A giraffe walks into a bar a screams, “Highballs for everyone!”

That's exactly where I wanted my $100 to go -- birthing another pundit.

No, I'm not complaining. After all, aren't I nothing more than an amateur pundit myself?

I, for one, look forward to reading what Hoard Dean has to write. I think his column could prove to be influential to progressives, like the columns of Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman, and Dan Savage. (Yes, Dan Savage is influential to all progressives. "Santorum," people?)

Perhaps he can once and for all tell us how to spell "YEAAAHHRRGGH!" Oh, and continue to tell us why No Child Left Behind is bullshit, and why foreign manufacturers should have the same worker protections we do, and why we need to be as critical of Israel as we are of the Palestinians. You know, common sense shit.

There are only four days left in May, so put this three-day-weekend to good use and celebrate National Masturbation Month!

Of course, like I or anyone need a special month for something like that.

After installing the Mac OS X 10.3.4 update, I can now enable and disable fonts at will in Font Book, and my font menu immediately changes in Quark. And to think I was about to drop $100 on a copy of Suitcase.

Thanks, Apple. It took four updates to deliver on your promise of decent font management built into the operating system, but you finally did it.

Aren't you glad you have decent font management built right into the operating system? Oh, that's right. You use Windows. Sorry.

I wish I knew the original source, as this appeared in my inbox. If anyone knows where this came from, please let me know.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The following is the "first final" list of events for the Republican National Convention in New York City, August 30 to September 2.

AUG. 30

6 p.m. -- OPENING PRAYER read by Mel Gibson, while being flogged with a spiked leather strap wielded by Ann Coulter, who will enjoy it a little too much.

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to RED.

* LEST WE FORGET -- HONORARY ROLL CALL of All Members of (and Friends of) Bush Administration Who Might Very Well Have Been Killed In Vietnam If It Hadn't Been For Nasty Trick Knees, Anal Cysts, Recurrent Headaches, and Highly-Placed, Overly-Protective Parents. (Sponsored by Tyson Chicken)

* ANTONIN SCALIA speaks -- "SLAVERY - THE ORIGINAL INTENT OF OUR FOREFATHERS, AND GREAT FOR BUSINESS! (Sponsored by Wal-Mart)

* DICK CHENEY hosts AMBASSADORSHIP RAFFLE - Opening Bid 1,000,000 (cash, non-sequential bills 20's or less)

* CLIMAX OF THE EVENING -- FILM - "BRING IT ON!" Stirring fictionalized re-creation of Mr. Bush's actual dental appointment in Alabama in 1972, where he showed the incredible courage to allow "deep cleaning" of gums without anesthetic. (Sponsored by Sinclair Broadcasting)

* SUGGESTED AFTER-EVENT -- "GET BAKED WITH RUSH "Crankster" LIMBAUGH! (Location TBD) (Sponsored by Pfizer)

AUG 31

* 6 p.m. OPENING PRAYER read by Our Lord (The Passion Of) Jesus H. Christ, as channeled by Lt. General William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the man who first revealed that Mr. Bush was chosen by God to lead this country into war against the heathens. Mr. Boykin will then give a short, upbeat presentation on Islam called, "My God can Beat Up Your God."

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to FLASHING RED.

* WAYNE LAPIERRE will pry Davy Crockett's Kentucky Long Rifle out of Charlton Heston's cold dead fingers (subject to Heston's death) (Sponsored by Smith & Wesson)

* DESIGNATED BROWN PERSON (Hispanic or Muslim, or possibly an Hispanic Muslim, if we can find one) will speak on how being a brown person doesn't automatically disqualify you from being a Republican (subject to finding a brown person capable of being bribed to do this - may need professional actor, possibly brought in from 3rd world country)

* CLIMAX OF THE EVENING -- PAUL WOLFOWITZ announces American plans to invade Iran, strip them of nuclear weapons, and turn over entire country to Bechtel to be run as a subsidiary. (Wolfowitz will tell anxious voters that the operation will involve 200 out-sourced "consultants", will take one week and will be entirely funded by pocket change found in a White House couch.) (Sponsored by Halliburton)

* SUGGESTED AFTER-EVENT -- "RIDE THE WAVE WITH RUSH "Big Oxy" LIMBAUGH!" (Do a couple of 'ringers' with Big Pharma - sponsored by ROBITUSSIN)

SEPTEMBER 1

* 6 p.m. -- OPENING PRAYER by the REVEREND JERRY FALWELL who will demonstrate the spirit of Compassionate Conservatism(tm) and the eternal mercy of God by wishing a horrible fiery death and an eternity in the pit of hell for all non-white, non-male, non-Christian non-heterosexual non-Republicans.

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to PULSATING RED

* THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF INSANELY RICH PERSONS (AAIRP) will present LAURA BUSH with A PLATINUM CHAINSAW in thanks for the Bush Administration tax cuts (Sponsored by Gulfstream)

* ANN COULTER, BILL O'REILLY and SEAN HANNITY will lead a special TWO-MINUTE HATE aimed at photo of John Kerry.

* CLIMAX OF THE EVENING -- DIEBOLD CORPORATION WILL ANNOUNCE ELECTION RETURNS - BUSH WINS RE-ELECTION WITH 51% OF VOTE (YET TO BE CAST). (JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA will certify vote results) Diebold Board member Wilbur H. Grafton will deny fraud, announce his retirement, and be named the new Ambassador to Jamaica. (Sponsored by Diebold)

* SUGGESTED AFTER-EVENT -- GET WRECKED WITH RUSH "Kicker" LIMBAUGH (sponsored by Eli Lilly)

SEPTEMBER 2 (nomination night)

* 6 p.m. -- OPENING PRAYER by ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN ASHCROFT, who will then sing "Let the Eagle Soar" and light the ceremonial "TORCH OF FREEDOM(tm) with the (actual) Bill of Rights.

* TOM RIDGE raises National Alert Level to Fire Engine Red, and ANNOUNCES CAPTURE OF OSAMA BIN LADEN.

* CONVENTION SHIFTS TO "GROUND ZERO" - DICK CHENEY will introduce and personally re-nominate PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, who WILL IMPALE OSAMA BIN LADEN WITH DAVY CROCKETT'S KENTUCKY LONG RIFLE donated by Wayne LaPierre (Sponsored by NRA)

* PRESIDENT BUSH WILL GIVE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, standing on Osama's dead body.

