Saturday, April 30, 2005

"the future never meets us in the ways we imagine."

dumpster

the titular quotation is from a great piece on the relationship between the unabomber and his brother (ted and david kaczynski) by stephen j. dubner (via).

it's kinda surreal to read...you get this impression that they are each other's dopplegangers.

anyway, a great read, check it out.

Ted, as it turned out, was more than eager to talk about David. And about pretty much everything. The life of a notorious prisoner, he admits, has its advantages. He lives on "Celebrity Row," a group of eight cells protected from the prison's general population...Among them, he says, are Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, and Timothy McVeigh. One can only imagine this bombing trio's conversations. Kaczynski says McVeigh (who has recently been transferred to another prison) lent him one of the most interesting books he's read lately...
[...]
When I ask Ted what he would say to David if he were in the room now, he answers, "Nothing. I just wouldn't talk to him. I would just turn my back and wouldn't talk to him."

David, who lives in upstate New York and works as a counselor at a teenage-runaway shelter, says he still loves his brother. He has written him repeatedly, offering at least one apology, but Ted has not answered. In order to gain forgiveness, Ted writes, David must renounce the "lies" he has told about Ted, leave his wife and remove himself from modern society. "If he does not redeem himself," Ted adds, "then as far as I am concerned he is the lowest sort of scum, and the sooner he dies, the better."

It is as awkward to face the gulf between these two brothers as it is difficult to overestimate the depth of feeling that once passed between them. Ted's life was steeped in rejection, isolation and anger; through it all, his younger brother was the only person ever to connect with him.


(pic is of an overturned, abused dumpster on upenn's campus)

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Friday, April 29, 2005

you think anybody wants a roundhouse kick to the face while i'm wearing these bad boys? forget about it.


2508506749550373
Originally uploaded by jhc.
Why do you love me? Why do you need me? Always and forever... We met in a chatroom, now our love can fully bloom... Sure the world wide web is great, but you, you make me salivate... I love technology, but not as much as you, you see... But I STILL love technology... Always and forever. Our love is like a flock of doves, flying up to heaven above... always and forever, always and forever... Why do you need me? Why do you love me? Always and forever...

god, i never get sick of napoleon dynamite shit.

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mp3 aggregator & social playlists

tagged truck

waxy quicklinks points to the hype machine, a caching mp3 "aggregator" (of sorts) that is generated from various mp3 blogs. in addition to downloading crap, you can also stream the day's playlist -- although performance was very choppy when i tried today (traffic to the site very well might be spiked right now b/c of the waxing, so i reserve judgement.)

along the same lines in the world of internet audio is alf eaton's playr, which allows you to create streamable playlists of any web-hosted mp3s via bookmarklets. additionally, it uses flickr's authentication & social networking services, enabling you to recommend playlists to your flickr friends. VERY VERY cool shit.

i didn't even know that flickr exposed these services, but -- as playr shows -- this opens the door for boatloads of apps to piggyback on flickr's existing social-nets, thereby lowering the barrier of entry for new social-network based services. (sidenote: maybe the entire social network api should be abstracted away into a seperate service???) i could see this type of piggybacking presenting a problem if you want to allow certain people in one social-net but preclude them from another, but i guess flickr already allows some granularity in their social network: contacts, friends, or family.

(pic is of a tagged up truck, perpetually sitting infront of the chinese grocer on 10th and vine)

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Thursday, April 28, 2005

some lisp jokes...you can basically skip this post

tree

via /.'s review of peter seibel's practical common lisp (online version here):

  • My other car is a cdr.
  • [Ed. note: okay okay, that was terrible, but...drumroll please...]
  • Today is the car of the cdr of your life. [somewhat tragically, this one made me laugh out loud for a second until i caught myself...]


i appologize for that outburst of geekiness.
now back to our regularly scheduled debauchery...

(pic is of a tree (obviously) taken on a beautiful day in rittenhouse sq.)

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Monday, April 25, 2005

my head is fucking killing me right now

look at this shit:

troops

look at it.

read this...seriously:

Protect our troops - from the womb to the war. What if the fetus you were going to abort would grow up to be a soldier bringing democracy to a godless dictatorship?


emphasis is fucking mine.

it goes on, but i can't bring myself to post the rest. i beg you, please click on the previous link and read the whole thing.

you know, i don't really care that much about abortion or war or whatever: as long as i am kept balls-deep in czech whores, i'm a pretty happy guy...to each his own i guess. but this just makes me want to spend the rest of my life living in a hole in the ground eating my own shit.

