I've gotten a lot of mileage for ragging on Texas for these idotic policies so it's only fair to give space when it's my own adopted state that is playing moron.

Kelley spotlights the plight of Rachel Boim, who was suspended and then kicked out of her school for a story she wrote in her personal journal.

Come on, Georgians! We're supposed to be the last bastion of common sense and down home wisdom. Eliminate these zero intelligence policies and start thinking again!

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Helen's flight to the States was made miserable because she couldn't recline her seat and the person in front of her could. Broken seat? Maybe not.

WASHINGTON - Every cramped air traveler may have the right to lean his seat back, but Ira Goldman sees airplane justice from another perspective — that of the person behind — and he's found a way to even the score.

Goldman invented the Knee Defender, a beeper-sized block of plastic that lets passengers prevent the seat in front of them from reclining

The hard plastic block, which has an inch-wide groove down the middle, fits around the arm of a tray table and acts as a barrier to the seat's backward movement.

So next time your seat won't go back, go ahead and check for the Knee Defender. In the event of an emergency your seat cushion may be detached to serve as a non-lethal bludgeon.

Posted by: Jim at 09:44 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Okay, we've all seen the picture of Miss Afghanistan in a bikini. She has a pretty face and enough body fat to feed an army of mice for about a millisecond. Could somebody please buy this girl an ice cream cone?

But it seems that she's been in the States for the past 8 years or so and there wasn't any actual pageant in Afghanistan that she won in order to represent the country. Did you really expect that there was? I mean, come on now. We displaced the Taliban but the Afghani culture is still the same as that of its neighbors. If a genuine Afghan girl stripped down to her skivvies and paraded around on stage she'd get a belly full of stab wounds from one of her brothers trying to "reclaim the honor" of the family.

So is it a good thing that Miss Afghanistan is part of the Miss World pageant? Well, sure it is. The more half nekkid women there are in the world the better. Is it an indication that Afghanistan is moving towards a "western" culture? Nah.

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Found a nifty link over at Ilyka's Place. It seems that Dean Esmay is looking to find out just what women hate about men. Ilyka had a rough time but finally thought one up. I don't see how this could be difficult for a woman. There should be loads of things that all y'all curvy wenches have against us.

Just for an example, there's the way we mark our territory over at your place. You know, the couple dribbles of pee on the rim of the toilet or the way we take the toilet paper roll off and put it back on so it rolls the right way (over the top!). Or the way we go through your cosmetics and beauty products and wipe our penises across your facial beauty bars. Or the way we'll put a couple of teaspoons of salt in your fish tank so the fishes all die and you'll sell the damn aquarium because you're so upset and that way we don't have to move the bloody thing for you when you get your next apartment.

You know, stuff like that.

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The Snark Hunt is up and active over at Kate's place. Don't know what the Snark Hunt is? Well, it's simply the best posts of the blogosphere with all of the touchy-feely crap culled away.

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First step, pick a kid friendly name, like The Wiggles. Do not pick a name that stands for terrorizing children.

We took Pooh Bear and two ninjas to a costume ball at a local mall yesterday. It was a one hour concert by a kids' band followed by a costume contest. The band was pretty good. They were high energy and got the kids, especially the little ones, dancing and participating in the music. Something bothered me about the band name though.

They were called "The Bugaboos". At first hearing it this sounds like a cute name. It's got "bug" in there and bugs are pretty popular with kids. They don't understand that "bug" also means "cockroach", "fire ant" and "black widow". For kids, "bug" means "daddy longlegs", "lady bug" and "cricket". But "bugaboo" sat wrong with me. I've got a fairly decent vocabulary but I couldn't think of specifically why it bothered me but it certainly did.

When we got home (none of our munchkins won the contest - it was rigged) I looked up "bugaboo" at Miriam Webster and found the definition:

1 : an imaginary object of fear
2 : BUGBEAR 2; also : something that causes fear or distress out of proportion to its importance

Yup, they named their band after the boogeyman. I seriously doubt that they intended to make their band name synonymous with childhood horror but that's where they ended up.

Moral of the story: When you pick a name for your band, go ahead and verify that it doesn't mean the exact opposite of what you are going for. When in doubt, use the Band Name Generator. Then again, Billy Manlove and the Amazing Hamster System might not be the best name for a kids' band either. Unless you're a priest.

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Daylight Savings Time,
Oh, Daylight Savings Time,
You suck.

Warning: Vulgarity ahead. more...

