Ray Bradbury said, ""

... Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain

I have precious little daylight left before the shambling drunken hordes take over the streets of Buffalo. I am now barricaded within my apartment with an abundant supply of cigarettes, snacks, books, and movies.

When there is no more room in the bar, the drunk will vomit on the stoop.

Can't wait til Guy Fawkes Day.

Update: Zombies and Pugs. What more can a guy want? Oh- Gorillaz:

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 31, 2007 16:10 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
life

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Must... Have... More... Problems!

I realized that despite all my little programming projects, I've been keeping to a narrow list of applications. Most of my perl projects mostly involve arrays of arrays and simple nesting loops. My Python and Lisp projects end up being an exercise in recursive diversion. As the liberals say, I've got to embrace diversity.

So I've been looking for interesting stuff to work on. Lists of programming problems asked in interviews would seem to supply more than enough interesting material, but given that they exist mainly to weed out an astonishingly large percent of applicants who cannot program their way out of a paper bag, I don't think I'll find much euphoric-sense-of-playing-G-d in those questions.

So I will ask you. What is a cool problem to solve?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 30, 2007 18:38 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
geekery

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Better Things To Do

Coworker: On Sunday, I'm gonna break into your house and kidnap you to watch the game with us.

Me: No. I've got better things to do.

Coworker: Name one.

Me: Read.

Coworker: Name another.

Me: Program.

Coworker: Those don't count. You're watching the game whet-

Me: Watch paint dry. Masturbate while counting prime numbers. Idly scratch my ass while in the produce section. I have better things to do than watch thyroidal ex-felons and wife-beaters knock each other even more retarded while penetrating each other's rear defenses and tight ends.

Coworker: You don't watch much football, do you?

Me: Tell you what. The day they make football interesting by blowdarting a random player full of PCP and amphetamines, throwing him a samurai sword, and then activating landmines buried at each yard line, then I'll watch it. Or if they allowed each player to carry a tazer-wielding midget on his back.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 30, 2007 17:01 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, conversations

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The Evolution of Idiocy

Somewhere, as I write this and even as you read this, someone is doing something fatally stupid. Someone, right now, is looking at a hand grenade and wondering whether to stick it into a toaster oven. His neighbor has climbed ontop of the roof and is now strapping on rollerskates. 3,000 miles away, a peasant is trying to fist-fight a wolf.

To be charitable, I'm not even counting the activities within frathouses. Hell, I'll even discount the state of Alabama. That's still a huge amount of serious, weapons-grade stupidity floating around.

So I wonder, has this rate of Darwin-worthy idiocy gone up exponentially? Is there 2 to some power more lethal idiocy seething among the world's population than when it was only a few million hunter-gatherers? Could I write a sexy differential equation for this rate? Or must I take into account the undeveloped cortexes of our ancestors and assume that a forteriori a less developed species will be more likely to see its members spectacularly flaunt the law of self-preservation? After all, we know that farmer ants pull a Warner Brothers moment half the time, grabbing onto the wrong end of the leaf they are cutting.

Is history a Malthusian arms-race over the supply of idiocy? This would imply that at some point, an equilibrium will be reached between the cumulative stupidity of the human population, and the distributive evolution of individual brains. Is that tenuous point in history the best we can hope for? When your brain is just advanced enough to offset the entire population of Poland?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 30, 2007 03:41 EST | Permalink | comments |
boredomblogging, morning

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Gourmet Authentic Home-Style Candied Panda Nipples

I filled the interstices of the day with 900 pages of George Carlin. Now my eyes are tired and I've got a headache, along with a nagging suspicion that the world really is out to get me.

The Isiah must never get ahold of this book.

Now I'll take some Exedrin, wash it down with a pot of coffee, and balance Carlin's sociopathic cynicism with Einstein's equally sociopathic goodwill in the hopes that they will cancel out somewhere within my cerebrum.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 29, 2007 15:12 EST | Permalink | comments |
books, life, boredomblogging

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Coding Horrors

Check this out: Coding Horrors. The rants of a programmer on everything digital.

(Hat tip: Ilkka, you devious bastard. I've probably found more interesting programming pages through your site than anyone else's.)

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 28, 2007 20:52 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
discoveries, geekery

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Sunday Night Bireli Lagrene

Playing Django's Minor Swing:

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 28, 2007 18:48 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, beauty

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Lazy Sunday Pseudo-Random Thoughts

I would like to have been a 19th century teratologist. It sounds like a job where you may not be able to keep any food down, but you'll still be rewarded by the gratitude of the Lovecraftian monstrosities you are studying.

One of my goals in life is to have a gargle of pugs. I do not know if this is a necessary or sufficient condition for having lived a decent life, so I kind of fear the day I shall have acquired as many pugs as I can. On that day, what if G-d decides my life is complete?

Do not touch Jim Morrison, no matter what he says.

If you listen really closely to Dizzy Gillespie's song "Slew Foot" on his live album Sweet Soul Live, you will hear at 3:25 a person yell "fuck!" and then fall into the piano. Dizzy meant for that to happen; that is how great a musician he was.

I now have a shelf full of spaghetti, a freezer full of coffee, a microwave weighed down with garlic, and much of one shelf of my fridge full of peaches. Kids, this is what happens when you are single: you realize that you can eat your favorite food every single day. Thank G-d I happen to like real food; I can only imagine that somewhere out there a bachelor is starving himself to death while eating through a closet full of calorie-free yogurt.

The protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, the same that causes toxoplasmosis in pregnant cat-lovers, has been shown to cause personality changes in both humans and rats. In rats, it causes them to lose their fear of the scent of cat, and even become attracted to it; it also causes rats to become less fearful in general. In humans, it causes males to become more spontaneous, carefree, physical, and impulsive; it causes women to become more kindhearted and motherly. This is more evidence that cats are our overlords, using advanced genetic engineering to subjugate our planet.

The LD-50 of caffeine is about one cup of coffee per kilogram body weight. There. Stop complaining about the evils of "one too many" cups of coffee. Unless you are an anorexic supermodel or dwarf, Starbucks will not kill you.

In every ethnic group, there are doubtless a few who are capable of space colonization. This subset will, however, not be at all like the ethnic group. Regionalistic tensions, the desire to see "one of us!" in space, will not alone help raise support of space travel. Can you imagine how hard it would be to convince an Inuit family that the Inuit selected for a mission will preserve their customs, when he is seen splashed all over the media speaking a Californian accent and sporting a duck's ass 'do?

L.Q. Jones built the 70's. While our politicians screwed around, our academia collapsed, and our economy died in a blizzard of holistic crystal therapy, he alone carried the decade on his Atlas-like shoulders.

I've always wanted to buy a large piezo-electric crystal and turn it into a hippie death gun. "Oh, you like crystals? Here, put this crystal next to your ear... [the crystal vibrates at the resonant frequency of his hippy skull]"

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 28, 2007 09:41 EST | Permalink | comments (4) |
boredomblogging

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Damn, I Hate People My Age (Pre-Halloween Party Edition)

Scantily clad drunken women in animal ears: stop flashing me. It's cold out and I just want to be able to buy cigarettes without seeing nipples. That's not too much to ask, is it? Not only am I not hip to that jive, but that's got to be a good way to catch a cold. I don't care if everyone else is aiming their aureolas at me, don't follow the crowd. Go home, put on some warm clothes, sober up, and think about what you've done.

Drunken toga guys: If I don't feel like seeing breasts, I certainly don't feel like seeing your testicles. Stop it. Now.

Drunk quartet in skin-tight bee costumes: Don't. Ever. Try. To. Hug. Me. Again.

Popeye and Olive Oyl: you have ruined a perfectly innocent cartoon for me. Now I want to gouge out my eyeballs.

Rastafarian guy loitering the downstairs foyer: next time I open the door to find a dread-locked brother lurking in the darkness, I will cut out his liver. I am not kidding, mon.

Carload of pirates: no, I do not want to find pirate booty with you. I am sure under some antiquated law I am within my rights to hang you on sight.

Accompanied carload of pirate hookers: break up with your boyfriends and find science majors. You can do better than a guy trying to nut-punch his buddies wearing a plastic hook.

Old man barely able to resist swatting these idiots with a cane: I salute you, my geriatric brother in spirit. Knock out a couple of them for the Gipper.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 28, 2007 00:10 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, hateblogging

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A Short List of People and Things I Do Not Like

Nudity and provocatively uncomfortable-looking clothing. I don't see how other men find it arousing. I always find myself wondering how interesting these poor women would be covered in parkas or comfortable microfiber plush blankets. A woman's attraction should not depend on whether she can fit into a sadistically designed set of lingerie. Don't these women realize a relationship based upon the perkiness of their breasts is doomed by biology and the laws of physics?

