[From Baby needs a new pair of shoes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

Trent say:

My god sits in the back of the limousine
My god comes in a wrapper of cellophane
My god pouts on the cover of the magazine
My god's a shallow little bitch trying to make the scene

I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype
I listened to everyone now i know that everyone was right
I'll be there for you as long as it works for me
I play a game
It's called insincerity

Starfuckers
Starfuckers
Starfuckers, inc.
Starfuckers

I am every fucking thing and just a little more
I sold my soul but don't you dare call me a whore
And when i suck you off not a drop will go to waste
It's really not so bad you know once you get past the taste, yeah
(asskisser)

Starfuckers
Starfuckers
Starfuckers, inc.
Starfuckers

All our pain
How did we ever get by without you?
You're so vain
I bet you think this song is about you
Don't you?
Don't you?
Don't you?
Don't you?

Now i belong i'm one of the chosen ones
Now i belong i'm one of the beautiful ones

Who's not going to smoke? You telling me?

This chick kicks ass.

People of Australia: do not fear the Donut. Accept the donut.

Now for a bit of the ol' Tasmanian Tie-Dye:

And don't blink now, it's the Eye o' Perth:

According to Aussie state-run media:

It has since posted a disclaimer above the national loop feed putting the images down to "occasional interference to the radar data".

"The Bureau is currently investigating ways to reduce these interferences," the disclaimer said.

Worship the Donut!

I had no doubt whatsoever that the Democrats' (and by extension, the US media's) insistence on the character assassination would backfire:

How is it that the media's approach has changed so dramatically in just the past couple of weeks? Perhaps the Democrats simply went too far when they claimed that tea-party protesters had shouted racial slurs at black congressmen during the ObamaCare weekend.

[From Strange New Respect - WSJ.com]

I really couldn't figure out what they were trying to accomplish there. The vote was going, it was decided before the name-calling began. Public opinion obviously had no meaning once they started filing into the Capitol (and probably not before that, either).

There was no way that they could think that making shit up about the 3rd-party opposition, which the Tea Parties represent, could raise public opinion by 30 points in time for the bill signing. Was there?

The blogger in me isn't dead, it's just sleeping. A few years ago, I was what the Old Economy referred to as a Producer. Nowadays, what with the Twitter and the Facebook, it seems that everybody has become a micro-producer, and a macro-consumer.

But this kind of economy is obviously nonsense. In a situation where the consumption so completely outpaces the production, it follows (in my little analysis) that quality of what we consume decreases rapidly.

People used to jab at bloggers, saying that it wasn't worth reading because, hey, who cares what your cat is doing? But think about the endless fluff that rolls by on your Twitter feed. The Facebook statuses, while interesting to me because I know the producers, carries little actual value with them. They just make you feel good.

If I compare what my connections are doing in the social networky present to what the people on the blogroll used to put out in a day of energetic blogging, well, let's just say the world has taken a turn for the stupid.

What accounts for the discrepancy in production and consumption? Could it be that somewhere the machines are running, thumping underground, lulling us Eloi toward the dinner bell? Don't come crying to me when your Twitter roll cold-cocks you and you wake up with your feet tied and an apple stuffed in your mouth.

Not me, man, I'm gonna hip-check that witch into the oven, just like Hans showed us. I'm mixing shit up, but you know what I'm about.

Source: US Department of Energy

As a matter of fact, I do see this as the endgame of Obamacare:

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

[From North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets - NYTimes.com]

Man oh man, these politicians have gotten my blood all angried up. I mean, how can you socialize health care with a 50.3% majority? Doesn't something like that at least deserve some consensus?

But this is what I'm talking about. This kind of shit keeps me up nights. And I've already got socialized medicine! So why in the world would it bother me?

And so, to get away from it all, I decided to go into the office today and knock out some backlog. A rare warm and sunny Sunday, which started out with the classic Sunday Roast in an English countryside pub, ended as weekdays do: with me pissed off in the office, wondering how the hell it all got away from me.

Obviously, Rube needs a hobby. Something to direct all this anger into. So, here are a few ideas, just off the top of my head:

• Bowling
  Bowling is...fun. But I can't say as I've ever really caught the fever, so to speak. I think it's the fact that most people who hang around in bowling alleys are scum.
• Pool hustling
  You get a better class of ne'er-do-well in pool halls than you do in bowling alleys. I'll even accept the fact that you can't smoke inside anymore. Nevertheless, this one's out. I used to think I was good at pool, until I got my ass handed to me steadily by that no-account shark, Eric . The limiter for me here is the lack of raw talent.
  
