Monkey unleashed

I've never been to Florida, I've never really wanted to go there, and now it looks like I've got another reason not to visit the state:

Wildlife officials said a rhesus monkey known to throw feces when mad is on the loose in Tampa Bay. Authorities have been trying to capture the primate since Tuesday afternoon, but it managed to evade a bucket truck and tranquilizer dart.

As if legions of old people who can't figure out that they're accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan, David Caruso constantly whipping off his sunglasses, and guys wearing pastel suits with T-shirts and their jacket sleeves rolled up weren't bad enough, right?  I think I'll just stick to buying their orange juice.

Posted by: Sean M. at 03:57 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Time to help you sort out my ridiculous life again

Last week my roommate was waiting for me in the kitchen after I got home from work at 3am.  It turns out that he's gotten his girlfriend pregnant*...with twins.  Also, they got married this past weekend.  Also, they're moving out** in spring before the babies are due (which, since then has been pushed up to the end of this month).

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I'm planning on moving up to DC soon - job or no job***.  So if any of you DC-area Morons know of any jobs or reputable temp agencies in the area, please let me know!

*This happened to my last roommate, too.  And he was a youth minister. Maybe I should look for work as a fertility god. 

**They are moving because they don't want to live in the same apartment building as multiple crack dealers (a fact I did not know) and a college bar (a fact I did know).

***I've been saving money for almost a year to move, so it's not as reckless as it seems, but I'll need a job fast.

Update: To answer Alice_H's question, I want something political eventually, but I'll take anything (administrative assistant, etc.) for now, just to get settled.  But, education-wise I have a BS in History (minors in Humanities and Religious Thought) and a Masters in Government (emphasis in International Politics).  On the job front I have internship experience in the press shop of an important conservative organization in DC and a little over a years worth of administrative (read: low-level beaurocrat) experience in state government.

Posted by: It's Vintage, Duh at 11:17 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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The double standard

Sure, when Oprah says this kind of thing to Kate Winslet, it's all peachy keen, but when I say it, I get roughed up by her bodyguard...

Winfrey told the star, "I love the fact that you have real breasts! I love that you have real breasts! Because in all the breast scenes, your breasts do what real breasts do."

[...]

Winfrey ended by giving the British star a high five, adding, "God bless your real breasts!"

Life just isn't fair.

Posted by: Sean M. at 07:36 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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The day Regis Philbin's life changed forever

Say what you will about Kelly Ripa, the woman knows when it's time to cut to a commercial break...

Posted by: Sean M. at 03:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I have nightmares

Per Alice_H's request, I am sharing the dream I had last night. 

I dreamt that I had to spend Inauguration Day evening watching the festivities with Michelle Obama.  At my apartment.  She kept throwing around glitter and confetti, all while yelling that I wasn't cleaning up her mess fast enough. 

It wasn't a long dream*, but it felt long.

(Thankfully I soon began dreaming that I was in The Jungle Book, but with a flying elephant in the place of Mowgli.  Also, I was swinging through the trees using not vines, but computer mouse cords.  It was even more wicked awesome than it sounds.)

Posted by: It's Vintage, Duh at 07:03 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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Football+Gynecologists=This?

Source.

Posted by: eddiebear at 12:13 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Press conferences are more interesting in other countries

Posted by: Sean M. at 05:11 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The most annoying song, evah

Most annoying song evah?  90% of popular music today begs to differ, the kids shouting "Do all your shopping, AT WALMART!" actually made me laugh.  Ledbetter could only handle 3:41 seconds of the Most Annoying Song Evah, I just finished listening to the whole song.

Posted by: doubleplusundead at 08:45 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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One way or another, I'm pretty sure I'm going to hell just for posting this video

(Via Teh Hotsnausages, kinda.)

Posted by: Sean M. at 06:21 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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A brief review of Gran Torino

I liked it.  Also, I learned many new racial slurs.

Posted by: It's Vintage, Duh at 01:41 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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He doesn't transform on the shabbos

I need one.

Posted by: It's Vintage, Duh at 05:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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In space, no one can hear you scream

Unless, that is, you're some kind of gigantic, world-devouring monster...

Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.

Again, I'm gonna go with a titanic being of unimaginable horror. Occam's razor, you know.

Posted by: Sean M. at 11:56 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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What could possibly go wrong?

If movies, teevee, and the kind of books people read on airplanes have a message for us, it's that cool super-science will eventually be the death of us all. And hey, it looks like they were right:

The idea of resurrecting extinct animals moved a step closer to reality last year when scientists announced that they had decoded almost all of the genome of the woolly mammoth, from 60,000-year-old remains found frozen in Siberia.

Now New Scientist magazine has named the 10 other beasts most likely to rise again, including the Irish elk deer whose antlers measured 12 feet across, the dodo and Neanderthal man.

Animals that died out thousands of years ago could be recreated using genetic information retrieved from well-preserved specimens recovered from permafrost, dark caves or dry desserts.

The article goes on to mention that scientists probably won't be able to bring back the dinosaurs because DNA degrades over millions of years, but we could possibly resurrect sabre-toothed tigers (what a great idea!) and creatures like...

The Volkswagen Beetle-sized "colossal" armadillo, with its spiky, club-like tail, once rumbled across the South American countryside, and some might fancy seeing it do so again.

Yeah, I'm not one of those people. In fact, I tend to fall squarely in the camp of people who don't "fancy" gigantic animals with spiky, club-like tails rumbling across, well, anywhere really.