Guys who say "my girl." Unless you personally brought her in a white slave market, she does not belong to you, and even then you've got to live in an Islamic society where such property rights are upheld in court. These men are often the same ones who name their genitals after 1950's sitcom characters. They should be fed to weasels.

Black parents who name their daughters outlandish sequences of characters. Congratulations, you have just prevented young 'Xhahn'iiqwah from being a respected physicist or doctor. You should sterilize yourselves immediately.

Parents who leash their kids and/or put them into chemically-induced stupors. Your momentary comfort will bite you in your ass when you cannot rely upon your under-educated and emotionally stunted children to support you in your retirement years. I hope you enjoy living at Dr. Bob's Happy Home For the Elderly.

Coffee vending machines. If I wanted to drink hot urine, I'd go live in a Californian commune where that is an accepted medical practice.

People who pride themselves on not being booksmart. Your superior common sense will come in handy during a lifetime of menial labor.

Post-modern literary critics. If you come anywhere near my Mark Twain with socio-economic deconstructionism, I will deconstruct your digestive systems in highly creative ways.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 27, 2007 16:23 EST | Permalink | comments |
hateblogging

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Geeky Link Fest

While I'm busy reading of the Book of George Carlin, cringing at descriptions of the immunological deceptions of parasites, and wondering where Rees put all his mathematics, I'll just throw up a list of cool links.

Vogon Poetry Generator

Gallery of Collision Events in Bubble Chambers

Hakmem

How to Write Unmaintainable Code

Elements of A.I. At Washington University

Paul Graham

University of Michigan Survey of Information Theory

JAPH Zoo

Eric S. Raymond's How to Be a Hacker

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches

Alan Turing's On Computing Machinery and Intelligency

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 27, 2007 13:13 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Birthday Bloggy Love

I didn't get to donate as much as I wanted to, but I hope it still helps out.

If you haven't hit up someone's tipjar, try it. It takes five seconds (I timed it) and gives you a warm, post-coital satisfaction. In fact, I'm smoking a cigarette with a big goofy grin on my face as I write this.

Since neither Amazon nor Paypal have a blog subscription service, I'm going to write a python program that analyzes my web browsing and calculates a suggested monthly fee for blogs I read based on number of hits and time spent reading it. Each month it'll then output an html doc with a list of hyperlinks to their tipjars extracted from their pages, along with the calculated amount. I'll be able to quickly and easily give back to all those whose grey matter I gratefully devour for far too many hours each day.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 26, 2007 21:04 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
blogging, geekery

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Woo Hoo! Books! And Two Addenda

As if in order to buy books I need the excuse of having been ejected from the womb 23 years ago.

I got:

Alice Calaprice's The Quotable Einstein
Dan Rockmore's Stalking the Reimann Hypothesis
Martin Rees' Just Six Numbers
George Carlin's 3 X Carlin: An Orgy of George
Harlan Ellison's Strange Wine
Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's The Mind's I

Ah. Math, science, tapeworms, and gallows humor.

Even better, today my mom and sister finally got their electricity bill straightened out and the plumbing repaired in their trailer, after over a year of living like Osama bin Laden. I welcome my family back to the human race and hope to hell they spend the next week scrubbing behind their undoubtedly filthy ears. Rusty, they've got trailer park stories that will put hair on your chest.

The bloggy love will flow soon. Very soon. I can almost hear Paypal rubbing its hands together.

Now I shall read until my mom calls again to torture me with two hours of stories about my babyhood and threaten to release my naked baby pictures to the newspapers.

Update: Argh. Note to self: assemble a team of safe-crackers and, in a daring heist, destroy all known photographs of my two-year-old self doing a James Brown impersonation naked on top of a toilet bowl accompanied by my stuffed monkey Vavoo.

Update 2: you know you've found a good book on parasitology when reading it makes you painfully aware of your rectum.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 26, 2007 15:57 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
books, life

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This is What I'm Talking About

My online tax refund site, bank, Ubuntu Forums, and about three other sites, sent me emails today wishing me happy birthday. What did I say? It's so absurdly easy to personalize services nowadays that there is no excuse for companies not to give people the digital equivalent of strippergrams and Mafia largesse.

Little things like that help take your mind off the neverending morbidly-obese-pug-on-a-treadmill that is life.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 26, 2007 03:26 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
life

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An Introspective Moment: Optimism Through Low Expectations

I'm not really an optimist. I simply have such low expectations that I am pleased and grateful for even the smallest things that go right.

This is a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, I am absolutely content with the world as long as I have a few books, a roof over my head, a pet; and enough money for food, coffee, cigarettes, and help for the people I care about. Throw in a spouse who doesn't steal a kidney while I sleep and I'm golden. It doesn't take much to please a man who is glad just to wake up.

On the other hand, because it doesn't take much to please me, it is easy for me to to fall into ruts, stagnation, and endure abusive relationships far longer than any sane person would. I have to push myself to increase my standard of living more than the bare necessities. It's hard to move up in the world if you can't think of any good reasons why you should. And it's damn near impossible to have a healthy relationship if one kiss makes up for weeks of insults and abuse.

Since I can't always rely on a friend yanking me out of a stagnant period, I've got to refine my ability to scream "bullshit! I can do better!"

But how do I fix this without becoming a caviar-swilling, ostentatiously aesthetic, mate-hopping, hollow yuppie? Therein lies the problem. Once I go in that aesthete direction and lose the simple joys of life, I've got no way to prevent a "because I can!" attitude that would lead to shitting in golden toilets and wiping my ass with goose necks. And that would be a shame, because I would be just as happy with an outhouse (happier, probably, because it would discourage houseguests), while someone out there really would be uncomfortable without a supply of downy bathroom geese.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 25, 2007 17:05 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
introspection

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If It Makes Money, It Would Already Exist...

Paypal or Amazon should create a blog subscription service.

The idea: a button you could put on your page that logs people into their accounts and allows them to add you to a list of people paid some specified amount every month. Say, $150 divided by the number of people in their list, or $10 to one blogger and $30 to another, etc. Payment could be manual or automatic.

Fast, convenient, and remarkably rewarding. Why doesn't it exist?

Update: Don't say fear of phishing. If that were the case, no one would ever log onto their bank's website or buy stuff online. Security certificates and protocols are wonderful things, and those who ignore them deserve to get scammed good and hard.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 25, 2007 14:51 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging

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The Things I Like

My favorite restaurant is unique in that it never has food, but they somehow manage to serve you. They miraculously create bachelor food out of thin air and for that I am an eternally loyal customer. I swear, they must have Jesus working in the back.

"I'd like a salami sub."

"Sorry, we don't have enough salami for a sandwich."

"Then I'd like a turkey sub."

"We don't have any turkey at all."

"How about a roast beef sub?"

"[She beams at me] We have that! But... we don't have any bread."

"Can I get two slices of pepperoni pizza?"

"We ran out of tomato sauce. Do you think hot chicken wing sauce would work?"

"That's a great idea!"

"We ran out of mozzarella cheese. Would provolone work?

"Yes! Can you add a bunch of hot peppers and onions to it?"

"We also have [bangs around under a counter] garlic paste-"

"YES!"

"Sorry about that. Your food is half price."

[Fifteen minutes later]

"[I give a tip larger than the cost of the food]"

"Oh my G-d thank you! I could hug you! [joyfully dances around with my tip and runs in the back to bring out her coworker to thank me too]."

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 24, 2007 16:31 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
humor, life

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In Which I Steal Jeff Goldstein's Thunder in a Mock Conversation with the Ghost of my Goldfish Houseguest

Me: I didn't know they made safari vests for fish. Is that a K-Bar on the bottom of your tank?

Goldfish: Mock all you want. Your problem is that you trust society. People like you will be swarming the air-intake tubes of the bunkers of people like me when the world ends. You've never even thought about buying a bunker in Nevada, have you?

Me: Only in the cold dark hours of the night.

Goldfish: What if society fell apart? Are you prepared to fight off hordes of starving, crazed barbarians roaming in search of food and sex?

Me: I'm a single man. No one expects me to have much food, and women will chew off their feet to get away from me. A nuclear holocaust won't change that.

Goldfish: If you were smart, you'd go to Sam's Club with a U-Haul and buy a lifetime's supply of canned meat and woolen longjohns. They'll be worth their weight in gold.

Me: How would spam and warm underwear help me fall in love?

Goldfish: It'll keep you alive when the bird flu kills half the human population and civilization collapses.

Me: That won't do any good unless I have a telepathic shaggy dog to sniff out women and slow mutants.* And a more lenient landlord.

Goldfish:

Me: Put some happy movies on your Netflix Queue. Milo and Otis, Disney, anything that doesn't involve ragged people in the desert. You're freaking me out.

