Quotulatiousness

February 20, 2010

“Are you stupid?”

Filed under: Humour, Media, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:10

My new Olympic hero, with a gold medal in press relations, Sven Kramer:

Update, 25 February: If you felt that Kramer was showing Hubris in the clip above, you might also feel that Nemesis showed up right on schedule, too:

After 25 laps around the Richmond Olympic Oval, Sven Kramer of the Netherlands crossed the finish line Tuesday and raised his arms in triumph, having secured — or so he thought — his second Olympic record and gold medal of these Winter Games.

Within seconds, Kramer’s celebration turned icy cold. When his coach, Gerard Kemkers, caught up to him during his cool-down lap, he palmed his head and delivered the bad news: Kramer was disqualified for incorrectly changing lanes with eight laps remaining in the 10,000-meter race.

Kramer, who has dominated the distance since finishing seventh at the 2006 Olympics, spiked his glasses upon learning his fate. He looked as if he wanted to punch Kemkers, who later accepted full blame for what happened. He said he glanced up from recording split times, became momentarily disoriented and barked at Kramer to switch to the inner lane.

February 16, 2010

The (looming) Greek default

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Greece — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

Tim Cavanaugh dispenses with the careful-to-avoid-blaming-anyone information being peddled by most reporters:

If you ever start thinking no place could suck harder than the good ol’ U.S.A., just look to the glory that is Greece. The Greek government is responding to its self-inflicted debt crisis by doing just about every single thing wrong.

That might not be clear from most of the media coverage. To comprehend any of the popular descriptions of Greece’s public debt problem, you need to be a yes man as mindless as the guy whose job it is to keep saying “Certainly, Socrates… You’re quite right, Socrates…” in the Platonic dialogues.

The New York Times blames the investment banks that held a gun to the crowned heads of Europe and forced governments to take on more debt. The Guardian says it was deregulation and privatization of state enterprises that caused public spending to, um, increase? (Just go with it.) Greek tax collectors say the problem is that tax collectors need to be paid more. And because he knows that being able to print your own money always encourages fiscal responsibility, Paul Krugman says it’s because Greece went off the drachma too soon. (That problem may be working itself out faster than anybody planned.)

But the beauty of Greece’s looming default is that it is a totally straightforward story of uncontrolled public spending and the determination of governments to run up impossible debts. In this case, as the above Times article spells out, those debts were run up in duplicitous ways that in fact violated the public debt rules of the EU from which Greece is now trying to get a bailout. Your worst nightmare of a wastrel American politician — call him Barack Schwarzenegger — would have a hard time mismanaging state finances this badly. Since getting on the euro in 2001, the Greek government has apparently been fudging its budget statistics, a practice countenanced by both conservative and socialist governments. To its credit, the current government kicked the current crisis into high gear when it released a deficit-to-GDP number of 12.7 percent — double the previously announced figure, and by far the highest in Europe.

Read the whole link-laden thing.

February 10, 2010

QotD: The shop vac . . . of doom

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Tools — Tags: — Nicholas @ 19:45

Now that I have a manly garage, with a manly workbench, I was delighted to receive for Christmas a Shop Vac. It’s a magical device that sucks up all sorts of debris, even liquid. It has attachments for everything. I think one attachment is for haircuts, but I haven’t tried it yet. The Shop Vac is gray and black and reminds me of R2D2 so much that I expect it to jack into my breaker panels and reprogram my DVR.

My point is that my Shop Vac is totally awesome. That is, unless I try to move it. It has wheels, but at the first sign of movement, the Shop Vac starts squirming and tossing off attachments like a balloonist heading into a volcano. The hose becomes like a spastic elephant trunk. It will find all of the loose objects in your garage and fling them one-by-one into oil spills and darkened spider nests. If you focus your attention on the flailing vacuum hose, the power cord will wrap itself around your legs and try to trip you into the pyramid of old paint cans. And the screaming. Good lord, the little wheels scream on the concrete floor. It’s Shop Vac language for “LEAVE ME ALONE! DO NOT MOVE ME! I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY TENTACLE!”

