The Sporadic Curmudgeon

A few minutes ago I received a request from an Australian high-school girl asking if her class could link to Atomic Deathray as part of a project on the future. Regretfully, I had to turn her down. Here’s my reply:

Jennifer,

While I am honored that you would consider linking to my site, I do not believe it would be a good idea. My site would most definitely be considered inappropriate material for a high-school class. It is not intended for minors, as I tend to express intemperate opinions with accompanying tasteless illustrations. Linking to my site would probably cause everyone involved a lot of grief, so please don’t.

I wish the world weren’t this way, but as you know here in the USA we have a hyper-religious cretinous Nazi zealot who can’t get the concept of “free speech” through his thick neanderthal skull running the Justice Department.

See? Inappropriate.

Sincerely,

David Bryant

The BMJ (British Medical Journal) is running a story with the blood-curdling headline Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness. It’s your basic Big Pharm kickback scheme, of course. But there are more troubling aspects. All you have to do is look at 20th-century history to see that this is bad, real bad.

From Germany’s extermination camp warmup exercises to the USSR’s gulags to the forced-sterilization programs here in the US; all began with inconvenient people being conveniently labelled as “mentally ill.”

A glance at the recent torture memos drawn up by this criminal administration will convince you that Bush and his accessories are unrestrained by human decency. This “screening” should worry you.

Anyone still supporting Bush at this point is either immoral or hopelessly stupid.

Calm down. It’s geography, not sex.

It isn’t often you see a headline like this: F*cking villagers vote against name change. God bless Ananova.

Turns out there is a village in Austria called, I kid you not, Fucking, in honor of a man named Fuck. (”A man named Fuck” sounds like a porno Spaghetti Western, doesn’t it?)

The 150 inhabitants recently voted on whether to change the name, because British tourists keep stealing their roadsigns.

Of course we’ve got our share of funky place names here in the US, like the oft-cited Intercourse, PA. Did you ever stop to consider what Grand Tetons actually means?

Update August 29, 2005 @ 10:00 AM: Both John C. and John H. have informed me that Fucking has now converted to theft-proof signs. Thanks for the info, guys!

Update August 29, 2005 @ 10:00 PM: My wife sent me this link to an extremely funny version of the story from Yahoo!® News. It just doesn’t get any better than the last few paragraphs.

I was reading the responses to a photography article on kuro5hin entitled Is Forgoing Digital for Medium Format for You? when I noticed the following line:

In the end, every layman and pro who saw the 30×40 prints picked the digital “snapshot” with a cheap $99 lens over the best of mediculously prepared Medium Format shots.

Ah, mediculously. Meticulous to the point of being ridiculous about it. Overzealous attention to detail. A perfect new word. It sings.

I did a dictionary and Google search. Ixnay on the dictionary, but quite a few showed up on Google. Every one I looked at seemed to be either a typo or writing by ear (much like the irritatingly frequent use of “then” for “than” by people that should know better).

Are we witnessing the birth of a new portmanteau word? I know it’s a new addition to my vocabulary.

I’ve been test-driving the new Mozilla-based dedicated web browser Firefox for a couple of days now, and it’s a beaut. This baby’s fast, and you can customize to your little heart’s content.

Download’s only a tad over 4 MB, the install is a snap, it can block popups and ads, and it’ll use your existing bookmarks. What are you waiting for? Get your ass over there right now.

Editor’s Note: Please forgive the tone of this “review.” I’m going in for a colonoscopy in about three hours and I haven’t eaten since Monday night. It’s almost ten AM Wednesday. Feeling somewhat odd. I will tell all in grisly detail later if I’m up to it.

We just can’t ignore it any more. The clumsiness, the slurred and incomprehensible speech, the unbridled bloodlust… I think it’s time to finally ask the question that’s been in the back of our minds for quite a while now:

Is George W. Bush a zombie?

Now, it may seem shocking to openly suggest that the Leader Of The Free World® is a fetid, hulking reanimated corpse befouling the earth with its unnatural existence, but is it really any more unlikely than the other scenarios this Administration has asked us to swallow lately?

Bush probably croaked during the notorious pretzel incident. There was a panic and nobody knew what to do, so Rove took charge. That night he performed some obscene blood ceremonies over the cadaver in the Rose Garden while Ashcroft mouthed unholy incantations with his spittle-flecked rubbery lips. Before you know it the rapidly decaying inhuman abomination was back in the saddle, ready to continue its midnight ride into the Apocalypse.

I tell you, there’s nothing like the good old American can-do attitude. Especially when it comes to creating malignant Republican monstrosities that corrupt all they touch. We excel at that.

Yikes! A woman walked into a Columbian prison recently with a live grenade hidden in her vagina. Later it went off when some inmates were playing with it (the grenade, not the vagina), killing three and injuring 15.

And no, this isn’t related to the exploding penis story I mentioned here a while back.

When I left the apartment this morning on my way to run some errands I got a wonderful surprise: seven cars in the parking lot had had their tires slashed. Mine included. One woman got off lucky; she only lost one tire. The rest of us lost all four. You can view the carnage here.

What gets me is that it wasn’t even something personal. Whoever it was just went down the row.

Mean and stupid. Causes all the trouble in the world.

This isn’t going to help my wife’s growing antipathy toward Las Vegas. I must confess, this kind of thing makes it difficult for me to disagree with her. We may have to bail on this cesspool.

The company I work for closed down for the afternoon and sent the entire development team to play nine holes of Battle Golf in 104° F Las Vegas heat today. Oddly enough, this wasn’t punishment.

Normally athletics and programmers don’t mix, but this was a lot of fun, with far fewer fatalities than that unfortunate catapult-bowling incident last September. As usual I took a buttload of pictures with my “disposable” Dakota Camera.

I’m happy to report that it wasn’t anywhere near as pathetic as I feared. I’d never golfed before, and seem to possess some natural ability. The only problem is that now I’m having a disturbing compulsion to move to the ‘burbs, get a riding mower, start smoking a pipe and refer to my daughter as “Pumpkin.”