Entertaining article from The Morning News:

Schadenfreude is a fairly simple word, as far as compound words go. Schaden means “harm,” freude means “joy.” Literally, it’s “harmjoy.” In fact, other languages have similar words: Greek’s epikhairekakia and the Finnish vahingonilo, for example. The feeling of schadenfreude isn’t cultural, though. It’s biological. In January, a study published in the journal Nature even identified the part of the male brain in which the feeling lives. But if anything, the way Americans use the word “schadenfreude” is embarrassingly American, not German.

I like reading etymologies as much as the next language geek, but I have to disagree here. Mr. Feifer's grossly overstating his case. Germans came up with this word for a very good reason: It constitutes about 80% of their humor. Germans, indeed Europeans in general, love watching low-brow, slapstick comedy. Ever wonder what the whole France/Jerry Lewis thing was about? Or Benny Hill's Yakety-Sax segments? There you have it.

A rare comical treat for a German is when somebody busts their ass on the sidewalk. As an example, I was in Atlanta once with a German girl, in the Virginia Highlands area. A lady was jogging by, and caught her foot on a loose flagstone (Atlanta sidewalks are among the worst I've ever seen). She ate dirt in a most unflattering and painful way. The girl I was with suddenly started braying like a choking mule, slapping her knee and pointing. I thought we were going to get sued.

I do think that Americans like it when their enemies or competitors take an embarrassing tumble. But Europeans will laugh at friends, or even complete strangers. In fact, it's pretty much become EU foreign policy at this point.

So, Iran's going to open a Great Satan Park?

Tehran - The former US embassy in Tehran could soon see a new chapter in its troubled history, with a top Iranian commander calling for the downtown compound to be turned into a “Great Satan Park”.

“We would be able to nicely show off the American crimes to citizens strolling in the park,” General Mir-Faisal Bagherzadeh told the official news agency IRNA.

“The former American Den of Spies should become the park of Great Satan,” said the general, who heads the Sacred Defence Foundation - an influential propaganda body set up to commemorate the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Aside from the obvious political overtones, it sounds awesome! I wonder why no one in the U.S. has done this.

So, I took the lovely A-Heldin to see a movie on Monday. Since it was Date Night, and her birthday to boot, I figured we'd go see a chick-flick. Eschewing the standard date fare of Mission Impossible and Hostel, I suggested we go see The Constant Gardener. A-Heldin is also fond of plants, so I thought it was money in the bank.

Despite the name, there's precious little actual gardening in the film. Just a few token bits here and there, but hardly anything that would earn the description "constant". As it turns out, it's a movie with a grave Social Message. I figured that part out when Rachel Weisz broke down crying over Britain's decision to forego U.N. parliamentary procedure vis à vis the Iraq War. This is what we've come to, I sighed. Distilling morality down to whether or not that 15th Security Council resolution got passed to support the preceding 14. A break with bureaucratic procedure actually provided the moral impetus for the film. Yawn. But moonbat chicks are notoriously easy, and 80 frames later Weisz is legs up with Ralph Fiennes in her posh London flat.

The film had as little to do with the Iraq War as it did with gardening. In other words, five minutes into the film, I found myself emotionally alienated from the characters, due to the horribly one-sided presentation of a serious topic which was completely unconnected with the story. Iraq wasn't mentioned again.

Weisz won an Oscar for her role. I don't know if she really acted all that well (the movie was dubbed in German), but I have a sneaking suspicion that her transformation into Tessa was largely responsible for the Academy's decision.

Here she is normally:

And here's how she appeared in the film:

Astounding.

The movie Itself was about mean, ruthless pharmaceutical companies furthering its agenda in Africa by strong-arming the poor and executing dissenters. The rubber stamp-worshipping Tessa (Weisz) falls victim to these heartless and, for the most part, faceless scoundrels. The irony of it all was that she actually wanted to name her kid in the movie "Che". Che Guevara, who ran the torture dens for Castro during the Revolution, is the heroine's inspiration?

The difference between Castro's goon and the pharma boys: Profit motive. What makes people really evil isn't oppression, torture, or murder. That's alright, apparently, as long it's all done in the name of Social Justice. Cutting in line at the U.N. and making a buck while curing diseases, however, is beyond the pale. The morality of good and evil in this film doesn't boil down to the tactics used by the drug companies, since these tactics have been used by Socialist regimes like Castro's for nearly 100 years, with nodding approval from people like Gardener's main characters.

