Pollywogs!

If you would ever need to purchase music (as in, you appreciate the artists’ work (doesn’t that (I believe) proper use of the apostrophe look unusual?) and want to financially contribute to them) I suggest Amazon.com for your purchasing needs.  FUCK ITUNES.  Amazon has DRM free mp3s, for dirt cheap.  FUCK ITUNES.  I decided to spend $35 or so and bought the Queens of the Stone Age discography (well, I bought each of the albums) after watching their videos on YouTube and realizing I really love this music:

The Blood Is Love

I saw you, in a way
Beyond figure out
These lines of life have been drawn… and can’t be removed
Our eyes is all it took to know

Open up your eyes
Deep blue, glassy lake
and swim ’till water and sky
Now are one, out of two
Oh, my bloodshot eyes

Open up your mouth
Touch your lips to mine
That we may make a kiss that can pierce through death & survive
Your words have branded my mind

Still i hold your hand
Wrapped as if a ring
We of flesh and blood are only carrying
It’s so hard to…
Well, you know…

The seed waits for the reaper to sow
Every breath an art
The dignity to learn it can strain & break your heart
Take all your pieces home
You ask when you’re alone, “what is love?”
The blood is love…

If you don’t want to buy music, I suggest easynews.com with newzleech.com.  A bit more complicated than a .torrent file, but a bit safer yet.  Personally, why someone would buy “Now That’s What I Call Music 70” is beyond me…I, umm, “downloaded” it and felt like I had wasted those invisible internet bits…

Did I mention FUCK ITUNES?  You can even manage your iPod with software other than iTunes (I recently removed that clusterfuck that is (fuck) iTunes and replaced it with gtkpod on my laptop (running Ubuntu 8.04) and Yamipod on my desktop (XP (FUCK VISTA)).

Oh, and I ripped all of the DRM off of my iTunes purchases with some software I can’t even recall the name of anymore.  Did you know iTunes doesn’t let you re-download the music you purchased in the event of a disaster?  Did I mention FUCK ITUNES?

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You hear about that Texas oilman who is pushing for massive investment in wind power?  He isn’t crazy, it’s an excellent idea.  20% of our power from four months in Iraq? Who is promoting this radical and pathetically insane drivel?  Al Gore?  No, the Department of Fucking Energy!

And if America gives big to the wind industry, expect it to give back, generously. Here are the expected benefits, from the report:

• Support of roughly 500,000 jobs in the U.S., with an average of more than 150,000 workers directly employed by the wind industry.
• Increase in annual revenues to local communities to more than $1.5 billion by 2030.
• Reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 25 percent in 2030.
• Reduction of natural gas use by 11%.
• Reduction of water consumption associated with electricity generation by 4 trillion gallons by 2030.

Iraq is such a complicated mess, but one thing is quite clear: the Bush administration went into it with the attitude that ‘no matter how bad it gets, that means more money for our buddies at Halliburton and The Carlyle Group’.  And when you think of how dearly needed those resources are needed to reduce the impact of the inevitable global climate change…

IT.  IS.  FUCKING.  CRIMINAL.

To the future…I’m sorry.  Truly I am.  You always look back and think “was there more that I could have done”.   I realize that we need to work overtime…but we needed to get started yesterday.  I’m so very sorry…

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So I’ve been on piracetam for the past month or so, been going good.  I have recently added a fair bit of fish oil to the morning dose of ginko, Choline, eleuthero and other assorted chemicals, and it’s been treating me quite well.  I nearly always feel alert and awake until perhaps 2 or 3PM.   Once I’m out of piracetam, I’m probably going to continue taking it on a very low level, but I’m interested in trying the next one out: Provigil.  Why?

It’s not an amphetamine or stimulant, the article explained: it doesn’t make you high, or wired. It seems to work by restricting the parts of your brain that make you sluggish or sleepy. No significant negative effects have been discovered. Now students are using it in the run-up to exams as a “smart drug” – a steroid for the mind.

It sounded perfect. A few clicks on-line and I found I could order it from a foreign pharmacy, just £30 for a month’s supply. I called a friend who is a GP, and told her what I was thinking of. She’d heard of people using the drug, and went away and looked up the details. “I think it’s a stupid thing to do, because you shouldn’t ever take drugs you don’t need,” she said when she called back. “Do I think it’ll seriously harm you? No, I don’t. But you’d be much better off taking a long holiday than narcolepsy pills.” Then she warned me: “There is one known side-effect.” Oh, damn I thought. A downside. “It often causes people to lose weight.” Are you mad? You become cleverer and thinner? I whipped out my Visa card immediately.

