Trick or Treatment? Remy channels Bobby “Boris ” Pickett for this Healthcare.gov-Halloween mash-up.
Written and performed by Remy. Video by Sean Malone.
[…]
Lyrics:
He was working on his laptop late one night
when his eyes beheld a ghoulish site
He could not log in despite several tries
then suddenly to no one’s surprise(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare Mash
(the Healthcare Mash)
it was a keyboard smash
(he did the Mash)
the website was trash
(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare mashWho could design such a site so flawed and so sloppy?
The code is so ancient, perhaps it was Hammurabi
He’d try to apply but the site would suspend
I’ve seen a eunuch with a more functional front end(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare Mash
(the Healthcare Mash)
it was a keyboard smash
(he did the Mash)
He tried to clear his cache
(he did the Mash)
He did the Healthcare mashHundreds of millions of dollars were spent
for a website that has trouble loading
How could the government’s web designers
create a site with such awful coding?(they did the Mash)
Ahh, they did the Healthcare Mash
(the Healthcare Mash)
it was a keyboard smash
(they did the Mash)
they spent all of our cash
(they did the Mash)
They did the Healthcare Mash
October 31, 2013
Reason.tv – Do the Healthcare Mash
October 26, 2013
October 25, 2013
QotD: The dangers of reading internet comments
I joke — hilariously — but there is a serious issue here. At least, I assume there is. Frankly, I can’t remember, because I made the mistake of scrolling down to the reader comments about the visa story. Reading online comments is like letting someone punch your brain in the face with a fistful of stupid. If you doubt this, consider that I’ve been hit with the “fist of stupid” so many times, I now think brains have faces. Kudos, Internet.
Scott Feschuk, “Mexico is ‘really mad’ at us, and it is so a big whoop: Diplomacy should be more like ‘Mean Girls’”, Maclean’s, 2013-09-20
October 23, 2013
QotD: Popular fiction
[…] it’s almost as if there’s a demon whose special job is maintaining the inverse relationship between quality and sales when it comes to runaway bestsellers. E.L. James would be an example, surely, but her prose isn’t much worse than Stephenie Meyer’s, which is middlin’ horrid, while their joint plotting is pretty much entirely horrid, not to mention largely incoherent and ethically vacuous.
Or there’s Dan Brown, who wouldn’t recognise a grammatical sentence or a plausible sequence of events if they each wrestled him to the ground and sat on his head. Which I dearly wish they would, if only to keep him away from any keyboard whatsoever and preserve a forest or two from dying all in vain.
By any criterion other than sales each of these bestsellers is plainly a badly inferior example of its genre and of the writer’s craft, yet they explode while far better things that are no less available (though often less advertised) do modestly. Some of it is a bit like talentless boy bands, an almost purely commercial phenomenon, but one still has to wonder why those particular publishers’ pushes go so viral. And weep.
John Lennard, MA DPhil. (Oxon.), MA (WU) (Goodreads blog), posting to the Lois McMaster Bujold Mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), 2013-10-22
October 22, 2013
Dahlia Lithwick on smelling like a teenage boy for a week
It’s not just a scent … it’s a lifestyle:
When I first told my husband that I was planning on wearing only Axe men’s products for an entire week, his answer was a foreshadowing of things to come: “You’re planning on wearing that stuff to bed every night for a week? Man. Axe really does work. It’s only been a few minutes and look, you’re already single again … ”
[…]
Despairing of any kind of social response that wasn’t either threats of a formal legal separation from my husband or subtle nostalgia from mothers of former Axe users, I decided to trot out the stuff at the last night of Slate’s annual retreat in September. Having sprayed it liberally all over my body on the night of the big promlike party, I watched my roommate — Slate’s Dear Prudie — actually flatten herself up against a hotel room wall and slide uneasily down the hallway, in the manner of that poor cat being chased by Pepé Le Pew. Almost immediately upon my arrival at the festivities I was accosted by three female Slate colleagues who spontaneously observed that I smelled completely amazing. I was briefly thrilled at the enthusiastic response, until I realized that I didn’t really want my someday teenaged sons to ever be quite that amazing-smelling to women in their 30s and 40s. One colleague said it brought her right back to whatever it is that happened in the back of a truck when she was herself 14. The silence was slightly less awkward than after the pants-spraying story the week before.