Well well, the little girl is all grown up! Y'all run on over now to Anna's Place and make sure to wish her a happy birthday!

As Apple ramps up its advertising presence with this year's version of the old Switch campaign, the tech press is all over the Mac's perceived "security problems":

Among its key findings, which McAfee clearly hopes will scare you enough to consider buying its anti-virus software for the Mac:

From 2003 to 2005, the annual rate of vulnerability discovery on on Apple's Mac OS platform has increased by 228% compared to Microsoft’s products which only saw a 73% increase.
As demonstrated by its March 2006 patch, which corrected 20 vulnerabilities, Apple’s Mac OS platform is just as vulnerable to targeted malware attacks as
other operating systems
Security researchers and hackers will increasingly target the Mac OS and other Apple products, such as iTunes and iPods.

I think everybody agrees that the Macintosh is in no way "immune" to viruses; it's a great example of a straw man argument, fighting claims of immunity that have never been made. Macs can definitely get viruses, just like any computer. But they don't.

The big mistake with the current anti-Mac blitz isn't just that it's factually inaccurate; it's that contesting Apple's (valid) claims of a more secure computing experience only draws attention to Windows' depressing track record of hideous vulnerabilities. It's an arena in which the Windows crowd is doomed to defeat.

McAfee, an antivirus vendor, is making an ass out of itself. They should know better than to compare an operating system with no known malware to one that's so insecure, an entire industry (which, coincidentally, includes McAfee itself) has grown around getting people to pay extra to patch the holes in an already expensive operating system.

If McAfee wants to get Mac people to buy their software, they need to stop spreading FUD, and make a spreadsheet! At least that would fill an actual need on the platform.

BTW, Ellen Feiss, the infamous "stoned Switcher", has a fan-site.

From skippystalin.

Seasoned skippystalinists will note that this may well be the first post he's ever written that doesn't mention genital masturbation. Moral masturbation, yes, but not genital.

Of the many crimes against the human mind committed by John Lennon, only "Imagine" surpasses his marriage to Yoko Ono. If the idyll envisioned by that song became reality, life would become unlivably irritating. For example, "Imagine no possession." Let's explore that for a minute. Let's say you're at a barbecue, and you cook yourself an awesome hamburger. Juicy, sizzling, a little red in the middle, with lettuce, onions, mayo, ketchup, and a big fat slice of greasy cheddar on it. And a pickle, if that's your thing. You sit down to eat your hamburger, but then somebody comes over and eats it before you do. He burned his, maybe, but he saw yours was awesome, so he came over and took it. You have no hamburger, and you can't really beat up the guy who took your hamburger, because, well, there's no concept of possession anyway. All you know is, you don't have a hamburger. Or maybe, since the concept of possession doesn't exist, you can't even understand the whys and hows of there is no burger. You're completely dumbfounded at this point, not to mention hungry. But, since there's also "no country", you can't even go out to eat Mexican food. Like I said, irritating.

Oddly, I never considered "Imagine" to be a political song. I never even realized it had lyrics until I was in my mid-twenties. I'd only ever heard it because my mom was a hippie, and was devastated by Lennon's murder. She was so distressed, in fact, that for years afterward she was obliged to buy every low-quality reprint of every droningly unoriginal album he'd made after the Beatles' split-up. If you've never heard his last album, "Double Fantasy", do yourself a favor and give it a listen. It makes his death a lot easier to accept. After hearing the Yoko Ono songs on that record, it's not hard to "Imagine" Lennon slipping Mark David Chapman a fifty after he shot him, along with a relieved smile and "Thank God for Devastators" lapel pin.

I remember consciously making a decision, when I was a little Rubeling, to reject political music. The idea came to me as I first watched the video, "The Lebanon", by the Human League. I loved "Don't you want me baby?", it being 80s trash, much like myself. Likewise, the toe-tapping "Fascination" was on everybody's Walkman back in the day. So, I was all pepped up to see a new song, and I thought, naively as it turns out, that "The Lebanon" might be a new dance sensation, in the tradition of the "Safety Dance," though divergent on certain obvious points, namely the "Safety" part. So, you can imagine my distaste when I realized that "The Lebanon" was actually referring to what we Americans call "Lebanon", eschewing the definite article commonly used by people in The England. Since the song came out in the Reagan Regime, I was somewhat reluctant to feel any kind of sympathy for people who'd just blown up 300 marines who were there to help keep the peace. Further exacerbating my confusion, the formerly Spandau Ballet-style gender bending Human League had degenerated into dirty, dirty hippies in between singles.

