This Mefi thread about playsets of yore will eat some of your time, but it’ll be worth it. Amazingly, the linked article did NOT include what I think of as the ur-Playset, the Fisher-Price castle I had as a tyke that was so well built that some kid is probably STILL playing with it somewhere.
(For the record, my Death Star is in my closet. Still.)
(Not pictured: Several other Ceasers; Whiskey; Baseball; Ben Folds; Gustav; Porcupine.)
On the 4th, cops in Tennessee set up a patently illegal DUI checkpoint. Watch what happens when a citizen asserts his rights.
I’ll be completely surprised if anything at all happens to these badged thugs. We should demand better. Don’t put up with this shit.
My friend John Nova Lomax wrote a pretty amazing piece in Houstonia magazine about his mother. You should make time to read it.
Ol’ Frank took some pretty solid shots of Billy Joe Shaver the other night. Enjoy.
30 months after their rollout, the TSA has finally complied with the law mandating public comment on their porno-cancer-scanners.
97% of respondents hate them. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the mealy-mouthed push-polls the TSA has been touting saying people don’t really mind them.
Brutal and spot on: Dying Kid in Houston Holding On Until Astros Develop Player Worth Meeting.
Fortunately, Chief Heathen Education Officer Ceaser has you covered with this short video.
Listen as LeVar Burton explains his ritual to avoid being shot by police on routine stops.
Jason Everman was kicked out of Nirvana just before they hit it big. Then he was kicked out of Soundgarden, just before THEY hit it big.
Then he joined the Rangers and, eventually, the Special Forces, and now he’s a student at Columbia.
Yeah.
He is, predictably, quiet about it. And thank God, because otherwise he’d be the guy who could say he was in Nirvana, and in Soundgarden, and in the Special Forces, and no one would ever believe him.
This morning, at a Louisville Starbuck’s, I saw this bumper sticker:
In case it’s not clear, let me spell it out for you: It says “Contradict” in the same style as the now-ubiquitous “Coexist” stickers, with the tagline “They can’t all be true.” Threatened by an America where they’re no longer the overwhelmingly dominant demographic gropu, they’ve taken a message of tolerance and turned it into a means to run around telling people their faith is superior, which I’m certain will do WONDERS for tolerance and pluralism.
What goons.
Ever wonder what it’s like to get a national security letter? Well, Brewster Kahle can tell you.
This is completely awesome, and I obviously must have 50 meters of magnetized ball chain.
Update: I have been alerted that the chain was NOT magnetized; this’ll work with 50m of normal bead chain, apparently, which makes it even MORE awesome.
The bullshit “Do Not Fly” list is getting its day in court, and it’s not going so well for it.
Via Joe Hill’s Tumblr, but screenshotted for posterity:
On a predictable 5-4 vote, SCOTUS strikes down DOMA.
Once again, Alito, Scalia, Roberts, and Thomas are invited to blow me. Hilariously, Scalia’s dissent includes the line “we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation,” unlike, say, the Voting Right Act.
WaPo:
The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court’s opinions announced Monday was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did.
The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual right-left divide. But Alito didn’t stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his colleague.
Our “originalist” Supreme Court has decided that the Voting Rights Act has, somehow, become unconstitutional.
Confidential to A.S, J.R., S.A., C. T., and A.K.: Eat my shorts. And, seriously, don’t some of you reactionary intellectually dishonest goatfuckers need to retire soon?
Via Wheaton’s tumblr:
Greenwald nails it. Here’s an interesting fact about Espionage Act charges, btw:
Prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?
And more:
The Terrorists already knew, and have long known, that the US government is doing everything possible to surveil their telephonic and internet communications. The Chinese have long known, and have repeatedly said, that the US is hacking into both their governmental and civilian systems (just as the Chinese are doing to the US). The Russians have long known that the US and UK try to intercept the conversations of their leaders just as the Russians do to the US and the UK.
They haven’t learned anything from these disclosures that they didn’t already well know. The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
I don’t fall into the trap of thinking either McCain or Romney would have been better here; the GOP theory of government power is typically far more offensive to me than the Democratic one – and, besides, everyone inside the Beltway is already lining up to pillory Snowden. The accord the parties find themselves in over this issue is part of the problem.
