I'm easily entertained

Me and the guys I used to work with enjoyed using freetranslations.com to hurl insults back in forth in email using a foreign language. The inslutee would have to go out, figure out which language it was, retranslate it back to English to see in what manner they had been insulted.

For instance, I might go and enter "My gay friend just loves the cock!" and have it translated into Portuguese.

"Meu amigo alegre somente ama o galo!"

When he translates this phrase back to English, however, he gets "My friend cheer up only loves the rooster!"

With a free translation, you get what you pay for.

"Blow me, asshole" taken from English to Dutch and back becomes "Me, bastard blow!"

Doesn't really sound like the same thing at all. Gotta be careful.

I may just make an entire post using free translation some time.

FDA: Cloned livestock is safe to eat

Goddamned right it is! Because it is 100% identical to uncloned food!!

Maybe this would be a good time to define the word "clone".

It means an EXACT COPY!! EXACT! No difference!

I am so sick of stupid people. This anti-cloning hysteria is ridiculous.

Clones have been around forever. See these slobbery little bastards? That's right...



CLONES! They just happened to have been cloned in their mother's womb instead of a laboratory. Small distinction, if you ask me.

How about these guys?



Yep! CLONES!!



OK. SOMEWHAT DISTURBING CLONES! It happens!



SMOKIN' HOT CLONES! Who can also sing! If you consider Country to be "music".

My point is that hysterical zealots with an agenda to sell seize on the word CLONES and wrap it up with evil and unnatural connotations.



Get over this cloning paranoia crap!

Cloning of all sorts is going to become as ubiquitous as fertility clinics, liposuction and 15 minute oil changes. Get used to it. In 20 years, we won't be able to imagine a time when it was unavailable.

"Jim Greenwood, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, said labeling meat from a clone would be as absurd as telling consumers that a steak was produced through artificial insemination, or by cows actually mating.

"None of that information would be useful to consumers," Greenwood said.

Federal scientists studied reams of data on the composition of meat and milk from clones and those of conventionally bred animals.

"You can't tell them apart," said L. Val Giddings, a vice president of BIO and a former Agriculture Department geneticist. "There is not an analytical, scientific test you can use to tell one from another. You just can't do it."

Human cloning and stem cell research (embryonic or otherwise...I don't fucking care) go hand in hand.

Here is the way this is going to work, people.

Somewhere down the road, your doctor tells you you have lung cancer.

No biggie. Neither one of you bat an eye. No chemo. No radiation.

He just scrapes a few skin cells off your arm, or takes a swab from the inside of your cheek. He sends them off to the lab with a prescription for "new lungs".

The lab reboots your skin or mucus cells into stem cells. Blank slates. Then they program those stem cells to grow into lungs. YOUR lungs. The ones you had when you were 18 years old. With growth accelerants it takes 30 days. Maybe even 10.

The lungs get shipped back from the lab, a surgeon removes your cancerous lungs and replaces them with your brand new, 18 year old, genetically identical (no chance of rejection...no drugs) lungs, and you go on living. It's all covered by insurance company because they just got themselves a 70 year extension on your policy payments.

Stem cell research and human cloning are good things!

Hysterical paranoia, waving of arms, screaming about "unnatural processes", "frankenfoods", "ethical dilemas", and "scripture" are bad things.

Woody Allen once said "Most people try to achieve immortality through their children. I prefer to achieve immortality by NOT DYING!"

Let the Luddites die off. May Unnatural Selection reign Supreme.

Give me all the cloning, genetic splicing, nanorobotic-patrolling Bio-SWAT Teams, cybernetic implants and artificially boosted glandular secretions that modern science can provide. I'll take it all, baby!

Keep me alive forever!

I'm more of a Cracker Squirmer

As an extension to my James Brown tribute, here are a bunch of white people "dansin".

Note: The difference between "dancing" and "dansin" is roughly equivelant to the difference between "wrestling" and "rasslin". Or "naked" and "nekkid".

Actually my daughter, young Galadriel Tanqueray Onassis, has seen me dance and she calls it the Flopping Fish dance. The closest analog in this vid is the Hip Breaker.

It just don't get any funnier than white folk dansin.

I'm a Sex Machine!

DUH DUH, DUH DUH DUH!! HIT IT!