Hatred of political music kept me off a lot of short lists, of course. Billy Bragg was right out, although his rascally use of Soviet imagery probably would've gotten me laid more in college. And just try whipping out your copy of Atlas Shrugged during the obligatory anti-dollar tirade at a hip-hop show. In fact, the only even remotely political band I've ever enjoyed seeing was Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, at The Masquerade in Atlanta. Seeing Jimmy Carter's face plastered all over his home city with the words "Unstoppable Sex Machine" on his forehead will take up a lot of slack as far as The Rube's concerned.

Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.

According to my table here, which in contrast to most of my blog is actually somewhat supported by factual material, the available operating hours for a shop in Germany run about 50%. In other words, of 168 hours in a week, you're allowed to be open for 84. That isn't much time to earn money, and it effectively halves the number people you can employ.

After doing minimal research today, in respect to this particular table, I felt restricted, somehow. We live here in a culture that, for some inscrutable reason, denies its folk the freedom to open their stores when they want to, or to shop when and where they want. This is probably because said shopping is, at best, a distasteful, capitalistic pastime, a danse macabre done to the music of the cash register bell and the cracking whip of the cigar-smoking, leering industrialist with the curiously bent nose. The one who, also for reasons unknown, still wears a towering stovepipe hat. As an American, that sounds like paradise, of course, but the more socially concerned Europeans see it differently. To each their own.

Tonight, on German state-run television, there was a documentary on the north-German city of Bremerhaven, which is apparently in some difficulty, of late. There were the usual whiners and beggers which, honestly, one sees enough of just walking down the street. The documentarists drumming up sympathy for the poor, starving Sozialempfänger (welfare recipients) of this down-and-out city, hit on many themes. Most of their points were rather unnuanced, centering on young men with large families, living in a city with no future, trying to get by on a mere 300€ or so in the bank. A good documentarist would have asked, "So, how are you going to provide for your family?" But these are not the kind of artists who want to change the world by making people think. These kind want to change the world by making people feel. The human heart is a remarkable creation*, but it's nothing compared to the human mind. This dipshit probably gets 1000 to 2000 Euros a month shoved up his ass, and has nothing better to do than go down to the unemployment office once a week to see if some bureaucrat, himself incapable of finding honest work, has gotten around to filling out the correct form 1088B-25/33234 so that maybe this weak sap can get a job interview. All that, you understand, in a city that even the doe-eyed mayor declared devoid of prospects. The question shouldn't be, "What can Deutschland do to ease his suffering". It should be, "Why doesn't this asshole do more to provide for his family?" At some point, it actually came out that the dude had 15,000€ in cell-phone bills to pay, on top of being unemployable. I worked this out, in an admittedly drunken fashion, to somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 beers a night for 13 years. Just for perspective, you understand.

Shops are the osmosis point of modern civilization. Money, which is pure, abstracted power, is exchanged between the classes, without the barriers of class or prejudice. You'll be just as likely to buy that shoe from a rich salesman as a poor one, a Turk or German, it doesn't matter. Your money goes back into the system, and taxes are paid; the salesman makes money for being in the store to greet you, and gets maybe even a commission on the sale; the shop owner makes his money by way of markup, and keeps the shop open, closing the circle. Everybody's happy. But restricting the hours that a shop can be open restricts the amount that everyone can be happy, doesn't it? And that's supposed to be a good thing?

Following the debate about shop opening times, you'll see a remarkable set of loyalties come to light. Speeches by politicians who dare breach the subject seek to find a middle point between the Church, which believes in Sundays being holy and therefore commercially not viable I guess, and the big trade unions, who would shit in the soup of the last person with a job, all the while asking for his money, you know, for a new tie or perhaps a papier-machier head of Dale Carnegie or something. That the German politicians are beholden to such scum is, of course, common knowledge. In the States, it's Halliburton and Diebold, so fair is fair. Having your entire media controlled by the Bundestag does have its benefits. Not only is every TV owned in Germany worth 18€ to the ruling party, all that money goes to finance the perpetuation of the hopeless, powerless, and, worst of all, shameless dependency of the German people on the government's looting abilities.

