1: Facebook is quite addictive

2: Usually I stay away from politics, but here's something to chew on.

Both major political parties have diverse, complex, and often contradictory platforms that go far beyond the simplistic conservative/liberal split. What is interesting is how they take sides when an issue is not addressed by the traditional party platform.

To whit: the electoral college. Republicans typically support it, and Democrats typically oppose it. Both sides can come up with long lists of lofty ideals that support/oppose it, but what it comes down to for both sides is that the electoral college elected a Republican twice in a row.

In the electoral college, most states use the Winner Takes All method but two states [Maine (D x4) and Nebraska (R x5)] use an alternate approach that arguably gives better direct representation. The Democratic Party proposed switching Colorado (R x9) to the new system in 2004, and failed.

Now it seems Republicans are all about more direct representation in the electoral college, but only in California (D x55). And who is defending the status quo? Yeah, the Democrats.

Conclusion: Only losers want election reform, but only the winners have the power to do it.

- Z

Item! It feels nice to be wanted. More details later, or not.

Item! My buddy and his wife ended up in Cancun this weekend. I can only hope they got a hurricane-season discount. They ended up 'finding' plane tickets out at $600 a pop, which was still better than sticking around at the hotel that made no evacuation plans and had been wiped out by another hurricane a couple years ago.

Item! (e:dragonlady7) was out of town this weekend so I got some quality fucking-off done. I did some housework but more importantly I totally found the best article on Wikipedia: (WIKIPEDIA - Voynich manuscript). This is the coolest fucking thing, and it creeps the shit out of me.

Item! What do you do with a bored Norwegian in Buffalo? Take him to the Pirate Festival for "Adult Night!" I can't really explain why.

- Z

The other night I had a weird dream. (e:dragonlady7) 's Norwegian cousin Aleksander was visiting us, and someone suggested that we should take him to a community ed. class about Norwegian Culture & Language. We showed up and there were maybe 100 people in the classroom, mostly just shooting the bull and eating the fruit & cheese trays. The teacher didn't really know anything about Norway and didn't bother to teach the class. I guess it was mostly just a social night called Community Ed. So Aleksander goes up to the front of the class and starts talking about what Norway is like, and some people are listening and some people are not, and nobody's being rude or anything, but really he could really have been talking about anything at all.

He kinda thinks this is totally lame, and there's all these people eating cheese and crackers, and so he says, you know, Norway's very similar to the United States in a lot of ways, except that when we eat cheese and crackers, we don't eat cheddar, we eat havarti.

And you know how in elementary foreign-language classes, when they teach you new vocabulary, the teacher says the word and the students repeat it? Everybody stopped what they were doing, said "HAVARTI!" in unison, and went back to chatting.

I split a gut and had to leave the room I was laughing so hard. Aleksander had half an idea of what was going on so he went on to explain that in Norway the cheese and fruit trays would be called a smörgåsbord [laying on the accent real thick-like]. And the entire class stopped, replied "SMORGASBORD!" and went back to doing whatever it was they were doing.

Laughing, Aleksander came out to join me in the hallway and asked me what the Hell was going on. I was laughing so hard I woke up.

Turns out neither havarti nor smorgasbords are particularly Norwegian.

- Z

My kitty Chita Rivera is such a spaz, a product of her surroundings I suppose.





Also, see my previous post if you want to hear all the stupid details about my living room. Here's a pretty decent color sample - yellow living room to the right, blue stairwell to the left, [future] orange hallway in the center. The old color is so bleh, especially when compared with the new color at sunrise

- Z

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Edited to add 'invisable microphone:' damn this is addictive.

So we've been renting a house from my mom for a while. It's a nice house but the walls are hideous. Somebody once decided to paint the living room periwinkle. [I can't explain it - the floors are a light-colored hardwood and the room tried its hardest to clash with itself.] My room is a smudgy light-toothpaste green. The kitchen has dead-wildflower wallpaper in muted earthtones with high-gloss white-and-yellow Formica all over the walls. And the master bedroom - jesus - is reflective silver wallpaper with baby blue flowers. Also, much of the ceiling paint [which is your standard white] is peeling. I strongly suspect that there are more serious problems with the walls, which are still the original [early postwar] plaster.

I told mom we were repainting the place whether she liked it or not. Then I showed her the swatches we'd picked for the living room. She kinda flipped out [she owns the house after all]. "You are an adult and you can make your own decisions. But when you leave the house you're painting it all white again." Hmf.

Now our living room is ZOMGWTFYELLOW!!! with all the molding in HOLY SHIT!!! PURPLE. It sounds like a trainwreck but it looks 300,000 times better. Turns out it was always a yellow room but nobody bothered to paint it that way. Pix soon.

I think maybe we won't tell mom what colors we've picked for the rest of the house.

- Z

Item! Keep your meat-hole clean. While the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets is fucking around with a Freedom of Information request, Weggies gave it to me straight. Their meat grinder used to connect to another machine, and now it doesn't. The inspector felt that the hole coming out of the meat grinder should be capped [it wasn't] and gave Wegs a "non-finable critical deficiency."

