Appropriate Blame

Snipped from Terrance:

Wanda Sykes, on Jay Leno, says of president Bush.

Jay: “But President Bush took responsibility.”

Wanda: “I don’t think the President should have taken responsibility…. I don’t blame the President. I blame the American people. Y’all knew the man was slow when you voted him in. You can’t blame the blind man for wrecking your car when you’re the one who gave him the keys.”

So very, very true.

Presidential Potty Break

POTUS needs a bathroom break.Snopes just confirmed that this is an authentic photo of a note written by President Bush “to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005.” Apparently the photo’s been causing something of a stir because of the content of the note:

I think I may need a bathroom break? Is this possible…

While it’s an admittedly easy opportunity to snicker at our dearly beloved führer president, I think people have been interpreting this incorrectly.

President Bush wasn’t checking to make sure he could wander out to the restroom without offending anyone.

The real story is that he wasn’t sure. He didn’t say that he needed a break — he said that he thought he might need a bathroom break. He then followed that up by musing as to whether it was even possible that he’d need a bathroom break.

Weird, weird man.

iTunesToriMix v1” by Amos, Tori from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2000, 45:31).

Secession

Found this via Chris Randall. Yes, I know it’s over-simplified hyperbole, and I’m guessing that it dates from roundabout election time. So what. It gave me a grin.

(Sidenote: I did a Google Search to see how widespread this was, and only got four hits, three of which were variations of the URL to Chris’s blog. But if I do a Google Blog Search, I get 165 hits. Has Google removed weblogs [or, at the very least, drasticaly de-emphasized them] from their default search now that their blog search is active?)

Dear Red States…

We’ve decided we’re leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we’re taking just the Blue States with us.

In case you aren’t aware, that includes Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.

We get the Statue of Liberty. We get Hollywood and Yosemite. You get Dollywood. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom and Enron. We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss. We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition’s, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that the new country will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we’re going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your politicians and evangelicals. They have kids they’re apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don’t care if you don’t show pictures of their children’s caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we’re not willing to spend our resources in Bush’s Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country’s fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation’s fresh fruit, 95 percent of America’s quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we’re discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with high morals.

Yet More Tweaks

A few more tweaks and oddments:

  • Re-worded the post metadata.
  • Added Technorati tags to the metadata.
  • Added pseudo-hidden ‘admin only’ links to all posts, comments, and TrackBack pings, allowing for single-click jumps to the edit screen for each item.
  • Used SimpleComments to combine comments and TrackBack pings into a single chronological list.
  • Added small icons (yanked right from the MT interface, actually) to comment and TrackBack listings to more easily visually identify which is which.
  • Added a :hover effect border to comment and TrackBack listings.
  • Comments I leave will display with a colored background to easily distinguish them from visitors’ comments.
  • Lots of templates updated so that all a links have an associated title attribute.

And…that’s all I’m remembering right now.

…has a posse

I saw this sticker slapped on the side of a lamppost last night and it made me laugh:

Seattle Monorail Has A Posse

This one’s the product of 2045 Seattle, a pro-monorail campaign.

There’s more and more posses out there these days. Andre the Giant had the first, Charles Darwin has one, Darth Vader, even Tony Danza…and I know there’s more.

But there was only one problem. I didn’t have a posse.

So I had to take care of that.

Read more

LiveJournal/OpenID Authenticated Commenting

So much for declaring a “no more tweaks” point. I just can’t resist the urge to fiddle around…

Thanks to Mark Paschal‘s OpenId Comments plugin (announced and described here, current release here), visitors can now authenticate themselves when leaving comments using a LiveJournal or OpenID account in addition to TypeKey authentication (or no authentication at all).

I’ve also increased the width of the comment entry field, as it was a bit cramped (thanks to mom for prompting me on this, as it was bugging me too).

Leave a comment, play around, and let me know if anything seems goofy!

(Update: Some goofiness exists. Generic, TypeKey, and LiveJournal options are working fine, OpenID comments are coming through as ‘anonymous’ even though the commenting UI reports that they’re successfully signed in. Something to fiddle with….)

Transitioned

There are a few benefits to being unemployed for a little bit. One of those is having more available hours in the day to spend tinkering around with some of my neverending PROJECTs.

I’ve just (mostly) finished converting all of my pages over to the new template styles provided by Movable Type 3.2. There’s a few tweaks that I didn’t bring over (multiple stylesheets, the live comment preview, gravatar support, and incorporating TrackBack pings and comments into a single list), and I’m still running over in my head which, if any, will be re-incorporated down the line.

For now, though, I’m declaring things done. Feel free to poke around, and as always, suggestions are always appreciated.

Here’s a brief overview of the changes I’ve made to MT’s default templates…

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Pussy Power!

Today’s news of the weird: Inventor fuels car with dead cats.

A German inventor has angered animal rights activists with his answer to fighting the soaring cost of fuel — dead cats.

Christian Koch, 55, from the eastern county of Saxony, told Bild newspaper that his organic diesel fuel — a homemade blend of garbage, run-over cats and other ingredients — is a proven alternative to normal consumer diesel.

Koch said around 20 dead cats added into the mix could help produce enough fuel to fill up a 50-liter (11 gallon) tank.

Never fear, though…it turns out that while the biodiesel fuel Koch is working on is real, the “dead cats” angle was nothing more than the overactive imagination of a Bild newspaper reporter.

A German inventor said he has developed a method to produce crude oil products from waste that he believes can be an answer the soaring costs of fuel, but denied a German newspaper story implying he also used dead cats.

“I use paper, plastics, textiles and rubbish,” Koch told Reuters.

“It’s an alternative fuel that is friendly for the environment. But it’s complete nonsense to suggest dead cats. I’ve never used cats and would never think of that. At most the odd toad may have jumped in.”

Bild on Tuesday wrote a headline: “German inventor can turn cats into fuel — for a tank he needs 20 pussies.” The paper on Wednesday followed up with a story entitled: “Can you really make fuel out of cats?

A spokesman for Bild told Reuters the story was meant to show that cat remains could “in theory” be used to make fuel with Koch’s patented method.

The author of the story said Koch had never told him directly that he had used dead cats as the story implied.

Sounds like Bild employs one reporter who’d make a better fit at the Weekly World News….

iTunesLiontamer” by Faithless from the album Outrospective (2001, 5:48).

Goodbye FedEx Kinko’s

Some people may have noticed that there was a lot more information here not too long ago.

I’m having second thoughts about publishing what just happened publicly, though.

Suffice to say:

  1. I didn’t get fired — I quit.
  2. This is a good thing (for me).

Friends and family are welcome to the details. I just don’t want an urge to air my dirty laundry to potentially damage any future job prospects.