Vice President Cheney, You Greedy Bastard, You!

Contrary to the headline, this is not a story about V.P. Cheney being a huge piggy.



At all.



Rather, this is a story about media misrepresentation.



See, over the last few months, every time you turn around, the media has been vilifying Dick Cheney, with nary a positive story to be found. Currently, the big flap is about the fact that Cheney is rich. Now, realistically, is there a single member of Congress, the Supreme Court, the President's Cabinet, or the White House major staff that's NOT fantastically wealthy by normal standards? No, there is not.



But, Cheney is rich, and rich people = bad. So, the media has been rambling on, and on, and on about how much money Dick Cheney makes.



However, not word one on where it goes.



You wanna know?





Charity.



That's right. For tax year 2005, Dick Cheney donated over 3/4 of his staggering income to various charities.  $6.87 million dollars, to be exact, the highest charitable donation by a U. S. public servant - ever. How heinous, and greedy of him. In fact, shame on you, Dick Cheney! Shame on you, sir!



No. Shame on the media, for lying through their teeth to the American people for the sake of an agenda. Shame on the media for slandering the nation's second-highest executive while ignoring the good he does. Shame on the media for ignoring the fact that Al Gore, when he was in Dick Cheney's job, donated a whole, scary $367 to charity.



I have no doubt that he has done many things in his life that were wrong; everyone has. But I am sick to death of the endless chain of negative stories in the media that conveniently forget to point out public figures on their team with the same failings; forget to point out the good done by their targets; and forget to have even a passing familiarity with the truth.



Isn't the TRUTH supposed to be their JOB?!?  

Edward R. Murrow is spinning in his fucking grave.

Wow, This Town Is Foggy. Oh, Look, Honey, It's Silent Hill!

Silent Hill At IMDB!

Rose cannot accept the knowledge that her daughter Sharon is dying of a fatal disease. Over the protests of her husband, she flees with her child, intending to take the girl to a faith healer. On the way, she ends up driving through a portal in reality, which takes her to the eerie and deserted town of Silent Hill. Sharon disappears in Silent Hill, and Rose follows what she thinks is her daughter's silhouette all over town. It's soon clear the town is not like any place she's ever been. It's inhabited by a variety of creatures and a living darkness that descends and literally transforms everything it touches.

...And so far as that goes, it's fine.

I will go a bit farther.

While trying to avoid anything spoiler-like, I will tell you as much as I can about this. Silent Hill began as a series of games by Konami, and they're currently working on the fifth title in the franchise. This is because the games are creepy on a level not found in any other franchise to date. Fatal Frame can stretch its fingers out and reach a distant second, but that's about it.

Most of the titles in the so-called "survival horror" games are pretty much not scary per se; they're survival games. The main character is usually military or police, set against an army of zombies / dinosaurs / zombies / more zombies / zombies of a new and different type / diseased humans who act like, but really aren't zombies / you get the idea. Silent Hill isn't like that. At all. There are monsters, sure, but in Silent Hill, one of the persistent themes of the series is the disjunction between perception and reality; in fact the main character of the third game asks another character about the monsters, and gets "is that what you see them as?" as a reply.

Silent Hill is about atmosphere, and it's certainly a more cerebral franchise than, say, Resident Evil. Don't get me wrong; RE games are fun, but as far as I'm concerned they're only horror by virtue of the grossout, which is the wimpiest horror. Silent Hill games are different. They are scary. Really scary. Looking-over-your-shoulder-in-the-parking-lot scary. Psychological horror, persistent exploitation of the fear of the dark, disturbing sounds, terrifying images, and uncertainty of perception are all themes you can expect to see explored in a typical Silent Hill game.

Inevitably, they decided to make a movie.

When I first heard about the movie, I cringed. Video game movies are first and foremost never like the games; secondly, they suck, and thirdly, they SUCK.

This one doesn't.

I described the games for one reason: because I suspect that word of mouth will drag an awful lot of people who don't play games to see it, and I want them to know what they're walking into. The movie is the best, by far, translation of game to movie I've ever seen. All the themes from the games are there, and it can be severely disturbing. Walk into it with your eyes open, because it's worth the ride.

I realize the critics right now are pretty unanimously hating it, but after reading several different reviews, I'm starting to wonder how many of them actually saw the movie, and how many of them reworded other reviewers' comments, because they all have the same complaints, and they're complaints that simply don't apply to the movie I just saw.

"The plot makes no sense."
Um, kay, so you can't understand more than one concept at a time, due to a steady diet of "romantic comedies" and other brainless "entertainment?" It's not hard. Little girl sleepwalks and yells name of creepy town. Mom takes her to creepy town to find out why. Girl disappears; mom hunts for her. Town is really, really creepy. Woooo, too tough for me, there, boy.

"It's dark."
It's a movie largely predicated on fear of the dark, just like the games it's based on. If nyctophobia is one of your big scares, gee, you think it might just be DARK?!?

The next two go together: "It's too much like the games," and "It's not very much like the games." To which I answer: pick one, and I'll disagree. If you can't even decide which one of those applies, shut up.

Here's the deal: they used plot themes from the games. The plot is remarkably similar to the first game, though not exact. The monsters are, by and large, directly from the first three games in the series. Most of the music is from the games. Several of the characters are from the games, directly. The locations and town map are from the game. It's a hell of a lot like the game.

However, all that does is supply a fan of the game with tons of "moments," when you recognize something from the game you didn't expect to see, and go "OOOOoooooOOO!!!" If you're not a fan, it's more than possible to enjoy this as a straight horror movie; it does quite nicely even without the background of having played the games. In this case, having a history with Silent Hill is more of a bonus than anything else.

Normally, I either outright hate (Wing Commander,) or laugh at (Doom) game movies; although I'm willing to give them a chance, they're almost always disappointing, like the American re-filmings of Asian movies; often for the same reason, the games are largely made by Asians, and exploit fears and cultural themes not prevalent in the West. This movie was one that I unashamedly enjoyed, both as a fan of the games, and as a horror movie buff. Is it art? Well, I don't know that I'd go that far; but it's a hell of a good show, and there was only one real "OMG can you BE that stupid" moment involved.

