Pollywogs!

You know what a fairy tale is? Since I’m not sitting across from you talking at the moment, I put my emphasis on the word ‘is’ in the previous sentence…

Pan’s Labyrinth is an amazingly crafted, amazingly executed fairy tale. I don’t mean to demean the words fairy tale in any sense…I highly recommend it to anyone (well, it can be brutally violent, so it would be a judgement call as to whether to allow a tot to see it)…it really tugged at my heart strings…

I used StumbleUpon today and found a mildly amusing screw-around site called Language is a Virus.

It had an automatic poetry generator which I found quite disturbing for the feeling of both resonance and schizophrenia:

Weird and damp under the dream

Totally desirous beside the grave
You poke black visions about the sky
Be wary! The devil has vanished
All glowing against the ground
You enjoy dark symbols on the grave
I reach! The pleasure never ends
Weird and damp under the dream
We stone transparent bones near the ground
Be wary! The passion is born
clouded tired
a long way from home
something missing
Out of whose dream
a stranger
turn aside
where he knew no-one

Here is another one:

Strange and yellow over the flowers

Totally damp near the mist
You dispel bright tentacles below the land
Tighten up your wig! The devil has fled
Sinful and heavy within the gods
You summon vaporous rubes beyond the flock
Be watchful. The bitch is gone
Strange and yellow over the flowers
We prod angry idiots on the virgin
Beware! The day will come
darkening unseeing
across the water
a sense of danger
In whose heart
my likeness
forget to go home
never knowing how

I ran one which required some user direction:

How the earth is i shall let the wind

In the head like a kick, lull them asleep: black velvety jacket;
the river murmurs, does he sink;
of blue waters! the rushes lean over her wide!

Contained in the vast ether, slips amorously.
- with a cloak of ignorance, down the long black river.
The wolves howl back whence does he come.
- from violet forests: where the stars are sleeping.

How the earth is, i shall let the wind
into the deep ocean and the horizon rushes
tremble at the tones, unfathomable space;

Into the ferocious tide rips, i have seen maelstroms eternal,
of the sea star-infused and entranced in pallid flotsam
trembled to feel, down into abysses

by GaS & Arthur Rimbaud

 

I’m fascinated by language as art, and yet a barren field myself…

Regular Nabisco Saltines have high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Why does it need those ingredients? Even their Multi Grain has partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.

Zesta Whole Wheat (while only having a small proportion of whole wheat) does use regular corn syrup and soybean oil.

And the taste?  In soup, I don’t notice any difference at all.  With peanut butter and saltines (one of my favorite foods of all time), it is certainly different but not at all disagreeable.  Maybe a hair less sugary, but no less enjoyable.

A million small choices equal a gigantic change.

Who cares about one dollar. Do you care about a million dollars?

Granted, Saltines have basically no nutritional value (think beer), but if you’re going to eat one that contributes in a small way to the inevitable breakdown of your body or one that contains less destructive, toxic ingredients…you’re right, it is better to just skip those unnecessary calories altogether…

Cutting back on the grocery budget.  Kelley and I average about $70 a week on groceries, so at $35 a person isn’t too bad.  I’m interested in how much others spend per person per week.  How about ‘including eating out, minus alcohol’.

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Czech men and women consume the most beer.  Men average about 100 ounces a week, with very few heavy drinkers.  And a medical survey says:

“If this is so, then beer intake should be associated with some general measure of obesity, such as body mass index or with indices of fat distribution such as waist to hip ratio or with both.”

But they said: “The association between beer and obesity if it exists is probably weak.”

A study published earlier this year suggested some people are genetically predisposed to develop beer bellies.

Teh win…

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Sounds good on paper, ‘in the field’ so to speak, not so much:

The FDA found “reasonable assurance” the device was safe, and a sub-agency even called it one of 2005’s top “innovative technologies.”

But neither the company nor the regulators publicly mentioned this: A series of veterinary and toxicology studies, dating to the mid-1990s, stated that chip implants had “induced” malignant tumors in some lab mice and rats.

If the FDA says it is safe, it simply does not mean a thing.  Well, it means that some large corporation strong-armed the government once again…

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Insanity.  Simple, pure insanity.

Given the overwhelming display of force deployed by Arpaio’s deputies, one would have expected the arrest of a mass murderer.

Instead, the crack SWAT boys nabbed 26-year-old Eric Kush. Let me tell you, Kush is really a bad, bad guy.

He was wanted on a misdemeanor warrant for failing to appear in Tempe Municipal Court on a couple of traffic citations.

Oh, and they also burned a house down, smashed a car,  shot up the neigbhorhood, and killed a puppy!  All in a day’s work when you’re part of a SWAT team and you’ve got some unfocused rage to vent.  Hey, I’m a fucking cop, out of my way bitches!   I’m off to shoot someone and break some things!

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What a whiny, rich cocksucker:

Proposed a month before Sept. 11, 2001, Cape Wind remains in limbo. It’s been frustrated at every turn by a handful of yachtsmen, Kennedy included, who don’t want to see windmills from their verandas. Many millions have been spent spreading disinformation and smearing the wind farm’s supporters.

