Perhaps more amazing than the Montana Grizzlies’ stunning comeback against Weber State to clinch a spot in the Big Dance is the story of their leading scorer who brought them there.

Throw in the fact that my hometown team, UNM, is in line for a 2- or 3-seed in the field of 65 and we have all the makings for one great March. Bring the madness!

Stay tuned for a Yahoo! pool wherein we invite all Mep fans, a la the Fantasy Baseball league…

Congratulations, sir, you win at Photoshop.

This is surely the best thing to happen to the “Land of the Tobacco Pipe,” in roughly 165 years, when the first organized game of baseball was played at Elysian Fields. And, by virtue of this post, you now know everything you will ever need to know about Hoboken, NJ. You’re welcome.

I was going to post this as a comment on Russ’ post, but I have enough to say that it warrants one of these ranty point-counterpoint things we love so much on TMR.

PleaseRobMe is an ingenious little piece of social propaganda. It would be clever or interesting if it weren’t so fundamentally flawed as to expose itself as its own straw-man.

The graphic atop the page says everything you need to know about the proclivities of this page, but also its willingness to be deceptive. The vision is conjured of a Google Maps for Burglars, wherein people can immediately see homes that are documentably empty and round up the goods in said domiciles before the unwitting occupants have time to check their Twitter accounts. Brilliant, right?

Except of course, this is nothing like the service actually offered by the site. Instead, one gets the kind of mangled cloudy information one might expect from the Internet. One gets fake identities (Twitter accounts), no addresses whatsoever, no maps, and uncertainty as to what homes may or may not be occupied.

In fact, the only thing that this website is at all is a series of Twitter updates indicating that the given Twitterer is claiming to be somewhere other than their presumed residence.

Basically, PleaseRobMe relies on many fundamental assertions, each of which is laughably untrue:

1. Twitter accounts can be certifiably linked to real identities.
This is quite hit and miss. Some Twitterers choose to use their real names, which themselves may or may not be that unique. Many are inscrutable to anyone but their close friends or followers, which seems to me to be the whole point of Internet identities. It’s hard to get an exact proportion, but you could spend the whole time someone is around the corner at the cafe just trying to discern who the heck they actually are.

2. People’s addresses are easy to find on the Internet.
This is one of those bright-lines that still exists for a remarkable number of people on the Internet – people will share their cell number, e-mail address, and personal emotions pretty liberally, but most are guarded about their actual physical address. Sometimes you can do a phone-book search and get a direct hit – other times a name will be so common as to create chaos and confusion. Often people live their lives unlisted. Even more frequently, people will move enough that their listed identity is out-of-date.

3. Everyone lives alone.
This is perhaps the most fundamental and crushing flaw in the PRM assumption network. In fact, most people don’t live alone. And very few of these Twitter updates make it clear who is with the person on any given outing, let alone breaking down who may be left at home or whether one lives with the person one is on an outing with. People have spouses, boy- and girlfriends, roommates, friends crashing on couches. The idea that knowing one resident’s whereabouts could in any way mean the remaining home is vulnerable is patently absurd.

4. One can reliably predict how long someone will be away.
Again, hugely inconsistent. Yes, if the person says “Going to Chicago for two weeks” and their address is in Honolulu, that’s a safer bet than “At the Starbucks”. But most updates are “At the Starbucks”. And it’s hard to say whether the Starbucks is in Chicago, Delhi, or Honolulu. Or how long the person will be there. Or whether they updated at the end of their Starbucks run and are almost home already anyway.

But beyond all these basic assertions, there’s a more insidious issue in play. These sites, satirical or not, are designed to get people to think that privacy is being eaten by the Internet and that will obviously lead to more crime and victimization for those losing the privacy. While privacy may or may not be reducing from the Internet, there’s absolutely no causal link between reduced privacy and increased crime or victimization – certainly not in any way that this site is trying to illustrate. By creating an atmosphere of unjustified paranoia about Internet privacy, this site convinces people of threats that aren’t valid and thus has the moral fortitude of the Bush administration invading Iraq over mysterious 9/11-related claims.

But more interestingly, it’s hard to say whether privacy is even all that reduced by the Internet in the ways that PRM is discussing. After all, phone books have existed for decades and are accessible to any member of a community. (Presumably one has to be in the same community as someone one is hoping to rob from.) And while it may seem like an interesting novelty to have a Twitter update saying someone’s at a Starbucks, how is that different from being able to make the presumption that, say, the house is empty during work hours because most homes need two incomes these days? One would actually be much safer and better off looking up basic occupation information that was available publicly long before the Internet and then cross-referencing with a phonebook. You know, basic trappings of 1950’s America that use real identities instead of Twitter handles.

Then again, in the 1950’s, I guess it was mostly just men out working while the women stayed home and cleaned and waited for the kids to arrive. Because certainly no one wanted to do dastardly things to homemakers and rob them.

In any case, PRM’s entire point and argument dissolve upon scrutiny and simply amount to someone shouting in the middle of the street “OMG! The Internet! It’s coming to get us!” for no reason.

One of my new favorite satirical websites is PleaseRobme, a database of absent-minded social networking updates broadcasting that the user is away from home. In the words of the website,

“So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home.”

This reminds me of some favored internet dating profiles. “On the one hand, my website handle is SuperHotMama, on the other hand, I chose to feature a heavily shadowed picture of my left ear in my profile picture.” Self-deception can be fun.

The Hexacopter can zoom in and out of view in the blink of an eye, and sounds like an “angry swarm of bees” as it collects intelligence, scans for impure thoughts, and prepares a euthanasia beam for its thankful victims.

Why, yes, sir, I am a jackass.

From Droogie at Daily Kos comes a new and exciting competition (we here at The Mep Report take no obvious position on the content herein.  You’ll all just have to read between the lines for yourselves…):

The Out-Dick Jim Bunning Contest!

So, here’s a few of the things I’ve done over the past few days to prove my dick credentials, in my ongoing efforts to out-dick Jim Bunning.

Our personal favorites:

1. Hung around outside a soup kitchen and cock-punched the homeless.

1. Ate king-sized Butterfingers, deep-fried and wrapped in bacon outside the window of a weight loss center.

1. Designed a fully-functional Puppy Incinerator, that can engulf 55 puppies in a clutch of flame every 30 seconds.

1. Downgraded the Puppy Incinerator to make it less energy efficient and capable of producing four times as much carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury, which is all sequestered in a poorly insulated vault located at a children’s playground.

1. Drove right into a puddle of water and road grime, splashing a busload of stranded single mothers carrying babies whose vehicle had broken down on the side of the road.

1. Posted videos on Youtube that claim to have new movies and music, but which really contain some techno song and footage from an anime cartoon.

1. Promised I’d give Conan O’Brien my late night talk show, then reneged years later.

1. Denied health care coverage to a toddler, claiming his broken leg was a pre-existing condition. He was born with the leg, after all.

1. Stood right next to another man at a row of urinals, even though there was plenty of room for a buffer zone unused urinal.

1. Heated up my cream of tuna with garlic sauce soup in the office microwave, then just left it there.

1. Told a gay employee that he’s free to do whatever he wants around the office, provided he gives me fashion advice and doesn’t “mince around too much.”

1. Borrowed someone’s car, then parked it across three handicapped spaces, then claimed the parking ticket and massive key-gash across the hood were both there before I borrowed the car.

1. Watched an old lady try unsuccessfully to shovel snow off her car from my heated apartment building, sipping coffee and laughing uproariously.

1. Yelled out the ending to “Shutter Island” to a line of movie patrons standing at the ticket counter — after they’d bought tickets.

1. Started the Facebook group, “If 1,000,000 people join this group, I’ll continue feeding my cat.”

1. Every time it snows, I yell, “That Al Gore is full of shit, man.”

Surprisingly absent from the debate in the article seems to be the issue of whether parents will be sneaking some alcohol to their accompanied minors. I guess people assume that only mid-ranged kids leaning toward teenhood are the ones who want to sneak some sips, or more importantly that any parents who want to give their helpless children alcohol already can under the cover of their private homes.

Come to think of it, I remember some vague family friends in Oregon who would regularly feed their baby half a beer, in part to aid in sleeping. Ah, rural Oregonian child abuse.

In any event, it looks like Clea may find it harder to get a drink with Senavene in tow, even close to home. So much for respecting the princess.

You may be familiar with Airborne, the sure fire cold remedy that, as the corporate branding tells us, was invented by a second grade teacher. Well, as it turns out, Airborne only operates on a second grade level — that is, it fights colds with the power of imagination.

As reported by ABC News, the only actual cited piece of evidence that Airborne effectively fights or prevents colds came from a study conducted by “GNG Pharmaceutical Services.” As it happens, GNG Pharmaceutical Services has about as much ability to test commercial products as the man with the exploding banana face (see yesterday’s post) GNG Pharmaceuticals in completely fabricated. It is a figment. And so millions of people have staked their cold-catching chances on this figment for years. Oops. Whatever will the oblivious public turn to next?

The lack of music, dialogue, and slow pacing of the thing really contributes to score a galactically high score on the absurdity scale. In my opinion, this video peaks when Banana Man fails to properly light one of his fuses, and impotently waves the lighter in front of his face, blindly hoping for yet another fizz and pop, followed by the splash of banana guts.

On the weirdness scale, I think this may even have trumped ‘Dancing Man in a Horse Mask Cooking Mushrooms…”

To be perfectly honest, Exploding Banana Head Man does incrementally reduce my affinity for the internets. It just don’t sit right, I tells ya.

Upon hearing of this morning’s devastation in Chile, I began to wonder whether all of this recent continental plate shifting in the news is connected. Is this, perhaps, the beginning of the Tectonapocalypse?

In a word: No. Haiti’s earthquake and Chile’s occurred on completely different plates, along completely independent fault lines. In fact, according to geophysics professor, Tim Dixon, the Earth gets a 7 magnitude earthquake approximately once a month, and an 8.8 range approximately once a year. Since humans, for the most part, don’t dwell in deep submarine caverns, or underneath the ocean floors, we experience few of these massive earthquakes firsthand. If your only source of information was cable news networks, however, you might begin connecting the dots and assuming that we’re in for some kind of “Pangea’s Revenge” disaster scenario.

One more thing about the Richter scale… I’d always known it was an exponential scale, but I didn’t know that each level actually represents a 3000% increase from the previous level. In other words, Chile’s 8.8 (were we to round off at 9) would be about 900 times more powerful than the 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti.

Given that information, one cringes at the potential devastation that is just starting to be reported in Chile. This could get very, very ugly.

I dun heard that the they gonna stop makin Hummers, so I wrote this here ditty, that I might not get the punching fits.

Ode to my Hum-V

Soaring eagles cried today
Cause Hum-V is goin away.
I begged GM to help it stay,
but the Chinese welched, they must be gay.

So goodbye to you, my trusty truck
Once you’re in car heaven, you won’t be stuck
with no more gas and no more bucks
to spend on it. That part always sucked.

For those of you who think that this is a totally authentic white-trash South African sensation, read up on their long history as internet performance artists. What separates Die Antwoord from the rest of the spoof pack, though, is their legitimately high level musical talent…

This band could easily become the Third World Eminems of the 2010s.

Four days ago, Andrew Joseph Stack, an otherwise unremarkable software engineer in his 50s, committed an act of terrorism when he crashed a small plane into the Texas State IRS center in Austin. While many people are still processing this event and its potential ramifications, some media sources seek to bury this story and downplay its significance.

While it seems impossible to outright bury the dissemination of an attack of this kind, the story has been obscured in the barrage of celebrity/media/sports stories that mass media outlets usually prefer. Yes, the attack was covered in the New York Times, but the Times downgraded the front page in a matter of hours to celebrate Lindsey Vonn’s gold medal in women’s downhill skiing.

While the Olympics are certainly worthy of coverage, is one medal out of 24, really a more significant event than what could be considered the beginning of a widespread populist revolt? It seems as if the New York Times, along with the rest of the established media, are choosing to downshift into celebrity/athletic fare, and deny that the suicide bombing was at all significant.

First of all, I have yet to hear any relating of this attack to the buzzword “terrorism.” This is despite the fact that the attack had all of the hallmarks of terrorism. We have a suicide, we have a plane being used as a missile, and we have a political and largely symbolic target. The main missing element is the foreign culture to scapegoat. Andrew Joseph Stack was a white, American-born, non-muslim, US citizen. Without the ethic or religious aspects, it’s as if the Right Wing Media doesn’t know how to properly leverage this news to support their point of view. Though it’s not as if they haven’t made a clumsy attempt or two…

Note that while Neil Cavuto could have used this forum to decry the Obama administration for its tax and spend policy and for creating too much big government, he remains incredibly timid in this interview with Scott Brown.

What Neil Cavuto knows (as do his Fox News Marionettes behind the scenes) is that this attack could just as easily have been targeted at the office of a major software company or the capital building, or even a media outlet seen as upholding the kind of corruption Andrew Joseph Stack saw as penetrating society.

Of course I don’t agree with his actions, per se. I think the scapegoating of the IRS is misguided and plays into the hands of critics who call him nothing more than a deranged nut with a crudely scrawled internet screed. And, of course the IRS agent killed in the attack had no particular power to change any of the problems that Stack layed out in his statements. I’m also fairly sure that a more thorough examination of Stack’s life will yield a lot more personal problems than financial trouble. It takes more than poverty to drive someone to violent reprisal.

However, that probably won’t stop Stack’s symbolic value in the decade to come. Populist rage is a valid, though unfocused way of looking at the society we’ve built. When you concentrate a society’s wealth to the extreme extent that we have, you’re bound to find large swaths of people who want to shake that system up, or even destroy it entirely.

And this is the dilemma for the corporate-controlled mass media. It spends much of its time glorifying violence, prejudice, hatred, inanity, and greed, so long as those emotions are used to distract and entice people who are being bled dry of their savings and properties. When those emotions are concentrated and directed back at the source of it all, the mass media panics. Better to bury the story than to understand it. Understanding what happened might encourage huge structural changes. And there are few things our corporate overlords like less than huge structural changes that they, themselves, didn’t engineer.

Hey kids. Wanted to give you the heads up that Klaus Pierre will be screening his movie Little Klaus, Big World on the west side of Los Angeles on Saturday, February 20th, at noon.

It’s a private showing, so I can’t announce the specific location, but I do happen to have a few invitations I can give out for those who contact me via e-mail (russ@mepreport.com). Viva la Klaus!

Much as I hate privacy, I am starting to come around to the idea that Facebook and Twitter are the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of the Internet. Purely because I charge them each with half a count of the murder of blogging.

When I first started blogging in the year 2000, I resisted the term “blog”. I didn’t like its shortness, its seeming triviality, the idea that blogging was something blippy and insignificant. I liked “web log” or “web journal” or even “internet diary” and even though I had one of the terser blogs out there, my posts would still almost always dwarf the absurd 140-character parameters of a “tweet”. Yes, there was perhaps the frequency and occasional irrelevance of tweeting, but 140 characters doesn’t even let one express an idea.

What was neat about blogging, in part, is that it was a public and accessible way to get across ideas so almost anyone (within our societal advantages of ambient time and money, of course) could read them and potentially be impacted. While there were early murmurings of this decentralizing information and giving the power to the people, it was pretty obvious that it would (like any good revolution) just replace one elite with another. And thus the newspapers started to crumble and the blogging infrastructure and hierarchy started taking shape.

This was fine, though, because it didn’t obliterate the small blogs. Even though newspaper conglomerates ran small locals out of business (or, worse, just strip-mined their content to the lowest common AP denominator), the point of blogging for most people wasn’t to make money but to communicate. So you couldn’t drive the small bloggers off the tracks. And thus I maintained a real insight into the thought processes and daily lives of many of my friends.

Fast forward to the advent of Facebook. Suddenly, most all my friends stopped blogging. The Blue Pyramid, my impressively popular website of mostly online quizzes since 2003, dropped off a cliff in terms of traffic. Suddenly a maelstrom force had entered the Internet and was eating parts of it wholesale. As more and more got dragged into the vortex, corporations and new ground-floor dwellers started loading Facebook up with trivial content and applications.

What’s insidious about Facebook is the way it presents information. For the most part, it is micro-communication, though “status updates” have limits twice or thrice as forgiving as Twitter (I still frequently find myself going over, but whatever). But Facebook has a way of presenting information that makes it completely overwhelming and, resultingly, trivial. Unless one lives on Facebook, stays logged in and refreshing all the time (I know a couple people who do this, but not many), then whatever floats to the top of the feed is completely random. No one can digest more than 15-20 status updates at a time and those at the top are often from your 55th, 64th, 99th, and 401st closest friends – people you would never bother to keep up with so regularly otherwise. It is fragmentation at its finest.

Yes, you can post “notes” that are more like blog entries. Yes, you can scan one individual’s entire page, though it usually consists of blippy irrelevant “wall post” musings from other people, a few photos, and terse and sporadic updates that don’t provide half the regularity or depth of even the most cursory blogs. I’ll admit that Facebook does photos pretty well through its tagging system and that it’s easy. Easy easy easy. Just sign in and go. And, theoretically, all the content you want is in one place.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no content. It’s really easy to post “HELP HAITI NOW” in your status, but impossible to provide the nuance of a more troubling look at the country, like I posted last month or Russ posted here yesterday. And yes, you can provide links, but who really goes to a lot of other non-video links in Facebook? And the need for character limits in Twitter has given rise to another insidious practice, that of URL-shortening websites.

Most savvy web users hover their mouse over most any link before clicking it to ensure they aren’t about to go somewhere suspect that will destroy their computer. I’ve gotten a little lazier about this since I have Firefox set to prompt me to accept or reject every single site’s cookie and save my preferences site by site, but I still do it most of the time. When you see a “bit.ly” or a “tinyurl.com” instead of a real website, there’s absolutely no telling what’s behind the curtain. When they first came up with these sites, I was mindboggled they’d be acceptable in an era when so much paranoia about spam exists. But apparently the Twitterverse can dictate the terms of the Internet’s surrender.

But of course, these sites do something far worse than just force someone to click links on faith (which, given my experience with fellow Meppers, I am already loath to do). They break down one’s mental link between the content linked and the actual website featuring the content. After all, you got it on Twitter and bit.ly. That’s all you need to remember. Just keep going back to the wells of Twitter and bit.ly – no need to remember anything else.

Like cell phones making people forget the phone number of everyone they know, this is a pretty extreme centralization of the Internet. My Dad reminded me the other day to regularly save as much important Internet as I could, both my own and others’, because we can’t take for granted the depth, breadth, and accessibility of the Internet forever. Russ and I had a conversation about six months ago wherein we re-established that the Internet’s decentralization is the last best anti-establishment hope in our world. If we expect all our content to come through portals like Facebook and Twitter, if we stop blogging in favor of driveling our thoughts to finite character limits and hoops of unsophistication, we’re letting the centralization win.

And what’s so bad about centralization? It’s too easy for corporations to control. It’s too easy to buy two or five websites and end up controlling everything. I fear corporations like most people fear the government, but it’s all for the same reasons. Consolidation of control for less than noble purposes is always a threat to those who want better outcomes.

Here’s my translation of this post for those who can now only process in 140 characters or less:

Twitter and Facebook are destroying blogging and accordingly our ability to process sophisticated or nuanced content on the Internet.

Whew. Seven characters to spare!

In Mep land, the post-Superbowl week is heralded not for parades and fanfare and All-American splendor. It is, instead, the highly anticipated (if unofficial) start of the baseball season.

