There’s a bunch of Cub Scouts here at the Taco Bell in Bakersfield. I don’t know . . . aren’t you supposed to take Cub Scouts to the woods so they can cook things over a campfire?
I think I could score some hot chicks in Bakersfield. I’m sizing up my competition here — nothing but fat guys with enormous heads.
Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any hot chicks in Bakersfield — just fat guys, fat women and fat, dopey Cub Scouts.
Our body in Kali Yuga is a field of action: As a man sows, so is his reward. Nothing by empty talk is determined: Anyone swallowing poison must die. Brother! Behold the Creator’s justice: As are a man’s actions, so is his recompense.
I’m going to savagely murder the next person I hear use the word “spend” as a noun, as in “leveraging our spend.”
Spend is a verb. Spending is a noun, e.g., “leveraging our spending.” I would still have to maim you for saying “leveraging” though, so try “getting the most for our money.”
You can also avoid death by saying “How much does it cost?” instead of “What is our spend?”
You have been warned.
Cops: Teens beat man because ‘they were just bored’ — NBCNews.com
Strange piece of “journalism” from NBC News . . . basically just a rewrite of a story in the Cincinnati Enquirer in which a 45-year-old man named Pat Mahaney received a senseless, brutal beating from six boys, ages 13 and 14:
Mahaney was taken to Mercy Mount Airy Hospital, where he was treated for four days before being released Tuesday. Police said doctors had to insert a tube down his throat to remove all of the blood from his stomach.
A tube remained in his right nostril as blood continued to seep out of his head, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, and his left eye is heavily blackened.
Police said the teens admitted that Mahaney had done nothing to provoke being kicked and punched repeatedly in the face while he lay helpless on the ground. One of the boys allegedly told police they only stopped assaulting Mahaney when a neighbor began yelling at them and said he was calling police.
The strange thing about the NBC article, though, is that it deletes information about the race of the kids, which is in the Enquirer article:
“It was a heinous crime but it was not a hate crime,” said North College Hill Police Chief Gary Foust of the teens, who are all black.
He said several residents have called police inquiring if Mahaney was specifically targeted because he is white. He was not, the chief stressed.
Two questions:
Emma Coats: The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar
The Economic Times here in Bangalore has a great obituary of Gore Vidal.
It includes an anecdote in which Vidal skewers Saul Bellow and his multiple wives, followed by the sentence
Never married himself, Gore . . .
Probably, like Liberace, just never found the right girl.
Even in an entire city full of motorists honking at one another, our driver this afternoon distinguished himself as the greatest horn blower since Horatio.
We were stopped in traffic at red lights, and he’d still sound the horn a couple of times just to stay limbered up . . .
When the world says “Give up,” hope whispers “Try it one more time.”
What the market does is to reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means, and thereby to minimize the extent to which government need participate directly in the game. The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity. It is, in political terms, a system of proportional representation. Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color-the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.
It is this feature of the market that we refer to when we say that the market provides economic freedom. But this characteristic also has implications that go far beyond the narrowly economic. Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated – a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.
The cab drivers here are either highly motivated to get you to your destination or completely insane. Or possibly both.
“Roads” and “lanes” aren’t well-defined. A lane is any relatively flat piece of ground, paved or unpaved, that you can take possession of and defend with headlight flashing, horn honking and aggressive refusal to yield.
Thoughts I’ve had more than once:
Don’t kill yourself striving for 100% coverage of code with automated unit tests. But take a few minutes to increase your coverage by 1%.
Most likely, that means going from 0% to 1%. And that’s the biggest improvement of all.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go. — Theodore Roethke
I’ve got good news and bad news . . .
The good news is there’s a new TV network just for dogs called DOGTV!
The bad news is the only thing I like to watch on TV is hockey and DOGTV doesn’t have hockey. 🙁
— Lightning 
ideasspotter: 75 Startup Tools and Apps
Ed Ruscha has resigned as a MOCA trustee, as have John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie, leaving no artists on the museum’s board.
“Art” and “artist” are words that get tossed around pretty lightly. Ruscha‘s work — and the same goes for Baldessari and Kruger — consists of modifying photos and other images, often by writing words on them.
It’s like lolcats, minus the occasional wit.
Opie is a photographer whose work is less interesting than the average high school yearbook.
Yesterday, the image below was posted on the MOCA Facebook page. It’s an actual museum piece called “Earthwork aka Untitled (Dirt).”
Yes, it looks like a pile of dirt, but if you click the image to enlarge it, you can see that it’s actually — a pile of dirt!
This is risk-taking art, the risk being that the cleaning crew may accidentally sweep it up and throw it in the garbage.
No doubt the four retiring geniuses can put forth a critical theory, based on “the process of creation,” to explain why a pile of dirt becomes “art” when placed within the walls of a museum. I say good riddance and take your dirt with you.
If we spend enough money on home decorations, maybe we’ll finally have a chance to be happy . . .
My boy is playing NBA 2K12 and points out that my Where’s Waldo shirt looks like the Washington Wizards (nee Bullets) throwback uniforms.
“Where’s John Wall-do?” he says.
Ha ha. I get my comeback opportunity a few minutes later when his game player passes to a teammate, who scores, but his player doesn’t get credit for an ssist.
“HOW CAN THAT BE ANYTHING BUT AN ASSIST FOR ME?!” he shouts in disbelief. “That’s bad programming.”
“Oh I doubt that,” I say. “The people who program video games are a lot smarter than the people who play them.”
I’m spending a couple of weeks in Bangalore at the end of the month. Travel is the most depressing thing in the world, beating out listening to other people talk about their travels.
Bangalore has been called the Silicon Valley of Asia. It’s like the Silicon Valley here in California, but with monkeys and malaria.
My boss has cautioned me to drink only the bottled water from the hotel, never the bottled water at the office.
“They refill the bottles at the office with their own water,” he said. “The hotel will give you two bottles a day, but I tipped the staff a dollar a day and they left extra bottles in my room. That’s a lot of money over there.”
I’m seriously thinking about tipping two dollars a day just to see what the heck happens . . .
