<![CDATA[titled: some amusing blog pun]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss en-us alanki30 [at] gmail Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:59:56 -0400 Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:00:08 -0400 iBlog 1.4.6 Alan titled: some amusing blog pun Twice the electrons, half the taste! Alan alanki30 [at] gmail titled: some amusing blog pun Arts & Entertainment <![CDATA[Random quick update.... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090706095946/index.html 1) Busy, busy, busy, work, work, work.

2) See #2.

Later 'tater. Try not to miss me too much while I'm gone, eh? ]]> Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:59:46 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090706095946/index.html <![CDATA[Branding... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090625085633/index.html It's become cliche. It's a dog bites man story. Another Republican politician caught with his pants down. (Though the Argentina thing was a nice touch.) Do we know yet if the Governor's mistress was a miss or a mister?

Even though it's fun to kick them when they're down, it's more sporting to help them back up, so I'm trying to think of slogans for ads to help the ... you know, I almost wrote "beleaguered" there because that's the word the media has been using since November, but it seems to me that maybe their problem is that they're just so exhausted from all the extramarital nooky they're getting. Bashing gays, destroying the economy, and banging hookers is exhausting work.

Anyway ... Feel free to contribute your own:

"Republican family values: We value our families as a cover for our seedy affairs. And so do you."

"The Republican Party: Monogamy is for the little people."

"The Republican Party: Now with 20% fewer man-on-man scandals."

"The Republican Party: Vote for us and we'll totally have sex with you."

"The Republican Party: A frat party without the respect for women. "

"The Republican Party: Guys Gone Wild, D.C." ]]> Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:56:33 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090625085633/index.html <![CDATA[Yup ... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C227687721/E20090623130506/index.html The answer to my question from the other day is yes, Kathy Griffin did smack Paula Deen with a switch.

Too bad it wasn't Rachel Ray.

BTW, though I've often disliked Paula Deen's cooking, her appearance on Kathy Griffin made me a fan, and she's certainly a FotG. ]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:05:06 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C227687721/E20090623130506/index.html <![CDATA[Movie Trailers... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090619094324/index.html Everyone likes movies made from toys. Transformers, GI Joe, He-Man. Great movies, right? The creme of the crop.

Anyway, here are some others we haven't seen yet, but might be even better than He-Man. Make sure you watch to the end as the last one may be the best one:

]]> Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:43:24 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090619094324/index.html <![CDATA[Take a whack at Ouiser ... er ... Paula ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090616092055/index.html No time for real blog posts, but ...

At the end of My Life on the D-List last night, did the preview of next week's episode show Kathy whipping Paula Deen with a switch?

We'll sell tee-shirts saying, "I slapped Paula Deen!" Half of Chiquapin Parish would give their eye teeth to take a whack at Paula.

That is all. ]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:20:54 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090616092055/index.html <![CDATA[Dan Savage on Pat Robertson... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090610102052/index.html Heh. That title sounds naughty.

You may have heard that recently Pat Robertson (yeah, I know) made a claim that people are not born gay. Instead, they're made gay. He says that boys are made homosexual because some coach or guidance counselor or some other male authority figure abused them.

OK, yeah, it's Pat Robertson and he's a cranky old loon who wouldn't know Jesus Christ if he ran over him with his car and who thinks lesbian witches brought down the twin towers. But he's not alone in these crazy notions. In fact, this point of view seems to be wildly popular among the nut-job fundie set.

Dan Savage obliterates this line of "thinking"...

"As a thought experiment let's concede the point: homosexuals are made, not born (with the exception of the few of us with "biological problems"). Who do you suppose is making homosexuals out of kids from fundamentalist Christian homes? Alen Keyes has a gay kid, Randal Terry has a gay kid, Dick Cheney has a gay kid, Phyllis Schafley has a gay kid. Seattle's Capitol Hill is crawling with gay teenagers and young adults who grew up in—and escaped from—their fundamentalist Christian homes. The documentary For the Bible Tells Me So profiles numerous kids from fundamentalist Christian families who grew up to be gay.

