Pornography and Politics

The Russians are looking to donate a sculpture to Jersey City as a memorial to 9-11. Besides being roughly 10 stories tall, one critic claimed it looks like a Vulva. Zurab Tsereteli, the artist, is known for causing a stir with his sculpture.

Of course the big problem is that Glen Cunningham, the now dead mayor of JC and political opponent of Bob Menendez was the only sponsor. Now that Cunningham's allies have all been kicked out, politics will likely kill this project--which really does look like a vulva.

The real solution of course is, if the artist really wants the project to go forward, is to make a few critical campaign contributions.

Fair and Balanced

When Al Franken's Book first went to Press, Fox news sued over the inclusion of "Fair And Balanced" in the title, claiming they owned the trademark on the words.

Anyone who saw Fahrenheit 9/11 may be more interested in Fox News explaining why a Fair and Balanced network had a cousin of one of the candidates make the decision to call the Florida race in 2000 rather than an article pointing out discrepencies in Moore's film.

Of the 3 news networks' websites-- MSNBC, CNN, FoxNews-- only Foxnews is reporting about the "flaws".

If foxnews is fair and balanced, I should be allowed to sell cocaine as long as I call it 'harmless white powder'.

Larkin

I bought a copy of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems last night at the Barnes and Noble. This is the second book of poetry I've purchased, the first beingEveryman's Library Edition of Beat Poets.

In either case, I'm enjoying Larkin quite a bit. I'm particularly fond of The Mower, (12 June, 1979).

Too Often

Too often have I dreamt that I missed a course for the entire semester, and even worse, kept thinking it hours after having woken up. The one moment that was really tip top was one night when I went to bed after being up all night (procrastination). I woke in the darkness of an early December evening and feared I had in fact woken up at 7 am the day of an 8 am exam without having studied. Wow. It wasn't true and I took the remaining 12 hours to study.

Midwest

From This article about chicago's up and coming boutique stores regarding an arial photograph of Chicago:

"'So many people walk in here and ask, `Oh, is that New York?' ' said Lance Lawson, who opened Jake in this gentrifying neighborhood. 'I tell them, `No, it's your city,' ' Mr. Lawson said. "

And thus, Chicago is still not New York.

South Dakota

For a while now, North Dakota has been edging for a Name change, claiming that South Dakota rakes in 5 times as much money in tourism. Everyone in the North thinks people don't want to go there because North = Cold. (never mind Mount Rushmore).

But now S. Dakota is hoping HBO's Deadwood will do for S. Dakota what the Sopranos did for New Jersey.

I can't wait to see the faces on all those Deadwood viewers who show up in S. Dakota thinking they are going to get into a gun fight.

Hair Bands and Opera

Saturday morning Mandee and I went to Vintage Vinyl. This was the first time I had been there in a long time. Just as we arrived, the band Sebastian Bach started playing. But I still had time to find The Eels Shootenanny and a Metric album.

Mandee found an album too.

That evening we went to Buccleuch Park for an even of world class opera. The performance was Madama Butterfly. Peter and Mandee and I sat around on the grass drinking wine--open alcohol container laws temporarily suspended--and listened to opera. It was amazing.

Poo poo to Paris.

Saudis

After reading this article, it seems to me at least, that the Saudi interpretation of islam is akin to the Pope's interpretation of Christianity; its is perverse and and fradulant.

I've been drinking it for years

Gin is making a come back. I like it with tonic.

Napster.com

Napster came back for file sharing (for money) a few months ago. Now they are giving away an MP3 player with a subscription to the service. The Subscription costs $119.00, and the free player is for sale on amazong for $110.00. This would be great if the subscription actually got you MP3's, but to transfer the songs to an Mp3 Player, you still need to buy them for $.99.

Napster also claims to have thousands of songs. While they did have That Dog, The Rentals, The Eels, and several other lesser known bands, they lacked others like The Special Goodness.

In either case, $.99 for a song still seems pretty high considering you don't get a CD and cover art and that most CD's (that Napster has) can be bought for less than $9.99 (the cost of buying a whole album) at the Target.

Finally, unless you are independently wealthy, there is no way using napster ever makes sense. besides the cost of the subscription being relatively high--high when you consider you don't actually own any of the songs and that you can't listen to them if you don't have the napster service--their is just so much music available you would need to dedicate your life to selecting and downloading music you like. And then if you want to listen to it anywhere other than at your computer, you still have to buy it for a dollar. Doesn't seem to make much sense.

In either case, it seems like the Eels put out another album last year when I wasn't paying attention. I guess I have to go track it down now.