Yes.  Oh my, yes yes!

I’m designer!

This, however, sound a bit more serious than piracetam, so I’ll likely start at a very low dosage and take it slow…

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Use it or lose it:

Among men who had sexual intercourse less than once a week, there were 79 cases of erectile dysfunction per 1,000 men. That number dropped to 32 cases per 1,000 among men who said they had sexual intercourse once a week, and it dropped even further, to 16 per 1,000, among men who said they had sexual intercourse three or more times a week, the researchers reported.

I’m already impotent.  Enough (too much?) said.

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Speaking of happy marriages, I am a ‘poor’ 35.  I tried to be as brutally honest with the answers as I could.  I would have tanked into ‘very poor (failures)’ if it wasn’t for the “orgasms” and “not cheating on your wife” bits, both of which are pretty heavily weighted positive.  I’m not the ideal husband of the 50s (or whenever this amusing bit of work was created).  I had a LOT of demerits.   Post up your scores in the comments, post anonymously if you like, I don’t mind.

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About fucking time: instant on computing!

The most interesting story the media is downplaying is the ASUS announcement that it will have a ROM boot chip on all its motherboards, which will boot Linux instantly on start-up. When you flick the switch the machine is instantly on. (It’s about time.) Of course, you will have to press another button for the machine to load Windows.

This development is important, since 90 percent of the time all a user wants to do is surf the Web. Often when leaving for a trip, I forget to check the weather. To do so, I would have to start up my computer, wait forever for it to boot, then go online. This way, I just flip it on, and boom—I get a browser and the info and I’m done.

It’s an extremely subversive ploy for a number of reasons. First of all, it gets people used to Linux, gives them a pain-free experience, and provides quick rewards. Second, it shows users that—most of the time—this is all they need. And finally, it makes Windows look like a subsystem not much different from a program that you run under Windows. The psychological effect of this is profound, and the results could be devastating for Microsoft.

Exactly.  I installed PCFluxboxOS on an old 450Mhz AMD K6 with 128MB of memory because I needed a floppy drive last week, and didn’t feel like fooling around with a live, working computer (none of which had a working floppy installed)…and once the slow ass hard drive gets done doing it’s thing it is quite fast enough for 99% of your tasks.  You can write Word .doc files, surf the internet, print…all with just about 200MB of software.  It is wonderful (and free)…but what I really want is instant on computing, where the LiveCD resides on a god damn ROM chip!!!

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Appeaser!  Conspiring with terrorists!  Wuss!  Al Qaeda ball coddler!

Oh wait, you mean everyone is responding very favorably?

For Europeans, America offers two faces: one of cynicism, big business and bullying aggression, another of freedom, fairness and nothing-is-impossible dynamism.

If Bush was seen as embodying that first America, Obama is viewed as fitting the second role — one that Europe has historically loved, respected and relied on.

On top of that comes his charisma. The German news magazine Der Spiegel splashed the headline “Germany meets the superstar” over a photo of Obama on its cover this week.

“Americans need a change, and what’s good for America is good for the whole world,” said Maike Smerling, a physician who was born and raised in the former East Germany.

Juergen Trittin, a leading lawmaker with Germany’s opposition Greens, pinpointed the contrast between Obama’s tour and Bush’s much-protested visits over the years.

“We should be glad that an American is coming who people don’t have to demonstrate against,” Trittin said on N24 television. “The rest of Europe is jealous that Barack Obama is speaking here in Berlin.”

Who would have imagined that decency. honesty, accountability and common sense would work?  That way lies madness!!!

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Speaking of madness…$10 a gallon for gas?  Don’t we hear about how that would cripple the United States?  Well, how does Europe do it?  To begin with, the difference between our $4 and their $10 per gallon at the pump is mostly taxes which are re-invested in a whole manner of constructive (not destructive) ways in Europe.  The other half is the wide range of fuel efficient vehicles at their disposal.

DO NOT BELIEVE FOR A MINUTE THAT “DETROIT” COULD NOT DO THIS HERE IN THE US //TOMORROW//.  Oh, and Washington could tax the shit out of ecologically damaging goods and services, bringing their true cost out in the open.  Political suicide?

You’ve made me an offer I can refuse,
course, either way I get screwed.
counter-proposal, I go home and jerk off.

- I’m Designer (I believe completely out of context)

What a way to operate our only fucking planet…