Category: Wierdness Du Jour

Bandwagon Jumpers and Gay Marriage

We’ve all done it. We’ve all been guilty of piggybacking our own beliefs onto the beliefs of others in order to get them recognized, but to sit there and tell supporters of Gay Marriage that the ban on it in California also speaks volumes about racism and hatred is not fair. I believe that it takes power away from those couples who are desperately trying to seek some societal recognition for the lives they lead. I see nothing wrong with those couples receiving recognition from the law. I see everything wrong with activists for other organizations who have nothing to do with gay marriage on your average day of the week, showing up to make a fuss because it gets their cause back in the newspapers. Grow up.

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Myspace Mom Testifies.

I wasn’t initially sure that this case would come to court, so this news comes as a bit of a surprise. I am sure I blogged about Megan Meier, the 13 year old who committed suicide because the mother of one of her school friends pretended to be a 16 year old boy on MySpace, who ultimately rejected the girl, who had been previously diagnosed with clinical depression. The alleged offending mother was allegedly aware of the diagnosis at the time that this incident occurred.

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Aftermath

Just for my readers who don’t know, I’m a white chick. I come from a long line of white people, and my long line of white people have mostly been poor farmers. They fought on both sides of the civil war. They fought in the American Revolution. They fought in Vietnam and in every war that America has engaged in since the dawn of this nation. My family has always been intensely proud of that heritage. My cousin has served in Iraq and we are all very proud of him for choosing the military life as an homage to my grandfather, who was an MP during World War II.

This is a rather lengthy bit of background to get to my point, but it is important because the point I have to make is about the changing of minds and attitudes between the generations. Admittedly, I did not vote for Obama, but I didn’t vote for him out of self-preservation reasons, more than anything else. Obama intends to make some changes that will hurt my family financially, not because I dislike the man, or think that he won’t necessarily make a good president. My grandfather, however, would have voted for his first Republican, ever.. this year and his reasons would have been much less personally motivated.

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AVG Having Issues with XP?

These sorts of things are disconcerting, especially since AVG is in one of my top free software picks for windows based machines. If this sort of behavior keeps up, I might have to start shuttling folks toward Anti-Vir. Which is annoying because it is ad-supported, but I see the capitalistic advantage in ad-supported utilities and am willing to do my bit for king and capitalism if AVG manages to work an epic fail.

Of course, since I don’t use XP currently, it will be sort of hard for them to get a failing grade from me, but there are XP machines in the house so we’ll have to see how far this goes.

Barack Obama to Suffer from Internet Withdrawal.

This is something that had never occurred to me. The president of the United States cannot communicate via email. I’m sure that I knew that somewhere deep down, but I was sure exceptions were made for family. I was positive that it was always possible for George Bush to email pictures of his wife and pets to his parents as they enjoy their retirement, but the New York Times pointed out that Barack Obama is expecting to be told by the secret service to give up his blackberry.

People that know me in real life know that it is nearly impossible to separate me from my iPhone. I am practically attached to the thing, and when I broke my first gen iPhone earlier this week I was so upset that I wrote a scathing blog post about the 3g that I had replaced the phone with. Of course… now I don’t want to give the 3g up because it’s my NEW iPhone and is my NEW appendage… and it’s shiny too.

I am not sure that I would ever be able to bring myself to hand it over. Not even if I had been elected ruler of the free world.

President-elect Obama, I already admire you for being willing to hand over your crackberry to the secret service. If you manage to bring yourself to do it without saying, “Screw you! I’m not taking this tin pot job!” you, Sir… are a far better person than I.

Two Largest Judgments in RIAA Cases were Against the RIAA.

Okay… this is just great. I know I’ve been quiet other than sharing news about my car, and my escapades with my car, but really… this had to be shared.

107,951$ in judgment against the RIAA in Atlantic v. Anderson. It’s about friggin’ time!

And note that the MSM is completely ignoring this news! There is no word of this on the front page of Google at all.

Another Pokemon for the Pokedex.

I’m all for good political humor… but this image that my son showed me earlier today, while cheesy, made my whole day. I’m posting it in an external link because I don’t believe in hotlinking and I’ve been too lazy to fix the flickr plug-in on my blog.

Why Left Coast Pizza Sucks.

Amen to this guy, who explains the science behind why it is that pizza on the west coast cannot ever approach the goodness that is true New York pizza. Apparently the secret is in 90 year old brick ovens, and the tap water. Amazing, no?

I’ve always wondered about that pizza thing. I mean, I like pizza enough to eat it, regardless of its origins, but there still is very little that competes with slices of New York style pies. Personally, I preferred my uncle’s rendition of pizza to everything else. My uncle is Sicilian and learned to make this wicked amazing pizza, which he then passed down to my father, who also makes this wicked amazing pizza, but it’s not quite as good as my uncle’s for some reason. Perhaps this exercise in scientific explanation makes sense, and can help humanity truly understand what goes in to making the best pizza in the world.

Whacko Cults

And the final digg find of the day is this really neat photo essay that describes the cults that went whacko.

It’s particularly topical because of all the news stories that have been surrounding the FLDS ranch in Texas, and all of the comparisons that I have seen made to this facility and Waco, with the most interesting quotes being from the Texas officials who desperately wish to avoid a repeat of the Waco tragedy. Of course, I do not mean to imply that those living on the FLDS ranch are cult members and personally, as far as that whole scene goes, I just want them to get through the evaluations of those children and let those kids go home. I am sure that maybe 5% of the families on that ranch have not been as responsible toward their children as they should have been, but the other 95% deserve to return to their loving homes. But the whole situation does bring Waco back to my mind, and thankfully, this time no children have died… at least, not so far.

I’m totally gonna have to buy this book.

Today I was digging through digg. This rarely turns up anything useful, but there is the occasional link to an article on kotaku that doesn’t completely suck. Of course, the primary reason why this article doesn’t completely suck is because it’s not an article at all, it’s a video clip. The video clip isn’t even produced by kotaku, but was, in fact, aired on G4. News that comes from G4 is often interesting because it paints a picture on the video gaming industry and market that you do not see in the mainstream media. This clip is precisely one of these.

In this clip, Adam Sessler of XPlay interviews the authors of this book called “Grand Theft Childhood” in which they posit the theory that children who do not play video games are at a greater risk of being socially ostracized and of becoming more physically violent than their gamer peers.

Food for thought.

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