For the fans: Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 is in the movie, and at one point does something so outrageously hideous that I turned to my wife and said "Ok, honey, we're definitely buying this one." She agreed after she got through saying "eeeeeeewwwwwwww." And just wait until the first time you hear that air raid siren. All your hair will stand right on end - outstanding.

Go see this movie. It may be the only horror movie to come out this year that deserves the bloated, inflated ticket price theaters charge. It certainly deserves the venue; the big screen and surround sound will help make this an experience, sure enough.

Dumbest. Criminal. Ever.

"There was one mother there with her child who pointed at the guy and said, 'You see? That's what happens when you break the law,'" Lunger said.

That's right. If you see a display case full of fake, plastic drugs, don't try to steal it.



Especially if it's on display at a POLICE CONVENTION.



You think I'm kidding. I know you do.



You should know by now I never kid. Ever.



Seriously - an 18-year-old tried to walk up to the display case and steal the drugs, not knowing that they were fake, in front of officers from THIRTY-EIGHT law enforcement agencies. Whoa. That's stupid. Future Darwin recipient, oh, please God, let him remove himself from the gene pool before breeding.

Worst. Driver. Ever.

Ok. We all know that the government, regardless of country, uses computers to track your tickets and moving violations, right?



What if you got so many moving violations, all in a short span of time, that the computer that was supposed to revoke your driver's license crashed trying to track them all?



Only in Australia, right? Right.



Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you Philip Charles Mounfield, the worst driver on the planet.

The twenty-four-year-old motorist has been charged with speeding nineteen times, driving a defective vehicle on eleven occasions, "causing undue noise" twelve times, performing burn-outs three times, careless driving twice and street racing once. He has even been charged with both extremes -- driving at 28 MPH over the limit, and driving significantly under the limit on the freeway. Other accusations include red light running, illegal turns, driving with a cell phone, and allowing a passenger to ride without wearing a seatbelt.

That litany of disaster resulted in the computer that Australia uses to track driving violations crashing during the process of trying to revoke his license, which allowed him to reduce 121 license points and $10,000 in fines to what's called a simultaneous suspension, which means that he drove so badly that they revoked his license 4 times, but let him run out all 4 at the same time, effectively reducing his penalty to one temporary suspension.



Damn that's hot.

Just So You Guys Know...

There's now a car that gets 156 miles to the gallon, diesel.





Buy one online and give the oil companies a donkey punch right in their bloated, artificially-inflated profits. Well, as of 2009, anyway.  One wonders if they'll actually get to build it, or if the oil companies and car manufacturers worldwide will band together to destroy it, a la Tucker.

Another Edition Of: OMG, You Are SO Stupid.

So, first, in a fit of creative genius and determination to make only the most complete social reject dorks work there, Best Buy renames its tech bench crew "the Geek Squad."



This reaches a height of corporate coprophilia not previously seen, ever.

Wow.

Striking.

So, the Geek Squad uses software, diagnostic software, to figure out what's wrong with your computer, because real, we-actually-know-what-we're-doing-and-can-get-a-real-tech-job geeks refuse to work for $8/hour, and thus Best Buy can only hire people who know that the Internet is "what you use AOL for, LOLZ!!1!"

Specifically, for a long time, they've used Winternals, a decent software suite if you can't figure these little things out for yourself.

However, recently, Winternals' owners asked Best Buy for more money for their products, and Best Buy, always a genius at cutting costs in the wrong places, said "um, thanks, but no. KTHXBYE."

Then, in the best spirit of saving money, Best Buy decided not to replace the Winternals software at all; instead, they instructed their Geek Squad crews to continue using the software despite it being unlicensed.

You guessed where I'm going next, right?



So, you were right. Best Buy is getting sued by Winternals, because they committed copyright infringement on a massive scale.

Now, being as Best Buy is a bunch of ruthless beancounters, you know what they're going to do, right? They're going to say "it wasn't company policy to do this, bad employees! No donut!" or, more accurately, "No lunch break! Only one person per department to close!"

Then, they're going to hang this on a few, select Geek Squad managers, thus further ensuring the devolution of their tech bench down the food chain to complete crap .

After which they will continue to use the software anyway, until they get busted again.

A Test

Just to see if I can get it to work:

So, anyway, it works. Hah.

Amazingly, Another Sequel That Doesn't Suck

Underworld: Evolution

Underworld: Evolution continues the saga of war between the Death Dealers and the Lycans. The film goes back to the beginnings of the ancient feud between the two tribes as Selene (Kate Beckinsale), the beautiful vampire heroine, and Michael (Scott Speedman), the lycan hybrid, try to unlock the secrets of their bloodlines.

Well, that's pretty accurate.
This movie begins with a flashback to events in the 1200's, when the Corvinus brothers first became vampire and werewolf. It then returns to the "present," that being about an hour or so after the events of the first movie.
I always like it when filmmakers do that; having a break of days, weeks, months, or even years between the events of the original and the events of the sequel suggests that the two in fact have nothing to do with each other besides milking a few dollars out of a profitable franchise, which I always hate.

Now, the IMDB users point out a few continuity errors, which I noticed, although I have to say they're much less glaring than has become the norm these days; things like a ripped shirt becoming whole are minor after seeing the cab windshield becoming whole in Collateral - several times.

I will admit that I derive a great deal of enjoyment from watching Kate Beckinsale in skintight leather; what straight male doesn't? But unlike the first, this movie brings its formula to the table more effectively, and that is action. There's nothing wrong with an action film, and this is a good one. Does the plot make sense? Well, sort of, but really it's mostly a backdrop used to provide the characters a way to beat the crap out of each other.

The effects are, if anything, more effective than in the first Underworld title, mostly because the crew got past the whole "whoa, we're making a werewolf film" issue and passed off the transformations as commonplace, often panning the camera past a human-werewolf transformation without even stopping. This is effective - usually, even in the first Underworld movie,directors of werewolf pictures end up "drawing out the drama" of the transformation at some point by giving an extended close-up effects shot - which is universally a mistake. Special effects are most convincing in moderation. Your brain has a tolerance level for visual effects, and past a certain point, the brain rebels against it. Spiderman and Spiderman 2 are perfect examples of how to do it right - the Spiderman character is entirely CG, but it's never focused on as the exclusive core of the frame, so your eye doesn't have time to pick out the details that give it away.