FIRST PEEK - Here is the proposed text for President Bush's speech:

"Hey, Freedom-Lovers! 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay The Course Evil-doers trust my gut 9-11 Freedom Evil-doers Stay The Course Democracy 9-11 Evil-doers trust my gut 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay the course Trust my gut Tax cuts Who cares what you think Evil-doers Things are great Jesus speaks to me 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay The Course Evil-doers 9-11 Freedom Evil-doers Stay The Course Democracy 9-11 Evil-doers trust my gut 9-11 Democracy Freedom Stay the course Trust my gut Tax cuts Who cares what you think Evil-doers Things are great Jesus speaks to me. G'night everybody!"

POST CEREMONY CLOSING NIGHT PARTY OPPORTUNITIES:

* "GET MAXED with RUSH "ROCKET CAP" LIMBAUGH!" (Sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline)

* RICK SANTORUM 'DOG ON DOG' PETTING ZOO (adults only, please)

* BILL O'REILLY SHOWS OFF PULITZER PRIZE, ACADEMY AWARD, AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

* SPECIAL BUFFET - JOHN ASHCROFT will PERSONALLY EXORCISE A KINDLE OF CALICO KITTENS, BARBECUE THEM, AND SERVE THEM ON CANAPES (sponsored by KRAFT "Thick N' Spicy" BBQ Sauce)

Mary A. Tolan has been newly appointed as director and member of the finance and investment policy committee of the mega-franchise Best Buy.

[Mary] owns 589,001 shares of Accenture stock. Prior to joining AccretiveHealth last November, [she] served 21 years in various management roles at Accenture.

Last month, Best Buy confirmed plans to outsource the company's information systems department, a move that will mean layoffs for about 130 employees and require another 650 workers to follow their jobs to Accenture.

Pretty serious conflict of interests, right? But wait…there's more:

Congress recently forced separation of audit and consulting businesses, thanks largely to the services in both fields rendered to Enron and other high-profile miscreants by Arthur Andersen. A corporate shake-up three years in the making created Andersen Consulting, a Bermuda-based global outsourcing, management consulting and technology services firm that, since Jan. 1, 2001, has been known as Accenture Ltd.

My goodness. Okay. We're all familiar with corporate malfeasance, but – we have to wonder – whatever could all this business with have to do with politics? I'm sooooo glad you asked:

Later this month the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is expected to award the contract to manage the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program tracking millions of people coming to the country each year on visas. [...] the department may well decide to delegate management of the US-VISIT program to an expatriate U.S. company with an appalling track record: Accenture.

[Accenture's] enormous cost overruns, backlogs and information failures have led to outrage in Ohio, New York, Texas, Nebraska, Virginia, and even Canada and the United Kingdom.

Most recently, the U.S. government used Accenture to implement a system by which our fighting men and women overseas could participate in elections. The company failed miserably, wasting enough time and resources that alternative remedies are impossible to implement for this election year's deadline.

Ah, the circle of life. But it wouldn't be complete without a good punch line, so here it is!

[Heavy Gracias to Stigmuth for this one].

Excellent words by Al Gore. See? Smart people do make good leaders. Duh.

(Mad propz to Atrios.)

Like this sort of poor behavior on the part of the media need even be pointed out anymore:

The headline here as of 11:05 AM:

"Terrorists Inside U.S. Plan Major Summer Attack"

SHOCK AND DISMAY!

So you click on the link:

"Officials plan 'lookout' alerts for 7"

"Although no specific target, time or date for the possible attack is known, the information is the culmination of intelligence that has been gathered over four months -- and it is the assessment that is new, the sources said."

Okay, nothing to see here, move along.

From Susan Sontag's excellent essay on Abu Ghraib:

It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves.

As a country of Paris Hilton downloaders (don't lie -- you typed it into Kazaa), humiliation more often than not takes the form of sexual humiliation. Bill Clinton couldn't be undone with a murder rap or a bad real estate deal; he had to be sexually humiliated before the country took notice. The Catholic Church has inflicted a heaping Hell of a lot of horrible hate, but the shit doesn't hit the fan on a grand scale until pedophilia rises to the top of the scum.

So why?

The Puritanical argument for sexual taboo is too easy to make. Sex, no matter what, requires a circumvention of vanity and modesty, that it always encapsulates a certain degree of humiliation. Don't get me wrong -- sex is a lot of fun, whether it's a long-term relationship or a drunken hook-up. However, sex requires a display of weakness, of poetic nakedness. No wonder Fundamentalists of any sort consider it evil -- it's a power struggle between people, not a power struggle between good and evil, not a power struggle where your spiritual strength is the primary tool. Sex is violent. That Perry Farrell was on to something.

So what better way to torture someone than to put him or her into a sexual situation where they have no power, where the display of weakness cannot be overshadowed by love or joy? In the best sex, everyone wins. In the worst sex, someone loses.

And in Abu Ghraib, everyone loses.

The June issue of Harper's Magazine has a tremendous article by Earl Shorris on the much discussed pied piper of neoconservatives, Leo Strauss.

One of the great services that Strauss and his disciples have performed for the Bush regime has been the provision of a philosophy of the noble lie, the conviction that lies, far from being simply a regrettable necessity of political life, are instead virtuous and noble instruments of wise policy. The idea's provenance could not be more elevated: Plato himself advised his nobles, men with golden souls, to tell noble lies – political fables, much like the specter of Saddam Hussein with a nuclear bomb – to keep the other levels of human society (silver, iron, brass) in their proper places, loyal to the state and willing to do its bidding. Strauss, too, advised the telling of noble lies in the service of the national interest, and he held Plato's view of aristocrats as person so virtuous that such lies would be used only for the good, for keeping order in the state and the world. He defined the modern method of the noble lie in the use of esoteric messages within an exoteric text, telling the truth to the wise while at the same time conveying something quite different to the many.

For Strauss, as for Plato, the virtue of the lie depends on who is doing the lying. If a poor woman lies on her application for welfare benefits, the lie cannot be countenanced. The woman has committed fraud and must be punished. The woman is not noble, therefore the lie cannot be noble. When the leader of the free world says that "free nations do not have weapons of mass destruction," this is but a noble lie, a fable told by the aristocratic president of a country with enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth a desert less welcoming than the surface of the moon.

As we heard last night, this tactic of employing the "noble lie" will continue - come what may. The United States is in Iraq to fight al-Qaida. Those who attack U.S. Forces in Iraq are "enemies of freedom". The lies are so brazen that one cannot help but infer some kind of superior intelligence behind them – a kind of "these aren't the droids you're looking for" power. Conservative commentators are all but winking at each other on camera, as if to say, "we know he didn't really mean that but he couldn't really say what he really meant because the rabble would never be able to comprehend the massiveness of our long-term strategic interests and how those interest are way, way more important than the 'quaint' provisions of the Geneva Convention, the medical bill of a short-order cook, or the price of a gallon of unleaded".

