Dead Cant Rant

From Boston.com. Click each to see them full-size.

Whoa.

A huge tornado funnel cloud touches down in Orchard, Iowa, Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at 9:04 p.m. The Globe Gazette and Mitchell County Press News reported that Lori Mehmen of Orchard, took the photo from outside her front door. Mehmen said the funnel cloud came near the ground and then went back up into the clouds. Besides tree and crop damage, no human injuries were reported. (AP Photo/Lori Mehmen)

This complaint pretty much describes our experiences at our local Wendy’s. It’s eerie how similar the attitude is. In fact we wonder if they shuttle the same few employees around the country. Twice in the past few months we’ve witnessed fights between customers and the staff, once with the police being called. I can absolutely believe the “don’t get an attitude” comment. We saw almost the same thing said when one of the employees got into a fight with a pregnant woman.

I am not making this up.

Interesting. Last month I stumbled across Mark’s post at Tempus Fugit and was stunned: somebody else in the world sees the calendar in a specific shape. And not just somebody, but a lot of people. I have spent my entire life visualizing numbers, days of the week, and calendar years in odd shapes and I just thought there was something wrong with me. Turns out I was right all along!

From the Wikipedia entry on synesthesia, here’s an example of how a person affected with number form synesthesia (as I am) may visualize numbers:

This makes math a pain in the ass…

Apatow puts together a brilliant send-up of the recent epic biopics of famous musicians Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. After laughing your ass off in every scene and at every song, watch the making-of extras on the DVD and you’ll really see how deep this movie was. As the man said, they had to force themselves to stop because they were making a 3 1/2 hour long Dewey of Arabia.

I was pleasantly surprised because I was disgusted by the previews I’ve seen for other Apatow films such as Harold and Kumar and Knocked Up. We watched Superbad which was pretty “bad” (not as funny as Napoleon Dynamite but a million times more vulgar, and the only decent character was of course McLovin) but this one knocks it clean out of the park.

Do not let your kids anywhere near this movie. Other than that…

Verdict: Best damn epic music biopic parody with the best soundtrack. Ever.

Watch the trailer

Did Jeff Peckman really videotape an alien outside his bedroom?

Or was it… Cthulhu??

Cthulhu ftaghn!

Too. Freaking. Funny. Honoring Our Fallen Nazis

My favorite:

Soldaten Klaus Pissenbottle
Sekritluftwaffetruppen

Klaus was able to leap from the truck and avoid instantaneous death by machine gun. Unfortunately, before he could bring his machine pistol to bear on the crazy American woman he was cut down in cold blood. He left behind a stout wife and nine eerily identical blond children.

Runner up: Sekritairplane Kapitan Dunken Der Doughnuts, but no cool close-up death shot

I meant to put this up last week. Thursday before last the San Antonio Express-News published an anti-school voucher letter that accused the Texas legislators as a bloc of conspiring to undermine the public school system and scheming to run schools “like a business” because “they only care about profits”. No effort was made to explain how legislators would profit from providing vouchers to inner-city children.

His letter reflects the dearly-held belief by many on the Left that their position is automatically inherently moral, and therefore all opposition is not merely wrong on policy grounds but is inherently immoral and even evil in nature. This explains the seething hatred of the right by many on the left.

My response to the letter directly challenged the author’s world view. The paper published it a few days later.

Opponents, not enemies

In Thursday’s letter “Funding a joke,” Tyler Smurr attacks the Texas Legislature for daring to support school vouchers.

But instead of attacking them on the merits of their proposal, he instead resorts to the cheap shot, writing, “They don’t care about the children of this state.”

In Smurr’s distorted view of the cosmos, there is only one possible right answer — his — and all others by necessity cannot reflect an honest disagreement over real issues (in this case, perceived social benefit versus personal freedom of choice) but instead must reflect the inherent evil of his opponent.

Such self-aggrandizing rhetoric is certainly entertaining but serves no purpose other than to make the author feel good about himself, facts be damned.

I have no doubt he has the best interests of the children at heart. I just wish he would get over his own infantile ego and extend the same courtesy to the opposing view.

More information on vouchers:

American schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model. A school voucher of $3,000 per student per year would give more families the option of sending their children to non-government schools. However, many people believe that such a small amount could not possibly cover tuition at a private school; they may be thinking of such costly schools as Dalton, Andover, and Exeter and concluding that all private schools cost in excess of $10,000 a year.

In fact, Education Department figures show that the average private elementary school tuition in America is less than $2,500. The average tuition for all private schools, elementary and secondary, is $3,116, or less than half of the cost per pupil in the average public school, $6,857. A survey of private schools in Indianapolis, Jersey City, San Francisco, and Atlanta shows that there are many options available to families with $3,000 to spend on a child’s education. Even more options would no doubt appear if all parents were armed with $3,000 vouchers.

Source: What Would A School Voucher Buy? The Real Cost Of Private Schools (Cato Institute)

“Education used to be the poor child’s ticket out of the slums. Now it’s part of the system that traps people in the underclass.”

Source: Baltimore’s Mayor in a speech to the Manhattan Institute

Whoa.

Link: sevenload.com

This is one of the sloppiest-written books I have ever had the misfortune of wasting precious time to read. I had hoped to be entertained as it is a Cussler book — I mean, this is THE Clive Cussler we’re talking about. However, as this was the first Cussler book I’ve read, I can only hope it was written by the co-author using Cussler’s universe and characters, otherwise (a) Cussler is a very bad writer, and (b) the fans who can’t wait to get more are apparently very simple minded and easy to entertain.

The plot twists and the science are both very interesting, but the character development is almost non-existent; all of the NUMA agents have the same “daredevil” attitude, and all the villains are of the megalomaniacal bent. Completely unrealistic. (although I recently read a study that claimed virtually all of the “heroes” in popular fiction are sociopaths — this novel could be that study’s Exhibit A) The writing is stilted and the transitions jarring, and dialogue between characters will go on for a page or more without any context causing you to lose track of who is speaking to whom.

Besides, if you find out about a plot that will effectively annihilate the world, wouldn’t you at some point talk to, oh I don’t know, the President? Maybe get some additional help from the NSA, CIA, military, FBI, and other governments as well? Wouldn’t these folks be priority 1 targets? Wouldn’t there be better ways to deal with stopping this than staging BS visits to try and “talk” the bad guys out of going forward with their plans to destroy the planet? Wouldn’t there be something better to do than to visit a Civil War re-enactment to track down the head of the agency so you can brief him hours before the event is supposed to happen? Shouldn’t you have done that earlier? Especially when the re-enactment scene exists solely to demonstrate the author’s “superior” knowledge of Manassas and the historical relevance of steamer race cars. Who cares?

I mean, really, this is just an incredibly bad book. The only thing worse than reading it would have been actually reading it to the end. What a ridiculous waste of life energy. It should be a crime to be suckered into reading a book like this. I’m thinking class-action lawsuit for undue suffering and mental anguish.