Patrick M Brennan

She’s very fetching. Unfortunately, that’s not an adjective which can be applied to the search engine she’s fronting for. Google doesn’t need a Flash preloader, either, or tell a joke even before it’ll let me search.

Have you heard about Chad Catagana, the guy who just got arrested for sending fake anthrax and death threats via the mail to a number of prominent Americans whose politics he disagreed with? Turns out that intimidation via post was only one of Chad’s many gifts.

This guy obviously had so much “talent on loan from God", he clearly needed a second career. Or possibly a third.

Not content to merely be a cranky wannabee right-wing commentator (by way of the Free Republic), he also seems to have tried his hand at being a kooky right-wing terrorist-by-mail; and apparently he’s also a bitchy wannabee right-wing sci-fi critic!

Here’s Catagana railing about the state of SF on TV:

How about creating a new sci-fi anthology with none of the puerile baggage of Rod Serling, Gene Roddenberry, Rockne O’ Bannon, etc., etc. It is time to end their reign of Left-wing innuendo, their anti-American, anti-mankind cynicism and fatalism.

(See this post for more.)

Boy, I bet he was pissed at Season Three of Battlestar Galactica! After two seasons of the Cylons standing in for The Terrorists, I’m sure he was absolutely appalled at the turn the plot took as the Cylons became the occupying power of the human colony and the humans resorted to suicide bombings. It probably flustered him so much, he got sloppy in his threat-mailings; and that’s how the Feds finally picked him up.

I bet Chad and his fellow travelers on the crypto-fascist message boards were just tickled when Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Jon Stewart received their death threats. Chad had an extra-special chuckle, of course, because he knew something his friends (probably) didn’t. Nevertheless, they were all sure that people who stand in the mildest opposition to the thing that calls itself “conservativism” deserve to die. Doesn’t that just warm your heart?

Unlike moronic asshole right-wingers like Chad Catagana, I don’t gloat when Americans receive death threats in the mail; much less would I ever send those threats. However, I do reserve the right to gloat when moronic asshole right-wingers like Chad Castanga are exposed for what they are, and when they receive a measure of justice for their crimes.

The Washington Post asked about 1,000 random Americans what year the September 11 attacks occurred in – and 30% of their respondents didn’t know. I mean, I guess I always knew Americans were generally ignorant of history. But this makes me feel like I’ve been too easy on America, because we’re not talking about, you know, what year the Gadsden Purchase occurred in. We’re talking about one of the defining moments of our own time, and 3 out of 10 of my fellow citizens can’t be bothered to remember that it happened on September 11, 2002. … or 2000. Or some year, who cares?

The web is a wonderful thing. Once upon a time, it was difficult to find rambling, incoherent, grandiose, paranoid delusion in a single narrative. It used to be that the best way to get this stuff was to be a celebrity, in which case the paranoid-delusional out there would send it to you in the mail. Nowadays, you can find a veritable smorgasbord of conspiracy on the web. This is one of the tastier samples out there:

“…The US government controlled all of my conversations since my birth with a computer program, beam weapons, and subliminal messages that went back in time to control us, so that I have been isolated most of my life from the rest of society. Government agents and secret society agents, claimed that the US military and the CIA had been targeting my person and associates with beam weapons, and that the CIA had done most of the time travel beam weapons body possession of my person back in time that changed my physical form from one form to another.”

Much, much more where that came from here.

I admit I’m a junkie for this kind of material. Aside from its sheer surface entertainment value, I’m also drawn to the people who write it, though I’m a little hard-pressed to explain what I find so fascinating about such characters. There’s mental illness here, sure, but there’s more. They’re a little sad, I think, that the world is altogether too mundane to contain their fantasies, or that they didn’t turn out to be as important as they deserve to be. Well … there but for a well-regulated prefrontal cortex (or lack of a good thought screen hat) go I.

Someday I’d like to write about one of these guys.

Was it simple intolerance? Xenophobia? Class resentment? Insecurity? Mental illness? Self-loathing? Or a combustible mix of all of these? Whatever it was, put on display on this video segment from Trading Spouses, it made for a hell of a show (in more ways than one, apparently). This poor woman from Louisiana loses it when she returns from “dark-sided” Massachusetts, and launches into a tirade about being a “prayer warrior,” about “gargoyles,” about the horrible “soltice party” [sic] she attended, about how she had to force her hosts’ children to go to a Catholic Church! I watched slack-jawed – appropriately enough, I suppose – as this woman screamed at her husband and children, humiliating herself and her family on national television. (and I thought, “those girls aren’t going to let their mother ever forget about that“) At one point, she tries to throw out all the crew members who aren’t Christians, and screams, “Get the hell out of my house – In Jesus’s name, I pray.” Brilliant.

It was great TV. I feel sorry for her, because there are no do-overs on national TV, and she’s had her bite at the apple, and she will forever be the fundamentalist crazy fat lady on the TV who doesn’t even know what a solstice is. (Hint: It has nothing to do with Satan.) However, sorry as I feel for her, it was still great TV.

If I had written her words as dialog, I would have been accused of being an anti-Christian – or anti-Southern – or anti-fat bigot, a hater of people who are not like me. If I had written her words as dialog, they would have been dismissed as totally unrealistic and over-the-top. Now I have a counter-example. Serious, steadfast, insular, raging lunatics really exist, utterly convinced of their own rightness and the rightness of their particular version of reality.

It’s sad, and I pity this poor woman and her family – not that she would care. I come from the hated state of Massachusetts, and I’m not a Christian, so I must be dark-sided. For what it’s worth, I agree with Margaret Perrin that astrology, psychics, and tarot cards are baloney; where I part company with Margaret is that I don’t think they’re evil. Also I eat less.