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Is Jim actually blogging on the weekend? Heck no. It's a beautiful autumn morning that's promissing to evolve into a fantastic autumn day. I'm about to mobilize the troops for an invasion of Stone Mountain.

But you can catch a couple of quality posts over at Writer's Noose. Chuck had a wierd morning and he has his very own troll now. He also has a post on a very disturbing EULA development.

Go visit and say Hi.

How are y'all liking the story aspect of Chuck's site? Good mix of actual development and bloggish entries? Anybody actually following along? Lemme know.

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As long as you don't have a heart attack, of course. Seems Chuck had a bit of a scare today.

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Swedish church takes step towards gay marriages

UPPSALA, Sweden (Reuters) - Sweden's national church has taken a first step towards allowing gay marriages after senior clerics voted to draft an order of service for such a ceremony.

While any final ruling is still a long way off, advocates of gay weddings celebrated the decision by the General Synod, the supreme church body consisting of about 250 clerics and lay officials.

The Swedish Church, formed soon after German cleric Martin Luther split with Roman Catholicism in the 16th century starting the Reformation, is one of the world's most liberal on sexual issues, allowing gay ministers and gay marriage blessings.

"It is a step towards making this reality but a solid theological foundation is needed before the church can go further," Archbishop K G Hammar told a news conference.

"The Swedish church has thus taken a prophetic role upon itself," lesbian pastor Ann-Cathrin Jarl told Reuters at the assembly in Uppsala, north of Stockholm, on Thursday. "We are the first major church that has come to that point."

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Y'all thought that Kevin Bacon was the most connected actor in all Hollywood? After all there's that whole "6 degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon" thing. Nay, nay, Fluffy. The truth is that the coveted spot is occupied by the one and only Rod Steiger who, despite having 119 films under his belt, is most famous for causing people to scratch their heads in consternation wondering "Who the hell is Rod Steiger?"

Steiger has an average separation of 2.651939. That is, there are about 2.65 degrees of separation between Steiger and any off-hand actor. Bacon has an average separation of a staggering 2.941131! That puts Kevin 1221 places out of first for best center of the Hollywood Universe.

This and other myths of the Hollyverse exposed by The Oracle of Bacon at Virgina.

(Hat tip G)

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Time to vote in the best weekly contest for new bloggers. Today I'm taking my cue from Susie and voting for Defending the Blogosphere Front in the War on Terrorism from Irreconcilable Musings.

Unfortunately politics seems to be rearing its head in the Showcase itself as a block of liberal blogs attempt to promote their agenda at the expense of a fair contest. Not that such an action couldn't have been taken by righty blogs, of course. Except it wasn't. And never seems to be. Peculiar, that.

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Than a slice of aged Cheddar,
In the mooooooooorningk.

(Read that in a Bugs Bunny singing voice for the full effect.) more...

Posted by: Jim at 09:18 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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And vice versa.

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1 Hanlon's razor.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 24, 2003 10:06 AM (jtW2s)

2 Damn. I thought I made that up. Must just have forgotten when I first heard it.

Posted by: Jim at October 24, 2003 10:35 AM (IOwam)

3 Hanlon's Razor /prov./ A corollary of Finagle's Law, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The derivation of the Hanlon eponym is not definitely known, but a very similar remark ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity." appears in "Logic of Empire", a 1941 story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls it the `devil theory' of sociology. Heinlein's popularity in the hacker culture makes plausible the supposition that `Hanlon' is derived from `Heinlein' by phonetic corruption. A similar epigram has been attributed to William James, but Heinlein more probably got the idea from Alfred Korzybski and other practitioners of General Semantics. Quoted here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in sig blocks, fortune cookie files and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This probably reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments created by well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare Sturgeon's Law.

Posted by: Jim at October 24, 2003 10:39 AM (IOwam)

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The Letter of the Day is was "B".

"B" is for Buffoon. Chuck's take on the recent anti-spam legislation sure makes the Senate look like buffoons.

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So this morning I opened up the old email and had 3, count them 3, spam mails for spam blocking programs. There's just something fundamentally wrong with this marketing approach. It's like a kevlar manufacturer drumming up business by walking around and shooting people.

Normally I delete spam faster than it can register (Spambayes filters the crap out into my "Delete me, I am an intrusive mass marketing email" folder where I summarily dismiss it after a cursory glance at the subject field) but one of these anti-spam spams happened to be the first in the folder so I got a look at it in time to halt my fingers in their automatic pressing of shift-delete. Here's the jewel that caught my attention:

Description:

The Most Powerful, Effective & Intelligent ANTI-SPAM BLOCKING program EVER!
Automatically cleans spam messages out of your mailbox before you receive or read them!