Goldfish: You just don't get it, do you? Vote Ron Paul! [swims off into the fourth dimension]

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 23, 2007 22:58 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, conversations

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At Least Gein Wasn't a Spammer

Is it just me, or are an awful lot of spam-filled mongols sneaking into Motimeland nowadays? I mean no offense to Mongols, who were quite nice once you got past the rape and pillage.

I've often tried to form a hierarchy of evil, and every attempt looks somewhat like this:

Muggers
People who steal candy from babies
Hillary Clinton
.
.
.
Pedophiles
Rapists
Politicians
Dictators
Socialists
People who eat babies
People who molest babies
Spammers

What's worse: every one of them can be found somewhere on the internet, where no one can make you scream in pain.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 23, 2007 20:18 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging, hateblogging

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Oy

In the wee hours last night, someone ran a red light and came damn close to hitting me on my bike, without once beeping or stepping on the brakes.

I instinctively applied the calculus of variations and realized, halfway through the lane, that the only non-lethal course of action was to continue going straight across as fast as possible in a geodesic orthogonal to the axis of the road. I had barely gotten out of the way when the wheel of my bike slammed against the lip of the curb, throwing me in a tumble ending against the door of a parked car.

Oddly, I didn't even get a single scratch, ding, or bruise. This is yet more evidence that I am extremely lucky but not smart enough to make use of it.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 23, 2007 17:12 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Tom vs. Insomnia

I've been having trouble sleeping this past week, and not even my proven insomnia cure has worked.

I treat my insomnia by competing with it. I deliver it a metaphorical roundhouse kick to the head and teabag it while it's down. Then I post naked baby pictures of it online. My philosophy: all I have to do is tire it out.

I simply tell my pineal gland, "secrete all the chemicals you want. I've got a freezer full of coffee and the will to use it. I also live right next to a 24-hour Tim Hortons. Feel lucky, punk?!"

If you're not going to sleep anyway, what harm can an extra three pots of coffee do? Show your pineal gland that the man with the coffee maker, bicycle, and internet connection is the boss.

Usually after a few days my pineal gland waves the white flag, McDonalds and Starbucks wage a bidding war over my rich and bold urine, and I fall back into a normal sleep cycle.

But not this week. I may have to add a Henry Kissinger interview to my Netflix queue.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 22, 2007 23:40 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
life, blog nocturne

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She'll Make You Smile

You know you needed that.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 22, 2007 15:46 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, beauty

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Late Night Babble

I've got V For Vendetta playing in the background as I write this, right at his V speech. That's it, I'm going to write a perl Vbot.

My hope: that it will construct a sentence like:

The virtuous vixens whose vibrantly vibrating vulvas vanquish forthwith the viscissitudes of virtiginously villainous Vaudevillian vloggers in whose vampiric ventricles vortexes vanish.

Update: Damn, I forgot that my former fiancee gleefully ripped up my massive 1938 Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary in a moment of rage and forced me to clean the English language off the floor. I hate electronic dictionaries, and I don't think I'll ever find such a fine dictionary for so cheap (I got it at a garage sale for only five bucks).

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 21, 2007 22:48 EST | Permalink | comments |
blog nocturne

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Kitty Caper

My family is conspiring to smuggle a cat to me. The wheels of fate are grinding together in an almost Catalinian conspiracy. False ID's are being procured, grappling hooks, chloroform-soaked rags, and RF-jammers are being bartered for on the streets of Moscow.

I am told that the cat is a phosphorescent pseudo-Siamese master of kungfu, with a healthy hatred of Communism and a preternatural talent on the accordian.

If this caper pulls off, I will return to catblogging with the pent-up energy of three years without a single feline overlord. Be afraid.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 21, 2007 19:36 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
life, cats

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Slouching Toward the Future

I got my (first!) dinky new MP3 player to work in Windows. Downside: I can only sync it with songs ripped off my cds, not Napster. Looks like I'll be buying tangible music until I upgrade, even though I'm still paying a premium for digital rights to more music than I could possibly listen to. But that's not such a big problem considering the cd's I already have. I can wait til I have full access to every single song I could possibly want.

Ubuntu still recognizes it as a camera, and I have not the patience to hack it.

I have a love/hate relationship with walkmans and mp3 players. I love the idea of filling every waking moment with music, but after a couple days I realize with horror that the influx of music is gradually speeding up my imminent deafness, and put the walkman away. Months later, I calculate with even more horror how much music I'm missing, I pull it out of the junk drawer for another round. I guess the cycle will continue for another couple years, except with better technology.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 21, 2007 16:33 EST | Permalink | comments |
boredomblogging

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Libertarianism in a Nutshell

If you're not mentally challenged, you've spent some time thinking up solutions to various social problems. You have ideas for how to end global warming, restore values to social discourse, prevent dictators, or enrich the third world. This is natural; even cavemen must have sat around thinking about how to produce heaven on earth. I don't care what you view as the biggest evil confronting civilization; if you're human you've thought about how to end that evil.

Think about your favorite solution. Do it now.

Now, imagine that same social policy in the hands of your worst enemy.

There. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 21, 2007 13:32 EST | Permalink | comments |
libertarianism

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The Testament of Dr. The Isiah

The Isiah: Scooby Doo villains never made sense to me. The moment you go out to the party store and buy industrial sized barrels of phosphorescent paint, smoke machines, projectors, and stuff, people will start coming to your little gold mine or whatever. You'll have teenagers trying to see the ghost and make out, dirty hippies and their dog shacking up there, the Harlem Globetrotters' bus breaking down in front of it, and pseudo-scientific "paranormal investigators" waving voltameters all over the place. Who needs that when they're trying to reclaim an abandoned and formerly valueless piece of land?

If they were smart, they wouldn't go through the bother of getting a Sam's Club discount on fake blood and trap-door springs. No. They'd open an antique store on the spot with a sign that says, "sorry, we'll be back later." And they could dig away never EVER worrying about anyone showing up.

You see, if you want to hide something, don't act conspiratorial and furtive. Do it out in the open, but make it boring as hell. No one ever goes into old antique stores or moldy bridal boutiques or box factories. No cop would ever stand outside an antique store at 3 a.m. waiting to do a drug bust; no, they're outside bars and nightclubs.

Criminals are stupid. Look at all those money-laundering nightclubs, stocked full of cocaine and dog-fights and prostitutes in the back room. Guys outside wearing bling and carrying heat. Even Don Knotts could see something was up. If they were smart, they'd open a tiny shoe-repair store and they could sell all the cocaine they want without anyone ever suspecting!

Like if I were a drug smuggler. You know what I'd do? I'd find a fat slob who really digs goofy baseball caps, flannel, bahama shorts, and the silken voice of Barry Manilow. I'd give him a U-Haul and a truck with "I Support the Sheriff" and "My Kid Is an Honor Student" bumperstickers. Then I could transport as many drugs or bodies as I want. Imagine you're a cop at a stoplight. On your left, a guy is loudly singing along to a Golden Oldies station, "Well the cat's in the cradle..." and really getting into it. One look at him and you know he'll bore the hell out of you with pictures of his kids and baseball statistics and woeful stories of his brother in law whose job search hasn't been going well because he hurt his back in the war and can't get disability because blah blah blah. Then on your right, there's a car with almost opaque tinted windows, three thugs listening to loud evil music with the bass turned all the way up into bowel-loosening levels, and rims. Which one do you think you'll notice?

I've put a seed of doubt into you. From now on, every time you pass one of those boring places no one ever goes to, you'll wonder how many kilos of coke and dead whores they have stashed away there. Mini golf put-put ranges? The windmill is probably full of heroin.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 21, 2007 12:39 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, conversations, best posts

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Wee Morning Illusion

Fricking. Cool.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 21, 2007 02:36 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries, beauty

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A Life of Plenty

For under $80, I was able to buy a couple comfy pyjama pants, a felt sleeping cap, 4 pairs of jeans, fluffy slippers, a myriad of socks, enough spaghetti to fill half a shelf of my cupboard, the makings of a mass of spicy mango chutney, a highly erogenous DVD player, an MP3 player, and enough chicken breasts to make Hugh Hefner blush.

Now I am warm, full of belly, and entertained. For under $80 I have purchased satisfaction such as not even Croesus could have dreamed of.

It's amazing what humans can do with civil rights, heh? If the third world had any inkling of how even the poorest American lives, I guarantee we'd see more dictators strung up and disembowelled.

Update: I seriously considered buying a giant stuffed monkey to snuggle with, and had to do an expected value calculation between buying it and getting a cat. The cat won out; by this time next month I may have a feline overlord of my own.

