So you went away because I've grown intolerably lazy about posting? Good on you. You should.
Some things don't go away, though. One of them is hits on this blog. Minions has had craploads of hits in the last four or five days. 95 percent of them have been from bots, searching for stuff about Alexandra Paressant, who I mentioned briefly and unkindly not long ago.
I'm thinking through how I feel about this. Your input is welcome; feel free to tell me what I should think.
For the record, I think she's sorta skinny and really not at all appealling. Her horse-faced boyfriend is welcome to her.
Monday, July 31, 2006
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Welcome to the Blogroll
This post, from the fine folks at Kissing Suzy Kolber, has earned them a spot to the right. Welcome, KSK, even though you've never heard of me, and never will. I also deleted a few links that make me tired.
Oddly Enough
This is also why I haven't posted for 12 days.
That and work, and houseguests, and...uhm...well, those two, plus PS2 and sex with my wife, who is way hotter than that poofter Ronaldinho's Eurotart girlfriend, pretty much cover it. Sorry.
I mean I'm sorry that I haven't posted. I'm not sorry that my wife is way hotter than Alexandra Paressant. Or that I have sex with her. Or that I play on the PS2. Or that I have houseguests. Got it? Especially the parts about my wife being way hotter than Alexandra Paressant and me having sex with her? With my wife, I mean, not Alexandra Paressant?
Good.
That and work, and houseguests, and...uhm...well, those two, plus PS2 and sex with my wife, who is way hotter than that poofter Ronaldinho's Eurotart girlfriend, pretty much cover it. Sorry.
I mean I'm sorry that I haven't posted. I'm not sorry that my wife is way hotter than Alexandra Paressant. Or that I have sex with her. Or that I play on the PS2. Or that I have houseguests. Got it? Especially the parts about my wife being way hotter than Alexandra Paressant and me having sex with her? With my wife, I mean, not Alexandra Paressant?
Good.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
My Day Off
Today is my day off. Read this one instead. And worship me! Worship me, faithful minionses of my dark overlordship!
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Indiscipline
Obligatory whining about busy life. Complaint about specific aspect of relocation to a new home. Snide comment about cable company. Plaintive wailing about difficulty of prolonged separation from spouse.
Okay, that's done. Still, I got no coherent grand unifying theme this morning, so it's bullets for you:
Okay, that's done. Still, I got no coherent grand unifying theme this morning, so it's bullets for you:
- As Ann Coulter calls for the bombing of the New York Times, some relatively oft-viewed wingnut blogger calls for the hanging of the five members of the Supreme Court who didn't see things his way in Hamdan, and oodles of relatively oft-viewed wingnut bloggers and psuedojournalists deliberately attempt to intimidate those with whom they disagree by publicizing personal information, the right goes batshit over some moron's comment and pretends it's representative of leftish thinking. Just shut the fuck up, you lying skanks. When you can make a better effort to pretend that you have something of substance to contribute to a meaningful discussion, that's fine, welcome back. But as long as you're going to divert every discussion by calling people terrorists, traitors, and worse, and pretending that every non-wingnut is identical to every other non-wingnut, just put a fucking sock in it.
- Speaking of Hamdan, what if Mister Justice Stevens doesn't hang in there? (Via Eschaton)
- Feeling put upon? Here, read about the London sewers. (Thanks to the increasingly tangential and bizarre, but still quite nearly readable Mr. Sun for this one.)
- 7-11 hates DC. (Via Wonkette)
- Juergen Klinsmann will be ours. Oh yes he will. (via Deadspin)
Monday, July 10, 2006
No, It's Not Minions Weekly
To those of you--the TWO of you--who hang around waiting for me to update: Sorry. I'm still recovering from moving fallout, including fallout at work, which has chosen an inconvenient time to become critical. Quick notes:
- France had to die because they couldn't win a Cup in Germany. Italy had to die because they made me root for Germany. Zizou's head-butt was one of the most fabulous things in world history. I didn't have a good view of the game because my cable is doing funky pixelated things--it's like watching streaming video on dialup, only worse. I didn't get my World Diving Championships final or my 1870-1945 final. It's all just way too unkind.
- Presumably, things are happening in the red-blue world. They are, at the moment, escaping my notice. Let's just keep it that way until I'm ready to re-engage, shall we?
- Please go visit the sites linked to the right, to entertain yourself until I surface long enough to post something funny. I'll try to do that by about Wednesday or so.