Yeah, I wish I had what it takes to work at Pixar.

Maybe I could work at Ideo. Yeah. Maybe after I get that Master's Degree at IIT. Dreams are expensive.

Sorry, I'm just a little bummed today, is all. Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep. Or maybe it's because the President mispronounced Abu-Ghraib three times last night, further proving that he's (quite possibly) a sociopath incapable of sincere compassion and I can't believe he's the leader of the free world. Or maybe it's because I'm not getting enough vitamins.

Yeah, it's the vitamins.

I can feel my soul physically shifting within my body, like a warm gelatinous blob. I've always struggled between the merits of high and low culture (or perhaps Nobrow), plebian taste (the aesthetics of the "common man") vs. the rarified pleasures of the educated intellect. At one point I actually considered reading In Defense of Elitism. I passed. Now, however, I'm thoroughly convinced that our entire society is hopelessly retarded.

"Shrek 2," the return of America's favorite animated ogre, earned more money on Saturday - an estimated $44.8 million - than any movie has ever earned in a single day.

DreamWorks' animated gold mine also set a five-day box-office record of $125.3 million, just edging past the $124.1 million scored by "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King."

"Shrek 2" became the second movie in history to top $100 million on its first weekend, finishing with an estimated $104.3 million from Friday through yesterday. Only "Spider-Man," at $114.8 million, opened higher.

A good portion of these sales - no doubt - were the result of parents' efforts to stop-up the suck-holes of their crybaby children for 105 minutes. But numbers this awesome can only be achieved when adult human beings make the determination that Shrek 2 is worth attending for their own edification. Now, I know very well that there is nothing easier than launching criticisms at commercially successful 'products'. VH1 has created a whole new genre of entertainment on this principal: the Most Awesomely Bad series, wherein a cavalcade of losers derides the infinitely more successful careers of their betters. It's a sad spectacle. But sadder still is the spectacle of people watching that shit and finding it entertaining. Shrek is shit. It's a shitty, shitty, shitty franchise. It's not lowbrow. It's not "targeted for a certain demographic". It's not "family friendly". It's one thing and one thing only: SHIT. There's no clever or witty way to put it. Anyone who pays to see it is retarded. It follows that $125.3 million over 5 days is a pretty good indicator that a galactic slice of our population is retarded.

What does Mary Matalin see in that nutjob?

"My macro position," he says, "is that in 2008 there's going to be a significant third-party movement in the United States that's going to combine Naderism and Buchananism. It's going to be native; anti-immigration; antitrade; very, very cool on military intervention; America first."

If a chimera of Nader and Buchanan rears it's head, I'll accept that as a sign of the freaking Apocalypse.

A third party can never make a serious dent in American society without some sort of fundamental change not only in the way we vote but in the way we perceive the world. The US is all about duopolies: God and Satan, black and white, beginning and end, digital cable and dish, and Democrats and Republicans. We don't like shades of gray. Shades of gray denote uncertainty and are the result of wasted lucubration. Commie pinkos! Facist fucks! That the American way.

But maybe Mr. Carville is on to something. We have a President that wants the economy to improve on the top and trickle down, and yet spends so much money even conservatives are complaining. He increases education funding that doesn't seem to fund anything but testing, and not teaching. He wants disadvantaged people to have universal health care, as long as those disadvantaged people live in Iraq. The Bush administration has a serious case of political schizophrenia, making choices that only seem to make sense to them.

So perhaps the duopoly will continue, but the political parties will change their animal icons from elephants and donkeys to griffons and merlions. But fundamental change won't come from a third party. One party moves one way, the other party moves to counter it. And until national, prominent elections employ an instant runoff system, third parties just look stupid to Americans.

However, if George Bush looks like the third party, not adhering to the tenets of Republicans or Democrats, then you have something. I think is is where a lot of the wishful thinking for a Kerry/McCain ticket comes from -- to alienate George Bush not only from Dems but also from the GOP.

Here's my point (and yes, I have one): Think back to middle school when you were learning the states of matter. A liquid is a state of matter that has "definite volume, but it takes the shape of its container with the help of gravity." (source) The liquid of our political system may slosh around, mix up, expand and contract, but the container is always the same. Creating a new container -- that's the hard part, the part that the system is designed to prevent.

Here's the reasoning behind the madness:

We didn't talk about polls," Rep. David Hobson, an Ohio Republican, said after the meeting with Bush. "He believes in what he's doing and he will stay on course for his beliefs, no matter what the political cost is.

Gee. I hope the political cost isn't so high that Americans will be paying for it (with life & limb) for the next 28 generations.

You've heard the song, you've line-danced and head-banged to it, you've partied like a true American and suffered severe "Bud-Butt" in the morning as a result. Still, the power of Toby Keith is as strong as ever it was:

Oh, Justice will be served and the battle will rage.
This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage
You'll be sorry that you messed with the US of A
'Cuz we'll put a boot in your ass
It's the American way.

Well, now that boot is in your ass. Did you think it wouldn't hurt? Hey Keith...thumbs up!

Brian Leiter has done a brilliant job of handing David Brooks his own severed rump.

[Gracias to Yglesias (again) for this one].

Samuel Butler's translation of the first line of Book I of Homer's Iliad is as follows:

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles…

Here's another example of the same line as translated by A.T. Murray:

The wrath sing, goddess, of Peleus' son, Achilles…

Another; this one by Richmond Lattimore:

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus…

Here is the same line in the original Greek:

Menin aeide thea Peleiadeo Achileos Oulomenen,…

"Menin" is the feminine accusative of "menis"; which translated literally is "wrath". Which brings us to the translation of Robert Fagels:

Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,…

While I would prefer "wrath" to "rage", at least Fagels gets the sense right: the first word should be as it was.

Which brings me to the video. I've heard many of the arguments questioning the authenticity of the footage of Nick Berg being murdered: one captor has a gold (verboten!) ring on the wrong hand; Berg is in an orange jumper reminiscent of an American federal detainee; the picutre is jumpy and of an unaccountably poor quality; there should be more blood (!?); etc.

Reader-mail on the suspicious convenience of the video points to more salient political issues:

Right at the very moment when the moral authority upon which rests our invasion and occupation of Iraq is irretrievably capsizing we get:

1. Physical evidence of Al Queda in Iraq. There, you see? This really is the front line in the war on terror. Forget the scandal, we have serious business to attend to here.