Update 2: After logging into Windows for the first time in months (in order to use the Napster account draining my bank balance every month), I found the MP3 player wouldn't allow direct sync'ing. On Ubuntu, it registers as a camera, and I've got to take some time to mount it as a removable medium. Eh. You get what you pay for, in this case $20.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 20, 2007 12:27 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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I Said It Before

And I'll say it again: I don't like people my own age.

I just went out to get cigarettes. Like always, on my way to the store I had to pass by hordes of drunken revellers, hooting and carrying on like bonobos. Scratch that. Bonobos at least have the excuse of no capacity for abstract thought.

One of my least favorite superpowers is the ability to elicit spontaneous and bizarre greetings from people I do not wish to know. Whether a thuggish guy in 'do rag stopping in the midst of violent gangsta rap to shake my hand, to a drunken middle-aged goth woman trying to hug me, to a crowd of emo guys suddenly cheering me, I get subjected to every manner of head-scratching joviality imaginable.

I've long ago stopped trying to figure out why this is so. Perhaps if I were evil, I could have turned this to great use in a life of politics. But I repeat myself.

Here is what I don't get. Suppose you and your friends were out drinking, getting uproariously debauched to the point of picking fights with brick walls and/or flashing street lights. Maybe you're celebrating something wondrous, like the arrival of Friday. What would make you suddenly notice a quiet guy walking at a rather quick pace, and trigger some response in your head that says, "Hey! Maybe this guy will be my friend!"? I must presume that, somehow, you have become so bored with fist-fighting walls and exposing yourself to inanimate objects, that the mere sight of someone so unusual as to not partake in such wholesome activities, strikes you with an exoticism usually reserved for midget pron.

Eh. I'll just have to get used to trying to figure out how to respond to a crowd of young black men giving me the Black Power salute, a crowd of beautiful women suddenly giving me peace signs, or a heavily tattoo'd bouncer scruffling my hair, with something less than absolute puzzlement.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 19, 2007 00:25 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, hateblogging, blog nocturne

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Reason #134 Why I Hate the Internet

Please don't watch this video unless you feel comfortable having your soul ripped out of your left nostril. I beg you, pretty please with sugar on top, please don't.



Why?!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 18, 2007 14:51 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
discoveries

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Me and Einstein

It's times like this I find solace in the words of Albert Einstein, such as:

I find it hard to pull my head out of a book, scratch my belly, and realize that it has been three days since I've eaten, that I've got no spare money for food, and that I really wonder how much of my coffee stash I would have to consume to fool my stomach's distension monitor into believing I had eaten a rather large dinner. No, it didn't occur to me that this is a bad thing. I've made my ease with my hair and I'll make ease with my apparently dreadful life skills.

Update: Summoning the spirit of Einstein, I nibble on coffee beans and a bit of honey, truly surprised at my astounding inventiveness.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 17, 2007 19:54 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, introspection

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Linky Love

Konqueror has an interesting feature that lets you see your most often visited sites. Here are a handful of mine:

Stuff On My Cat
I Can Has Cheezburger
Overheard in New York
Wikipedia
Bits and Pieces
Pandora Radio
Dilbert Blog
Fourth Checkraise
Ace of Spades
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler

As per Mark Twain, those who try to find a pattern in this list will be shot.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 17, 2007 15:04 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging

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Richard Cheese Is a Naughty Girl

No, I am not feeling very N-A-S-T-Y.



Boom-chacka-wacka-wacka, baby.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 17, 2007 03:39 EST | Permalink | comments |
music

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Musical Alley

I had a possibly profitable idea over the weekend.

I'd like to buy an abandoned bowling alley, strip it down and renovate it, and install soundproof partitions in it. Load it with fine musical instruments and recording equipment, get a liquor license, and set up an alcohol/coffee bar in it. What would I have? A musical alley.

The idea is simple. You pay an entrance fee and can then wander around, free to pick up a $4,000 Les Paul or whatever and play. You could press a button and cycle through what people are playing in other areas. Find a bass player you like? Press a button, invite him over to your booth and you've got a new friend. Find a sax player and you've got magic. By the time you leave you've got memories, cds, and the feel of a beautiful guitar still on your hands. And I've got customers who are guaranteed to return.

I could imagine bands almost spontaneously forming and competing, leagues forming for tournaments, etc.

Too bad I'll be deaf before I'll have the opportunity to do this myself.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 16, 2007 16:30 EST | Permalink | comments (4) |
music

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She Knows the Constitution Better Than You

Mgrhetos is taking her Oath of Citizenship tomorrow. Go give her a hearty welcome.

America is blessed when she receives immigrants of ability. When those immigrants are geeks, she gets drunk, sings karaoke, and starts flashing the rest of the world.

Mgrhetos, just think. You will be one of the few people in America who have actually read, understood, and sworn to uphold, the Constitution. This makes you better than almost every native American you will meet.

*revised to note that we are gaining a lady geek*

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 16, 2007 15:01 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
discoveries

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I Figured Out

The perfect way to celebrate my upcoming birthday.

I'm going to make a huge pot of coffee, order enormous quantities of Chinese food, and spend the day donating to every blogger I like. If they've got a tipjar, they're getting some love.

Right now, I can think of three of my favorite bloggers who could really use the money. By "use," I mean that it will keep them from starving and/or having a nervous breakdown.

I declare this a meme. Come up with a list of the people whose words most influenced you and humored you. Then come up with a list of reasons why you'd be an asshole not to thank them for it.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 15, 2007 18:57 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
life, blogging

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In Which I Steal Jeff Goldstein's Thunder With a Mock Interview with Fritz Lang

Me: I just watched the Last Testament of Dr. Mabuse and M. You're a brilliant director who somehow managed to do special effects almost 70 years ahead of your time and snuck in anti-Nazi themes right under Hitler's nose. So, why the gratuituous crotchshot of Komissar Lohmann?

Lang:

Me: I mean, was it really necessary to stuff a camera under his desk while he was on the phone? What were you trying to get across by a gratuitous close-up of his hammy nether-regions? Did the sight of his porcine hocks, centered so carefully on the screen, serve as a metaphor for the desperation of a police force unable to capture a vicious child killer? Or were you making a statement about the existentialist crisis which strikes every man with the (I presume here) heft of one of those meaty thighs?

Lang:

Me: Furthermore, how the hell did you get Yoda to fill in for Dr. Mabuse in that famous transmutation scene?

Lang: You just don't get it, do you?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 14, 2007 21:17 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor

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Late Night Longing

Right now, I could really use a cat or morbidly obese pug. It's actually been years since I've had a pet to snuggle with on cold nights.

I wonder how much I'd have to bribe my landlord to overlook the no-pets clause in my lease. Since I've already pledged the name of my firstborn to The Isiah, 49 percent of my soul in the form of stock certificates to class-mates in elementary school, and am saving my organs for the highest bidder, I fear I have nothing left to bribe with but cold hard cash.

Next year, I'm getting a gargle of pugs no matter what.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 14, 2007 00:04 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, blog nocturne

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Baloo: The Lost Years

Meet Baloo:



In 1967, he was in every respect just a normal, friendly, singing bear. A strong advocate of Taoism, marijuana legalization, and Thoreau's ascetic Transcendentalism, Baloo lived in a simple cabin with his wife Moonbeam-Morningstar. Sure, there were some troubles, like when The Man came down on Baloo's hemp fields, but Baloo brushed these aside with his characteristic laid-back attitude.

Things went badly after Mowgli filed a lawsuit against Baloo for child abuse. Mowgli claimed video evidence existed that Baloo had forced him to eat insects. The evidence was damning.

One morning shortly before trial, Baloo kissed Moonbeam-Morningstar one last time, scratched his ass against the Scratching Tree for good luck, and walked out the door of his little Eugene, Oregon cabin forever. Investigation shows he was on a plane toward Bali by noon.

Baloo found himself lonely, penniless, hunted, and lost in a third-world cess-pool. As luck would have it, the first time someone tried to mug him, Baloo discovered for the first time that he liked the taste of blood. He became a mercenary for the local warlord, Shere Khan.

The next decade flew by. Baloo gained more scars, not all of them physical. His experience in the last war wrecked his nerves. He began to have nightmares and abuse opium.

It seemed Baloo would become yet another shell-shocked soldier of fortune wandering from brothel to brothel and bar to bar. It was then that Baloo found religion in the unlikely form of Rafiki, a wandering mandrill shaman known for his role in the Simba coup.

Rafiki persuaded Baloo to dry out. Over the course of a harrowing three days tied to the trunk of a Joshua tree, Baloo felt the opium tremors burst through his body, rage, and slowly disappear. On the third day, Baloo was reborn a new bear. Baloo's soul began to heal. At the urging of his mandrill guru, he applied for, and received, a position in the Peace Corps. Using his experience with arms smuggling, Baloo became the pilot for a small non-profit delivering medical supplies and food to impoverished villages.

