atomic_fungus (atomic_fungus) wrote,
atomic_fungus
atomic_fungus

#1828: Another use for the engine crane!

Use it to lower your turkey into the deep-fryer. That's cool.

My engine hoist looks exactly like that one, too.

* * *

So Tiger Woods had a car wreck the other day, and no one seems to know WTF is going on.

If it were Joe Schlabotnik from Poughkeepsie--all else being equal--this wouldn't be on the news. Domestic strife, possibility of liquor involved, WTF. But because it's Tiger Woods--

I pretty much stopped listening to the coverage after the newsreader said "shortly after leaving his mansion" because I began to think about what that meant. Yes, when you can play at the top level in a major sport, you probably end up living in a "mansion"; but almost no one uses that word any longer unless they want to make you think the person is a skunk. The filthy rich own mansions, after all.

F it. That's all I wanted to say about this nonsense; I don't give a flying rat's ass about celebrity news.

* * *

A British detective is trying to determine if Barack Hussein Obama is eligible to be US President.

I really don't know what comment to make, here.

* * *

I'll bet you didn't know that we live in an oppressive hellhole of a country, now did you? I certainly didn't. While I understand that our freedoms are under assault I never would have suspected that we already have Secret Police listening to our conversations and arresting us for having the wrong opinions. I could not have imagined that we live in a country where your neighbor could have you hauled away by the SS for saying something uncomplimentary about Dear Leader. It simply did not occur to me that we are living under the jackboot of government tyranny...what?

Oh.

It seems America is an "oppressive hellhole" because there are people out there who do not wholeheartedly subscribe to Political Correctness, and some of them are teachers, and these teachers must be re-educated. America is an "oppressive hellhole" because there is racism, sexism, and bigotry out there.

See, here I thought a country like Cuba or China was an "oppressive hellhole" because of the way theie governments regulate things like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, etc; but I'm wrong. It's America which is an oppressive hellhole because we don't have socialized medicine!

...Jesus Christ.

* * *

ZOMGWTFBBQ, we might be heading for a shortage of uranium!

...but only conventional reactors need uranium. There are plenty of other reactor designs out there which use other power metals (thorium being the most commonly touted alternative) and that assumes you don't actively start trying to breed fissile material.

And what about the tons of spent fuel sitting in storage? For fuck's sake, how many goddamned times do I have to say

WE CAN RECYCLE OUR SPENT FUEL

anyway?

Uranium is not like coal, where you mine it, use it, and it's gone; it takes a handful of isotopes per load to "poison" a fuel core, and if you simply remove those isotopes the uranium fuel can be put back into the reactor and re-used, over and over and over again, with relatively little additional uranium required to replenish the total mass at each cycle.

We recycle just about goddamned everything else that comes out of the ground--iron, aluminum, copper, zinc, lead, gold, platinum, name it!--so why in the fricking hell do we need to avoid recycling fissile material at all costs? It makes no goddamned economic sense!

*sigh*

* * *

Is the recent climate email scandal the final nail in the coffin of "cap and tax"? I sure hope so.

* * *

Sometimes, people wise up: "... [L]eftists are Mr. and Ms. Misogyny. Neither the males nor the females care a whit about women."

The very next sentence: "Women are continually sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. If under radical Islam women are enshrouded and stoned and beheaded, so be it."

I have said before that liberals really don't care about womens' rights, as long as the women in question aren't rich American liberals. If the women in question are poor muslim women, their "equal rights" include the "right" to wear the hijab as required by islamic law. (Also to be executed for being raped, etc.)
My other epiphanies: those ponytailed guys were marching for abortion rights not because they cherished women's reproductive freedom, but to keep women available for free and easy sex.

And the eagerness for women to make good money? If women work hard, leftist men don't have to.
I am going out on a limb here to say that many of the men who protest for abortion do so because they sincerely believe in "a woman's right to choose"...but the writer makes an excellent point about "free and easy sex". If you think abortion has nothing to do with the availability of consequence-free sex, you have not been listening very well to the people who promote abortion.

Birth control of any kind is primarily about recreational sex. While there is nothing wrong with that, it must be said that abortion as birth control of last resort--which is what nearly all abortions are--is supposed to be the exception. At least, that's what we're frequently told by the abortion lobby, that abortion-on-demand is supposed to help women stay healthy, which is why so many laws and advocacy pamphlets talk about "the health of the mother". But in fact, "unwanted pregnancy" is behind nearly all of them.

I'd wager that plenty of men who protest for abortion are there in fact because they don't want to get roped into supporting a kid.

* * *

So my brother and his family came down yesterday with leftovers, and I slept through their visit. I think the old sinusitis is flaring up again, because I've slept a lot over the past few days.

Oh well.

Yesterday I caught 300 and was amused by it--it was entertaining--but I had to note how Spartan society had been sanitized for the purposes of this story.

In the movie, Leonidas referred to Athens as "that bunch of boy-lovers" but Spartan society had a lot of homosexuality in it as well. Their military culture--which was drilled into the men from a young age as the story correctly pointed out--was thick with homosexuality, in part because (it was thought) a soldier will fight harder with his lover at his side. (Kind of the opposite of "don't ask, don't tell".)

But a movie made for 21st century America won't sell if all the main characters are fudgepackers, no matter how awesome they are otherwise--how well did Troy end up doing?--and so the story rather neatly excised that little historical fact.

(Speaking of recreational sex, one reason homosexuality was so common in Greece was the lack of contraception. Having a gay lover meant needing fewer trysts with your wife, which meant fewer kids.)

The homosexuality doesn't detract from the legendary battle of Thermopylae; it was a fact of life in ancient Sparta and--in that culture--perfectly normal. ("Normal" meaning it was widespread, not confined to just 5% of the population as it is today.) But it doesn't make for a commercially viable movie, so it had to go.

* * *

Having seen Pitch Black last summer, when I saw that Chronicles of Riddick was going to be on, I had intended to watch it. But I faded out, so I ended up taping it, and I'll watch it later.

* * *

Showtime and DirecTV have again given us three free months of all the Showtime channels; and again I'm seeing through their ploy. The idea is to get people to add Showtime to their DirecTV subscription; that way both Showtime and DirecTV make more money. It's advertisement.

That being the case, couldn't they at least have something on which is worth watching?

They're not showing In the Name of the King but they're showing other shit movies, going all the way back to the early 1980s for some of them. WTF? Is this supposed to make me think "ZOMGWTFBBQ I GOTTA GET SHOWTIME NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW"? Because it doesn't; it makes me think, "Wow, I am not missing a goddamned thing" and "Thank God I'm not paying for this shit."

Dexter: not interested. Californication: not interested. The movies they're running? See above. Anything else?

No.

As I recall from last year, they did run a couple of worthwhile movies in January, just before the free trial expired, but those movies were run at godawful times. (Flyboys was the one movie I made an effort to see.) Otherwise they ran a ton of shit.

This year their lineup includes softcore porn. For yucks I tuned into one, watched about ten minutes, and then turned the TV back off: those movies were aimed at people 20 years younger than I, and the acting was scarcely better than what you see in a real pr0n flick. (The writing certainly was not.) It wasn't entertaining even as a "bad" movie, where you can make fun of the movie's badness. It was just bad.

So I doubt that Showtime's ploy will work this year any better than it did last year. Oh well.
Subscribe

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

    When you submit the form an invisible reCAPTCHA check will be performed.
    You must follow the Privacy Policy and Google Terms of use.
  • 0 comments