The towers would be at least five miles out and barely visible from shore on the clearest day, but the summer plutocrats resent any intrusion on their waterfront vistas — and, equally, any challenge to the notion that they control everything.

“But don’t you realize — that’s where I sail!” may stand as Kennedy’s most self-incriminating quote.

Aww, those poor rich bitches.  Not in my back yard.  Waa waa waa…

I’m rich, don’t you realize?  Not just rich, but fucking rich!  I can do what I want!

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Apparently, salt tenderizes steak.   Not a little salt, but apparently PAINTED with salt for two or three hours, then rinsed and patted dry.  Apparently the salt is pulled inside the tissue and breaks down the protein?

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This is neat: a reverse anthropological expedition into London by Vanatu natives!  Perspective, ahh what a refreshing breeze you are…

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Giuliani, an asshole’s asshole:

 ’Basking in the lasting glow of his Sept. 11 leadership while campaigning in Pinellas County and Orlando on Friday, Giuliani stressed national security and electability, rather than the sort of hot-button social issues that are thought to be critical to winning the Republican nomination.

For me every day is an anniversary of Sept. 11,” Giuliani said’

Oh, wait…he knew the buildings were going to collapse but only told a handful of people, only cared about body recovery until the Bank of Nova Scotia gold and silver assets were recovered (the firefighters are pretty pissed about all of those bodies ending up in the dump for some reason), made piles of tactical crisis management mistakes (but said all the right things (smile for the camera!)).  Giuliani is a failure!

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I’ve been reading a pile of neat books, and am continually struck by interesting quotes I wish I could share.  So, I’m going to share a couple passages from the old medium, the printed word:

From the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s ‘Freethought Today’ newsletter, and excellent article titled ‘The Jesus Myth’:

‘One of the problems faced by Christian scholars is that there is no record of Jesus’ existence in any contemporary sources…Educated theologians know this perfectly well, yet they maintain the pretense of apostolic authorship and keep the truth hidden from lay congregants.

The synoptic gospels now accepted into the canon are only a small remnant of perhaps hundreds of proto-Christian gospels extant during the first few centuries B.C.E and C.E.,…as reference works, the New Testament writings are hardly more reliable than fairy tales.

 …

For a possible hint of Jesus’ historicity, Christian authorities relied heavily on a single brief paragraph in the works of the respected Jewish historian Flavious Josephus, who was born in 37C.E…if anyone was in a position to report the wonder-workings of a local holy man…it was Josephus.  Yet in all his voluminous works, the single paragraph (regarding Jesus) says only that Jesus ‘(insert typical bible propaganda here)’…The problems with this famous passage are many.  First of all, it is noticeably out of context with the surrounding material.  Second, it did not appear in the early copies of Josephus’ works,nor in the second-century version…(it only appears in) the fourth century, and is first quoted by Bishop Eusebius, the enthusiastic advocate of what he called ‘holy lying’ for the greater glory of the church, known to have been responsible for many interpolations, revisions and blatant forgeries.’

 Further reading of Jesus, born of Mithra, Adonis, Dionysus, and so on and so on…especially Dionysus, fuck he was Jesus’ twin…oh wait, that shit happened like 400 years before Jesus…good thing they didn’t have Google back then or those bitches would have been caught plagiarizing like a mofo…

A minor selection from ‘The End of Faith’, by Sam Harris:

“And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful.  Public executions were more popular than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, fornicators were murdered without a qualm.  The basic lesson to be drawn from all this was summed up nicely by Will Durant: “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”

There really seems to be very little to perplex us here.  Burning people who are destined to burn for all time seems like a small price to pay to protect the people you love from the same fate.  Clearly, the common law marriage between reason and faith -wherein otherwise reasonable men and women can be motivated by the content of unreasonable beliefs- places society upon a slippery slope, with confusion and hypocrisy at its heights, and the torments of the inquisitor waiting below”

So many years, and still the same bullshit from fundamentalists year after year.  The more I read this book, the less I care for the idea of freedom of religion.  I’d rather have ‘freedom from religion’.  You can do all the religion you like in your home, but keep it away from me.  And you better fucking not drag me out of my house in the middle of the night and burn me on a stake either, you fucker…

Witches are made of wood, they float in water and they burn…

Speaking of witches, a selection from ‘Drawing Down the Moon’, by Margot Adler:

“In my fifteen years of contact with these groups I was never asked to believe in anything.  I was told a few dogmas by people who hadn’t ridded themselves of the tendency to dogmatize, but I rejected those.  In the next chapters you will encounter priests and priestesses who say that they are philosophical agnostic and that this has never inhibited their participation or leadership of Neo-Pagan and Craft groups.  Others will tell you that the gods and goddesses are “ethereal beings”.  Still others have called them symbols, powers, archetypes, or “something deep and strong within the self to be contacted,” or even “something akin to the force of poetry and art.”  As one scholar has noted, it is a religion “of atmosphere instead of faith; a cosmos , in a word, constructed by the imagination…”

 

 Finally, from ‘The Truth’, by Al Franken:

 So, to Tom DeLay, the Schiavo case wasn’t so much about Terri Schiavo as about Tom DeLay.  And he was determined to make the most of it.  Where other Republicans confined themselves to vague generalities about the possibility that Terri was aware of her surroundings, DeLay felt no compunctions about making a case that was both laughably and tragically false on its face.  The St. Petersburg Times, reporting on March 21 on DeLay’s leadership in the Schiavo matter, quoted his argument for reinserting the feeding tube:

She talks and she laughs and she expresses likes and discomforts.  It won’t take a miracle to help Terri Schiavo.  It will only take the medical care and therapy that patients require.