The rest is, as they say, history.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 13, 2007 21:12 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |

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Nice Line, Buddy

Scanning the recently updated mo'blogs, I found this excerpt from Fake Designer Sunglasses:

Want to jazz up your dull and mundane personality...

I always thought it was easier to catch flies with honey than by comparing them to Henry Kissinger.

But who knows? Maybe someone will read it and say to himself, "you know, I really am a quite dull, insipid, redundant, boring, prosaic, reiterative, uninteresting, arid, cloying, mundane, plebeian, jejune, dreary vortex of vapidity. When I open my mouth, birds fall asleep and plummet to the ground. My best friends are all deaf-mutes. I tarnish mirrors. My personalized license plate is a random alphanumeric string and is the same as my email address. But if I had phony designer sunglasses, I might just become a sex-god just like Jim Morrison. Put me down for 100 pairs!"

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 13, 2007 10:49 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, blogging, discoveries

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Jack's Lament

In order for Danny Elfman to have captured the mood of Halloween so perfectly, he must have teamed up with Ray Bradbury to capture and interrogate neighborhood children.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 13, 2007 10:11 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, beauty

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Ergh

Did Motime just eat about 90 percent of one of my recent posts?!

Update: Thank G-d I had written it in emacs and was able to restore it.

I can't remember the last (if ever) time Motime did this. Kudos, Howard and our Italian overlords.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 12, 2007 22:17 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
blogging

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Three Browsers in Brief

I got bored and spent a little while messing around with Opera, Firefox, and Konqueror (on Linux, of course).

Opera has the fastest page loads with automatic pipelining, the best default page with its Speed-dial choice of 9 sites, automated search keywords in the Address window that don't depend on the creation of a bookmark, a wonderful zoom function, and a very convenient DOM developer console. It has very little support for useful javascript plugins such as the Gecko editor on Motime, poor multi-threading across tabs such that Youtube or Pandora is bound to halt during the loading of the current tab, and memory-intensive widgets. Opera's weakest point is handling streaming media; I can barely get 30 minutes of play out of Pandora without interruption. Almost as annoying, its tab-switching frame rate is low enough to cause momentary ghost fragments across pages. Its developers clearly optimized for load speed at the expense of creature comforts.

Firefox has a more even processing load across tabs, but this reduces average load time. It has excellent support for jscript plugins, better than either Opera or Konqueror. Its add-ons not only are less memory-costly than Opera's widgets, but they are much more heavily developed. Its handling of streaming media is far better than Opera. Not only is its Composer setting drool-worthy, it also has the sexiest configuration access I've ever seen in a program. Firefox's weakest point is its memory consumption; even in Linux it's a hog. However, its raw animal power makes up for this; it is the emacs of browsers.

Konqueror has without a doubt the best support for streaming media. I have yet to see a Youtube video skip a beat on it. Tab switching is instantaneous and crisp. It's got unusual features such as allowing you to open a page through another browser, oddly broad selection of browser spoofing configurations, ability to split a frame from a page into another tab or window, a powerful editing mode, and a built-in translation capability for a large variety of languages. Like Opera, it has little support for Gecko and other jscript plugins, and for some reason I cannot get Gmail to display properly at all. Its weakest point is loading speed: in its default configuration it takes almost twice as long to display a page (but when it does, it is perfect).

All I can say, is each one is best for specific purposes. Just stay away from Opera if you're a big Youtube fan. I also tested each on loading the horrid html of Myspace pages, and found Konqueror the most resistant to its madness.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 12, 2007 20:07 EST | Permalink | comments |
boredomblogging, geekery

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The Future of Spam: An Information Theoretic Argument *Restored*

If it still exists, take a look at the blog Special Land.

Link farm or real blog? Confused? Look very closely.

In the days when dinosaurs stalked the earth, spam was instantly recognizable. Indefinite repetition of the same few phrases meant the probability of any specific gimmick appearing was close to 1. This meant that early spam had a very low information entropy, and hence low information content. The extremely low information content of spam due to enormous redundancy made even primitive pattern-matching filter algorithms very effective.

Thanks to the evolutionary arms-race between spam-catching algorithms and spammers, spam has gradually become more entropic. This it can do by one of two means:

1. Pseudo-random jumbling of words.
2. Emulation of the information content of natural language.

Spammers can lower the probability of any specific word appearing by pseudo-randomly jumbling words together. Any one word being unlikely to appear, the information content can be raised high enough to fool simple algorithms. In practice, this can be done in one line of Perl code:

$spam .= @spammy_words_drawn_out_of_a_dictionary[int(rand()]\s;

It becomes almost impossible for a crude algorithm mechanically to distinguish this jumble from normal text. This forces spam-filtering mechanisms to reverse their approach and instead match the relative word frequency of suspected text with that of natural language. Humans, however, can immediately detect that the words came out of either a program or a best-selling post-modern writer.

Natural language at the word level has an information content of about 4.5 bits. Some words are much more likely to follow other words, and the relative rates can easily be extracted from a study of natural language texts. In theory, you can compile the statistics for articles in the New York Times, and construct a database of the relative frequency of word pairs. An algorithm then may compare the relative frequencies of a suspect string such as "Go mountain herbal who is John Dewey" against this database. It should be obvious that this method requires considerable more programming skill and vastly more resources. Don't wonder why Google has the most efficient filtering algorithms.

Spammers naturally countered by tweaking their own algorithms to mimic natural language. It is easy to do once someone has already constructed a statistical frequency database. In practice, this requires shockingly little code. The simple expedient of generative grammar can produce Chomskian "The invisible green darkness shouts smelly words" sentences which can achieve a very close fit to natural language frequencies while still remaining randomly generated. Interestingly, my perlbot Gibberbot created that example. This can be done in perl, for instance, by the construction of arrays for each component of grammar and a sifting mechanism such as

$spam = "@noun_main[int(rand())] @verb_past[int(rand()] @def_article[int(rand())] @adjective [int(rand())] @noun_object[int(rand())].";

Spam constructed in this manner is ferociously difficult for an algorithm to detect. Humans may not be able to identify a specific sentence as phony, but the extract as a whole will reek of inhuman construction.

The natural next step for spammers is to abstract from words and toward topics, in order to mimic the conceptual flow of natural language. In practice, this requires only the construction of arrays of arrays of generated sentences (constructed as in the previous example code) pertaining to specific themes. In perl:

@inspiration = (@respect, @anecdotes, @pap); @advice = (@mortgage, @financial, @parenting, @love);

By this means, spam becomes exponentially harder to identify for both humans and machines. In effect, the spam generator has mimicked human thought processes and could be a contender for a Turing Test.

One of the early arguments against the Turing Test was the "hand-bag" argument. Given enough memory, you could just program a machine with canned responses to every conceivable input. Although this is NP-hard, in theory a computer with a large enough storage capacity could pass a real-world Turing Test by absolutely trivial means. Yet upon simple reflection of the fact that "input" also includes past input, we see that the problem the machine faces has not gone away. It must still approximate the "flow" of conversation and as such is infinitely constrained due to the combinatorial infinity of possible sentences and conversations. Yes, a machine may be constructed such that, having driven enough programmers insane in building it, for a limited time it can fool humans. But it can do no better than a machine designed to play chess, itself nearly infinite in scope due to combinatorial factors.

Here is where spam becomes scary. The Turing Test is an iterative interrogation of the algorithmic process, whereas spam is a one-shot deal. Imagine the difficulty of determining a man was insane from hearing one sentence, as compared to hearing him rant for three hours. The Turing Test is loaded with context from which a human may extract a judgment; spam has no such context.

Take another look at Special Land. Each sentence at first glance appears to make sense and looks like natural language. Each cluster of sentences looks like something a human would write. And each post, were it broken into paragraph breaks, would resemble something written by a disorganized yet still reasoning human. The same can be said for my blog. How could you tell whether this sentence were written by Tom the Pooklekufr or one of his perl programs?

You can't. The above sentence was written by one of my programs.

In the future, spam detection may require either an actual artificial intelligence, or humans somewhere in the loop.The former is unattainable as of yet, and the latter is unspeakably costly.

Horrified yet?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 12, 2007 16:28 EST | Permalink | comments |
spam horrors, geekery, conversations, best posts

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The Little Things that Make Me Happy

I brought some blankets today.

If I were a poet, I'd say that one of the blankets is so soft, it is as if it were sewn together from kitten bellies and chinchillas.

But I'm not, so I won't.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 12, 2007 15:09 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, boredomblogging

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Colorful Quantum Cats

I find that it helps to visualize cats when working with quantum mechanics. At least for the first approximation.