And while baseball reality is certainly exciting what with the three Mep favorites (M’s, Sox, and Yanks) all poised to be major contenders this year, baseball fantasy is also right around the corner.

Playing fantasy baseball has been a personal tradition for over 18 years. Once the internet streamlined the process of updating statistics and standing, it became a not-too-minor obsession.

For the first time this year, I’m extending an open invitation to any Mep readers who feel up to snuff, to join our traditional fantasy baseball league. I warn you, the field is stocked with highly competitive, trash-talking, walking baseball encyclopedias. I implore you to not accept this invitation lightly. But, if you do want to test your mettle against some of the finest baseball minds in the blogosphere, feel free to e-mail me personally (russ@mepreport.com), and I will send you the league name and password.

We play a Yahoo! hosted, 20-ish team, very deep league, with a straight up fantasy draft (as opposed to a roto-style player auction). See you out there.

On this bleak winter morning in a country seemingly coming apart at the seams, two heartening reminders (check out the poll results) that the internet will always trump mindless mass-media propaganda.

Image via Reddit user, hiddencross.

While American citizens are demonstrating their good will, as they do, on cue, whenever informed of a disaster of the magnitude of the Haitian earthquake, we largely remain oblivious of their own government’s direct role in the plight of one of the poorest nations on Earth.

As relayed by Truthdig’s Amy Goodman, Haiti never had the chance to become a self-sustaining, truly sovereign nation capable of withstanding a natural disaster. Not while it has been weathering a succession of imposed political disasters for the last two centuries.

For nearly a century and a half (from 1804 to 1947) Haiti was forced to pay over $150 million in reparations to France for daring to declare statehood, rather than remaining a loyal slave colony under French rule. These reparations, the equivalent of over $35 billion today, permanently entrenched the fledgling state in insurmountable debt.

The U.S, under the auspices of the World Bank and IMF were only too happy to lend Haiti money, under the conditions that it forcibly accepted subsidized US agricultural imports. Of course, Haitian farmers could not compete with the artificially cheap US crops (sometimes referred to as ‘Miami rice’) and a country which once sustained itself on its own food production, became an unwilling dependent on food imports. Before 1950 Haiti produced more than 80 percent of its own food and also exported food. Today it imports 75 percent of its food as a migration of farmers who abandoned their crops sought work in cities.

Of course, this doesn’t begin to speak to the US’s history of supporting bloody Haitian dictatorships, or of our military occupation of the island from 1915 to 1934. It is enough to say that we, very much intentionally, never gave Haiti a chance to compete as an autonomous economy, never gave it a chance to thrive, and never gave it a chance to develop the kind of infrastructure necessary to deal with a natural disaster.

After all, what sort of example would it set for the rest of the subjugated world to watch a former slave colony transform itself into a beacon of hope for other down-trodden, occupied, or enslaved peoples? That certainly could never have been allowed to happen. Imperialism would never have been the same.

Don’t think the moral lines are being blurred by those asked to go to war for the ideals of torturing people born in a different place?

Think again.

The girl is 4 (four) years old. Four. And you thought spanking was bad.

Not noted in the article is whether or not the man was well versed in the ways of fabled Mep target the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, whose headquarters are across town in Yelm, Washington. Perhaps he’d moved the family to Yelm after being otherwise unable to live with the things he’d spent his life doing.

I wonder if everyone supports this troop?

Oops!

Yep.  It’s Sarah Palin’s hand, and those are notes from the EXACT SAME SPEECH WITH THE “OBAMA AS TELEPROMPTER GUY” LINE.

We here at The Mep Report are begging, nay, pleading with you, Sarah: the teabaggers need you.  The Republicans need you.  Your country needs you.  And most of all, and as always most importantly, YOU need you.  Please, please run for President. It would truly be a year of wonders.

I was stunned by Weather’s claim that he played in the NFL. His wiki-page confirms that he actually played half a season in 1971 for football-icon John Madden’s Oakland Raiders. Weathers also starred alongside Ahnold in the movie Predator, which should have given him an in to US electoral politics…

For nostalgic purposes, here’s the original confrontation between Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago. In this particular iteration, it’s set to weird anime music, but that’s the internetz for you…

I, for one, would like to welcome our new Corporate Overlords and offer them any help my flawed human faculties can offer.

Here’s one of Murray Hill’s designated human representatives in a recent interview on MSNBC…

I recorded some fantastically washed-out grainy video in an attempt to share this experience with you. Not only do the following clips give you a sense of the performances, they also recreate the crowd’s futile attempts to see anything amidst a standing room only mob. In any case, enjoy the festivities:

Here’s a charmingly lame Will Ferrell routine…

Here’s Mep favorite Jason Segel performing Dracula’s Lament with Jack Black. Following this performance, Segel and Russell Brand sang a duet of the Sarah Marshall song “Inside of You,” capped by a lusty make-out session between the two. Unfortunately my camera wasn’t rolling… Surely someone else’s was.

Here’s a bit of Brand’s scattershot stand up routine later in the show:

A truly unexpected performance here from the WWF’s Iron Sheik.

Here’s the Shins’ James Mercer covering Neil Young’s Don’t Let it Bring You Down…

Genius comedian Patton Oswalt regaled the crowd with his angry musings before an Aimee Mann set.

He then brought the house down with his Yoshinoya Beef Bowl routine.

Here’s Ben Stiller vamping on stage with a mysterious figure referring to himself as ‘Fabreeze Fabreeze.’

A vindictive Stiller returned during Tenacious D’s closing act with a giant drum set…

All in all, a very compelling night of entertainment.

Okay, so little babies like to take their socks off….and that is just so annoying because who wants a sock-less baby? That’s about as bad as a baseball player without a codpiece.  So we gotta do something about that–and now we can, thanks, again, to our friends at One Step Ahead (those friends who are always…one step ahead of us…).

We can buy straps that will keep those suckers on.  No matter how those little rascals pull, their socks aren’t coming off!

…Er…

Okay, I’ll say it.  What’s the over/under on how long it would take for a baby to become clinically insane from the intense frustration of not being able to remove their socks?  Am I the only one that doesn’t have a baby that would just say, “Oh! It appears that these things don’t seem to come off…oh well, I guess I’ll just continue to stare at the ceiling.”

Okay, so your son is a bed wetter…my condolences…so you make him wear underwear that has a “comfortable” sensor pad that connects to a “tiny” alarm that you can clip to his pajama top.  Any time he has an accident during the night, the alarm will be triggered and will let out a “distinctive warbling sound” that will get his attention.  Um.  As a parent, who has survived the first two years of having a baby (a time period where you are kicked headlong into the depths of sleep deprivation), I would like to recommend that you don’t wake your sleeping child up with a loud warbling sound.  I want to save you from wasting your time and money, because unfortunately “due to health reasons” One Step Ahead cannot accept returns of this product.

Stacey: Hey Tracy! How was your weekend?

Tracy: Hey girl! It was good. I saw a movie Saturday night.

Stacey: Awesome! What did you see?

Tracy: It’s Complicated.

Stacey: Oh, well, you don’t have to tell me.

Tracy: No, I don’t mind, It’s Complicated.

Stacey: Oh, it’s going to take awhile? Well, girl, that’s okay…I have all day!

Tracy: No, no, it won’t take long, It’s Complicated.

Stacey: Oh, well gee, come on, it’s not like I’m an idiot, just tell me the name.

Tracy: I am, It’s Complicated.

Stacey: You are what?

Tracy: Telling you, It’s Complicated.

Stacey: I get that it’s complicated, but I think I can handle it, so tell me already.

Tracy: Okay then, It’s Complicated.

Stacey: It’s complicated.

Tracy: Yes!

Stacey: Yes.  Telling me is complicated.

Tracy: No, the movie, It’s Complicated.

Stacey: Oh! The movie is complicated.

Tracy: No, the movie is It’s Complicated.

Stacey: Well, hello, Ms. Bad Grammar.  Well, anyway, the movie is complicated…so what’s complicated about it?

Tracy: Oh, nothing much, it’s a pretty straightforward plot, pretty derivative actually.

Stacey: Then why did you say it was complicated?

Tracy: I didn’t, I said that it was It’s Complicated.

Stacey: Yes, we established you don’t know proper grammar…can you just tell me the name of the movie already?

Tracy: Whatever, Stacey.

Stacey: Talk to the hand, Tracy.

Here’s the trailer where they pretty much show you the whole movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt-l1liNjk0

Big Fat Whale has created a terrific portrayal of the absurdity of corporate personhood.

Speaking of which, here’s Dr. Larry Lessig’s first impressions of the relevant sickening SCOTUS decision last week…

For more on why Mac Users are impotent tech fetishists and unwitting, unpaid salesman for the company, see TMR #16 and #35. No offense intended, of course

And then came the inevitable women’s hygiene spoofs…

For more from this uncannily well-cast Matrix spoof crew, check out their Matrix-run-by Windows XP bit.

The first thing you may notice about this video piece is that Obama’s placement is jarringly off. Even in the closeups, he is presented as extremely left-of-center. Compare this to a more even-handed weekly address (when he was addressing America’s Christmas spirit):

In the Christmas piece, Obama is exactly centered on the screen, and makes several references to typically right-wing entities that he’s attempting to reach out to in the spirit of the holidays. In the Christmas piece, he mentions that the tree is imported from Uber Red State, West Virginia (while it could have just easily come from more moderate Virginia), and he makes several references to military families and bases throughout the world.

Here’s another address from October which addresses a much more conservative audience — small business owners. Obama is again more centrally depicted (though just a smidge left of center) as he attempts to bring in entrepreneurs under his umbrella of tax incentives and health care reforms…

When comparing the two older addresses with this week’s speech, it is clear that Obama is desperately trying to shore up his base. He is sitting to the extreme left-of-center of the screen. He is saying “For the love of God, I’m with you!” to the progressives and populists who have become increasingly dismayed at his too-friendly-to-Wall-Street policies. In a more recent address, he may have also offered a subliminal snub to his much maligned Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. Even the flags behind him (typical patriotic symbols) are pushed nearly out of the frame compared with the two previous pieces.

Amidst the skewed shot, the viewer’s eye is pushed towards the right side of the screen, where an end table is seen with a pile of books on it. Given the (intentionally) misaligned stacking of the books, the White House may be trying to convey that lawyer Obama has been spending sleepless nights pouring over the precedents and ramifications of the Supreme Court’s recent decision, as he foments a plan to fight back. This is to be taken in contrast with the earlier pieces, when a more family oriented-setting is depicted in the background (either a Christmas tree, or a dinner table with a decorative centerpiece).

The White House seems desperate to convince people that Obama is hard at work on behalf of the progressive constituents that got him elected. If it fails, the next Presidential Weekly Address may feature a pleading left side of Obama’s face, while a Goldman Sachs logo subtly burns in a nearby fireplace.

Airbus, that airplane manufacturer that just doesn’t know when to bow down to Boeing and give up already (sorry Brits), has proposed a standing-room only option…

I’m presuming they are going to market this mainly in Asia.  I’m sure the “People Pushers” union is psyched!

Lemme See

WARNING: Not kid or Homophobic Friendly

I might even call this self-actualization Tetris. In this game, you’re not the removed architect and organizer of pieces, you’re the pieces themselves. Heavy, right? Building blocks of the world, unite!

This week, England’s Telegraph UK, featured the SarcMark, a purportedly new innovation for warning others of your not so sincere tone. A life-long ironical satirist myself, the SarcMark seemed to offer the prospect of more directly insulting the oblivious. Unfortunately the SarcMark isn’t a novel idea — at all…

Available for download at the rate of $1.99, the SarcMark itself resembles a backwards letter ‘G’ with a kidney stone. Though I liked the idea at first, something seemed oddly familiar about it — as if I had seen it before.

After combing the internet for a bit, I found paydirt…

I knew my aborted 12-year old Hebrew studies would come in handy some day. Yes, the SarcMark is actually the Hebrew letter ‘Pey’ or ‘P.’ It seems that the industrious folks at Sarcasm Inc. are opening up an entire new market to consumers — we now have the ability to buy and sell the letters of foreign alphabets for profit! That’s literally hundreds of new symbols that can be trademarked and sold on the open market. What an opportunity! (Add desired stolen symbol here)

Inspired by Sarcasm Inc, I wanted to unveil the newest Mep Report grammatical addition to the lexicon. It’s this:

I call it the Super Exclamation Point! Why use a regular old line with a dot, when (for only $4.99 plus shipping and handling) you can have this robust image of a slanted ‘T’ next to a man with a stick up his behind. It’s completely novel and definitely not English! Order now!

———-

As an aside, it did also occur to me that we already have the equivalent of a SarcMark. It’s this — . The tongue-sticking out smiley face (made up of a colon and a P) is intended to convey joking or sarcasm, and is already used at the end of the sentence. Perhaps this is why Sarcasm Inc chose to steal the Hebrew letter ‘P’. They are literally buying out the competition. If they trademark all letter ‘Ps’ for themselves, they will own a majority stock in the world’s tongue-sticking out smiley faces and have outright ownership over all of the methods of declaring written sarcasm. How devious! (insert stolen symbol here)

Other fun volleys from Conan and NBC:

- Conan’s initial response to the attempt to move his show.

- Conan puts up the Tonight Show for sale on Craigslist.

- Hitler laments NBC’s decision.

- Former NBC castaway, David Letterman chimes in.

When I first got into baseball, the Oakland Athletics were my team. It’s hard to admit as a loyal baseball fan that I had a team before the Mariners, that my eternal and undying fanhood is not to my first love. It has become acceptable in our society not to marry your first love or have the same job for life, but sports fans are basically supposed to stick with one horse forever, for some reason especially in baseball. But alas, such is not my story.

I first discovered baseball watching softball games in public parks in Washington DC in the spring of 1988. I was intrigued by the strange shape of the field, the amalgam of so many people doing such specific things. More than anything, it looked like fun. It was nothing like the sports they had us play in PE, nothing like the endless running that people seemed to equate with organized sports. It had an artistry to it, a mystery, it demanded explanation. I wanted to know more and my parents – not exactly big baseball (or sports) people – couldn’t give me much beyond the very basics, which only deepened the mystery. They enjoyed the camaraderie of the public park games, too, though, and we were sometimes the only fans in the bleachers at these loosely organized games.

Then we moved to Oregon that summer and took a trip down to retrieve our stored items from the Central San Joaquin Valley in October. In a random hotel lobby, there was a TV displaying – wonder of wonders! – the same basic game I’d seen in the DC parks. But it was shinier, with classier uniforms, and thousands of fans. I parked in front of what turned out to be a World Series game, having no idea the significance or even that these were professionals. The desk clerk took me for an avid fan and bemusedly asked me which team I was rooting for. It hadn’t occurred to me. I looked back at the screen.

“The green team.”

Green, you see, was my favorite color. And so I was enthralled by the Oakland uniforms, triply thrilled when I realized the next spring that their mascot was an elephant. And their nickname was associated with the grade I diligently pursued in every subject. I fell hard for baseball. And not just baseball, but Major League Baseball. I learned most of the rules through third grade playground kickball, started reading boxscores in the daily paper (I remember vividly poring over the details of a matchup that appeared to be between the Boston Royals and the Kansas City Red Sox), tried out for Little League, infamously (in my own memory) thinking that the glove was supposed to go on the hand one found dominant, to the point of arguing with the person who gave me a glove out of the bucket of extras that my right-hand glove wouldn’t fit properly on my right hand. I overcame this, adored Little League, and started setting my sights on a Major League career.

And then came baseball cards, which were to dominate an incredible amount of my time and energy for the rest of my time in Oregon. And with baseball cards, a new awareness of the players. And quickly, before even the midpoint of the 1989 season, I had picked a clear favorite. He was a towering hulk of a player, but thoroughly competent and, moreover, seemed like an affable guy. He was the heart of the Oakland A’s lineup. His name? Mark McGwire.

Mark McGwire was my favorite baseball player for years, even after I had shifted gears from the A’s to the Mariners, the result of a long geologic wearing down from hearing over a hundred M’s games a year on the radio and falling for the excitement of the likes of Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson. Before the ‘89 World Series, I had a lifesize Mark McGwire poster on the back of my door, which stayed there till we moved to New Mexico. I loved Big Mac, loved his effortless grace in smashing homers, his fearsome glower as he awaited the next hopeless pitch. He was perhaps an unlikely hero for a scrawny, terribly short right fielder (though I was quickly falling for Rickey Henderson too, with his wily speed, and I would soon become a catcher and really deepen my understanding of the game), but he just seemed to have the game figured out. He had the right attitude. And a cool name.

By 1998, I had grown to almost dislike the A’s after some intensely rivalrous years with the M’s in the new six-division structure of MLB and Big Mac had left them anyway. But I was over the moon about his season the summer before college, remember watching on a friend’s computer every at-bat after 60 homers. Wherever we were, whatever we were doing, someone would keep watch at the computer during Cardinals games and call us in and we’d all crowd around. Maybe it wasn’t every game, but that’s what it felt like at the time, and I’ll never forget 62, sending me over the moon with the high arc of the ball. There was the All-Star Game later, too, maybe the summer of ‘99 or 2000 if I recall correctly, watching Big Mac rip what felt like 50 straight homers, all of them 450+ feet, just taking the cover off the ball and sending it as far as possible. I couldn’t stop smiling and my parents watched too and said that I knew all along, had picked the best guy so long ago.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately or hate baseball, you’re doubtless aware of Mark McGwire’s recent admission that he used steroids. The news is hardly earth-shattering for those paying attention to baseball in the last decade or so, watching people balloon into caricatures of themselves, popping out homers left and right amidst rumors of juiced balls and diluted pitching while baseball enjoyed the increased “game-saving” profits and turned a blind eye. The recrimination McGwire and his cohorts have faced has been severe and one might expect, given all my other proclivities, that I would feel betrayed by Big Mac, that he’d play Bill Richardson to my baseball fandom and I’d walk away thinking they were all crooks and cheats, unworthy of the homage we try to pay them.

But it’s not so. I diligently attended tens of San Francisco Giants games during Barry Bonds’ pursuit of the career home-run record, cheering every time he came to the plate. I still think fondly of McGwire, even as the media eviscerates him and the baseball writers laughably refuse to grant him passage to the Hall of Fame. I’m not wild about Rafael Palmeiro, but I think that’s just because he lied so vehemently about the whole thing. And I’ve always hated Roger Clemens and A-Rod since he ditched the Mariners for greed, so it’s really just an excuse to gang up on those guys.

Why? Is this just my loyalty to baseball overwhelming everything else I rationally feel? Everything I think about drugs and authenticity and everything else out the window? I mean, how inconsistent could I get, right?

The issue for me, and I haven’t seen this argument anywhere else (nor do I expect to), so I suspect I’m on my own here, is that the difference between steroids and everything else is basically nil. Yes, steroids are technically illegal, but so is refusing to sign up for the Selective Service. We live in a country where smoking marijuana is a vilified criminal activity while drinking alcohol is a lauded social rite. Law alone is no argument, no justification. Folks, the laws are stupid. And even if the laws about steroids are designed to protect people from long-term ill health, I know plenty of people who’ve been prescribed steroids for one thing or another. Heck, just a year ago, a Kaiser doc tried to put me on a lifetime steroid nasal spray to prevent all these ear infections.

