Ahab Has A Blog.

Ksysguard - the panel applet - would be better if it put current values in the tooltip. It would also be better if it were documented how you get stuff onto there - by opening ksysguard - the app - and dragging "sensors" from the left tree panel thingy. Reordering the sensors on a given display also doesn't seem to work.

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Saw her walking down the street. High heels, odd clothing. Kinda stripy pantsuit thing with big billowy legs and weird, garish pattern on top, wraps around her neck, upper back bare. She started telling me how she was going to volunteer with a vetinarian [maybe because I heard something on TV like "Anyone know where I can finda vetinarian? I'm taking care of my grandmother" with no explanation of what that was supposed to mean]. She claimed the strange clothes was her vetinary uniform. Later she was in the strange multi-bedroom circular plan house - sort of a grungy dormitory with a hallway running around the outside - and she started falling asleep standing up, then falling asleep on me, and I tried to find a place to settle her on the couch next to my sister. Somehow she was paler now. She did not want to be put down.

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Thought later about my lack of natural defenses. Others assert their id, their reptilian brain of aggression and need, without ever being aware of it. Many people who would never admit to aggression are in fact the worst reptiles (story of the 80s, hippies gone yuppies). The question is, do I want to take care of myself by engaging in my reptile brain, or do I want to live in a higher place and let me reptile brain take care of business by itself. In other words, is learning about reptile brain why I'm here?

Saw myself trying to stop thinking about something. Reminded me of once wearing sunglasses watching a tennis match in afternoon sun. I saw in that moment the trick of "letting go". Part of the problem is having enough confidence to see the whole situation, rather than the onrushing brick wall of danger. Then I visualized myself speeding towards a brick wall and stopping inches away from it. Then I visualized myself watching myself do this, then me the watcher watching the watcher, and so on, quickly leafing off into mandelbrot hall of mirrors receding to infinity. And a quick series of other revelations speeding off into self-reflections. Is this my fate? To watch enlightenment, and never to be in it? Where is my brain? Which part is really me?

I know I'm not the reptile. But I'm not sure he's visible and doing his job, either. I don't want the dragon sleeping, but I don't want him shooting fire out my nose, either. So I know about this: why can't I see others having the same struggle? Are my sudden intuitions about the mind of others always blind to what mirrors me?

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Farking Hi-larious. Nothing funnier than watching nerd trolls and regular old under-the-bridge trolls go head to head over whether the MD5 crack constitutes a legitimate defense against a traffic camera, spar over what black men and others do on a typical day (and this being the internet, it's not easy to tell who among the commenters might be), and, let's face it, any conversation that invokes "TCP/IP drinking game" is worth your... uh. Well it's good for... uh, well it's as funny as it is stupid. Or useless. Whatever.

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So... wtf? pastafarianism. I approve, even though I approve of many contrary things. But the weird thing is, I distinctly remember a late friend talking, in the sixth grade, about the virtues of the cult of the flying spaghetti. The crawling sort were also in the mix. So, being a generally hip a-hole - you can't make some casual python reference and expect me to go "duh", or a thousand other things - I have to wonder - what is the origin of the flying spaghetti stuff?

I'd love to credit Ben L&emdash; with the whole deal - I heard about the flying spaghetti deity/deities from him in, oh, 1982 or so. But since he died (RIP) in the early 90s I have to wonder who has been carrying the torch. And who lit it. It's weird.

:wq

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Thu Sep 15 22:19:39 EDT 2005

Government failures at the federal, state and local levels are being widely blamed for the anarchy and loss of life in the early days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29.

"Yet now everybody says government is the answer. It's baffling," said Ronald D. Utt, who studies federal public works spending for the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Baffling indeed. Let's rephrase: "The fire department showed up an hour late and the house burned down. And the now homeless victims think that munincipal services are the answer to their problems. It's baffling!".

Indeed

And outing Plame, whether illegal or not, did harm to our national security.