Via here:
Snowden said Monday, “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American,” slamming Cheney for the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping and for “deceitfully engineering” the Iraq war.
This is a short SF story presented as a bug report to Twitter, regarding the failure of their API to limit result sets to tweets from the past.
You should go read it.
Turns out, there is such a thing as flying snakes. You’re welcome.
We fell behind. Sue us.
A few fun bits from the Steampunk Ball portion of Comicpalooza, with Abney Park. The lights were my nemesis!
Free Press Summerfest, which is mostly Ume.
In accordance with regulations, we now provide photos of NEW KITTENS.
Back in March, I talked to you about THAT IS ALL, John Hodgman’s final volume of complete world knowledge. If you’re interested in that book, it might be worth your while to check out the audiobook instead, because it is brilliant.
The link there goes to a review that goes into detail about the evolution of Hodgman’s voice, which is something I had intended to do in my blurb but ended up leaving off, largely because I wasn’t sure how much of what I thought I was seeing was in the text, and how much was colored by casual interaction with Hodgman on JCCC3 (where, obviously, he wasn’t “in character” all the time).
This is spot on, though:
Without giving too much away, you should know that That is All makes its crucial Turn when Hodgman stops writing as a familiar character, and begins writing as what we might guess is “himself,” whatever that means for a writer who is so aware of his changing status and thus his changing voice. Taking on a new voice, one that is so unselfconscious, is surely a vulnerable place to be after so many years occupying jokey versions of himself — we’ve heard Hodgman as a Former Professional Literary Agent, Resident Expert, Famous Minor Television Celebrity, and finally Deranged Millionaire (if you aren’t familiar with these, read your history). Now we are hearing from the post-post Hodgman — in other words, beyond the narrator-in-character writer there is a Hodgman voice we’ve been waiting to hear from again (I remember this voice from before his first book), and boy does it hit home. The book’s brilliant conclusion, telling the story of the metafictional Anne Darling Egan, serves as a transition not just in the book, but in Hodgman’s career — it suggests what Hodgman will do next, after the end of this series of postmodern characters. I have no inside information, but listening to the long segment preceding the closing song, I couldn’t help but think — Hodgman has a novel in him.
What I conclude from That is All is that Hodgman’s Deranged Millionaire character was gaslighting us the entire time. The truth, of course, is that Hodgman himself is a genuinely kind person who uses character as a way to express himself with a kind of wry, safe detachment. His recent Derangement is a fun side-note in the arc of his career, but careers aren’t what matter. What matters is that we do what we love, that we are with the people we love, and that we do our work surrounded by friends — that is what Hodgman has been doing by bringing in Paul Rudd and Jonathan Coulton and running gags that span dozens of hours of audio and years of work — he’s demonstrating to us what is most meaningful isn’t the jokes, it’s that those jokes are shared.
Justine Bateman — sister of Arrested Development‘s Jason, and alum of the Family Ties ensemble — has, at age 47, enrolled at UCLA for a computer science degree.
Delightfully, she’s keeping a blog about the experience.
In MSFT operating systems, it’s basically impossible to block Microsoft’s domains because they get treated specially and do not use the normal DNS system.
Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.
Ladies and gentlemen, Brushy One String.
If you (a) enjoy good writing, (b) enjoy Iain Banks, and are sad he’s gone, or (c) just love Formula 1, then you should definitely go read this. Here’s a bit:
It’s all about the power, and weight transfer. The F1 cars weigh 600kg. In a Lamborghini Diablo – a maniac, kaka off-a-shovel device if ever there was one – each bhp has nearly three kilos to move around. In what we’re to be driving, each horse only has to shift 800 grams. Under acceleration drivers get hit with 2.5gs, under braking it’s four gs.
[…]
‘Allez! Go!’ Clutch out.
