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by George Ziemann
January 3, 2007 ~~ On New Years' Day, my 10-year-old,
Mackenzie, brought me a Britney Spears CD that she had received
as a gift two or three years ago (I certainly wouldn't have bought
it). She said, "I don't want this any more. What should
I do with it?"
"Well, you can't throw
it away," I said. "You have to keep it as a permanent
reminder of how bad your musical taste was when your age only
had one digit."
"I really don't want to
ever listen to it again." Hmm. She must have heard something
through the pre-teen grapevine along the lines of "Do you
know what she did!?!?" followed by a unanimous, "Eeeeewwwww!!"
"Just put it in the bad
taste drawer there, right next to Metallica and KISS."
~~ Week of Death -- The last week
was pretty grim. Gerald Ford, James Brown and Saddam Hussein
all ceased their mortal existence, dominating all news coverage
and briefly distorting reality.
Gerald Ford -- If he hadn't died, I would never
have known that he "healed a divided nation." He pardoned
Nixon, who we pretty unanimously agreed was just as guilty as
the rest of his cronies that spent time in prison. I also remember
Ford nailing at least one spectator while playing golf. And falling
down. Or maybe that was Chevy Chase.
Saddam Hussein -- Let's see if I remember the entire
plot. Some Al Quaida (sp?) guys floew planes into the World Trade
Center, which cased them to fall down, killing about 3,000 people.
In retaliation, we went to Afghanistan, chased Osama away, then
attacked Iraq, which was not involved in the WTC thing, and over
threw the government in about a week. We captured the flag, won
the game. Then we began an occupation, which has now cost us
more lives than we lost on 9/11, and about a half million Iraqis
have been wiped out. We still can't find Osama, but Saddam was
hanged. If that whole story had been a movie script, it would
have been rejected because it doesn't make any damn sense.
James Brown -- When the Godfather of Soul passed,
some of us wanted to wait a couple of days before accepting it
as fact. As I watched Al Sharpton closing the casket, I wouldn't
have been overly surprised if James had jumped back up to sing
the chorus one more time.
~~ As the media trumpets the grand predictions
that God delivered directly to Pat Robertson, it is important
to remember that last year, God told Pat that America would get
hit by a tsunami because we're all bad, bad people and that Dover
would suffer a separate disaster for sticking with evolution
in science classes. Didn't happen. Hmmm. What could this mean?
- Possibility 1 -- God was wrong.
- Possibility 2 -- The voice in Pat Robertson's head
is not God.
January 4 ~~ Is it just my imagination or did the
cows in the Colorado snowstorm get emergency food faster than
any could be delivered to New Orleans after Katrina?
January 5 ~~ Virgin
Digital has given up, offering its current subscribers a
free mp3 player and three months subscription to Napster. By
"mp3 player" they mean "not an iPod."
January 15 ~~ In
a recent survey of college students on U.S. civic literacy,
more than 81 percent knew that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
was expressing hope for "racial justice and brotherhood"
in his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. Most of the
rest surveyed thought King was advocating the abolition of slavery.
January 22 ~~ Been off commenting over at Boycott-RIAA
recently, which has been using up all of my blog-worthy material.
I'm noticing that I've really become incredibly cynical of absolutely
everything. Like possibly well-intentioned
IT guys, "the
world's biggest record label" (that appeared out of
nowhere yesterday), the
Universal exec who is apparently unaware of his
CEO's mindset, capped off by the tale
of woe from DJ Drama, which seems nothing more than a pre-release
publicity stunt because DJ Drama already
signed with Atlantic (last paragraph at the link).
January 23 ~~ The
BBC already has excepts from tonight's State of the Union
address, wherein The Decider "will warn that failure in
Iraq would be 'grievous'" and then try to talk about something
else -- like using less gasoline. Why should we use less oil?
For the environment? Hell no. We need to use less oil because
we started a religious war where all the oil is. If you plan
to watch, make sure you know the official
rules for this year's speech.
Later the same evening -- Watched the speech. Is it just
me or did he dodge the question? Did Bush ever say what the state
of the union is? I don't think so. But he did finally notice
Darfur, which means he'll be out of office for two years before
he remembers about New Orleans.
January 26 ~~ At midnight tonight, the telegraph
will cease to exist.
~~ Brain
damage will make you stop smoking -- "Scientists studying stroke patients
are reporting that an injury to a specific part of the brain,
near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit,
effectively erasing the most stubborn of addictions. People with
the injury who stopped smoking found that their bodies, as one
man put it, 'forgot the urge to smoke.'"
The specific part of the brain
is called the insula. "The insula has widely distributed
connections, both in the thinking cortex above, and down below
in subcortical areas, like the brain stem, that maintain heart
rate, blood pressure and body temperature, the body's primal
survival systems."
"There's a whole neural
circuit critical to maintaining addiction, but if you knock out
this one area, it appears to wipe out the behavior."
I'll bet it does. I can hardly
wait until my next doctor appointment.
"This might sting a little
and you'll feel some pressure near the ear..."
~~ IQ tests for fat people -- If you're so fat you need some
kind of medical procedure to correct the problem, someone now
wants to insist you have to pass an IQ test first. If you're
fat and stupid, well, tough luck, pal. You're not worth
saving, apparently.
Still no IQ testing required
to become president. And fat is okay if you only want to be vice
president.
~~ Ghost
Brides -- No, it's
not about the lives of women married to CIA agents.
January 27 ~~ Black
people remembering that
they started rock and roll.
January 28 ~~ RIAA has named the University of South
Carolina as the top
college for piracy. I'm thinking this would have been worth
a Grammy nomination had it been announced earlier.
~~ What Were They Thinking? Over
at Slashdot, they're talking about how Google Maps has started
blurring out "sensitive map information" (or maybe
they just noticed it). Isn't that kind of like giving out the
whereabouts of every sensitive location? The terrorists won't
figure out to look for the blurs on the map as potential targets?
We should be blurring out non-sensitive locations as well. Especially
things we wish someone would just go ahead and blow up anyhow.
January 29 ~~ A
guy at Fox News has revealed the big "surprise"
for this year's Grammy show, making it even less of a surprise
than last year's well-advertised secret.
~~ Science now recognizes dwarves
and hobbits, still no word on elves.
~~ Microsoft officially releases the consumer version
of Vista tomorrow, making today's news that their new "Protected
Media Path" DRM has already been broken even that much
more amusing.
January 30 ~~ All they are saying, is give
the surge a chance. Sounds like a copyright infringement
to me, unless it turns out to be satire or a parody.
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