The disgusting merchants of human suffering over at verdi.de, who, by the way, run the corrupt unions in Germany, have an article on shop closings that has to be read to be believed. (English translation here).

I give it about 5 years.

* - Or evolved, if that's your thing

The iPod is now 5 years old, and in that time has become a cultural icon, something that everyone knows. As an ambassador for the world of Apple, it's performed admirably. People have gotten used to Apple's leadership role as a hardware company, and also as a design house, largely due to the styling of the little white brick that everyone loves.

Take a look at this picture from the unveiling of the iPod in 2001.

The styles haven't really changed much. The first-generation iPod's screen and finish is no different from my own fourth-generation model, and The Steve himself was a little chubbier, and a little less grey, but looks pretty much the same as our current third-generation model. But let's pull the camera back a little bit.

What the..? What's up with the presentation? Is that an overhead projector off to the left? And what's that...font? Do I detect the lighthearted whimsiness of Comic Sans, perhaps? Is this whole presentation running on fucking PowerPoint?

I believe the next slide was that picture of the duck crushing his computer with a hammer.

What I'd never noticed about that picture (which, along with Comic Sans MS, has appeared in at least 65% of all PowerPoint-built presentations since its introduction in 1995), is that he's about to crush a somewhat microcephalic Macintosh II.

When you take this presentation, which incidentally also looks like it was shot in somebody's unfinished basement with the sound of Mexicans pounding up dry-wall heard faintly in the distance, and compare it to the elegant flashiness of the modern "One more thing..." era, you can see what a cultural impact something as simple as a presentation package can have on a community.

In reference to my earlier post, which involved things that are illegal here in Bavaria, I present the legally-available opening times for shops in various countries around Europe.

* - Some exceptions are allowed, such as for regional festivals like Oktoberfest

** - Some exceptions are available for the self-employed

Reference: Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung

I do believe I now make the best biscuits on the European continent. I'll be happy to try out other people's biscuits if they are of a different opinion. Except French people, as they probably roll theirs in frog snot and otter-noses before baking.

Not have health insurance
Dance on Easter
Move house without notifying the government
Own a television or computer without notifiying the government
Keep a store open on Sunday, or after 8PM

Right, I have a blog. Almost forgot. Hmmm...well, what's going on? How bout them wacky Mexicans, eh?

We're getting into the Easter groove here at the YouBitch winter retreat. And to prove it, here's an army of undead rabbits.

I'm feelin' it.

See that name and address right there? That's there's a comment spammer. Go get 'em.

Intel, not normally known for being the bleeding-heart type of corporation, is taking one for the team so that people who live in mud huts can surf porn instead of digging wells.

What is it with people that they think that Kazaa and Hand-cranked laptops are going to alleviate suffering in the 3rd world?

UPDATE: And man, is that picture behind them creepy. It reminds me of those Soul Cube tableaux in Doom 3, where the ghosts of the ancient civilization that once inhabited Mars are fleeing the demon hordes, locking their essence into the one weapon that could defeat them in the far future, the Soul Cube. Except this time, they're locking themselves into a large pumpkin, and, instead of demons, they're fleeing Amazon Women on the Moon director John Landis.

It's system update time again, and that means it's time for a reboot:

So much for the uptime. And this is a laptop. I shudder to think what kind of ups I'd be ruining if this were, say, a Mini.

I was just sitting here, whiling away the dog end of a day gone by, watching a nice little documentary about the 1970s cultural scene. For anyone born between the years 1955 and 1965 who might be reading this, I have a quick question for you: WHAT THE FUCK? I mean, what the fucking fuck were you fucking thinking in the 70s? Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me refresh your memory:

Now, I was born in 1970, and really had no choice in the matter. I had my wide-pants and my Huffy Thunder Road like everybody else, but I wasn't out disco-dancing and playing limbo and joining cults and shit. What the fuck was up with you guys? You even let Roger Moore play James Bond!? Man, that's some shit.

I'm suddenly disgusted with you nuts.

At the moment, I'm hard at work transforming a 15-pound paperweight into a healthy, productive workstation. It's a Sony VAIO PCG-F190 laptop, with a big, fat "Made for Windows 98" sticker on it. Unfortunately, it's completely incapable of running that operating system, at least if the requisite accessories are running, like firewalls and antivirii.