The sound assaults. I feel like a shell in a gun. The car leaps forward like a Navy fighter slung from a carrier. Feather slightly, pull back on the right paddle for second, exit pits. Assume the line. First gentle corner again, burst of – Holy shit! – power, then the counter-intuitive braking. It’s not really counter-intuitive, it’s just counter to anything I’ve learned in a road car, apart from how to do emergency stops. You stamp on the pedal. And stay stamped. It’s 40kg of pressure called for in the F3s; 80 in the F1s.
‘I brake, I wait’ Stephan said. The first part of the braking zone is the one place in each corner you have even the most microscopic amount of time to think, because initially, brake is all you do. Meanwhile, having just rearranged themselves after acceleration and then cornering, your internal organs struggle to find yet another novel configuration. I suspect bits of my insides that didn’t know the other parts existed have found themselves on term close to intimate, all jellied up together like passengers in a tube train. I start changing down (not too fast, or the engine blows up). Apex. Push the accelerator delicately, smoothly, trying to keep the whole foot on it, not just the ball. The LCD screen swings the revs on a ballistic curve from left to right, starting at 3000 and ending at 13,000rpm. The power…is crushing, awesome, frightening, dazzling. And synesthetic; over-spilling to invade and co-opt the sense that don’t appreciate it from first principles, obliterating divisions in the mind, searing tis impression forever into the deepest places in the memory. The car reacts instantly to every input like it’s responding to intentions, not actions.
Go and watch, and for God’s sake stay through the patch.
It really irritates me that, while I can set a time zone on an appointment, I cannot set flights in my calendar so that they appear properly regardless of where I am. I ought to be able to say flight 123 leaves Houston at 10:00 CDT and arrives in DC at 1 EDT, and have it work. But it doesn’t appear possible.
Grr.
This bit over at Crooks & Liars is illustrative:
Have you noticed how many right-wingers are decrying the “tyranny” of the Obama administration these days?
It’s particularly rife on the Tea Partying far right, where it’s extremely common to hear Obama being portrayed as a “tyrant,” particularly regarding his recent attempts to promote gun-control measures.
[…]
I was reminded the other day, rereading Stephen Budiansky’s marvelous book about Reconstruction, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, just where the right-wing fetish about “tyranny” comes from. It’s a highly selective fetish, after all; none of these “libertarians” seemed even remotely concerned when George W. Bush launched the whole “enemy combatants” enterprise back in 2001.
According to Budiansky, it — like the phrase “waving the bloody shirt,” as well as the whole conservative adoption of that rhetorical ruse as an aggressive form of defense — has its origins in the years during and immediately following the Civil War, when it was common for Southerners to sneer at Abraham Lincoln (alive or dead) as a “tyrant”:
Budlansky’s book includes this:
A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution.
Huh. Pure coincidence, I’m sure.
From my long-overflowing mailbox: “FAQ: The ‘Snake Fight’ Portion of Your Thesis Defense.”
That every few months, it decides my .OST file is fucked, and that I need to delete it and re-download all my data.
All eight fucking gig.
This morning, when I stopped to buy kolaches because my favorite burrito truck wasn’t at my usual coffee shop, an older white dude came in behind me.
He was of a certain type:
“Huh,” I thought. “I’ll bet that guy is either UH’s head basketball coach, or head football coach.”
Chris Oliver, via Bobbie Oliver’s Twitter: “Cocaine is like Ayn Rand: I don’t enjoy it myself, but I can see how it would appeal to assholes.”
As of today, it has been a year since Achewood updated.
Stephen Colbert eulogizes his mother, who died last week at 92.
It may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was 92 does not diminish — it only magnifies! — the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.
If your eyes are dry, I’m not sure I wanna know you.
Colbert, like us here at Heathen, has long been a fan and supporter of that “Kickstarter of philanthropy,” Donors Choose. DC is our “go-to” gift of choice for the severalness of folks in our lives who quite honestly don’t need another gee-gaw to commemorate another trip around the sun. It might be nice, gentle Heathen, to drop a little money in their bucket in honor of the late Mrs Colbert, seeing as how she clearly did a damned fine job with her boy Stephen.
Way back in 1994, when I moved to Houston and took a job at TeleCheck, I was absolutely shocked to discover that, in their machine room, there was still an honest-to-shit PDP-11 running RSX, alone in room full of Vaxes and Alphas.