October 19, 2013
October 17, 2013
QotD: Small town architecture
Damariscotta, Maine, is a village about forty percent of the way to Canada along the Atlantic coast, with about 2500 people living in it, and at least that many gawping at it at any given time. It’s cuter than a baby trying to eat an apple.
Damariscotta is an Indian name that means something in Indian, I suppose. I don’t speak Abenaki, and neither do Abenakis, so there’s no use askin’, but I think it means: “Place we’ll burn down during King Philip’s War, and again a few times whenever we’re bored and the sheriff’s drunk during the French And Indian Wars.” The colonists got jealous of the Indians getting to burn the place down fortnightly, and burned the place down themselves so the British couldn’t occupy it during the Revolutionary War, or maybe so the bank couldn’t repossess it, I can’t remember, I was very young back then.
[…]
The restaurant was identified to me as haunted, anyway. I was likewise informed that there’s a tour that points out all the local haunted houses, which includes most every building in town but the Rexall. No one ever wants to die and haunt a Rexall. It ain’t dignified. I believe to a certainty that I was supposed to be interested in the fact that the building I was in was haunted by someone besides a man with a liquor license, but I have a defective nature and I wasn’t; but I was fascinated to learn that out-of-plumb doorframes, squirrels in the attic, and a hint of cupidity is enough to get you a paying job lying to people “from away.” And to think I’ve been lying to strangers for free all these years, and on more diverse topics.
There’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in small cities in the East. The really nice looking cities are made of brick, and all the buildings look like one another, because everything that was there before burned down eleven or four or nine times, until the residents all decided brick buildings were cheaper than a fire department, and built everything at the same time under a regime of architectural and intellectual coherence that is not abroad in the land just now. Damariscotta’s like that; Providence, Rhode Island, parts of Boston, and Portland, Maine are too.
One likewise cannot help but notice that in Damariscotta, the rhythm of the lovely brick buildings, with the occasional gawjus neoclassical residence smattered in, is broken only by the public library, which is fairly new, and built in the Prairie/International/Cow Barn/Reform School style, because reasons. There’s a plaque on the sidewalk that declares the entire downtown a member of the National Register of Historic Places, so you have to check with someone official about the color of the mortar you’re using to fix a brick on your haunted ice cream parlor or haunted Kinko’s or whatever you’ve got, but the town can hire Frank Lloyd Wrong to design the library and place it there like a dead cat at a picnic.
“Innocents Abroad: The Damariscotta Pumpkinfest”, Sippican Cottage, 2013-10-16
October 14, 2013
You can’t make me eat kale
At American Digest, a paean of joy at the thought of being forced to eat more kale:
Of late many self-employed food bullshit artists have concluded that we should eat more kale. Why anyone would want to eat even a little kale is beyond me. Kale, considered dispassionately, is something that you’d want to dry and stuff into a tick mattress if you were out of paint soaked rags and seaweed. Kale is not, strictly speaking, a food.
And yet, and yet, there it is. Oozing in piles of of leafy green intestine cleansing fronds in what can now only be described as the weed section of the produce aisle at your average Whole Foods.
How kale actually got into our national food chain is a mystery almost as deep as how the flavor of pumpkin (backed by “Spice!”) has been infused into foods and beverages starting October 1. Both kale and pumpkin exemplify items from the somewhat vegetable kingdom that would be better going straight from farm to compost without passing through humans.
And yet, and yet, here we are … one more mile down the road to hell courtesy of those post LorenaBobbittized vegans within whom there is not a teaspoon of testosterone in a trainload.
[…]
That’s the wave of the future and it is not an amber wave under spacious skies. Nope. It is a wave of pale and sodden progressively “good-for-you” greens slopped onto your aluminum plate in the prison chow line on Planet Vegan. You remember that putrescent puddle of gurgling spinach guts in spinach water that was once glunked on your plate in the high school cafeteria? This is the same thing only with extra thiocyanate. But hey, its KALE!, so count yourself lucky. Think of all the children of the elite and super rich that are going to bed tonight without any.
