Tuesday, August 31, 2004

BBC NEWS | Europe | Berlin bear's break-out bid fails

BBC NEWS | Europe | Berlin bear's break-out bid fails: "Juan the Andean spectacled bear first paddled across a moat using a log for a raft, then scaled a wall.

Finally he appeared to commandeer a bicycle, before zookeepers with brooms cornered him, and a colleague picked him off with a tranquiliser gun."

keep fighting the good fight juan the andrean spectacled bear. we're on your side my friend.

Monday, August 30, 2004

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Frustrated chimp takes up smoking

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Frustrated chimp takes up smoking

i formally exempt the bbc from all war coverage to dedicate 100% of resources to continuing this line of reporting.

regards,
rj renolds jesus.

Saturday, August 21, 2004

members of the biomedical community, please commence pant unzippage

perhaps i'm just a lot geekier than thou, but i think the hubmed interface to the pubmed service is fucking amazing. not only does it allow you to generate rss feeds of queries (turgidity increasing...) but it also utilizes touchgraph, a visualization applet for relational grouping & traversal (climax achieved!).

if this is all over your head, but you are a big medical journal kinda person, drop me a line and i will walk you through it.

regards,
peer-reviewed jesus.

If faced with a bear, play drunk.

This article is about a bear who went into campers' coolers and drank all their beer. I found it hilarious when it said the bear tried the Busch, but then switched to the local microbrew. That's awesome. But only 36 beers. Either the bear is a light-weight, or the people he stole the beers from where a bunch of old ladies. But the best was what the rangers used as bait to trap him.

Of course, after being charge with public drunkeness and sleeping it off in the drunk cave, he had to call his cousin the Molsen bear to bail him out. And with the Canadian-American exchange rate, the Molsen bear is going to have to whore himself out some more to the corporate pimps.

Commenting on his cousin's binge, the Molsen bear replied, "We knew this was coming. It was just a matter of time. It all started with the picnic baskets back at Jellystone; Ranger Smith warned us. The picnic baskets were just a "gateway" for him to experiment with new things. I also blame that little friend of his, Boo Boo."

Friday, August 20, 2004

Boing Boing - Stealth Lynndie-ing

genius.

UPDATE: link fixed

Thursday, August 19, 2004

with friends like these, who needs friends?

i asked in the crease for some advice on a secondary app the other day. this is what he had to say:

I left [the fields] blank. But I think there was one or two with a drop down menu with either 'Yes' or 'No'. Otherwise, blank. Like the look on your face when you see a naked lady. No expression. Because it doesn't interest you. Because you don't swing that way. Unless there's a keyboard attached to her chest.


i would probably be a lot more pissed off if it wasn't so true. i asked my good friend heidi klum to to go ahead and replace her buttermilk-filled tits with a keyboard. here are the results for your edification (that's how torless says 'jacking-off-purposes'):



should i make a joke about repetitive stress injury here? it's tough to tell. in the crease, anonymous, you fuck-faces always seem to be full of bright ideas, why don't you guys caption it? the best caption gets an order of nachos (is a single order an order of nacho?) from 7-11, on the house.

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

The Power of God Compels You...to Waste Paper

I thought that this was kind of funny - phonebook-tearing pastor. He went through 39 in three minutes. But I think he sinned when he got greedy and said, "Oh, I wanted forty." Nevertheless, the feat was very impressive, I mean, I can bearly rip open my bag of chips without breaking a sweat. But then again, he does have the power of God on his side, so there was some bias. He should totally enter the World's Strongest Man Competition.

People started to get suspicous, though, when they found out that the name of person handing him the phonebooks was Lou C. Fir.

Monday, August 16, 2004

interview with john perry barlow

reason magazine has an interview with the eff's john perry barlow that i found interesting. it's about copyright, libertarianism, politics, media, etc. it touches many of the same themes as the alan moore interview i linked to earlier, so if you enjoyed that, take a look at this one as well.

The way most people get paid for work done with their minds is on that basis. Lawyers, doctors, and architects don’t work for royalties, and they’re doing fine. Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.