2. Evidence that while we may have criminals, the people we're fighting are truly ruthless monsters.

3. Reassurance that no matter what further Abu Ghraib images or videos are released, well, you won't see a beheading for God's sake.

4. Something that bypasses entirely what Bush and Rumsfeld refer to as "the filter" (the media) and instantly, without warning and leaving no traces behind, delivers it's highly emotional and viscerally irrefutable message to the entire world.

5. Evidence that our enemy is growing more sophisticated. In the past Al Queda has handed VHS tapes or audio cassettes to Al Jazeera. Now apparently they have digital video cameras and internet access.

6. Something that is guaranteed to get Abu Ghraib off the front pages all over the world.

You just could not have a more perfectly scripted propaganda piece for the purposes of the Bush administration at a more crucial time. It is what the administration and its apologists continually point to when questioned about Abu Ghraib. Without it they have nothing. In an attempt to give it more force Powell actually chastised the entire arab world for not being more outraged over it.

Lastly, there are those loose ends. The sketchy narrative of US military protection to Iraqi police custody to band of masked terrorists. Berg's family insisting that we're not getting the full story.

I suppose it's natural to look skeptically (or even in outright disbelief) upon such horrors. As some dipshits have been saying,

...how do you wind up in a prison if you're just innocent and didn't do anything? […] I'm going to dispute [the] contention that we had a lot of people in [Abu Ghraib] with just no rap sheets at all, who were just picked up for no reason at all.

Indeed. How could such things happen? The Holocaust. The Trail of Tears. The Rape of Nanking. Paris Hilton. Some monstrosities are so blindingly wretched that their scope can only be comprehended piecemeal.

For me, however, the issue of the authenticity of the video is not nearly as telling as the larger context in which it exists: a cauldron of fear, despair, pain...and wrath. Like in the Iliad, wrath is the genesis of war. President Bush continues to remind us that he will "never forget the horror of September 11". To forget, forgive, or otherwise outgrow the pain of an injustice would lessen our wrath. To continue fighting, one must perpetually feed the spirit with fresh injections of rage. Of course, rage leads to rage. Attacks to counterattacks. Murder to slaughter. When I watched the video of Nick Berg being killed, while I recognized that it may be seen by some as suspicious, it nonetheless filled my eyes with water. Like September 11, it ignited a brisant flash of wrath within me; followed by a lingering residue of sadness. It's the sadness that lasts. What begins with wrath can end only in years of wandering; or maybe just a ceaseless parade of destruction.

The New York Times reveals an interesting election-year-flip-flopping trend by the administration:

Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, announced recently that the administration was awarding $11.7 million in grants to help 30 states plan and provide coverage for people without health insurance. Mr. Bush had proposed ending the program in each of the last three years.

The administration also announced recently that it was providing $11.6 million to the states so they could buy defibrillators to save the lives of heart attack victims. But Mr. Bush had proposed cutting the budget for such devices by 82 percent, to $2 million from $10.9 million.

Whether they involve programs Mr. Bush supported or not, the grant announcements illustrate how the administration blends politics and policy, blurring the distinction between official business and campaign-related activities

[…]

In April, Secretary Thompson announced that the administration was awarding $3.1 million in grants to improve health care in rural areas of Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico and New York. He did not mention that the administration was trying to cut the same rural health program by 72 percent, to $11.1 million next year, from $39.6 million.

Mr. Thompson likewise recently boasted that the administration was awarding $16 million to 11 universities to train blacks and Hispanic Americans as doctors, dentists and pharmacists. But at the same time, the administration was urging Congress to abolish the program, on the ground that "private and corporate entities" could pay for training.

Now, if we assume for a moment that the White House is not inhabited by a pack of incontinent weasels, some rather startling inferences can be drawn from all this apparent duplicity. Maybe they think that their actual policies would never be whole-heartedly endorsed by the public; which would indicate either an arrogant, undemocratic meat-fisting of our social contract, or leadership. It can be hard to discern the difference. Maybe they're getting their messages mixed up because they're not talking to one another. Too busy fisting fighting truck-drivers terrorists perhaps?

The New York Times has changed it by now, but Wonkette caught what I can only believe is an excellent Freudian slip.

Moment of silence for Tony Randall and my boss' mother.

Eric Alterman, in criticizing a fellow blogger, has inadvertently stumbled upon a perfect metaphor to describe our hapless President:

…like a college sophomore who discovered Ripple and Sun Tzu an hour ago.

Apropos of nothing: Did your face get that way in the war?

So what!? Hey, some non-heroic (gasp!) troops did some crummy things to the Iraqasaurs. Whoop-dee-do. So we’re losing credibility. Whoop-dee-do. What in the name of holy hell is anybody going to do about it? Answer: NOTHING! Why? Because they CAN’T DO SHIT! We rule. We’ve got the bigger guns, we’ve got more money, we’ve got Hollywood and apple frickin’ pie. How did we get all these world-crushing assets? FREEDOM! Let’s call a spade a spade folks [bangs on table], any discussion amongst ourselves at this point is one thing and one thing only: ENTERTAINMENT! I listened to some dude wax eloquent the other day about putting up “Defeat Bush” posters and organizing community meetings. What a dork. He lives in Chicago. Illinois will vote for Kerry, regardless of what he (or anyone) does. And even if Illinois didn’t, even if Kerry lost the whole country and Bush continued to do whatever the hell he wanted – we’d still rule. Think of world politics as the NFL. Our team is on the 40 yard line, at 2nd and 14 in the middle of the third quarter. It’s cold. The ball is wet. Our middle linebacker has a slimy cut over his left eye. Our quarterback can’t spell “bicycle”. The stadium is packed. It’s all very exciting. Wait! Look at the scoreboard: we’re winning 247 to 3! Gosh, I wonder what’ll happen if we fumble.

UPDATE: I'm all out of wine. You fly I'll buy.

You can lead a pig to shit, but you can't make him him roll around in it:

President Bush's request for $25 billion more to fight the war in Iraq has started moving through Congress, where it is running into bipartisan criticism from members who say the proposal is a blank check they are unwilling to endorse.

Bush's proposal […] calls for creating a "contingent emergency reserve fund'' to help pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and giving the Defense Department almost total leeway in deciding how to spend the money.

