Well, if you do, I wrote another story in the same character’s voice. It’s about how much the narrator likes swimming. He likes swimming about as much as he dislikes the Talking Dog.

It’s the PBR logo, but instead of

it says

I’m willing to grant that there are some mixed messages.

NOTE: The word Socialist (capital S) refers to the Socialist party. The word socialist (lower case s) refers to the school of political thought.

There are a lot of reasons to hate FOX*, but the one that has gotten to me more than any other is the whole “Obama is a Socialist” fear mongering they’re doing. A current Google search has more than four and a half million hits for the search terms Obama and Socialist, but the whole thing is fucking absurd. Obama isn’t a Socialist, he’s not even a socialist. He’s a moderate Democrat. I would know, I’m a socialist, and he doesn’t come remotely close to representing my values.

Being a socialist is pretty great. It’s fun to argue with someone and say something like “of course every citizen deserves medical care,” have them counter with “that sounds like socialism,” and be comfortable saying “man, we should BE so lucky.”

See, having the government pay for and/or administer health care is not socialism, any more so than public schools, police and roads. These are public services, services which every person in the country deserves access to. This, to my mind, is the absolute LEAST that a person should be able to expect from their government.

The most immediate response when I out myself as a socialist is that I have something against free enterprise. I find this one amusing, as I’m a huge proponent of free enterprise, it’s part of the reason I agree with socialism. Honestly, I’d be in favor of the complete dissolution of all national corporations. Anything that ought to be on a national scale (internet, phone, railways) should be passed to the national government. Anything that ought to be local (grocery stores, restaurants, farms) will be owned and operated by people who actually live in the area and can see the impact of what they do. This doesn’t mean a product can’t be carried nationally, it just means that rather than a single chain carrying the same products everywhere, each product would be sourced for a specific local clientele. Locations would develop a culture. There wouldn’t be as many obscene benefits available to huge chains, making it far more likely that a startup could become competitive if there is indeed an unsatisfied desire in consumers.

I’m well aware that the scenario above is not traditional socialism, so just to verify, yes, means of production for essential goods like oil and sustenance food farming in the hands of the government. This still leaves local farms to produce foods people actually want under their own agency. Are there problems? Sure, but I can’t help but feel a greater affection for an organization chartered under the notion that its purpose is to serve the public good, rather than to make money from the public regardless of the outcome.

I’m honestly interested in some counter arguments, so if you think I’m full of shit, by all means let me know. A position like this succeeds or fails based it its ability to resolve or adapt to criticism.

*MYSPACE JOKE

Here are some things I have opinions on.

Drinking at Lunch: PRO!

Drinking at lunch is great! You get to come back to work a little tiny bit drunk, but it only lasts for like an hour! I’ll grant that drinking at lunch is a sometimes thing, but I am categorically in favor of it.

The Free Market: CON!

I don’t believe in The Free Market. I don’t mean that I disagree with ideals of Free Market capitalism, I mean I don’t think it is a thing. If the Market is not regulated by an outside force, it will fall into monopolies and oligarchies who will control it from within, generally at the expense of the consumer and bottom rung employees. The Free Market is dumb.

Lady Gaga: PRO!

I want to be clear that I have no interest in her music in any way. I am just happy that if a person has to be famous, it is her. She got famous and immediately said “I know, I’ll dress like a loon, get naked, and staunchly support safe sex and gay rights!” Lady Gaga, KillAllTheWhiteMan supports you in a way that does not involve actually listening to any of your songs.

The internet is the greatest collection of information in history. No library has ever rivaled it, and certainly, none has been faster. Look, check this out:

All I had to do was go to Google and search for “Pictures of Bears.” Do you have any idea how long it would have taken to find a picture of bear cubs doing Karate before the internet?

AWESOME.

It occurs to be that it’s probably pretty weird being the Didn’t Get Famous guy from:

• Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
• That Show Tom Hanks Was on Where He Lived Part Time as a Woman
• Wham

(Note: I’m aware this post comes dangerously close to topical relevance, but I promise, it’s not long before I start talking about things in a really abstract, general way, and there’s a footnote about grammar.)

The discourse on the iPad (aside from a very cogent observation my friend Linguistics Mike about the fact that in certain parts of the country people were already pronouncing iPod as iPad) tend to consist of people who are really angry about the iPad, generally with an undercurrent of “how you could you let me get this excited?”*; people with more of aschadenfreude thing going where they just love watching Apple fail; and people defending the iPad as a matter of course.

I’m ignoring all of this though, because in every conversation I’ve seen people are discussing things on the wrong terms entirely. People complain about all the ways it fails to perform tasks one would expect from a personal computer; or doesn’t have flash like every Windows, Mac or Linux box has for years now (fewer years for Linux**); or that Apple is denying access to the file system at a meaningful level. All of this completely misses the point: The iPad isn’t a computer, it’s an appliance.