Mark McGwire started talking early on about Andro, his legal daily supplement that he took to help build muscle. (I think it’s short for something, but I’m not sure what.) He recommended it to people publicly. And it was always the part of him that made me most uncomfortable, because something felt weird about taking a drug that would make you better at baseball in some way. And that, I think, is the point. All of it – lifting weights, even, let alone nutritional supplements or legal chemicals or other artificial inducements – is weird. Professional athletics have long relied more on science than on straight hard work. It’s about what to eat and what to drink and what to ingest and what to inject and what to build to specifically construct, through carefully researched science, the greatest athlete possible. It’s all artificial.

At that point, we have two choices. Either only let people play who walk in off the street and refuse to try to change their bodies… or let them do whatever they want. There are countless players who are on prescription ADD drugs that would otherwise be banned stimulants, but they get a special exemption. You probably can’t find a Major Leaguer (at least a position player) who isn’t on countless chemical supplements and substances. The science of sports is carefully managed and throws everything into doubt, especially when compared with the era of Babe Ruth, whose scientific regimen consisted of eating as much as possible. I mean, come on. Can you imagine Babe Ruth getting by in today’s game? They wouldn’t even give him a tryout till he shaped up.

I just don’t see the bright line between steroids and the rest of it. And while the law may have made things “unfair,” deterring a Ken Griffey Jr. or a Will Clark from trying steroids, baseball’s policy throughout the Steroids Era made it clear that they didn’t see the difference between steroids and other artificial substances either. You can call something illegal all you want, but if no one’s going to enforce the regulations and everyone heaps praise on what you’re doing, you pretty quickly realize that word doesn’t mean what you think it does.

As we get closer to a world of genetic engineering, this question isn’t going to go away. People will look first for the genes that impact growth and size and strength, beefing up their children in the hopes of lucrative contracts. And then where will we be? Do we bar these people and their unfair advantages, penalizing them for things they had literally no control over? Or do we start a space race for 11-foot tall mutants who hit every single ball over the wall till we have to rebuild the Polo Grounds to keep things in play? And what of our society’s increasing proliferation of BGH and other substances which have already increased our relative size and height?

Science will keep pushing the bar. And if one’s going to let some things in and not others, one’s being inconsistent. I don’t blame any of the people who took steroids in the so-called Steroids Era, though I still hate Clemens and A-Rod. I look down a bit more on those who lied, but I even understand their frustration with the double-standard retroactively being enforced on them. Big Mac, I forgive you. I get it. And I hope all the baseball writers get off their sanctimonious high horses long enough to let you into the Hall of Fame someday. After all, they didn’t exactly blow the cover off these stories in 1998 or 2000, however obvious they think your actions were then. They pocketed their money and made their reputations at those times, so who are they to deny you yours? Ex post facto standards are never fair and certainly not in America’s pastime.

And thanks for being honest about it, however long it took you to open up.

I can’t believe these opportunities are still available.  I’m so happy and honored to have been chosen.

Office Of The National Security Advisor
Federal Republic Of Nigeria
Aso Rock Villa, Asokoro District,
Abuja-Nigeria.

Attn: Honourable Beneficiary

I am Lt. General Peter Olu (Rtd),National Security Advisor to the New Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.I am delighted to inform you that the contract panel which just concluded its seating in Abuja, just released your name among listed beneficiaries to benefit from the Diplomatic Immunity Payment.

Your payment file was forwarded to my office by the auditors as unclaimed fund, we wish to use this medium to inform you that for the time being,the Federal Government of Nigeria have stopped further payment through bank to bank transfer due to beneficiaries numerous petitions to United Nations against Nigeria on wrong payment and diversion of contract/inheritance funds to different accounts….

In this regards, we are going to send your contract part payment of $4.1 Million USD to you via our accredited shipping company…

Note: The money is coming in 2 security proof boxes. The boxes are sealed with synthetic nylon seal and padded with machine. Please you don’t have to worry for anything as the transaction is 100% risk free…

The consignment will be coming with a Diplomatic agent,who will accompany the boxes to your house address….

Bear in mind that the diplomat does not know the original contents of the boxes. What l declared to them as the contents is Sensitive Photographic Film Materials for security reasons. I did not declare money to them please. If they call you and ask you the contents please tell them the same thing Ok….

Lastly,i will secure the Diplomatic Immunity Clearance Certificate (D.I.C.C) which will make him pass every custom checkpoints all over the world without any hitch.
————————————————

What’s “synthetic nylon seal” and why does Fed Ex not offer that as an option?  Oh, I guess they do.

“Sensitive Photographic Film Materials”…so he told security that he was sending me porno pix?

I SOOOOO want a D.I.C.C.; that’s so sweet.

Oh, Akon, you are such a gentleman.

“Nothing you can compare to your neighborhood Ho.”

Oh, stop!  You are too kind.

I honestly don’t understand where the lines are in discussions of race in this country.

Before I get into the recent controversy surrounding Harry Reid’s comments re: Barack Obama’s candidacy, I have to check two things at the door.

1. My general views on race/racism, wherein I believe that things would honestly be best if no one ever mentioned race ever again. As I’ve said many times in many contexts, the terms we use to describe “race” are basically divided into a racist’s view of people, cutting them up into randomly sorted skin colors that have nothing to do with their personhood or even genetics or nationality. Not only do we need to discard our current racial categories, but the more we talk about race in general, the more we entrench racism as a practice, because awareness of race creates racism. Especially because race is an invented racist construct. I could go on, but I’m describing something I’m going to suspend for the purpose of this post.

2. My insane distaste for political apologies of all stripes, let alone the timing of this one in particular. The time for Reid to apologize for these comments was in 2008, when he made them, not in 2010, when a book exposing them is about to be published. Which just demonstrates that Reid does mean what he said and isn’t sorry, which is true of everything every politician has ever said and apologized for. But usually there’s a 48-hour gap that makes the apology look more feasible than, say, a 2-year gap.

Now then. We can begin.

First of all, does no one remember that the sitting Vice President, a man hand-picked by Obama himself, Joe Biden, made similar racially charged comments re: Obama during the early part of the campaign? Please recall. Sure, he didn’t drop the word “Negro,” but he sure implied the same things Reid was talking about in his comments.

Also, can we talk about the word “Negro” for a second? When did that become offensive? I certainly think we can all agree “Colored People” sounds more offensive, but that’s right there in the name of one of the most respected institutions in the country, the National Association for the Advancement of, uh, Colored People. Weird, huh? And don’t tell me this is like a more nefarious n-word, that people in the group allegedly described by it can use it but others can’t. For one thing, a lot of people in that group still find the n-word offensive from anyone. For another, “Negro” just means “Black” in some other languages. MLK used it in almost all his speeches. Doesn’t it seem weird that this has morphed into something that everyone’s calling a “racial slur”? How did this happen?

Wikipedia says this term became offensive in the 1960’s, but I guess someone forgot to tell MLK that (seriously, it’s all over the I Have a Dream Speech)… or the United Negro College Fund, another top-notch organization for civil rights. Oh, and the 2010 Census Bureau.

Wait, what? Read that last paragraph of the Wikipedia article’s top section again. The first census conducted under a African-American/Black President will include a term that everyone thinks of as offensive? Isn’t that… odd?

I mean, can you imagine an actual racial slur appearing on the Census as an option just because some people might identify with it? Is “fag” going to show up in the sexual orientation box because it’s all over YouTube comments? I mean, what?

So I have to question whether the term is really even that offensive. But it goes beyond the term, sure, Reid was saying some damning things about Obama’s skin tone and linguistics. Right? Wasn’t he?

Well… maybe. I mean, let’s compare it to something CNN said all campaign long, starting about March 2007. CNN continually peppered America with the following question: “Is America ready for a Black President?”

Isn’t that racist? Isn’t that way more racist than anything else we’ve discussed here so far? (Except maybe the n-word.) I mean, seriously. What does that even mean, if not racism atop racism? Why wouldn’t America be ready for a Black President (or any kind of race or gender of President)? Either the question implies voters are racist as all hell or the question itself is racist, implying there’s some good reason they wouldn’t be ready.

If the voters are racist, then Reid’s comment can be taken in the same light as the question CNN and other media outlets spent the whole campaign blithely asking. Will American voters overcome their racism? And he said that because Obama’s skin tone is lighter than other African-Americans/Blacks (I mean this is just observable fact, right? After all, he’s, uh, half-Caucasian/White, remember.) and he doesn’t speak Ebonics, that Americans are more likely to overcome their racism. Now should he have said “Ebonics” instead of “Negro dialect”? Sure. Did he probably say the latter because his intent was to be more delicate and he feared saying “Ebonics” would somehow be more offensive because it might seem parodic? I bet.

The real issue with all this gets back to my fundamental view on race, which I agreed to check at the door but can’t anymore. Obama is Multiracial. We probably all are. But by any rubric in a post-octoroon society, Obama is neither Black nor White. And yet everyone assumes he’s Black. Because he looks Black. Because that’s all race is about, someone’s most superficial gut-check appearance.

In which case, why does analyzing that appearance become any more racist than referencing that appearance in the first place? And if racism is about assuming people will do something because they look a certain way, why isn’t categorizing people and dividing them up based solely on physical appearance the exact same thing? Race is racism. Fundamentally.

Which is probably why it’s so hard to draw lines and distinctions around what phrases, speculations, or comments are racist and aren’t. Because, really, they all are. But as long as we’re going to have everyone asking questions like “Is America ready for a Black President?,” I don’t see why we can’t make other observations about our racist-ass American voting public.

From the article on Truthdig:

“The iron goals of greater and greater profit, order and corporate conformity dominate their [corporate underlings] squalid belief systems. And by the time these corporate automatons are managing partners or government bureaucrats they cannot distinguish between right and wrong. They are deaf, dumb and blind to the common good.”

While the indoctrination described in the article is widely applicable, it is written specifically referencing the modes and methods of financial firms. In a way, these firms serve not only the nominal functions of their mission statements (the shifting around of funds and the recordings of profit) but they also operate to systematically erase the moral tendencies of their employees. They are, in effect, Universities of Evil.

These bodies finely sort through their employees and empower the least decent, the least human of their lot and grant them the equivalent of Evil Tenure. The recruits who are able to effectuate the most harm to the largest number of people are held up above their peers, lauded, given the highest marks, and put into greater positions of authority and job security.

These esteemed graduates then move on to contaminate other institutions (government structures or other corporations) with their hard-learned psychoses. These Bad Will Ambassadors then take up their wrongful place as the most esteemed members of our business community, and the idols of our celebrity and wealth-driven pop culture.

It is only through this hard-earned career path that Graduates of Evil can move on to post-Golden-Parachute life of corrupting children, inspiring sociopaths, and drop-kicking puppies.

So contact your local Evil Recruiter and see what the fuss is all about. With an advanced degree in Evil, you can learn the following marketable skills:

Soul Capture
Drinking Tainted Goats Blood
Puppy Punting
Doomsday Device Construction
Dark Portal Conjuring
Master-Level Dissembling
Apocalypse Creation
and Derivatives Trading

Call now! Operators (of the Dark Arts) are standing by!

This week, BLDGBLOG featured Remnants of the Biosphere, a series of portraits of what was once one of the most ambitious scientific projects in human history. Biosphere 2, constructed in the Arizonian desert, was billed as the first large scale enclosed eco-system designed by humans. It is now little more than a run-down tourist center.

Though its wikipedia entry is noncommittal, nearly all observers considered the project to be an unequivocal failure. The original live-in crew turned from hope-inspiring pioneers to starving, oxygen deprived malcontents in a matter of months.

Even the wiki article does acknowledge that the best lesson derived from the experiment was that, “small, closed ecosystems are complex and vulnerable to unplanned events.”

That may be the wiki-understatement of the year.

The failure of Biosphere 2 brings with it some irresistible symbolism. After all, the project was named after Earth’s ecosystem, the original Biosphere. And, adjusting timelines proportionally to size, Biosphere 1 is on an identical path.

The crew of Biosphere 1 is itself growing short on breathable air, palatable water, and nutrient-rich food. The atmospheric conditions on Biosphere 1 are slowly going out of whack. Its built-in safeguards are beginning to fail. And like its successor, Biosphere 1 has an inept command crew who have not prepared for any of the inevitable disastrous contingencies.

As on Biosphere 2, scientific rigor and conscientious stewardship have succumbed to fear mongering, demagoguery, and willful ignorance. Like Biosphere 2, marketing prowess and investor confidence is valued higher than knowledge and expertise.

Once we acknowledge the impending failure of our Biosphere 1 project, perhaps we will have the technology to import outside resources (via interstellar import programs) to replace those that the Biosphere can no longer produce. Perhaps, like Biosphere the Second, we will demand that the keepers let us out of this decaying, uninhabitable, deathtrap and seek our fortunes elsewhere. Perhaps we will be able to lease our Biosphere to an intergalactic home developing conglomerate who will find some commercial tourism value in its remnants. Perhaps by then, galactic sprawl will have populated the Milky Way and provided homes for trillions of space tourists who would pony up a few credits to see the fetid remains of a once glorious and confident planetary civilization. Perhaps they’ll think of the throngs of human refugees as a race of Pauly Shores. Perhaps they will see the humans as a people who have their adorable foibles and who persevere obliviously through adversity until they are inevitably bailed out by wiser, saner outside forces. Perhaps our lovable incompetence will be our saving grace, after all.

Yesterday, our Digital Overlords (Google Corp) released a new “superphone” that may change life on this planet as we know it…

As reported in TechCrunch, unlike its peers and predecessors, the Nexus One phone will not be plastered all over the media landscape. No one will have to compose a melodic ditty to make the Nexus One seem approachable and familiar. No one will hire John Hodgman to personally mobilize the techno-geek demographic. No one will film silhouettes of dancing hipsters who have found a preternatural groove thanks to the hot new electronic device clipped to their belts.

No, Google, the ‘do no harm’ corporation is sparing us the deluge. They just want to let us know that they have a new product, and that it’s pretty cool. So they’ll link a Nexus One tutorial to your YouTube page. They’ll gently point you toward a demo video on Engadget. But they’re not going to beat you over the head with the thing in the same way that their esteemed tree-fruit competitor might.

And whether they are aware of it or not, the geek masses are thankful for this.

While the phone itself promises little more than an incremental advance from smartphones already in the marketplace, the true innovation of Google’s Nexus One, is that it could be the first Big Market Gizmo not forcibly jammed down your throat by the mass media.

Say g’night, Billy…

The host of ‘Sports Science‘ clearly considers Brees to be a short-haired Legolas incarnate. And while his accuracy feats are impressive, I would consider another pool of athletes before crowning him the most accurate in the world. After all, major league pitchers deal with a target about 20 yards away (60 ft, 6 in. to be exact), and the cream of the MLB crop have their own tales of mythical acumen.

Nevertheless, this is even more reason to root for America’s Sweetheart team this playoff run.

I’ve always been a fan of anagrams and palindromes. So has University of Portland Prof Aziz Inan (pictured above).

Inan cites 01/02/2010 as the second of twelve palindromic dates this century, the first of which was 10/02/2001.

This is nearly as exciting as the moment I discovered ‘Gooberman’ was an anagram of ‘Boomerang.’ In the words of my delighted relatives, “It added an Australian flavor,” to an otherwise ridiculous name.

Some super die-hard Mep fans may remember the podcast episode where we revealed that The Mep Report was an anagram of ‘Prophet Meter‘

As it happens (according to this anagram generator) it also can be re-arranged to form:

Thee Prompter – (Greg’s role?)
Preempt Other – (Mep argument tactic)
There Perm Top – (Fancy-haired emu?)
Tether Me Prop – (Houdini’s request)
Temper The Pro – (Tiger Woods agent’s strategy)
Peep Her, Mr. Tot – (advice to voyeuristic child)
Peter? He Mr. Pot – (description of Pete)
Pert Mop There – (nice hair)
The Moppet, Err… – (Senavene did what?)
Rope, Tempt Her – (a fishing mantra, perhaps?)
Preterm Pet Ho – (premature delivery of your baby hooker)

Happy Twenty Ten. For those of you too lazy (or annoyed by obligatory tradition) to conjure a New Year’s Resolution, here’s an auto-resolution generator.

Everyone’s favorite Emilio Estevez sibling was in the news today for allegedly “breaking several pairs of eyeglasses” in front of his wife during a Christmas tirade. The horror!

The BBC lead story also cataloged a series of “arm slaps” between Charlie Sheen and his estranged wife.

Oh, did I mention that Sheen also pinned his wife on the bed and threatened to have her killed? Perhaps I should have led with that tidbit.

Now, I realize that I’m not a Jesus disciple, and, as such, not privy to certain Christmas traditions, but in my limited experience, Christmas seems to be a totally appropriate time for eyeglass murder, arm slapping, and empty death threats.

Why, it was just last year’s festive season when I was in the company of a lovely and devout Christmas family going through their yearly tradition of accusations, hysteria, tantrums, ultimatums and eyeglass murder. Again, as an outsider I can’t point to the page in the New Testament where it mandates winter equinox crying fits and delusion, but I’m sure it’s at least symbolically presented in the text.

As a cat being chased around by a vacuum cleaner, I am both baffled and genuinely afraid of the havoc the holiday season is capable of wreaking. Every year, it seems to bring with it unnecessary emotional stakes and dire consequences for the people caught up in them.

And so, my choices seem to be to either bunker myself and wait out the dreaded period, or, reluctantly participate in someone else’s calendar induced-insanities. As such, this time of year trends anywhere from the mundane to the apocalyptic.

I find that the building up of expectations is one of the best ways to ruin whatever one is looking forward to. Rarely can any single event live up to the vivid imagination of the hopeful. Christmas, more so than any other happening I can think of (with the possible exception of a visit to DisneyLand), comes bundled with insane levels of expectations. A season of wonderment, visitations by mythical historical figures, spontaneous musical happenings, and unbridled avarice have been ingrained into the minds of Christmas goers from their earliest memories.

I question how anyone can have even a mildly pleasant time under these conditions. It would seem to parallel playing a game of catch in which the first person to drop the ball spontaneously combusts. What is initially a fun distraction immediately becomes a recipe for trauma.

And so, as I do in my more lucid years, I sit and try to wait this damned season out. I wait for the commercial mob rule and ramming-speed shoppers to pass, I wait for the families to reunite and unleash their pent up ingratitudes, I wait for the looped musical propaganda to quiet, and for the singing nitwits to cease. I wait for the psychedelic red and green landscape to pass over the horizon (and simultaneously wonder whether draping everything with red contributes to the aggravated and belligerent nature of the season), and I wait for the dead temporary pet trees to be returned to their waiting dumpsters outside.

And soon, soon there will be quiet. There will be no more unreasonable expectations (or at least no more than usual), no more pure fiction (back to the scaled-down lie of the everyday persona), and quiet — blissful quiet. In due time, the sun will stop hiding from the human collective insanity and begin to make the days tolerably long again. For, my Christmas is the return to normalcy. My anticipation is for the insanity to end and the singing to cease. My Christmas present is to return to a world that isn’t completely polarized (and paralyzed) by religious beliefs or familial traditions, and the best part is that my Christmas season lasts for 50 weeks a year.

With A-Team memories fresh in the mind, it occurs to me that this seemingly innocuous 80s show may have planted seeds in the minds of thousands of servicemen that it might be cool one day to retire from the rank and file and pursue a career in mercenary work.

On the bright side, if they did do this, perhaps they also carry the programming to be relatively benevolent mercenaries who only take work from busty-blondes and recently orphaned children.