I apologize for the poor choice of pictures. My bad.

But I was actually a HUGE James Brown fan. It is absolutely, anatomically impossible to sit still through a James Brown song. Unless you are dead or a Republican.

His music reaches in to your soul and just turns you into a meat puppet. Controls you like a marionette.

He was such a perfectionist, he would fine members of his band (The JB's) huge amounts of money for showing up late or not knowing their parts. His band had a reputation for being TIGHT! No missed notes, no missed beats. James Brown and his band were a single organism. They functioned in complete, soulful, unity.

Everything you hear out there today that calls itself R&B, Soul, Rap, Hip Hop, Gangsta, whatever; owes everything to 2 men...James Brown and Sly Stone. They are the two giants upon which everything else is built.

Godspeed JB. Getchyou a bunch of that Heavenly pussy. If there is anyone who can do it, it's James Brown.

From the bottom of my cold, black, heart

I normally try to avoid mushy sentimental shit.



But after almost a year of posting this nonsense, I just want to say thank you.



Thanks for stopping by occasionaly and putting up with my bullshit.



Whatever you are celebrating this season, enjoy it with people you love, stay safe and be happy.

I know. It brings a tear to my eye too.

Now go on, ya knucklehead. Get outta here before I clobber ya. Why, I oughta....

A Christmas Story

I was a witness to something pretty cool yesterday. It actually had me in tears for a good portion of the afternoon.

As part of their holiday compensation package, all of the employees at the company where my girlfriend works were given $100. But there was a “catch”. They couldn’t keep the money and they couldn’t give it to a friend or family member. They had to “pay it forward” and do something nice for someone else. Then they were supposed to log onto the company website and tell how they dispersed the money.

Just that alone is pretty cool.

My girlfriend's oldest son is an Army Paratrooper with a wife and a young child. She understands how incredibly difficult life can be for military families, especially around the holidays while the husband is in Harm's Way. She decided that she would like to take the money and put it in a thank you card, drive out to Fort Leavenworth, find someone who looked like they needed it, and just give it to them. She invited me to come along.

Her idea was to sort of wander around the Post Exchange and watch people, maybe pick up snippets of conversation, looking for someone in need. She really wanted to give it to the wife of a soldier who was on deployment; to let her know that her sacrifices were appreciated and that someone cared. Walk up, hand her the card, tell her thank you, maybe give her a hug, and walk away.

Now, picking out a deserving soul at random is pretty tricky. A woman with a shopping cart piled high with expensive goodies is obviously out. A woman with a handful of clipped coupons struggling to find the right items is a possibility. A woman pushing a shopping cart that contains more children than merchandise deserve serious consideration.

But we didn't have to make that choice. As so often happens, events unfolded in a completely unexpected way.

The first place we stopped after we got on base was a convenience store to get a card, use the restroom and grab a couple of soft drinks.

My girlfriend strikes up a conversation with the store manager, explaining what she wants to do, and soliciting ideas on where she can go to find someone in need. The store manager gets on the phone with the base and the general consensus seems to be that she should come back during the week when the appropriate offices are open or just mail the voucher to the Army Community Service who would disperse the funds based on assessed need. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

But my girlfriend is a little discouraged. She really wanted to make a difference in a deserving person’s life and let them know that they were loved and appreciated. She didn’t want to just add it to a pool of money and let some bureaucratic committee decide who gets an impersonal check without so much as a kind word. She wanted to do something personal and “Christmassy”.

While we are there, the manager’s daughter shows up and is waiting for her to get off the phone so she can talk to her. She is young, obviously newly pregnant and (I figure) most likely married to a soldier.

As we are leaving the convenience store, the manager's daughter catches up to us at the door. She said her mom had told her what my girlfriend was trying to do. I immediately thought “OK, she wants the $100, her comes the sob story”. I'm such a cynical bastard.

But instead, she said that she knew someone who was really struggling. A young mother with 3 boys, ages 5, 3 and 1, with another child on the way. Her husband had just been deployed to Iraq. The manager's daughter could obviously use an extra hundred bucks herself. But she was thinking of someone else.

My girlfriends eyes immediately misted up (as did mine...as they are now), her jaw got set in that way that says "I've made up my mind!" (a look I know all too well) and she just said “Where does she live?” This was exactly the type of person my girlfriend had been hoping to find at random.