Kaplan GRE Books

I purchased a Kaplan GRE vocabulary book a few weeks back. Of course I did this before I found the GRE vocab book I bought four years ago, also from Kaplan.

When I found the old book I was hoping that since my new copy said second edition, that the book would include a whole different set of practice tests.

I was wrong. The books are identical, down to the page numbering. The only difference between the two? A dollar difference in the price printed on the cover. Fuck you Kaplan.

Virus

Reports of a new cell phone virus mention that the virus spreads via Bluetooth technology embedded in the phone. BMWnow makes cars with bluetooth.

Imagine now a car infected with a virus. Since bluetooth is wireless, the car could infect anything it drives past-- other vulnerable bluetooth devices such as cell phones, and other cars.

In the past, protecting your computer from viruses was as simple as not opening an attachment. But imagine a self executing, self replicating virus as it runs amuck in computers and imagine this scenerio:

Rich white chick has an infected Nokia. She gets into her new BMW equipped with bluetooth, and its infected. She leaves New York via the GWB, infecting the EzPass computers. The virus spreads through the EzPass system and starts infecting cars throughout the metro region. A NJ State trooper gets off the turnpike. As his car passes through the toll plaza, his car's computer is infected. He passes into a secure location of Newark airport, infecting baggage computers and the control tower. The control tower broadcasts the virus to a passing 777. The plane then infects the electronics of passengers on board. The plane lands in Los Angelos, infecting computers at LAX. A passenger on the 777 boards another plane bound for Mexico. As the passenger disembarks in Mexico, the virus comes to an end, finding no known compatible devices. But the damage has been done. The entire western world is infected with a malicious bluetooth virus.

Of course this whole scenerio will be avoided when the Monkey Controlled Robots take over the world and destroy humanity.

MTA Photos.

I may have mentioned this previously, but the MTA has the stunningly stupid idea of banning photography of the NYC subways.

If you think this is as stupid as I do, You can send them an
E-mail.

I sent this to them:

The recent ban on photography in NYC subway system completely undermines the many small business merchants selling film and camera batteries. Millions of tourists pour into New York Each year, many looking to take pictures of the NYC subway system. These amatuer photographers patronize the many small businesses in the city with purchases of film.
In addition, there are many thousands of art students at various academic insitutions in the city. Without the ability to photograph the subway, many of their portfolios will be left empty.

Perhaps my reasoning is absurd, but then again, so is your ruling. Limiting photography of the NYC subway system will not thwart the efforts of terrorists. Getting out of your cushy, air conditioned MTA office and patrolling subway stations one at a time is more likely to stop a terrorist then a ban on photography.

Good luck, and don't forget to thank your union representative for your job security; your steller administrative abilities surely cannot be accounted for it.

RL Stine

RL Stine has an interesting view on poetics

: "The world has enough bad poets. I try to discourage everyone from writing poetry."

Transport Tycoon

Transport Tycoon was one of my favorite games of all time. I had all but given up hope that its creator, Chris Sawyer would ever come up with a Transport Tycoon II.

But it seems, according to this interview, that he has. Saywer is also the creator of the Rollercoaster Tycoon series. I think this series was terrible, mostly because of the child-like graphics.

Unfortunately, Transport Tycoon 2, known now as "Locomotion" (Worst title ever?) has similarly garish graphics.

Comparatively, the somewhat limited Railroad Tycoon III has some amazing visuals. The two unfortunate points with this are that (a) you only run trains and (b) the interface is fairly poorly written. Moving around the the RRT3 world is nearly impossible. Though I am pleasantly surprised how fast the game with such impressive graphics plays, and how smoothe it is.

In either case, the real successor to Transport Tycoon might actually be Transport Giant. Not only does the game look to have some decent graphics, the times span of the game includes horse wagons and clipper ships all the way to modern monorails. This is the same maker of Traffic Giant and Industry Giant.

Industry Giant seemed, at least to me, to focus too much on industry, and Traffic Giant focused only passenger transport. But to really be an excellent game, Transport Giant will have to be mroe than a mere amalgamation of the Industry and Traffic Giant franchises. What made the original Transport Tycoon amazing was the very naturalistic handling of transporting goods and services (at least back in 1994 it was fairly naturalistic).

There was something not quite right with Industry Giant. Besides somewhat cartoonish graphics, the transport vehicles moved in ways that seemed characteristically digital and fake, rather than in ways that real ships cars and planes would travel. I fear that Transport Giant may not over come this issue.

All of these transport incarnations really seem to miss the real point. Its not just fun to build a giant transport empire, its fun to also watch. The only software publisher to really get this part right is Maxis, the great founder of the genre when they came out with SimCity almost two decades ago (ok, not quite, but a really long time ago). The newest incarnation, SimCity 4 achieves everything one could want on a graphical level. It is the absolute model for graphics in the genre.