For those interested in more than mere amusement, here’s another segment of the same lecture on the subjects of continuity and discontinuity. You should probably have your quantum mechanics textbooks handy for this one…

A fantastic Huffington Post rant by Miles Mogulescu perfectly enunciates the growing divide between Obama and the movement that brought him to power.

In his piece, Mogulescu, a progressive entertainment attorney, makes the case that Obama, once a historic symbol of reform and progressive values, has taken on a style of governance that is nearly identical to the centrist capitulatism of Bill Clinton.

Moreover, this conciliatory style of leadership is not merely a coalition building strategy of a charismatic diplomat. It is a guise, a means of engineering corporate cooperation by a group historically supportive of consumer protections, trust busting, and union empowerment.

In the words of Mogulescu,

“Democrats are about to pass a bill that uses the coercive power of the federal government to force every American — simply by virtue of being an American — to purchase the products of a private company. At heart, the Democrats’ solution to 48 million uninsured is to force the them to buy inadequate private insurance — with potentially high deductibles and co-pays and no price controls — or be fined by the federal government.

In effect, this represents an historic defeat for the type of liberalism represented by the New Deal and the Great Society and the ascendancy of a new type of corporatist liberalism.”

It’s a must read. I know that in saying this, I do not speak for all the Meppers, but while the Obama presidency represents an incremental improvement to the fatuous Bush years, it does not carry with it the means or even the desire to fundamentally change the nature of corrupt and decaying power structures that would rather profit off of the suffering of Americans than act in the common interest.

In a recent episode of Handy Manny titled “Home Sweet Home,” a neighborhood child plays a dangerous game of duck, duck, goose called “nut, nut, bolt” with the tools (click on the episode title, watch or skip intro, and then click the scroll bar to -03:22 to see the abhorrent scene).

During my short-lived career as a stand-up comic, I had a catchphrase which was not unique to me, but which I made so much my own thru my brilliance that everyone who saw me remembered it forever more as mine…
Well, I created a new phrase and thanks to Google am happy to report that only three other people have thought of it!

Alright you ready?….

IGNORANCE IS SANITY!

So, its like ignorance is bliss, but its a bit more realistic…let’s say educative; suggesting some information is best left unknown.  Like, I wish I hadn’t seen Saving Private Ryan.  I think I can respect the horror of war and what men and women went through to maintain our freedom, without having to be traumatized myself with such disturbing images.

Other catchphrase users:

1) Keith Lyons, poet extraordinaire, uses it in his infamous poem “Crying Alone In A Crowded Room.”

2) A blogger on http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread37240/pg1

3) An unknown writer of House fan fiction in part 2 of Foolish Hearts.

Oh, to be in the company of such greatness!

I know I’m late on the announcements, but…I…I don’t know…why?  why?

You can also check out the original “Damn I wish I was Your Lover” by Sophie B. Hawkins if you’d like to see what they had parodied…not as fun, but very 80’s and she actually uses “shucks” as a lyric…

Yep, that’s not a typo. If the story is accurate, Alvarez, a native of Uruguay, dropped three hundred smackers to make something which isn’t that far off from some of the material in Independence Day (with considerably less Randy Quaid). (Avatar, by contrast, cost four hundred million to complete.) Within a week he had offers from major Hollywood studios for his services, and ended up signing a thirty million dollar deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures. There’s been some heavy skepticism that someone could produce any vaguely professional film for $300, let alone something this impressive, but until I hear different I’m going with the story, for the cool factor if nothing else.

Life, time, space garbage — it’s all out there. And whether it’s real, or simply an alien-induced immersive simulation, it’s all that we have.

Or, in the words of the Vajracchedika Sutra,

Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble
A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud:
Thus we should look upon all that was made

Thematically speaking, did this video remind anyone else of Kal-El’s training?

For the uninitiated, Wafflepwn is the YouTube handle of a newly-minted 16 year old internet celebrity. Over the course of a year, Wafflepwn has amassed tens of millions of video views and over 200,000 subscribers by broadcasting the flaily tantrums of his emotionally disturbed big brother.

The piece that initially put Wafflepwn on the map was an Internet Perfect Storm. Combining World of Warcraft-with self-flagellation, the video appealed to the gamer and voyeur alike. Created in the vein of other peer-humiliation videos (see Star Wars Kid), the “Greatest Freakout Ever,” represented much of the worst the internet has to offer.

After garnering over sixteen million views in seven months, the YouTube video has completely changed the lives of Wafflepwn and his Texas family. What was once a son’s privately embarrassing antics is now a revenue stream for the entire clan. As the sequels to “Greatest Freakout Ever” began to come down the pike, other family members began to participate in instigating the big money tantrums from their disturbed son. They filmed him cowering up in a tree, sent the family’s grandmother to paddle him, and gave him an obviously disappointing birthday party in the hopes of eliciting another breakdown. Wafflepwn’s new YouTube channel has even spawned a fledgling production company — “Freak Out Productions.”

While freak shows and carnivals have existed since the beginnings of human civilization, internet freak shows have emerged as their more viral, more accessible, and more lucrative counterparts. Any family with a camera and a computer now has a serious financial decision to make regarding the potentials of exploiting their children for instant fame and fortune. When compared to the huge cost and effort associated with family therapy or counseling, the financial incentives become clear. Why attempt to treat or help a problem child when they can be far more profitable to their parents as an internet celebrity monstrosity?

For Steven, the subject of these pieces, it is very hard to see a route to normalcy. A confused kid who exhibited anger management problems now is being simultaneously ridiculed and rewarded for his anti-social behavior. His value as a money-maker and an attention grabber come solely from his inability to cope with everyday situations. His tantrums have elicited far more attention than anything else he is likely to do for the rest of his life. Wafflepwn’s decision to post and promote these videos will have irrevocable effects on his brother’s path in life.

In his latest video, Wafflepwn himself is interviewed by a British camera crew. Wafflepwn contritely answers the producer’s questions as he is hit by the realization that his YouTube antics haven’t been all fun and games. He is just starting to have a sense of how big the world really is, and how the attention of the YouTube Mob can change the lives of the people around him.

In the latest Mep Report podcast, the Meppers discussed, in part, the ramifications of a world in which privacy is on the verge of disappearing. The Wafflepwn Phenomenon is a harbinger of the darker aspects of this world. It speaks to the powerfully exploitative forces that surround a beloved video sharing website, and the devastation that it is capable of wielding.

I’m so glad we’ve abandoned trickle-down economic theory. Or something.

A Bronx native, Grayson graduated from the Bronx High School of Science (a former rival debate institution of mine) and was Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard. So, it seems that understanding internet culture is no small mental feat for a US Rep. Having taken office earlier this year, Grayson has already made several splashes on national TV, drawing attention for his bold rebukes of Republican obstructionism. During an earlier health care debate, Grayson branded the Republican health reform strategy as one which hoped for American citizens to “die younger,” so that they wouldn’t have to make use of inadequate health insurance later in life.

As you can probably tell, I like the cut of Grayson’s jib. A classic Bronx kid, Grayson doesn’t take lip, doesn’t censor himself, and shoots from the hip. He shows an understanding of the national media circus and should prove to be a well-known national talking head for years to come. And his politics seem utterly reasonable so far. We may discover down the road that his coming was prophesied as the Anti-Coulter.

Facebook Is Kind. Facebook Is Good. All Hail Facebook. When Even Foresight Should Have Been 20/20; Just War Vs. Just a War; Gilligan’s Island As Metaphor for War; Clea and Facebook are BFF; Storey Still Hates Privacy; How the Internet Saved and Destroyed the World At the Same Time; and It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses a Thought.

Download Mep Report #117

Virgin made a potentially huge announcement in the scope of human civilization yesterday as it publicly debuted the first piloted commercial spaceship.

As referenced in the linked article, Spaceship 2 and its carrier White Knight 2 will shuttle civilian passengers to the fringes of space, just below low-earth-orbiting satellites. Funnily enough, going beyond that range would put shuttle missions in danger of being knocked around by the colossal amount of space garbage circling earth in each of the tiers of normal satellite operation.

The current manifestation of Virgin Galactic amounts to little more than a Six Flags – Stratosphere theme park for the affluent; a zero-gravity joy ride for those that can afford one of the premium seats. However, what this endeavor represents is something a great deal more important.

It seems less and less likely that the faltering first world states of this planet will make any real attempt at space colonization. A global depression, a shrinking resource base, an increasing population and a deteriorating environment may distract world leaders from this vital task before conditions on the ground become too dire to wait.

The only viable alternative left may be for a college of intrepid corporations to take over this vital role. Instead of a unified human race approaching the great unknown with a noble, science-based, inquisitive approach, the galaxy may be franchised out as corporate rivals gleefully spread the mantra of free-market capitalism to the far reaches of space. Nauseatingly, this may be the last, best, hope for mankind.

I’ve made no secret of my affinity for the Virgin brand. It seems to belong to that small cadre of evolved corporations — innovative brands with strong independent leadership and a desire to impact the world in a positive way. (As I re-read that last sentence, I stifle a gag reflex as I’ve just written a sentence entirely in vapid PR-speak.)

But, I should give credit where credit is due. Given my usual distopian ramblings, it is heartening to see someone looking out for the future of mankind. As Robert Heinlein said,

“Earth is too small a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.”

And even if the new galactic baskets hold only the corruptible, self-serving eggs, I suppose that’s better than no eggs at all.

Looks like Mr. Obama is finally going to earn that Nobel Prize of his. In one of the more devious moves in recent presidential history, the big O has sent out nearly the entire US army to lamely wander the deserts in Afghanistan.

Under the auspices of a “Surge” (or possibly a Belgian cook named ‘Serge’) the bulk of America’s Army has been sent to the Great Elephant Graveyard of Empires; The Country That Wasn’t; The Stan of Afghans; The Most Useless Pile of Rocks This Side of the Moon. The O man has done this with no apparent mission (unless you count hunting down 97 or so bearded, cave-dwelling recluses as a worthy mission for 100,000 soldiers), and he has attached it to a ’soft’ withdrawal timeframe in 2011. Of course, if ‘conditions on the ground’ don’t meet expectations in 2011 (read this as: if Afghanistan is still Afghanistan), then the timeline for withdrawal ceases to exist.

This is the military equivalent of putting a lame racehorse out to pasture. Resembling a Texas-sized bomb-testing range, Afghanistan should serve as a familiar and comforting surrounding to put our Army out of its misery. Like Old Yeller before it, the Army might put up a fuss before floating off to that giant Humvee in the sky, but you simply can’t keep an outdated, diseased, incontinent fighting force around forever. It’s inhumane.

After all, the future belongs to other fighting forces. Perhaps we’ll go the way of smaller robot and/or cyborg-hybrid death squadrons, perhaps we will resort to satellite shoot’em up with China, perhaps we’ll develop a boutique arsenal of “tactical” nukes to do away with future pesky cave dwelling insurgents, but there simply is no longer any room for a giant herd of half-trained human warrior cattle that need to be fed, watered, and salaried.

Like corporate America before us, we’ll leave the in-person soldiering to newly outsourced mercenary armies who don’t have to be trained, paid-for, and supervised by loathsome bureaucrats. Like ‘Starter School’ students, privatized mercenary forces will have better equipment, better textbooks, better computers, and carry a better killing GPA. The ‘Public Army’ boys simply don’t have the faculties to properly compete on the same level.

So, say goodbye to your Army. It was the best that it could be, but sometimes, that just isn’t good enough.

I have no idea what this piece was actually hocking, but it’s nice to see Mr. Lipton reaching across gender boundaries to share the aged-old art of beard stroking with a goatee-challenged youngster. Always good to see a formerly plodding, self-absorbed, useless flesh sack actively involved in serving his community.

For more on the absurdist theater that is the American news media, check out this phenomenal piece on Truthdig, entitled, “Addicted to Nonsense.”

The article indicates that there’s new evidence that children are born wanting to help others. The biological logic behind cooperation being preferable to competition is obvious, or at least was obvious to Americans prior to the Reagan years.

While I still fundamentally believe that the purpose of humanity is to overcome human nature, it never hurts to have a naturalistic argument for squelching capitalism. After all, if we imagine prehistoric humans hunting woolly mammoths, it’s easy to see that the person who carted off the whole mammoth to feed themselves alone probably wasted more mammoth than a person who shared it with the group.

In fact, the rest of the group would probably just gang up on the one person, kill him, and take his mammoth. The capitalists were eliminated in the old days.

Somewhere along the line, though, it looks like we become more manipulative in our actions. “As children grow older, they become more selective in their helpfulness. Starting around age 3, they will share more generously with a child who was previously nice to them.” I blame the scourging influence of television. Or, y’know, maybe the golden rule is naturally intuitive as well.

So next time you sell off all your stock in your company and shamelessly move your wealth to the Caymans while your investors suffer, don’t blame human nature. Either you were raised poorly or you’re just an asshole.

If you’re a British citizen with a vivid imagination, a glance at the 2012 London Olympic festivities could have you branded a trafficker of child pornography.

This week, her majesty’s lawmen passed the Coroners and Justice Bill 2009. An omnibus bill, the Coroners Bill affected many aspects of the British legal system. Most notably, it potentially criminalized the acts of the British design team that submitted their London 2012 Olympic Logo in the style of a cartoon character performing fellatio on the city of London.

Thanks to Coroners and Justice, any person found in possession of an indecent cartoon image of a child is subject to “..a term of imprisonment not exceeding 3 years. By extension, British officials have also criminalized the act of merely possessing such material, as it now makes all website owners (and visitors) who proliferated the logo hypothetically subject to jail time in Britain and/or Northern Ireland.

According to Limey Legislators, once the seed of corruption enters one’s head via the Intrawebs, this evil, pernicious, meme will fully infect one’s entire outlook on life, children, and the triple jump. Once the unsuspecting internet browsers mind is tainted by the LAist’s interpretation of the logo as “Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob,” the innocent bystander can no longer see the image as anything else, including a jazzed up font portraying the numbers 2,0,1,2.

Well done there. Those lads have certainly struck a blow against the corruption of children everywhere — hypothetical, Rorshachian, cartoon children, in any case.

Take it. Take it now. Take it with reckless abandon. Take it till you get all 64 possible answers. Then tell your friends and take it again.

If you’re interested in my personality, it’s apparently aligned with Jane Eyre:

You’re Jane Eyre!
by Charlotte Bronte
Epic in scope and vision, you like looking at your own complete history. That said, your complete history is pretty much crazy. You seem to be followed by suitors, craziness, fires, and incredible turns of both good and bad fortune. Through it all, you persevere while maintaining adherence to your own somewhat middle-ground moral code. While you have confidence that everything will work out in the end, you sometimes wonder if it’s worth it along the way. Oh sweet sweet Jane.
Take the Book Quiz II at the Blue Pyramid.

Other Meppers? Mep fans? Tell us what “other” book you are…

Wondering what to be thankful for this Thanksgiving? How about being grateful you’re not this guy.

I’ve recently been working my way through the legendary TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” on Netflix’s instant streaming video feature. In one of the early first season episodes, a man lives through about 18 hours of unimaginable torture when he is paralyzed after a car crash and unable to convey to anyone that he is alive or conscious.

It’s probably the scariest episode I’ve seen yet, and it’s about 1/10,000th of the horror (in terms of literal time) experienced by the man who lived for 23 years while fully conscious but attributed to being in a fully vegetative coma. Granted, some of the horror of the episode includes the belief that he will be killed, while after a couple years, the Belgian coma man had to start believing he would just go on forever in that state.

But I’d argue that might be worse. With no one believing that you’re conscious, all you have is your own thoughts. No communication or contact with the outside world and, much more importantly, no one making any sort of effort to stimulate or entertain you. The greatest blessing you would get to interrupt this unending boredom would be scraps of overheard conversation that no one believed you could fathom.

If I ever fall into something diagnosed as a vegetative state, please get a second opinion. And leave the TV on in my room all the time, just in case.

On second thought, given the state of our modern media, better make it a series of books on tape. Whatever will be going on the next 23 years might be more torture than I want to witness.

If you’re one of those people who thought digital photography’s advent was going to kill the art of the picture, here’s a good counterargument.

I’m not as into photography as I used to be, but picture series like this always make me contemplate giving up the words for a while to go in search of these allegedly kiloword packages. I really had a knack for it as a kid, but I probably never would have been capable of stuff like the highlights in this National Geographic photo contest.

It’s in depictions of nature like this (if not actually being out in it directly) that I find some of the strongest proofs for the existence of God. You can believe all this beauty develops by random dice-rolls if you want, but it just doesn’t wash for me.

What, you didn’t think I could write a whole post that was just about “look at this link I found on the internet and how pretty it is,” did you? All speech is political.

Good news, everybody! Existing home sales soared in October 2009 to levels not seen since the 2007 bubble. Surely this shows that the alleged green shoots have blossomed into a veritable cornucopia of cash, just in time for Thanksgiving.

Not only did home sales jump 10.1% month-over-month, but they’re up a whopping 23.5% year-over-year! Twenty-three and a half percent! Holy cow!

But, er, prices are still down. 7.1%. Hm. Let’s not peer behind that curtain, right?

Or, perhaps we should. Remember our widgets example from before? Put this on a 10-year trajectory and you end up with increasing sales by over six-and-a-half times while only diminishing sales prices by half. And while that’s better than the pace of August’s figures, it’s a little disconcerting when we apply it to the actual home sales and prices.

Basically, this pace would lead to an October 2017 sales rate of 33 million existing homes at a median price around $96,000.

Yeah, that’s right. Thirty-three million homes. There are about 125 million homes in this country, so that would be a sales rate of over a quarter of all existing homes being sold every single year. For just over half of the current price of $173,000 apiece.

I reiterate, even if we take these inflated sales numbers (everyone acknowledges the tax credit is ballooning sales) seriously, the ultimate outcome of this pace is not recovery, but fire sale. As long as prices are continuing to deteriorate while sales figures rise, that demonstrates increasing weakness in the market, not strength.

At the point at which every fourth home in America is for sale, it doesn’t matter whether anyone is buying them or not. The writing would be on the wall that no one wants to live here anymore.

This was Klaus’s first domestic appearance since his farewell episode on BoingBoingTV when he was deported by a determined INS agent…

And I thought we saved this kind of commentary for the NASCAR TV crew.

I attended the midnight premiere of teeny-bopper sensation Twilight: New Moon, this morning. Having re-read that sentence after writing it, I am probably as baffled as you are as to why I agreed to go along with it. Suffice to say, I have a friend who is a big Twilight fan, and I didn’t want her to have to brave the crowd alone, so agreed to do a solid for her while also fulfilling a morbid curiosity to figure out what this Twilight phenomenon was all about.

And hey, I figured maybe there was an outside chance I could find something to like about Twilight. I mean, I love the song “Twilight” by ELO (which is initially what I thought the movies were a derivative of), I didn’t completely 100% loathe Underworld, another Vampire/Werewolf genre piece, and, way back in the day, I actually thoroughly enjoyed Interview with the Vampire.

Of course, I realize that the genre didn’t start with Ann Rice either, but there does seem to be a great deal more substance in these pieces as we trace them closer to their original source. The new genre of Vampire fare (including HBO’s True Blood) seem to be what happens when you make a copy of a copy of a copy. The whole thing gets incredibly fuzzy, and the quality drops off the table.