UPDATE: whew...gse points out in comments that this is a parody. the product is real, but meant to be ironic. all is well in the world, and i can go back to my normal life of eating 7-11 nachos carefully balanced on my stomach while watching videos of the olsen twins shopping in milan.

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Friday, April 22, 2005

modern dating

dalmation

makeoutcity points to an interesting interview w/ rabbi shmuley boteach (author of kosher sex) on modern living & relationships:

I've asked women in female audiences around the world, it's so funny to see this - no matter where you are, be it a non-Jewish audience in the Netherlands two months ago, to Jewish audiences in New York, "who here needs a man?" You will see three or four hands go up. I don't mean three or four percent, I mean three or four hands. And then I say to them, "Do you need a refrigerator?" All the hands go up. The inability to be vulnerable is the problem: it's the depth personality not the surface personality that has to fall in love.

Now that we no longer see love as a need, but as a luxury, what's the definition of a luxury? A luxury always has to be the best. When it comes to necessity, "good enough is good enough." When it comes to luxury: only the best. The luxury items are always Gucci… When love becomes a luxury not a necessity, "nah, I'm not gonna marry anyone. I need the best, because I could live without it. It's not a need." When it comes to food, I don't need the best restaurant. I need food that's good. But if food became a luxury, we'd all go to five star restaurants, because it's not a necessity and we could live without it. We're a generation that's incapable of identifying our core needs.


tangentially, assemble me points to some interesting data from the census bureau's mother's day fact sheet:

25.1: Average age of women when they give birth for the first time — a record high. The average age has risen nearly four years since 1970


regards,
a very single jesus h. christos.

(pic is of dalmation mural on 6th btwn. south st. & bainbridge st.)

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Wednesday, April 20, 2005

levitt on bagels and honesty

pics

steven levitt is a crazy guy: an economist that studies random shit like the effects of distinctively african american names on earning potential (none...in the long term), correlations between abortion and crime rates (inverse), and now: bagel thievery (via kottke's interview):

In 1984, when [paul f.'s] research institute fell under new management, he took a look at his career and grimaced. ''I was sick of every aspect of the whole thing,'' he says. ''I was discouraged. I was tired of chasing contracts. So I said to management: 'I'm getting out of this. I'm going to sell bagels [on the honor system].'''
[...]
He had also -- quite without meaning to -- designed a beautiful economic experiment. By measuring the money collected against the bagels taken, he could tell, down to the penny, just how honest his customers were. Did they steal from him? If so, what were the characteristics of a company that stole versus a company that did not? Under what circumstances did people tend to steal more, or less?
[...]
...he will say that telecom companies have robbed him blind, and another bagel-delivery man found that law firms aren't worth the trouble. He also says he believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He reached this conclusion in part after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors -- an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service and administrative employees. Maybe, he says, the executives stole bagels out of a sense of entitlement. (Or maybe cheating is how they got to be executives.) His biggest surprise? ''I had idly assumed that in places where security clearance was required for an individual to have a job, the employees would be more honest than elsewhere. That hasn't turned out to be true.''
[...]
He has identified two great overriding predictors of a company's honesty: morale and size. Paul F. has noted a strong correlation between high payment rates and an office where people seem to like their boss and their work. (This is one of his intuitive conclusions.) He also gleans a higher payment rate from smaller offices. (This one is firmly supported by the data.) An office with a few dozen employees generally outpays by 3 percent to 5 percent an office with a few hundred employees. This may seem counterintuitive: in a bigger office, a bigger crowd is bound to convene around the bagel table -- providing more witnesses to make sure you drop your money in the box.
[...]
The bagel data also show a correlation between payment rate and the local rate of unemployment. Intuition might have argued that these two factors would be negatively correlated -- that is, when unemployment is low (and the economy is good), people would tend to be freer with their cash. ''But I found that as the unemployment rate goes down, dishonesty goes up,'' Paul F. says. ''My guess is that a low rate of unemployment means that companies are having to hire a lower class of employee.'' The data also show that the payment rate does not change when he raises bagel prices, though volume may temporarily fall.

If the payment tendencies that Paul F. has noted so far might be called macro trends, it is the micro trends -- those reflecting personal mood -- that are perhaps most compelling. Weather, for instance, has a major effect on the payment rate. Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay a significantly higher rate. Unseasonably cold weather, meanwhile, makes people cheat prolifically; so does heavy rain and wind. But worst are the holidays. The week of Christmas produces a 2 percent drop in payment rates -- again, a 15 percent increase in theft, an effect on the same order, in reverse, as 9/11. Thanksgiving is nearly as bad; the week of Valentine's Day is also lousy, as is the week straddling April 15. There are, however, a few good holidays: July 4, Labor Day and Columbus Day. The difference in the two sets of holidays? The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are freighted with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones.


he's got a book out now too.