Trying to own intellectual products and creating an economy of scarcity around them as we do with physical objects is very harmful to the development of culture and the ability to speak freely, and a very important principle not talked about much, which is the right to know. I think we have a right to know. It shouldn’t be something we have to purchase.
[...]
But by virtue of our abdication, a very authoritarian, assertive form of government has taken over. And oddly enough, it is doing so in the guise of libertarianism to a certain extent. Most of the people in the think tanks behind the Bush administration’s current policies are libertarians, or certainly free marketeers. We’ve got two distinct strains of libertarianism, and the hippie-mystic strain is not engaging in politics, and the Ayn Rand strain is basically dismantling government in a way that is giving complete open field running to multinational corporatism.
[...]
You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment -- the Internet -- with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different ways to find out what’s going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony of viewpoints that doesn’t have any political coherence at all, a beautiful melee, but it doesn’t have the capacity to create large blocs of belief.

The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.


personally, i've given up on libertarianism. the vast majority of people like being lied to and given milk in little cardboard containers with bendy-straws and being told that it's nap time. that's why i'm supporting morgan freeman and the redemopublicratican party, which runs on the following platform: "and of course, when elected, the redemopublicratican party promises a boot stomping the face of every american for eternity. that is our solemn vow." (read the whole series over on pinkerton's blog...pretty funny.)

regards,
absentee-ballot jesus

formal apology to cnn, kick in the nuts to bbc

i think i owe an appology to cnn for singling out their reportage of non-news. in the interest of complete transparency, bbc loves to do it too, like in this story about insect gambling in hong kong.

A police spokesman said the Far East Friends of Crickets Social Club was raided following a surveillance operation by undercover officers.

Cricket fighting is legal in Hong Kong, but gambling on the result is not.
[...]
Cricket fights, which were a popular pastime in the 1950s and 60s, are quite rare in modern Hong Kong.

For one thing, the widespread use of pesticides has reduced the availability of suitable fighters. [ed: hilarious.]

It is reported that a champion cricket can cost more than $2,500.


bbc: what the fuck! you guys have got to focus up here! WAR, OKAY? THERE'S A WAR. AND GENOCIDE (presumably). AND THE OLSEN TWINS ARE IN COLLEGE. do you know what kind of panties they're wearing today? i sure don't, because you're not fucking telling me bbc! get with the fucking program.

jesus.

Friday, August 13, 2004

Who would have thought drinking made you stupid, too?

I have taken it upon myself to bring to the 4 or 5 readers of this blog more recent and relevant news. On CNN's website I found this article. The guy actually told the police to arrest him because he was driving drunk. WTF?! Maybe he didn't have enough for a cab home. Dude, call me, I'll come pick you up.

Anyway, don't be stupid like this guy. First, for trying to drive home drunk. Second, for telling the police to arrest him.

CNN.com - Girl testifies Disney's Tigger molested her - Aug 3, 2004

good thing there's not a war going on. or genocide....or the mcats.

i can't wait to see pictures from the courtroom of jurors trying on the tigger suit and groping each other.

UPDATE: via a scornful and contemptuous email, the increasingly annoying 'in the crease' has informed me that this is an old story, and tigger was acquitted. note to in the crease: go fuck yourself. shouldn't you be memorizing lines from the simpson's 4th season dvd or something? look, i'm not a cnn kind of guy, alright? i'm too busy jacking off to ashleigh banfield to keep up with cnn's 'aligator shits out live chicken' and 'girl marries man who once burried her alive' garbage on a daily basis.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

work sucks

ah, i remember the moribund days of being a career man. you probably didn't know this, but i used to be a strategic management consultant for mordechai consulting group in galilee from 20 AD - 24 AD. those were four long years. don't get me wrong though, it wasn't all bad. actually, i was a full baller: the pinstripe tunics made from the finest goat fur, the german donkey carts, you know how i get down. i was pulling in a pretty respectable 300 sheckles a year, which was maybe below my market value -- being the son of god and all -- but it kept me laced up in butter-soft leathers and cristal.

but i always felt something was missing. that certain joi de vivre, as they say in canada. those godless and deoderantless europeans got it right. of course, there's been talk about the relationship between religion and corporate buffoonery since the days of max weber, and we hear about it today as well.

niall ferguson restirrs the pot in this opinion piece for the la times (registration required):

Why is this? For one thing, Americans have much shorter vacations than Europeans. While German, Italian and French workers enjoy, on average, more than 40 days of vacation a year, the average American has to make do with just two weeks.

