Jr lost his first post as a Unitarian minister for diddling teenage boys? He wriggled out of it and was never accused again…whatever that actually means. That explains why there are no women (except mothers) in his little stories. Puts a different light on the Ragged Dick Series, don’t it?
You can read Alger for free, thanks to Project Gutenberg, and it’s lots more fun than doing your job. Take it from a weasel.
March 20, 2008 — 2:16 pm
Comments: 47
Somebody here order a nightmare?
What you get when you do a Google Images search for “marsupial.” Her full name is “marsupial in pickle jar.” No link — it’s from the Ann Arbor Pioneer High School Ecology Club Home Page; them chilrun don’t be needing a weaselanche.
The Floor Guys are coming in an hour to belt sand and polyurethane Weasel Towers. My ever narrowing circle of territory is now going to consist of precisely one room, in the basement. And there I shall dwell all my days and be queen unto them and I shall rule them benevolently, with a wise hand, firm and fair.
I’m so screwed.
I’ll be offline at home — I’ve got to unplug everything and get it out of their way — but I’ll still have access at work, so you won’t miss one thrilling moment of the bitchin’ and whinin’ and generally actin’ like nobody else ever had to move house before.
Just call me Marsupial in Pickle Jar.
March 19, 2008 — 8:34 am
Comments: 42
If you keep picking at that thing, it’s going to leave a scar
So I started off this morning with a post about nondestructive testing — you know, where you slather a special dye on cast metal and shine a blacklight on it and any flaws or cracks fluoresce. I had this whole political metaphor going about how McCain was the dye and the Republican coalition was the machine and…oh, trust me, it was working. Then IE hiccuped and I lost the whole thing.
When I went to retrace my steps, I got totally distracted. First I ran across this article about the nondestructive testing that was done on the Liberty Bell after this nutcase walked up behind it and began whaling on it with a sledgehammer (remember that? I didn’t). That brought me to this cool site about the Liberty Bell, which is where I ran into these people. The ATAC people, from the graphic.
Oh, it’s okay. The “Avenging” doesn’t appear to involve smiting of any kind. The group wants to ensure any monuments commemorating the President’s House in Philadelphia are constructed employing sufficient persons of African heritage and that it is officially noted that Washington kept slaves there. The usual shakedown, in other words.
Which is why “avenging” is such a jarring choice of words, with its hint of violence — or punishment, anyway. And their position paper:
ATAC requires the commemorative project because justice demands it. Justice demands it because our ancestors as forced laborers transformed America into the economic world power that it remains today, because our ancestors died for America in all of its wars, and because our ancestors had their freedom, culture, family, language, land, religion, name, and often their sanity, limbs, and even lives ruthlessly stripped from them for three centuries by America (and other European-initiated slave trading countries) in a manner unlike anything ever experienced in the history of humankind. ATAC also requires the commemorative project because it an essential step toward telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about American history.
Jesus! Can we turn up the AC a couple of notches? Slavery is a shameful blot on America’s founding — and we took to it embarassingly close to modern times — but it was hardly “unlike anything ever experienced in the history of humankind.” As historical atrocities go, US slavery was middlin’ atrocious.
Has this ahistorical sense of unique grievance been simmering out there all along? Am I just becoming aware of it on account of Obama’s racial two-step? Being a white girl from Tennessee, I reeeeally don’t like to talk about race, but maybe white cringe is partly how we got here.
This is not headed anyplace good.
March 17, 2008 — 2:02 pm
Comments: 83
Some days, I am just SO proud
Flying saucer house for sale in Chattanooga. Only $100,000 on eBay.
Built in 1970 to resemble a flying saucer preparing for liftoff, it has three bedrooms, two baths, a pushbutton retractable staircase and oodles of charm. Charm. That’s the word, right?
The current owner has only had it four months and won’t say why he’s turning it (right into the teeth of the worst property market evah). I can guess. Can you imagine trying to wedge Grandma’s oak china cabinet into that thing?
And I thought I had real estate woes. Actually, I do have real estate woes: I’ve been living in my own basement for a week and I’ve just discovered my electrical box is sitting in an inch of rusty water.
Still, it could be worse. It could be THIS.
March 14, 2008 — 11:00 am
Comments: 35