- Minions' birthday is July 13. Minions' Amazon Wish List is here. Just saying.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Why They Can't Be Stupid
Okay, sure, some of them are. Hindraker certainly isn't evincing any sparks of intelligence, and Michelle Malkin's porn buddy Bryan Preston is a sack of rocks. Hannity's probably not all that bright, although he's making money by being a lying tool on national television and we're not, so there's some intelligence-like quality happening there--call it faux intelligence. And O'Reilly's stupid, but he's so testosterone-addled and batshit insane that it outshines his native stupidity.
But Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin...these two keep turning up. The allegedly liberal news media keeps propping them up, too, as if to try to prove both these malicious witches' legitimacy and their own. Tom Tomorrow nailed it, here (just watch the Salon ad and get over it).
A recent sampling:
But Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin...these two keep turning up. The allegedly liberal news media keeps propping them up, too, as if to try to prove both these malicious witches' legitimacy and their own. Tom Tomorrow nailed it, here (just watch the Salon ad and get over it).
A recent sampling:
- When the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times printed articles about the SWIFT international banking system--a secret only to those who know nothing about banking, and a system bragged on by the President only days after 9/11--Coulter, Malkin, and their ilk (let's just call them CMilk for short) began to propagate the outright lie that the two Times papers had publicized secret data. For one thing, the stories revealed no secrets. For another, CMilk are mysteriously ignoring the fact that the Journal published essentially the same story on the same day. Coulter's rhetoric about this non-issue has included proclamations that Timothy McVeigh should have bombed the New York Times building. Malkin's has included a series of Photoshopped World War II propaganda posters suggesting that the Times is deliberately getting Americans killed. There's nothing about these attacks that isn't hate speech. And the attacks are so outlandish, so unabashedly untruthful, that they cannot be the result of stupidity.
- After the New York Times published a travel-section puff piece about Saint Michaels, Maryland, a quaint Eastern Shore village known to anyone who whiffs around the Chesapeake Bay a little on the occasional weekend, various CMilk went nuts, claiming that the paper had posted the addresses of Vice President Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's vacation homes. For one thing, it's a lie: the Times provided no such information. There's only one road into Saint Michaels. A picture of a security camera in a birdhouse in Rumsfeld's driveway was posted with Secretary Rumsfeld's permission; CMilk claim the publication provided valuable information to terrorists. CMilk forgot that Newsmax, a right-wing news operation, published a similar story about the exact same location, noting the locations of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's homes. I don't see anyone picketing Newsmax to let us know that it's a Jihad-symp organization. Cmilk also conveniently forgot a 2001 Times piece--picked up around the country--naming the road in Chappaqua, New York, where Bill and Hilary Clinton maintain their primary residence. CMilk's publication of the address of the Times photographer who shot the completely authorized birdhouse pic (or, in the absence of such publication, strident defenses of those bloggers who did), coupled with their unashamed lack of a sense of irony about these facts, gives the lie to the notion that they're stupid.
- Our final presentation: Michelle Malkin, who has brutally assaulted everyone who disagrees with her worldview by calling them "unhinged," "moonbats," "deranged," and various other epithets, and who savaged notable dissenters such as Cindy Sheehan and some UC Santa Cruz students (whose phone numbers she published), headlines her call to today's protest at the Times' Washington Bureau thusly: "Dissent Is Patriotic." Is it possible for someone to be dumb enough not to understand that level of hypocrisy? I don't think so.
Smarter people than me have written about this. Check them out.
Pattern Recognition
I was playing Minesweeper the other day because I was both bored and overstimulated. You see, sometimes, my giant, forest-slaying piles of unread books, my two computers with dozens of rich and layered and complex games, some of which I've never even played, and my PS2, offering simulations of any sport I'd personally care to simulate, just can't keep me happy, and not even actual masturbation will do the trick, and I need to play something simple like Minesweeper or Freecell to calm me down from the breathtaking technological marvel that is my cave. And to keep from doing anything productive.
Many of you probably know about Minesweeper. It's all about pattern recognition, learning the lessons offered by a pattern of symbols and applying them to solve a logic problem. The problem is that, if you don't solve the pattern, the game blows you up. One of the tricks is to make sure that you act on guesses as little as possible. Because guessing will, in fairly short order, get you blown up.
When I was a manager at a long-ago and faraway place I like to call the Death Star*, I used to try to use Minesweeper as a test of pattern recognition skills. I needed a lot of young persons (the job paid crap and was pretty much McDonalds for liberal arts graduates) and had to separate them out somehow. Pattern recognition was important to the job, in the sense that if one could recognize recurring patterns in the data we were analyzing and summarizing, one could do the job quickly, if not artfully.
I never could figure out a fair way to score Minesweeper performance as a skills test, though, and people got really nervous when I'd watch them over their shoulders as they played. So the testing program didn't work out. But the correlation remained, verified through observation of them what got hired: those that could play Minesweeper with any facility were pretty good at this job, and those who guessed a lot pretty much sucked at the job.