It's for exactly this reason that Evolution works. Both the effects and the plot, which does have holes, like any action movie, are tacitly accepted by the crew, and therefore easier to accept by the audience, because they move past before you have a chance for your mind to nitpick it to pieces. Since this is something that I am notorious for, I expect that the fact that I liked this movie will come as somewhat of a surprise, but the way the movie is put together, and the pacing, really doesn't give you much of a chance to do anything other than wince and cringe a bit when someone's head gets ripped off.

I will give this movie a good recommendation, with the caveat that you will enjoy it more if you watched the first movie, and the second caveat that you really shouldn't eat during some of the fight scenes.

A Serious Article, For Once

Ok.



For just a minute I want to talk about "hate crimes."



The term refers to acts of violence and vandalism in which the perpetrator is assumed to have been a racist.



Now, violence and vandalism are already illegal. If you beat someone to death with a hammer, frankly, it doesn't matter if you scream "nigger nigger nigger" while you do it or not, they're still dead, and homicide is a crime.



However, some people don't understand the underpinnings of their own idea, so I'm going to explain it to you.



SOME people have been sufficiently misguided that they now believe that yelling "nigger" while killing someone somehow makes the fact that he's dead FAR WORSE than simply killing him with a hammer would. Thus, the "hate crime" laws passed in virtually every state, because people are fucking stupid.



So: if your premise is that committing a crime because you hate someone's skin color is worse than killing someone for no damn reason at all other than that you're really fucking crazy, what you're really saying is that there's something to this racism, after all. Because, you know, the existing laws against rape, murder, robbery, vandalism, assault, and battery are only good enough for WHITE PEOPLE. Everyone ELSE needs "special protection."



The very concept of "hate crimes" is in itself racist; it implies that minorities require protections not extended to the majority, which is a flat out statement that the minorities aren't as good as the majority. The majority, after all, can be trusted to take care of itself.



What society needs to do is stop BEING racist - and instead of codifying racial differences into law with demeaning intent, ENFORCE THE EXISTING LAW.



What brought all this long-ass rant on, you ask? Well, I'll tell you.  A Florida State Representative from Fort Lauderdale has proposed an anti-bullying law, which makes bullying behavior among schoolchildren a crime. Now, I can understand that, although I think a more effective deterrent to bullying would be mandatory self-defense classes - if everybody knows karate, who's gonna be the bully, hmmm? - but I disagree with criminalizing our citizens before they're even out of grade school.



So, where's the hate-crimes aspect come into play? Simple. The law's introduction into debate in the state legislature was greeted with storms of protest over so-called "human rights" groups, because it didn't contain any special, extra protections for black kids or latinos against getting their asses kicked by a white kid.



Because, you know, them darkies, they gotta be protected, all of the lesser creatures are our responsibility, after all.



The state representative in question understands the concept quite well, actually: here's what she said.

Bogdanoff, reached in her Tallahassee office, said she would not use selective language to define who should be protected because she does not want to uphold the safety of one child over another. "They are saying there are certain children who deserve more protection than others," said Bogdanoff. "I want to protect all children."

Pop Quiz!

You just got hit by a train.



You're alive.



What's your first thought?



Ok, I know, same as Jesse Maggrah; "Holy crap, dude, you just got hit by a train."

But then, what's your second thought?



Of course, it has to be:

"Maybe the metal gods above were smiling on me and they didn't want one of their true warriors to die on them. Otherwise, I'd be up there in the kingdom of steel."

That's gotta be the first time I ever heard of someone surviving an accident because they were all relaxed from listening to Norwegian heavy metal. Normally, it's booze.

I Bring You - The Anarchist Ice Cream Truck!

You think I'm kidding.



I never kid. Goat, maybe, but kids are off-limits.



This guy has gotten a grant from the Hallmark family - one of their members runs a foundation supporting "art," - to buy and refurbish a vehicle into what the owner, Aaron Gach, calls the "Tactical Ice Cream Unit," which in addition to "anarchist ice cream flavors," whatever that means, also contains military grade armor, police uniforms, video surveillance equipment, and gas masks.



The owner uses it to distribute pamphlets recommending such organizations as PROMO, the Black Panthers, the International Solidarity Movement (known to work with and fund Palestinian terrorists,)  and CAIR, known to fund and support Hamas.



Seriously. In addition to hideous ice cream flavors (chili mango, anyone? No? Then maybe hibiscus?) he hands out pamphlets advocating support of terrorist organizations to little kids.





Way to go™ Hallmark! Your greeting cards are not only shitty, overpriced garbage, but now they fund terrorist sympathizers! You. Are. Awesome.

Attention, Stupid People! There Are Too Damn Many Of You! Buy Condoms!

Brilliant Doctors In Action, part 11,032

After an investigation, the California Department of Health Services found that on January 13, CHOC surgeons opened the wrong side of a child’s skull during an operation to remove a brain tumor. The agency’s report noted that the doctors involved failed to observe the “time out” before the surgery and failed to mark the operation site on the child’s head.

So, what you're saying is, you can't tell your left from your right? And you're a BRAIN SURGEON?!?

Oh, yes, it goes downhill from here.

The agency concluded that the mistake may have been the result of a doctor moving the operating table in order to make room for an assistant surgeon. This may have caused the operating team to become disoriented. Although the child was under the care of CHOC doctors, the incident occurred at nearby St. Joseph Hospital, where CHOC contracts for additional operating space.

Which means, of course, that the doctor got confused because the table was moved. If you're that easily confused, chief, how did you pass the part of medical school where you OPERATE ON PEOPLE'S FRIGGIN BRAINS?!? Get a real job, as a carwash attendant. You'll be better liked by your coworkers.
Well, maybe not.

In breaking news, activists believe porn is bad for you. In fact, they think it causes brain damage.

Harmer is part of a cadre of anti-porn activists seeking new tactics to fight an unprecedented deluge of porn which they see as wrecking countless marriages and warping human sexuality. They are urging federal prosecutors to pursue more obscenity cases and raising funds for high-tech brain research that they hope will fuel lawsuits against porn magnates.

