11 Oct

R.I.P. Cursive

For some reason, cursive never stuck for me.  Along with everyone else, I suffered through no less than a few of my formative hours marveling at how my various teachers went loony on me.  I mean, after having finally learning how to write the alphabet, we suddenly – and without rationale explanation I might add - were expected to write it in a completely different way.  A practice I immediately chucked when they weren’t looking and, short of my incoherent signature, haven’t used in decades. 

Well, I remember last year I was exploring the possibility of going to law school (a bullet I have since dodged) and had the privilege of sitting for yet another American standardized test known as the LSAT.  Part of the security process included a pre-written declaration that you were not taking the test for someone else blah blah blah which you were supposed to copy in longhand and sign.  Well hot damn if there were instructions in stern looking bold-type that I must copy this in cursive and block letters would not be accepted.  The proctor had very little sympathy for my situation and thought I was just taking the piss.  I struggled through, but I swear that whoever verifies those statements must have thought that there was an eight year old somewhere in Paris wanting to get an early start. 

Anyway, the point of all this drivel is that I was happy to awaken this morning to learn that apparently cursive is dying, defunt, passe – it’s like sooo 1990s dude.

06 Oct

Friday Dublin, er... Copenhagen Pics

So I have returned much triumphant from my trip to Denmark. It was a fairly sleepy, quiet town now that the carnival is over. Definitly a good place to get some rest. And who knows, maybe they party-hearty after this old man goes to bed? Oh, and to answer the question I posed last week? In Denmark, they call a Danish dee-licious!

Apparently, leaving a ‘going away’ notice on your blog is actually an invitation to barrage the site with porn and pharmaceutical ads. Apologies for that, I think I’ve gotten it all now. But as my friend Tom says, “if I ever want to find black/asian midget muff diving lesbian butt banging incestuous donkey fuckers, I know where to go.”

Well, as you might have expected, I brought back a few pictures. Hope nobody minds them supplanting the Friday Dublin pics.

 

Copenhagen has a really great zoo - an enterprise I've been quite disillusioned with since Barcelona. Copenhagen is putting tremendous focus on habitat reproduction and the animals definitely seem a good deal happier and less stressed. This little fella just kept lookin’ at me – think I smelled nice?

Of course, as the much ballyhooed children’s book tells us, everybody poops. Rhino’s are no exception. Although I wonder if we really needed it spelled out for us? BTW, if any of youread Danish, I would LOVE to know what this says!

Parliament, I think? Funny when you get architecture burnout. Any one of these buildings if located near me would be something to gawk at. But here I don’t even bother to learn what I’m looking at!

And I can’t POSSIBLY leave you all without a little homoerotic, hermaphroditic worship play to take home with ya' (sorry for the dark pic, it was night and I am no photographer!).

The little mermaid. She’s sad because apparently vandals have cut off her head. Twice.

Thought this was some nice graffiti.

Yup, that about says it all.

Finally, one of Copenhagen’s many canals.

29 Sep

I'm off to Copenhagen!

 I wonder what they call a Danish in Denmark?


See you all next Wednesday!!

 

26 Sep

I'm not dead Link Vomit

Contrary to popular belief, I am neither deceased nor have I been abducted by shifty government spooks and taken to gitmo for all the subversive crap I put on this ol’ website. The truth is that I am being held hostage by four energetic children, an incapacitated partner, and three new foster kittens, each of which require about three and a half hands and 28 hours of awake-time per day. So I barely have enough time to breathe much less blog.

I have, however, been meaning to produce pithy comments on the following:

Clinton’s fabby smack-down of Chris Wallace, Fox News, and the rest of moronic America who have been trying to rewrite history. This is a model of how modern Democrats need to use little things called “facts” to combat the revisionist hacks who have been telling lies for so long they have already begun to believe their own filth.

The Prince of Darkness’s promised October Surprise (hey, surprise! You lose!)

The latest farce of bin Laden death rumors. How truly beautiful it would be if this supposedly larger-than-life scumbag were to die in bed rather than some tragic suicide run where others had to suffer. Likewise, I would love to see a completely impotent Cowboy Bush fall flat on his promise to get ‘im and instead half-ass chase the guy around the desert until he finally dies of natural causes.

Brilliant suggestion on how to keep the increasingly inept TSA/Airline handlers from misplacing your luggage.

Fun little doo-dads of presidential doodles.

Terrorist bloopers.

And the really obvious truth that BushCo have single-handedly increased terrorism and terrorists around the world. Way to go!

Oh, and bonus - pabre, triste Katherine, who gosh-darnit really, really believed that helping the GOP steal an election would actually qualify her for a reach-around. Sorry!

So … since I don’t have time to elucidate my opinion on the latest nail-biters on season 5 of my favorite reality TV show, The White House, I invite you to read these links yourself and just simply try to imagine what brilliant commentary I could have written.

20 Sep

TSA invokes forced hibernation for air travellers

As loyal THF readers may already know, your host spends an inordinate amount of time at airports both in and out of the U.S. For the most part, I reluctantly admit that, despite the best efforts of shrill reactionaries, my forays into the security process are generally smooth. With a number of notable exceptions involving the removal of pants.