Pattern recognition is a key skill in life, and in intellect. They teach it on Sesame Street: "One of these things is not like the other." Doctors, lawyers, firemen, and cops, among many others, rely on pattern recognition as a stock in trade. Successful programmers are the great pattern recognizers of our business and technical culture; breaking down code into repeatable patterns is a key technological skill. It's even more basic than that, really; lions certainly rely on pattern recognition when they're scanning the savannah for, say, zebras--and let's not forget the gazelle, recognizing the pattern of a bit too much quiet--and we all recognize a potentially dangerous pattern in hearing footsteps behind us in the dark and quiet of the night.
Pattern recognition is so important to all cognition that we can quickly grow overreliant upon it. We think the car ahead of us will make the right turn, and we rear-end them. We think that sex is good, so we marry our partner. Uh, wait, that's only usually a mistake when I do it. Never mind on that one, eh? We think that the media tell us the truth, so we keep reading the Post and the Times and watching the nets.
Therein lies the rub for right-wingers. They are overconfident in their pattern recognition skills. And let's face it, they have good reason. They have consistently found and exploited reliable themes like cowardice, lust, greed, and made them stick through constant repetition in an easily digestible form, while turn rational attempts to refute these themes by shouting insults, lying at the top of their lungs, and maintaining a haughty pretense that, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, their number are as susceptible to those foibles (and more) as anyone.
It's been a successful, if dishonest strategy for a short-attention-span society. It doesn't rest on facts, which makes it easy. It's shallow, so even people with limited intelligence can manage it by loudly and stubbornly parroting talking points that they can't possibly understand. This is evident because, when people refute their talking points, they resort to sliming, name-calling, and nursery-rhyme-level taunting. It can be exploited ruthlessly by people of great intelligence--people who must know that they are lying, people who cannot possibly be unaware of the ramifications of their actions.
I was going to work a series of recent pattern recognition exploitations into this post, but that list has grown so huge that it merits its own post, which is forthcoming soonish.
*The Death Star is a major American corporation, one of the largest, in fact, and a big player in the government contracting bidness. I will not be libelling them by using their actual name, because they have more lawyers than I have molecules.
Many of you probably know about Minesweeper. It's all about pattern recognition, learning the lessons offered by a pattern of symbols and applying them to solve a logic problem. The problem is that, if you don't solve the pattern, the game blows you up. One of the tricks is to make sure that you act on guesses as little as possible. Because guessing will, in fairly short order, get you blown up.
When I was a manager at a long-ago and faraway place I like to call the Death Star*, I used to try to use Minesweeper as a test of pattern recognition skills. I needed a lot of young persons (the job paid crap and was pretty much McDonalds for liberal arts graduates) and had to separate them out somehow. Pattern recognition was important to the job, in the sense that if one could recognize recurring patterns in the data we were analyzing and summarizing, one could do the job quickly, if not artfully.
I never could figure out a fair way to score Minesweeper performance as a skills test, though, and people got really nervous when I'd watch them over their shoulders as they played. So the testing program didn't work out. But the correlation remained, verified through observation of them what got hired: those that could play Minesweeper with any facility were pretty good at this job, and those who guessed a lot pretty much sucked at the job.
Pattern recognition is a key skill in life, and in intellect. They teach it on Sesame Street: "One of these things is not like the other." Doctors, lawyers, firemen, and cops, among many others, rely on pattern recognition as a stock in trade. Successful programmers are the great pattern recognizers of our business and technical culture; breaking down code into repeatable patterns is a key technological skill. It's even more basic than that, really; lions certainly rely on pattern recognition when they're scanning the savannah for, say, zebras--and let's not forget the gazelle, recognizing the pattern of a bit too much quiet--and we all recognize a potentially dangerous pattern in hearing footsteps behind us in the dark and quiet of the night.
Pattern recognition is so important to all cognition that we can quickly grow overreliant upon it. We think the car ahead of us will make the right turn, and we rear-end them. We think that sex is good, so we marry our partner. Uh, wait, that's only usually a mistake when I do it. Never mind on that one, eh? We think that the media tell us the truth, so we keep reading the Post and the Times and watching the nets.
Therein lies the rub for right-wingers. They are overconfident in their pattern recognition skills. And let's face it, they have good reason. They have consistently found and exploited reliable themes like cowardice, lust, greed, and made them stick through constant repetition in an easily digestible form, while turn rational attempts to refute these themes by shouting insults, lying at the top of their lungs, and maintaining a haughty pretense that, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, their number are as susceptible to those foibles (and more) as anyone.
