The Blog with No Name

POP THEM ALL!!!

“Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer.” - Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron

Amazon.com has the original Star Wars box set for 40% off! Buy buy buy! Now now now!

Only a scruffy-looking nerf herder would miss out on this!

Anybody got suggestions on a thoroughly happy book? I want to read something happy.

A true and faithful reproduction of my latest spam (read the last sentence carefully):

Buenos dias! Steevak,

piety compagnie condensible
decolonize bedridden

Continuing news but still scary:the U.N. wants control of the Internet.

I need to do some research about the origins of the Internet, but it seems to me (and my limited knowledge) that the U.S. not only built the Internet but one of our private companies governs it. The U.N. can keep it’s damn dirty claws off of it. Kthxbye.

I thought this quote was particularly hilarious:

Other critics say ICANN is too slow in making decisions and adopting new technology

Yeah, and an enormous bureaucracy like the U.N. will be so much faster. . .

UPDATE: Just found this real quick. I’ll be reading the whole thing later, but I do find it interesting that the idea of the internet was started by our very own Department of Defense.

ONE MORE TIME: Oh yeah, and we’re already working on Internet2.

Once, when I was very young, I almost died. This video shows it all. Click the image and meditate on your own mortality.



(4.6 MB QT mov)

Here is a quick article about the coming discussion of terraforming Mars to make it a “little Earth.” The general consensus is that it is very possible but would take a lot of money.

However, some people think it’s a bad idea. Dr. Pratt, an astrobiologist (what?), makes an interesting comment:

It is very depressing. Before we have even discovered if there is life on Mars - which I am increasingly confident we will find - we are talking about undertaking massive projects that would wipe out all these indigenous lifeforms, all the strange microbes that we hope to find buried in the Martian soil. It is simply ethically wrong.

“Ethically wrong”? To do what? Kill microbes?

Another doctor says its “not ethical” to terraform Mars because we might do “devastating things to the planet for a temporary effect.” It’s a planet. A ball of rock. Since when do rocks factor so heavily in our ethical schema?

I think the idea of creating another home for us Earth-people would be pretty smart, especially with all the asteroids zipping around. It’s best not to have all your eggs in one basket.

Hopefully Halliburton will get the contract for this.

This morning I read Night by Elie Wiesel, a winner Nobel Peace Prize (read his speech). Night is Wiesel’s memoir of his experience with the Holocaust.

Wiesel and his family were in Hungary, so they weren’t exiled to the concentration camps until 1944, when rumors of Germany’s defeat were already whispering the question of “when?” and not “if?”. However, the Nazis were too thorough and efficient to let the Jews in Sighet to go without suffering. First, there were just soldiers moving into the city, then there were curfews, then they were forbidden to worship at the synogogues, then they were forced into ghettos, and then finally they were deported to Auschwitz.

The next year and a half of Wiesel’s life was a story of horror, desperation, and suffering. There is no reason to go into detail. Fortunately for Wiesel, he spent most of his time in the relative “paradise” of a sub-camp of Auschwitz, called Buna, and he had not been separated from his father. But as the Eastern front approached Buna, they were evacuated, and Wiesel was forced on a truly horrific migration in the dead of winter, where 100 bodies would enter a cattlecar but only a dozen would stumble out. By the end, sons had turned against fathers, sometimes beating them just to steal a scrap a bread, and the faith of many men had been shattered.

Wiesel writes:

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

He was only fifteen.

Fox News made a boo-boo.:lol:

Depends on where you’re from. And it’s soda.

When I first saw trailers for this movie, I didn’t think I’d see it. It just looked lame as some type of icky romance movie. But then reviews started coming out for it, including this one by Slate, that were basically raving about it. So, I decided to see it. I went with my friend, Brian.

It is a good, good movie. Unfortunately it’s also really hard to describe the movie. It was a romance of sorts, I suppose, enough to be a good date movie, but not enough for a guy like me to gag. Carrey, who has really matured in his acting, also brings enough levity and slapstick to give a nice touch of comedy. There’s also a strong element of suspense as Carrey’s character, Joel, tries to save his memories of his love, Clementine, from being erased. Oh yeah, and drama. There’s drama too.

The cinematography was excellent. And everything from the sets to the special effects to the editing to the score worked so very well to give you the sense of being in a strange dream state where things are real but not really real.

See this movie. It’s darn good.

Pros: It’s a darn good movie (see above)
Cons: The ending is a little frustrating
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Currently listening to “Lonesome Valley” from the album O Brother, Where Art Thou? by The Fairfield Four

You know you need to clean your room when you scour the floor for clothes to wear instead of looking in the closet. I need my mommy.

Anyway. . .

This is now a Dick Clarke-free zone. I will not mention Clarke again. If you want info on that on-going mess, go to any political blog or wait for the mainstream press to play catch up. I’m sick and bored of it.

Dick Morris believes Kerry is going to get crushed by Bush. He credits the Bush ad campaign. Obligatory money quote:

This Democrat is not ready to run for president, and the more the Republicans press him, the more he will self-destruct. His campaign advisers are hoping that a few hours extra sleep on his ski trip will restore his political judgment, but they ignore the fact that he never had a lot to begin with.

Speaking of Kerry, has anybody seen many pro-Kerry signs (bumper stickers, lawn placards, etc.)? I hardly ever see them. I saw only one pro-Kerry sticker today. I’m pretty sure that I see more “No Iraq War” signs, Kucinich stickers, or Dean stickers than pro-Kerry signage. Maybe it’s true that many Democrats aren’t at all excited about him and only support him because they hate Bush so much? Or maybe Queen Anne is a Republican stronghold (hahahahaha!)?

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, is always interesting (3 MB mpeg). Here he states he doesn’t want a single Internet user to have an “online experince without hitting a Microsoft ad.” (bottom of article) Since I use Firefox with ad blocking I don’t see a whole lot of ads these days, but before I used ad blocking I didn’t see a whole lot of Microsoft ads. I feel sorry for all those who are going to be exposed to the deluge of their ads.

It took me four and half hours to slog through today’s news. Normally I plow through it in about 2 hours. It didn’t help that I got sidetracked by c-span.org’s stream of Clarke’s testimony from today. I watched about an hour of that. It didn’t get interesting until an hour in anyway. Clarke started getting grilled on his conflicting book and ‘02 press release. This world is getting more and more complicated. I might have to give up my day job just to keep up with what’s going on.

Books I’ve finished reading recently:
\Lament for a Son\
\The Problem of Pain\
\I, Robot\
\A Grief Observed\

The subject of three of those books is rather depressing, and two of them had a high emotional charge. The book I plan on reading this weekend is Night by Elie Wiesel. The subject of this book is about Wiesel’s experience in the Holocaust, so I’ll be reading yet another less-than-happy book. I need to read something happy.

This blog has become a lot less personal these past few weeks. Not sure what to think about that. Maybe it’s because my life is so boring these days. Or maybe it’s because of the heated and ominous political atmosphere. Who wants to hear my life anyway?

A man gets jailed for killing an armed robber, and Clarke might be pulling a Kerry, speaking of whom, take a peek at what his spending plans would mean for us (scroll to bottom).