For instance, the quantum mechanics of color. Visualize it like this:

You wake up and you find your cat sleeping on your chest. Ignoring the position of the tail and limbs, the cat can have one of two discrete states: ass-forwards or head-forwards. We shall call them |ASS> and |HEAD>.

Now, there is some probability that you will awake to find the cat in one or the other state. Since it involves cats, and since cats are very complex, we shall call this probability C the complex probability amplitude of being in a feline base state. The cat's total state can be described as the linear superposition of the probability amplitudes of it being in each feline base state. In other words,

    |CAT> =  |ASS>C₁ + |HEAD>C₂.

If we wanted to make this sexier, I could throw around equations like

     C₁= a/2 e^{-(i/h/2pi)(E₀-A)t} + b/2 e^{-(i/h/2pi)(E₀ + A)t} ,

to represent this probability as a function of time and the fact that the cat requires some energy A to get into a comfy position. But cats are sexy enough as it is.

Expanding these sums out for the cat's possible shifting to and fro, we find a Hamiltonian matrix which describes the energy necessary to transition from one to the other state. We find that this leads to some especially comfortable feline states, in which some definite energy is required to move from one to the other, and some states the cat will never ever try out because it is far too cool. This means, despite the seeming ease with which the cat may assume one or the other position, one of them requires slightly more energy (on the order of 2A) to get into.

What does this mean, to say that a transition from |ASS> to |HEAD>, or vice versa, requires a differential expenditure of energy? It means that when you supply energy to the cat on the order of 2A (such as a hearty yawn and a yell of surprise) when it is in a state requiring more energy to get into, the cat will try to become comfortable again by flipping into the other state, digging its claws into you, and refusing to respond to its name no matter what you yell at it. This is obviously analogous to the absorption of photons within a frequency inversely proportional to the flipping energy determined by the Hamiltonian matrix. And hence, the reason why some atoms look red and others look golden.

If this didn't make any sense, don't worry. Cats are very difficult to understand. At least, after reading this, you will have an interesting rebuttal (ha) to make when someone drags out Schrodinger's Cat.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 11, 2007 21:02 EST | Permalink | comments |
cats, blog nocturne, geekery

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Damn I'm Good... and Hungry

Being a single male, I grocery shop as my ancestors once hunted: with much trepidation and many poisonous arrows. Those who survive my Hunts claim I am very efficient.

I ask myself, "what if this is the last food I'll get in a while? What if I can't eat or trade it with my brethren and it rots? What if it attracts bears? Does it taste good with a shitload of hot pepper?"

So, I get just enough to get me by for two weeks. Literally. I've usually got things timed down to the exact peach, strand of spaghetti, bottle of dish-soap, and jalapeno.

This worked until today, when I suddenly found myself faced with a miscalculation.  Being too lazy and cheap to eat out, I found that the only things in the house that I know are edible and will not try to eat me, are a jar of peanut butter, a small bag of frozen string beans, an onion,  a jar full of hot pepper brine, and a can of tomato sauce.

Here is a lesson in male (and child) psychology for you. Edibility is additive. Where a woman would integrate over this list and arrive at the answer, "No. Get real food," a man just sees food.

Don't ask me how I did it, but I managed to both make dinner and appease my inner caveman.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 11, 2007 19:36 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Morning Spam Greeting

In my spam folder today:

Greetings Pookleblinky are you the next man in the world to have a supersize in the pants?

Well. Who am I to say that somewhere, some one right now isn't enthusiastically stuffing a cheeseburger into his pants? Alas, that tickles neither my pickle nor my lettuce.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 11, 2007 03:49 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, morning, spam horrors

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In Which I Prematurely Age 40 Years and Proceed To Wax Nostalgic and Complain

I must confess something that will sound very strange to you.

Somehow, I managed never to see a woman spit until I moved away to college, nor did I observe aggressive promiscuity in high school. I grew up completely oblivious to gender feminism's backfire, in which women were encouraged to embrace every male vice and flaw with gusto. Despite Sullivan County's many evils, libertinism was not one of them. For instance, I cannot recall hearing women casually described as "bitches" before I moved to Buffalo, either by themselves or by men.

As a result, I never gained that "Madonna/whore" complex so beloved of Freudians. I had no reason to believe women were any less than divine beings gracing the earth and keeping men from descending into apes.

It is only recently that I realized that I had spent my childhood wholly ignorant of a movement determined to convince women to drag themselves into the gutter along with men. A combination of 60's radicalism, moral relativism, absurd moral contortions among feminists justifying the very attitudes they once condemned, and an increasing apathy toward outrage, had long ago made my view of women archaic and naive. By the time I entered the real world, I found women had beaten men in binge drinking, were threatening to overtake men in promiscuity, and had gleefully embraced foul treatment.

What went wrong since Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley? When I was young, I could never have imagined women actively defending Sharia law and Islamic societies which declare women to have no souls, no rights, and half the evidentiary value of men. I thought Margaret Mead's delusional portrayal of indigenous cultures was something people had long since rejected. I could never have imagined a women advertising her promiscuity as a moral stance. The sight of a woman farting in public would have made my head explode.

In many ways, my former fiancee represents the tragedy women have forced themselves into. I heard her, an intelligent and strong woman, describe a past that I could only respond to with sadness and pity, and I could see her struggle to balance regret and nostalgia in recounting these tales. She struggled to better herself, but some obstacle implanted in her over the years fought against it. I see the same thing when, during a conversation with a man from the ghetto, he visibly struggles against the adoption of ghetto language spoken nearby. You have not seen tragedy until you have seen someone fighting against the worst part of their soul and losing.

I would not be so offended if I did not see that the people most harmed by modern barbarism were doing it to themselves. It is a man far more clever than Ellsworth Toohey to convince another man to commit suicide.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 10, 2007 22:03 EST | Permalink | comments |
hateblogging, blog nocturne, introspection

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Literary Blogs

Motime has a welcome abundance of literary blogs, but almost without exception they are stilted, forced, high-school style tedium. They are written without passion, without courage, and without any expectation of controversy.

This has to stop. If you are going to record your literary journeys, whether from bibliophilic wanderlust or the Bataan death-march of mandatory reading lists, you may as well write as if you are the last scion of literacy to a dying world. No one would have rediscovered Sophocles if he had been subject to dull exegesis. No one has ever gotten inspired by a term paper. Write as if your life depended on inspiring another person to pick that book up, if only to cull out evidence that it is pernicious bullshit.

Here are some hints.

In high school, you are taught to write in boilerplate prose mimicking the syntax of the questions you are asked. "Why is it important that Raskolnikov gave the Marmeladovs money?" "It is important that Raskolnikov gave the Marmeladovs money because _______."  This is acceptable in high school because high school teachers are not generally known for academic rigor. Outside academia, people recognize this lazy Searle-style rote programming and reject it. Despite the execrable existence of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, people want distinct, non-robotic voices behind the words they are reading. They don't want to cut-n-paste excerpts into Eliza. Kill the passive tense, put sentences into logical order, and regard the order of questions as a suggestion.

"Importance," unlike a bookworm, does not randomly infest a book. A book becomes important as a result of people finding meaning in it, acting on it, and changing either themselves or the world. To cast aside with mediocrity a book as "important" is to spit on the face of everyone who has found meaning in that book. Note that a book may change empires even while being objectively a piece of shit, see for instance A Critique of Pure Reason and Das Kapital. Remember that people have given their lives because of the ideas found in some of the books you are reading.

"Relevance" is more than a trisyllabic word. Mark Twain would kill you if you called Huck Finn "relevant." How do I know? He said so himself. Read between the occurrences of the word "nigger" and you might find out what he actually said.

Admit it. Most of the texts assigned in school are assigned, not because of the quality of the writing, but because the author has the right skin color and/or genitalia to be selected by bureaucrats deathly afraid of controversy. Do you know why this persists? Because too few people are brave enough to stand up and proclaim it bullshit. This is the same reason liberals get elected, "artists" make a living flinging dogshit at canvases, and dictators rise to power. You have two options: you either value your grades, or your integrity. Remember: no one gives a damn how Shakespeare did in school. Grow some balls and announce in no uncertain terms that you are tired of pap.

In the real world, no one gives a damn how you feel. You must be prepared to do something few courses teach: argue persuasively that you are right without muddying the waters with pretentious idiocy.  That way lies gibberish.

I know, I know. You are going to say, "but if I don't write in semi-robotic prose that Maya Angelou is the greatest poet who ever lived, I'll get an F and live in a van down by the river!" I have one thing to say to that: 10 years from now no one will give a damn what your teacher or professor thought of you.

