The Sporadic Curmudgeon

Some people just have way too much time on their hands, as is borne out by this page on cantilever coin stacking. Actually, it is kind of cool. Maybe I’ll bring a few rolls of pennies in to work tomorrow…

I just realized that we are witnessing a vital, historic struggle for the direction of America. It’s one of the most important events in our nation’s history, like the Civil War or McCarthy, Kennedy or World War II. Our fate, our survival as an ideal, is in the balance.

No matter how this turns out, we must be observant. Someday we must bear witness.

The poster boy for unbridled avarice and stupidity, Senator Rick “man-on-dog sex” Santorum, is sponsoring a bill that would forbid the National Weather Service from competing with commerical weather services such as Accuweather and The Weather Channel. Among other things, this means the spectacularly useful National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website would go dark.

Of course, people’s lives depend on the NOAA’s data, but that’s immaterial. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with the holy bottom line. Gutting science while putting people at risk for a handful of silver is a Republican tradition, after all.

And after the NOAA has been forced to dismantle its data-gathering apparatus, what happens when a company that’s providing the vital information (for a fee, naturally) goes belly-up because of, say, accounting improprieties a la Enron?

I remember when we used to be afraid of foreign threats to our nation. Those were the good old days. This bill must be stopped. It’s stupid and dangerous.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Bush’s wrongheaded dismissal of global warming? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried to bury inconvenient facts. Has any American administration in history been this hostile to objective reality?

OK, I’ve officially had enough. Now people are seeing an image of the Virgin Mary in a stain beneath a Chicago underpass.

We’ve had Jesus in a dental X-ray, a brick, a frying pan and an oyster shell. I’ve seen Mary pop up on the side of mailboxes and in discolored windows.

For some reason, the mainstream press gives these “apparitions” news space that could otherwise be devoted to what it’s supposed to be devoted to, namely covering the malfeasance of the Bush administration.

Therefore, in an attempt to correct the balance, I am asking that you, my readers, report absolutely anything resembling Jesus, Mary, crosses, popes, Holy Ghosts and the like to the media. The more disgusting and questionable the object on which the image appears, the better: puke stains outside nightclubs, piles of dogshit, strings of plantar warts, etc..

It would also be good if you could persuade a bunch of idiots to stand around the image with tears streaming down their faces. Local TV stations eat that crap up.

Personally, I’m going to be on the lookout for holy toilet bowl stains. And it’s not like we have to worry about blasphemy; the Catholic Church just trumped us all by electing an ex-Nazi Pope who talks about making the Church “smaller and purer.” (Am I the only one that gets nervous when Germans in positions of authority start talking about purity?)

P.S. Hey, kids! Don’t forget to check your underwear for faith-affirming skidmarks!

A New York man was arrested for threatening the life of a federal judge today.

What could have caused this? Hmmm… let me think…

Well, on March 31 Tom DeLay released a press release concerning the Schiavo case containing this statement threatening federal judges:

The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior…

And on April 8, addressing a meeting of prominent conservative “leaders” in Washington, DC, lawyer/author Edwin Vieira made an interesting observation:

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.”

As Senator Frank Lautenberg has pointed out, it is against the law to threaten the life of a judge. All this hysterical Republican propaganda about “judicial tyranny” has consequences. “It’s just political hyperbole” doesn’t cut it. Given the right-wing mindset, such language is deliberately calculated to encourage some unhinged religious fanatic to kill liberal judges. It has no other purpose. This is terroristic intimidation, pure and simple.

It’s not a new tactic, of course. I refer you to Henry II’s “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Becket, of course, could (briefly) have testified to its efficacy.

My question is this: in light of the rash of violence against the judiciary, why are these two still walking the streets? At the very least, they should be charged with incitement. Or is threatening the life of a government official only illegal if you’re a Democrat?

I am absolutely flabbergasted that high officials in the US Government and their lickspittle toadies are actively calling for the assassination of judges that don’t toe the line. Doesn’t sound much like America, or even democracy, to me. “It can’t happen here?” Tough shit, kids. It already has.