Yet I am loathe to gracefully acquiesce to the sheer arbitrariness these attacks on my freedom of movement simply because we are learning to live with them. I mean, you seriously expect to stop terrorists by making me take off my shoes? Give me a damn break. If I want to smuggle explosives onto the plane, I’ll just go ahead and shove ‘em up the ol’ urthwalker rectum.

Such procedures do nothing except give comfort to the simple-minded in creating the illusion of security in an insecure world. Moreover, these procedures are inherently racist in assuming that folks of the brown-skinned persuasion are fundamentally lacking in cognitive higher neocortical function sufficient to avoid repeating the same modus operandi of a previous failed attempt. When it comes down to it, I would rather come to terms with the fact that everything carries inherent risks, and I would rather roll the dice on the radically unlikely event that lightening will strike twice than deal with the delays and indignations of removing clothing in an unsanitary public arena.

The newest atrocity, of course, is the ban on liquids in U.S. and U.K. airports. In fact, upon leaving taco-land a few weeks ago, I discovered I was not even permitted to carry on a sealed bottle of water purchased from the airport vending machine inside the secure area. Of course, since we all know that terrorists are planning to attack our food chain, including Mars Bars, Vittel, and Lorna Dune by posing as the vending-machine-dude, I really shouldn’t be surprised. But I am damn well annoyed at the whole shebang.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of several stationary weeks languishing in the luxurious urthwalker manor, completely devoid of impending travel plans. But my partner and I decided last night to celebrate the fifth year of our patriarchal-construct with a weekend of debauchery in Copenhagen, so I am once again faced with the increasingly delicate task of packing without liquids. What a pain. Sounds like I’m not alone in my annoyance, either.

So, it seemed like a good time to link to this little doo-dad, an online game where you play the airport security guard charged with the task of confiscating completely arbitrary items from a benign airport populace. Seems just about right to me. Enjoy!


20 Sep

Congress debates student strip searches

The FBI issued their annual Uniform Crime Report today, revealing that marijuana arrests, at a record high after 40 years of the failed War on Drugs, now account for over 786,000 arrests per year, more than all violent crimes combined. 

"These numbers belie the myth that police do not target and arrest minor marijuana offenders," said NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre, who noted that at current rates, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 40 seconds in America. "This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources that diverts law enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious and violent crime, including the war on terrorism." 

Any sane human being might take this opportunity to reflect upon the effectiveness of our drug policies, and wonder whether prohibition and enforcement are perhaps inserting themselves as causal factors.  A rational person would be frustrated by this increase and ready to consider other options, such as the wildly successful policies of Holland.  Or, they might just try to figure out ever-creative and legal ways to get into the naked rectums of underage boys and girls: 

The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006 (HR 5295) is a sloppily written bill that would require any school receiving federal funding (essentially every public school) to adopt policies allowing teachers and school officials to conduct random, warrantless searches of every student, at any time, for essentially any reason they want. All they would have to do is say they suspect one of their students might be carrying drugs, and then they could conduct a wide scale search of every student in the building. These searches could be pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches depending on how far school administrators wanted to go. 

Glad to see our police and policymakers are putting emphasis where it belongs.

20 Sep

THF Tool of the Week

I’m really not into name-calling. After all, such labeling is not only a tool of the simple-minded, but is also the first step in the dehumanization process by which we are able to forgo our ingrained respect for general human decency. By example I point to the administration’s semi-successful push to torture terrorists, combatants, extremists, or prisoners of war as opposed to a similar PR push to shove bamboo shoots under the fingernails of someone’s brother/sister, mother/father, or child. Applying labels allows us the necessary psychological distance with which to commit normally unimaginable acts upon our global neighbors.

That said, I will allow myself this rare foray into the sticks and stones process and present to you a rare edition of THF Tool of the Week:

The November elections are less than two months away and now candidates are gearing up and getting out, spreading their campaign goals. For most candidates putting up campaign signs and handing out brochures outlining who they are and what they stand for is standard, but for one candidate those tactics don't go far enough.

To an Emmett strawberry farmer, who's running for governor this November, his name means everything. "It seems like only a nut would do something like that, but I'm not a nutty kind of person at all," Pro-Life told CBS 2 News.

Meet Pro-Life, yes that's his name, formerly known as Marvin Richardson.

"My wife, she's not into calling me Pro-Life yet," he said.

Uh-huh. Not nutty at all. And Charles Manson had some really good ideas, too.

19 Sep

U.S. jails press member without charge

Back in the USSR: 

The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing. 

Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for "imperative reasons of security" under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative's review of Hussein's work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.

19 Sep

When you call yourself "Natural Selection Foods"

This is ironic on so many damn levels it makes my liver hurt.

19 Sep

Bush played paintball once, I think

Bush Vs. People who actually know what the hell they're talking about:

IN THE FIGHT over rules for the interrogation and trials of terrorism suspects, there is a split -- not so much between Republicans and Democrats or the White House and the Senate, but between leaders like President Bush with no combat experience and those like Colin Powell who know combat and want to maintain the Geneva Conventions as a protection for US troops. 

Well it’s about time someone said it.  You know, someone besides the millions of frakkin’ people who have been screaming it for years.