Which all means, of course, that we're going to see more and more rich lawyers, who watch porn. Greeeeeeat. There's more to this than appears on the surface, though: although I'm sure porn can be habit-forming, I find it somewhat unlikely that looking at naked people causes brain damage. Unless it's William Hung. Or Tipper Gore. But those two aside, I find it difficult at best to believe that any sort of physical harm results from watching people do things that you, yourself, if you were honest, might like to try if you could get a partner who'd try it. So what this will really mean is three waves of lawsuits: the first, when the research inevitably finds an undeniable link between porn and Dain Bramage; the second, when they are found to have falsified the research and the porn companies sue to overthrow the previous lawsuits; and the third, when the porn companies sue for damages for business lost while people thought their product killed brain cells.
Who am I kidding? Porn websites outnumber regular, non-porn ones about 1,000 to 1. The likelihood of them losing any business, even if research was published by someone reputable claiming that watching porn made you kill puppies, is tiny indeed. Instead, you'd get an explosion in home-based "puppy relocation" businesses.

CNN has been for quite a long time a respected name in news, if not the biggest. However, since you're reading a blog, that means you're aware to some degree of the blogosphere. You may not be aware of how huge an impact it's had on the mainstream media; despite Dan Rather getting fired when a story of his got fact-checked by a blogger, the MSM has dismissed that as a kind of freakish, one-shot deal. Sadly, CNN had to prove them wrong. In a fairly direct role-reversal, CNN posted photos on its webpage that were not only stolen from a blog - they still had the blog's logo on them. The blog, predictably, caught them at it, and made it their front-page story - and attracted the attention of the millions and millions of people who read Fark.com, a news aggregation site.
Now, I'm not saying that the news channels are behind the times, a bit, but I had a coworker tell me on Saturday that she had seen an item on the TV news about the authentication of the Gospel of Judas - which I had told her about quite some time ago. You may recall me mentioning it, actually. On April 6th.

Everybody's favorite New Mafia group, the RIAA, is so arrogant it defies belief. They 've been suing university students, we all know that, but they actually told this girl to drop out of school and use her tuition money for the settlement. Yeah. From MIT. I don't know about you, but this seems incredibly shortsighted. Not only for the public opinion damage, but also - MIT grads make waaaaaaaaaay more than dropouts. Why not hold off a bit until she graduates, and THEN twist her arm? I mean, at least then she'll be able to afford it. Now you'll never get the money - I seriously doubt if Sallie Mae will make payments to a trade organization with no legal standing.

In other news, this is why your FedEx package was late as hell and looked like Tom Hanks' volleyball in Castaway.

In a classic Older Vs. Younger, there are two bills moving forward in the Florida state legislature: one to change the driver's license requirements for people over 80 - sponsored by teens - and one to require high school students to declare a major. Heh.

Microsoft, always a hero in the anti-malware wars, has a history of doing stupid things when confronted with devious programmers' latest tricks. Things like releasing patches weeks after the new virus is due to activate, or waiting months for a patch that causes something else to break, and the list goes on. However, I don't think I've ever heard an admission of this nature:

"When you're dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch," said Mike Danseglio, a program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft. "In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit."

Now, in all honesty, I've run into things of this nature before, which is why I keep a pretty good set of backups on hand - if there's something that I can't root out with a manual registry edit and then a reboot in DOS mode to remove the files from the system, then I'll just do exactly what Mike recommends, because I've reinstalled XP so many times at this point that it only takes me a couple of hours to be back online and posting complaints about it. I have to say, though, that it's weird in the extreme to hear a manager from Microsoft admitting that they suck, and are rampantly pwned by the leet haxxorz. Wild stuff, I tell you.

While I'm talking about Microsoft, you should know that Internet Exploder 7 is a download that, at least for the immediate future, you may not want.

Don't wait until Microsoft releases IE7 to begin testing your applications. Based on what I've seen so far, unless you're using pretty much pure HTML on static pages, your application is going to break in some way.

Oh, how very, very reassuring.

Finally, I get to offer you a news story of an unusual type: a SMART crook. Two, to be exact. They were burgling a pub in Amstetten, Austria, when an obviously drunken Hermann Bendt staggered in, collapsed onto a barstool, and asked for a beer. The two then served him until he passed out - and THEN robbed the place and left. Bendt was too bent to notice, and slept it off until the police arrived and woke him up. Helpfully, he was able to tell police that it was

one big bloke and one smaller one

that did the dirty deed.

Carmen Electra is in trouble with Max Factor cosmetics, and in fact may lose her contract, because she went on the Howard Stern show and tried out a sex toy, on-air. Ok, I know you're not into that sort of thing, there, Max, but you DID know she got her celebrity from being in PLAYBOY, right? Not from "a modelling portfolio?" I mean, she got famous in the first place by showing her naked ass to the world. This is not really a big deal. My only complaint: no video, so I didn't get to watch her do it. Damn it! Life is just not fair. Anyway, *WARNING: NSFW* here's the toy in question. Ok, I'm a guy, so that thing wouldn't do much for me, but I can just look at it and understand why chicks dig it. Max Factor, if you're going to hire Playboy models, get used to the idea that they like / have had / talk about sex. Because they're likely to.

School Boards Are Stupid, Part MCMXCLXVIII: Pearl River, Mississippi, where the local school board has ruled that Leah Lott, 18, cannot bring her boyfriend, a Marine, to her senior prom - despite his scheduling his pre-deployment to Iraq leave to coincide with her prom - because he's 21. This one just doesn't really need a lot of commentary: school boards are fucking stupid.

Germans are bored: you can tell, when one of them sues the Easter Bunny. No, I'm serious. Stop laughing. Karl-Friedrich Lentze, from Berlin, claims that the Easter Bunny addicted him to chocolate, causing him to get fat and stuff. Come on, chief, it's not CRACK. But anyway, he said:

The Easter Bunny is a sadistic and unscrupulous offender who preys on people's sweet tooth.

"Find this evil bunny, handcuff his paws and remove him from shops in time for Easter.

And since it's easter, I guess they failed, didn't they.


Happy Easter, everybody, and goodnight.

The Greatest Wrestling Match, Ever.