Anti-spam blocking?

Do they even proof this crap before subjecting the world to their drivel? Spam blocking software would block spam. Anti-spam software would work against spam. Anti-spam blocking means that their software works against techniques to block spam. In other words they are saying "Use our product to make sure that all of the spam sent to you gets around any spam blocking systems you have in place."

Retards.

Posted by: Jim at 06:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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No slack for pencil sharpener

When she was growing up in South Korea, Sumi Lough says, she used the traditional pencil sharpener that all children there used: a 2-inch-long blade that folds into a small handle.

Now a resident of Katy, Lough went to a school supply store while visiting Seoul, South Korea, and bought one of the sharpeners for her daughter to use.

But what may be considered a routine item for schoolchildren there was alarming enough in the Katy school district to get Lough's 13-year-old daughter in deep trouble. School officials viewed it as a potential weapon.

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Lots of good stuff over at Writer's Noose. Chuck's having a bad day (boat trouble) and has some snarky type posts. Go visit and say hi.

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Rice-a-Roni, The SanFrancisco Treat.

Rice. A tasty side dish, certainly, but a treat? I can't imagine getting a hankering for a treat and thinking "You know what would be a nifty little pick-me-up? A nice bowl of Rice-a-Roni. Yeah, that's the ticket." As far as treats go I have to rate Rice-a-Roni way down on the list. Well below traditional items like cookies and pastry. I'm thinking it would even fall below a medium rare steak on the old Treat-o-Meter. So what exactly is up with "The SanFrancisco Treat"?

G and I think we have it figured out. What is SanFrancisco well known for, besides the aforementioned rice treat? Yes, that's right. Homosexuals. It seems pretty clear that Quaker Oats (The company that makes Rice-a-Roni and it's non-treat cousin Pasta-Roni. And why exactly is rice a treat but pasta isn't?) is inferring that the preferred treat to the homosexual palate is a tasty dish of rice.

This is very interesting and raises several questions. Why do homosexuals prefer rice to more common "straight treats"? Is this seeming sensual oddity a side effect of homosexuality or a cause of it? And most importantly, can this preference for rice be used as a substitute or enhancement of a straight person's gaydar?

We quickly decided that the first two questions lacked sufficient humor potential would likely require federal funding to investigate fully so we concentrated on the last one. Could we develop a system that uses the knowledge of tasty rice being a preferred homosexual treat to assist homophobes the world over? And, more importantly, would there be any way to make money off of it? We believed that we could indeed develop such a system but there would be little profit potential. Any money we made would most likely be lost when we were sued by Quaker Oats. Therefore our system, known as the "Rice-a-Roni Homosexual Evaluation System", or more simply the "Rice-a-Roni Test" would be open source and free for use by any and all.

Our first step was to verify that tasty rice was not a preferred treat for heterosexuals. We took a poll of our straightt coworkers (male and female) and the unanimous decision was that they did not seek out Rice-a-Roni as a treat, or even as a snack. Some admitted to occasionally using the product as a meal instead of its intended use as a side dish but even that was done rarely and only when "there wasn't anything else in the house". We did not, of course, poll homosexuals as Quaker Oats already established the homosexual preference for tasty rice as a treat and we didn't want to get beat up or anything when said homosexuals found out what we were doing.

A second poll established that all straight respondents viewed chocolate chip cookies as an acceptable treat. For most it ranked quite high or at the top of their overall treat preferences. Even the ones that didn't have a particular love for chocolate chip cookies still preferred them to Rice-a-Roni as a treat source.

Our groundwork done we set about constructing the "Rice-a-Roni Homosexual Evaluation System". Being computer nerds this naturally fell into a flow chart. The beauty of this system is its simplicity. No training is needed to administer the test, simply follow along on the flow chart according to the responses of the subject. Note that although the original intent of this test was revelation of homosexuality for homophobes (gaydar enhancement) it can just as easily be used by sexually confused persons to determine their own sexuality or as a dating assistant for homosexuals. There's a much lower chance of an awkward situation developing when asking a prospective partner if they like cookies instead of grabbing his/her ass and jamming a tongue in an ear.

So without further ado, here is the "Rice-a-Roni Homosexual Evaluation System": more...

Posted by: Jim at 09:51 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The Letter of the Day is was "A".

"A"is for Alternative. Is man juice a decent alternative to facial cream?

(Hat tip G)

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