I Want To Defy The Logic Of All Sex Laws

Seemingly taking some Beck lyrics to heart a couple are doing a lot of naughty stuff that's illegal someplace then taking photos (that first link, by the way, is not even remotely safe for work). Given some of the strangeness in the second link, though, I'm not sure they're going to break all of them. I'm guessing this one is going to be right out:

It's against the law to make love to a virgin, whatever the circumstances, anywhere in the state of Washington. According to the wording of the legislation, it's a major crime even to marry and then spend the night with a virgin bride in that city.

(Via Memepool and an obvious need to get more hits)

Band Names

Memepool recently linked to an article about Vampire Watermelons, which struck me as almost, but not quite, a great name for a band. Then again I was briefly taken by "Airborne Scrotum", though I think you'd have to be in the right sort of band for that to be really great. I've always had a soft spot for "Woodland Fire Hazard" for no good reason except it's got a "Hindu Love Gods" rhythm to it.

Not that I need a band name at the moment, but if I do it's good to be ready.

Plus having vampire and scrotum in a post is bound to send the hits up...

Hey! Now there's a band name Little Pauli and the Vampire Scrotums.

When The Saints Go Crashing Out

Fans are asking Southampton's players to refund the ticket prices 2400 of them paid to endure the 5-2 Carling Cup humiliation at Watford.

From The Guardian.
I sympathise, but that's football. Ask Newcastle fans who had to endure a 4-1 thumping by Fulham despite seeming to have the run of the ball. As for players being disappointing, I doubt Saints fans have payed to close attention to the career of Harry Kewell, but I reckon he'd owe fans of Leeds and Liverpool quite a few bob a-piece by now.

Speaking of owing right-thinking people a bob or two... Apparently Micheal Bolton has recently claimed that he will stop singing when he stops breathing. I'm sure some people are more than willing to help him with that, in fact No Rock & Roll Fun want a large pillow for Christmas.

Book Angst

Vince Keenan describes Book Angst as " the website of the moment". So I'd better link to it.

Certainly if you like long, mostly coherent screeds on the publishing industry (and who among us doesn't) it's a place to go.

I take issue w/ the fact that I'm bashing the industry per se--I see this as trying to open up some sort of constructive dialog--but beauty (like abuse) is in the eye of the beholder.

Tin Foil Hats At The Ready

The conspiracy theories have started already. It's being said that exit polls in states with Electronic Voting were curiously inaccurate compared to those without, and that inaccuracy almost always favoured Bush by around 5%.

MSNBC have found some more incidences:

Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.

I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.

Oops.

Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.

Vote early! Vote often!

Of course, you would be a fool and a communist to read anything but glitches and errors in to any of this.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

Ah, the "Values Voters" are starting up already. Evolution textbooks row goes to court is about a school board trying to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by putting a sticker saying that evolution is "a theory, not a fact" on science text books. Two things strike me about this. One is that the sticker is true; evolution may be as near to a fact as a theory gets and it does explain and predict so much, but it is still only a theory.

The second thing to occur to me is what would happen if, to placate me as an atheist, I had them put a similar sticker on all the Bibles at school.

As usual an image of fairness is attempted:

The board says the stickers were motivated by a desire to establish a greater understanding of different view points. "They improve the curriculum, while also promoting an attitude of tolerance for those with different religious beliefs," said Linwood Gunn, a lawyer for Cobb County schools.

Obviously this is a load of old cock. The stickers were motivated by one viewpoint while promoting intolerance for those who would tell you different.

Scarily, near the end of the article it is mentioned that "Pennsylvania's Dover area school board has already voted to teach intelligent design". As I've mentioned before intelligent design is creationism in slightly fancier clothing and, as such, a way of attempting to get religion taught in a science classroom. It is not a scientific theory and has no reason to be regarded as such.

Pulled Off At Half Time

Warning: The banners on the linked to site are not "Work Safe" and neither is the pop-up it generates.

For those of you who think football doesn't have enough homoerotic moments as it is...

Smilin' Through The Tears

Fark doesn't really need my traffic, but what the hell.