While standing in line amidst a throng of teenaged (and wistfully nostalgic honorary teenaged) girls, I asked my movie companion whether the traditional vampire rules applied to these Twilight vampires, and I learned the following:

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by garlic (heck, they are so chic they probably grow their own basil to make pesto for their vamp-dinners)

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by crosses (hard to keep up a proper goth look without them, I suppose)

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by stakes to the heart (this would piss off Van Helsing to no end)

– Twilight vampires are not harmed by the sun…

The sun? These vampires aren’t hurt by the sun? What exactly makes them vampires, again? Sure, they drink blood, but so does Billy Bob Thornton, and he ain’t no vampire either. I mean, there are quasi-precedents for this, like Blade, the Daywalker but even Blade was a huge anomaly in the vampire world, as he wasn’t 100% vampire.

You see, when Twilight vampires are exposed to the sun, they… well… they twinkle. Basically, when Twilight vampires have sun shined on them, they look like Mariah Carey. Jesus, could we soften up this monster legend any more? How about instead of fangs, the Twilight vampires have candy corn incisors, and instead of blood, they really lust after gazpacho soup.

The strange thing is, even after watching the entire movie, I learned almost nothing more about Twilight vampires that made any kind of sense at all. The movie is a perfect replication of the mind of a teenaged girl. The main character (a 17-year old girl) Bella, basically sits, and pines for her vampire boyfriend for 90% of the movie. She becomes depressed, she listens to her Ipod, she throws tantrums, she hangs out with the local neighborhood boy (the modern incarnation of Pacey), and melodramatically fakes suicide over and over in the hopes that her passive-aggressive vampire boy, Edward (Dawson), will come to save her. She sulks, she cries, she thinks about going to live with her mom, and then she goes off on a spontaneous (and random) jaunt to Italy to frolic with the tourists.

As expected, the movie was instantly forgettable — even now, details of the “plot” are rapidly falling out of my head. But, honestly, I can’t even say I disliked this movie as much as the Time Traveler’s Wife. Time Traveler’s Wife seemed harmful on several levels (in part by implanting the desire to marry abusive husbands). Twilight: New Moon is about as harmless as you can possibly get. And frankly, there are many movies from my teenage generation that mirror this plot exactly. Teenaged girl pines until she discovers a magical world of new powers and boyfriends?

Exhibit A: Teen Witch

Exhibit B: Labyrinth

Exhibit C: The male 80’s equivalent: The Lost Boys

So, yeah. I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that a money-driven sequel based on a tired genre brings absolutely nothing new to the table. What’s disturbing is that no one seems to expect any blockbuster these days to bring anything new to the table. Is it possible that our pop-culture is stuck in some kind of mobius strip of bad children fare, followed by bad teen-aged fare, followed by bad superhero blockbusters, followed by bad middle-aged life dramas? Christ, American media is depressing.

The interview touches on many health-related Mep-centric themes, including not taking the word of doctors as gospel (see the 85% theory), seeking outside of the box treatments, and trusting yourself to be your own best advocate. It’s worth a listen. Below, you’ll find the trailer to the recently-released documentary.

(Ahem… Warning for language… You may have to cover your virgin ears should you decline to be properly educated)

I’m just sayin’.

I know previous rants about our obsession with child kidnappings and the weird things people say as a result have been met with mixed reviews. But the fact is that our culture is far too smitten with child kidnappings and murders. And I blame the media.

It’s not 100% the media’s fault, of course. They just put the information out there and the idiot Americans consume the information. At the same time, if the media could put the experience of taking crack cocaine into equally addictive words, shouldn’t they somehow be held liable for the resulting consequences?

We have found the lowest common denominator. It’s news stories about child kidnappings and murders. These things, while tragic and terrible, are not news. Even less are they news because the very few wealthy attractive kids are the only ones you hear about.

Do your part by never speaking of them again, never clicking on another piece about them. Well, y’know, after this article.

Cyborg Trading — a high-frequency trading solution for everyday investors who want the immense feeling of gratification that comes from manipulating the system to one’s advantage.

Perhaps it’s time to revisit our true feelings about the Financial Masters of the Universe. If we had the ability to game the system, and use advanced algorithms and super computer clusters to steal billions of dollars from the bank accounts of laughably archaic analog stock traders, wouldn’t we?

After all, it’s not the big-time traders’ fault that they have access to a system which allows them to play Richard Pryor in Superman III. In the words of Peter Gibbons,

“[At] the 7-11. You take a penny from the tray, right…? You know the pennies that are for everybody? Well those are whole pennies, right? I’m just talking about fractions of a penny here. But we do it from a much bigger tray and we do it a couple a million times.”

There you go. Why bother with regulation and reign-ins when we can provide premium cheats to every man, woman, and child? This is capitalism folks. First one to grow a conscience loses.

As Ellis recounted it:

“I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria. I was zeroed in on the (catcher’s) glove, but I didn’t hit the glove too much. I remember hitting a couple of batters and the bases were loaded two or three times. The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder. I started having a crazy idea in the fourth inning that Richard Nixon was the home plate umpire, and once I thought I was pitching a baseball to Jimi Hendrix, who to me was holding a guitar and swinging it over the plate. They say I had about three to four fielding chances. I remember diving out of the way of a ball I thought was a line drive. I jumped, but the ball wasn’t hit hard and never reached me.”

So, it could have read something to the effect of:

“OMG stop whining uR LAM3 a$$ off. STFU.”

While some of us are tired of the same old formulaic nonsense, one must admit that this is a very impressive feat for a writing staff made up entirely of manatees.

Procrastination is devoting every last waking hour to Dragon Age: Origins, because at least it’s not a life-stealing MMORPG that goes on without end. At least it is a singly contained story that can theoretically be beaten without taking out a mortgage on your ever-loving soul. And so, when we theoretically procrastinate by spending the better part of every waking hour marauding around as an Elven Champion, in some sickly nostalgic attempt to resurrect Skystrider Antilles, we drive off the Procrastination Boogeyman by immersing ourselves so deeply into the game that we realize we have been hunting through the catacombs of a werewolf nest for five hours vainly searching for some creature called Witherbark who, as elven legend has it, can remove the curse that has afflicted the Dalish elves whose help you require to vanquish the vast undead army known as the Blight, all while seeking your revenge upon the Vassal Lord of Ferelan who left your Grey Warden Master to die a bloody death at the hands of said Blight. Yeah.

And when, hypothetically speaking, you look outside your window, and daylight is streaming in, when you were pretty sure you started playing this campaign just after work ended, and you’re not sure if you’ve eaten in six hours and yet you wonder how many more Levels Up before you can unlock the Champion Prestige Class that will REALLY begin to allow you to simulate the MMORPG days of yore and wonder why your party’s shape-shifting forest witch refuses to properly appreciate your generosity after you give her a found onyx statuettes as a gift and notice that you’ve used the highly detailed character creation features to craft an Elven Warrior that looks exactly like yourself in digi-form and find your in-game-self getting annoyed that he can’t get the local merchant to give him a sweetheart deal on a brand new, Tier 3, steel greatsword, and you might just have to make due with crappy Grey Iron, and you hear morning birds chirping outside and workaday world alarm clocks going off and you haven’t even reached the bottom level of the werewolf catacombs yet, so clearly you can’t stop the campaign for something as trivial as the dawn of a new day in the outside world and you think your rear end might be inextricably stuck to your leather desk chair as you think about getting up for a second to grab some light sustenance except for the fact that your party’s inventory is dangerously close to full which means that there is actually a limit to the gigantic horde pile of shit you will be able to drag out of the catacombs to sell for cash and you lament the fact that the catacomb geists don’t have their own merchant handy and you realize that 45 more minutes passed as you’ve been making these decisions and you’re only on your second day of playing Dragon Age: Origins and wonder how much effort it would take to rig up an IV solution next to your computer to ensure that you’re properly hydrated before you black out and crave things that you would never have in your barren kitchen, like Ready Made Western Omelets and Rendered Nutrient Paste Tubes (as invented by John Malkovich’s character, Dr Jeff Peters, in the little known sci-fi romance Making Mr. Right) and you wonder where, in the global scheme of things, you rank as far as the first phalanx of players playing through Dragon Age: Origins who ordered it the day of its release (and didn’t get to play through it in some early, previewy, game tester environment) and maybe you’re on the front lines of getting deep into the story and you think someone told you that today is Veteran’s Day which means your school is closed and you don’t have to take any breaks for teaching…

Yeah, that’s also a type of procrastination.

Yep, old Rupie has decided he would be better off without the help of the search catalogs of the most powerful force on the Digiscape. The fickle browsing public probably won’t even buy into his Plutocratic Propaganda Machine if they have to have its content balanced with actual news sources. Only through full indoctrination (via paid web subscription) can the PPM live up to its full psychologically potent potential. And so firewalls must be erected. Rupie and Co. will happily wall-in their own unsuspecting readership brick by brick. Perhaps they’ll even ordain a few editorialists and build the New Church of Foxentology, while they’re at it. Better that than to expose themselves to the danger that is the Intraweb’s open exchange of ideas.

Some shamed former steroid users are taking drastic measures to return to a home life free of hecklers.

At a Las Vegas media event this weekend, disgraced baseball slugger Sammy Sosa revealed his intention to live out the rest of his years as a Caucasian Playboy/Baccarat Master known as Johnny Faro.

“Johnny Faro don’t need no home run records,” Sosa remarked. Johnny Faro’s got a speedboat, and, and James Bond’s watch. Johnny Faro is waterproof to 300 meters! Johnny Faro is a swinger! Johnny Faro drives in all the runs on the Baccarat table. Johnny Faro hit goes 4 for 4 with seven RBIs in the casino. Johnny crush tape measure blasts on his schooner. F-you, I’m Johnny Faro!”

Some have speculated that Sosa’s drastic change in appearance was due to past drug abuse, and not an intentional identity change.

This theory might be corroborated by another former slugger and steroid user Barry Bonds, who now works nights at a local San Francicso strip bar as a dancer who calls herself, Barry Bonds.

There is also the strange case of disgraced slugger Mark McGwire, who lives out his days as a torso-less Laotian cripple, now known as Pog Mog.

It will be left to the sporting media and fans to decide whether these bizarre physiological changes were caused by the massive levels of horse testosterone and human growth hormones that these athletes bravely ingested, or whether these characters simply wanted to shrink from the limelight and leave their old identities, pigmentation, and genitalia behind.

As a Yankee fan, it’s very clear to me that the Yankees are a polarizing force. You either love them or you hate them. And, frankly, neither perspective lends itself to really deeply analyzing anything. Yankee fans, for the most part, forgive any misdeeds by the team and players, and Yankee haters feel as if the team ritualistically slaughters puppies for sport.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, to hear Storey (a classically trained New York-aphobe) making the classical Yankee hater argument — namely, “The Yanks bought their team.”

Since I’m tired of the same old back and forth (which offers little to no real analysis of the mechanisms by which baseball works), I’d like to dig a little bit deeper here to make an actual debate out of something that usually ends up as an empty fan-fueled screaming match. Fair enough?

Ok, so, on its face, saying a team “bought their championship” really doesn’t mean anything at all — since every single team in the history of professional sports bought their team. That is what professional sports is, a forum in which athletes play their sport for money. So, unless someone wants to uncover some secret Socialist Professional ball team of the Civil War Era, we are discussing sports in the context of players who play for compensation.

And compensation has been an issue as long as ball has been played professionally. In 1930, Babe Ruth made $80,000 a year, which was more than President Herbert Hoover made ($75,000). When asked about this disparity, Ruth famously quipped “Why not? I had a better year than he did.”

So, since, on face, Storey’s argument that the Yankees bought their team is meaningless, we can assume the implications are one or more of the following:

1) The Yankees (and hence, the Steinbrenners) simply have far more money than anyone else.

2) The Yankees can have whatever players they want, with no limitations.

3) Baseball should be settled on the field and not in the boardroom/clubhouse/negotiating table.

4) The Yankees, like Goldman Sachs, drain baseball of revenue and competitiveness, and run their business irresponsibly.

Let’s take these one at a time:

1) The Yankees (and hence, the Steinbrenners) simply have far more money than anyone else.

As sports owning billionaire magnates go, the Steinbrenners are very run of the mill. As of last year, Forbes rated the Big Stein as the 377th richest American, with a net worth of approximately $1.3 billion.

Meanwhile, to take a random example, the Seattle Mariners’ majority owner is Hiroshi Yamauchi, otherwise known as the owner of Nintendo, whose worth is estimated at $7.8 billion.
So, theoretically, Yamauchi could assemble the largest most feared payroll in baseball history with his personal wealth. But, like most owners, he prefers to run his team as a legitimate business, relying on the team’s own revenue to generate payroll.

2) The Yankees can have whatever players they want, with no limitations.

This argument is just nowhere near the truth. Don’t you think the Yankees would have Albert Pujols at first base and Tim Lincecum on the mound if they could simply take any players they wanted?

Even when it comes to free agents, the Yankees have their limits. This is why they cut payroll 8 million dollars from 2008 to 2009, despite wanting to field a powerful team after building New Yankee Stadium. This shouldn’t seem possible given Storey’s tales of the Yankee spending spree in the offseason. What he neglected to mention was that the Yankees needed some huge contracts to come off of the books to be able to make the Sabathia, Burnett, and Texeira signings. The Yankees lost Mike Mussina to retirement, Jason Giambi, Carl Pavano, and Bobby Abreu to free agency, all having hefty contracts that completely offset the 2009 signings. While the Yanks were happy to see Pavano and Giambi go, they would have loved to retain 3rd hole hitter Bobby Abreu, but could not justify the cost in light of the other moves they wanted to make.

In 2008, the Yankees could have had free agent Torii Hunter (or Aaron Rowand) to play an otherwise vacant centerfield. They declined to make an offer and instead decided to use internally developed (and vastly inferior) Melky Cabrera.

In 2007, the Yankees could have tried to re-acquire free agent stud Alfonso Soriano to play centerfield, or second base, but instead went with players developed through their farm system. Slugger Carlos Lee was also a free agent slugger not in the Yankee plans. Also in 2007, the Yankees were famously outbid for Japanese Ace Daisuke Matsuzaka, when the Red Sox offered a package totaling nearly $100 million. Meanwhile, highly touted pitcher, Barry Zito, signed a $126 million contract with San Fransisco.

So, the assertion that the Yankees can have literally whomever they want is completely farcical.

3) Baseball should be settled on the field and not in the boardroom/clubhouse/negotiating table.

Has this statement ever been true? Hasn’t shrewd management and general management always been a key part of assembling a championship team?

Was it fair that the Red Sox traded Jeff Bagwell to the Astros for Larry Andersen in 1990? Was it fair that the Mariners gave up Jason Varitek and Derek Lowe for Heathcliff Slocumb in 1997? Or that the Giants traded Joe Nathan, Fransisco Liriano, and Boof Bosner, for the Twins’ AJ Pierzynski? These transactions hardly seem fair — ‘criminal’ would be a better word for them, yet, they are part of the game.

In Keith Olberman’s Baseball Nerd blog, he pointed to the Yankee scouting staff (headed by Gene Michael) compiling reams of data on Philly hitters to allow Yankee outfielders to be perfectly placed in nearly every situation, giving the Yankees a huge advantage in the series. Is this fair? Whether it is or not, inter-team scouting is universally recognized as part of the game. And the Yankees seem to have the best scouting in the business.

Moving right along…

4) The Yankees, like Goldman Sachs, drain baseball of revenue and competitiveness, and run their business irresponsibly.

People say a lot of bad things about Goldmann Sachs, but rarely do they mention Goldman Sachs program to donate 10% of their revenue to help build up local banks and investment firms around the country. People don’t mention it, because Goldman Sachs has no such program. But the Yankees do.

As part of MLB’s Revenue Sharing Agreement, large market teams pay a luxury tax when their payroll exceeds a certain amount that goes directly into a pool of money given to the organizations of smaller market teams. In 2009, the Yankees gave $29 million to this fund.

Yup, teams such as the Pirates, the Marlins, and the Royals get free money from MLB to bolster payrolls due to lackluster attendance, and dismal team revenues. And you know what? Often, these teams’ ownerships pocket the cash and do nothing to improve the quality of their ballclubs.

Case in point, the Florida Marlins.
A team that received about $25 million dollars a year over the past decade (via MLB Revenue Sharing) had a payroll of $14 million in 2006, and $21 million in 2008. In other words, the Marlins are spending NONE of their own money on payroll and still pocketing millions upon millions while intentionally fielding a subpar team to turn a profit. Talk about despicable ownership.

So, the harsh truth is that some teams have no interest in a level playing field. They reap what profit they can by selling players whose value increases, without any intention of reinvesting those profits in the team. Frankly, these teams who intentionally hamstring their talent do the real damage to the league, and the fan base.

On the other hand, the Yankees do everything possible to reinvest revenues into improving the ballclub. In doing so, they generate more attendance for Major League Baseball than any other team. They generate more merchandise sales for Major League Baseball. They generate higher television ratings for network broadcasts of baseball. And yes, they’re certainly helped by a baseball friendly city, a century-old tradition of winning baseball, and a top notch media market. But they’re undoubtedly good for baseball as a whole.

And frankly, they’re also helped by New York’s restaurants and nightclubs. Players want to live in New York, and they want to play there, independent of salary. A couple quotes:

“To be a Yankee is a thought in everyone’s head . . .Just walking into Yankee Stadium, chills run through you. I believe there was a higher offer, but no matter how much money is offered, if you want to be a Yankee, you don’t think about it.”

- Jim “Catfish” Hunter

“All ballplayers want to wind up their careers with the Cubs, Giants or Yankees. They just can’t help it.”

- Dizzy Dean

Is it fair that New York is a more desirable living place for free agents than Seattle? Is it fair that New York was a home to the greatest most legendary ballplayers to ever step on a field? Is it fair that the Yankees have existed for 75 years longer than the Seattle Mariners, and hence have a much more deeply-steeped baseball tradition, fanship, and player legacy?

This is the reason why, in the salary capped NBA, historically successful franchises like the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers are able to draw in massively unbalanced amounts of talent despite being limited in their spending. Players simply have preferred destinations. So, unless you want to appoint an MLB Czar to allocate talent evenly to each ballclub (and kill the concept of a General Manager), you’re going to deal with disparity, preference, and protestations of unfairness.

It doesn’t seem particularly fair, especially not for those who seek Harrison Bergeron levels of fairness where beautiful people wear masks and the strong must carry leaden weights. But it is reality. And in reality, factors exist which unbalance the playing field. Every single playing field in every conceivable competition of any kind is unbalanced by something. And you can either sit at home and whine about it, or you can try to improve your own lot.

The Angels, a historical joke of a franchise, came up with a new marketing plan, trying to capitalize on the LA fan base. It came up with a new marketing ploy in the Rally Monkey. And it went from an annual flop, to an annual contender (and 2002 champion).

Some teams look to recruit more international talent, some teams look to Moneyball, and some teams look to zany fan promotions — but everyone is looking for a way to generate more interest in their ballclub. The Yanks are simply the best at this game, and this game, is equally important to the game played between the lines.

At the risk of starting a flame-war with Russ, it must be observed that the Goldman Sachs of baseball purchased their 27th championship that was delivered last night. This cannot, perhaps, be said of all 27 titles, but it sure can be said of the 2009 edition.

Russ would have you believe that his beloved Yanks are somehow categorically similar to the Red Sox, Mets, Cubs, and so on as teams that spend big to attempt to buy a title. And while he may have a point that the method is somewhat similar, the ability to deliver on the approach is categorically distinct.