Yet Simcity is a city building simulation, not a transport simulation. While you can build roads and rail lines and harbors, you dont actually direct or control any of the transportation. There are no extensive selections of locomotives or different kinds of buses; only generic bus stations that produce automatically a standard city bus.

When SimCity Rush Hour, the expansion pack for SC4 came out, there was hope and speculation that perhaps this might be the add on to simcity that would make it the ultimate simulation game. Instead, Rush Hour updated SC4 with some gameplay corrections, and added back to SC4 some of the features stripped out of the game during the testing phase (early screen shots of the game depict many of the features in Rush Hour that the original SC4 release were missing. Hardcore fans who bought SC4 in the first months after its release were than milked for another 30 bucks for features promised in the original game. its good to be a software programmer).

In either case, I'm still waiting for my ultimate game. Some day, maybe, it will come.

Solutions.

Peter's mention of Syria's Control of Lebanon brings up some interesting points. Lebanon has experienced something of a rebirth since the civil war and is actually growing up to be a pretty civilized country attracting tourists and business.

But at the same time, Syria's presence in the country offers a very unstable situation with Israel. Or rather, Palestinians in Israel offer an unstable situation for the rest of the world.

Since the Syrians really don't want to leave Lebanon, and the Palestinians need a place to go, why not send them all to Lebanon? With the influx of refugees, the Syrians won't want to deal with administering the country anymore, and will want to leave so that the Lebanonese will have their country back as their own. The Palestinians, engrossed by the luxorious beaches, hotels, and night clubs will forget that they hate the jews permenantly stabalizing the Middle East.

It might take some time, but I think this is a solution everyone will be able to live with.

Failings of the Court

The supreme court has thrown out the case of a man suing over the pledge to the flag because the mother and father of the child are fighting over custody.

The "Under god" clause of the flag pledge seems an even better reason for the aethist father to be allowed to sue: since he is not responsible for rearing the child, he has no control over whether she is brought up believing in a ficticious entity or not and a state sponsored belief in god reinforces such a position. Instead, if the state were to take a position that does not embrace god as the flag pledge does, then the responsibility to instill a sense of religion on the girl would fall only on the mother.

Drugs:
In many arguments about the legalization of drugs, opponents have consistantly brought up that legalization is equal to endorsement. If this is in fact true, "under god" must be struck from any state sponsored flag pledge because it is endorsing one god, presumably the judeo Christian god. if on the other hand, this is not endorsement of god by the state, then drugs must legalized because it doesn't represent an endorsement by the state.

Big Brother

Baltimore is installing a closed circuit television system in the city to monitor the streets.

Sure, I'll agree of all the places I would not want to be at night, right after Newark, Baltimore is ranked pretty high up there. But a video system that allows police helicopters and patrol cruisers to watch every street block seems a little invasive.

The best part is, its all in the name of terrorism. After all, if terrorists are going to hit a target, its going to be the ghettos of Baltimore.

A major terror strike that wipes out Baltimore is sort of like the use of the atomic bomb in the movie Independence Day: The government nukes Houston in effort to wipe out the aliens. Just like that city, I don't think many people would care if Baltimore was removed from the map.

Intrigue

A store in Ridgewood is offering print on demand for books. Its also one of the cheapest services considering other services that do similar things. It also looks like an interesting Bookstore.

Androgyne

According to the The Gender Genie that Peter found, 6 out of 7 stories I have written are actually written by a woman. I used Jesus, Panama Love and The Women of Jackson Peirce (both by females). But also several partially completed stories (greater than 500 words.) Maybe I should just sit down and try writing some chick lit. At least I would have some ready money.

Appropriate

As plans materialize to drink New York, keep in mind limits.

Student Loans

The federal government is considering ending fixed rate loans for students. At a time when student loans can be gotten for 3%, there is a good chance many students will take out loans that ultimately are erased simply by inflation. Instead, the new Higher Education Act is seeking to make all student loans variable rate interest.

At a time when more students are taking out more debt, why are worrying about fixed rate vs, variable rate? Why not focus on providing grants and lowering costs of college tuition, at least at Public Universities.

At this rate, the Chinese will not only out number us, but out smart us too.

Bye, Bye Ladies

With the state of new Jersey banning ladies' night at bars, there have been many protests from people saying there are bigger issues the state should be dealing with, and many have vowed to fight the ban.