Four words:



Vince. McMahon. Versus. God.



That's right.



Vince got his ass whooped the last time he climbed into the ring, so he announced that his opponent had "divine intervention" and challenged Shawn Michaels and his tag team partner, God, at the next pay-per-view.



I've never paid, and I won't now, but it's almost worth it to see where they go with that. Comedy gold, I expect.



Anyone notice that there aren't any mobs sending death threats and firebombing cars because of this news? Gotta wonder what the Religion of Peaceâ„¢ would have done with "Vince Vs. Allah" don't you?

Because I Know You've All Been Missing My Snarky Commentary...

...Or maybe it's the news. Yeah, that's it, the news.



Like the story of Michael Goza, of Cleveland, Ohio.



Michael is 30 years old.



Michael is a burglar and suspected rapist.



Michael is sitting his ass in jail after getting caught at the scene of a break-in gone bad.



How Bad, You Ask?



Well, he broke into a house, saw the family's daughter sleeping, and decided, "Hey, I can get a little while I'm at it. Score!"



Sadly, the daughter knew judo.



And so, the 30-year-old burglar is in jail, after getting his ass whooped by a NINE YEAR OLD GIRL.





HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!



Oh yes, it's true. It's all true.

Oh, The Irony... The Sweet, Sweet Irony...

Let me just say, before we really get started: our nation's lawmakers are nutjobs. Of course, this is our fault; we elected them, and continue to do so, despite mounting evidence that they are monkeys.

I just want to point out that some of them deserve a PRIZE. Minnesota state Representative Bud Heidgerken, for example. Students in Minnesota are starting to have such a severe problem with non-english speaking professors at local colleges that they're actually pushing legislators to require a spoken English qualification before a professor begins teaching. Wait for it:

And while we expect college instructors to know their stuff, Heidgerken has another final exam in mind. As he put it, "To take a speak test, and only then, after they take a speak test, are they allowed to be in the classroom teaching."

Good thing for Representative Heidgerken they don't have a similar requirement for the state legislature, eh?

Irish journalists gathered a few weeks ago to vote for various awards to be distributed by Magill magazine, including the "Survivor of the Year" award. One name sprang to mind immediately for the award: Denis Donaldson, who was for years a spy in the IRA for British Intelligence. Despite his cover being blown, and his admission that he had, in fact, sold the IRA down the river to the Brits for years, he's survived untouched.
You may, perchance, see where I'm going with this.
The very night Magill magazine was handing out the awards, the "Survivor of the Year" was blown away in his cottage by two shotgun rounds to his chest. Although the IRA denies any involvement, I think they just have a tiny sense of the absurd.

Now, as most of you know, I am a gamer. And most of my friends are also gamers; my friends and I, gamers all, typically spend good amounts of non-game time on the internet on gamer "community" websites and forums, discussing games. One of the things we loathe the most is advertising - it's fine on a webpage or TV commercial - gotta pay the bills somehow - but there's been a disturbing trend of late among game development companies to insert advertising content inside games, which just sucks. However, it may be time to get our own back. MindArk, the Swedish gaming studio that operates the online game Project Entropia, has released a public toolkit to allow gamers to create and post their own ads - inside the game. I can just see the "ALL J00 R T3H F@GG0TZ!!!LOL!!" billboards springing up everywhere, overnight.

You just have to love it when the cops, constantly accused of racism, sexism, insert-tribal-id-here-ism, prove it. It goes on the front page when the violations are so severe that they result in the county blocking access to the police union's website. Montgomery County has blocked access to the Montgomery County Fraternal Order of Police website based on defamatory, discriminatory comments made on the site's forums.


And on a non-ironic, totally unrelated, but far more important and far-reaching note: National Geographic has authenticated the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. Thought you might find that interesting.

Shocking Developments For Christians!!

The National Geographic Society has confirmed as authentic what they are calling the only known surviving copy of the Gospel - of Judas Iscariot.



You read that right.



Judas. Worst traitor in history, betrayer of the Son of God, blah, blah - except that according to HIS gospel, there was something going on that the other Apostles simply didn't know about - namely that Judas was acting on instructions from Jesus himself when he went to the Romans.



Think that'll cause a bit of a shakeup?



Honestly, I don't.



Why?



Because I think the leaders of the Christian church will do what they did with the Gospel of Mary, the rest of the Gnostic Gospels, and the books of the Apocrypha - decide they're politically inconvenient, and simply ignore them. At best they might issue a statement saying they weren't divinely inspired, which will work flawlessly.



It will work, because the people who think this is all a load of hooey will ignore them whatever they say, and those who listen to them will believe whatever they're told. For a fun challenge of this, take a copy of the Apocrypha, and challenge any "Christian" with it. Watch the antics they go through to try to "prove" that the information therein is somehow false, simply because the Catholic church voted to have it removed from the Bible. I even had one genius once try to explain that the Catholics were divinely inspired when they picked which books to include, so that made it ok.



Heh.

You guys might enjoy reading the articles about it - NG has quite a bit of info about how they verified it, restored and preserved it, and how it was found in the first place.

This Shining City...

The reference is Biblical: Matthew chapter 5, verse 14:

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

(From the King James version.)

In this time when sometimes it seems that everyone in the world is convinced America is the greatest villain in history, we forget that this verse is appropriate.

See, America occupies a position brought about by the wit, dedication, determination, and conviction of those generations before ours - one from which we can be seen by everyone, every country and every citizen - in all the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

This means that we have great power - our ability to act as an example to the rest of the world is unparallelled simply by virtue of our visibility - but our responsibilities are equally great.

Why? Or, as some of you may ask - why us?

I will tell you: because we're here.

Nothing more. This generation didn't get us where we are today; even if you have an inflated sense of your personal worth, you know that you weren't even alive when the decisions were made that propelled us into our current position. This generation - my generation - inherited its position as citizens of the city on a hill from our parents, and theirs; from the Founding Fathers, the Framers of the Constitution and the fifty-six brave warriors who signed the Declaration of Independence; and every citizen of the United States who came before us.

Some of you may think that our lack of responsibility for our position removes from us any need to act to maintain it, and this is true. We don't have a responsibility to maintain our position at the top of the hill. What we do have is a responsibility - just because we're here, to maintain stewardship of the city itself.