Update: Chomskybot says:

Can dialectical abstruseness perpetuate isomorphic diffusion of continuity? Or does it deaccentuate periodicity while clearly mapping holomorphic entropic interchange onto degenerative interchange which itself transfigurative interchange through explicative plasticity? Although, to the construct that rallies around deconstruction, holomorphic aggregative contextuality which alludes to aggregative interchange is evident in that entropic periodicity factors into the convergent degenerative interdependence which deaccentuates pedagogically degenerative diffusion (which itself is a diverging construct) howsoever it may be evident that predicative degenerative periodicity which vanishes degenerative interchange clearly delineates interdependence. Can positivistic interpretation refute isomorphic discourse?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 10, 2007 18:25 EST | Permalink | comments |
books, blogging, hateblogging

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Nicotinized Coffee, 2

Note to self: add a little more nicotine to the coffee. All day long I've had a continuous urge to grow a full beard and roundhouse kick people in the head. 

Oh hell. Tonight I'm going to chain-smoke, put on some Ella, and browse the Icanhascheezburger kitty archives.

I can has nicotine fits?

Update: Hema Malini always helps when I'm in a bad mood:

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 10, 2007 15:10 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Thoughts on a Sunrise

So I'm sitting there, staring at the clouds, wondering just how complex the Feynman diagrams get for each term of a perturbation expansion as infinitely dense swarms of virtual particles appear and disappear in the course of everyday quantum interactions. Then I wonder whether graph theory could illuminate this nonlinear expansion of nodes and edges. What is the rate at which the genus changes? Would it mean anything if a F-diagram had a Hamiltonian circuit? Differential graph theory?

Then my coffeemaker stops burbling and I wonder whether my wondering is just a qualitatively different form of ignorance than quantum mystics babbling about the transcendental properties of the Uncertainty Principle.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 10, 2007 03:44 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
morning, introspection, geekery

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It Will Give You Superpowers

Hopefully.

I have perfected nicotinized coffee, and for the next few days will be its judge, jury, and human guinea pig. I figured, if I can't caffeinate cigarettes, I may as well bring the mountain to the madman.

What if this catches on? Will liberals someday denounce a movie because of the gratuitously cool postures the characters take while sipping espresso?

Mad, they called me. Mad!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 09, 2007 03:33 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Attack of Cthulhu Baby

I was taking a nap on the bus home, thoughts idly wandering, senses turned mostly off, when suddenly I felt a flurry of wet tentacles smack into my face and poke into my nose. Within an instant I was awake, pulse pounding, and ready to see what Lovecraftian horror had emerged from my dreams for some spaghetti breakfast.

Then I saw a sight that would drive lesser men mad:

I stared at the baby and she drooled back at me, gurned, and punched me in the nose.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 08, 2007 15:01 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
humor, life

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Morning's Lispy Nonlinearity

(defun fib(n)
(if (< n 2)
n
(+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))

(defun fact (n)
(if (<= n 1)
1
(* n (fact (- n 1)))))

(defun factfib (n)
(if (< n 2)
n
(+ (fact (fib (- n 1))) (fact (fib (- n 2))))))

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 08, 2007 03:47 EST | Permalink | comments |
morning, geekery

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PyMagellen Project

I had an idea a while ago to create a Wikipedia explorer bot in Python. The idea is, you'd set a base page from which the bot will stochastically hop, creating an interesting path through wikispace. You could set it in the morning, and find a whole list of interesting connections waiting for you when you get home. Imagine that:

Nother's Theorem - Indiana Jones 45
Indiana Jones - Stephen Hawking  5
Stephen Hawking - John Cleese     2
*
*
*

It would be even cooler if you could impose constraints on it to match favored subject areas. For instance, having it pump out the most heavily referenced pages dealing with Fourier Analysis or robotics.

You know what would be even cooler than that? If I could fit in a fuzzy matching scheme that would allow the bot to hold a somewhat intelligent conversation about expert subjects. I ask "What is the Weyl Tensor?" and it slurps up that page and the three most heavily referenced pages on the subject, and then can pattern-match phrases, parroting off sentences from those articles. "Why does the Weyl Tensor vanish in curved spacetime?" would pump out sentences containing "Weyl","vanish","curved", etc. and do a passable imitation of a bitchslap. I'm betting you could probably create a passable imitation of a Teacher's Pet who rote-memorizes chunks of the textbook.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 07, 2007 16:54 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
geekery, hackery

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Sunday Gorilla Music: You put de lime in the coconut

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 07, 2007 14:34 EST | Permalink | comments (3) |
music, discoveries

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Why

Unsolved problems in physics

And no, "why didn't Einstein get a haircut?" isn't on the list.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 07, 2007 12:55 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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One Down, Many More To Go

Things to do before I die #358:

Ride a bike through a thunderstorm in the wee hours of the night, carefully aiming at all the puddles, and then sing Tom Jones' "My Delilah" at the top of my lungs to the rhythm of thunder while dancing naked in a baseball field.... check!

Because sometimes, you have to work for your goals.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 07, 2007 00:06 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
humor, life, blog nocturne

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*Holds head in hands*

Howard, I finally figured out that the comment filter allows wildcard pattern matching. I can filter for IP address (spam) comments just by entering ***.***.***.***

All the time I've wasted scanning through pages of spam! I'm not quite at the point of Josiah tearing his clothes in anguish, but I'm close.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 06, 2007 13:28 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging

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Bittersweet Radio

I've finally set up my Pandora radio-station to perfection. It's seeded with Skip James, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Robert Johnson, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dick Dale, Man or Astroman, Jimi Hendrix, Richard Cheese, Ralph Stanley, Chris Thomas King, Death Cab for Cutie, and Gorillaz. Whatever algorithms they use, they've perfectly modelled my musical taste.

The only problem is, Pandora is buggy as hell. It's an even bet it won't load properly, and even if it does, there's a good chance it'll suddenly die on you halfway through a song. I've yet to get even a half-hour of uninterrupted play from it. I'm hoping Google will buy it and give it more cowbell. Kudos to the behind-the-scenes programmers, and raspberries to the web designers.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 06, 2007 13:20 EST | Permalink | comments |
music

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Sometimes

You just need put down the wavefunctions, sit back, scratch your belly, and idly clip your toenails while smoking a cigarette.

And then make a pot of coffee and go back to torturing your brain.

This would be a hell of alot easier if my Scilab distro hadn't somehow compiled without documentation. I'm working in a pidgin of Maxima, Python (for the easy control loops and complex support), and C++. Not helping.

I'm afraid it's still almost literally Greek to me.

I've always wondered at my mathematical quirks and shortcomings. I was self-educated in a public school, so I ended up getting a mish-mash of mathematics from all over the place. I knew about Cantorian ordinal arithmetic before I knew trigonometry, for instance. The result is a horrible lopsidedness and disjoint between advanced concepts and the basics. For instance, I've got almost no mental arithmetic as a result of an unlucky early encounter with a "speed arithmetic" book. Yet I can grasp partial differentiation and multiple-integration techniques. I've got the inverse visualization skills of Poincare, yet I can understand fairly easily the "flow" of an equation. I'm almost blind when it comes to visualizing wavefunctions and wave-packets, yet the formalism I grasp. I can understand wedge products of state vectors in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space, yet I always have to work through just how a Laplacian works. There are murky dead zones in my knowledge, parts that never assimilated with the rest.

The way I see it, I've got two alternatives: a)do what Descartes did and re-integrate my mathematical knowledge from the basics in one unbroken hierarchy of deductions, or b)whittle away at those weak spots as it becomes necessary. Since I am by nature lazy, I'm betting that I'll be stumped by simple things for decades to come.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 05, 2007 21:45 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, geekery

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Voodoo Mathematics

The Isiah lent me Solimon & Srinath's Continuous And Discrete Signals and Systems. By page 20 I realized I was in the morass of Engineering mathematics. Seeing engineers do math is alot like seeing a voodoo doctor correctly diagnose and treat a subdural hematoma. You wonder first, how the hell he did it. And then you wonder just how much he gets paid an hour to do it.

Here is one example that will make the mathematically inclined among you wet your pants:

They "integrate" the piece-wise unit step function. The unit step function,

           {1,  t  > 0
u(t) = {    
           {0, t < 0

has a glaring discontinuity at the origin. Not only that, it's tough to even call it a function. This doesn't stop a signals engineer from happily integrating it and discarding the constant of integration. Think about it. This almost makes poor Euler's

1+ 2² + 2⁴ + 2⁶ + 2⁸ + ... = (1 - 2²)^-1 = - 1/3

look like rigor.