“Good lord! Why?” I asked.
Well, it was complicated. TeleCheck used to be a loose confederation of state-by-state franchise operations, before one guy had bought up most of them (and, eventually, all of them). When they were still mostly franchises, though, a guy had had the idea to create a stand-alone computing services company to do the IT and programming for the franchises, plus some other clients as needed. He called the firm RealShare. (IT at TeleCheck was still known as RealShare well into the 1990s.)
By the early 1990s, nearly all the franchises (all except Australia, New Zealand, and two US states) plus RealShare were under one very leveraged roof held by a handful of execs (all of whom became hugely rich when FFMC bought TeleCheck in like ’92 or ’93, but never mind that). By that point, RealShare’s outside client list had dwindled to ONE: the vaguely-named MultiService Corporation of Kansas City. And MSC’s services ran on the PDP-11, and MSC wouldn’t pay to upgrade, so there they sat.
At the time, 19 years ago, it seemed obvious to me that this was a terrible idea, and that while they COULD stay there for years, they’d be left behind by the broader industry. In technology, holding on too long to older tech can become very, very expensive! Besides, by that point even the technologically conservative TeleCheck had moved on to Vaxes, and in fact was slowly migrating to the wave of the future that was Alpha. (Yeah, about that…)
I left TeleCheck in 1997, off to greener pastures. I assume that lone PDP has long since been powered down. After all, that was almost two decades ago.
Imagine my surprise, then, to discover today that there ARE PDP-11s still in use, and that the organization using them intends to keep them on line until 2050, and has taken to trolling through vintage computing forums to find talent to keep them running!
“Wow! That’s amazing, Chief Heathen! I assume, at least, that they’re not being used for anything IMPORTANT, like financial processing, right?”
Well, you’d be wrong. True, it’s not financial processing they’re doing. It’s nuclear plant automation in by GE Canada.
An obsolete system from a defunct company with effectively no user base and fewer knowledgeable developers and administrators? What could possibly go wrong?
Author Joe Hill decided to try out one of those “You Write Like ____” sites. Madcap hilarity ensued.
Robert Reich is, as always, on point:
[…] Republican states are more homogenous and conspicuously less like the rest of America than the urbanized regions of the country that are growing more rapidly. Senators and representatives from these states naturally reflect the dominant views of their constituents — on immigration, abortion, and gay marriage, as well as guns, marijuana, race, and dozens of other salient issues. But these views are increasingly out of step with where most of the nation is heading.
This state-centered, relatively homogenous GOP structure effectively prevents the Party from changing its stripes. Despite all the post-election rhetoric about the necessity for change emanating from GOP leaders who aspire to the national stage, the national stage isn’t really what the GOP is most interested in or attuned to. It’s directed inward rather than outward, to its state constituents rather than to the nation.
This structure also blocks any would-be “New Republicans” such as Chris Christie from gaining the kind of power inside the party that a New Democrat like Bill Clinton received in 1992. The only way they’d be able to attract a following inside the Party would be to commit themselves to policies they’d have to abandon immediately upon getting nominated, as Mitt Romney did with disastrous results.
Fortunately, due to rapid demographic changes, Texas isn’t likely to be one of the GOP holdouts like the rest of the deep South.
A Canadian car dealer got robbed, and so they ran this radio ad that is completely hilarious and awesome.
And polite, naturally.
There’s a pretty good video floating around concerning what would happen if Superman punched you at full force, but it turns out it’s basically exactly the same riff that Randall Munroe did in his very first What If a few months ago when he answered the question “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% of the speed of light?”
Answer in both cases: rough equivalent of a GIANT-ASS NUCLEAR BOMB. But given Munroe’s profile at this point, it seems kinda unlikely that the Superman-fist guy hadn’t seen Munroe’s work, which makes his effort seem cheesy.
I defy you to find something better.
h/t: Agent R. I AM FULLY AWARE OF MY DEMAND.
I kinda want to drink in the 1860s bar.
These Season 3 Infographics are completely brilliant.