Category: Thoughts

Look funny? Live in a mobile home? If you’re in the Twin Cities, the cops are going to take your house and leave you barefoot on the side of the goddamn highway.

Why isn’t this being reported?

In preparation for the convention, cops in the Twin Cities are rounding up and arresting hippies. It’s OK, hippies are gross. FDL has more.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin has a pretty clear stance on abortion and an even clearer stance on church and state and heathens.

Oops: “Mrs. Wooten is wearing a red shirt that says, “Merced: Invest in California’s Future.” Which is pretty much how all the trouble began.“

Bank boards up a foreclosed house, only to have people break in and steal the boards. They spent $10,000 to sell it. Final sale price: $1, although the new owner will need to pay back taxes and water bills, and the house now needs a new roof, windows, siding, plumbing, wiring, fixtures, flooring… oh, and the garage caught fire.

I thought the stimulus check plan was dumb, so the Globe confirms it: The people who most need them are least likely to get them.

Not enough people recycle their direct-mail pieces. Funny, I keep a recycling bin right next to the mailbox so they can be recycled right away. I guess the goal is to drive me to recycle them after reading? Whatever.

Web radio is getting choked. Well, that’s a damn shame.

There’s got to be a thesis in the similarities of SATs as a way of measuring the ability to learn and FICO as a measure of creditworthiness. It’s all about tying something very abstract and diffuse to a number, then idolizing the number and ignoring the actual thing it’s supposed to refer to.

Yet more evidence that Dan Grabauskas should not be in charge of the MBTA.

Headline in the Boston Metro: “So What Is Real?”

Of course, they’re talking about the amount of fakery in this year’s Olympics, but still, it’s an unusually philosophical question for a paper that usually covers firefighters, kittens, and Owen Wilson.

I sure hope she’s making this up.

This year, the Olympics authorities will take what is delicate referred to as 4,500 samples, and store them for eight years so that if they develop new tests for previously-undetected drugs, they can go back and check old champions with new technology.

It sounds great, but just imagine the logistical challenges of keeping a room-sized freezer full of urine at ultra-low temperatures for eight years. Just imagine being the person whose job it is to guard that freezer to prevent tampering. Just imagine, some time in 2013: “Hey, Bill, we got a new test developed for synthetic HGH, can you go down to the 2008 Olympic Pee Freezer and pull samples 3021 through 3044?”

Yet another reason that we should not only allow, but promote, doping. My primary desire for it, of course, is that it’ll lead to great leaps in transhuman technologies. Genetically engineered swimmers with fins for feet!

Seeing our jackass embarrassment of a president schmooze with Olympians just makes me want to break the TV.

I guess he’s no more of an embarrassment than the Chinese gymnastics team, which is obviously faking the birthdates of its athletes to get them to competition age. Seriously, look at the difference between the American and Chinese gymnasts– the Chinese have fielded a team of children who have no idea how badly they’re going to injure themselves.

I love watching the Olympics. But you have to keep in mind a phrase that I think is attributed to Brecht: “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.” You don’t need state-sponsored doping programs to know that. You can see the president using nominally non-political events for political purposes and know it.