No Maps for These Territories

One major reason I can think of for not supporting Hillary Clinton for the nomination (well, one of very, very many), is that I don’t like the idea of our country being run by dynasties.

I mean, jesus, this country has been run by the Bush/Clinton dynasty for 20 goddamn years now. I don’t want to make it an even quarter of a century.

There’s a danger here, in that we need to cycle in new people, with new ideas, and not get used to a certain name being the person you have to go to for leaders. We don’t need American Royal Families. It’s time to break the chain and get some new blood in there, and shake this country up a bit, because I don’t like where we’ve been going.

20 years! I still can’t believe that. An entire generation of Americans has never known a leader who wasn’t a Bush or Clinton.

You know, in all the discussions I’ve seen of conspiracy in the moon landing, I’d never heard of the mirror that we left there. It pretty much destroys all the conspiracies, yet it’s not talked about much. Neil and Buzz left a mirror there, pointed back at earth, in 1969.

I’ve been watching a documentary about gravity here, and it turns out that astronomers are able to bounce a laser off the mirror that we left there, and use it to measure quite accurately the distance between the earth and the moon.

Now, if you hit the surface with a laser, the photons don’t make it back. It takes an incredibly accurate telescope and a lot of patience to hit that little mirror. If there wasn’t a mirror there, the experiment wouldn’t work.

What’s awesome about this is that it’s repeatable! You can go to an observatory with a telescope mounted laser, just like this documenter did, and test the theory. Boom, there’s the mirror, we landed on the moon. Shut the hell up, wackos.

You used to be able to walk into a store and talk to the owner.

Next, you called a help line, and talked to some kid reading a 3 ring binder.

That was too expensive, so we hired Indians who don’t understand your problems to help you with your problems.

Following that, we got lots of websites where you can only fill out a web form, and someone will help you, eventually.

Google has taken the next step, and told people to fuck off completely.

I’ve got a problem with Noobtoob’s streaming feed on Youtube. It’s all documented right here in a forum post.

Why is it in a forum post, where I’m begging for help, and no one is listening? Because Google has decided that they won’t help you at all with anything that breaks. They set up a forum, so you can beg for help from other people who are there to beg for help. Needless to say, it doesn’t work very well.

If you go to their help pages, you can click through FAQs, but there’s NO contact information anywhere. There is literally no way to get help from anyone. You can’t even fill out a form begging someone to help. Once, I found a page where there was a text field, and I begged that they would help me with my Youtube/Adsense problem.

I got no response, so I went back to use the text box again… and they had REMOVED it, I shit you not. There was one place on the entire site where you could try to contact a person, and it was a mistake that they fixed.

So, this is the future. Web 2.0, community-generated help forums, with thousands of people screaming into the night and no one listening. I guess if enough people complain on forums or blogs, they’ll read about the problem in a website, and then decide it’s big enough to fix. I never thought I’d miss Indian call centers.

It’s mind bogglingly unfriendly and stupid, but I guess it’s cheaper than helping people. Because, you know, Google is short on money.

I want to propose a Constitutional amendment saying that we can’t have a president who doesn’t believe in evolution.

None of this wishy washy “It’s just a theory!” nonsense that shows that you don’t have two fucking brain cells in your head. Read any five pages of a Richard Dawkins book, and if you still don’t understand that the mountains and mountains of scientific evidence show exactly what is happening, you are INELIGIBLE.

It’s fucking 2008, people. I don’t mind if you’re religious, a lot of people are, and that’s cool. None of us know what caused the big bang. But we sure as shit know what happened after it. Get on board.

All of my friends have been posting this thing, and I did it myself out of curiousity, because everyone else that posts it has either all blue on the top or all red on the top (mostly blue, of course).

However, being a libertarian, my beliefs are a mixed bag from both parties. A couple strange things to note is that I don’t agree with anyone on more than 68% of issues, and also, none of my top matches has a chance in hell of even making it through the primaries.

I figured that Ron Paul would be my top hit, actually. I was surprised he was farther down, but that’s probably because of my stance on things like abortion and gay marriage. I don’t know a damn thing about Bill Richardson, but apparently he’s the most libertarian of the bunch. For the number of things that I answered that I’d do, like cut budgets, and privatize social security, I can’t fathom why a Democrat ended up at the top. I guess the truth is that neo-cons have zero in common with me, and Democrats have a little bit.