But this is only part of a growing transatlantic disparity in patterns of work.

There are, for example, many more Europeans out of work than Americans; over the last decade, U.S. unemployment has averaged 4.6%, compared with 9.2% for the European Union.

Then there is the familiar European penchant for strikes. Between 1992 and 2001, the Spanish economy lost, on average, 271 days per thousand employees as a result of industrial action. For Denmark, Italy, Finland, Ireland and France, the figures lay between 80 and 120. The figure for the United States was just 50.
[...]
In 1999, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average American in employment worked just under 2,000 hours a year (1,976). The average German worked just 1,535 — fully 22% less. According to a recent U.S. study, the average Frenchman works a staggering 32% less.
[...]
You see, the most remarkable thing about the transatlantic divergence in working patterns is that it has coincided almost exactly with a comparable divergence in religiosity, both in terms of observance and belief.

According to the Gallup Millennium Survey of religious attitudes (conducted in 1999), 48% of people in Western Europe nowadays almost never go to church; the figure for Eastern Europe is just a little lower at 44%. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, less than one in 10 of the population now attends church at least once a month. Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland does more than a third of the population worship once a month or more often.

By contrast, more than twice as many North Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more.


personally, i think this argument is bunk. if religiousness was indeed a contributing factor, then why is italy just two polio cases away from being considered a third-world country?

me, personally, i think that americans just don't know how to enjoy life. in fact, i think that we are expressly forbidden from doing so by our politicians and media. i mean, kids have to be given orders to turn off nickelodeon...BY NICKELODEON!

and now researchers in the u.s. found the genes responsible for transforming monkeys from lazy dumb-fucks into shit-throwing workaholics. i know at least two corporate types that had some stuff leak out of their pee-pees when they read that article, but why shouldn't they be excited? it's only a matter of time before such modifications become de rigueur (that's french for "explosive diarrhea").

what advice can i give you? none. except for this: are you sick of your job? then burn that bitch to the ground.

regards,
motivational speaker jesus.

Sunday, August 08, 2004

Giving health care to those who need it most.

I can't believe that we spend money on teaching gorillas how to sign. And not only that, but how quick they got the doctors to give her a check up. I mean, I'm still waiting the doctor to pull the endoscope out of my ass.

But, maybe I'm being too harsh. The animal was in pain, and they took care of it. And it is amazing that she is able to communicate so effectively with humans. I guess she can sign to the patients sitting in the waiting rooms of the doctors who treated her why they can't get treatment today because of some hairy animal. I can image one hand gesture that those patients can give her right back.

But image the hazing the doctors had to have received after returning to their hospitals.

Ahh, the American health system. So quick to respond to a hairy beast while millions have no care. Only in America.

By the way, the kitten in the picture must have been shitting itself after realizing it was face to face with a gorilla with better health care than most of America.

Thursday, August 05, 2004

see timmy? dreams DO come true!

mary k. letourneau is a free woman at last. well, as free as any level 2 sex offender can be.

Letourneau, 42, pleaded guilty to raping Fualaau when he was 12. The case has spawned books, a made-for-TV movie and relentless media attention from around the world.


they forgot to mention "innumerable masturbatory fantasies" in that list.

As a Level 2 sex offender, Letourneau is considered likely to reoffend. She is living in a house south of Seattle near the airport, to be close to the two daughters she has with Fualaau and for the sake of convenience when her four other children visit from Alaska, a friend of Letourneau's said.
[...]
Letourneau was a 34-year-old elementary school teacher in Des Moines in an unhappy marriage when, in 1996, her friendship with 12-year-old Fualaau mutated into flirtation and then sex. Their passion raged out of control, Fualaau testified in a 2002 civil trial. "We had sex in the gym, we had sex in the girl's bathroom and we had sex in her classroom," he said in court.

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Damn dirty tree huggers

I find it ironic that these so-called eco-tourists were traveling on a gasoline powered boat. What fucking hypocrites! What's the matter, was their boat that runs on nice thoughts and self-righteousness in the shop?

It seems no one was hurt. Good thing too, because it would have been difficult for them to drive home in their SUV's if they were unable to shift on the fly into four-wheel drive to get over that speed bump in the parking lot.