As I sit here in Chicago, sweating profusely as a result of a hideous caffeine bender, it sure does seem like our strapping young nation has slipped from its moorings. I miss the old right wing. They're just not funny anymore. Their rants about morality, militarism, and the evil temptations that dwell in the inside of an intern's mouth (so warm!) were a delight to refute. Now, the poor bastards just look lost, clueless…disconnected. My indignation has been transmogrified into pity and sadness. One gets the impression that somewhere, buried deep in the soul of the GOP, there is a genuine desire to fix the things that have gone horribly wrong, but no matter how hard they try, they can't help it – they just keep fucking up.

My second link courtesy of Slashdot today.

A4 Paper Format / International Standard Paper Sizes. Now it's no big deal that two pieces of A4 make an A3. After all, in our we-hate-Europe-but-we-still-used-English-measurements intransigence, two pieces of letter-sized paper make one tabloid page.

But here's where it gets cool: The ratio of ISO paper proportions is the square root of two. The Square root of two is easier to calculate into a Golden Section, and is therefore more pleasing to the eye because it occurs more frequently in nature.

Yeah, seriously.

Yes, Republicans, a homo-loving terrorist liberal like me has another reason to hate America -- our paper-sizes suck.

My second link courtesy of Slashdot today.

A4 Paper Format / International Standard Paper Sizes. Now it's no big deal that two pieces of A4 make an A3. After all, in our we-hate-Europe-but-we-still-used-English-measurements intransigence, two pieces of letter-sized paper make one tabloid page.

But here's where it gets cool: The ratio of ISO paper proportions is the square root of two. The Square root of two is easier to calculate into a Golden Section, and is therefore more pleasing to the eye because it occurs more frequently in nature.

Yeah, seriously.

Yes, Republicans, a homo-loving terrorist liberal like me has another reason to hate America -- our paper-sizes suck.

I headed out to the midnight showing of Troy last night; not a smart move considering the running time (165 minutes). At the risk of giving away the ending, allow me to report the following: Troy gets sacked. Of course, this will doubtless come as a huge surprise to a vast majority of American viewers. Nevertheless, we can all look forward to a few months of listening to people pepper their discourse with allusions to ancient heroes – for the price of a movie ticket you can now exhibit the indicators of a classical education. Which is cool. Of course, Troy cobbles together (and creates from scratch) a wide variety of Trojan War Stories; there's stuff from the Iliad, the Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid and some fun stuff on Helen's abduction that's inserted to flesh-out the story.

Now, back in college I studied a little acting. One class I took focused exclusively on ancient Greek drama. We worked on Agamemnon, Medea, and of course the Oedipus trilogy. We studied Michael Cacoyannis' 1977 masterpiece, Iphigenia. We groveled; we screamed; we tore at our clothing and cursed the Gods – wildly idiotic behavior, even for a bunch of hung-over college kids. A lesson I learned during that time is that one of the difficulties of staging Greek tragedy is that the emotions involved are often so extreme and their expression so vehement that contemporary audiences often don’t know what to make of it all; nor, sometimes, do the actors. The makers of Troy have largely solved this problem by not including many large emotional speeches, and by hiring exceptional actors (Brian Cox, Peter O'Toole) to counterbalance the worthless hacks incapable of providing emotional depth (Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger).

At least Brad Pitt, an actor with genuine talent, admits he is somewhat out of his depth. At a publicity junket he made this comment when asked about Peter O'Toole:

[he is] very eloquent and very powerful, and comes from a training that I haven't had, [one] I don't completely understand.

Still, to give him his due, Pitt does a fine job in the film – even though the screenwriters deprived him of dialogue he could really sink his teeth into.

UPDATE: Looking for great acting? Look no further than Eric!

And it could happen again...:

"We think mass extinctions may be defined by catastrophes like impact and volcanism occurring synchronously in time," Dr Becker said.

"This is what happened 65m years ago at Chicxulub but was largely dismissed by scientists as merely a coincidence. With the discovery of Bedout, I don't think we can call such catastrophes occurring together a coincidence any more."

And to think that the only mass meteor extinction I knew about was the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I guess there was another, more significant one 185 million years earlier. And if the problems I've had with my PowerBook (losing files, dropping it, and bad RAM) are any indication, these things usually happen in threes. Perhaps we're due for one more.

Personally, I wish we'd talk about these sorts of things more, and in venues other than bad movies. Getting struck by a meteor is everyone's problem, from Rummy to Osama to you and me. And the more we talk about meteors that wiped out life 250 million years ago, the less we can possibly talk about God having created the world in six days or Brahma laying a Cosmic Egg or whatever cockamamie shit you can think of. (Hell, even the idea of a Big Bang seems a little crazy to me.) After all, why would God do that, unless he wanted to try again, and that would negate the infallibility of God in the first place.

The less we can talk about God creating the heavens and the earth, the less we can talk about God determining how we have to live our lives. No more land grabbing in the name of Jesus/Jehovah/Allah, no more "evildoers" or "infidels" or "sodomizers." Sure, with no more God, there would be an obvious time of turmoil when we kill off a lot of each other because there's simply no God anymore to stop us, and Hell is other people. I believe, eventually, we'll realize that we have a limited time on this earth before we're buried in it, and perhaps we can work together to enjoy it while we can.

Unfortunately, all that hippie bullshit is simply moot since we have no way to prevent the next meteor/asteroid/comet collision. So I guess I'll see you all in Hell.

And now for something unexpected: a vigorous defense of our Secretary of Defense. Some lefty hippies think he ought to be fired. Well, I think he's done a swell job. Let's not forget that it is his responsibility to oversee battle plans and to keep our country adequately defended. Now, the President ordered him to plunge hundreds of thousands of troops into the cradle of civilization. The President ordered him to invade a country that posed no immediate or discernable threat to the United States; to topple its leadership and decimate its military. The President gave these orders without asking Rummy for his opinion on the matter. It's also important to note that this President misconstrued the lessons of Vietnam; he believed we lost that war because the military wasn't permitted to unleash a great nuclear firestorm of destruction (a/k/a "victory"). He didn't understand that Vietnam was not winnable for political and cultural reasons; he doesn't read thick books on policy. So Rummy was directed to blast the little sand monkeys straight to hell without regard for political considerations (i.e., protests, Sean Penn, the French, prison-related fetishes, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Goggle search for the "Grand Opening of the #1 Vacation Hotspot for International Terrorists", etc.). So Rummy did as he was told. Did Rummy know that Iraq would turn into a cesspit of anti-Americanism in the post-war period? Maybe. But who cares. His job ain't "nation building"; it's make sure that once the enemy falls, he don't get up no more after that. See? Bush thought his job was to delegate, like a good MBA. He thought he was supposed to point to Rummy and say, "win that war"; then take a nap. So that's exactly what he did.

