Hey, crimes against humanity are only treason. Death penalty stuff. Why don’t I pardon myself before I even get convicted!
Thanks again to everyone who voted for him. Everything has gone so well since he’s been in office!
As usual Patty and I were roughhousing on Friday night and somehow we started shoving our iPhones into each other’s mouths. I bit down on his phone (very lightly) and felt glass fragments spray into my mouth. I shattered the screen and dented the aluminum on the back. SMRT.
Speaking of good things in my life, there is now a herd of goats on the hillside of Corona Heights Park near my home. There has been a huge problem with homeless encampments there and they need to clear the brush out so they can build switchback trails to allow the cops to get to the encampments. It’s sort of funny to see 300+ goats a block above Castro Street, and no one knows they are there.
This post might be NSFW. YMMV. If you find it in fact NSFW then I apologize for offending your sensibilities beforehand, because this is actually pretty damn funny.
So my friend Sheila has several hundred dachsund puppies in her loft, or at least it seems like it when you go over there and hear them bark. Kevin and I had to dogsit for two of the little ladies about a year ago. A couple of days before the dogsitting was to occur our friend Pink told us that the dogs “69’d” on a regular basis. I was incredulous. “Pink,” I said, “dogs don’t 69.”
“No, no, they do! I swear!” he insisted.
“No way, Pink,” I said.
“Whatever, Nick,” he dismissed.
So later in the week the girls came over for their dogsitting trip. At one in the morning the fat one destroyed our comforter for no apparent reason. Feathers filled the air as we fired up the vacuum, much to the apparent chagrin of our landlords above. Meanwhile the brown one walked and peed at the same time, leaving odd, long trails of urine all over the house. Lovely. After they exhausted us with their horrible behavior adorable antics, we fell asleep in our comforterless bed.
As usual I got up the next morning an hour or two earlier than Kevin and traipsed into the office to check email and whatnot. The girls followed me in and collapsed behind me on the floor while our dog, Feynman, wisely remained sleeping in the bedroom. I was typically bleary-eyed and tired, so it took me a second to recognize the distinctive sound of tongue slapping flesh. My conversation with Pink immediately came flooding back to me. I peeked over my shoulder to find, lo and behold, the dogs doing this:
So if anyone ever tells you that there are not gay animals you can point them in this direction, pointing out that a gay animal himself posted a video of other gay animals doing the nasty.
Sometimes I read things on other people’s sites that I already had mentally composed, just never put down in any tangible form. I swear people steal them straight out of my head.
In any case, Peter Dubuque has written an amazingly succint, well-put letter to some Democratic congresspeople detailing the absurdity of the past few years, and how the Dems are just as responsible for the horrendous transformation of American life during the Bush Ascendancy as the Republicans are.
As Peter quoting Edmund Burke puts it: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Just an awesome read.
Poor Tuttle, OK– they have Jerry Taylor as their City Manager. It seems his hosting provider installed CentOS, an excellent Linux distribution, on the computers used to host Tuttle’s web site, but never configured the computers after the initial install. The web site thus simply showed the default CentOS web page, which includes instructions as to how to configure it. Jerry Taylor instead wrote the CentOS team and threatened to call the FBI unless they “removed their website from his website.”
The CentOS guys were extremely nice about it, even as they became exasperated with how dense this guy was. They had no obligation to provide any support to this guy, but they did, and every time they asked him for the information they needed he became more irate and ignorant. Finally they just went ahead and figured out who the guy’s ISP was for him and told him to go ask the ISP, and after the ISP resolved it, Jerry had the audacity to tell the CentOS guys that it would have been better for them to solve the problem for him more quickly.
Hats off to Jerry Taylor, the most smartest man in Tuttle, OK!
Here are some DVD’s that Iraqi insurgents use as both training and recruitment tools. It’s quite graphic.
If this doesn’t make it plainly obvious that Iraq is another Vietnam, I don’t know what does.
This war isn’t going anywhere.
Why don’t we lower taxes for the rich and then spend some more money we don’t have on the war?
So the idiotic broadband companies are trying to do away with net neutrality and charge companies like Google for “access to their pipes.” The net effect of this would be that, unless Google paid a company like Verizon a fee, Verizon could slow down your and my access to Google when using Verizon’s lines.
Nevermind that consumers and businesses both pay for access to the Internet—because Verizon and Comcast and SBC don’t do anything exciting except connect us to the Net they feel like they’re missing out on the money that truly innovative companies like Google and Yahoo are making.
Message to Verizon, et al: you guys are like the water company. We need you, but only so much as to make sure that the data is flowing, and then to stay the hell out of our way. We don’t want to hear from you, we don’t want to see you, we just want access to the Internet and for you to do it without interruption or annoyance.
So, as usual, I wrote Senators Boxer and Feinstein. My letter:
Dear Senator Boxer:
At Senate Commerce Committee hearings that began today, broadband providers tried to make a case for a new ability to charge various companies for priority service on their networks. They argued that since companies like Google and Yahoo are making money on the Internet that they should somehow get a piece of that pie. I cannot disagree with this position strongly enough. I firmly believe that if these broadband providers are allowed to do such a thing that they will be the only ones who win out, and meanwhile prices will rise for consumers and other businesses while all of the innovation that the Internet has brought us will be stifled.
I am writing to urge you to vote to support any and all measures that would mandate net neutrality for Internet service providers. I am a small business owner who makes a living creating innovative Internet solutions. California is a state of companies that do the same, and in the process effectively drive the Californian, American, and even global economy. The Internet has always been governed by an implicit principle of net neutrality, and as such has allowed all of the innovations of the fifteen years to happen.
As it currently stands, consumers pay for access to the Internet. Likewise, companies like Google pay for their access to the Internet. Why exactly these broadband companies think that they should be able to impose restrictions or charges on either of those two parties when both are already paying for the service in the first place is beyond me.
As Google has pointed out, the barriers to entry for being an innovative company on the Internet are extremely low– anybody with a good idea and some dedication can create something amazing in their garage– and those barriers are so low almost entirely because of net neutrality. Imposing fees on a company of Google’s size wouldn’t do much to their bottom line, but it would raise that barrier to entry so high that the next Google or Yahoo would probably never be able to get off the ground. When the next amazing thing comes along it may never see the light of day unless net neutrality is maintained.
This issue is of such vital importance to our state, country and economy that I do not think it can be stressed enough. Please do whatever it takes to see that net neutrality is mandated, that prices remain reasonable for everyone, and that innovation can continue to flourish on the Internet.
Sincerely,
Nick Hodulik