Disagree? Let’s go to the tape:

2 a : a piece of equipment for adapting a tool or machine to a special purpose : attachment b : an instrument or device designed for a particular use or function ; specifically : a household or office device (as a stove, fan, or refrigerator) operated by gas or electric current
— Merriam-Webster

Computers up until now have been tools. It’s function has been fluid, and the designers and manufacturers have generally hewn to an open, easily accessed and modified method of use and interaction. It’s worth noting that with both software and hardware this has been less true of Apple than any other group. My guess is that, with the iPhone, Apple finally got the chance to make something they’ve longed for for years. A totally closed hardware, with every application filtered through them, functioning in a walled garden. There is none of the chaos of variety or permutation. An application running on one iPhone 3G is identical in it’s performance to any other, regardless of the other software the user may have installed. There is almost no meaningful access to the actual operating system, but the trade off is that if something works once, it can be reasonably assumed to work in all cases. Talk to any iPhone owner, one of their favorite things will be that things just work.

Now expand this mentality out to another type of device, one where small size can be traded for speed and screen real estate. It makes a lot of sense. The iPad doesn’t do computer things, because it’s not really a computer. It’s an internet appliance, designed to facilitate access to the content and functionality of the internet without the complication of a tool like the normal personal computer.

I can understand some of the frustration. A computer can be utilized*** to perform an incredibly wide variety of tasks in a multitude of ways. The iPhone, iPod Touch, and now iPad can be used to perform a relatively small number of tasks****, very few ways, often only one way.

The big upshot for Apple, is that it turns out the tasks they perform are the tasks most people actually give a shit about. Imagine the average mid 30’s lady on a bus ride to work. Can she check her email? Can she read some news? Can she check Facebook and Twitter? Yes? All of those things? Really easily? Wow, this doesn’t sound like she’d find an appliance like that useless at all.

*Which is hilarious, since Apple’s response to the hype was silence.
**Every computer in my house dual boots Ubuntu. I know from whence I speak.
***Utilize is not the way you write use when you want to sound fancy. It is a different word and means a different thing. Yes, the meaning is similar, and yes, the words kind of sound the same but that doesn’t mean you should default to utilize in an academic context.
****Of course, the specific tasks one can perform are always changing, after all, “There’s an app for that.”

Regions are to scale, but the scale is subjective and semi-arbitrary.

So today is my birthday. It’s ALSO a super cool date in the Roman calendar, as written by people from the US. People who write dates down in a reasonable day-month-year format please read this post on November 11th of this year.

So, today’s date:

Right off the bat, it’s an anagram. Same backwards as forwards. Pretty fun. But it’s so much more.

It’s an ambigram! That’s when an image is the same even when you rotate it 180 degrees.

It’s the same flipped horizontally

and vertically.

It kind of goes without saying, but it’s also the same mirrored at the midpoint horizontally

and vertically.

This post has no real content, and I’m kind of sorry for that, but I’m a big nerd and I think this is neat.

Oh, also, it’s binary for 30.

I really like horrible movies. I own Crossroads and Showgirls, I’ve seen The Room more than once. I’ve been a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since well before I actually had Comedy Central. My friend Mark and I once went to a video store specifically to rent It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive, the final part of a trilogy about mutant, killer babies.

I’m establishing a little background here so that you can understand that I know from awful when I tell you that Vampires Vs. Zombies is the Worst Movie I’ve Ever Seen, and a hot contender for Worst Movie Ever.

I would try to give you a capsule description of the film, but I totally can’t. The plot has so many flashbacks, and nightmares, and waking up from nightmares into another nightmare, but they’re both flashbacks that it’s impossible to tell what was actually happening, what was imagined, and what order they might have happened in. There is no cause and effect. It’s like a really shitty version of Jacob’s Ladder. Add in characters who show up for one scene, do something that makes them seem important, then vanish, or show up several times, do nothing at all, then vanish, and I’m left assuming bit parts were given out to investors in exchange for a scene or two that doesn’t really impact the overall “plot”.

The movie is supposed to be a modern adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu Carmilla, a Lesbian Vampire novel that predates Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. There are several elements of the original story present, but none of them are coherently explained, so to anyone who isn’t expecting a General to show up out of nowhere, they’re just one more shitty broken bit of plot. There is all the lesbian sex, which one would thing would improve things, but it’s so clumsy and awkward that it’s just kind of boring. The zombies don’t seem to have anything to do with the vampire plot, and in fact, mostly come out of nowhere. I’ve got a theory that the producers realized they couldn’t afford many extras, so they put the few they had in zombie make-up, it would explain why every location in the movie was more or less abandoned.

If any of this made the movie sound fun, or sexy, or so bad it might be fun to watch, it’s not. It’s just boring, frustrating and stupid. Mark, the friend who so happily laughed his way through Doomsday with me, got so frustrated after one of the “this character is safe. NO IT’S A DREAM. No, that was a hallucination, they really are safe. NO THEY AREN’T.” sequences that he stood up, flipped off the screen, said “Fuck this.” and left the room until the movie was over.