Let’s start by examining the 2009 payrolls. The Yankees spend 48% more on payroll than the next closest team. Forty-eight percent. That’s not within some margin of error that makes them pretty much like any other team. That’s vastly, egregiously more spending. You can run any economics model you want and you’ll find that someone who can afford to pay their workers 48% more will blow away the competition. There’s simply no comparison.

And only 7 of the remaining 29 teams spend half of what the Yanks do. Meaning that unless you’re rooting for one of those teams, your club is being outspent by over 100%. Yeah, who wouldn’t quit their job and go work for double wages? Come on.

What this translates to in the baseball world is that any given free agent will go to the Yankees first. Sure, all the top clubs sign big name free agents in addition to what they can get by trades and the farm system. But the top few people, the first few rounds of bidding, are always going to New York. Whoever the Yankees want in a given year, they will sign. Period. It’s like guaranteeing yourself the first-round draft pick every single year, except instead of taking a risk on undeveloped talent that may blossom in a few years, you’re taking people in the prime of their careers.

Never has this been more true than with the 2009 Vampire Squids. The second generation of Steinbrenners got serious and took CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett (apparently cornering the market on pitchers who go by two initials in place of a first name), and Mark Teixeira. The combined salary paid to these three gents in 2009 alone was a whopping $52.4 million, or more than the entire payroll of the Pirates, Padres, and Marlins. And their back-loaded contracts will pay them even more in the future years; the ability to pay even more in later seasons being the real clinching factor in convincing these three men to sign with NYY.

Throw in Alex Rodriguez, moneygrubber extraordinaire, and the total climbs to $85.4 million, which would put the salaries for those four players alone as the 14th highest payroll in baseball, between the Cardinals and the Giants.

You think these guys aren’t responsible for the wins? According to Fan Graphs, leading purveyor of a trendy new sabermetric statistic called WAR (Wins Above Replacement), you can calculate exactly how many wins a player is responsible for. Sabathia scores 6, Teixiera checks in at 5.2, and Burnett comes in at 3.1. That’s 14.3 wins, the difference between going 103-59 as the Yankess did and coming in at 89-73, which would have put them 6 games back of the Red Sox. Throw in Pay-Rod and the total climbs to 19 wins, or enough to keep the Bombers out of the playoffs altogether.

And this, of course, fails to account for the fact that the newly minted Yankees were two-thirds of the playoff rotation. Pitching is what counts in playoff baseball, and Sabathia and Burnett combined to go 4-2 with 56 strikeouts in 10 starts. Try subbing in homegrown Yankees into that rotation and see how quickly the team folds to the Angels, if not the Twins.

And if you think I’m parodying the Yankees’ ability to compete by taking out their 4 best players, keep in mind that the remaining payroll without the new guys and A-Rod would still be making $116 million, which would be the fourth highest payroll in baseball, just behind the Red Sox. So yeah, the difference between a top-level non-Yankee payroll and the actual Yankees is about 19 wins. Money can buy you W’s.

Yes, there may have been glory days when the likes of Paul O’Neill and other Yankee farmhands brought in the gold. Yes, Derek Jeter, most overrated player in baseball history, came up through the New York system. The point here is that 2009 title was bought, plain and simple. Why do you think the Yankees have failed to win a championship over most of this decade? Why do you think the year that they suddenly drop $400 million on their three favorite free agents, they cruise to victory?

At least they haven’t starting buying lobbyists to convince Congress to hamstring other teams. Yet.

In one of the greatest World Series performances of all time, Japanese veteran Hideki Matsui totalled six RBIs on three hits to secure the first title for the New York Yankees since 2000.

Here’s a very informative piece about Matsui that may be lifted from the MLB Archives, or perhaps the History Channel, as its production value is so spectacular:

In a night of blissful delirium for the Yankees and their fans, a few more tidbits from the greater intrawebs:

A compelling article by fan and commentator, Keith Olbermann, argues that it is literally impossible to hate Yankee closer, Mariano Rivera despite your rooting preference. He also happens upon network cable rival Sean Hannity in the Stadium crowd.

Yankee fan propaganda central, Nomaas.org, saved the premiere of a complete website redesign for the Yankees championship clinching game. One wonders what would have happened to the Wordpress upgrade if the Yanks collapsed in seven.

River Avenue Blues features a great GIF showing us a full spectrum of hope transforming into relief and finally to bliss, on the face of Yankee manager Joe Girardi.

Great night for baseball.

International Man of Mystery and former star of BoingBoingTV, Klaus Pierre, has recently been spotted by the Los Angeles Bloggarazzi.

According to the article in LA’s Metroblogger, Klaus is planning some sort of news release to recap his adventures outside the bounds of BoingBoing over the past year. I wonder what emu-centric pop culture site will have the world premiere release of said interview? You’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, enjoy some classic Klaus below, and remember that you can’t keep a good French-German Action-Hero-In-Training down.

In a world where former Green Jobs Adviser Van Jones was dismissed for an off the cuff comment made against ring-wing turdblossoms, one wonders what sort of repercussions await demonstrably incompetent White House Advisers. Apparently none.

Here’s a mashup of recent Geitner commentary provided by MSNBC, and posted on the Business Insider who recently called for Geitner’s sacking.

What interests me in this video is less the empty assuagings of a career Wall Street Insider. The MSNBC commentator does a fine job of pointing out the inconsistencies in Timmy’s lame offerings. What struck me was the incredibly subservient posture that Geitner assumes whenever he attempts to persuade. His demeanor resembles an ashamed child having naughtily snuck a few treats out of the cookie jar.

It almost seems as if a world of shady dealings and backroom handshakes desperately want to come pouring out of Secretary Timmy in a tear-filled confessional. Part of him seems to want to stop the actions of this double-talking, placating uber-bureaucrat speaking to the cameras. Part of him can remember the feeling of impotence and shame in surrendering his lunch money to the mocking schoolyard bully. Yet Secretary Timmy never stood up to these bullies. He decided to demonstrate his loyalty, his servile worth to the bullies that they might stop their beratings and beatings, and use him as a proxy, instead. Then Little Timmy could be the bully. Timmy could wriggle with glee as he stole the lunch money of a smaller classmate, knowing that he now had the backing of the bullies to do horrible things. Timmy had a knack for this, and soon began to carry out things more devious and Machiavellian than what the bullies could have ever dreamed of. Little Timmy began to take bets on which of the schoolchildren would be brutalized for money. Timmy began to sell classmates bully insurance (a far more lucrative game) and leveraged his bully friends to shakedown any kids who refused his protection. And as long as Timmy saw to the stealings of more and more lunch monies on a larger and larger scale, he would have the protection of the big bullies, and a little tiny corner of the sandbox that he could call his own. Timmy’s game got to the point where he was making lunch money on proposed future allowances and lemonade stand proceeds that weren’t even set up yet. Timmy got so good at taking the lunch money, that he managed to take lunch money that didn’t even really exist at all. The bullies seemed to like the imaginary piles of lunch money even more than the actual lunch money they used to steal themselves.

Little Timmy doesn’t particularly like having to explain himself to the pundits and panels and congresspeople. They don’t congratulate him for making friends with the bullies. They just keep asking for the lunch money back. Well Timmy knows that the lunch money is long gone. Most of the lunch money never really existed in the first place. The question askers don’t understand that. Do they expect him to return some giant pile of lunch money for real? How can he even begin to answer demands like that? So little Timmy bows his head and tries to explain how much he cares for the lunch money, how he worries about it at night, and how it’s all being used to buy lunches for very important lunchers. But in the back of his mind, Timmy wants desperately for the question time to be over, and the lunch money games to resume. Timmy wants to control it all, in a big imaginary pile. Timmy wants the whole world to work to sustain an ever-increasing, vast ocean of lunch money. He wants to dazzle the bully overlords with more lunch money than they could ever have dreamed of, so that one day they might thank Timmy for all his hard work, and say they were sorry for when they used to beat him up. Then Timmy might finally feel good about himself again. Then Little Timmy might finally play in peace.

Moving “Live-Win” probability graph via fangraphs.

Truth be told, I was doing my Jimmy Fallon impression for much of last evening, attending a reading of a theatre piece hosted by an up and coming playwright. Having DVR’d the entire 4 hour affair, I was determined to receive no updates and intel of the ongoing festivities…

So go ahead and condense that entire graph to 45 minutes of furiously fast-forwarding, pausing, and screaming into my television. In a flash, Yankee Manchild Ace CC Sabathia was completely neutralized by Everyman Joe Blanton and a lackluster Yankee bullpen performance.

Fortunately for the Yanks, the Phillies’ closer, Brad Lidge, had had his soul stolen back in 2005 by a young Witch Doctor/First Baseman named Albert Pujols…

Here’s another vantage of this event (Special Thanks to the MLB’s Stalinist policy of disallowing remixes of game footage):

And so, in the 9th inning, the Yankee big money hitters made mince meat of a Mojo-less Lidge, taking a firm grasp of the 2009 World Series, and possibly forever changing the legacy of Alex Rodriguez.

Think again, formerly disgruntled friend.

This Klingon propaganda reel comes to us via the Star Trek devotees at Bad Monkey Studios. Somehow they had the wherewithal to record the entire thing in an authentic Worf-ian dialect.

Representing the human (or Terran) faction we have two pieces of classic sci-fi themed propaganda. One is the UED victory report from the game Starcraft: Brood Wars:

The other originates from Robert Heinlein masterpiece turned campy movie, Starship Troopers.

While the Klingon video earns points for its excessive use of children and flags, the Troopers video does smartly feature Denise Richards. However, it does seem to waver on message. What exactly are the benefits of guaranteed “citizenship” other than frolicking around with Gary Buse’s kid and following a vacant Casper Van Dien to certain doom?

At least the UED video acknowledges the risks of battle, and gives us the promise of a hero’s funeral upon defeat. Also, it’s more logo conscious.

Ultimately, I’m going to have to go with the Klingons for superior propaganda here. They make a life of warfare and sacrifice seem infinitely cheerier than their flat foreheaded counterparts. Duch vees oh nook, rien!

Incidentally, for those who are wondering why Starcraft and Starship Troopers seem to be telling the exact same story, they are. Starcraft borrows heavily from James Cameron’s Aliens, which borrows heavily from the original Starship Troopers novel. As one should expect, the sci-fi Grandmaster is at the heart of many of our dreams of space conquest.

For more on Klingon Ethics, see Mep Report #24, where we discuss the potentialities of a war between Klingon Nation and Ghandi Nation.

Now, if we could only hop in the Delorean and mimeograph a few copies for Wilson Pickett and the Bee Gees:

Link via Laughing Squid.

As you just saw, the movie tells the story of a primitive but proud indigenous alien culture defending itself against a human-run technological assault This theme is, of course, nothing new…

The main difference, though, is that Avatar builds in a concept familiar to internet gamers (especially purveyors of MMORPGs). The idea that you can plug into an ‘Avatar,’ who you control, and perform your actions through is a direct reference to video games and an overt attempt at wrangling in the hugely influential gamer demographic.

As if this wasn’t enough to convince studios to fund the project (remember, this screenplay has been floating around in some form since 1994), Cameron seemingly threw in an attempt to co-opt an entire corner of the RPG market. Let’s take a closer look at the native race in Avatar — The “Na’vi.”

Hmm, that’s odd. The Na’vi seem to be a CGI carbon copy of the Draenei race from World of Warcraft, the most popular online role playing game in history. Their inclusion seems an especially clever way of drawing in the 15,000,000 strong WoW contingent without acquiring any copyrights, trademarks, or even making any mention to the source material.

Even the name, “Na’vi,” seems reminiscent of gamer parlance. Nav (or Navigational) Points are often used in games to direct the user to a particular place on the map. In my experience, these came into vogue in the MechWarrior series, which also seems to have a strong presence in the storyline of Avatar (note the remote battle mechs that take on the Na’vi army).

Hmm, co-opting past blockbuster themes, secretly embedding familiar pop culture characters and worlds, and copying other successful works. I suppose that is one way of getting your lame duck screenplay produced. Perhaps, on a meta-level, the movie Avatar is really the avatar of the awkwardly titled World of MechWarrior Craft of the Jedi.

As we’ve learned from his prolific action movie career, the Governator doesn’t take anyone’s guff. Ever.

That’s why it was hilariously reminiscent of my Ultraviolent 90s Cinema upbringing when the San Fransisco Chronicle revealed that Arnie intentionally hid an F-bomb in a letter explaining a recent veto…

For those of you who aren’t crack cryptologists, just read the first letter of every line of the letter’s body. Yup. That’s about as clear as Predator Camo Mode, ain’t it?

Apparently, the rebuke was in response to Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, who implored the Governator to “…kiss [his] gay ass” at a recent California fundraiser. The bill in question was an Ammiano sponsored bill to fund San Fran Port operations.

Well, as we’ve learned time and time again, you simply do not mess with Arnie. Isn’t that right, Sully?

Turns out, he’s not the only one who thinks traders like the Yanks.

Several years ago, Russ pitched to me the idea that you could predict the fate of the market on any given spring or summer day based on the outcome of the prior day’s Yankees game. When they win, it’s up, when they lose down. The argument was not pie-in-the-sky, but indicated that floor traders and Wall Street shakers were likely to be Yankee fans and allow their subconscious feelings of optimism based on their favorite team bleed into buying and selling on the market.

In a world where casino gambling is labeled as a serious investment, the theory struck me as about as plausible as any other. Obviously it would take quite a while for people not versed in computer programming to come up with a formula to test this, although anyone who was good at correlating things could probably plug in the baseball encyclopedia against stock history pretty fast. After all, baseball stats and stock market fluctuations are probably the two areas subjected the most rigorous numeric analysis over time, at least in this country.

So CNBC’s discovery that the Yanks have an overall positive impact on the market, especially when they go all the way, is utterly unsurprising to me. The way things are going, you might be better off figuring out stocks to pick based on the Steinbrenner family’s most precious investments rather than corrupt analysts who’ve been bought off by Goldman Sachs.

This really just gives me one more reason to root for the Phillies.

Great snippet from the Business Insider today recapped some less than accurate Matt Taibbi predictions about the fate of the 2009 Yankees.

According to the Rolling Stone rabblerouser (back in April):

“…the first six-game losing streak in May, the first whispers of a Joe Girardi firing in June — [the high-priced Yankee free agents] will all scatter like rats to the far corners of the Yankee clubhouse and start making cell-phone calls to their agents and whispering to the press…

And unless the karma gods decide to spend the summer in a diabetic coma, it’s almost certainly what’s going to happen to this year’s Yankees. God, is it going to be fun to see. Nothing is more entertaining than watching the rich choke on their own greed.”

Now this would be all fine and good and consistent with Taibbi’s populist railings against the Goldman Sachs of the world, except for one thing: Taibbi has a very personal bone to pick with the Yankees as a die hard Red Sox fan. And that simple fact reduces his entire argument to rubble.

When you root for the JP Morgan’s of baseball, it’s awfully hard to construct a credible diatribe against baseball’s Goldman Sachs. The Red Sox have a payroll of over $120 million dollars a year. While many New Englanders may convince themselves that their team is secretly constructing a socialist paradise in which the fans own the team and all share in the gains of Glorious Red Sox Nation, reality begs to differ. To nearly every other team in Major League Baseball, the Red Sox are the big, bad, free-agent acquiring vampire squid.

This is because the Red $ox (along with every other big market team) play the same game as everyone else. They get the free agents they can afford to sign, they pay the scouts they can afford to send to the baseball havens of the world, and they sign the best possible TV and ad deals that their popularity warrants, to generate payroll money.

Want to grumble about the teams that do this best? At the very least I would hope you are from Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, or Tampa Bay. At least then the disparities are consistent with your point of view.

In the meantime, Yankee Universe will continue to support the team that most actively participates in Socialismball by subsidizing the rest of the league. That would be said Yankees, to the tune of $27 million, this year. Workers of the baseball world, unite!

This is a pretty simple and obvious reality. The fact on the ground is that, despite dire warnings of mandatory vaccines from one group of Internet crazies and overpromises from the typical government perspective, there is a shortage of swine flu vaccines. And given that they just created the thing, there will be all year.

In fact, they’ve pretty much never had enough flu vaccines to go around in history, seasonal or otherwise. This year, because of the demand for H1N1, they’re actually close to having enough regular flu shots.

At the point at which not everyone can get an H1N1 vaccine, then if you’re happy and healthy and between a certain age range (let’s say 20-50), you’re taking the vaccine out of someone else’s arm and into yours and chances are that other person is more vulnerable than you are. You may actually be contributing to their death.

Sure, I guess if you work with such vulnerable populations there’s a chance that you’ll get it and be contagious, so you could make a mitigative argument there. Although the solution may actually just be for you to stop being a workaholic and stay home when you feel even slightly sick.

This reality may change when either (A) there are 300 million doses of swine flu vaccine available domestically, perfectly distributed throughout the states, and/or (B) people who are 20-50 with good immune systems start dying of this thing. Until then, chill out and let the people who could actually be impacted get in line first.

I sure hope this clears up the pandemic panic.

Update: Favored consumer protection website, Consumerist, picked us up on this one. Well done, lads.

And, Yahoo’s TV blog follows suit. No linky though. For shame.

A spartan yet somewhat cryptic work, Switch slams the viewer with distopian imagery reminiscent of the Matrix or George Lucas’s THX 1138. In it, a man (seemingly born into servitude) must choose from the limited paths presented to him as he blindly races down an array of infinite corridors. Some of these lead to wealth, some to passion, and others to simply more yet unopened doors. We are left with the suggestion that the entire race is little more than a mad dash towards death.

This piece, already receiving high recognition on the foreign film festival circuit,
falls well within the French Existentialist tradition.

Heavy stuff for a weekend internet foray, yes. But what better time than the wee hours of a Saturday morning to question the worth of ones existence, no?

With this Wordle thing, you can take any webpage or piece of writing and have it analyzed for frequently occurring words. One cautionary note: blogs seem to rely only on the last few entries rather than a holistic summation of the whole blog, which strikes me as a real weakness. Though I guess that provides the incentive to keep redoing it every few weeks.

This is good for at least as much fun, in a more verbal Storeyesque way, as the Japanese hair machine (which was, btw, totally disappointing for me, because it didn’t sufficiently cover/replace my extant hair).

For those of you who enjoy living vicariously through your computers, Burger King Japan has announced the limited release of the Windows 7 Whopper.

With this mountain of fried chuck, you can personally simulate the experience of installing an unstable, under-tested operating system on your own biological BIOS. While I can’t reliably translate the Japanese slogan, I think it roughly says: “Windows 7: Kill Computer; Kill Self.”

Update: Just found the video of Windows 7’s first victim:

A few weeks ago, I registered my car with the state of New Jersey and their Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC), what most literate states call the “DMV”. Then about a week ago, I got the following piece of mail:

And I’m embarrassed to say, they almost got me. Not that I was about to actually call them or sign up or something, but I was briefly worried that there was indeed something wrong with my warranty and I had to inquire about this with Toyota.

You see, I purchased my Toyota Prius about two years ago exactly and I got an extended warranty that went above and beyond the factory warranty. And it was reasonable to think that the basic warranty would last about two years and the extended warranty might have a problem if I was getting this notice.

But then I examined it more closely and again discovered the same telltale signs that I’ve seen before. No personal information on the card (though there was personal info on the outside). No VIN. No reference even to the model of the vehicle in question. No detailed information at all.

Although I sort of shudder to think about that being the only test, because this information is relatively easy to acquire. I assume that this company got my name and the fact that I have a recently transferred Japanese automobile from public or sold records from the state of New Jersey. How much harder could it be to acquire a few extra compelling details? And if those details had been present, would I really be worried?