So now, I've got 6 GB of disk space, 640KB of low memory and, God help us, another 63MB of XMS/LIM-EMS distinction to deal with. It'll be interesting to see if my suppositions are correct, namely that modern computing environments destroy productivity through user-attention overloading.

Basic Setup
Getting the computer up and running was easier than I thought it would be. DOS installation was breeze, as awas Windows for Workgroups 3.11, fine piece of sofware that it is. The only problem I had was getting the PCMCIA network card going. The card itself wasn't the problem, per se. The problem was getting the PCMCIA subsystem going. Card Services under DOS is handled by software from SystemSoft, which incidentally forbids redistribution and doesn't offer it themselves. Fuck 'em, that's why God made restore CDs from other manufacturers. My real-mode memory management chops were also a little rusty, seeing as I couldn't get all the hardware drivers loaded along with DOSKEY, MSCDEX, and the rest loaded without sacrificing 50K of low memory

So, let's take a look at the tools I've assembled for the job, out of the distant past, are up to the task.

DOS 6.22
The Cadillac of real-mode operating systems. It contains as much cruft as will actually fit into 640KB of memory, plus or minus a few UMBs. With DOS 6, Microsoft also introduced their very first overtly user-hostile application: MEMMAKER. It was a utility that purportedly harvested unused blocks of upper memory, meaning those bytes between 640K and 1MB, for use by memory-resident programs and drivers. What it actually did was assign addresses in use by network cards and SCSI adapters to SMARTDRV, the disk-cache program, to use as scratch-paper. Hilarity ensued.

WordPerfect 5.1
Now we're talking pro-duct-ivity, buddy. You can crank out more pages per hour when you can only get 80 characters on a line, you know. And I always thought that kerning was for pussies.

Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus is a gimme. It was the standard that defined what "standard" came to mean in the computer industry: A soulless monopoly that crushes innovation, while fixing prices to the point where buying a software title that amounted to a modern TableView widget for $495.00 actually seemed reasonable. Choice only entered the conversation when deciding whether to pay 500 smackers for the agile 2.2 version, or 500 clams for the flashy 16-vibrant-color VGA-goodness, not to mention ginormous 156MB memory addressing capability of version 3. At UPS, we couldn't believe our embarrassment of riches, and installed both on all machines.

I've been trying out Release 2.2 for a day or so now. It's a great product, lean and mean, but keeps giving me EMM386 errors. I'll have to see what I can do about that. It also tends to take a dump when I view a graph in VGA mode. That's probably the cheesy NeoMagic graphic chip in the VAIO. I'll set it to CGA and see what happens.

PageMaker
Believe it or not, my first real job was typesetting business cards at a small printing shop in Norcross, Georgia. My workplace consisted of a 20-lb. Kaypro laptop running Windows 2.0, with PageMaker 2.0 (still made by Aldus back then, not Adobe).

(Picture thanks to this awesome site, that also has a picture of Arthur C. Clarke using the exact same computer: Rube have geek boner!)

I did my designs on the 9-inch screen, then I'd ship the PageMaker files to our service bureau, which was all Mac and actually had a laser printer, over a 2400 baud modem. Let me just reiterate my gratitude at this point for the fines folk at Procomm for including ZMODEM in the Test-Drive version of their software. Transfer-resume was an absolute necessity for files over 100K.

Games
Of course, nobody can be productive without a nice set of games to play. At the moment, I've got (all from original disks, no less):
Syndicate
Warcraft 1
F-19 Stealth Fighter

That's it. I've got Civilization, Mechwarrior 2, and a few others, but I won't install them until I've found the original disks. Trying to be legal here.

What I'm really looking forward to trying out are the programs that I didn't get a chance to hit back in the day. So, if anybody's got a copy of Lotus Improv or dBase III or IV, let me know, and I'll try to integrate into my new workplace. And I'll let you know how it went, as soon as I find a 16-bit email program that supports IMAP.

I'm humbled as a blogger when I read absolutely devastating shit like this, from some Microsoft employees. Absolutely scathing critique of their own company, which means they'll be disposed of in pieces in Ballmer's trash over the next few weeks. The delay by Micros~1 to get Vista out the door seems to have had a perturbing effect among its employees.

Vista may be wheezing into its final development stages, but Xgl is working now. I got it running on my Ubuntu box over the weekend, and lemme tell ya, them thar's some eye-candy. Nicely done, guys, now let's see if you can make Linux do something useful.

