Quartz City

Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?

Oh yeah… the first “which xxx are you” test that I actually agree with 100%

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

I suppose at some sort of meta-level toys about hazardous material spills might not be appropriate for little kids, but five/six year old me would have loved this set from Playmobil

Now all I need is a Fisher Price exterminator set with the abandoned rat-infested subway line.

World66 lets you make a nice map of countries you’ve been to. I’ve been to:

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

There’s also a map generator for US states, but my map is pretty easy:

create your own visited states map
or write about it on the open travel guide

Happy birthday Macintosh - you are now no longer a teenager! Thanks for providing me with a job and career for the past 16 years.

I’m pretty much a clueless cheesehead when it comes to identifying the differences between the microgenres of electronic music. This guide helps out a lot.

I have to link to this press release from Long John Silver’s that Teresa Nielsen Hayden pointed out because it’s total CKB-bait that combines two things I love: Mars and weird sea creatures. Long John Silver’s announced that it will give America free Giant Shrimp if NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover project finds conclusive evidence of an ocean on Mars by February 29, 2004.

The fine print on the offer is priceless:

An ocean body of water shall be defined as a single body of water the surface area of which equals or exceeds 5,000,000 km2

…

Odds of a successful redemption of this offer are not calculable by traditional means.

As Teresa notes, the Long John Silver’s sounds more excited about space exploration than Bush II did in his space policy speech that outlined NASA’s mission to the Moon and Mars. As I suspected, the new space policy is primarily just government-funded R&D for all the Usual Corporate Suspects with little leftover for science not-directly related to the manned space goals. The announced plan gives NASA a little boost in cash, but I see little in it that convinces me that this was going to be a serious long-term plan.

Then there’s paragraphs like this which just leave a bad taste in my mouth (from the Washington Post)

As an example of private industry’s hunger for a Mars mission, Steve Streich, a veteran Halliburton scientific adviser, was among the authors of an article in Oil & Gas Journal in 2000 titled “Drilling Technology for Mars Research Useful for Oil, Gas Industries.” The article called a Mars exploration program “an unprecedented opportunity for both investigating the possibility of life on Mars and for improving our abilities to support oil and gas demands on Earth,” because technology developed for the mission could be used on this planet.

At least during Apollo, the rhetoric wasn’t so crass. I know I know, back then the corporate buzzards were all gathered about for some cash handouts as they are now, but at least you had a deep sense that everyone was pulling together for the higher purpose of sending someone to the Moon.

Fuck. I suppose it’s time to uncross my fingers for any potential funding for Pluto Express

Two news items in the news today reminded me of this quote from Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.

First up is from today’s Boston Globe

WASHINGTON — Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight — and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers — including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.

Ummm, isn’t this basically Watergate Redux?

Second, on the way in to work this morning I was listening to Democracy Now and I had no idea that Kerry was also a member of Yale secret society Skull And Bones. If he gets the nomination, this would make the first time in US history that the presidential election is between two Bonesmen.

Skull And Bones’ membership roster reads like a who’s who of the American investment banking and intelligence community. For some background info, check out this book and this site.

Apocalypse Pooh was an early mash-up mix of Winnie The Pooh cartoons with dialog from Apocalypse Now. Piglet becomes fried journalist Dennis Hopper. Gopher is Robert Duvall. And the “fucking tiger” is, well, you know…

I was wondering if Apocalypse Pooh was available somewhere and behold - it’s on iFilm.

Sometimes a picture (or in this case a screengrab) is worth a little more than a thousand words.