Itemised loathing and feed yourself smiles

There is a billboard on Hanley as you head north to Manchester. It is advertising the Bike Show at the St. Charles Family Arena, sponsored by Wide Open Motorcycle magazine. The big draw to get people to attend? Win Free Breast Augmentation!

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Young men and ladies are losing their mind

Driving home today I saw something very scary. They are coming...



Unfortunately I'm sure his platform of 'total detachment from reality plus racism and theocracy" will go over well here.

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The spheres are in commotion

The Pew Research Center has a nice little News IQ quiz. I thought it was way too easy, but the scary thing is I am sure a majority of Americans would get less than 60% on it. I missed a single question (on the number of troop casualties in Iraq) and it dropped me to the 85th percentile. UPDATE: CNN has a weekly news quiz, but in at least one of the questions the accompanying photo includes the answer. Nicely done. I missed the sports question, of course.

Interesting news out of China about a 100,000 year old human skill. What I found most interesting was the quoting of an academic that contradicts the assertions of the newspaper. I could tell that article did not come from an American source. It would be a rare and wonderful thing for an American paper or wire service to publish an academic that was disagreeing with a media outlet. Sure enough it was AFP, Agence France-Presse.

Something else possibly older than previously thought: The Platypus.

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You pretend you're anything

This is a direct quote from our move planning meeting. I have witnesses.

"You'll also be getting an email with a packing checklist so you can list all the things to be moved. We're only sending you one copy of the list, so if you need more than one print out you can make photocopies of it"

And a better quote from Griz on the topic of multiple items on your clipboard in Windows:

"I can count the number of times I've wanted that ability on one fist."

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They call me a butcher

I think that Schnuck's marketing department needs a course in remedial English.

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And I don't believe in God so I can't be saved

Some items on religion in America:

Ed Brayton has a nice post commemorating Religious Freedom Day, in honor of Thomas Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom.

Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee believes that we need to amend the Constitution to bring it in line with Christian doctrine. Sort of the opposite of what the Founding Fathers wanted. This would make the U.S. a de facto theocracy, where Biblical law was enforced. And many of those laws are the ones that the Taliban was enforcing in Afghanistan when they executed women for being insufficiently subservient to their husbands. "I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution, But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

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This simple expectation to save this day.

Big week for tech news. Sure there's the geek porn object-of-lust du-jour (yes I want one, no I can't even come close to affording it). And several other cool things out of MacWorld, combined with no real innovations or bombshells at CES. But the real deal is that Sun is buying MySQL. MySQL, if you don't know, is the heart and sole of Open Source projects. It is on pretty much every Linux box in the world, and the vast majority of Macs as well. MySQL is a serious competitor in the low to mid range database server world, taking money out of the pockets of IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft on a regular basis. And this is the smartest way Sun could leverage their position as the dominant data server hardware vendor into more software and service sales. Brilliant move.

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Went to the studio then we made a video

The latest Mutha Show is now up, check it out!

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You can download it to your iPod from my Box Set

At the prompting of my very good friend Chuck, I finally got around to trying out the Amazon MP3 Music Store. I've tried all of the online music stores (that work with Mac) as they've come and gone, and while none of them have been truly awful they also haven't compared to the ease of use of the iTunes Music Store. iTunes of course has the advantage of the store interface being the same as the media player interface.

The initial setup was a little screwy. Start download, enter billing info in a seperate window, finish download. The instructions however were very simple and it installed flawlessly. The selection is mixed relative to iTMS. There's a lot that I couldn't find on Amazon that I could on Apple, and vice versa. Of course with my tastes being what they are there was a lot I couldn't find on either.

Really the only quibbles I have are

• that if you buy a single song you have to manually add it to your media player
• if you buy an album it only inserts a soft link to the tracks in iTunes rather than physically copying them in. Which may be a problem depending on how you have your backups configured (e.g. you may think you're backing the music up when you are not).

Overall I'd give the Amazon MP3 store an 8 out of 10 (due to selection). And I'd give the same to iTunes Music Store.

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Hey hey hey all you girls in these industrial towns

As I was pulling out of the parking garage one of those billboard trucks went by advertising PT's. The major event they were promoting was "Free Erotic Body Piercing". At a strip club. I would have to imagine that's possibly not the most sterile environment in which to have something like that done. Is that even legal? And do you really want someone jabbing a needle into your body in a poorly light noisy club crowded full of drunk people? There is a very high probablity of things going Very Badly. When I got home I went to the website to see the details on this, as it wasn't clear from the billboard when and where this was happening (if you aren't a connoisseur of East Side strip clubs, PT's owns five over there ranging from the high end Penthouse club to the skanky and dangerous Roxy). The "Free Erotic Body Piercing" was happening at Roxy's, natch. Which obviates any questions of legality. Oh, and it happened two days ago. I get that billboards sometimes aren't taken down right after an event happens, but this is a mobile billboard. Maybe just don't keep paying them to drive around promoting something that's over? Though I am curious as to what they consider to be an "Erotic" versus "Non-Erotic" body piercing. If I wanted to go get my eyebrow done would that count? What about my belly button. I understand that's considered erotic when a woman does it, but I would argue there's no way it could be considered such if I did it.

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I've got better things on the other side of town

For all the talk on stltoday about how smooth the first day of the 40 shutdown has gone it seems a bit premature. School doesn't start until tomorrow, which will cause a tremendous increase in traffic. And a lot of people don't go back to work until Monday, which will also increase traffic a good deal. Also note, rush hour isn't over yet.

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