We Are In Agreement

US Soldier Awarded Cheney "Excellence in Parenting" Award

U.S. soldier 'waterboarded his own daughter, 4, because she couldn't recite alphabet'

The Google Superbowl Ad...

...was very cute, I liked it.

I wonder how long it took them to find questions that had benign auto-fill suggestions, unlike, say, anything that begins with "why"

Juarez is murdery

(CNN) -- As many as 15 gunmen stormed into a house party in Juarez, Mexico, in the early hours of Sunday morning and opened fire, killing at least 13 people and injuring 13 others in one of the deadliest attacks the city has seen this year, a police official said.

One of the deadliest? It's January 31. Not good.

The Bell Jar

I just finished The Bell Jar, one of those books that's been hanging over my head for 20 years.

What struck me was just how funny it is, how much I enjoyed the character of Esther Greenwood, and The Bell Jar's redemptive conclusion.

For a book that deals with madness, and the 1960's tragic prescriptions for madness (esp. electroshock treatment), The Bell Jar is surprisingly light and readable.

I can see it having a profound impact on seminal feminists in the 1960s, dealing humorously with dating, marriage, sex and the limited number of options women faced, especially brilliant women like the central character (read: Plath herself).

Maybe Plath would have committed suicide anyway. Or maybe, had she not been constricted by the mores that forced women in the 1960s to get married and pregnant, Plath would have soldiered on and churned out books and poems and screenplays and penned more lines like,

"the face that peered back at me [in the mirror] seemed to be peering from a prison cell after a prolonged beating. It looked bruised and puffy and all the wrong colors. It was a face that needed soap and water and Christian tolerance."

See, that's fucking hilarious, I'm sad she didn't spend the last 40 years writing.

Capital Punishment and torture

Haiti now faces another problem: guys in pick-up trucks driving around, plying orphans with food, then kidnapping them and selling them as sex slaves.

Now I oppose all forms of torture and capital punishment, but should it happen that these guys were, say, rounded up, sodomized, and set on fire, I think my opposition would take the form of a lukewarm Tweet.

I might even say "oh, now that's awful."

News of Salinger's death spreads like a brushfire

I was following Google's live-feed of news generated by the death of JD Salinger (that's a long way of justifying why I'm posting a screen shot of a World of Warcraft forum page).

I found this and had to post it. The second post (by Phibes), the context, his sig, the forum...it makes me...it makes me hate the internet...

 

I give this girl credit for her composure, I would have evacuated my bowels into my pantalones

TSA worker plants a bag of white powder on a passenger as a joke

Rebecca Solomon is 22 and a student at the University of Michigan, and on Jan. 5 she was flying back to school after holiday break. She made sure she arrived at Philadelphia International Airport 90 minutes before takeoff, given the new regulations.

[...]

After pulling her laptop out of her carry-on bag, sliding the items through the scanning machines, and walking through a detector, she went to collect her things.

A TSA worker was staring at her. He motioned her toward him.

Then he pulled a small, clear plastic bag from her carry-on - the sort of baggie that a pair of earrings might come in. Inside the bag was fine, white powder.

She remembers his words: "Where did you get it?"

[...]

Solomon, 5-foot-3 and traveling alone, looked up at the man in the black shirt and fought back tears.

Put yourself in her place and count out 20 seconds. Her heart pounded. She started to sweat. She panicked at having to explain something she couldn't.

Now picture her expression as the TSA employee started to smile.

Just kidding, he said. He waved the baggie. It was his.

HHAHAHAAA!!!!! I hope he gets the chair.

USB Flower

Pretty sweet, especially for me as my answers to these questions ranged from "yes" to YES!!"

This doesn't sound at all creepy

Artificial muscles let cadavers (and someday paralyzed humans) wink.

The next advancement will be artificial deltoids and a voice-box that allow cadavers to raise their arms and say "brrrrraaaaains."

Because New Orleans doens't have any other problems...

Tabitha has been working as a prostitute in New Orleans since she was 13. Now 30 years old, she can often be found working on a corner just outside of the French Quarter.

[...]

These days, Tabitha, who asked that her real name not be used in this story, has yet another burden: a stamp printed on her driver’s license labels her a sex offender. Her crime? Sex work. 

New Orleans city police and the district attorney’s office are using a state law written for child molesters to charge hundreds of sex workers like Tabitha as sex offenders. The law, which dates back to 1805, makes it a crime against nature to engage in “unnatural copulation”

Of the 861 sex offenders currently registered in New Orleans, 483 were convicted of a crime against nature, according to Doug Cain, a spokesperson with the Louisiana State Police. And of those convicted of a crime against nature, 78 percent are Black and almost all are women.

I think that qualifies as systemic racism.

She also has to purchase and mail postcards with her picture to everyone in the neighborhood informing them of her conviction.

Nice touch.

Color Lines