Item! I am the Troy Tulowitzki of base humor. Anyone else want to try fitting Pablo Neruda, Joel Giambra, and the US Geological Survey into a joke about public sex, while commenting on the chronic underfunding of the Erie County public library system? Can you do it in under three sentences? Yeah, thought so.

Item! Don't be a cock to the press. This is pretty self-explanatory: we have a press and you don't. Furthermore, we're underpaid and cranky and if we're writing about you we already think you're a fucking idiot. Oh yeah, and we record pretty much every telephone conversation we have. What is wrong with you?

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

- Z

I do not seriously consider the quality of a mobile phone's camera when I'm shopping for one. It is a phone and I use it to talk. That having been said, if a phone should come with a camera, it would be nice if it were halfway decent. The camera on my Sony Ericsson T616 sucks balls. But that is not why you came here today.



This is a document hanging up at the entrance to the Amherst St Wegmans. You cannot read it here because my phone's camera sucks, but at the top it says 'NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH - INSPECTION - 6/23/07.' It is hanging up with all kinds of other boring paperwork, like their beer & wine license, and the building's rated maximum capacity, and like the minimum wage laws and employee of the month. Boring.

Except-

what is that checkmarked box labeled? You cannot read it here because, once again, my phone's camera sucks, but it says 'CRITICAL DEFICIENCIES.' [The other options were 'this establishment is in compliance...' and 'critical deficiencies which have been addressed...']

Ya.

- Z

I will refrain from adding my own commentary.

Since at least mid-June, BRO has been posting negative stories about Buffalo that are saved to a hidden cache page and not posted to or made mention of on the main pages that we are all familiar with.

I didn't read about the YWCA heroin-at-daycare case on BRO, did you? Yet here it is, and it was Dugg by nearly two thousand users. Which put it on the frontpage of one of the web's most visited pages, seen in the neighborhood of 200,000 times.

Here's a story BRO didn't post (but did) about the man who was beaten with his own prosthetic leg. I especially love the accompanying graphic. It's been posted to Digg.

To top it off, BRO has even posted stories from way outside city limits - Lockport, County of Niagara, is representing on BRO's cache site, with sodomizing pitbulls galore. Digg? Check. Over 1,000 Diggs, to be precise.

[...]

So, while promoting the wonders of Buffalo to the local audience, Buffalo Rising is perfectly content to promote some very ugly, very negative stories about Buffalo (and Lockport, County of Niagara), to a separate worldwide audience in order to artificially inflate web statistics.

- Z

1. You ever wonder what it's like to be a sysadmin for an alt weekly? You want to find out? Send me your resume.

2. You ever see those ads on political websites showing the president making a monkey face or Hillary Clinton's eyes popping out of her head, and the ad says: 'Do you approve of the job this person is doing? Vote in our completely neutral and totally legitimate ballot.'

I've never clicked on one, so I don't know if they even register your 'vote.' I'm sort of half-curious about how the voting breaks down for those, but I'd be more interested to know how many people vote on those at all. [And also, academically, how many of the people who vote on those things actually vote with real ballots in November.]

I am not a big fan of Newsvine [I find it far too self-referential to be of any use] but they are running an interesting presidential primary poll. Get websites of varying levels of bias and neutrality, give them a relatively neutral ballot, and see what comes up [sample ballot: ].

What is interesting is not so much how the political sites are biased ['The Mitt Report' is 96% for Romney, imagine that] but how nonpolitical sites can be strongly biased in weird ways ['ClanTemplates,' which appeares to be some kind of gaming site? has Al Gore with a convincing lead, and I don't even think he's running].

- Z

We have a WiebeTech hard drive enclosure at work and I'm very impressed with it, so I ordered another one for my new home backup drive (e:zobar,40088) . Have you ever read an order confirmation email? Have you ever enjoyed reading it?

Hello from WiebeTech,

We just received your order and we think it's just super duper that you've chosen to do business with us.

If you check the shipping status of your products hopefully you'll see everything is squared away and ready to go (those are called "out-the-doorsies"). Sometimes everybody wants the same thing you want at the same time you want to have it and we run out of stuff (those are called "out-of-stocksies"). If you ordered an "out-of-stocksie" it makes us sad, but then we're happy again because we know that it will soon turn into an "out-the-doorsie."

So after all the money and shipping twiddle bits are set to go then all the products you ordered are built skillfully by hand in a magic realm called "Production" by clever little beings called "Wiebes." The Wiebes will carefully test and format every function and characteristic of your product(s) before carefully packing it and sending it off with a smile and a wave of their little orange hands. If you want to check on the Wiebe's progress with your order you can send an email to shipping@wiebetech.com. But don't worry, they will send you an email when it goes out the door.

When you receive your order don't forget to register it (www.wiebetech.com/registration) so the Support Wiebes can assist you with your product should you need it.

Also, we're on the edge of our seat wondering what you think of WiebeTech, our products, our people, our website or even of life in general. Would you mind just taking this little survey for us? www.wiebetech.com/survey it won't take but a minute.

We had the greatest time doing business with you. You are now our new best friend!

Thanks a Bunch!
WiebeTech, LLC

It's like Charlie and the Hard Drive Enclosure Factory over here. I'm picturing Laverne putting a glove on my enclosure as it rolls by on the conveyor belt and waves to the assembly line.

- Z