Fark, for those who don't know it, is a kind of collaboritive effort to find links to some of the weirder corners on the Internet -- and plain ordinary corners, too, if they suddenly become interesting. Americans often post links to the Guardian as an example of how wacky those English can be.

A constant of Fark is the Photoshop contest. Some of them are very funny and some devolve in to slagging off how bad an idea the contest is. Some reach a halfway point where insider jokes (know on Fark as "cliches") tend to overwhelm what's there.

Today's Photoshop was "What if other popular movies were performed by puppets?". There's some great stuff. Be warned, though, that there's some really awful stuff, too. I particularly liked the "Passion of the Pig", "Apocalypse Now", "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" and the one below.


Disturbing, but funny... 

The People Have Spoken... The Bastards!

Eric Alterman in Altercation (linked to on the right) puts it well:

Let’s face it. It’s not Kerry’s fault. It’s not Nader’s fault (this time). It’s not the media’s fault (though they do bear a heavy responsibility for much of what ails our political system). It’s not “our” fault either. The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything.

They don’t care that Iraq is turning into murderous quicksand and a killing field for our children. They don’t care that the Bush presidency has made us less safe by creating more terrorists, inspiring more anti-American hatred and refusing to engage in the hard work that would be necessary to make a meaningful dent in our myriad vulnerabilities at home. They don’t care that he has mortgaged our children’s future to give trillions to the wealthiest among us. They don’t care that the economy continues to hemorrhage well-paying jobs and replace them with Wal-Mart; that the number without health insurance is over forty million and rising. They don’t care that Medicare premiums are rising to fund the coffers of pharmaceutical companies. They don’t care that the air they breathe and the water they drink is being slowly poisoned and though they call themselves conservatives, they even don’t care that the size of the government and its share of our national income has increased by roughly a quarter in just four years. This is not a world of rational debate and issue preference.

Just about every blog I've looked at today is upset and trying to work things out. I realise these thing are self-selecting so I probably had greater hopes that Kerry would win than I should have. Still, it's hard not to feel a little down today.

Damn! My Job Is Boring... Here's A Diary of It

The Indy has an article by someone being reasonably witty about his terribly disappointing job, in this case as a Bookseller. It has all the usual little anecdote about silly customers:

Constant enquiries along the lines of "Have you got that book? It's red," begin to chafe.

Angry customers:

The growlers were the worst, barking at us, demanding maps of the Dordogne and biographies of Napoleon.

"What do mean you still haven't got it! It was ordered a bloody age ago!"

Crappy managers:

He had caught me leafing through a copy of Sylvia Plath's diaries. Before I could turn the third page, Ronald was upon me. Incandescence in a cardy, he stormed: "Get on with some fucking work, Anthony, I've got better things for you to be doing than reading in this shop."

In a modern bookshop, literature is of no great importance unless it is neatly stacked, branded with a three-for-two-sticker and sold to some idiot who wants what they saw on the advert. God forbid you read any.

It's not a bad article and, as I said, reasonably witty. It just seems to me that there's a lot of this sort of thing about these days. I'm pretty sure there someone who works in Waterstones (or wherever) blogging something now along much the same lines. I know that there's at least one fast-food employee, video shop employee and prostitute (assuming Belle De Jour is real, but there are probably plenty of others out there) blogging merrily away, letting us all in to their little private hells, or epiphanies, or that moment when the manager did something really funny/ totally out-of-order.

You know, people you would start drinking in other pubs to avoid are suddenly touted as the fresh face of blogging. I don't get it. When I go out, I don't really want to hear other people's work stories, unless that story is exceptional or something that really affected their mood and them not getting it out of their system is harshing my buzz. Daily accounts of the tedium of someone else's job is, well, tedious.

These things happen in jobs everyday for just about everybody. The decor changes and some of the props, but the main difference between a bloke at McDonalds and a bloke in an office is that the bloke in the office is going to go out of his way to deep fat fry something.

I suppose on one level these blogs are the living embodiment of "Write what you know". But at least one writer has opined that "Write what you know" is the sort of advice you give to writers that you suspect have difficulties holding a pen.