It’s pretty clear from her profile in New York Magazine^[1] that Isabel Kallman is an intensely annoying person, and I’m really glad I don’t know her. (Not that she’d get caught dead knowing me, but that’s a different story.)

This woman has found her own uniquely psychotic solution to the anxiety which faces almost everyone who becomes a parent: that we won’t be good enough, that we’re not up to the job, that we’ll fail as parents.

Her solution is equal parts denial, shameless shilling, amphetamine abuse, business contacts, more denial, and gobs of cash. She’s launching a TV network! She will become the Martha Stewart of parenting, the “Alpha Mom” who will show all the slobs out there how much better she is than they are. Her empire will grow “from television to radio, to broadband and wireless, and on into toys, beauty products, books, and music … The end goal is for the Alpha Mom brand to become like Oprah, … who is ‘the template for success in media today.’”

Oh, yeah. Somewhere in her to-do list, there was a baby. How does she find time to take care of her child while she’s out conquering the universe? Answer:

[T]he hottest experts… talked about the right way of parenting: …You wear him on your body so that he gets used to your voice, develops language skills more quickly, “becomes,"… says Isabel, “a smarter baby."… But she could never pull that one off. The more Isabela’s child demanded of her, the more she went out to learn. And the more she learned, the more she was told to stay close; and the more people she hired who could do that for her.

This was motherhood’s magic bullet, the most valuable lesson Isabel learned in her studies: “It takes a village.” Isabel quickly hired one. Her son was just 2 weeks old when she retained a night nurse. When he was 5 months, “I started realizing I needed to get out more,"… and she brought on a nanny. Then after about a year, when she started working, “I obviously needed more help,"… so she hired a regular babysitter as well; also often employing her father and an Alpha Mom intern.

Isabel began to see that all things were possible again, that with her village, she could pursue the extraordinary goals she had both for herself and for her child. While the village watched him, she set out to master motherhood.

Where “motherhood", I guess, means something other than “being a mother to your child.” To Isabel, it means, “getting rich(er) by exploiting other people’s feelings of inadeqacy.” As for the actual motherhood thing, well hey, that’s what servants do while you master motherhood.

Hey Isabel, here’s a hint. There’s a name for a village when the “villagers” are actually your employees: it’s called Potemkin.

footnote: I couldn’t honestly tell from the article whether the writer was fawning over Isabel or mocking her, even sometimes in the same sentence. Then again, they mocked Martha, didn’t they? And look where she is.

Thanks to my lovely wife for pointing out this article, via a little pregnant.

It’s the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing, and Google is celebrating by debuting Google Moon. This is just the thing when you need driving directions from Mare Tranquillitatis (site of the Apollo 11 landing) to the Descartes Highlands (where Apollo 16 set down). Just don’t look too closely at the moon…

My blog is currently under attack from the vermin known as comment spammers. You may have heard of these cockroaches. Striking from cleverly-hidden bases in their parents’ basements, they boldly overwhelm the defenses of unsuspecting blogs’ comment systems, turning what was once an interesting, fun and useful tool for socializing and intelligent discussion into advertising space for their useless and parasitic web sites. In this case, it’s impotence pills and hair-loss products. I mean, gosh, where’s a guy to go when he needs to pill to produce an erection, after all? Or something to prevent hair loss? These products are so difficult to get, you know? Clearly, he needs to turn to the comments posted in a very obscure, rarely updated, and nearly-unread blog!

In the time it took for me to write this post, 13 new spam comments appeared. No doubt by the time I’m done typing this sentence, another two or three will show up. Fun, huh?

I’ve had to put up some additional defenses against these worms, and I’m confident that I’m not done yet. For one thing, I will have to personally approve all new comments. For me, that means that simply maintaining this blog, and guarding it against fat assholes with no talent, no brains, and more time than they can usefully employ – oops, sorry, I got off on a rant there. Now where was I? Oh yes …

For me, it means that guarding my blog against these lowlife scum becomes yet another chore, not unlike the daily grind I already endure guarding my email from mail spammers. USENET isn’t even useful any more due to spam. It’s sad and pathetic that there are jerks who have nothing better to do than waste good tools in this way, and it’s even sadder that people who have something to contribute must spend their time fighting the abuse.

The Retail Alphabet is a fun little diversion. Twenty-six letters are presented by each separate puzzle (there are four of them at the time of this writing). They are all lifted from various trademarks and logos you see every day. Your task is to identify the company or product associated with each. The letters are presented out of their familiar context, so it’s a challenge.

It’s all a bit of harmless fun, but while you’re playing this, try to compare the number of corporate logos you can easily identify to the number of birds or leaves you can easily identify. What does that say about us?

For a related bit of fun, have a look at this bit of satire. (Satire, yes, but more true every day.)

Dice persists in posting bad code on their online ads!

Since their last ad, they’ve definitely improved, but good syntax doesn’t mean their logic has gotten any better.

The ad still says, in plain English: “If you’re salary isn’t good, go to Dice.com. If your salary is good, suck it up.”

What?

I thought “Suck it up” meant something like “endure pain bravely", or “be strong“.

Maybe somebody knows an interpretation of “suck it up” that I’m not aware of. Maybe it means “good for you!” or “way to go!", or “guess you don’t need Dice.com!”

I have a suggestion for their advertising folks:

if ((You.workFor("Dice.com") || You.haveAdClient("Dice.com"))&&(You.writeAdCopy()))
{
   You.stopTryingToWriteCode(please);
}