Granted, my first call would be to either Toyota’s mainline or the dealership where I purchased the car, not to the scam artists. But I’m a pretty sophisticated consumer of scams and spams. Given that this card came in one of those sealed peel-off-the-perforated-sides official-looking formats that usually indicates a live check, how many people might fall for this? How many NJ residents might confused MVC for MVS?

Clearly, a good number. Which begs the question why we allow this to happen in the first place. Even the staunchest defenders of capitalism must have qualms with the market “solving” by immoral but clever scam artists being able to straight steal from vulnerable and trusting people. I mean, are there no limits on caveat emptor?

Clearly this is a bad time in America’s history to be asking these questions. As the country more and more openly faces the fact that nearly every surviving financial institution in the nation fleeced the American public and the individuals employed therein are getting rich on the backs of everyone else losing their jobs, maybe this is just a sign of other people trying to rise up and get in on the kleptocracy.

Part of the question for me really hinges on whether the state of New Jersey, as I suspect they did, sold this information to the bogus “Motor Vehicle Services” in exchange for much needed cashflow. Because that would pretty much indicate that we’re beyond salvation. When the government is so broke that it can only pay for corporate bailouts by selling information to other corrupt corporations, we pretty much have no alternative to starting over from scratch.

Professional skeptic and media rabblerouser, Bill Maher, willfully engaged the taboo this week when he expressed his doubts about the Swine Flu vaccine. Not surprisingly, his panelists reacted as if he suggested they eat a small child, live on set.

This is an especially courageous stance for Maher to take given the greater medical community’s open disdain for anyone who would question their products. Never mind that there is a body of evidence mounting that most currently cited vaccine efficacy studies are heavily biased and, no double-blind vaccine testing (against a placebo group) have ever been effectively demonstrated.

Never mind that in both 1968 and 1977, when flu vaccines were completely mismatched to corresponding seasonal outbreaks, the flu mortality rate didn’t rise a single point. Never mind that even though we immunize 50% more elderly people than we did 20 years ago, the death rate has increased nearly twofold.

Never mind that (as Maher cites) a typical flu vaccine contains mercury, chicken embryos and formaldehyde. Nope, there certainly isn’t a credible debate to be had on whether we should be injecting millions of people with that. Certainly not. Right Canadians?

Even the usually infallible Jon Stewart completely dropped the ball on this debate. Instead, he used shlubby Glen Beck as a strawman to avoid the real arguments completely.

The moral of the story is, never believe the glowing screen — especially when it tells you that you’d be a fool to question it. Do your own research and find your own answers. Either that, or willfully accept your intravenous chicken fetus.

Late in the video, Kaiser makes the claim that the dollar’s 52-week low (which is actually a 14 month low) is not only due to a weakening economy, but efforts by other nations to dump US dollars as a reserve currency.

There is a growing body of evidence that Kaiser is right on the money. According to the New York Post, foreign banks have about half as many reserves in dollars as they did ten years ago. With less willing dollar hoarders overseas, the Federal Reserve can no longer count on flippantly increasing the money supply to spur on the economy. Global patience for US economic hegemony is quickly running out.

China, Russia, and the EU seem to be staging a financial intervention for their shop-a-holic, denial-laden, American counterpart. They no longer seem interested in cleaning up his mess. These countries know that when you have a delusional addict wreaking havoc on your life, sometimes you simply have to step back and let him go it alone.

The question is, how far will America go before self-awareness kicks in? How hyper-inflated will we allow dollars to become before we acknowledge the consequences of having a completely unhinged, unaccountable monetary policy?
It may hurt for now, but there may come a day when we thank our global trading partners for cutting us off. It might even spur us into joining a twelve-step recovery program for former World Powers living beyond their means.

Update: For those interested, here’s the second half of the Face Off discussion:

To review, I called out NCO Financial Systems for being a scam and leaving a recurring phony spam message about debt collection on my answering machine. In an interesting development, the calls stopped shortly after I posted about this, though I can’t imagine they would be coordinated enough for that to be anything other than coincidence.

Today, a “Jonathan Walker” offered me this rebuttal of sorts via a comment on the post:

“as you did your research correctly we would’ve known that debt collection agency will be breaking the law if they diclose any information beside the right party so how would you know that the company is a fraud,just because you got a message c’mon dude do your research correctly also the BBB has alot of complains about alot of companies why do you figure that the BBB only has complains about NCO financial system you are probably another consumer that owes a debt and the only way to get out of it is by saying bad stuff about a company,probably this is not the only company you have been writting about,SO PAY YOUR DEBTS!”

[massive sic]

I have two theories about this comment:
1. It’s a Mep Reporter having a little fun or trying to stir the pot.
2. It’s someone in the employ of NCO Financial Systems trying to cover for them.

While I’m always inclined to go with #1, especially after Russ introduced zombie flash videos into my life (not to mention the origin of the whole “Omaha” thing), I doubt it in this instance. For one thing, the post is old, already on our third page. A Mepper would press buttons on a more pressing issue. For another, a Mepper would know better than to accuse me of having outstanding debts.

For, of course, I have never accrued a debt in my life. There was technically a very small student loan that my parents took out for me that was required as part of my Brandeis financial aid package my freshman year, which was almost immediately repaid. Other than that, I have never owned a credit card (though I use debit cards frequently), never taken out a loan or a mortgage, even bought a new car with a check for the entire sum. I don’t believe in debt. So, no, Jonathan, it’s not my debt.

But I smell a rat in this comment that goes beyond the implication that I’m a deadbeat debtor. The post is old, so it could only have been found via search engine, unless this guy’s a regular reader of ours that was a month behind in his posts. So he was probably searching for NCO Financial Systems (I’ll check the search log when it’s updated for the day to see if I can find the referral search he made). And the misspellings and psedo-conversational attitude are a bit of a stretch, even for Internet comment buffoonery. Either he’s new to the language, writing way too fast, or trying to look amateurish.

More than anything, though, why would some random unaffiliated commenter come to the stirring defense of a corporation that’s obviously attempting to scam people? Who spends their free time doing this? It’s an obvious and inarticulate attempt to make NCO look possibly viable, to counteract the corporate image that is clearly tanking in an Internet capable of fact-checking.

The whole point was that I did my research, Jonathan. That was the point of my original post – look on Google before you call a dubious business back. This might be why you said “as you did your research correctly” rather than “if you did…”, because you’re subtly acknowledging that I’m right.

But you better get back to your workstation and make those robocalls. Or keep Googling and covering up for NCO. Otherwise, you won’t get paid.

This short was created by animator Nick Cross. An interview about the piece can be found on Slow Decade.

By the way, if you think “Yellow Cake” sounds familiar, it’s because the term refers to a form of processed uranium ore. Hard to say if that plays into the title or not, though I imagine it does.

Uh oh – turns out that the planet isn’t getting warmer after all!

Just as the dire predictions that hurricanes would relentlessly bash every American coast in the years after 2005 proved laughably false in the face of some of the lightest hurricane seasons on record that actually followed, so it turns out that the planet has actually cooled since 1998.

I’m going to repeat that, just in case Al Gore or his followers are listening: 1998 remains the hottest year on record. Every subsequent year has been cooler than 1998.

1998, b-t-dubs, for those scoring at home, was over a decade ago.

So how have we become a culture obsessed with global warming? A society that, instead of focusing on species preservation or deforestation or the destruction of the world’s oceans, has mortgaged the entire environmental farm for a few degrees? It’s almost enough to have me starting to think conspiracy. That, despite global warming sometimes seeming like a noble lie (I’m no fan of emitting things into the atmosphere, even if the consequences are less dire than Gore would have you believe), the lie might not be so noble after all.

The nobility of the lie hinges on the question I discussed in my prior post on this subject and whether the micro “solutions” being proffered to the first-world public are really just distractions from the real agents of environmental destruction or not. It’s starting to feel like no accident that the “green” movement is more about buying new technology than actually reducing any waste in a meaningful or broad-based way. Yay, lightbulbs! That’ll stimulate the economy and convince people that capitalism is compatible with being “green”!

Maybe it’s just another, more nefarious green that’s behind this whole co-option of the movement. So people will continue to eat meat and fish and contribute to overconsumption (buying 600 tote bags!) while the planet cools by itself and corporations continue to act with impunity. Hooray.

Man, my posts always end up being such downers.

Sunday night, Yankee fans (including Yours Truly) watched for several hours as the Bombers attempted to exorcise the memory of one of their most infamous free agent acquisitions – Human Pin Cushion, Carl Pavano.

While any modern day baseball fan faces the prospect of losing favorite players to free agency, thoughts of Carl arouse a special level of ire for the Yankee fan.

Here is a pitcher who took $40 million dollars (guaranteed money for four seasons) and ostensibly made up various injuries to avoid actually having to play. Rather than rehash the whole history, I’ll leave you this vintage Mep video to explain his history (the creation of which shows how much hatred I carried for this man):

And so, when his contract finally expired last year, we Yankee fans thought we’d finally seen the end of Mr. Pavano. We were wrong. Pavano (now a Cleveland Indian) faced the Yankees in late May, and showed the prowess that had convinced the Yankee front office to offer him a small yacht stacked with $100 bills, back in 2004.

In early August, the sputtering Indians dealt Pavano to the Minnesota Twins for a player to be named later, and realizing that free agency was again approaching, Pavano put in some actual effort. He won three of his last four decisions and helped the streaking Twins steal the AL Central title from the Detroit Tigers.

Many Yankee fans relished the thought of facing him last night, in the potential clinching game of the American League Division Series, as a final revenge upon Listless Carl and his cavalcade of excuses.

However, with a fake sense of indignation of how he was treated by the Yankee Universe, and a national stage to showcase his soon to be free agent arm, Carl Pavano baffled the Yankees for nearly seven full innings. He struck out nine (a season high), walked none, and pumped his fist emphatically as he matched veteran Andy Pettitte inning by inning.

While clutch fireworks by newly anointed “True Yankee” Alex Rodriguez and gruff backstop Jorge Posada ultimately handed Pavano the loss, I can’t escape the feeling that Pavano managed to beat the system yet again.

A less than sullen Pavano was asked about his performance after the game. His response:

“I think definitely I’ve shown I can go out there every fifth day… Yeah, we came up short. But the whole road coming here was so enjoyable”

Somehow Listless Carl managed to pitch just well enough to impress potential free agent suitors in 2010, and just poorly enough to end the Twins season. It just seems a little bit too convenient. I get the feeling that some poor, deluded, general manager will pony up big bucks for Listless Carl come April. And he’ll do it just in time for Carl to pull his Hangnail routine. Buyer beware.

I think that the Aviator Emu and his friend Alan Greenspan will be bringing you a lot more newsreel Mep videos in the coming months. We’re pretty excited about this new (old) genre of recording.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to book my tickets on the dirigible.

This unassuming top article from CNBC’s front page may look like it has insight. Instead, it warns some “perspective” buyers about their potential confusion.

Among their confusions might be what they’re called in the first place. After all, these are actually “prospective buyers”. CNBC’s spellcheckers must be as diligent as its critics of big business and shady stock deals.

Extra points for preceding the phrase “as to whether” with such a blatant typo and for the subtle messaging of the real value of American homes. Because those are pennies in the picture. Not dollars or even quarters – pennies.

I’d say more, but I have to rush out to get some perspective on buying a house for five cents with an $8,000 tax rebate.

For too long babies who had plagiocephaly were the only ones who had to wear headgear.  They were “special” babies who needed to have a little help to make sure their head shape turned out normal as they grew.

Now, thanks to a new product on the market, “special” parents can put their babies in headgear too.  The Thudguard ensures that their babies will not lose brain cells bumping their heads against furniture like everyone elses babies; in a sense leveling the future playing field one fall at a time.

I know I’ve recently been pimping Michael Moore’s Capitalism, but this video serves up the same effect in 8 odd minutes. The Prophet Bill Hicks would probably have referred to these two as “Impotent Silverfish Satan Spawn.” They represent the lowest form of human life on the planet. One can only hope that no alien species learns of humans through intercepted AVN broadcasts.

Let’s examine this afternoon’s headlines, shall we?:

Now, there are a ton of reasons to root against economic recovery in the US, ranging from hoping for a total collapse of capitalism to saving the environment to simply giving the country an unprecedented dose of humility. But to avoid flight delays? Really?

Also, let’s look at the context in which CNN so cleverly chose this horror story of the coming flight delays. Was it just a slow news day? Is there nothing else to report to Americans hungry for 24/7 news?

Let’s see… the seminal turning point in the war in Afghanistan, an upcoming movement on healthcare that has dominated the American political scene for the last few months, the first ever serious excavation on the moon via explosion, the Taliban claiming credit for the latest bombing… yeah, I’d probably choose the specter of increased flight delays that comes from more scheduled flights too.

What’s great about the article is that it’s not even news so much as basic logic. When more planes are in the air, it creates more traffic, thus leading to more delays. The same principle by which, uh, all traffic in the world has always worked, from horse and buggies to trains to cars. Spectacular.

CNN might as well have put a simple math equation as the top story of October 8th. It would probably be less intuitive to the average reader.

To be fair, there were also some colossal duds they didn’t pick for the top story, though it makes you wonder if CNN has any editing at all on their website. Levi Johnston stripping? Jennifer Hudson has a kid? Ted Williams’ frozen head? Since when does CNN stand for Celebrity Nothing News?

At least they also ran a feature on the avalanche video. We totally scooped CNN.

They say it trains boys up to “two months faster.”  I think I’d rather take the two months, but I’ve never potty-trained a boy before, so what do I know.

Speaking of which, Capitalism: A Love Story is a must see. It’s your duty as an American citizen to pony up the ticket fare and absorb it.

Here’s some interesting analysis from English language Russian broadcast, Russia today:

It should be noted that few domestic American news stations seemed to have any similar level of coverage of the event. Seemingly the Letterman extortion scandal is a far more important global issue.

Returning to the Lama, here is his acceptance speech:

And here is an older BBtv piece that I shot about human rights abuses that persist in Tibet:

“You son of a motherless goat!”

We have a problem people.  Babies like to show-off their bellies.  Well, we can’t stand for it anymore and OneStepAhead is helping us end it.  Let me introduce you to “Sta-tuct” and the end of baby shirts going above your baby’s belly.

Today, Britain’s Daily Mail Online gave us a glimpse of a possible future distopian solution to unemployment.

Internet Eyes is “a worldwide online instant event notification system utilizing video feed to notify the owner of the feed (customer) that an event is occurring.”

In other words, anonymous internet viewers will be conscripted to sit at their computer and browse through hundreds of hours of surveillance video, in the hope that they can spot some unseemly activities going on, and instantly report it to a Game Warden for a cash reward.

So far, Internet Eyes is stopping short of fully employing online participants in the search for shoplifters, petty thieves, and other Dangerous Sub-Societal Malcontents. But offering monthly cash prizes for viewers who excel at catching Undesirables is a tentative first step down that path.

This new “game” seems to have a huge demographic to take advantage of. There are tens of millions of users out there, patiently waiting to find opportunities to work on the internet. And once it’s determined how lucrative searching for Bad Guys is (as compared to farming for gold on World of Warcraft, for instance), the users and gamers and unemployable masses will flock to see who can earn the most Vigilance Points.

And once this program is underway, do not count on your fellow internet users to abstain from World of Surveillance out of some moral or ethical compunction. Do you really think that the Korean factory workers who earn pennies an hour by farming items in an online video game will be any less likely to take a slight pay raise to search for Altoids tin filchers at the 7-11?

If you need any more proof that this is the direction we’re headed, look to Neal Stephenson’s prophetic work, Snow Crash,

“They [Gargoyles] serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society… The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.”

Well, they’ve done it.  Bach, the makers of “Rescue Remedy,” have solved the problem of kids’ fear of failure.  Meet “Confidence Remedy”

the new addition to the Bach Kids line.  It can give your kids that “natural boost to aid in overcoming frustrating obstacles of self-doubt.”

So, to all those parents afraid of following in your parent’s footsteps by verbally abusing your child and shattering their self-esteem…Worry No More!  Just add a drop of this alcohol-free formula to their morning cereal and you’re good to go!

Also available, “Daydream Remedy,” for those neglected children who spend their whole day dreaming of what it would be like to have a caring, supportive family with whom they could spend quality time.

We all want to believe the little myth that people are spreading about global warming, that somehow a small band of intrepid environmentalists can bring down a planet-wide behemoth of a disaster by making small marginal choices like replacing perfectly good lightbulbs with headache lamps and maybe biking to work once a week.

It’s a good story and it’s probably even got some noble-lie elements (well, excepting the fluorescent lights of course, which are the manifestation of all that is wrong with our society) in encouraging people to do good things for the wrong reasons. But kids, and you may want to sit down for this, it’s bunk. You can’t make a difference.

Why? For one thing, you (and by you, I mean collectively, because this includes every single individual residential American) just don’t do enough polluting and wrecking the Earth to matter. As this graph illustrates, residential and commercial factors combine to make up about 10% of the total contributions to greenhouse warming. And the graph here says that residential sources use 21% of the power generated in the USA. That same graph says 17% of power is used by commercial sources, so we can apply the 21:17 ratio to the 10.3% in the first graph, making it almost exactly 4.5%. So we add that to 21% of the 21.3% from power stations and we get another 4.5%… 9% total.

There’s a little bit from driving too, though a vast percentage (can’t find a source, but it’s intuitively obvious) of this is either for commercial trucking or people driving to work, which itself is commercially driven and generally not something people feel they have a choice about. So, say we tack on an extra 3% total for driving factors.

What does this mean? If all individuals stopped driving except to get to work, never used electricity, and never polluted at all from their houses, we’d only have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 12%. Say it’s 15% for extra fun. Do you think this is going to make a dent in the meteoric upwelling of emissions and corresponding heat?

And that’s if everyone cut their usage to zero. Not a few people replacing a few lightbulbs or turning off the TV an hour early or unplugging one vampire appliance. That’s every man, woman, and child in America throwing away their refrigerator because they don’t get power to their house. Changes of that caliber in everyone’s personal life and 85% of the deadly juggernaut is still coming for us.

I wish people understood this, that it’s the giant commercial-industrial complex of the market that’s really driving contributions to greenhouse warming. And while you can pretend that a little boycott or rally is going to do something about that, no amount of “consumer action” is going to change the way businesses do business substantially enough to dent that remaining 85% of emissions, any more than holding a couple Nader rallies is going to bring down the two-party monopoly in our pseudo-democracy. You can boycott a bigger polluter and buy from someone who pollutes 5% less (or is 25% better at not getting caught polluting), but this kind of incremental musical chairs is going to have zero ultimate impact on the general upward spiral.

You can’t make a difference on a problem this big. You just can’t. There’s no marginal impact that you are having. You can stop driving and stop flying and move into a hovel with no electricity, but unless you’re going to convince corporate America to do the same, it makes no difference whatsoever. You can stop eating beef and rice (the raising of cattle and farming of rice are huge biomass contributors to greenhouse gases), but you alone are not going to move the bar on a spiraling planetary epidemic. Not gonna happen.

By far the best thing for global warming would be an end to the American economy. We would then possibly have to shut down all the commercial and industrial operations that really contribute to pollution and even stop mining for natural resources and chopping down trees. We’d have plenty of houses extant in which to house everyone and would return to a sedentary agrarian system of being. That may be our only hope.