In other words, given proper treatment, there was no reason Terri Schiavo couldn’t live out her lifelong dream of being a Rockette.

Wise man, that Tom DeLay.  Did I say wise?  I meant RETARDED COCK-SMOKING ASSCLOWN CUNT.

Hello again…

Related: abusing children’s toys…

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http://admin.wildflowerfarm.com…

Here is an idea: grass that grows very slow, has very deep roots and only ever makes it to about four inches tall. What would I call that? FUCKING GENIUS!

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This is temporarily crashed, but once it is back online it is a canidate calculator. I found I was most aligened with that Gravel dude, but I already suspected that. Reading over the ‘issues’ makes me fucking sick to my stomach, to think of the weak-minded and easily led sheeple that allow themselves to be whipped into a mindless orgasm of fear and terror. Well, I guess if it worked in Germany, no reason it shouldn’t work here too, eh?

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Just some quick little tips to reduce your footprint. Conservation really is key until people stop throwing everything away and realize that finite is a fact of life…

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Laser Espionage Microphone (how-to) - video powered by Metacafe

Found at : http://www.geeksaresexy.net…

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Sacrifice a goat to ‘fix’ a jetliner?

I do believe you, sir, are fucked in the head!

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No end in sight…

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Are you inured yet of the injustice and inequity, the absurdity and outrage? Or are you one of the few who actually care?

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Oh baby Jesus how I love the world so! Actually, let me rephrase that: Oh baby Jesus how I love all of these incompetant assclown fucktards so! Oh, and they have the authority to throw me in jail? Praise baby Jesus!

“The program presented shows ample evidence of incomplete design, incomplete verification of design, and incomplete “white box” and “black box” testing. Therefore the software has to be considered unreliable and untested, and in several cases it does not meet stated requirements. The planning and documentation of the design is haphazard. Sections of the original code and modified code show evidence of using an experimental approach to coding, or use what is best described as the “trial and error” method. Several sections are marked as “temporary, for now”. Other sections were added to existing modules or inserted in a code stream, leading to a patchwork design and coding style…”

Great…this shithead hack is the one sending me to jail, eh?

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Drive your car to death, save a pile of cash. An excellent idea! I gotta find a keeper…

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I swear to god, the first time I am harassed at the airport is going to be the last fucking time. If someone hauls me off to some fucking Spanish Inquisition style dungeon, I am going to rip their nuts off with my bare hands right before they shoot me in the head.

‘Wolf traces the “watch list” back to a 2003 directive from Bush to his intelligence agencies to identify people “thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts.” After the list was given to the airlines, CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes got a copy. The list was 540 pages long and there were 75,000 names on it of people to be taken aside for extra screening.

The more stringent “no fly” list has 45,000 names on it, Wolf reports. Prior to 9/11, the list had just 16 names, but 44,984 suspects were quickly manufactured to justify the creation of the vast airport security apparatus at God knows what cost to American taxpayers.’

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Nice, friendly and interesting. Or as I like to call it, riding the fine line between amusing and asshole…actually, this is a very good article, containing some basics which seem to be too easily forgotten. File this one away for future reference!

Related: More flash and less content, but still worth contemplating for a few moments.

Additionally related: Honesty. The fact that the human race is NOT like this, does that mean we are all gibbering, slobbering, ravingly insane? It seems to me that we must be…

‘I’m already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I lied to him in my first e-mail — that I haven’t ordered all his books on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious about his work. He writes back: “Thanks for your honesty in attempting to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have been.”‘

Further reading: Letting go of worry.

Advanced topics: a book on Buddhism.

‘One of the criticisms of Buddhism, particularly by Westerners, is that it is nihilistic. The book offers good answers to that charge. Nihilism is a product of belief, and Hagen continually prods us to move away from any form of belief toward the function of perception.’

‘…to lead the existence that I have, even to type words on my computer for this review, I have to think conceptually. Hagen addresses this dilemma: “The problem is not so much that we [conceptualize]. In fact, we can hardly help but [do it]. … The real problem is that we are caught by our concepts. We don’t have to grant them power or accuracy or validity that they don’t have. We simply need to recognize that our concepts are not Reality.”‘

Be nice. Have fun. Let go of worry. See. Be.

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The government has your best interest at heart! Ha ha ha. Ha… Oh, hell, I’m just joking, but it suddenly doesn’t seem very funny…fuck, I gotta go grab a tissue, I just started crying…

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Let’s end this light and fluffy!