October 11, 2013
Jonah Goldberg on Scooby Doo
For this week’s Goldberg File email, Jonah Goldberg ran an old piece from some time in the last few years, talking about the cultural implications of the TV show Scooby Doo:
So my daughter and I have been talking about Scooby Doo a lot. She thinks the show, in all its myriad incarnations, is riveting. She will interrupt conversations with “Oh, Daddy, did you know …” and I will expect to hear about something from school or from her daily life, and she will commence to tell me something about Shaggy or Velma or Scooby.
The show has gone through a lot of changes over the years (the Wikipedia entry is disturbingly interesting; one of these days I must remember to carve it into a great chain of toilet seats). In case you didn’t know, the show now features real monsters and ghosts quite often. Not always, but often enough. For decades, the monsters weren’t real, merely the attempts of hucksters and con men. Now the makers of the show teach little kids that there really are vampires and witches.
At first, I thought this scandalous. I always thought the point of the show was to teach little kids not to be scared of things that go bump in the night.
But this is actually the least offensive thing about the show. Bear with me.
Recently, I caught the tail end of one of the newer episodes, and I was dismayed to discover that the perpetrator of the scary hoax was not the bad guy. He was something of an environmentalist/historic preservationist who wanted to keep some greedy corporate fat cats from developing some land. It seemed like something close to an endorsement of ecoterrorism.
Obviously, I was going to turn this revelation into an NR cover story. But as I pondered it, I thought more deeply about the original series. The show starts in 1969. The kids of Mystery Inc., who seem to have absolutely no parental supervision, are clearly counter-cultural. Freddie may not be gay, but he wears an ascot, and, for anyone under the age of 60, that alone is an invitation to a beating. And given that the show was launched in 1969, he may just be dressing that way to duck the draft. (Indeed, why the heck aren’t Fred and Shaggy knee-deep in some rice paddy somewhere?) Velma, meanwhile, certainly looks like she runs a pottery shop in Burlington, Vt., if you know what I mean.
And Shaggy, well, he’s a filthy hippy who always has the munchies. ‘Nuff said.
Alice Munro’s Nobel a vote of confidence for other Canadian dissidents
The Washington Post‘s Max Fisher plays it straight with this report on the recent Nobel Prize awarded to “dissident Canadian writer Alice Munro”:
Munro has long been celebrated by Western writers. American novelist Cynthia Ozick once described her as “our Chekhov,” comparing her to the Russian playwright known for challenging Russia’s restrictive Tsar-era social codes.
State media in Canada reacted positively to the news, calling it a great victory for the Canadian nation and the state ideology. Still, Munro is expected to come under intense pressure from Canadian exile communities, who are already calling on the author to use this moment to focus greater attention on the lack of political freedoms in Canada.
Rights groups such as Amnesty International are urging Ottawa to allow Munro permission to travel abroad to accept the prize in December. Though Canadian Nobel winners have been permitted to fly to Oslo to accept the prize in years past, the political nature of Munro’s work and recent Canadian tensions with the European Union have called this into question.
In the meantime, some of Munro’s admirers in the West have expressed hope that the author’s works may finally be fully translated into English.
QotD: Political memoirs
Any statement in a politician’s memoirs can represent one of six different levels of reality:
a. What happened.
b. What he believed happened.
c. What he would have liked to have happened.
d. What he wants to believe happened.
e. What he wants other people to believe happened.
f. What he wants other people to believe he believed happened.Jonathan Lynn, “Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue”, JonathanLynn.com
October 5, 2013
QotD: Immortality, if you want it
Those of us who are non-believing heathens might prefer porting our minds to robot bodies before the natural expiration date on our organic selves. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that a digital representation of your mind, no matter how accurate, is still “you” in some sense. But I think that fear will go away as soon as we see the first robot that thinks and acts exactly like Uncle Bob did before he made the jump. If Uncle Bob the robot acts human enough, we’ll come to see him as the same entity that once inhabited an organic shell. When technology is sufficiently advanced, we’ll get past the magical thinking about spirits and souls and the specialness of having organic parts.