America does not have, inherent in its physical location on the North American landmass, any spark of righteousness not available to every nation in the world. We have no more natural resources than Russia does; we have not one, but two coastlines to defend, as well as two enormously long terrestrial borders; in terms of landmass, we're actually at a military disadvantage, because the sheer scale of our territory renders it impossible to police completely. What we have, the crucial difference that sets us apart and makes us unique, is the standard upon which our government is based.

The Constitution is a document unique in the history of the world. Almost every nation has a constitution of some sort, but in all the world, ours is unique, because unlike any other nation, ours is based upon the consent of the governed. The constitution of every other nation in the world begins by saying "the government gives you the following rights:"

Ours is the lone exception. Ours begins by saying that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inherent in our nature as sentient beings, and says "no government can take them from you." It says "we, the people, allow the government to do the following things." It says "the government can only do what we give it permission to do."

This is what makes America the shining city on a hill. We are free. We have the freedom to do anything we wish that does not harm others; we even have the right to say we don't. We have the right to act in ways of the greatest good, and the right to call ourselves a huge, reeking evil; the right to defend each other to the death, to preserve our liberties, and in the same breath to persecute those who choose to do so; we have freedom of speech, so that we can say anything we like, even if it is to say that we should be destroyed.

But a city on a hill cannot be hid. Because of our position, our visibility to the rest of the world, we are an example to them, whether we wish it or no. The world watches us, sometimes in hatred, sometimes in love, sometimes in schemes, sometimes in brotherhood; but it watches us, whether we like it or not. And such a position of visibility carries responsibilities.

As citizens of the city on a hill, you see, everything we do, whether good or evil, right or wrong, is seen by the world. Everything we say gets heard; everything we watch is noticed; every action we take, no matter how minor, is scrutinized endlessly by the rest of the world, not necessarily because we warrant such scrutiny, but merely because we're there: we are the shining city on a hill, regardless of who or what put us there.

And as stewards of the shining city, we have the responsibility, just because we're there, to keep the walls and buildings untarnished; to keep the streets clean; to keep the order and to defend it against those who would undermine its walls, cut its roots, and tear down its heart.

The city itself does not care what name you choose to call yourself, or how you define yourself. I do not choose a political party to join because I do not care to be labeled, nor do I care to have decisions dictated by dogma, rather than by my responsibility as a steward of the shining city. You may choose to do so; this is what freedom is, you see: the right to make choices. I am not defined by my race; again, if you choose to use your race, whatever it may be, to define yourself, go right ahead. You may label yourself by religion, or wealth; by sexual urges, or age, or whether or not you own land; you may label yourself in any way you choose, because you have that freedom - because you live in the shining city on a hill. In all the world, only the walls of that city defend your rights to label yourself as you will; in all the world, only the soldiers of that city will endure the abuse and revulsion of its citizens and continue to defend their right to act in such a disgraceful way; in all the world, only one place has as its bedrock your right to do whatever you want.

This is why you, and I, and all of us, are stewards of the city; this is why we have a responsibility to the city, and its maintenance, and this is why our sacred honor is invested in its walls, whether we want it there or not: because the walls of the city and its defenders are all that stand between us, and those of us who would remove those freedoms forever.

But there's another level yet: we have responsibilities not only to ourselves, and to the city itself; we have responsibilities to every oppressed person in the world, every person who has been discriminated against with bullets, rather than hurtful remarks; every person who has been tortured with knives and blood, rather than loud noises; every person who has been threatened with death for practicing their religion, rather than told not to be so loud about it; every person who has been shot at, imprisoned, or killed because of who they sleep with, rather than told that their chosen sex act is "icky."

That responsibility is simple: to deserve the city.

Because if the city falls - if the solitary place in all the world where there is hope is brought down, then our failure does not merely impact our own lives, but those of everyone in the world. Democracy is an experiment tried only once before in human history on such a grand scale, and Rome fell when its citizens lost sight of the fact that they were Romans first, and began to use the government to feed and care for their tribes instead.

We cannot allow such a disaster to happen again.

America is more than a loose collection of tribes; we are, and must be, a nation. The hideous evils of tyranny rule the overwhelming majority of the world, and even in those nations not governed by tyrants, the assumption is still that the government is the purpose of the nation, and not its guardian. Only here, ONLY here, is the government the steward of its citizens.

Right now, this idea is under attack, besieged in all directions, by foes within and without; those who wish us to become a police state, like Soviet Russia was, and China is; those who wish us to openly dissolve into anarchy, like the Sudan; those who wish us "free" from the need to consider the rights of others at all, like Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Those who hate, and fear, the responsibilities inherent in a life in the shining city disguise their intentions in a myriad of ways. They claim that our freedoms should be curtailed "temporarily" in the interests of "security." To paraphrase better writers than myself, a man whose highest priority is his own safety deserves neither saftey nor freedom, and can only be made and kept free through the efforts and blood of better men than himself.

The enemies of liberty try to disguise their intentions by claiming that freedom is the freedom to do anything, regardless of others; that freedom has failed, because they do not understand it; that a campaign to free the oppressed in other nations is a failure to leave others to their self-government; they claim that righeousness consists of doing "the greatest good for the greatest number," without understanding that they themselves would not be here were that the case.

Freeing the oppressed is not a failure: it is, ultimately, the highest moral responsibility of those who live in the city on a hill, for if salvation comes not from those who have achieved it, what source for it can be found? Tyrants never free the oppressed. As citizens of the most visible nation in the world, and stewards of its purpose and ideals, it is our solemn duty, to which our lives, our honor, our dedication, conviction, effort, and blood must be devoted: to prove, by our actions, the righteousness of freedom, and its meaning; to free the oppressed, protect those who request it, defend the rights inherent in any sentient being, and guard the city, its walls and heart, against any enemy who comes, for failure in this, our charge as its citizens, is a crime of the highest order, against every living being.

This shining city on a hill must stand; it must be, as it has been in the past, a beacon of hope for those not within its walls; its gates must remain open to anyone with the courage and strength to reach it; its defenders must be looked upon with honor, for their lives are all that stands between it and disaster; and most importantly, when the oppressed see the hordes before our walls, they must know, as generations have known before them, that the shining city will endure, and shelter them if they can reach it.