Posted by: Sean M. at 09:29 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Geek Test

Question 1.

Do you know who all of these people are?



If so, congrats! You passed.

Question 2

Do you own all of these games?

If so, welcome to the club.

Update: Of course no geek post is complete without the Blood Elf Dance from Blizzcon 07

Posted by: alexthechick at 06:33 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Sure, why the hell not?

Larry Flynt and Joe Francis are looking for bailouts too.

Posted by: doubleplusundead at 04:16 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Presented without context

"I just wanted to burn his penis so it belongs to me and no one else, I didn't mean this to happen," Ms Boord quoted Mrs Narayan as saying.

Right. Because there's nothing that encourages a guy to stay with you more than setting fire to his junk.

Posted by: Sean M. at 03:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Conservatives Are Engineers, Liberals are Mathematicians

First, a joke:

An engineer and a mathematician are taken into room and shown a long hallway.  At the end of the hall is the most beautiful woman they've ever seen, completely naked and obviously ready for anything.   They are told by their host that they can do anything they want with that woman for as long as they want but there is one rule.  They are only allowed to move toward her in increments of half the remaining distance.

The mathematician says, "This is bullshit!  If I can only get half-way there each time I'll never reach her!  It's impossible!"  he stomped out in a huff.

The engineer laughed and looked at his host, "I may not be able to get all the way there but I'll get close enough to make it work."

In the comments to this post, I started to talk about how liberals are always looking for 100% perfect solutions while conservatives, understanding the imperfectibility of man, are happy to find solutions that mostly work.  This is particularly true if the negative side-effects of more "perfect" solutions tend to aggravate other societal ills.

If individual charity only manages to eliminate 90% of America's poverty, a liberal will say it is rubbish and must be replaced by the unstoppable power of the government.  Conservatives are cool with that because they know that forcing society to remove all negative results from existence have many more shitty side effects than benefits.

Of course, in all other ways liberals are really nothing like mathematicians but really, I just wanted to tell the joke.

Posted by: Moron Pundit at 01:51 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment
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Sound Off: Freedom Versus Equality

I was going to rant about this but I keep finding myself unable to distill this argument into anything readable. I'm just going to throw out my thesis and a few supporting arguments/thoughts and see if you Morons can help me out.

Thesis: The pursuit of increased equality in society (particularly through state action) necessarily results in greater limitations on individual freedom.

1. Calling healthcare or employment or housing a right is reversing the fact that, in reality, someone else's right to choose whether or not to provide these things is actually being removed.
2. A right can only be a right if you can provide it yourself without coercing other people. Admittedly, some rights in the Bill of Rights are merely specific limitations on the powers of government.
3. Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does an amendment enumerate a power of the state to force behavior of citizens.
4. Victims of Etcism, in essense, are demanding the removal of people's freedom to set their own criteria when picking employees, customers, etfc.
5. Freedom by its very nature increases the likelihood of inequal situations.
6. People have the freedom to hate other people for whatever reasons they want.
7. The more equal the government tries to make things the MORE freedom it must take from the people.
8. There are almost zero legal limitations on minorities at this time and any perceived disadvantage is generally derived from the lack of an affirmative law explicitely describing a right.*

Conclusions:

1. The United States was founded not, as some people believe, on the basis of equality but instead on the much more functional and important principle of FREEDOM.
2. Allowing public whim to decide what groups are not being treated equally allows the majority to arbitrarily determine who is "more equal" under the law. This will inevitably lead to fascism.
3. The freedoms to screw up and be screwed over and make stupid mistakes and take advantage of other people's mistakes are far more important than any non-legal infringement of equality.

 Does any of this make any sense.  I think the idea may be too big for one essay but I'm too stupid to refine it into anything useful.  Maybe you can.

* For example, I was told that in 40 states (!) homosexuals don't have the right to not be fired because of their sexual preference. This is, of course, absurd. It may be true that 40 states lack a specifically enumerated right for specifically homosexuals to have a job but certainly the more generally acknowledged right to not be fired due to a certain Etcist class would apply.

Posted by: Moron Pundit at 12:43 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Not to sound like an idiot but...

If oil prices continue to fall, why the hell is the price of gasoline going up in Wisconsin?  We were down to 1.50/gallon when oil was 60+/bbl.  Now we're back up to 1.99/gallon when oil is down toward 45/bbl. 

Am I missing something?

Posted by: Moron Pundit at 09:21 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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A few notable pro-Israel links

You know how I loves me some pictures of Denver*...Joshua Sharf has done an excellent job of capturing the local pro-Hamas demonstrations here.  Plus I like that since his headline said "Hamas's", his blogging tool turned the URL into "Hamass". 

Gila Weiss at My Shrapnel explains the fallacy of proportional response.  I think everyone here probably understands this fully well, but if you're in an argument with one of your 'progressive' relatives, just point them here and tell them to shut up.  Gila's whole blog is fantastic reading - if you're not familiar with it, start with the beginning posts in the sidebar, you won't be able to stop.  And expect to ruin your makeup from the tears of sadness and joy streaming down your face.  That's right, I'm talking to you, Moron Pundit.

Israellycool and The Muqata are liveblogging the war.

And don't forget to send the IDF a pizza.

Update: And here's an American mother of an IDF soldier.  I can't even imagine what she's going through.


^{*If you're wondering why the hell I haven't updated my blog in eons, it will resume tomorrow.  I needed a short break, so I can love what I'm doing again.}

Posted by: Alice H at 11:59 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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