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Saturday, May 31, 2003I'm supposed to leave for Detroit in six hours, and I can't sleep. (I am going to see Roger Clemens this weekend. It will not rain. It will be cool.) I'm hit or miss when it comes to sleeping: some weeks I'm out for twelve hours a night, others I toss and turn for hours, like something that tosses and turns quite a bit for a long time. I can't write a decent metaphor when I can't sleep. At least I got two hours of sleep earlier tonight. I was dog tired and decided to turn in early to conserve some energy for the Big Weekend. I even skipped watching one of my favorite shows, Law & Order: SVU. Or, as my mom unintentionally mispronounces it, Law & Order: SUV. As if the show is about Ice-T and Richard Belzer bouncing around NYC in a swank ass champagne-colored Range Rover paddywagon, sipping Dom B & B and puffin' a little smokey smoke. Richard Belzer would wax philosophical about how John Lennon was really assassinated by Roswell aliens acting at the behest of the Illuminati or some shit. Ice-T would mock his hippie cracker ass. The detectives would cruise around in this modern day Mystery Machine, listening to 50 Cent records and questioning supsects, alternatively. If the perp ever tried to run away, Ice-T would make an incredulous acerbic comment like, "Foo, what makes you think you can outrun the Po-leece?" and then blind him with the light reflecting off his massive quantities of Bling Bling. Then, more Richard Belzer nuttiness. I would pay money to watch that show. Later on, mah homies. And now, hopefully, sleep. posted by Nate on 1:42 AM link Friday, May 30, 2003I don't smoke, except for a rare pipe or cigar, and I will never try a cigarette. They're addictive and not expecially chock full o' health. (They do not have Vitamin C in them.) However, the anti-smoking movement is ridiculous. Who cares if a person wants to kill off some lung cells in a bar? If I don't like like the smokey atmosphere, I'll go somewhere else, not try to ban cigarettes in public places. And I'm not all that concerned about a saloon's second hand smoke. I'm more concerned about second hand alcohol, especially as it manifests itself in the musclebound guy who swears I'm eyeing his girl and cordially offers to really give me somethin' to look at. The worldwide anti-smoking campaign is so out of hand that now there is proposed legislation to ban marijuana smoking in Amsterdam. The Dutch government wants to outlaw all types of smoking in "public entertainment areas" by 2005. The (in)famous Dutch coffee shops would not be exempt, and would actually be forced to comply twelve months before everyone else. Um, yeah. This is like going to a Grateful Dead concert for the music. "Those Amsterdam hash bars, I'd have a great time if it weren't for all that damn smoke. The coffee is good, the ambience is great; it's a fun family friendly environment, really. They'd be just like Applebee's and T.G.I. Friday's if only they'd only get rid of that annoying, caustic, vexatious, and out-and-out disagreeable smoke. P.S. I read Playboy for the articles." <NormMacDonald> Note to self: have drugged out immoral romp through Amsterdam's red light district before the year 2005. </NormMacDonald> posted by Nate on 3:18 PM link Victor Davis Hanson has a great piece on the Cold War's effect on the post- 9/11 world. On Europe's Anti-Americanism, he writes: With such a common threat, natural differences between Europe and the United States — from the positioning of Pershing tactical missiles on German soil to prevent Soviet nuclear intimidation, to continental criticism of the American role in Vietnam and Central America — always were aired within certain understood and relatively polite parameters of common history and interests. With a common and deadly enemy nearby, Western Europeans had no utopian illusions that the United Nations, rather than NATO and America, could stop an aggressive Soviet premier... He also writes on our allies in the freed Communist countries of "New Europe" and, of course, the effects of the Cold War patronage system on Middle Eastern strongmen. there is an entire generation of Arab dictators and terrorists — from Arafat to Saddam Hussein — who were trained or welcomed in Moscow, and who predicated their policies on the idea that Soviet intelligence, Soviet weapons, Soviet money, and Soviet opposition to America could provide them a degree of security otherwise unwarranted by their own resources or ability... In that context alone should we