It's been a successful, if dishonest strategy for a short-attention-span society. It doesn't rest on facts, which makes it easy. It's shallow, so even people with limited intelligence can manage it by loudly and stubbornly parroting talking points that they can't possibly understand. This is evident because, when people refute their talking points, they resort to sliming, name-calling, and nursery-rhyme-level taunting. It can be exploited ruthlessly by people of great intelligence--people who must know that they are lying, people who cannot possibly be unaware of the ramifications of their actions.
I was going to work a series of recent pattern recognition exploitations into this post, but that list has grown so huge that it merits its own post, which is forthcoming soonish.
*The Death Star is a major American corporation, one of the largest, in fact, and a big player in the government contracting bidness. I will not be libelling them by using their actual name, because they have more lawyers than I have molecules.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Eurotrash at Play
So the World Cup comes down to four European teams in the semifinals as ginormous superpowers Handbagtina and Brazil bite the dust, both fairly ignominiously. And none of the teams left is England. I got nothin' here, kids.
England went down in a pool of its own vomit, on penalties, generating little offense and squandering what urgency it could muster after Wayne Rooney attempted to castrate some poor bastard with his cleats, then violate the ancient England-Portugal peace treaty to cover up his turds. Once it went to penalties, you knew England was doomed, especially when Sven sent up gloriously useless Frank Lampard to take the first kick. Jamie Carragher had the right idea, sneaking one past the Porto keeper before he was ready, but sadly for Albion, the ref was paying attention that time, and Carragher obligingly handed over the retry to the keeper.
Of course, the whole thing was a waste of time; nothing can stop the Portuguese from treating every game like the World High Dive championships.
The France-Brazil game was better--tight, taut, exciting, pleasing. Despite the teams involved. It's incredible that the geriatric French can keep this up, but then again, they were taking on the geriatric Brazilians. Friday's games shall never be spoken of here again. The Germans got the right outcome against the whinging sluts from Argentina, I managed not to drown in fury, and it's over and done with.
I am left with little focus for my partisan angst, and so I have decided to pull for one of the two best remaining matchups for the final: the Actual, For-True World High-Diving Championships. I look forward to joining all of you in watching in wonderment as the Italians and Portuguese spend 90 minutes trying to out-flop each other. Thrill to the beat as no fewer than 18 greasy prima donnas simultaneously writhe on the ground in badly faked indignant agony, leaving only their goalkeepers standing to punt the ball back and forth, and leaving us with no idea whom to support as these two clubs of cynical smut-peddlers flounce their way to glory.
Second best is the war grudgematch final. The problem here is that there's only one righteous outcome, and I don't like it, even though I picked the Germans to win on the strength of their home advantage before this thing started (I'm as clueless as anyone; I had them beating Brazil in the final). On the other hand, the one thing that's guaranteed about the winner of this year's tournament; I won't like them. Yes, yes, please contain your surprise.
England went down in a pool of its own vomit, on penalties, generating little offense and squandering what urgency it could muster after Wayne Rooney attempted to castrate some poor bastard with his cleats, then violate the ancient England-Portugal peace treaty to cover up his turds. Once it went to penalties, you knew England was doomed, especially when Sven sent up gloriously useless Frank Lampard to take the first kick. Jamie Carragher had the right idea, sneaking one past the Porto keeper before he was ready, but sadly for Albion, the ref was paying attention that time, and Carragher obligingly handed over the retry to the keeper.
Of course, the whole thing was a waste of time; nothing can stop the Portuguese from treating every game like the World High Dive championships.
The France-Brazil game was better--tight, taut, exciting, pleasing. Despite the teams involved. It's incredible that the geriatric French can keep this up, but then again, they were taking on the geriatric Brazilians. Friday's games shall never be spoken of here again. The Germans got the right outcome against the whinging sluts from Argentina, I managed not to drown in fury, and it's over and done with.
I am left with little focus for my partisan angst, and so I have decided to pull for one of the two best remaining matchups for the final: the Actual, For-True World High-Diving Championships. I look forward to joining all of you in watching in wonderment as the Italians and Portuguese spend 90 minutes trying to out-flop each other. Thrill to the beat as no fewer than 18 greasy prima donnas simultaneously writhe on the ground in badly faked indignant agony, leaving only their goalkeepers standing to punt the ball back and forth, and leaving us with no idea whom to support as these two clubs of cynical smut-peddlers flounce their way to glory.
Second best is the war grudgematch final. The problem here is that there's only one righteous outcome, and I don't like it, even though I picked the Germans to win on the strength of their home advantage before this thing started (I'm as clueless as anyone; I had them beating Brazil in the final). On the other hand, the one thing that's guaranteed about the winner of this year's tournament; I won't like them. Yes, yes, please contain your surprise.
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