No matter which way it goes, I’m gonna be sad with whoever wins the election this year. Notice that ALL of the major front runners are within 4% of each other on my chart. Looks like it won’t matter much to me which side wins.

68% Bill Richardson
63% Mike Gravel
63% Ron Paul
63% Chris Dodd
61% Rudy Giuliani
59% John McCain
59% Barack Obama
58% Dennis Kucinich
57% Hillary Clinton
56% Mike Huckabee
56% John Edwards
55% Mitt Romney
48% Joe Biden
46% Tom Tancredo
46% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

I’ve been reading passiveaggressivenotes.com for the last 30 minutes, and it’s gotta be the most fascinating thing I’ve seen all week. People are absolutely nuts. And reading the notes that they leave for each other is a window right into the craziest illiterate parts of their souls. From screaming at people who have sex on creaky beds to labeling someone the “Mad Bomber” for crapping all over the stalls at work, this is a peek into some weird shit.

The most passive aggressive thing I’ve seen in a personal situation is a roommate who was unable to clean up other people’s stuff going out and buying his own knife and labeling it, so no one could yell at him for not cleaning it, but that was NOTHING compared to this madness. Check it out.

Rusty and I headed off with all his belongings to Maryland:

It got cold very fast:

But we made it.

The stop in through Illinois was awesome, it’s always great to hang out with the clan.

Adrienne’s Redskins hat was a big hit:

So was Guitar Hero:

For New Year’s Eve, I drove up to Harrisburg to hang out with Kevin, and we met Matt Pinfield from MTV fame:

And then we drank a lot and watched his friends set a dresser on fire, and toss it off a roof.

Like I said, we drank a lot.

Today I swung by to see Alison and Lee and their baby, and their kickass house.

That’s it so far ,tomorrow Rusty and I are gonna go check out DC.

As any of you know who have come over to our house in the last year, we’ve got a couple neighborhood cats that have adopted us, including a cute little old lady named Chairman Meow, who has been part of our house for about a year, and could be found every night on either my lap or Adrienne’s, completely content.

She also absolutely loved heat, she’d go and sit and watch the fire for hours, or sit on the heating grate. Between heat and people, her world was pure joy. She was pretty much the friendliest cat I’ve ever seen. She loved to come up and give people a little nudge with her head until they petted her. Unlike every other cat in the world, she loved to be picked up, never ran away, never got angry, never scratched. She was pure affection.

Last night, she showed up with a huge lump on her back, which turned out to be a herniated bladder - the vet says she either got hit by a car or fell from something too high. Since she was 15 years old, the surgery would have been too much for her, so our neighbors (who she belonged to), put her down.

What stuns me is how upset I am. Chairman quietly became part of my family, and she was so happy and innocent, and to have her gone forever from a freak accident, when I didn’t even get to say goodbye, is heartbreaking. It’s almost harder for me to see animals hurt than people because they don’t know why they’re being put down, or why they’re in pain.

I think my own fear and hatred of mortality makes me less able to deal with this sort of stuff than the rest of you normal people, I don’t think it’s okay that anyone has to go. I can’t wrap my head around how it’s okay that we never get to see someone again when they’re gone, forever. Whether it’s a cat or a person, it’s just as permanent, and just as wrong.

Sorry to see you go, Chairman. I find myself missing you every time I sit on the couch. Life is really unfair sometimes.

Bye, kiddo.

Does anyone have any good suggestions for podcasts? I’m going to drive from Santa Clara to Tucson, and then from Tucson to Maryland. So we’re talking about five straight days in a car. Good podcasts would be nice.

I’ve been listening to The Future and You, Hardcore History, the Singularity Podcast, and Astronomy Cast… I’ve downloaded JapanesePod101, and some others. But what do you guys listen to? Better yet, what are some good serialized podcasts of books or old radio shows? Any suggestions?

Hey East Coast peeps-

I’m heading out to the East Coast with Rusty, to help him move to Maryland for good. We’re leaving Tucson right after Christmas, and we’ll be arriving in Silver Spring around the 30th.

I’m thinking about hanging around town for a few days, maybe till the 4th or so, going down to DC, seeing the sights, riding the metro, eating east coast food, seeing old friends, that sort of thing.

If you’re in that area, and you want to get dinner or lunch, or show me something cool, or get a beer, drop me an email or comment on this post. I’d love to see people, it feels like I hardly ever come out east anymore. I’ll have a rental car, so I don’t need to be hauled around, either.

Let me know!