A few days ago a friend expressed the following sentiment via a raging e-mail:

We have allowed this to happen. We are responsible. These people are our elected officials. They represent us. They work for us, as us. We committed those abuses. We permitted and approved that treatment.

I totally agree insofar as we need to be held accountable for our actions (or lack thereof) in the voting booth. On the other hand, inferring this kind of direct association with criminality is exactly what terrorists do when they target civilians of democratic nations. Speaking of which, I can't resist quoting a little Bill O'Reilly at this point:

Remember the people of any country are ultimately responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible for Hitler, the Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should not target civilians but if they don't rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.

Bill Moyers responded thusly:

It would be like punishing the inmates of Auschwitz and Buchenwald with further starvation and humiliation because they did not rise up against their Nazi guards.

So herein is the dilemma that makes this argument concomitantly compelling and revolting. When addressing failures within our own system (i.e. Bush), it serves our interests to invoke a shamed outrage at our inattention in an attempt to galvanize opposition; the same logic when applied externally, however, condemns innocent bystanders to suffer the self-righteous (and sometimes fatal) tantrums of foreign powers. If we can rise up and defeat our dunderheaded leadership, great. If we cannot – and the election in November condemns us to four more years of winter – I prefer to think of myself as not responsible in any way for this administration: they don't reflect the America I know – to steal a phrase.

Hi-ya! I'll let you try my Rumsfeld style.

Contrary to popular wisdom, I don't think Rumsfeld should be fired for the recent Iraqi hostage humiliations. That's simply not enough. The whole administration needs to be fired. Let's not waste our time on Rummy when we should be pointing the finger at the guy who hired him. Oh, and that guy's puppet George Bush.

On another note, when I took a summer workshop in Tai Chi in high school, my buddy Dan and I came up with some of our own stances. My favorite was "Finger Young Monkey." "Buttfuck Tiger" was too crass and not quite as clever.

Yet another reason not to use Windows, and if you have to use Windows, not to use Internet Explorer:

"My wife and I separated for a time because she thought I was looking at porno," said Fred McFarlane, a store owner in Georgia. "We are religious people. She just couldn't be with me after she saw the pictures that were in our computer. I don't blame her. Even now, I know it's real hard for her to understand it was the computer that did it, not me."

My girlfriend is using Firefox now and hasn't had any trouble.

Blogger just updated their service, adding comments and Atom newsfeeds. I'll get this stuff enabled as soon as I can.

Saturday night, I informed a friend of my plans to take a breather from the rigors of school and bow out of the summer quarter. I might actually be able to commit the mental energy to insightful political commentary again.

He looked forward to making plans but qualified that statement with a sad outlook to the summer movie season. "Is there anything you're looking forward to?" he asked rhetorically.

Actually, the summer movie season for me is always a bore. I'm not a fan of blockbusters, as they nearly always suck. Movies like Kill Bill prove that you can have all the action sequences and amazing cinematography and still provide a compelling story. Movies like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hulk prove that even good directors look like amateurs when given a script written by committee and huge effects sequences that have to be amalgamated with insipid filler. Since the disappointment of Howard the Duck, I've never looked forward to the summer movie season.

Okay, I do want to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and The Village. But they'll probably suck, too.

Just so you don't think you're reading a different blog, I blame the terrible glut of poorly conceived but incredibly expensive movies on rich Republicans, all of whom are probably closet pedophiles.

Today, something different: a defense of Fox News. As everyone knows, Fox is possessive and proud of their tag-line, “Fair and Balanced”. Whatever the left might say, they are indeed balanced. Externally. See, they never explicitly say as much (even though their defenders do), but they feel they are balancing out the news delivered by other “elite” media: NBC, CNN, NPR, BBC, etc. Unabashedly conservative, the folks at Fox News are offering a corrective to what they view as leftist flap. I would argue, however, that what they are doing is balancing out the market-driven decision making among the other prominent providers of information. Other networks are clinging to an outdated notion of journalism: impartiality. This is the great experiment of Fox News. It’s not a conservative revolution in news, per se, but rather a revolution in the world of partisan journalism. George Washington strove to avoid a separation of America into a dichotomy of parties; he felt it was essential to provide the American people with a collective identity. Clearly, this was not to be. Fox News is simply a vehicle by which the partisan nature of our political system can extend its character into the conventions of journalism. Channel-surfing these days only highlights this trend. All the major cable (and network) news outfits are airing the developments of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Fox News, on the other hand, is airing pop culture stories, human interest bits regarding American citizens brutalized by South American guerilla movements, Palestinian attacks in the West Bank, anti-“terror” maneuvers in Iraq, frivolous medical lawsuits, etc. See? They’re providing balance. If it weren’t for Fox News, I would never have learned that Alan King had died in a timely fashion [confusing grammar intended].

Rush Limbaugh, never one to disappoint, is in rare form these days. Here's a blurb from his website – one that is proudly bolded and set apart – which emanates a pungent blast of Limbaughstank:

…even if this is legitimate, I do not think that this is representative of my country. But if this is what it takes to beat these people (bangs table) then by God that's what it takes -- and that's what it comes down to, to me (bangs table).

Goddamnit if that doesn't make me want to spread my rump cheeks and stuff an apple pie up my cornhole! America needs more table-banging maniacs like Limbaugh. To borrow from the Ace of Spades, I like to think of Rush as a right-wing Greenpeace... for evil.

What does this war-torn world need more of? You guessed it: smart commentary on the Olsen Twins.

It is an old cliché that is rarely heeded: the artist is the keenest barometer of his culture. Well, maybe I just made it up. But it sounds old, doesn't it? Nevertheless, over the last few days the New York Times has pumped out a remarkably consistent series of Theatre reviews; theme-wise that is. First came a fascinating play about the murder of a child by Bryony Lavery called "Frozen", about which was written this:

An essential theme is how people channel and compartmentalize their most violent and troublesome feelings.

Okay. A little taste of violence and how people deal therewith. Next, Mark Medoff's "Prymate":

…opened last night at the Longacre Theater amid a mild furor caused by casting a black actor as a gorilla who sexually assaults a young blond woman. […] In terms of plot, everything comes down to power, desire and revenge in the most primal way.

Golly. It seems that we're really getting into issues revolving around our baser instincts, eh? Finally, today we get the skinny on Neil LaBute's "The Distance From Here":

This is a work, you should know, that begins with two loutish lads hurling themselves against a railing at the zoo to stir up the chimpanzees within. And it's Mr. LaBute's grim joke that just who the real animals are here is not an easy call.