The manager's daughter said we could follow her. When we got to her friend's duplex, the woman wasn’t home. The manager's daughter said she didn’t have her cell phone with her (do any of us actually memorize phone numbers anymore? I don't.), but she could run home, call her friend and find out where she was. It would take 5, 10 minutes, tops. Cool.

So we take some time to drive around the base at Fort Leavenworth waiting for a call. My god! What a beautiful place. Except for the old Disciplinary Barracks. That didn’t look like much fun. But the rest of the base is just magnificent! Well manicured lawns, lots of trees, 150 year old red brick buildings, great views. Just incredible. I’d love to take my Nikon up there and get some pictures, but I’m guessing I’d need a pass of some sort. Post 9/11, just walking around military bases snapping photos is probably frowned upon.

My girlfriend's phone rings. It's the manager's daughter. Turns out that the reason her friend wasn’t home was because she had to take her youngest boy to the Emergency Room! Talk about someone who could use some help! Her friend offers to meet us at the convenience store where we met and take us to the hospital.

We all go in, my girlfriend says hello and starts to try and explain what's going on. The woman looks a bit suspicious. I don't blame her. Military families are proud. Rightfully so.

My girlfriend quickly gives up trying to explain things and just hands over the card. The woman thanks my girlfriend, my girlfriend thanks the woman, who stands up (feverish baby in arms) and offers a heartfelt hug.

We make a quick exit so the young mother can focus on her children.

I don't know if I believe in a god or not. Mostly I lean towards not (as frequent visitors know). But my girlfriend believes. What are the odds of $100 randomly finding it's way to a pregnant military wife with 3 young boys in the Emergency Room of a hospital?

I'm just sayin'.

Merry Christmas folks.

Thanks for stopping by.

Vote for Bad Astronomy

OK, this is really simple. Go here and vote for Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Blog as the Best Science Blog. There are 10 finalists for Science Blogs in the 2006 Weblog Awards. Right now he is in 9th place and needs help. Some squid guy is in first place. Don't ask.

It's two fucking mouse clicks out of your life. Just do it.

Why do I care?

Several reasons.

1. I love astronomy and Phil is kinda like Carl Sagan. Except Carl is dead and Phil is alive. He's just so geekily enthusiatic about nerdily cool space shit. For you local Kansas City area folks, Phil Plait is to astronomy what Gary Lezak is to weather, but without the fucking weather dogs.



OK? 'Nuff said.

2. Phil has ZERO TOLERANCE for mystical nonsense. He loves to debunk bullshit.

3. Like me, Phil seems to be a Hit Whore. But unlike me, he is a $2000 a night picky-assed call girl who gets 12,000 hits every time he publishes a post. While I am more like a local Independence Avenue street-walking skank with a hideously fat cellulite-ass and a tragically short skirt who is absolutely thrilled (and completely mystified and befuddled) that I get between 20-50 hits a day.

4. Phil is so desparate to win this award and disgrace the squid guy that he will publish links to every website that does what I'm doing right now...being his bitch and asking my readers to vote for his website. That means that there is a potential for me to get 12,000 new visitors to my blog (who will immediately conclude that that was 90 seconds out of their lives that they will never get back).

So please; click, vote, and then just move along. There's nothing else to see here except two desparate blogs who are using each other to up their hits.

It's pretty pathetic, really. Like some cyber-circle-jerk.

Ewwwww!!!!

Merry Christmas from XO!

Seriously. From the bottom of my cold, black heart. Merry fucking Christmas. Or Chanukah, or Kwanza, or whatever superfluous overlay of the winter solstice you choose to celebrate. Really. I mean that.



Here is a link that will make you feel all warm and fuzzy about the origins of Christmas and explain why "Xmas" isn't a bad thing.



Here is a link that will tell you about the 4000 year old pagan roots of "Christmas traditions" and why the early promoters of Christianity shamelessly piggybacked on those neolithic traditions to further their own political agenda.



This is what a guy who wears a pimp suit and slides down your "sooty chimney" while you are asleep (without so much as a lube or buying you dinner...fucker probably even slipped you a roofie) and leaves you a "present" really looks like.

Happy Goddamned Holidays!

Why?

OK, look at this cluster map. Look at Australia.