But all's well that ends well, everybody's shirt collars stayed up. Except for one guy, whose collar was a little limp on the right side due to the ordeal. I heard it's being sent back to J. Crew for inspection. I just hope that the guy didn't remove the "Inspected by #'x'" sticker so it can be put on that Inspector's permanent record.

Unfortunately, cleaning up the mess proved to be a bit hectic. They were unable to predict the flow of the oil since the clean-up crew mistakenly trained using ping-pong balls instead of popcorn to simulate oil spills.

Kids say the darndest things.

Funny thing I heard the other day. I was walking down to the subway in our fair city, which is much like the underground world in Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone and Dennis Rodman (aka Welsey Snipes), soundtrack by Sting, when I overheard a little girl ask her dad, "Why does it smell down here?"

I promply yelled out, "Because the bums piss here!" and proceeded to pee on her and her family.

Sunday, August 01, 2004

funny haha?

not sure if this is funny or depressing, via a post-gazette article on troops in central asia, and that was via john robb:

Manas Air Field near the capital of Kyrgyzstan now hosts more than 1,150 U.S. servicemen, the largest American military presence in Central Asia outside Afghanistan.

Yet "some of them still don't know where they are," joked Lt. Col. Stan Giles, the base chaplain. "You know, there's an old saying: 'War is God's way of teaching geography to Americans.' "

healthcare on the cheap

gross anatomy has an interesting rant about wal-mart's healthcare practices. basically, they don't have any. via the documents linked to in his post:

Employers who don't provide affordable coverage are abusing the system and their workers by passing the costs onto the taxpayers, other businesses and their workers. Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the US is also the largest abuser of the system. High insurance premiums and deductibles keep more than two-thirds of Wal-Mart workers—that's nearly 700,000 workers—from participating in the Wal-Mart health plan. Traditional supermarket employees have about 80% coverage.
[...]
Wal-Mart’s actions shifts $1 billion onto the shoulders of other employers and taxpayers.
[...]
On a wage of $8.00 an hour with about 32 hours a week--$1,000 a month, most associates can’t afford even the low end range of Wal-Mart health insurance, $250 a month, or 25% of their gross income for Wal-Mart’s family health insurance.
[...quotes below are from the second article...]
A snapshot of Georgia's program for uninsured children shows that it's packed with kids of Wal-Mart employees. A state survey found 10,261 of the 166,000 children covered by Georgia's PeachCare for Kids health insurance in September 2002 had a parent working for Wal-Mart Stores. That's about 14 times the number for next highest employer: Publix, with 734.
[...]
The ratio of Wal-Mart employees' children per company worker in Georgia, though, greatly exceeds those of Publix and Shaw Industries and Mohawk Industries, the Nos. 3 and 4 employers on the PeachCare list.

Wal-Mart, with 42,000 workers in the state in 2002, had about one child in the health care program for every four employees. The ratio for Publix was one child in PeachCare for every 22 employees. For Shaw, it was one for every 30 employees, and for Mohawk, one for every 26 workers.
[...]
About half of Wal-Mart's U.S. workers are covered under the company medical plan, considered a low participation rate for large companies. But Fogleman said the total of employees with health insurance is 90 percent, because many get coverage through a spouse, a parent or a government program such as Medicare.
[...]
Wal-Mart workers can buy individual coverage for as low as $15.25 every two weeks and family coverage for $66.25, Fogleman said. But those options have a deductible of $1,000, meaning that care is paid for by the employee until that ceiling is reached. Then Wal-Mart covers 80 percent of further costs. Wal-Mart says its average spending on medical benefits per employee is $3,100 per year. That's less than the industry average --- about $4,400 for large retailers --- as calculated by Mercer Human Resource Consulting.
[...]
The retail industry typically offers less-generous benefits and imposes longer exclusion periods than others, in part because of high employee turnover, noted Werner Gliebe of Segal Co., an employee benefits and human resources consulting firm. Wal-Mart employees pay about one-third of their health care premiums. That's typical of retailers and exceeds the 20 percent paid by an average Fortune 500 company worker, said Gliebe. "You have a double whammy: People who are lower-paid having to contribute one-third of the cost," Gliebe said. Typically, as a result, fewer employees of retail companies enroll in their benefits plan, he added.


sometimes, wal-mart makes jesus angry.