"Who's raping all these Christian kids?

"Not openly gay people. Fundamentalist Christian parents don't allow their children hang out with openly gay men and women. Openly gay men do not get hired to work as a guidance counselors at fundamentalist Christian middle schools; out lesbians do not get hired to work as coaches at a fundamentalist Christian high schools; openly bi graduate students don't get to serve as dorm captains at fundamentalist Christian colleges. So it isn't out gay men and women—openly gay coaches and counselors and youth pastors—who are raping all these Christian kids and leaving them "confused" about their sexualities. Most fundamentalist Christian kids have never met an out gay or lesbian person. Which can only mean...

"All these Christian kids are being raped by straight-identified, nominally-Christian coaches and counselors and youth pastors and dorm captains."

Read the rest. ]]> Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:20:52 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090610102052/index.html <![CDATA[Up, up and away... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C227687721/E20090608092504/index.html Busy weekend.

We had a great time going down to Florida to see my niece graduate from High School. (Not only did she graduate from high school, but I think she completed enough college credits to get a couple of Masters degrees. Clearly she takes after her Uncle Alan in the brains department.) Soon she's off to college, with enough merit scholarships to pay down the national debt.

I've only been to Florida a couple times, but it always strikes me as a strange place. To my Michigan eyes the vegetation looks like something out of a Star Trek episode and the weather is odd and there are all these weird animals wandering around. For example, lizards. I don't think Michigan really has any lizards at all. We have reptiles (snakes), but that's about it, and except for the massasauga (the Michigan rattle snake, which is very rare and not even all that venomous and will almost always run away instead of strike) none of them are poisonous. We don't, for example, have little lizards that crawl into bed with you, nor do we have big lizards living in the nearest pond waiting to eat you (never smile at a crocodile). Nor do we have bugs that, when splattered on your car, contain ichor that will eat through the paint of your car (so-called "love bugs"). We have black bears, but they'll run away if you yell at them. We have wolves, but no one ever sees them. We don't have panthers. We don't have dangerous herds of wild hogs.

We have deer. We have robins. We have squirrels. Meh.

Let me put it this way ... no one would ever choose Michigan to go on a safari.

And the weather? Usually when we go somewhere requiring a rental car we get the funnest thing we can find. Convertibles, for example. Convertibles aren't all that useful when it rains every 15 minutes.

Florida is like Land of the Lost without the laugh track.

What's funny is that we went down there and stayed at Disney but never went into the parks (we got a discount on the hotel). What's even more amusing is that it was, apparently, Gay Days at Disney and we didn't even know it. So we flew all the way to Orlando for the entire weekend, on Gay Days, and didn't even see the parks. We didn't see any gays either. (I suspect Gay Days is a hoax cooked up by Disney to increase tourism amongst those with disposable income.) Oh well. Even if we had known, I doubt we'd have gone into the parks, anyway. We like roller coasters of which there are only a couple, and Disney has always seemed two steps creepier than Stepford to both Brian and me. Plus it's like Amazon hot down there, and who wants to wander around a theme park when the souls of your shoes are melting into the pavement? (BTW, my insider information informs me that the restaurants at Disney stock up on salad during Gay Days, and that the only other obvious difference is that the visitors to the parks tend to be much more polite. Apparently it's a popular weekend to work.)

Insert rant about air travel here. I keep trying to remind myself when I fly that I really should be spending the entire time with my hands in the air shouting "Wheeeeee!!!!!" given that I'm sitting in a tin can with 200 other people doing something that is physically impossible for us, but that we've figured out how to do through sheer force of will, and that anything else on the planet that can do this took millions of years of evolution at the cost of all their brains and thus their chances of ever inventing an iPhone. But it's hard to get that worked up about the experience when I'm totally surrounded by fat midwesterners, sitting there like Custer at the Little Big Horn but if the natives had cottage cheese thighs and two bags of cheesy poofs, with one in front of me leaning back far enough to do dental work (that molar should really come out, sir), and some old broad sitting behind me kicking my chair every 5 minutes (She was 2'5" tall. WTF?!), leaving me exactly 1.5 square inches of seat space, wishing I'd have been able to take a pocket knife onto the plane so I could amputate my legs above the knee so that I'd at least be spared the pain of having my knee caps crushed into powder. (I'm not limber enough to chew off my own legs, but I contemplated it for most of the flight.)