(stencil of woman's face in profile is around 20th and chestnut i think...)

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Is It Lactose Free or Not?

Over dinner with JHC and Vin Diesal the other night, they suggested that I begin a reoccuring "Is it lactose free or not?" post; as I am intolerant of only three things: 1) lactose, 2) racism, and 3) the Dutch.

I've recently rediscovered a wonderful product from Trader Joe's, Tofutti Cuties. This is apparently only the tip of the soy-based iceberg from Tofutti. They are only about half the size of your regular ice cream sandwich, but are very good. Like most soy-based products I've tasted, they have a bit of a nutty flavor. And since they have zero fat, endulge. Just don't leave them in your friend's freezer just before he goes out of town; then returns after you leave the country.

I'm looking at you farside301, there had better be some left when I return.

Final verdict: 0 Lactaid pills.

NOTE: This scale is based on the number of Lactaid pills necessary to eat the reviewed product. Therefore, vis-a-vis, condordantly, the lower the better.

Sunday, April 17, 2005

what the??

pics

holy shit, i step away from ETM for a weekend and this is what i get.

who the fuck are you people? and more importantly, why did i invite you to post on my blog?

grab hold of yourselves! fratocrates is spinning in his grave right now.

the REAL vin diesel: what kind of "gossip columnist" are you? the fucking christian science monitor is breaking these stories before you are. i want real gossip, like what connie's ass tastes like (creme brule???).

fing fang foom: i don't even know how to address you. should i cast a spell?

in the crease et al., keep up the mediocre work.

your fearless leader,
jesus henry mother fucking christos.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Nintendo Unplugged

Here is an a cappella group that was doing the music from various Nintendo games. It's actually really good. But who can tell me which games the songs are from? I can't put my 'Up- Down- Up- Down- Left- Right- Left- Right- A- B- A- B- Select- Start' on some of them.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

back from st. louis

gateway arch

went to st. louis mon/tue/wed for an interview.
def. a nice town...not too big, not too small, nice sky & sunsets.

it reminded me a lot of baltimore:
very patchy,
but it doesn't seem like the restuarants are nearly as good
(admittedly, big shoes to fill).

i did walk a mile through monsoon-like conditions for my first del taco experience. was it worth it? not really, but on the way, i stopped at the half-mile point to get fries at rally's...they kicked ass as always.

being in a red state was somewhat strange. religion is not only palpable: it is overt. in addition to churches on every corner, every fifth billboard is of jesus. it made me realize that religion -- for all intents and purposes -- is invisible on the east coast.

(pic is of the gateway arch)

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Wednesday, April 13, 2005

some numbers on social security

bush devil

some numbers on social security, via the past couple harper's indices

Amount to which a San Diego defense analyst’s payments to Social Security had appreciated when he retired in 1994: $261,372

Amount to which he calculated they would have grown if he had invested in a Dow Jones index fund instead: $248,166

Percentage of Social Security contributions that go toward administrative costs: 0.6

Average percentage of contributions to Britain's privatized pension system that do: 30


(pic is stencilled graffiti of gwb w/ horns. a happy coincidence that this pic goes w/ this post...i actually don't care about social security privatization b/c I'M RICH YOU UPPER MIDDLE CLASS FOOLS!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. oh dear, i do think it's tea time.)

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Sunday, April 10, 2005

hilarious

via overheard in new york:

Toothless bag lady: I don't know what it is with this town anymore. I guess no one likes blowjobs. I give great blowjobs! Maybe I'm charging too much.
Cop: What are you charging?
Toothless bag lady: $100.
Cop: That's pretty steep...

--Times Square


Overheard by: Spiney

Saturday, April 09, 2005

seagate 300gb external drive

Wake up Donnie!!!

in short, don't buy the seagate 300gb external hd if you are in the market for an external hd unit. i wish i saw the amazon reviews before i picked this piece of shit up. i've had it for less than 12 hours: so far, my computer can only recognize it sporadically and when recognized, the cocksucker eventually locks my system up hardcore.

however, i've got one of their 160 gb models, and it works fine.

go figure.

(pic is a stencilled grafitti of 'frank' from 'donnie darko' (presumably). somewhere southwest of rittenhouse sq...)