Why didn't Bush two years ago just ask Karl Rove and a few others in the administration whether they had leaked Plame's identity to Bob Novak and the others? Why doesn't he ask Rove now? Is it because he knows the answer? Or because he doesn't want to have to fire Rove?

As a precaution against such a catastrophe, Bush now says he will fire anyone found to have broken the law by outing an undercover intelligence operative. Previously he had said he would fire anyone who outs an intelligence officer, period.

The coverup, in short, is going well.

All fun is now being removed from playgrounds. But that's not enough; running, too:

"To say `no running' on the playground seems crazy," said Bartleman, who agreed to be interviewed on a recent outing at Everglades. "But your feelings change when you're in a closed-door meeting with lawyers."

Die, don't run. Right. It would no longer seem crazy, it would just seem heartless and evil and a sure sign of the immediate death of society. It would seem much more sensible instead to kill the lawyers first, then if a parent sues over their child, say, breaking an arm from tripping while running, break the parent's arm, too.

My childhood bridged the era of metal "monkey bars" over concrete to the nasty beginnings of crippling our children through kindness - if they don't learn by skinning a knee, they'll learn by getting hit by a train because the signal was broken and they didn't think to look anyway. In our playground, that meant no using the swings, because someone might fall onto a bed of dangerous mulch, and no using the other equipment because it was near the kindergarten and might "distract" a bunch of 5 year olds (how would you be able to tell - seriously?). After school, we could break our necks and no one would care, but during recess (when we actually got it), that left 4-square, dominated by a small, co-ed tribe of total assholes and flaming prigs.

I decided one day that it would be fun instead to catch the leaves falling from a tree. My friend started doing it, and pretty soon it was a big rowdy fun game. The neighborhood toughs would try to push people out of the way just before catching it, but eventually they tried to catch the leaves, too and while we didn't dare push them, we weren't above snatching the leaf just over their outstretched hands. Kids were actually having fun, even kids who didn't usually play together. Of course this was banned. That's right there was a new rule announced: No Catching Leaves. I'm not kidding.

So to all my elementary school teachers, I say: fuck you, you shrill fascists. To all the school district lawyers, I say: an excess of caution can do more harm than good, and you're wasting time on playgrounds while you've got more important things to worry about: schools built on landfills, teachers fucking students, students throwing bricks at people, bullies, bomb scares, teachers' contracts, etc. And to the parents who sue over every playground injury, no matter how accidental or unforseeable, I say: fuck off and die a painful, slow death; you are destroying civilization with your selfish, childish, parasitical behavior.

Every behavior does not need to be controlled, not every accident requires a counter-measure, and not every injury implies a wrong. Grow up, you soulless idiots.

Oblique, Obtuse

We got something like Eno's Oblique Strategies only we call it "Obtuse Tactics". It's kind of a line-for-line homage/parody/ripoff/joke/ha-ha-only-serious. Its output should be visible at the bottom of the page.

It's a Perl script you can download here.

[Update: not on the bottom of the page. Some of it is at the top of pages ending in a slash. That might change, or might not.... Tue May 23 00:53:33 EDT 2006]

have you heard The Double Black Album ? JayZ vs Metallica. it's actually pretty entertaining and very dark. check out bannedmusic.org. that's the hook to me - music that is basically outside The System. even if there is a (largely brit-originated "mashup" culture derived) persistent tendency to mix non-hip-hop with hip-hop, authentically black music with "mainstream" aesthetics (a la fatboy slim or chem bros), well - great. that's always been the game, not since hip hop, not since rock, not even since jazz but since the blues and the first commercial vinyl.

basically, even though it doesn't fit my aesthetics, like hip hop in general it fits my values.

This is a new feature that will appear from time to time: unfortunate real names. E.g. "Fuk Yu", some unfortunate Chinese guy (this one even made it onto Crank Yankers somehow, but we'll leave the tin-foil hat stories for another day).

Today's real name (middle name withheld to protect the innocent little baby): Frank N. Bean.