understand the race by Middle Eastern tyrants and despots to acquire weapons of mass destruction. WMD is a polite name for some sort of surrogate Soviet nuclear deterrent, [of the sort used] to coerce or blackmail the United States from acting freely to promote the establishment of democratic government and freedom and the removal of terrorist enclaves. To quote Stewie, "Indeed." posted by Nate on 12:22 PM link According to the UK's Guardian, there are plans for a Lord of the Rings Musical in 2005. Here's hoping they will draw from this, the greatest swordplay musical ever. posted by Nate on 11:37 AM link Thursday, May 29, 2003Anticipation. Is making me late Is keeping me waiting. --Carly Simon Right now I'm waiting. And waiting. And waiting. I'm in queue in an EA Sports tech support chat. Every game I've tried works in Windows 2003 except for Madden NFL 2003, as my buddy George and I found out last weekend. Oh, the game installs and runs fine, but with one teeny problem. There is no save directory. That's slightly problematic, since George and I play in "Franchise" mode. I tried creating the save folder myself, but the game insists that I have -1.00 MB of free disk space. I'm only number 4,457 in queue. I'm like a two year old on a long car trip, cranky and bored with nothing to do. So today's posts might be stupid and semicoherent (I mean, moreso than usual). UPDATE: I was there until the chat room shut down for the day. Screw you guys, I'm going home. posted by Nate on 3:07 PM link Listening to the local news radio ten minutes ago, I heard that a warthog went on a rampage at the local zoo. She had a wounded leg, so zookeepers had anesthesized her to transport her to the zoo vet. As they put the 'hog in a truck, she woke up from the anesthesia. It then went nuts, climbing into the driver's seat and engaging the gearshift. The truck went motoring through the zoo, causing visitors to flee in terror. I'll try to find a link. Nothing on the local newspaper's website yet. Just goes to show you: don't mess with a warthog. They're Bad Ass. posted by Nate on 1:23 PM link Wednesday, May 28, 2003A few hours ago I ordered tickets for this weekend's Detroit Tigers / New York Yankees rumble. According to the Detroit Free Press, Roger Clemens is officially scheduled to go for win 300 Sunday, but other sites have been reporting he'll start Saturday due to Wells' injury. I got tickets for both Saturday and Sunday just in case, and figure I'll spend the weekend across the border in Windsor, Canada (AOL voice: Welcome! You've got SARS.). I'm still trying to get ahold of my Brooklyn-born ex- college roommate who lives in the D-Town area. (Jake, if you're reading this, check your voicemail.) If I can't get ahold of him, maybe my sister can go with me instead. Ticket Bastard hammered me on service fees-- $3.75 per ticket plus a $3.00 fee per transaction. $21.00 for $70 worth of tickets. Granted I did not have to get up from my computer & drive four hours to the stadium to buy the tickets (which would have involved (a) getting up, and (b) putting on pants), but a 29% convenience fee seems a bit high. I guess Eddie Vedder was right about the whole corporate whore ticket surcharge thing. Asshats. Geez, now I feel all anti-establishment and stuff. Down with exhorbitant fees! Damn The Man! posted by Nate on 10:24 PM link Instapundit has been down all day. This is roughly the equivalent of Yahoo! going down in 1996. A slow day in Blogville, to be sure. UPDATE: Off Wing Opinion's Eric McErlain writes that there was a fire at the web hosting company that serves Instapundit. FIRE! FIRE! Settle down, Beavis. posted by Nate on 8:17 PM link Guess what? I wrote another humor article. It's something I've been thinking about for the past few weeks, and I finally had time to write it down. It's about that loveable fuzzball Alf. And that loveable fuzzball Michel Foucalt. They're two great tastes that taste great together!!! So enjoy Alf As Sexual Deviant: Sexuality and Knowledge-Power In a Postmodern Age. What's scary is that halfway through, I started believing my deliberately skewed hypothesis. Postmodernism, ya gotta love it. Or hate it, if that's part of your socially programmed paradigm. posted by Nate on 5:25 AM link Remember the 2000 story about how the U.S. was barring the export of Sony Playstations to countries like Iraq, fearful that they could be converted to supercomputers? We laughed (at least I did) about the sheer paranoia of the Military Industrial Complex. Now, according to this article, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from Sony PlayStation 2s. The "Emotion Engine" coprocessor can perform 6.5 billion mathematical operations a second, and the researchers have linked together 70 machines through a network switch, running Linux. The resulting machine can run quantum chromodynamics simulations at ludicrous speed. QCD problems "are the single largest consumer of computing resources on supercomputers at the Department of Energy and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center." In the words of Ben from Full Throttle, "Cool." The Sony Playstation 2: Imagine a beowulf cluster of th-- Oh wait. They already did. UPDATE: The link for the original Iraq story is dead. The Slashdot discussion is here. UPDATE 2: Dammit, Slashdot linked to the same story five days ago. I really am out of the loop. Between this and installing a Microsoft OS, I'll undoubtably have my l33t H4X0r D00d credentials revoked. posted by Nate on 12:38 AM link Tuesday, May 27, 2003Hrmmm... At some point during the last few weeks while I was busy dicking around with Windows Server (which makes a good workstation now that I have it configured and tweaked), The New Republic's web page has gone to subscription only. It used to have free registration. Doh! Although I consider myself a conservative, I like The New Republic. I only occasionally agree with them, but they're honest in their reasoning. Unlike other left wing magazines I've read (see Nation, The.) It seems to me that the Left has gotten progressively loopier in the past twenty years, pandering to different factions within the Democrat party. Race Baiting and Class Warfare and Anti-American Chomskyism, Oh My!!! By contrast, TNR is a throwback to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan left, willing to criticize liberalism's abuses and absurdities. They care about workable public policy, not just demonizing Republicans and electing Democrats. Interestingly, one of the free articles on their site (and I didn't read this until after I started typing this post, though it dovetails with my point) compares Joe Lieberman with Scoop Jackson, and discusses the difficulty of getting elected as a moderate Democrat. posted by Nate on 10:49 PM link I know art when I see it. Sorta. This quiz shows a number of pieces and asks the question "Is it art or is it crap?" I got 12 of 16; I guess all my undergraduate courses on postmodern literature and cultural studies paid off. This illustrates that "urban vs. rural conservatism" chasm debated on National Review a few weeks back, I'm sure. Not that I'm urban, or going to take a week off to see the goldfish in a blender exhibit, or anything. It's just that some conservatives enjoy getting jiggy with a snootful of brandy and the writings of Donald Barthelme. posted by Nate on 10:19 PM link Sunday, May 25, 2003I'm getting slightly aggravated with Windows Server 2003. Mostly because I'm using it as a workstation rather than as, well, a server. Rather than being able to superuser to install most programs, I have to log off and then log on as Administrator. I guess it's slightly more secure, but it's really freaking annoying. There are a host of small things like that that make it less workstation friendly than UNIX. Maybe I should hunt down my old Windows 2000 disk (I refuse to install Windows XP Pro. Not only is it expensive, but the default button theme suggests a terrible chromatic accident at the Duplo block factory. It makes my eyes bleed. Last I checked, that wasn't a good thing.) UPDATE: The thing that's bugging me most is the way that some programs force me to log off / log on to install them, others let me enter the Administrator password to install, and others let me install them straight away. The security seems inconsistently strange on this OS, like how my user account can read and modify files anywhere on the disk, including the Program Files directory. This is a plain vanilla user account, not a member of the "Power User" group, which I assume is like UNIX's "wheel." Weird. posted by Nate on 3:30 PM link According to ABC news, the United States had a workable plan to capture Osama bin Laden in 1998, but Janet Reno put the kibash on it. A bit surprising, considering her predisposition to storm armed compounds of religious nuts. Maybe its because these religious nuts had more than a couple guns to fight back with. I don't like John Ashcroft, but compared to his predecessor he's as harmless as SpongeBob Squarepants. posted by Nate on 12:56 PM link
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