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Thursday, April 07, 2005

more google map satellite image crap

waxy links points to 'google sightseeing,' a blog on interesting images from google map's satellite images. things like area 51, niagra falls, hoover dam, etc.

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Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Who says CEO positions are bad for your health?

Maybe getting that cushy CEO job at McDonald's isn't the best move for your health. After one CEO dies suddenly of a heart attack, his successor dies of colon cancer less than a year later. This third guy will probably have a statue of Mayor McCheese fall on him during a photo op.

The one armed man did it.

Now there's absolutely no excuse you can give that would satisfy parents as to why you can't become a rock climber. This guy had to go and ruin it.

Monday, April 04, 2005

Proper Usage

Yes, our good friends in Indian medicine seem to have come across a medical case so singular that it had to be reported:

Accidental condom inhalation.

Arya CL, Gupta R, Arora VK.

Jaswant Rai Speciality Hospital, Meerut, India.

A 27-year-old lady presented with persistent cough, sputum and fever for the preceding six months. Inspite of trials with antibiotics and anti-tuberculosis treatment for the preceeding four months, her symptoms did not improve. A subsequent chest radiograph showed non-homogeneous collapse-consolidation of right upper lobe. Videobronchoscopy revealed an inverted bag like structure in right upper lobe bronchus and rigid bronchoscopic removal with biopsy forceps confirmed the presence of a condom. Detailed retrospective history also confirmed accidental inhalation of the condom during fellatio.


I won't ask the obvious questions...

Virginity Pledges

Bill Maher wrote about abstinence pledges in Salon.com. (As usual, you'll have to watch an advertisement to get a day pass, but here are some select quotes.

"New Rule: Abstinence pledges make you horny. A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take "virginity" pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just as many STDs as the other kids.

But that's not all -- taking the pledges also makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal. Which leads me to an important question: where were these pledges when I was in high school?

Seriously, when I was a teenager, the only kids having anal intercourse were the ones who missed. My idea of lubrication was oiling my bike chain. If I had known I could have been getting porn star sex the same year I took Algebra II, simply by joining up with the Christian right, I'd have been so down with Jesus they would have had to pry me out of the pew."

Well then. Even better:

"Is there any greater irony than the fact that the Christian Right actually got their precious little adolescent daughters to say to their freshly scrubbed boyfriends: "Please, I want to remain pure for my wedding night, so only in the ass. Then I'll blow you." Well, at least these kids are really thinking outside the box."

Thank you Bill.

Blind MD

Now there's absolutely no excuse you can give that would satisfy parents as to why you can't become a doctor. This guy had to go and ruin it.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

lifestyle choices and cancer

cops

via cnn:

More than 60 percent of all cancer deaths could be prevented if Americans stopped smoking, exercised more, ate healthier food and got recommended cancer screenings, the American Cancer Society reported on Thursday.
[...]
The American Cancer Society estimates that in 2005, more than 168,140 cancer deaths will be caused by tobacco use alone...In addition, scientists estimate that approximately one-third (190,090) of the 570,280 cancer deaths expected to occur in 2005 will be related to poor nutrition, physical inactivity, overweight, obesity and other lifestyle factors.
[...]
Thun said the report was not meant to make cancer patients feel they caused their own disease.

"This says just the opposite. The reality is things like smoking and obesity and physical inactivity are often described as voluntary but the choices we make are made in a social context,
" he said.

"In designing our communities and our lives, we inadvertently have made a lot of choices that work against health."


(photo is of a couple of squad cars, photographed while we were making a late night taco bell run)

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Saturday, April 02, 2005

education for degenerates

unwanted love

for the past year, my fellow classmates and i have been trying to remember the name of a neurological disorder where the afflicted randomly hump inanimate objects. well, thanks to shounuck, the answer is finally here. behold...in all its glory...klüver-bucy syndrome:

Klüver-Bucy syndrome is a rare neurological disorder that causes individuals to put objects in their mouths and engage in inappropriate sexual behavior. Other symptoms may include visual agnosia (inability to visually recognize objects), loss of normal fear and anger responses, memory loss, distractibility, seizures, and dementia. The disorder may be associated with herpes encephalitis and trauma, which can result in brain damage.


for the sake of completeness, it's caused by "[b]ilateral destruction of the amygdaloid body and inferior temporal cortex."

note to self: bilaterally destroy jessica alba's amygdaloid body.

(picture is presumably of a partially scrubbed-off heart tag on koresh dance studio's side door. 20th btwn. chestnut and sansom.)

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