Long Week

Very long week. I had some things but they have to wait.
In the interim there's this:
http://howdovaccinescauseautism.com/

And also this from the consistently great Albert Burneko.

Throwback Thursday: Your Love by The Outfield

My cousin that I don't really talk to called me on the phone yesterday. It was so weird and unexpected that although I saw his name on my phone I thought it was a mistake. Phones do not make 'mistakes' so I am very obviously a moron but it seemed more likely than someone that hasn't called me in over a decade would decide to reach out on a rando Wednesday. I about fell out of my chair.

Cousin Jeff is the oldest of my three older cousins, and he had a lot of money and the cool house and the cool car and a kickass stereo in both and was always going to exotic places and doing cool shit like getting punched by Don Johnson in Aspen (during peak Don Johnson) and going in and out of debt on development deals and wearing neon and a mullet and powerboat racing and traveling the world and modeling and doing all the drugs. And, significantly: leaving me the keys to his estate while he did those things, for which I am eternally grateful.

This song was an inescapable hit in the big 80's that defined my cousins heyday. He probably didn't much care for it then (or now) - his musical taste is more sophisticated. That's his loss, because this jam is solid gold. 

Word is that his life is something of a mess now. That lifestyle is only sustainable if you have an unlimited amount of money; he does not. I can't say I really knew him very well - we moved in different orbits. He was always doing stuff I understood but didn't relate to, even now as an adult.

Anyway, I gotta call him back and talk about... something.

Enjoy the Outfield.

Hot Slow Jamz: Passenger by Royal

This is the good shit. It dropped a couple weeks ago, it's got a few hundred thousand plays on Soundcloud so as these things go it's something of a hit. And a free download. You're welcome. 

Mittens

Legally is Spel(l)ed Wrong! LO(L)

Mitt Romney is going to run for president so he can 'lift poor people out of poverty'.

I wasn't sure if this was a real thing, or if it was something on The Onion.

Turns out it's a real thing. Mitt Romney is a tone-deaf idiot that made a LOT of money by moving jobs offshore and laying off American workers. So he did create jobs (overseas). I don't have an issue with that in principle: businesses are in business to make money. But if you do that and then run for public office on a platform that claims you have the public interest at heart it is... disingenuous.

How is Romney going to lift poor people out of poverty in 2016? Last time around it was to raise their taxes ("broaden the base") and prevent them from getting access to affordable health care. Because he's an asshole. So: not at all going to help poor people, then.

What's great is he probably thinks he has a real plan to help poor people because he only ever talks to rich people. An actual poor person would know immediately that he was full of shit. Unless they were stupid. And it's the American electorate we are talking about so, yeah, maybe he's got a chance at the nomination again. 


http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/17/mitt-romney-2016-poverty-republican-national-committee-speech

Very Christian of You: Worship or Get Beaten

This has everything:

• Doughy, righteous, self-important pastor with mil-spec haircut and macho goatee
• 'Dangerous' bright kid
• Gross abuse of power and authority in the name of religion
• Physical violence from an adult to a child in order to teach them a lesson about worshiping Jesus

Apparently physical abuse is totally cool as long as you're doing it in the name of Christ. Something to be proud of, even. The kid learned to love Jesus AND that it's okay to hit someone in Jesus name. Efficiency.

This is how they teach at the Bible Baptist Church of New Jersey, courtesy Pastor Eric Dammann.

No word on what Pastor Eric's strategy is for adults who don't take the "Lord" seriously. Presumably he can't "punch as hard he can", not least because if you punch adults you will get charged with assault and/or get your ass kicked. But kids, enh, they can't fight back. Go right ahead and hit them.

I got a message for all the dangerously bright kids that don't take fictional characters seriously: it's not your fault you are smarter than your pastor / parent / teacher. Hang in there. It's a big wide intellectual world out there and it belongs to the future, which is you.

Love Your Pet!