Breathe.

Anyway, while we were down there we went to see UP. A beautiful movie visually, and everything else about the movie, the characters, the acting, the dialogue, etc. was great. My highest recommendation: Just go see it. Now. In 3D if possible. ]]> Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:25:04 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C227687721/E20090608092504/index.html <![CDATA[Silent Spring... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090601103623/index.html We try to be as Earth-Friendly as possible at our house. We're diligent about recycling. We use compact fluorescents where the zombie-esque color of the light and the humming won't bother us (basement and garage primarily). We reduced the amount of thirsty turf in our yard by about half several years ago and now have landscaping consisting mostly native plants that don't need much water.

All that is my way of justifying the rather ridiculous amount of chemicals I sprayed around the outside of the house on Saturday to get rid of some carpenter ants that have invaded our home. By nightfall our side porch looked like Ant Judgement Day. Muah ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Neither of us has yet grown extra appendages, began projectile vomiting our internal organs, or become a walking tumor, so I guess the amount I sprayed was just shy of mutagenic.

And before anyone posts some ant-hugging comment about how one can should make peace with the ants, or suggests some "green" alternative (which won't work, I don't care what you say, if I poured vinegar on an ant hill those ants would just make vinaigrette). I'd like to point out that they started it by crawling on my leg when I was sleeping. Any bug that crawls on you when you're trying to sleep is just asking for it. The ant-gauntlet was thrown down, and I responded with vigor, as only a chemist can.

It would be nice if they'd just die all at once though. We're getting a little tired of vacuuming up all the corpses. Brian thinks that some evening we're going to go out on our side porch to find an enormous, huge, giant pissed-off mega-ant made entirely out of ants that will totally kick our asses. I'll keep some Raid handy just in case. I'm not walking out there unarmed. They may be down, but I'm not sure we've seen the last of them.

Better living through chemistry. And by living, I mean me, not them. ]]> Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:36:23 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090601103623/index.html <![CDATA[The Defenders of Marriage... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090529094229/index.html Are you safe from the Defenders of Marriage? Probably not. This would be funnier if it weren't true:


]]> Fri, 29 May 2009 09:42:29 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090529094229/index.html <![CDATA[Random Tuesday Stuff... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090526110619/index.html 1) My Dharma "The Tower" shirt arrived from Cafe Press. It turned out great.

2) The California Supreme Court is set to hand down its gay marriage decision today. I think everyone is expecting bad news.

3) Went camping this weekend, and with the exception of it being a little cold at night, we had wonderful weather and a great time as usual.

4) Obama has announced his choice for the Supremes. Federal Appeals court judge Sonya Sotomayor looks qualified (cf. Harriet Miers) and it's a clever political move to force the Republicans to have to object to an Hispanic woman.

So what's new with you? ]]> Tue, 26 May 2009 11:06:19 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090526110619/index.html <![CDATA[The Incident... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090521090142/index.html There are a bunch of workers digging very big, very deep holes next to the Chemistry building right now. In addition, they're pounding huge I-beams into the ground with a giant jack-hammer thing which is shaking the entire building.

Am I wrong to worry about them hitting a pocket of unusual energy beneath the campus and causing some sort of major incident and/or time shift? ]]> Thu, 21 May 2009 09:01:42 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090521090142/index.html <![CDATA[Things That Make You Go Hrrrrmmm... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090520093202/index.html Let me make one thing clear right from the start: I've never watched American Idol. OK, I have fast-forwarded through about 5 minutes of it when it runs over into Fringe, but I've never actually seen the show. (If you're wondering why, it's because I think the phrase "talent show" is usually an oxymoron and because as far as I can tell, the only people more anonymous than former Idol winners are former "The Next Food Network Star!" winners. Whatever happened to those people anyway?) However, I am informed enough to know there's some gay guy named Adam who might win, and some other guy who is supposedly some brand of Christian or something, but I only know this because apparently teh Christianists are making a big deal about not voting for the fag, who is obviously not a Christian because he's gay. Or something.

