Random things

This guy is angrier than I am. I agree with him, though. Wal-mart sucks.
"Wal-Mart and Target, a ruthless, terrorist organization, determined to rule the world!" The bastards. I would take them out, except I don't have a highly trained, special missions force to back me up."
The best line? "Friggin' ass monkeys"

http://www.gambling-law-us.com/
Hmm, poker may not be a good idea in North Carolina.

The Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam

A whole site full of pictures of the Earth from space!

Wrestling on demand is almost here. Hopefully they will show lots of good stuff, like mid-90s Nitro cruiserweights instead of WWE crap. At least there are good alternatives out there.
Oh yeah, by the way, Dean Malenko ~!

Without Reservation
So, what do people in the military think of this?

The PowerPoint breakup.

We've got to get the Swiss Swoll Roll and Pig's Fat Ass on the market soon! England already has a 8591 calorie sandwitch!

Platinum Stages: For all your stripper pole needs.

Wait a minute, I thought there was already a They.

The Last Starfighter: The Musical!

Voters being prevented from voting. How much is real, and how much is hype?

Mechanical Pong!
Seriously, how much free time do you need to build this?

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again into bondage."

Alexander Frasier Tytler
"The decline and fall of the Athenian republic"

This is the kind of thing that could only happen in New York City or maybe Los Angeles. It helps that his family and neighbors are all in show business.

I was once in an elevator in Greensboro with Kimberlin Brown, but that's about it. Well, I have autographs of Tim Russ and Armin Shimerman and Harry Gant somewhere, but it's not the same thing.

This is the best argument against George Lucas messing with Star Wars I have ever read:
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Art also has its morality, and many of the rules of this morality are the same as, or at least analogous to, the rules of ordinary ethics. Remorse, for example, is as undesirable in relation to our bad art as it is in relation to our bad behavior. The badness should be hunted out, acknowledged and, if possible, avoided in the future. To pore over the literary shortcomings of twenty years ago, to attempt to patch a faulty work into the perfection it missed at its first execution, to spend one's middle age in trying to mend the artistic sins committed and bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth-all this is surely vain and futile. And that is why this new Brave New World is the same as the old one. Its defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book-and in the process of rewriting, as an older, other person, I should probably get rid not only of some of the faults of the story, but also of such merits as it originally possessed. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.

-Aldous Huxley, the foreword to Brave New World

This is one of the stranger conspiracy theories I have seen.

House votes to give themselves a raise.
Okay, we need to pay them well or they will be (more) corrupt, sure. However, using the inflation calculator on this page, I discovered that I make less money now than I did when I graduated college. A raise every four years does not cut it.
Maybe I should get a federal job...

A page of scripts from Red Dwarf!
This one explains my feelings about my high school reunion pretty well:
RIMMER: Look, I'm not much good at big speeches, and I know I haven't always been an easy guy to get on with. And I know that, given the choice, I probably wouldn't have chosen you as friends. But, I just want to say ... that over the years, ... I have come to regard you ... as ... people ... I met.

My class reunion is this weekend, so I thought I would put in some quotes dealing with reunions.

Leonardo Leonardo : Remember my story, Plug: I'm suing the government over some bad meat.
Plug: But sir, everyone already knows you're a billionaire industrialist with world domination plans.
Leonardo Leonardo : Who's suing the government over some bad meat.

- Clerks the cartoon

and

Arlene : [about the nametags she's made for the reunion] I had the yearbook pictures put on so everybody knows who everybody was!
Martin Q. Blank : A special torture!

Marcella : You know, when you started getting invited to your ten year high school reunion, time is catching up.
Martin Q. Blank : Are you talking about a sense of my own mortality or a fear of death?
Marcella : Well, I never really thought about it quite like that.
Martin Q. Blank : Did you go to yours?
Marcella : Yes, I did. It was just as if everyone had swelled.

Marty : They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they've all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do. What am I gonna say? "I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How've you been?"

from Grosse Pointe Blank

Two tickets to the secret society movie theater, please.

Can you practice your love?

Zipdecode

So blue eyed people drink more? What a great excuse!

Villain Hall of Fame
After watching several classic 80s movies and shows over the weekend, I decided to create a Villain Hall of Fame. This may one day be on a separate page, but I doubt it. Anyway, the inaugural class consists of Al Leong and Patrick Kilpatrick. Both men get lifetime achievement awards for being bad guys in the background of almost every action movie and TV show since the 80s.

Patrick Kilpatrick gets a special nod for his defining role as the Sandman in Death Warrant.

Ah, Al Leong. Truly a giant in the field of cinematic villainy. He has had so many roles (most of them involving him dying a few seconds after he shows up onscreen) that is it hard to choose his greatest role. I think it is a tie between "Wing Kong hatchet man" in Big Trouble in Little China and Minh, due to a great fight scene in Rapid Fire.

Congratulations to both of them, and if you haven't seen any of their movies, wow.

The top scientists on TV are Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker.

Harry Bottoms for President.

Just to get political: Zell Miller is full of crap.
From this page:
Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele also took Kerry to task for sharing views with Republicans. Steele criticized Kerry for proposing a $6 billion cut in intelligence funding "just a year after the first attack on the World Trade Center." What Steele didn't say: Three months before Kerry made his proposal, Rep. Porter Goss -- Bush's pick to be the new CIA chief -- proposed a much larger cut in intelligence funding. Neither Goss' proposal nor Kerry's passed. But as Annenberg has noted, a Republican proposal to cut $1 billion from the intelligence budget passed on a voice vote the same year.
and...

Bush initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, then changed his mind when it was clear the votes were against him. He opposed the creation of the 9/11 Commission, then supported it. He opposed a congressional investigation into the intelligence failures that led to the war in Iraq, then supported it.

The president who was praised so often this week for his "unflinching" war on terror once said he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive", then said that he didn't really care about finding him. The president who never wavers used to say that America will win the war on terror; over the weekend, he said "I don't think we can ever win it"; over the last week, he's been explaining that he didn't really mean what he said when he said it.

Here are a bunch of cool images of Hurricane Frances:
2000m resolution
1000m resolution
500m resolution (super huge)
By the way, why do these pics come from the University of Wisconsin?

This is a cool picture of the Earth at Night, just because I liked it.

Faithless Electors
Okay, granted this has never changed the outcome of an election, but still, shouldn't we have some legal guarantee that the elector votes the way they are supposed to?