GIMME ALL THE SUGAR

Today is love your pet day around here. If you have a pups or a cat or a tortoise or whatever then please take a special time out and love them today. And then do it again every day for as long as you get to have them with you.

Pets are the best! Love them! Give them all the kisses! All your dog wants is to be told how good he/she is. Do it for me today, and do it for them every other day of the year. No one gets to the end of their life and says, "yeah I loved that dog too much".

If you have a cat then do whatever your cat likes. Treats and hopped up on goofballs catnip? Yes!

Enjoy your day. I'm in training in Foreign Lands all week. Do they have the internet in Canada? Hope so.

See you out there.

Vive la France!

History!

I cannot sufficiently express how little I think of fundamentalists that slaughter people because they were offended by the depiction of their "prophet" (this includes all religious fundamentalists - I don't discriminate). The cowards that killed the staff at Charlie Hebdo are dead now, which is for the best. Current reports suggest they killed 12 people and wounded dozens more. Also let's not leave out the other cockroach that killed 4 people in a Jewish store. Unfortunately this is just one in a series of similar attacks around the world. Earlier this week it was a village in Nigeria, and a few years ago it was Mumbia, India. That's just the easy ones off the top of my head. There are too many examples to list.

This is not a holy war. This is a war against ignorance and intolerance and discrimination and bigotry masquerading as "religion". Fight it with intellect, and if need be fight it with force of arms. If that's what it takes then that's what it takes.

More to Follow, but first: Steph Curry

When I used to imagine being really good at basketball I never even imagined that anyone could be as good at basketball as Steph Curry is right now. Enjoy.

Sound Makes the Difference

I am a simple man. I like simple things.
This is solid gold. Needs audio for the full majesty.

Happy New Year! And: Battle of the Five Armies, Reviewed

Good Directions

I hope you had a nice Christmas or whatever. And also you were able to take a couple days off around the New Year. I was awake until midnight but not much later. I'm old and tire easily. Tried to talk The Girl into an East Coast New Year's but she wasn't having it. We compromised: went to a party for some food and company, were home before midnight.

Rounded out the new year by seeing Battle of the Five Armies, a long and boring movie about some dwarfs and elves and humans. And a hobbit. It was... not a good movie. Very predictable, with 'heroes in danger who will rescue them?!?' over and over again. Some stuff happened, and a breathtaking number of creatures were killed with no apparent loss of blood, because PG-13. But: not good.

Let's get this out of the way: the Lord of the Rings books are dated and racist. It's great that Tolkien came up with a fully realized fantasyland but the books have not held up well. If you want to read a fantasy classic that is still relevant then please read The Once and Future King by T.H. White. Heck even the later Harry Potter books are better than LotR.

LotR are part of the canon because it helped create a genre and set a very high standard for storytelling but the light/nature vs. dark/industrialism is too limited for modern (read: not overtly racist) tastes. That table-flat  / paper thin character structure leads to hundreds of thousands of orcs getting killed like cockroaches because they are evil and evil is bad and I'm six years old and can we get Liam Neeson in here I love when he kills things.

To be fair: nothing that Peter Jackson did to all the hundreds of thousands of dead orcs was as grotesque as the cash grab he executed when he stretched the Hobbit into three movies. You would think that Jackson would (eventually) run out of stuff to say. Well, you would think so until you remembered that his first three LotR movies were a marathon interminable slog. The advantage of those movies is that he had a lot more to work with than he did in the Hobbit.

Enjoy it on video at home. You can take snack breaks during the dull parts, which is most of them.

Point of interest: How do you stab someone and not get blood on your sword / knife / spear? If I cut myself shaving I bleed like a stuck pig for 20 minutes. If you get stabbed to death in the Hobbit movie you die from, ummm, something not blood loss. So that part was plain silly. Perfectly acceptable to decapitate any number of Orcs and also kill a huge dragon and burn up enormous numbers of villagers in fires and so forth. But no blood, because that would be scary. Censorship is real.