As stewards of Liberty, we have responsibilities. Those responsibilities may have chosen us, rather than the other way around, but they are still there, and failing in our stewardship is an utterly unacceptable moral evil. We have a duty to ourselves, our forebears, and our nation to end the divisiveness, end the notion of tribes, end the bickering, and forge our destiny with renewed will, unified heart, and singularity of purpose. God does not care what name you call him, or if you call him at all; your bedroom habits are of interest only to those in your bedroom, and your opinions are, and should be, acknowledged as such, rather than presented as facts. My opinions are here for you to see - but regardless of opinion, mine or yours, we cannot let our nation fail in its purpose because we are too lazy to care for it properly. You may not agree with the leaders we've chosen; you have the freedom to change those leaders. You may not agree with the laws those leaders have passed; vote against the leaders and their laws. You may not agree with the places our soldiers go, but never, ever despise our soldiers for defending your liberty, or someone else's. Doing so is a dishonor I fear the city cannot bear for long; even the bravest, strongest soldiers in the world have to have a home to go to, or they have no reason to fight, and if ever our soldiers fail, the walls will fall, and the shining city on a hill will crumble, perhaps never to be rebuilt.

In The Beginning, God Made Idiots. This Was For Practice; Then He Made School Boards.

This has got to be the single one dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard, ever.

Warren Township, Indiana.



Elliot Voge, age 14, a student at Stonybrook Middle School, was walking up to the school building after being dropped off in the morning by his carpool. It was a bit chilly, being March 3rd, so he stuck his hands in his coat pockets to keep them warm - and found his Swiss Army knife in his pocket. He had been whittling - you know, carving tiny useless trinkets out of wood - the night before, and had forgotten to leave it at home.



Following his school's "Zero Tolerance" policy, he entered the school building, went to the office directly inside the front door of the school, and turned the knife in to the school's treasurer, explaining what happened.



What a responsible young man! He knew the rules, and immediately complied with them when he realized he was in violation of them, despite the fact that the knife wasn't even his, it was his little brother's, and quite expensive. The school principal even noted that

throughout the entire investigation and student due-process, Elliott (sic) was a model student.

Where, might you ask, did the principal annotate his good behavior? On his commendation for Doing The Right Thingâ„¢? Oh, no, my friends. This annotation was made by the principal on his Student Expulsion Recommendation.

That's right. The kid went right to the authorities and said "I made a mistake, and here it is;" and they went "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKK!!! A KNIFE!!!! YOU TERRORIST PIG!!!" and threw him out of school. Anybody wonder how long it'll be before any other kid admits breaking the rules? I mean, after all, you get the same penalty if you just plain get caught, right? So why bother being good, and following the rules, and stuff, if you get screwed either way?

Hopefully, Elliot's parents win their lawsuit.

The Worst Corporate Assreaming, Ever.

You gotta love it when you're going broke but you have good lawyers.

Background first:



Alcatel is a French telecommunications company, which of late has been beleaguered by competition of increasing stiffness, largely due to the fact that Alcatel's R&D department sucks,  with a capital $.



Lucent Technologies was, at one time, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard Co., and originally formed to R&D and manufacture more efficient modems. They expanded to  design and manufacture of all levels of telecommunications hardware, and were spun off by HP into a separate corporate entity a few years ago.



However, Lucent is a little strapped for cash, since the latest round of patent lawsuits has kind of beaten them down, and their expertise has become their marketable commodity.



A match made in heaven, you say? Alcatel's $$ in exchange for a proven R&D team and a manufacturing unit of reputable stature? What a great idea!



Which is why Alcatel is buying Lucent.



Here's where things get interesting. Somehow, despite the fact that this is a straight buyout by Alcatel, the Lucent Tech lawyers owned their ass. Literally. Under the terms of the buyout deal, the board of directors will consist of:

• 7 board members from Alcatel
• 7 board members from Lucent
• 2 board members "from Europe" to be appointed at a later date
• the board chairman, who does not get a vote.

The board chairman, it works out, will be the current CEO of Alcatel. Go back up and look at the part where he doesn't get a vote.

The new company's CEO will be the current CEO of LUCENT.



This is like if you bought my company, got demoted, relegated to a non-voting administrative position - a glorified secretary, in specific - and I replaced you, after you paid for the privilege.



WOW.



Lucent, remind me not to get sued by you for any reason at all, ever. You'd probably end up owning my wife.

Commercials You'll Never See In The U. S., And Other Video Goodness

Lots of videos await you!

First,  a German ad you'll never see on American TV, showing one good reason to keep your prescription contact lenses up-to-date.

Next, Cossacks.com teaches us one way to finish an argument quickly:

"Double A" copy paper shows you why not to mistreat your copier:

A Microsoft executive, tired of M$' total inability to design good product packaging, filmed this to make fun of that fact. You'll never see it on TV, but it is legit - it really did come from Microsoft.

And finally, an 8 minute explanation of why it is a bad idea to call griefing PVPers on it to their faces in an MMO. (Because... THEY'RE GRIEFERS... WTF.)

Hope you enjoyed this little excursion. Thanks, Google Video.

OMG! A New Entry! It Must Be A Fable!

Fable!

In this groundbreaking role-playing adventure game from Lionhead Studios, your every action determines your character's skills, appearance and morality. Your character's life story is created from childhood through to adulthood and on to old age. Grow from an inexperienced child into the most powerful being in the world, spoken of by all and immortalized in legend.

Now, Fable:TLC is a good game. It's not a GREAT game, but it is a good one. The majority of the flaws from which it suffers are due not to actual bad design, but instead not enough GOOD design.
For example: the quests. There aren't enough of them. The quests that are in the game are fairly engaging, no farming to be found, although there are a couple of "go-get-em's." The problem's not the QUALITY, rather strictly a matter of QUANTITY: there are only enough quests in the game to guarantee about 12 hours of solid gameplay for a dedicated gamer. Contrast that with any game in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series - I guarantee that without cheating it is totally impossible to win any game in the series in under 50 hours.