Hmm...It's a good thing that people don't pay attention to artists – otherwise we'd fall into paroxysms of despair over our collective regression into mere beasts. After all, We The People are more civilized than all that. Aren't we?

As I sit here listening to the Donald Rumsfeld testify, it seems to me that 'ol Rummy is making some pretty salient points regarding the difficulties of handling criminal allegations in such a bizarre and hostile set of circumstances. What really strikes me, however, is the constant assertion – by all parties – that "a majority of our military men and women serve with distinction, honor…" etc. While it makes us all feel warm and gooey and proud to hear such things, nothing could be more irrelevant. Protocols established for the proper behavior of those in authority (civilian and/or military), should reflect the reality that people are not altruistic saints. Trust, while essential, is secondary to codified regulation. Consider the Patriot Act: the problem people like me have with it is not so much that we don't trust John Ashcroft (which we don't), but rather we should not be put in a position wherein trust is our only option. Like Rummy said, there are at any given time thousands of court-martials pending – so why are we so surprised by nasty criminal behavior? An over-reliance on benighted trust.

UPDATE: Reader mail -

Now we can look forward to even more disturbing revelations to come - on video, too! This is so much more fun than the first gulf war. The people that I really feel bad for are the graphics folks at CNN who have to come up with a flying "Prison Sex Torture" logo and a theme song. Poor bastards.

Reader mail:

I don't mean to nit-pick but I just saw your most recent post […] and I have to say perhaps OpinionJournal has a point. After all, if you've seen the pictures you will notice that somebody misspelled "rapist." Surely students at the elite universities can at least spell correctly.

Quite so. While we're on the subject of nit-picky exactitude, I must recommend Lynne Truss's much applauded bestseller: a quick read as well as a polite reminder of the power of being perfect.

Be sure to sign up - DRAFT REGISTRATION: United States Armed Forces.

The latest lefty bugaboo tie-in comes from – big surprise – the WJS's OpinionJournal:

No doubt many people enter the military and successfully overcome troubled lives. But it also occurs to us that increasing the quality of military recruits would probably help avoid future Abu Ghraibs. One constructive step toward that end would be for elite universities to drop antimilitary policies, so that the military would have an easier time signing up the best and brightest young Americans.

Yep. The problems at Abu Ghraid were caused by a lack of quadra-ocular academics in the military. If only more of those fancy-pants intellectual elites were in the army, they'd provide the kind of lofty moral principles that are so obviously absent. Of course, academia is overflowing with useless liberal claptrap: apparently, just what the military needs more of. Here's a simple solution: when you wage a war, make sure it's not complete bullshit. I guarantee that smart people will enlist in droves.

The President's interview with Al Arabiya Television was another dunderheaded monstrosity:

In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse -- more than an allegation in this case, actual abuse, we saw the pictures -- there will be a full investigation and justice will be delivered. We have a presumption of innocent until you're guilty in our system, but the system will be transparent, it will be open and people will see the results.

I can't help but get nitpicky for a moment. To say that the abuse was "actual" because "we saw the pictures" is just plain moronic. Sure, I believe the abuse was actual, but a picture hardly answers in terms of the final verdict. While Bush is no lawyer, I still expect a better understanding of evidentiary theory from him than this. Especially since he follows up this brain-fart with that crack about "presumption of innocence"; I mean...holy shit! Does he even know what's coming out of his mouth? And that comment about how "the system will be transparent" – honestly, can anyone listen to this and not recall Guantanamo Bay? Continuing...

Again, it's very important for people, your listeners, to understand, in our country that when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act -- and we act in a way where leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our Congress asks pointed questions to the leadership. In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this. A dictator wouldn't be saying that the system will be investigated and the world will see the results of the investigation. A dictator wouldn't admit reforms needed to be done.

Gosh, I seem to recall Dan Rather sitting down and asking Saddam Hussein some rather pointed questions. Unless I'm mistaken, dictatorial behavior is characterized by the behavior of the dictator rather than by the behavior of the media. I'm also under the impression that "saying" that the system will be investigated, etc., is rather unrelated to the question of whether or not action is actually taken. But these are minor quibbles. What makes me really giggle is that, while not necessarily a dictator himself, he sure has been rather secretive from time to time himself. ("...reforms needed to be done"? Oh dear me.) And then we get this little beauty:

There are a few people there in Iraq that want to claim credit for any situation on the ground, but the people in Fallujah are tired of foreign fighters and radicals and extremists preventing them from living a normal life.

I guess it just doesn't occur to him that American soldiers qualify as foreign fighters. No matter. Let's look at the bigger picture: what was the through line of Mr. Bush's interview? Apology? An expression of sympathy for the victims? Regret? Nope. Like all good students of language, let's look to the text for the answer:

Secondly, it's important for people to understand that…

Secondly, it's very important for the people of the Middle East to realize that…

Again, it's very important for people, your listeners, to understand,…

And so the people in the Middle East must understand that…

The Iraqi citizens must understand…

…first of all, you've got to understand, sir, that…

Secondly, it's very important for the people of the Middle East to understand that…

Ah! The President is sticking to his strength – telling y'all what you need to know. God knows, there ain't nothing the Iraqis are saying that he "must understand". Right? That's right Mr. President. You can't listen your way to dominance.

UPDATE: Here's something else that the folks in the Middle East need to "understand": "U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey."

From a Q&A session with financial gurus Warren Buffett & Charles Munger:

A 14-year-old from California, Justin Fong, asked what advice Buffett and Munger would give a young person on how to be successful.

"It's better to hang out with people better than you," said Buffett. "Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction."

Added Munger drily, "If this gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group, the hell with 'em."

Is it any wonder why everyone blogs about politics and popular culture? The real issues of economy and power have already been settled by guys like this. I just hope they made it crystal clear to little Justin Fong that his unpopularity will indeed only be 'temporary'; his school chums will learn to love him once he achieves total dominance.

(A nod to evhead for this one.)