Click for full size. IF YOU DARE!!1

There's another one. I'll only say 3 things: It belongs to my girlfriend, it smells like rum and almonds, and you can see what it looks like after it's been eaten on for an hour in the extended entry.

I swear to God, "CBT" used to stand for "Computer-Based Training". Google can be such a minefield these days.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I was on the road all day, trying to bring home the bacon, so that the lovely lady and I can live in the luxurious lifestyle we've become accustomed to. I walked into my apartment, and knew immediately that all was not well. The smell of another man's aftershave greeted me at the door.

I looked with suspicion behind the doors, with uncertainty around the shower curtain, and with some difficulty under the bed (no mean feat, that: it's a futon). What greeted me in the kitchen destroyed my faith in humanity. The reality I feared came crashing down upon me like a truckload of cinder blocks.

They ate the PIE! All my goddam PIE is gone! What sort of rapacious fucking Huns ravaged my kitchen and ATE ALL MY FUCKING PIE! Ok, maybe it's time for a little context here. Last night, I made a Georgia Peach Pie for me and my lovely lady. And THEY FUCKING ATE THE PIE! I was really looking forward to eating some pie when I came home. But now, I guess I'll have to go sit in a bar, drink hard liquor, and listen to sad songs about life, longing, and the loss of beloved pastries.

UPDATE:

frank say:

It’s quarter to three,
There’s no one in the place ’cept you and me
So set ’em’ up joe
I got a little story I think you oughtta know

We’re drinking my friend
To the end of a brief episode
So make it one for my [Georgia Peach Pie]
And one more for the road

I've got a new favorite podcast, Philosophy Talk. It's a radio show out of Stanford University, as far as I know, and it's basically a bunch of professional philosophers, wastrels all, sitting around talking about thinking about stuff. It sounds like a good gig, and the highbrow-ness of the whole operation makes me feel better about my general intellectual decay.

This last weekend, they were discussing the morality of charity in general, and foreign aid in particular. Now, these are your typical college boys. The discussion they led in this particular episode was pretty rarified, and abstracted to the point that it was just a question of, is it right to give money to starving savages in distant lands, so they can build a well or something. They also had a professor of bioethics, Peter Singer, who was arguing the one-world, it takes a village, kumbaya side of things. I got the distinct impression that he didn't really like people, most of his arguments being that the U.S. destroys the world, so it's citizens need to give til it hurts so that other people can stay as primitive as possible while dragging Americans down into the swamp with them.

I detected a distinctly dour tone to Mr. Singer, a mixture of White Guilt and pie-eyed transnationalism. Of course, a moment's googling unearthed this interview at The Nation, where he is described as

author of The President of Good and Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush... A leader in the animal rights movement, Singer advocates the moral equality of humans and animals. His previous books, including Animal Liberation and Practical Ethics, have been translated into fifteen languages, earning him critics around the world. He has also written about the permissibility of euthanasia and infanticide.

Wow, what a dickhead. And what a ridiculous goober to have on a show about the morality of charity. And what an absolute cocksucker to employ as a professor of bioethics! And just what the hell is bioethics about, anyway? Ethics is not a biological function, it's an intellectual function. Didn't this dude go to Sunday school?

Anyways, the guys talked about whether or not we're our brothers' keepers, and about whether or not it's an ethical obligation of Americans to help these people, etc. But I just had that feeling that the conversation wasn't about the morality of anybody, or the ethical obligations of anything. As this discussion always is, it was about politics. Nobody's trying to convince anyone that they should do more, morally and ethically speaking. They're trying to force people to do it through the government's use of tax money. They brought out the old, tired statistics about how the U.S. proportionally gives less money in foreign aid than any other country. I don't believe even that much, but there's also the factor of private contributions, where you'll surely find that the U.S. is a world leader in throwing money out the window by way of lining the pockets of NGO ne'er-do-wells. But that's obvious and not really worth belaboring.

They should have a discussion on the ethics of legislating morality. It would start out well, with everyone agreeing that morality is a series of personal choices. Then, ask whether or not the practicing of charity with other people's money through force of law is moral or immoral. The answer to that question will be good for a few paragraphs of bullshitting. Suspecting that an intellectual is bullshitting is usually a pretty safe bet. You know when an intellectual is bullshitting when his answers are longer than two sentences.