(OK, I'll fess up. Actually I did once become interested in American Idol for 30 seconds when the producers of Fringe placed "The Observer" in the audience. But thankfully owning a TiVo means never having to watch crap you don't want to watch for the 10 second shot you're actually interested in watching.)

Anyway, back to the anti-fag voting Christianists. These would be the same Christianists who made a big deal about how terribly awfully naughty and mean it was for the judges supposedly not voting for Ms. California supposedly because she is supposedly a hot, phony-breasted, possibly under-age topless-picture-posing, good Christianist girl, yet again demonstrating what whiny busybodies, fusspots, and hypocrites they are, right?

And real human beings, capable of breathing on their own without cue cards, actually care about this stuff, right?

Sorry, I pay so little attention to this kind of stupidity because it cuts into my LOST watching time, so I may have the details wrong. Care to enlighten me? ]]> Wed, 20 May 2009 09:32:02 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090520093202/index.html <![CDATA[Dharma Initiative: The Tower... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090518132929/index.html Mon, 18 May 2009 13:29:29 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090518132929/index.html <![CDATA[Michigan in the (Fake) News... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090513115449/index.html In case you missed this article: Detroit Mayor Throws First Brick in Glass-Breaking Ceremony for New Slum.

Money quote: "It is my great honor to introduce to you the brand new Baneberry Heights," announced Bing, gesturing to the ramshackle subdivision behind him. "Filthy, dangerous, filled with violence and blight: It's all here, and it's all completely falling apart."

Ouch. Almost as on-the-money as one of the local NPR commentators stating that most of the country thinks of Detroit as a "crime-infested hell hole." *wince* What? Too on the mark?

Oh, and in case you caught fellow Chelsea-ite and actor Jeff Daniels on the Colbert Report the other day, I'm happy to inform you that the school bond issue did indeed pass. ]]> Fri, 15 May 2009 08:54:49 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090513115449/index.html <![CDATA[And You Can't Spell Team Without Meat... ]]> http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090513092821/index.html Last night we were catching up on our Iron Chef watching. (The original. The Japanese version. The version with the balls to use fermented octopus rectums (octopi recti?) as the secret ingredient. "Mmmm! So Chewy! And not too oily!") The other night they were using something called "natto", which is fermented soybeans. Trust me, that description does not do justice to the cat-puke-like appearance of this "food." It has a ton of stringy, sticky goo covering it that looks exactly like the ectoplasm covering an Alien egg after it pops out of Alien Mommy's butt. And people eat it.

Anyway, Iron Chef is shown on the Fine Living Network, which has commercials disguised as hints. For example, they offer hints on painting a room, brought to you by Sherwin-Williams. Or hints about cooking brought to you by an olive oil company.

In one of the commercial/hint/product placement things, they had a hint about keeping your marriage together. I'm not sure what they were selling, but there it was anyway. Seriously, marriage tips on FLN. And teh breeders think teh gays don't take marriage seriously?! Anyway, they had some new-age guru guy who appeared to be a cross between Dr. Phil and Counselor Troi and Bob Ross giving tips about keeping a marriage together. In his first tip he noted that it's important to do things for each other. He gave two examples: running a bubble bath for your partner, or taking out the garbage. (Brian takes out the garbage, so I haven't had a bubble bath in 14 years. *le sigh*)

Later, Dr. Counselor Phil Ross Troi's second happy little commercial had him giving tips about making sure that both partners take enough "me" time:

TV Pitchman: ... Because remember: Marriage starts with an M and ends with an E, so you can't spell "marriage" without "me."

Brian: You can't spell marriage without "RAGE" either. ]]> Wed, 13 May 2009 09:28:21 -0400 http://homepage.mac.com/akiste/iblog/C2076943558/E20090513092821/index.html