So maybe you can make a difference. Go out and short some stocks. Refuse to participate in the economy. Quit your job. Boycott America. Then there may be some hope of saving this planet after all.

If, you know, global warming exists in the first place.

And frankly, who are we to stop them? The full-clip involves a statewide Schwarzenegger reassurance immediately followed by the apocalypse. Good times.

The Yankees sure don’t rest on their laurels. Just days after clinching the best record in baseball, the pinstripers open the premiere Foam-Fighting Training Camp in the country. Someone needs to sign that redhead to a long term deal.

As much as this article tries to distract you into looking at differences – those between nations or genders or both – the real issue is that money provides more stress in people’s lives than anything else, but #2 is the state of the world.

We can easily take stress as a proxy for both what people care the most about and, secondarily, what they are putting the most effort into. There’s no point in being stressed about something one doesn’t care about and presumably one ruminates for lengthy amounts of time on something that offers stress.

So money is the only thing standing between us and a primary focus on improving the state of the world. But because of money, we instead focus on how to get more cash in our individual wallet than how to make the world a better place.

This is hardly a surprising discovery for anyone who understands money, but it is somewhat impressive to see it put so starkly in an article published in the mainstream press. It’s almost as though money were a deliberately created system put forth to distract people into competing and worrying about their own individual standing rather than working with others to improve the state of everything. Almost.

If you’re one of those types to wonder what the alternative is, keep in mind that you’re talking about the alternative to the single thing most responsible for distracting people from the real problems the planet faces. It’s like looking at a world where everyone is infected with some deadly degenerative disease and musing on what an alternative world might look like. “How could we possibly devise a system for societal operations where not everyone has hepatitis C?” would be an equally good question to your query.

The answer, of course, is that anything would be better. But for starters, why don’t we just say that everyone has a right to food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, and a reasonable degree of discretion over the use of their time, without fear that they will somehow lose one of these because of inability to collect an arbitrary set of pieces of paper?

That’s not so hard, is it?

OMG, he just took out the moon! That is one bad-ass, hockey-playing polar bear.

Looking for a way to perk up your work week? Why not update yourself on the impending enviropocalypse?

According to an exhaustive study by the Global Footprint Network, September 25th was the day that the planet used all of the available planetary resources that it could replenish in a year (otherwise known as Earth Overshoot Day). For the rest of the year, we’ll be culling, reaping, and utilizing that which won’t grow back.

Ever the optimist, I like to look at the impending death of our home planet as an opportunity to try out other levels of existence. Farming, fishing, manufacturing, and reproducing can get quite monotonous after a few hundred generations. So, as I see it, here are our options:

The first option is to figure out a way to exist in bio-friendly hibernation pods, as the new movie Surrogates seems to suggest. Now, this may be with the help of Matrix-like robotic overlords, or it may be as autonomous dwellers in an expanded Internet or Multiverse. Incidentally, Surrogates seems to pull heavily from Snow Crash, a novel whose characters spend most of their free time on a fully-immersive giant virtual reality internet. The environmental benefits to this type of lifestyle are clear, with the added bonus of living life in a giant video game. I have high hopes for this potential reality.

Our second option is to dispose of our planet like a used diaper and seek out life on another potential dumping ground elsewhere in the galaxy. For those ingrained into the deficit spending culture, this may be the only satisfying solution. Many sci-fi tales, including Robert Heinlein’s, Farmer in the Sky set the scene for human colonization of other worlds. These are tales of future explorers homesteading on nearby habitable planets. While playing Galactic Oregon Trail sounds like a real hoot, it doesn’t come without its own share of problems. Firstly, this reality sticks us with the farming, fishing, and reproduction toils that we were trying to get out of. And secondly, this future path assumes that humans will have the smarts to build things, grow things, and live without electricity while we break in our new environment. Not bloody likely.

The third option is much less fun, as it involves heeding the constant whinings of our scientific community. Cutting down on global consumption just feels wrong. It would be the equivalent of declaring defeat in the War Against Nature, which we know our political leaders could never bear. And I for one, don’t like losing to an unconscious pile of dirt and brine. Doesn’t sentience count for anything anymore? So, no, I refuse to lay out the potential of slowly weening ourselves off of our highly consumptive habits. It’s just wrong. Surely there must be a more extravagant, American way to go about doing this. Perhaps we can keep our day-to-day abuses intact and simply jettison some of our more extravagant behaviors.

I bet that putting an end to NASCAR and Entourage would roll us back to a level of existence short of Earth Overshoot. And if that doesn’t work, we can always choose some toothless, symbolic action that represents our commitment to fixing our leaky planet when we decide to get around to it. In that vein, I propose that we recycle Tyra Banks into organic mulch. At least this would make our dying planet an infinitely more palatable place to live.

This is a tough one to bear. Above, is a picture of nutbar Mel Gibson wielding a beaver puppet. Allegedly, this is all for an upcoming Jodie Foster directed film entitled, “The Beaver.”

One would think that Gibson, a religious nutcase in his own right, would have the wherewithal to treat The Giant Flying Beaver that Rules the Universe with some measure of reverence and respect. How would he like it if I made a Jesus Crucifix Dummy for my new short film entitled “Puppet Messiah?” Wouldn’t that make for a fun-filled family outing?

Anyway, if you’re going to create a beaver-centric comedy, clearly your star should be a cybernetic, taxidermied, beaver case mod. A la Compubeaver:

Hey, Hey, The Gang’s All Here, Krull and Kelp Kollide, Russ Goes Back to School, Immortality Is/Is Not Overrated, Baby Sea Cucumbers, Rack-O is Whack-O, Cash for Coal, and NAFTA Bartenders.

Download Mep Report #116

The story here was that I had agreed to do stand up comedy last weekend, but wasn’t particularly in the mood for joke-telling (especially given that the venue was a standard comedian trap — a privately hosted party). So, instead, I decided to employ the audience as the cast and crew in a YouTube video.

The results were mixed. Obviously I had little control over what we ended up recording, but it was a promising experiment. I sort of like the idea of having strangers collaborate spontaneously on a web project. It’s very internet ethos-y. On the bright side, it may be an entirely new form of performance art. Fun.

Zittrain describes a system based not on economics and self-interest, but on random kindnesses, free favors, and civility. What he is describing is no less than the evolution of mankind into HuMan 2.0.

Incidentally, for the Meppers take on Wikipedia vandalism, check out Mep Report #26.

Link via Philosophy Monkey

According to the team,

“He was only buried for 4 and a half minutes which is incredibly short. I cannot stress these next sentences enough; that in and of itself to be unburied in ONLY 4:28 is miraculous if you have any understanding of being caught in an avalanche and what it takes to be found. It could literally be some kind of “world record” just on how good the guide and supporting cast of other skiers was in getting to him… Oh…the luck? They located him so fast because his right glove came off just before he came completely to rest and there was an excellent visual of course.”

Digg.com is one of the largest websites on the planet. Like many of its competitors in the social media arena, it doesn’t purport to create or provide anything of substance. Digg’s value comes in the community that it organizes and speaks for. In Digg’s case, that community’s function is to vote for the most worthy news stories of the day for more casual visitors to consume.

With the announcement of some prospective changes to its voting rules, is Digg capitulating to big money interests? Or has its slow march to corruption already rendered its original mission moot?

With its massive growth over the last five years, Digg has become a virtual kingmaker. One link from the Digg front page can send massive swaths of internet traffic to any given website at any time. This ‘Digg Effect‘ is one of the more powerful forces known to the internet. It can instantaneously promote stories, videos, or news items into super-viral memes that have the potential to reach millions of users.

With the advent of online ads, web traffic became a very real form of currency, turning Digg from a virtual billboard into a virtual ATM machine. Not surprisingly, the key to the Holy Teat of Internet Traffic became an incredibly valuable commodity. And the holders of such relics are especially susceptible to corrupting influences.

But, let’s not kid ourselves. Digg wasn’t ever a democracy in the truest egalitarian sense of the word. The site runners have always kept their ‘Feature Algorithm’ a secret. In other words, no one knows how many votes it takes to bring a story to Digg’s vaunted home page. No one knows how many down votes it takes to bury a story. No one knows why some stories seem to linger on the front page longer than others. As far as pure democratic processes go, you can rank Digg somewhere in the neighborhood of Iran or Afghanistan.

Even with its flaws, Digg was once a thriving community of diligent news consumers, constantly pouring over incoming submissions and voting especially compelling ones to the front page. This culture is no more. Algorithm changes have discouraged Digg users from being too active in reading and filtering new submissions. A shift in focus on socializing and befriending other users has lead to the creation of virtual Digg Voting Blocks. The results of this new policy has dramatically reduced the diversity of stories that end up on the featured page.
One study concluded that 46% of Digg’s front page is controlled by as few as 50 websites. Not surprisingly, these 50 websites represent some of the biggest, most well-funded players on the internet.

It’s hard to blame founder Kevin Rose and his inner cabal for Digg’s corporate devolution. I mean, if you were a kid who designed a network capable of leveraging insane amounts of traffic on behalf of a rowdy internet throng, wouldn’t you want some measure of control over the thing? Wouldn’t you set up secret features that allowed your staff to counter the rampant Digging of unacceptable content, or allow yourself a backdoor to throw a bone to websites that paid you to feature them? Wouldn’t you set up safeguards to prevent out and out revolt that threatened the livelihood of your virtual property? I think you would.

This is why democracies aren’t generally run by kids fresh out of a computer science program at UNLV. Thriving democracies have transparency; they have checks and balances, they have interest groups working to ensure that the interests of the few are communicated to the many. Digg has never had any of these protections.

Therefore, Digg has never been a true democracy. But it was close, once. Unfortunately it has slowly succumbed to the addictive brew of advertising dollars, strategic partnerships, and celebrity. So don’t bother raising a stink about the new proposed changes. And don’t expect to find this story on Digg’s front page any time soon. Its corporate overlords wouldn’t approve.

Image via MaximumPC

Turns out, of course, that NCO Financial Systems is a scam. And they use a lot of numbers. Mine, for those scoring at home, was 888-480-1534, which appears as the latest and greatest in the comments.

There are a lot of pretty obvious signs that this is bogus, including the fact that an automated message that is always the same leaves the message (rather than a human being) and, more importantly, they do not identify the person allegedly owing the debt or the nature of the debt being collected.

It’s unclear whether NCO buys actual debts and just uses shady practices to inflate them or incite repayment – or whether NCO just starts spamming phone numbers with requests to have people pay phantom debts in the first place. But with debt and debt defaulting becoming an ever larger part of our world, it’s good to get versed on the fact that someone saying you owe them money is probably lying in pretty much all cases.

In any event, the general principle of capitalism applies. It is far easier to attempt to steal from idiots than to do actual work or anything resembling productivity. For all we may criticize a social ethos that created gladiators, orgies, and Saturnalia, we should take a good long look at what the profit motive convinces people to do.

Or as Bob Dylan put it:
“Now, it don’t seem to me quite so funny
What some people are gonna do fer money.
There’s a brand new gimmick every day
Just to take somebody’s money away.
I think we oughta take some of these people
And put ‘em on a boat, send ‘em up to Bear Mountain . . .
For a picnic.”

via the folks at EndCiv.

Earlier today, internet business culture behemoth, TechCrunch, posted a riddle for its millions of devoted followers. Branded as a heretofore unbroken code, the decipherer was promised Good Will Hunting-like stardom and a potential job with Google, no doubt as the Alpha Team Leader of a Top Secret Super-Genius Infiltration Training Program. Not to mention a TechCrunch t-shirt…

These prizes were more than enough to coax thousands of readers to devote their early afternoon naptimes in search of the key to the cipher. Even Yours Truly could not resist the lure of an unbreakable code that had previously foiled unworthy MIT twerps.

And so we crunched. We juxtaposed. We rearranged, substituted, and counted. Early discoveries of a phone voice mail belonging to the Google central nervous system were quickly debunked. Other phone numbers surfaced, seemingly belonging to a Boston law firm. I, personally, came up with several fax numbers and the contact phone for a Bay Area company called Integral.

And in the end, both on our worksheets and in the post’s comment thread, it was revealed that the correct answer belonged to a voice mail that belonged not to Google, but to some network-marketing scum looking for a few sharp minds to enslave and ultimately impoverish with yet more promises of unattainable riches.

Sadness. On several levels. First of all, that a first-rate website could so easily be scammed by snake-oil salesmen into putting out an internet call-to-arms. Secondly, though, that this vast resource of intelligentsia all over the world can only be harnessed by a virtual prankster.

Is there no cause more worthy of this kind of collective mental effort? Can’t we use these kind of thought experiments to do something useful, like figure out the Unified Field Theory or balance the budget, or create a Phantom Zone to exile all News Corp Executives into oblivion?

Probably not for awhile. As it seems that TechCrunch will be thought of as the Website that Cried Wolf for the foreseeable future. For shame.

PS: For you super nerds still keen on finding the answer… Here is my original worksheet…

Occurences:

1 = 1 6
2 = 2 8
3 = 2 2
4 = 0 3
5 = 1 1
6 = 4 5
7 = 0 4
8 = 3 7
9 = 0 9

A = 3 A
B = 0 I
C = 0 L
D = 2 M
E = 1 Q
F = 2 D
G = 0 F
H = 1 J
I = 3 O
J = 2 R
K = 0 E
L = 3 H
M = 3 N
N = 1 S
O = 2 T
P = 0 U
Q = 3 X
R = 2 B
S = 1 C
T = 1 G
U = 1 K
V = 0 P
W = 0 V
X = 1 W
Y = 0 Y
Z = 0 Z

55 possible characters. 8 gaps.

gaps at 7, 9, 17, 20, 28, 33, 42, 49

gaps of gaps: 2 8 3 8 5 9 7 BHCHEIG

each line gaps: 7,9, 6,9 6, 11, 9, 5

gaps of gaps 2, 3, 3, 3, 5, 2, 4

7 9
6 9
6 11
9
5

QLQ6 6I1 R8I3 Fx IA3J
8386 691 9893 69 9131

number of characters

6,1,2 break or, excluding breaks: (617) 274 -8660
5,2,2 break the final zero representing the last needed digit
5, 4, break with no characters following the phrase.
8, 2 break
4, 6 end

Update:

Never mind. The thing was recently solved. It was a substitution cipher that went something like this:

Code for translation:

0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (JOBS)

456789ABCDE2FGHIJKL0MNOP1QRS3TUVWXYZ (0123)

The result:
CONGRA T UL ATION SK EE PSEAR CHIN GORCALL6 17 6390 570×10

CONGRATULATIONS KEEP SEARCHING OR CALL 617 639 0570 (extension 10)

Google Jobs answers that call

via fivetechsoft

There’s something really effortless about the sound that Zaptra conjures out of his electronic panoply. It reminds me of the mood evoked by Garden State, or similar coming of age, traveling montage-heavy pieces. It makes me want to do Tai Chi in the middle of Times Square.

This piece was directed by boy genius, Jyrki Rantasuo.

Shiver me timbers! Today also be Talkin’ Like a Pirate Day. We here on the SS Emu are a non-sectarian crew, and hope you find a non-land lubbin way to cheer and grog yourselves into the bloomin’ nighttime.

Here be some help with your pirate diction. Now get off me poop deck, and sally forth into the mighty surf an spray…

This Japanese site will take any portrait-like picture that you upload and automatically convert it into a blinking, nodding, quasi-zombie animated template ready to model various animal heads, wigs, and facial hair.

It’s easily good for 45 minutes of time wasting. Fun, fun.

Link via BuzzFeed.

In a stunning turn of events this week, Facebook revealed that it now takes in enough actual money to pay for its own business expenses.

“There’s a myth that you can’t make money on the internet, these days,” said recently post-pubescent CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“As it turns out, all you have to do is become a social organizer for a virtual nation of 300 million, and keep them distracted with Mafia Wars while you sell off their personal shopping habits to retailers,” Zuck noted.

Here’s to hoping other internet entrepreneurs heed Zuckerberg’s message and find new and creative ways to engage (exploit) internet users, at large.

Mep Report 116 – Limb Regeneration in Infants from Laserfalcon on Vimeo.

In other news, spanking is remarkably ineffective at changing the behavior of baby lab rats.

Here’s the thing – most children don’t understand what it is about their behavior that is incurring the wrath of their parent(s). Children embrace the world and do whatever it is that they think is interesting, usually changing their mind every seven seconds. To sprinkle this exploration with periodic rhythmic beatings only aids their perception that the world is random and cruel.

I’m never the biggest fan of watching parental discipline in a grocery store or other public setting, but watching someone actually hit their child who is younger than five is one of the most shocking things I’ve actually witnessed. And yet many people think it’s just part of the show.

My favorite quote in this article, though, has to be this:
“Some remain unconvinced that parents should never spank their children. Robert Larzelere, associate professor of human development and family science at Oklahoma State University, conducted a meta-analysis of 26 studies on the subject, and found that, overall, spanking seemed more effective than 10 of 13 alternative disciplinary methods for getting a child to behave or do as asked.”

I just love that “more effective” is the rubric prescribed. I wonder what if the three more effective methods included threatening to kill the child or depriving them of sustenance. After all, we all know that implementing the death penalty for shoplifting would be “effective” at reducing incidents of the crime.

I’m willing to guess, though, that the #1 effective method, even in that study, was having a detailed conversation with the child about the nature of their misdeed. If only we started applying our more enlightened parenting methods to criminal “justice”.

Faced with the prospect of becoming the most popular weekend pastime in the United States, the National Football League is taking drastic steps to withdraw from public view.

As reported by Time Magazine last week, the NFL has adopted a “blackout” policy, preventing local fans from viewing their team’s games if the game in question fails to sell out its tickets.

In the face of harsh criticism, NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, stood tough last week as he explained to the media that simply too many American moods hinged on a professional football result.

“It’s just too much pressure,” Goodell admitted.

Noting an unprecedented increase in NFL player-related violent crimes, Goodell blamed the American public for getting his employees all riled up.

“First Plaxico shoots himself in the leg, then Donte gets hopped up on goofballs and runs somebody over. Shawne Merriman just tried to lock himself in his basement with Tila Tequila. Can’t you see that you’re tearing us apart?”

Wiping back tears, the Commissioner continued:

“We used to have a nice little league. Football was a fun little Sunday jaunt in the park with leather helmets and a few friends. But then you had to care soooo much! You had to craft your little foam fingers and cheeseheads and spiked shoulderpads. What kind of self-respecting person wears a silver killer robot zombie costume to a local sporting match? Is that what we’re supposed to look like? Is it?!? ” Goddell whimpered.

According to Goodell, the blackout policy is intended to slowly wean the American public off of football for the time being.

“We…just need a break. We need time to work out our issues. We would really appreciate it if you stopped watching us on television if you’re not coming to the games. Don’t call us, don’t e-mail us, and please take us off of your facebook page. Look, there are other things going on in the world. I’ve heard that there’s some kind of national healthcare thing that you can go make yourself crazy over. If you really love us, you need to give us some time.”

With that quote, Commissioner Goodell retreated into his NFL executive tour bus to consult with his girlfriends. Press were advised to delete his cell phone number from their records and “grow up.”

For more on Star Wars political philosophy debates, check out the recently minted Mep Report 115.

Russ Gets his Graduate Degree (Mep Report 116 Highlight) from Laserfalcon on Vimeo.

Krull, Krill, and Kelp (Mep Report 116 Highlight) from Laserfalcon on Vimeo.

Link via /film

Freddie, how could you…