The worst of it, if I can pick just one thing, is that the situation totally ruins my manly vibe. I live in fear that Shelly will come into the garage and see me losing a cage match to R2D2.

Scott Adams, “My Shop Vac”, Dilbert.com, 2010-02-10

February 9, 2010

This week’s silly health panic: third-hand smoke.

Filed under: Environment, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Don’t worry, anti-smoking campaigners! Even though the evil smoking empire is in retreat, and smokers get worse press than child molesters and people who talk at the theatre, there’s a new moral front opening up: third-hand smoke! The war isn’t over yet:

Lingering residue from tobacco smoke which clings to upholstery, clothing and the skin releases cancer-causing agents, work in PNAS journal shows.

Berkeley scientists in the US ran lab tests and found “substantial levels” of toxins on smoke-exposed material.

They say while banishing smokers to outdoors cuts second-hand smoke, residues will follow them back inside and this “third-hand smoke” may harm.

Efforts are currently underway to determine if there’s a strong media response to this “new threat”. If so, funding will be sought to research the possibility of “fourth-hand smoke” and possibly even “fifth-hand smoke”.

January 26, 2010

When politicians get too close to the sharp end, militarily speaking

Filed under: Government, Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:42

This is a good example of why it’s a bad idea to allow politicians to get too deeply involved in military acquisition and logistics:

The U.S. Army wants to use more precision “smart” weapons. To that end they have replaced unguided MLRS (227mm) rockets with a GPS guided one. There is now a very popular GPS guided 155mm artillery shell in use. Laser guided Hellfire missiles are widely used by helicopter gunships. But there’s still one unguided “dumb” weapon that the army just can’t seem to get away from; their unguided 70mm (2.75 inch) rockets. Back in 2003, the army planned to begin phasing out these rockets. But, instead, during the last five years, the army has purchased nearly a billion dollars worth of 70mm rockets. Not because they wanted to, but because the politicians from Vermont, where the rocket is manufactured, had enough clout to force the army buy over 100,000 70mm rockets they don’t want, won’t use, and will eventually have to dispose of. That last step will cost more money, unless they can find some foreign country that wants to buy them, cheap.

I guess the plant that produces them is in a district represented by a member of a powerful committee in Washington.

January 20, 2010

This has got to be a mis-communication

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 21:55

At least, I hope it’s just a miscommunication:

Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.

It was not known whether the action reflected a high-level policy decision at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or confusion in a city where dozens of entities are involved in aid efforts.

“We are not supposed to get rations unless approved by AID,” Maj. Larry Jordan said.

Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.

Surely not even the most pig-headed rules-lawyer would have required this . . . I hope.

H/T Castle Argghhh.

Update, 21 January: For reasons of incompetence, I forgot to actually include the URL in that link to Castle Argghhh. Fixed now.

While I’m updating the post, this may be relevant:

The MRE (Meals Ready to Eat, in a pouch) are frequently used as emergency rations. The MRE has evolved from its initial introduction in 1983 (12 separate entrees) to today (24 menu entrees). The MREs change from year to year, and new entrees are added in place of others. The U.S. military has generally switched out entrees each year (apparently the notion that such a deal is a zero-sum game seems to persist, as opposed to just adding new ones). This constant evolution has done much to diminish the bad reputations MREs had early on. Back then, the MRE (officially, “Meals, Ready to Eat”) was often called “Meals Rejected by Everyone”.

The United States also has other rations, including variants for cold weather (which has a higher calorie count than the regular MRE – 1540 per meal compared to 1250 for an MRE), and a kosher/halal variant for Jewish and Moslem soldiers (both religions, for instance, forbid the consumption of pork). Vegetarian entrees are provided, as well. The United States also has developed the Humanitarian Daily Ration (HDR), which has three meals and is based on vegetarian entrees to provide a low chance of offending cultural sensibilities. Many of these HDRs were dropped over Afghanistan in late 2001. Several hundred thousand HDRs are stockpiled for disaster relief, and production can be ramped up quickly. MREs and HDRs are particularly attractive because they provide uncontaminated food that does not require refrigeration, in a compact package. The UN, and many other food aid organizations, use the HDR for situations like Haiti.