The game's morality system is fairly interesting in an academic sort of way - by which I mean, seeing what the game devs decided would count as good or evil. Not murders or stealing, but the minor stuff like healing party members, using particular spells, wearing dark, scary looking armor (?!?) or tattling on an adulterous husband. The only problem is, it doesn't go far enough. Although people will flee from you if you get scaaaary enough, shops will still sell to you unless you actually attack the shopkeeper, and towns have no memory at ALL - if you leave town and go throw some coins in a church donation bowl, suddenly you are Golden Boy again, and everyone loves you. Although your appearance changes based on your "alignment," it doesn't seem to really matter; you are at no point so repulsive that a change of armor won't cause women all over the game - and men too - to fall at your feet.

The romance system is fairly interesting, if not realistic at all. You can cause anyone in the game world to fall in love with you if you are impressive enough looking and say "hey," in a smutty kind of way, over and over again. Gifts ranging from flowers and chocolates to jewels of every description give you a boost in how effective your flirting is, and soon the tiny floating heart over your victim's head will become a giant golden heart, at which point they will begin pestering you in a VERY rude way for a wedding ring. Once you get them one, they pester you for a house, and you can acquire one in a couple of places. Actually, you can acquire several, complete with wives or husbands, in different locations at the same time, and none of your spouses will ever figure it out. You can have sex in this game, although it doesn't actually show anything; but you can listen to a variety of moans and groans based on how good you are at it - practice makes perfect. Occasionally, if you treat your spouse(s) well, they will give you presents, or if badly, divorce you in loud, public fashion, causing you to get laughed at by local children.

Combat is fairly well put together, with three divisions of fighting: magic, ranged, and melee. Melee is fairly straightforward, the more times you hit without getting hit, the more you charge up your weapon, until you can unleash a super attack. Repeat as necessary. Ranged is a function of patience; the longer you let your attacks charge before loosing an arrow, the more damage you do, allowing a constant stream of one-hit kills on even enemies of much higher level if you're patient. Magic... Ah, now there's the gravy.

I'll tell you why.

Unlike in melee, where your attacks move you around, and ranged, where you're pretty much obligated to stay locked onto one enemy, whether by target locking or sniper zooming, when using magic you can pretty much move freely, because most of your useful spells are area-of-effect spells. This is where combat starts to break down, though, as once you master the Enflame spell, you can pretty much whup the crap out of any monster in the game, including the bosses. The area-of-effect spells added in the Lost Chapters expansion are somewhat less unbalanced, as they require such a significant charge time that the enemies will virtually certainly get a free lick or two while you get your spell ready. Enflame, however, leaves you temporarily invulnerable to enemy damage, covers an enormous area, does really impressive damage, and best of all has no casting delay at all. None. Not even a little bit.

Which leads me to my next point, kids: don't smoke crack and then design a questing system. Why do I say that? Because the quest system is innately exploitable to a really impressive degree. See, saving your game outside of an active quest area is a "world save," which when loaded deposits you, items, xp, and all, right where you left off. Saving during an active quest, however, is a "hero save," which means that if you load it, you keep all the xp and items you'd found to that point in the quest, but start outside the quest area in the last position you were in before beginning the quest.

What does this mean? Well, effectively, it means that you only have to struggle for xp and items until you receive the Hobbe Cave quest, and then you're set like Chet. The Hobbe Cave quest features a really huge, ongoing outpouring of enemies, a ton of items, loads and loads of xp, and can be repeated ad nauseum until your character is maxed out in every stat- and it's about the 6th quest you get. Also, one of the items you can get repeatedly during this quest is a Silver Key, which means that you can open any treasure chest in the game by the time you've been playing for about 3 hours.

Similar exploitability is built into the trading system, as well, allowing you to trade repeatedly with the same trader without interruption until you have amassed amounts of wealth so stratospheric it looks like the score that breaks Pac-Man. See, the traders base their prices on the scarcity of goods, which means that if they have a bunch, it's cheap, but if they have one, it costs a ton. So, you go get yourself about 9,000 gold, run around to every merchant you can find and buy them out of health and magic potions, and then go to the merchant in the first town and sell all of them at once. Then buy them back for less than you sold them for. Repeat as necessary. Ultimately, you need about 50 potions for this to make any serious headway, but you can get that many pretty quickly. The more potions you have, the faster your money goes up. This can be used with any commodity in the world, although jewels are ultimately the way to go - there's one merchant at which you can make a million plus a trade, over and over again, just for selling a jewel he carries in lots of 50.

There are, however, tons of interesting touches to offset this kind of goofiness. For example, you can buy businesses and houses, and rent them out. Unfortunately, this is ALSO a feature the devs didn't feel like showing off, so they only put in a few places where you can buy either houses or businesses in the entire game. As a result, if you want to buy a bar, for example, the best way to go about it is to pick one, and kill everyone in it. If your reputation is good, or at least you're wearing "Good Guy" armor, you can pay the guards to leave you alone - in fact, the morality system and its consequences are so profound in their effects upon the game world that you can usually tell the town guards "I'm Sorry," (there's an in-game emote for it, and you can hotkey it,) and have them totally forgive your brutal murder of dozens of people.

Wait, that's more goofiness.

Well, you can customize your weapons, and your character. Um, like, with haircuts, beards, tattoos, and different clothing. The tattoos and clothing can even make you more evil or good!

Wait, that's goofy, too.

Dammit.

See, this is the problem with Fable: it's not a bad game, it's just that although the devs came up with any number of really interesting ideas, they didn't bother to think them all the way through. Logical Consequences = interesting game world, if and only if you bother to actually HAVE consequences, and stuff. Saying "I'm Sorry," after murdering 25 people should not get you of the hook, no matter HOW good your reputation is.

All in all, this is an interesting game, and certainly worth playing, but I really hope that in the inevitable sequel, the devs at Lionhead Studios manage to convince themselves to carry things through, and to avoid the screamingly annoying exploitive nature of the current setup. Honestly, make money easier to make honestly, and players won't have to invent elaborate ways to defraud your merchants. Leaving loopholes to allow players to defraud your merchants so that you don't have to actually create a working economy is just lazy.

Oh, and since I haven't mentioned it yet: welcome back to Xeno's Guide!