A Swedish man climbing a mountain peak on the island of Koh Puh (apparently near Phuket) got some amazing photographs of the December 2004 tsunami hitting the beach.

Fuck.

A month or so ago, my Windows 2K box went tits up. Catastrophic hard drive failure. Luckily, I’d noticed it making some funky noises, so I backed all my data up. Finances being what they usually are, I’m having to wait until the ol’ IRS refund check comes in to replace the drive and Windows.

So I’ve been using my Linux box instead. There’s just one problem with that: I do a lot of multimedia work. Video editing, graphics, you name it. I decided to install some multimedia software on the Linux machine so I could continue my work.

As a result, my weekend is shot all to hell. I have just spent the last four goddamn fucking hours trying to install one single goddamn fucking son-of-a-bitch application. It’s not even an application I’ll be using; it’s an application that the application I want to run uses in the background.

I find the program. I start the install.

Dependency problems. It says I have to install another program.

That program says it requires a library file that’s missing on my system.

Problem is, that file is sitting there in the correct directory. I’m looking at it now. Google search.

Find hidden dependencies. Each corrected dependency calls for another install and another round of unsatisfied dependencies.

I have so far installed (or attempted to, anyway):

1. piave (used by the app I want to use: KDenlive)
2. gcc c++ (the version I was using was too new)
3. libstdc++
4. libstdc++ devel
5. gcc devel
6. libxml2
7. libxml2 devel
8. libraw1394
9. libraw 1394 devel
10. libavc1394
11. libavc1394 devel
12. libSDL
13. libxorg-x11
14. libxorg-x11 devel

Most of these were actually on my system; they just weren’t the version the app was expecting. I finally gave up after the last round of dependency errors.

So here I sit, it’s well after 4 PM and my day is gone never to return, and I STILL HAVEN’T GOTTEN THE MOTHERFUCKER TO INSTALL!!!!!!

I’m not an idiot. I make my living programming computers. I’ve been at it a while, too: I wrote my first program before most of you were born. And I have to say that if a guy like me can’t figure out how to install one simple little application without it eating up every microsecond of my weekend then it’s too goddamned fucking complicated.

Hey Linux guys: you want to beat Microsoft on the desktop? Solve the goddamned motherfucking software dependency problem. A software install should be a simple double-click on an icon, like Windows. Otherwise it just ain’t gonna happen.

Jesus Fucking H. Christ.

New infra-red imaging techniques developed for the analysis of satellite data has been applied to the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a collection of heretofore illegible document fragments discovered in an ancient Graeco-Egyption garbage dump in the late nineteenth century. The revealed texts contain both unknown works and works feared lost forever. The ancient authors represented include Sophocles, Hesiod, Euripides and others.

Only a small part of the collection has been analyzed so far, but indications are that the collection will yield some five million words, increasing the total classical corpus by 20 percent.

Our picture of the ancient Mediterranean just got a lot sharper. I can’t wait for this to be published.

A drunken Welshman eating a shish-kabob has ended up as one himself. After returning home from a pub crawl with friends, he dropped his trousers and underwear, waddled to the window and shouted “who wants some of this?” He then lost his balance and fell out the window, impaling himself on a railing below.

The victim had done the same thing the night before, minus the auto-defenestration.

The inquest also heard from David Wilson who shared the flat with Mr Mason.

Mr Mason had appeared at the window in a similar manner the night before, he said, but that time was saved from falling through by a friend who managed to grab him.

The following morning when they had sobered up, he said Mr Mason had acknowledged what a dangerous stunt it was.

Given God’s well-known fondness for ironic deaths, I’m relieved Mason wasn’t eating bangers and mash.

While fiddling around with the new satellite imagery in Google Maps, I stumbled across the words "Eat Pecans" gouged into the ground a few miles southeast of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

It’s not the Cerne Abbas Giant or the Nazca Lines, but it’s still kind of cool.