If you wonder why it’s nicknamed “The Grauniad” . . .

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:13

This is the sort of thing they were notorious for:

You wonder why those “Crotians” and the “Sebians” can’t get along . . .

Amusingly, they got the national names correct in the article’s URL.

January 18, 2010

Why just be shallow? Show off your shallowness for the next generation

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:54

It used to be that you could show off your lack of imagination by naming your kid after sports stars. These days, it’s names from popular films that are all the rage:

According to a rather sketchy report in the Sun, some parents have inexplicably decided it’s a bright idea to name a kid Neytiri or Toruk or indeed Pandora. The latter is top choice in the US, “with UK parents set to follow”.

The Sun appears to have got the shock news from blinkbox.com, which suggested that the $1bn box office barrier acts as a trigger for movie-based sprogbranding. A spokesman offered: “Past the $100m barrier, the chances of a film’s star lending their name to a child increase.”

This remarkable and almost unbelievable fact explains, of course, why priests have in recent years been obliged to utter: “I christen thee Bilbo Dark Knight Barbossa Gollum Jack Sparrow III…”

It almost makes you sympathetic to those countries which legally restrict the names parents are allowed to select for their children . . .

January 9, 2010

QotD: The awfulness of airports

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Over the weekend, an idiot walked the wrong way through a secure exit for arriving passengers at Newark airport. An entire terminal was shut down so that everybody on the “sterile” side of the security barriers could be herded back out and rescreened. The entire process took just under seven hours. The cascading delays disrupted air travel worldwide. They didn’t even catch the doofus who caused the ruckus. No doubt, if they’d announced his location over the paging system, he’d have been drawn and quartered by a mob of traveling salesmen from 3M and a gaggle of middle-school girls returning from a volleyball tournament.

Now, I should back up. When I referred to the “sterile” side of the security barrier, I was using the term narrowly, to refer to folks who’d been through the metal detectors. Because to use the word “sterile” in its usual context in a sentence with “airports” — those belching Petri dishes of bathroom effluence and unidentifiable noisome miasma — would be a grotesque abrogation of journalistic trust.

According to the latest epidemiological research, airports reside somewhere between no-frills Haitian brothels and Penn State fraternity bathrooms when it comes to hygiene. USA Today recently surveyed the health-inspection records of airport restaurants and found that serious code violations were as commonplace as rat and mouse droppings; 77 percent of 35 restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport had at least one major violation.

I could go on, of course. The petty humiliations, the routine deceptions from airline employees desperate to rid themselves of troublesome travelers (“Oh, they can definitely help you at the gate!”), the stress-position seats, the ever-changing rules for what can and cannot be in your carry-on, being charged for food that the Red Cross would condemn if it were served at Gitmo: Air travel is the most expensive unpleasant experience in everyday life outside the realm of words ending in -oscopy.

Jonah Goldberg, “A No-Fly List? Count Me In: Flying before 9/11 was already awful, and it has only become worse”, National Review, 2010-01-08

January 4, 2010

Sony’s latest consumer mis-step

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:44

Dark Water Muse treated himself to a new bit of electronic kit over the holidays, a Sony Reader Touch. He wasn’t best pleased by the purchase:

The Sony Reader is an all but useless device, certainly at its current price point. Especially if you already happen to own a portable electronic device capable of rendering common document and media file formats — got a smart phone? Got a netbook or laptop? Then you’re already living the dream that is merely Sony’s Reader Touch nightmare.

DWM gives the Sony Reader Touch negative 1 out of 10. Truly impressively bad, particularly when measured on a scale of +1 to +10.

How does DWM compute negative one? Read on.