• Juggling
  Juggling is one of those things I can do but can't explain why. I'm not a good juggler, mind you, but I can keep three going for a few rounds. I guess I could try to become an expert juggler, but probably lack the requisite dexterity, and I most certainly I lack the dedication. The payoff here is minimal.
• Stupid cigarette tricks (advanced)
  I can do the following tricks already: the quick-snap; the single-loop toss-and-catch; the single smoke-ring. All of these I can hit with about a 60% success rate. It's a fine hobby, I guess, except for the fact that it will fucking KILL me. So that's out.
• Blogging
  Now we're talking. Maybe I should take up blogging again?
  

This creepy-ass little robot crossed with an Aibo would just about weird the shit out of anybody.

Pro tip: If you really want to feel your skin crawl, watch that video with Bauhaus's "Bela Lugosi's Dead" playing in the background.

Maybe my grasp on the American political system is shakier than I thought, or this is a press release reprinted as news:

Senate Democrats are holding a news conference Thursday on a jobs bill without an actual jobs bill, an apparent sign that the Massachusetts Senate vote that is bringing Scott Brown to Washington is still reverberating through the U.S. Capitol.

[From FOXNews.com - Democrats Close to Vote on Jobs Package Without Bill in Hand]

And FoxNews, as the No Agenda boys have been theorizing for a year now, looks just a little bit more like a straw-man mouthpiece for the Democrats.

When I was a boy, if you were planning on going into politics, you generally got everything you needed to know from Schoolhouse Rock's "I'm just a Bill". It was simple, really, you're just a bill waiting on Capitol Hill, as it were. There were no votes unless something was being voted upon, and there was no law until the painstaking process, which made sense (at least in cartoon form), was completed. This is what keeps frivolous whims from becoming the law of the land.

I'm trolling, of course, because this article is nothing more than a press release from the Democratic party saying "Hey, dudes, we're still here and we're like in Congress and we're gonna vote on stuff", which I thought everyone kind of assumed. It's just a way to be a bit more relevant, to get some headlines. There's some juice in being in Washington, so you might as well use it.

It's all about hookers and blow with these people.

You may have noticed that this place is getting a little more attention lately. There was some sort of mess, a realignment of stars it seems, that caused the code in my Django site to start behaving differently. Mind you, the code wasn't changed: There were no updates to the site; the server was not touched; it just started working differently, in a fit of spontaneity unbecoming of a piece of software.

Looking at your old site also means taking inventory, making sure the infrastructure you built in a fever to support it is still running along greased grooves. But looking through my Olde Internet Propertyes is a bit like going through my mom's attic.

Apparently, back when I started doing this thing in '01, it was quite fashionable to go through the dictionary, slapping .com or .org on any word with more than 1 syllable, and paying someone to watch over that portmanteau for you for about a decade while you decided what to do with it. This was no longer the dot-com gold-rush, but its echoes could yet be heard throughout the Blogging Revolution.

The Twitter Shitter era that we live in now has effectively cancelled that noise, though. The domain name's cachet is not what it used to be, and festooning one's self head-to-toe with dozens of them, year-in and year-out offers less and less return. Therefore, it's time to clean some house and shorten some lists.

Interestingly, none of these myriad domain names were ever registered out of a desire to make money, or display my activism – with the possible exception of freemarkchapman.org, a site which I sadly never got off the ground. The injustice continues, at least for anyone who ever bought Double Fantasy. They were, more often than not, the product of a night of hard drinking and a brilliant flash of creativity, invariably but a wisp of a memory in the harsh light of morning/noon.

So I will let them expire, and check up on them a year from now to see what kind of Spamtastic domain parkers have taken up residence. I'm setting an iCal alarm as we speak.

Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.

So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.

Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?

One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?

Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.

The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.

Which is why I have to giggle at this page.

How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.

In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.

The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.

The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.

But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.

Document image cribbed from here.

The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.

There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).

What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.

So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.

Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?

• what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
• and Home Sharing?
• Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
• Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
• Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?

I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.

But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.

I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.

Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.

This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.

Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...