To me, the most interesting possibility for the future involves porting human minds to software that includes entirely simulated realities. Such a program — a digital mind if you will — could live in an entirely artificial reality and experience what seems to be a genuine human life for the rest of eternity, or at least as long as the software keeps running. The freaky part is that if such a thing will someday be possible — and I think it will — then it follows that the time after it happens will be infinitely long whereas the history of time before it happens is finite. So it follows that there is an infinitely greater chance you are already the simulation and not a human who is reading this paragraph and contemplating it. Weird.
If you didn’t already have enough reasons to eat right, exercise, and keep your mind sharp, consider what you might be bringing to your own immortality. I was hoping to get there before the dementia sets in. But I just reread what I wrote and apparently I’m already too late.
Scott Adams, “Choose Your Immortality: Someday you’ll be a robot with a locket holding your last human cells”, Time, 2013-09-18
October 2, 2013
QotD: Day two
I don’t know who’s more foolish: the greeter standing there, cheerfully helping shoppers, or the other customers who weren’t panicking and hoarding like I was. Don’t these idiots realize that the government is shut down?!?!
The lack of rioting at Petco encouraged me — might there still be actual human food on the shelves at other stores? Swung by Whole Foods where I saw canned goods … and large cuts of beef and pork on sale at $1.99 / lb. Remembering a trick from Lucifer’s Hammer, I bought all the meat I could fit in the shopping cart, took it home, sliced it thin, and dehydrated it.
As I stayed up until 4am slicing meat I couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that the customers at Whole Foods are just as deluded as those at Petco. Fools. Pathetic fools. The societal breakdown might not be that obvious yet, but by day three of the government shutdown they’ll be hammering at my door, looking for salted beef.
Sadly, I’ve realized that my preparations aren’t as far along as they should be. Ammunition will soon grow scarce, and I’ll need other weapons to defend myself from bikers and feral children once the government shutdown really hits. I recall from Dies the Fire that crossbows can be made from truck leaf springs. I’m going to go onto Craigslist to try to find a blacksmith or craftsman I can barter with, but I fear it may already be too late — has Craigslist survived this long?
Clark, “Government shutdown: day two”, Popehat, 2013-10-02
September 28, 2013
“Stoking the star maker machinery behind the popular song”
If you'd like to make a radio-friendly hit song in our current music climate, you'll need the following three things:
— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) September 28, 2013
A kick drum on the quarter note. Some sort of clap/high snare on the two and four. Whiny lyrics. Congrats you've joined the corporate world.
— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) September 28, 2013
Yes yes, I didn't mention autotune. That's basically a given at this point. #cherwantsherroyalties
— Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) September 28, 2013
QotD: Sir Humphrey Appleby on discrediting an expert report
Sir Humphrey: There is a well established Government procedure for suppress… deciding not to publish reports.
Jim Hacker: Really?
Sir Humphrey: You simply discredit them.
Jim Hacker: Good heavens… how?
Sir Humphrey: Stage one, you give your reasons in terms of the public interest. You hint at security considerations — the report could be used to put pressure on government and could be misinterpreted.
Jim Hacker: Anything could be misinterpreted. The Sermon on the Mount could be misinterpreted!
Sir Humphrey: Indeed — it could be argued that the Sermon on the Mount, had it been a government report, would almost certainly not have been published. A most irresponsible document. All that stuff about the meek inheriting the earth could do irreparable damage to the defence budget.
Sir Humphrey: In stage two you go on to discredit the information you’re not publishing.
Jim Hacker: How, if you’re not publishing it?
Sir Humphrey: It’s much easier if it’s not published. You do it by press leaks. Say it leaves some important questions unanswered, that much of the evidence is inconclusive, that the figures are open to other interpretations, that certain findings are contradictory and that some of the main conclusions have been questioned.
Jim Hacker: Suppose they haven’t?
Sir Humphrey: Then question them. Then they have.
Jim Hacker: But to make accusations like that you’d have to go through it with a fine-toothed comb.
Sir Humphrey: Nonsense — you can say all that without reading it. There are always some questions unanswered.
Jim Hacker: Such as?
Sir Humphrey: The ones that weren’t asked.Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, “The Greasy Pole”, Yes, Minister, 1981-03-16