Not necessarily reader mail, but mail nonetheless, on the Abu Ghraib prison debacle (slightly edited with links added):

...Stripped Iraqis piled up on the prison floor brought to mind Peter Hansen's (UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs) description of Zaire's coping with the refugee spillover from Rawanda's frenzied Tutsi-butchering: "Probably the most terrible picture had to do with the demonstrations in Goma at the time directed against the refugees. Roadblocks were being set up by the demonstrators, and the most available material to build the roadblocks were the corpses, which were being stacked across the road to hinder traffic." Now there's a concept for an SUV ad - you're American Royalty and you can plow right through urban decay! The main reason we may agonize over the discreet sexualized cruelty of US troops and completely - and I mean completely - look the other way as an entire population is hacked to bloody bits is, of course, because they are us. ... One could even, I daresay, make the case that ridiculing Donald Trump is an expression of nationalism as you make fun of him because you believe he is yours to make fun of. Take some wealthy, arrogant Italian who is firing little people from the luxury of his Roman palace and you may suspect that he's an ass but you certainly can't say so for sure. Yet, as staff Sgt. Ronnie Caballero so ably illustrated over Schwarzenegger's recent visit of the troops when he said, "He's real people, he's not like other politicians making money," nationalism means defining as your own people who really won't give you the time of day, who may only spare enough time to tell you to fuck off. Rather, to have one of their stooges tell you to fuck off. So even if George Bush acts only on behalf of a very small minority that explicitly excludes me, well, that's my Bush! The difference is that patriotic identification with and fixation on the ruling classes is a kind of nationalism + religiosity = idolatry that is a one way street; it doesn't work in reverse. People that live in trailers and poor southern towns who join the military to escape poverty are ours only temporarily and tentatively. We don't know what to do with our war criminals. We may joke in public over Michael Jackson's child-rape, but we're silent about Abu Ghraib. We love the idea of a vestal Jessica Lynch raped by barbarians but won't believe that vestal Lyndee England [sic] would energetically torture defenseless humans. Perhaps Lyndee was just interfering with God's plan for the Iraqi people. Either way, it doesn't jive with the story of America the blessed and America the good and Bush the redeemer of the world, and so out it goes. In short what the episode has taught me is that no matter what happens in the future, Iraq is just a backdrop, Iraqis just props. It is extremely telling that Bush met the torture photos with the self-referential "That's not the way we do things in America." We, like Bush personally, are more interested in our self narrative. .... As far as the war is concerned we have a tremendous tolerance for the suffering of non-Americans. What we care about is winning. If we lose our souls to gain the world, well, that's the price of victory and we will gladly pay it. To triumph is divine.

UPDATE: It's simply unbelievable.

It may have been circulating on the internet for months, but it only becomes a story when the French decide to air it (the cowardly frogs!).

The moral of this story is to back up your computer to removable media often.

Like you really care, but here's what happened:

Saturday night, I'm transferring files from my old computer to my new Powerbook. I simply dropped the old hard drive into a PowerMac, plugged the Powerbook in with a Firewire cable, and dragged the old to the new. It took four hours, and I watched as everything moved over -- four years of design files, 8GB of music, tons of digital photography. Basically, my life. I sat there for four hours watching each file go from one computer to the other, ensuring their safe passage. When it was all over, I look over the Powerbook's file directory, double- and triple-checking that every song was intact, every file was solid, every photo was unblemished.

And it was. I swear to God. Every single file made it to my new hard drive.

Those of you who are running OS X (and you all should), here's a word to the wise: after making huge changes to your hard drive on OS X, like adding 22GB of data in one fell swoop, it's always good practice to repair permissions. I knew this, and I did this. That wasn't the problem.

Sunday morning, my girlfriend asked to see some photos of our cats that I had in iPhoto. Interestingly enough, my photos weren't loading in iPhoto. Huh. I though something might be wrong with iPhoto, so I burned my entire library from my other computer to CDs, copied it all to the Powerbook, and restarted iPhoto. Didn't work. Tried to reinstall iPhoto. Didn't work. Huh. I'll try repairing permissions again.

Meanwhile, that hard drive I copied everything from previously? It was being formatted to go into my girlfriend's PC. Everything was going bye-bye.

The iPhoto thing is confounding me, so I say I guess I'll just go to the Genius Bar. No big deal.

After getting my girlfriend's PC all set up and ready to go, including reinstalling The Sims and every expansion pack, I decide to take a break and head over to my girlfriend's brother's apartment (he lives in the coachhouse behind us) to chill for a bit. Oh, and I'll bring my Powerbook so he can hear this great song by Parts and Labor. I pull up iTunes, and lo and behold, the MP3 is not there.

Holy shit.

So I open up the iTunes music folder. Holy shit, half of my music isn't there.

I open up my documents folder. Holy shit, over half of the work that I've done over the past four years is gone.

And why is my hard drive reporting that I only have 3GB left on a 60GB hard drive? It should only be about half full.

I'm panicking. The whole idea was to get everything on my Powerbook and THEN back it up because the Powerbook had a DVD burner. 5 or 6 DVD-Rs seemed like a better prospect than 30 to 40 CD-Rs. And I watched everything transfer. And I repaired permissions when I was done. What the fuck was going on?

To make matters worse, I had no internet access because I hadn't set up my new wireless router yet, and I couldn't have set it up if I had wanted to because I didn't have a working computer. AHH!

This morning, I told my boss that four years of work, including schoolwork, was on the line, and God bless her, she agreed that it was an emergency.

If there is absolutely any reason for buying an Apple, it's the Genius Bar. Not once did anyone ask me for my ID, my proof of purchase, my "I LUV STEVE JOBS" tattoo, anything. They simply helped me. And for two-and-a-half hours, we poured over my machine, running every sort of diagnostic doohickey we could.

The good news is that there is nothing physically wrong with my Powerbook. The bad news is that I lost most of my files.

What it seems happened was something went slightly wrong during the writing of 22GB of data in one fell swoop. The more I tried to fix it, the worse the problem became, to the point that it became irreparable. So it's pretty much my fault. In the future, copy files in chunks, make sure it's okay, give the file system a chance to catch up, then copy more. I didn't lose everything, but I lost a majority of it, like past schoolwork, large freelance projects, and the website I was designing for myself, which I've been working on for over a year. It's so sad.

Do I still love my Powerbook? Of course I do. Sure, OS X has it's idiosyncrasies, just like any operating system. One of those unfortunate bugs reared its head and bit me in the ass. There's nothing I could have done.

The moral of this story is to back up your computer to removable media often because computers are imperfect machines built by imperfect humans.

Here's the final word on the 2000 presidential election: American IQ!

Also, the hotly anticipated data for 2004 has finally arrived regarding sexual habits in Milwaukee:

Women…had fantasies about having sex with police, firefighters and people in uniform and strangely for an urban setting a number of women wanted to have sex with a cowboy.

Yeah! I knew spending a month's pay on cowboy boots wasn't as stupid as my girlfriend told me it was. You hear that baby!? Chicks dig me. So shove it, cupcake. I'm gonna saddle me up a slice of gutter-trout and open her range up wide – YEE HAW!!

I'm ashamed to be who I am.