Oh shit. I forgot. This is 2006.

Australia is a large land mass (They are called 'continents'. They are the mostly tan and green stuff in the mostly blue stuff).

Look at the mostly tan stuff, in the middle of the mostly blue stuff, in the lower right hand corner of the screen. See where the red dot is? The one in the middle?


That's someone from Australia who visited my blog. Let's zoom in.








Alice Springs. Little town in the middle of a whole lot of walkabout.









Alice Springs, Australia is about as far from anywhere as anywhere can be. How the fuck does sombody that far in the outback stumble across my lame-ass blog?

Guess I should just thank Al Gore for inventing the Internets and The Google.

Seriously. Most people who actually know me don't read this shit. My girlfriend hardley ever visits my blog. How do people from Australia, India, South America, Africa, Europe, the middle east and Russia find me and read me?

I mean, I know how they find me. It just blows me away that they actually do.

I'm not that interesting! I'm mostly full of shit!

I'm amazed that I get any more visits than me, checking to see if I have any visits.

It just don't make no sense.

Our Newest Museum

Wow.

You have got to go see this museum.

I had a couple of hours to kill yesterday so I thought I'd swing by Liberty Memorial and check out the new National World War I Museum.

I was totally unprepared for how comprehensive, vast, impressive and awe inspiring this place is. Kansas City done good.

A couple of hours wasn't nearly enough. I'll be going back when I have more time and there are fewer people.

But I'm telling you, this is going to become an international destination for scholars, researchers, writers and simple citizens with a personal connection to this war.

The collection of artifacts on display is absolutely amazing! They started collecting stuff in 1920 and never stopped. The condition of the items just boggles my mind. We are talking about metal, leather, wood and wool over 90 years old. But it all looks brand new. It's incredible. Posters look like they were printed yesterday.

The only museum with a larger collection of WWI artifacts is the Imperial War Museum in Great Britain. But that museum has a much broader scope. Our National WWI Museum is, to the best of my knowledge, the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to the First World War.

Did you know that NINE MILLION soldiers were killed in this war? That doesn't count the wounded and "shell shocked" (that's what they called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome back then). It was the first war that saw the use of airplanes, tanks, chemical and biological weapons; while at the same time, employing cavalry charges and swords. Google "trench warfare". It was probably the most barbaric, unsanitary, brutal form of warfare ever fought.

I was very impressed. The National World War I Museum at the Liberty Memorial gets the very first, ever, Hip Suburban White Guy Seal of Approval.

Josie The Christmas Cat

My ex-wife had a cat named Josie. Josie was a weird fucking cat. But that may be redundant.

You know those plastic plugs that you put in electrical outlets to “child proof” them?

Josie couldn’t stand those fucking things. She was POPI (Plastic-Outlet-Plug Intolerant). A rare, but tragically amusing, feline affliction. She would find one of those plugs within seconds and claw it out of the socket, leaving it lying on the floor like a freshly-fucked prison-bitch. Then proudly strut away in search of her next victim.

I suggested breaking her of that habit by inserting a some metal plugs and letting her take a few swipes at those. I was vetoed. Probably just as well. No doubt my inserting the metal plugs would have earned me a Darwin Award and some You Tube Immortality. “Here. Hold my beer and watch THIS! ZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTTTTT”

But Josie’s real talent was even more entertaining.

She loved to eat those little “icicles” off the Christmas trees. Ya know, those little decorative, shiny strips?

Ummm, surprisingly enough, cats don’t really digest those very well.

Something about cat-stomach enzymes not being biologically evolved for breaking down seasonal, decorative, mylar dietary supplements.

She would occasionally manage to succesfully pass one. Made the kitty-litter box look very festive. It was like she was doing her part to decorate her little area of the house.

But more often than not, we would just find her walking through the house with a big string of tinsel dangling from her ass.

At first, we would try to hold her down and pull the tinsel out of her ass. Turns out, cats like that even less than they like being given a bath.

Trying to get her to submit to a tinselectomy was more trouble than it was worth.

We eventually discovered it was easier to just snag the ass-trailing piece of tinsel on her way by and give it a gentle tug. Josie would run away from the offending sensation leaving you holding a smelly, cat-shit-encrusted piece of Christmas cheer.

Ah! Memories!