Two points: bars are for drinking first, and for meeting women second. Sure a bar might stand to bring in more poeple by having a ladies night because women will come in for free and the men will follow. but if no bar has ladies nights, the men will still go to the bar and women will follow to meet men. Lets face it, in age of feminism, women are (or at least should be) as willing to pay their share of door charges and are as likely to seek out male partners as are men seeking women. Would a girl on Sex in the City go to bar where there was no prospect of meeting men? or even more relevant, not go to the bar at all? No, of course not.

Point Two: if this is such an absurd issue that the state is wasting its valuable resources on, then why continue to make a big deal about? Accept the decision by the state board of civil liberties and get over yourselves. But obviously it is an important issue, why else has every politician in our state weighed in on the subject?

Fuel Economy

California is looking to reduce CO2; the only real way to do this better fuel economy. The Auto industry representative quoted in the article makes mention of the possibility that with states like California trying to regulate emissions, they could never meet all the standards. He is of course forgetting, that if the auto industry simply met the most stringent standard, they would not have to worry if each state had their own requirements. But this makes too much sense.

I only wish oil wells would dry up sooner so we could stop worrying about automobiles.

Ronald Redux

"The world is a better place because he was here,' the Rev. Dr. Michael Wenning said."
NYTimes:

And even better now that he is gone.

Foreign Relations

"A Bush administration lawyer had told justices that it would be unprecedented to have U.S. judges resolving lawsuits against foreign countries over expropriated property. The administration argued it would harm America's relations with those countries."
NYTimes

If the Bush administration was so concerned about foreign relations, why was there a unilateral decision to invade iraq?

Starbucks

Starbucks empolyee application test:

A customer who asks for a medium is asking for?
(A) This would never happen
(B) A cup with volume greater than the smallest serving, but smaller than the largest serving.
(C) This question is not relevant

When a customer asks for one tea bag, they mean what?
(A) They want coffee
(B) If they want a Venti Size tea, they really want two bags because that is how many comes with a Venti size tea.
(C) The customer does not know what they are talking about

A customer who asks for Heavy Cream wants what?
(A) whole Milk
(B) Half and Half
(C) Heavy Cream

Harry Potter

Went to see the New HP last night. We arrived 45 minutes early to get a good seat, which we did; center screen, about halfway up. [sidebar: i think Tom Chung was there]. Anyway, after sitting through 45 minutes of slideshow advertisements and 15 minutes of commercials, [Inlcuding Fanta's fantasmo girls, which I swear reduces the intelligence of Americans simply by watching it] and in the middle of a horrible preview for some teen movie, the lights come up and the screen goes black.

Someone pulled the firealarm and everyone was ordered to leave the theater. The people who had the aweful seats on the front or on the side were eeager to leave but only after some prodding from officials were the freaks, like Mandee and Me, willing to leave our center screen seats.

Outside, people were so stupid leaving the theater that had it been a real fire, half the audience would have burned in the theater and the other half would have burned because they were standing next to the building. We fled the scene ASAP since there seemed little sense in sticking around for hundreds of people to do the same thing.

Proms

Erik's Post about Prom rules leads me to wonder why high school authorities are so uptight about alcohol. Let's just assume that everyone at the prom does not drink nor do they attend drunk. Are the Chaperone's to accompany the prom goers to wherever it is they go after the prom or to Seaside for the post prom weekend Bang fest?

On the otherhand, if students were allowed to attend the prom intoxicated, and were then served alcohol at the prom, they would be too drunk later that evening to have unprotected sex in the back of the limousine because the boys' members would be to flacid.

So all in the name of safety, school officials across the nation encourage unsupervised drinking and unprotected sex. Way to go America!

GRE

I've spent a good part of my day taking practice tests at this site. I feel sort of stupid.

Corn Palace

My Boss went Here for the Memorial Day Weekend.

Amazing.

This is a pretty interesting peice about email disclaimers. Most entertaining.

I hate cars

For more than a decade now, computers have been in cars to tell us all sorts of things have gone wrong with various parts. This Article talks about a Kia owner's fight with her car computer. The computer keeps giving her a check engine light, when in fact the problem simply is that the gas cap is not tight enough (she insists she tightens it).

In New Jersey, the MVC will fail your car for inspection for a check engine light. Most of New Jersey's inspection is based on the on board computer. Since I have not exactly been current with getting my car inspected (thank god Im clear until 2006), I've had plenty of time sitting on lines at the MVC to think about this: simply reprogram the computer to always send out information giving the all the clear.

Apparently, congress now wants to pass legislation to force car companies into giving owners access to these codes. Of course, the last thing we really need is a bunch of amatuer programmers (read: me) playing around with the car's on board computer. But at the same time, if I could pay my mechanic $500 and never worry that my computer was going to fail me at the inspection station, of course I would do it.