Only the newly arrived on H. G. Wells’ Time Machine could find utility in a Sony Reader. Or if you’re too proud to admit you fucked up by buying one in the first place and prefer to go to your grave, Sony Reader over your heart (trust DWM when he says, any friends you might still have after becoming a Sony Reader Touch owner, or surviving relatives, want to see it buried with you too), rather than get your money back.

DWM returned his Sony Reader Touch after making extra special efforts to try and modify his relationship to reading text with it. He wanted the Sony Reader to work. He was willing to tolerate “a little” deficit in the reading experience, if only to avoid having to slaughter one more tree to feed his hunger for crime novels. But, feeling disappointed and defeated, DWM sent his Sony Reader Touch back to from whence it had come (extruded from that great product anus behind so many retail consumer products).

I’ve got a couple of dozen books on my iPhone, but I consider them to be “emergency” reading . . . for those times when I don’t have internet access. It’s great that the iPhone can work as a small ebook display, but the key word here is “small”.

December 30, 2009

If the terrorists don’t kill off the airlines, the TSA will

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

Radley Balko joins the chorus of protests about the latest set of how-stupid-can-you-get “security” rules from the TSA:

Seems to me that what this, Flight 93, and the Richard Reid incident have shown us is that the best line of defense against airplane-based terrorism is us. Alert, aware, informed passengers.

TSA, on the other hand, equates hassle with safety. For all the crap they put us through, this guy still got some sort of explosive material on the plane from Amsterdam. He was stopped by law-abiding passengers. So TSA responds to all of this by . . . announcing plans to hassle law-abiding U.S. passengers even more.

If you’re really cynical, you could make a good argument that they’re really only interested in the appearance of safety. They’ve simply concluded that the more difficult they make your flight, the safer you’ll feel. Never mind if any of the theatrics actually work.

After my last business flight (the day of the Shoe Bomber’s transatlantic aircraft attempt), I’ve actively avoided commercial air travel. This latest set of Security Theatre set dressings merely extends the range I’ll be willing to drive rather than putting up with the flight — actually, the flight preparation, rather than the flight itself.

Update: Don’t know why I thought it was the Shoe Bomber . . . it was the would-be liquid bomb conspiracy that happened while I was in transit through Atlanta.

December 29, 2009

Worst. Decade. Ever.

Filed under: Government, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 18:30

Air security gone insane

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:58

Hard to disagree with Gulliver on this one:

In the wake of Friday’s attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the people who run America’s airport security apparatus appear to have gone insane. Despite statements from several officials, including Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, that there is “no indication” of any broader plot against American airliners, some truly absurd security “precautions” are being implemented on US-bound flights worldwide.

The most ridiculous new rule prohibits passengers on US-bound international flights from leaving their seats or having anything on their laps—even a laptop or a pillow—during the final hour of flight. You’re probably thinking “Wait, what?” Indeed. The New York Times elaborates:

In effect, the restrictions mean that passengers on flights of 90 minutes or less would most likely not be able to leave their seats at all, since airlines do not allow passengers to walk around the cabin while a plane is climbing to its cruising altitude.

Gulliver looks forward to the barrage of lawsuits from the first people who are forced to use the bathroom in their airplane seats. This is the absolute worst sort of security theatre: inconvenient, absurd, and, crucially, ineffective.

December 22, 2009

PJTV visits Detroit

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:53

December 15, 2009

“B+ — it’s the new FAIL”

Filed under: Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:10

Frank J. has been having fun with his latest meme:

I started a Twitter meme yesterday and Ace really got it going where we listed other things we would rate a good, solid B+ based on Obama’s grading scale.

BTW, for those who still think Twitter is gay, in what non-gay things do you start a discussion of politics and Firefly and Chuck’s Adam Baldwin sometimes joins in? I think that means you’re gay.

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Tiger had rated his marriage so far a B+.
Charles Manson’s efforts on reforming… hmm… I’d say that’s a solid B+.
Landing of the Hindenburg is a good, solid B+. A- if it were on time.
Hitler’s relationship with the Jews: B+.
My avoiding Godwin’s Law: B+.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress