In case you haven’t heard, Congress has finally rallied together to address a major problem facing this country right now. Iraq? No. Health care? No. The economy? No. Immigration? No sir. Oil? No no no. Give up? It’s a newspaper ad.
MoveOn.org published an ad in the New York Times criticizing Gen. Petraeus for being a shill for the White House, presenting misleading information to Congress and the American people. Apparently the thing that really has our illustrious legislators burning bright with the fire of righteous indignation was the heading “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” How dare they?! I’ll defer to MoveOn’s justifications rather than getting into them myself. They make sense to me.
To put this in perspective, I defer to the eloquence and knowledge of President Bill Clinton:
I sure do miss him sometimes! Sadly, it’s not just the Republicans involved in this nonsense. Many Democrats are jumping on the bandwagon as well, perhaps in fear of being left behind. My own Congressman voted for the House resolution condemning the ad. Way to go, Rahm!
Well, I hope now that Congress has dealt with this absolutely critical issue of a newspaper ad they’ll be able to move on to some of the lesser problems facing us. Like those I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
Another day, another death. Actually it looks like this one happened a few days ago, but it didn’t come to my attention until today.
Author Robert Jordan (aka James Oliver Rigney, Jr.–I can see why he used the nom de plume) passed away this week at the age of 58. The cause of death was a rare blood disease.
This is significant because Jordan was working on a finishing up his massive epic fantasy series, “The Wheel of Time“. And I do mean massive and epic. I read all 11 of his books in the series (and these are some big books) to date. Even book 10, which was by most accounts–including mine–a real stinker. And now I may never know how the story ends! Will Rand Al’Thor win the last battle? Well he probably will, but I want to see how. . . and I want answers to the many unanswered questions. Will Mat and Thom go get Moiraine? Will. . . OK I’m not going off on a tangent on those; they could be a whole blog post on their own.
This was my worst fear (regarding these novels, not in life)–that something would happen to prevent Jordan from finishing. Back in my undergrad days when I started the series, we used to joke about it (before Jordan’s diagnosis. . . we weren’t heartless bastards). And it has come true! Damn! I am sad of course, but also mad that he didn’t finish sooner. He dragged the series out longer than it needed to be (I’m looking at you, book 10!). And now tens of thousands of fans are left hanging. I heard a rumor that he finished the end of the last book, but not the beginning. If that’s true I hope someone can fill out the missing part and release the book. I mean, he must have at least left behind some notes on what he was planning, right? Right? Please? Argh!
I could wax poetic in eulogizing RJ, but instead I’m just going to tug on my braid, smooth my skirt and scowl. Men!
Brett was a crucial part of Match Game’s success, in my opinion, and certainly contributed to making it my favorite game show of all time. Of course I never met her, but she seemed like a very nice person and I never heard anything to the contrary. She was certainly funny, and maybe even a little crazy.
So Family Guy Live! was awesome! It was hilarious and very interesting at the same time. Putting faces to all the voices was fun. Even though I consider myself a fan of the show, I’ve never been a superfan and I didn’t realize that some of the voices were people I knew from other things. Like Alex Borstein, the voice of Lois, was on MADTV and played the famous Ms. Swan. The voice of Meg is Mila Kunis, Jackie from “That 70’s Show” (who incidentally seems like she really is a bit of a ditz). All the main characters were there, except Patrick Warburton (Puddy on “Seinfeld”) who voices Joe the wheel-chair bound cop. And of course we got the Seths: McFarlane and Green.
After they were all introduced, they read through an episode, complete with occasional asides and commentary. We also got several live musical numbers (”Shipoopi!”).
And then, for a real treat, we got a sneak peak at the upcoming “Star Wars” themed season premiere. It looks like it’s going to be great. They poke fun yet maintain a proper reverence. They also stepped up the animation for the space ship scenes. I can’t wait to see the whole thing this coming Sunday!
They wrapped up with a little Q&A, some of which were requests to do certain famous parts of the show.
As it turns out, Alex Borstein has a potty mouth. She likes to say “fuck”, and she sang a song (as Lois) than involved her complaining “You never eat my pussy anymore.” Of course, there was a family with three kids right in the front row. She addressed the family several times, seeming slight apologetic, but not really. It was great!
I’ve seen plenty of stupid and self-serving analogies in my *mumble mumble* years on this earth. . . and I won’t say this one takes the cake, but it at least gets a cookie.
Roberts referred to the work of the late author Norman Maclean, who grew up in Missoula [where he was speaking] and whose book “Young Men and Fire” chronicled the role of firefighters in Montana’s deadly Mann Gulch Fire of 1949. Like Maclean, lawyers and judges must sift through mountains of information to find the evidence that really matters, he said.
Roberts noted that both firefighters and lawyers are viewed as “a little bit nuts” and have a strong sense of camaraderie.
I wish there were more direct quotes in the article. I’m curious how far he took that preposterous analogy.
This has inspired me to come up with one of my own!
Software developers are like soldiers. We both often find ourselves in unfamiliar and difficult situations (working with other people’s code) and can accomplish the most when we work in teams. It’s important to coordinate in teams though, as friendly fire is always a danger (”Oh no you changed your function, now my module doesn’t work!”). We can both find ourselves in high pressure situations (”OMG showstopper!”) and never know when something could blow up in our faces.
First, there was a magnitude 8.2 earthquake off the coast of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. I haven’t heard of any casualty reports and so far only a small tsunami has resulted from the quake. Looks like they got lucky.
Second, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his resignation. Apparently Abe’s party has been mired in scandal. He has been PM for less than a year.
This headline made me do a double-take when I saw it on the elevator: Putin dissolves Russian government. Huh? CNN.com doesn’t have much to say about it. In fact, the paltry quote below is the entirety of their article on it at this time…
MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — President Vladimir Putin dissolved the Russian government Wednesday in a major political shakeup ahead of parliamentary elections in less than three months and a presidential vote next year, news agencies reported.
The dissolution is expected to result in a new prime minister, who will be seen as Putin’s choice to succeed him after he steps down next spring.
The newspaper Vedomosti, citing unnamed Kremlin officials, reported Wednesday that Sergei Ivanov, a first deputy prime minister and a leading contender to succeed Putin, could be appointed prime minister in the near future.
So he dissolved “the Russian government”. All of it? Really? I doubt that. I assume it means the parliament and the PM, but I don’t know that much about their government. Apparently CNN doesn’t either.
Resizing images has never been a pleasant thing. Trying to make something bigger using interpolation rarely results in good-looking results. And resizing something to be smaller can often lose important detail. And these techniques really fall apart when you aren’t retaining the aspect ratio of your image.
But apparently someone has been working on a Better Way ™.
Check this out:
This is very impressive, in my opinion. I can’t wait for this “retargeting” technology to find its way into consumer grade image editing software!
Just some little tidbits to let you know I’m alive and still sporadically blogging.
Luciano Pavarotti died of cancer at the age of 71. He was one of the Three Tenors. This is sad news. There are now only two tenors: Placido Domingo and the other guy.
I’m hot. My part of the office is not adequately air-conditioned. I had a desk fan but the cheap piece of shit stopped working a couple days ago. And do you think you can buy a fan this time of year? Well certainly not around here (the Loop). I’m fucked. Sweaty and fucked.
New iPods and an iPhone price drop. Neat, but I’m still not going to buy an iPhone. Probably not an iPod Touch either. It’s an ironic name since you can’t control it by touch like you can a classic iPod. Now I can just reach into my pocket and adjust the volume, pause or move to the next song by touch. The iPod Touch requires you to look. Perhaps it should be called the iPod Look.
The state government has still not given the CTA the money they are asking for. The fare increases and service cutbacks are 10 days away and counting. The measure has yet to pass a single house of the Legislature. And if it does, our illustrious governor has vowed to veto it. So either Governor Ratface has to get a clue or the Legislature has to pass it by enough votes to override his veto.
Updated 1:15pm: As it turns out, I did find a fan. I stopped into a Walgreen’s as I was passing by during my lunch break, and they had 6 fans! Not 6 models, mind you–6 actual fans. They now have 5 (or fewer). The new fan is bigger and noisier than the old one, but at least it moves air. We’ll see how long this one lasts. It seems I’m no longer sweaty & fucked.