Part of the code of the engineer, and to a lesser extent the physicist, is that whatever works, works. Rigor is an obstacle keeping you from the answer you want and besides, someone will eventually clean up your mess. This mindset has done wonders for mathematics, from working with infinitesimals decades after Berkley's scathing indictment of their illogic and eventually producing the rigorous framework of calculus, to the casual screwing around with infinities that lay at the heart of quantum mechanics. Our civilization is largely built on the achievements of men who said, "Screw that. I'm integrating that and no one can stop me." And some of those men were even mathematicians who should have known better.

I recognize this. I accept that sometimes Cartan needs to just sit back and let Riemann pour water on an electrified copper globe. But it still disturbs the hell out of me.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 05, 2007 18:02 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Two Slices of Life

Coworker: [leaning over with a leer] You reading a smut book?

Me: Only if you find Hermitian conjugate operators arousing.

Coworker:

Me: How the hell do you mistake a page full of equations for pron?!

Another coworker: Watcha doing tonight?

Me: I'm going to seduce Fourier series until they give me their secrets.

Coworker: You need to find yourself a woman.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 05, 2007 15:20 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery

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Attack of the Bad Movie, or How Ed Wood Smote My DVD Player

An MST3K movie actually killed my dvd player. Damn you and your curiously awful movies, Ed Wood!

Displaying the calm precision of Herbert West, I conducted an autopsy and extracted the trapped movie, feeling quite like a Chernobyl midwife.

Even though a replacement would be only about $20, I find myself facing the tough choice between the ability to watch an indefinite number of movies, and purchasing a single book. I looked at my Netflix queue and noticed that Rashomon and The Thin Man are supposed to arrive tomorrow. Then I looked at my Amazon cart and saw Advanced Programming In the Unix Environment. Back and forth and back and forth...

At least I can probably sell my dvd player to the Ed Wood Fan Society.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 04, 2007 18:05 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |

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In Which I Again Steal Jeff Goldstein's Thunder With a Graphic Representation of A Headache With Sneezy Tendencies

thubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthub
thub AHHHHH thubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthub
thubthubthubthubthub AHHHHH thubthubthubthubthub
thubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthub
thub AHHHHH thubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthub
thubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthubthub
thubthubthubthubthub *choo* thubthubthubthubthub

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 04, 2007 16:44 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, life

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Morning Joy

You'd have to be dead not to smile when she sings.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 04, 2007 02:26 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, beauty, morning

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Spampoetry

Check out Cteaghin's blog Spampoetry, assembled out of the raw linguistic chaos that is spam. I can't say that William Burroughs would have gone crazy if he saw what spambots did to language, seeing as how he shot his wife in the face trying to play William Tell, but he certainly would be quite delighted.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 03, 2007 17:07 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, discoveries

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For RustyMadgal: The Smullyan-McCarthy-Boolos "Ouch Me No Wanna ThinkyThink!" Logic Puzzle

Here it is:

Three goddesses A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter (Whether Random speaks truly or not should be thought of as depending on the flip of a coin hidden in her brain: if the coin comes down heads, she speaks truly; if tails, falsely. She does not merely respond with random utterances.).

Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one goddess. The goddesses understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are 'da' and 'ja', in some order. You do not know which word means which.Furthermore, although they are immortals, they get grumpy at that time of the month. While on their period, if you attempt a Godelian trick such as asking True, "Are you going to answer this question with the word that means 'no' in your language?" her poor head will explode. Needless to say, you are not allowed to offer any of them chocolate.

Go!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 03, 2007 15:18 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
discoveries, geekery

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Four Words

Hamster. Balls. For. Babies.

Discuss.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 02, 2007 17:49 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor

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Homo Autobusianus: Effusive Madman

I saw the most wonderfully insane man on the bus this morning.

He got on, turned toward the passengers, and announced "I love y'all! Which hand has the money? Which hand? This hand? Or this hand? This hand!" whereupon he threw a crumpled dollar bill at an old lady. Then he proceeded to pay his fare and sit by me. I must mention that the front of the bus was almost empty, so he must have deliberately decided to sit right next to me, sideways so his face was within two feet of mine.

For the next half hour, he entertained the bus with amusingly psychotic games. "Pick a language! Any language I'll speak it! Hable Ingles? Parle vous Francois? Guess a number any number!" he would shout, turned in his seat toward the rest of the bus. Someone humored him with Spanish (I caught the words "cabron" and "pinche"), causing him to rattle off something lightning quick and then throw more crumpled dollar bills at old ladies. When he asked me, I said my favorite Japanese sentence: "Yukkuri hanashite itte kudasai," momentarily confusing him before he recovered by throwing more crumpled money at an old lady.

Interspersed with the wonderful games were lectures on spiritualism. "I got the ying and the yang together! You can't love the ying without loving the yang like a man and a woman! They not fags! Wanna see my ying and yang?!" He flashed a happy smile and held up a pill for the rest of us to see, and
 threw that at a teenager. And then followed it with a wad of money tossed into an old man's face.

Before getting off, he made a show of offering to hug anyone who volunteered. When no one did, he not-so-much-as-hugged-as-brushed-against-and-groped that same old man.

Buffalo, oh Buffalo. Your children amaze and scare the hell out of me.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 02, 2007 15:23 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
humor, life

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Nice Touch

My cell phone company sent me an email wishing me happy birthday and offering a discount for this month.

Such a nice gesture it almost makes me forget that I could write their b-day mailer code in 10 minutes.

Despite my cynicism, I wish more companies took 5 or 10 minutes to program personal touches into their services. I don't know about you, but I'd like it if Amazon sent me a wishlist a month or so before a friend's birthday or anniversary, or if Netflix inserted some "surprise me!" function that would mail me a random recommended movie on my birthday.

Since fewer people are using cash nowadays, I foresee a future in which almost anything you buy on your birthday gets some perceptible discount upon swiping for it.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 02, 2007 15:05 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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The Many Tongues of Motime

Lately I've been surfing Motime with Babblefish, wandering among my Spanish and Portuguese speaking neighbors, drifting through Motime's Chinatown, and meandering along digital Indian courtyards.

Howard is right: Motime may be the only civilized spot on the web. Whereas every other blog on Blogger is a spam-filled nightmare, here there are nothing but narratives, slices of lives caught in time. You get the impression of being in Salman Rushdie's Bombay, where the air is thick with the collected stories of a continent. Edna St. Vincent Millay had to imagine the tale of a man in Capri; here with one click I can discover his joys and sorrows and peculiar fascination with dressing up kittens in pirate costumes. You can console, mock, argue, and commiserate with a person thousands of miles away; on much of Blogger you usually can only recoil in disgust or horror at them.  Only the mighty Mu.nu empire can claim to be as idyllic.

Motime is a small enclave of the quirky and the friendly, in a frighteningly big blogosphere full of furries and necrophiliac balloon fetishists. Explore it and thank G-d you will not encounter the Yetis of Perversion that creep throughout the rest of the web.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 01, 2007 22:07 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging, blog nocturne

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Night Music

Beautiful rendition of the gospel song Run on

Dave Brubeck's "Take Five":



Skip James' "Devil Got My Woman":

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 01, 2007 19:51 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, blog nocturne

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Argh.

Me: What do you mean?

Coworker: I'm just saying, Iran, Iraq, North Korea- Bush's 'Axis of Evil'- they don't want to be democracies and we don't got the right to tell them how to live.

Me: They have the right to be savages?

Coworker: They got a right to live like they want. Barbarian, whatever. That's just you as an American saying that.

Me: Step away from the big words, Othello. When you claim Iran has a right to maintain a theocratic dictatorship and that North Korea has the right to be a famished shithole under a schizophrenic Tim Burton monster, you are talking about people, not an abstraction. You're claiming that somewhere in Iran, some man has the right to hold a screaming little girl down and slice off her labia majora with a rusty razorblade and then sew the raw wound closed around a twig, that some man in North Korea has the right to drag a mentally retarded child into a concentration camp on the outskirts of Pyong Yong. No man has the right to inflict violence on innocents. Evil is not a cultural difference to be tolerated.

Coworker: That's their tradition.

Me: I can't help but notice you're black. What if some good ol' boy asserted his culturally protected tradition to string you up and have at you with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers? Would you accept his right to live his life how he wants?

Coworker: That's fucking wrong.

Me: How? What's the difference between a crowd of Iranians stoning a 12 year old girl for having been raped, and a crowd of Klansman lynching an innocent black man?

Coworker: If they wanted to change, they would.

Me: Tell that to the people without the guns, literacy, and food.

I noticed a disturbing trend: I have met very few blacks who are actually willing to make moral judgments. I can't count how many conversations I've had in which I find myself facing a man who refuses to see any evil other than that Committed By Dead White Males. What the hell has gone wrong since Martin Luther King? How perverted must you be to accept any atrocity as long as it's not related to your ethnic group?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at October 01, 2007 17:13 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
hateblogging, conversations

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