Today over on GoComics.com they've got a Bloom County strip from the 1980s, and it mentions the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.
The Bhagwan was the "gen-u-wine Indian guru" equivalent of a televangelist, and had amassed a sizable fortune and a collection of Rolls-Royces before it all came tumbling down in 1985. Then Saturday Night Live did a brief sketch featuring Randy Quaid as a Texan used car dealer trying to sell the Bhagwan's collection of cars and that was the last mainstream America ever heard of the guy.
* * *
"Public restroom"="public place" so it's okay to take pictures? This woman is a traffic court judge. Hopefully not for long.
* * *
The models prove global warming, but they're not sensitive enough. Yeah, I've given up trying to understand the mentan gymnastics of the warmista crowd as reality stubbornly refuses to follow their models.
I really like the bit in the middle somewhere, about how a huge injection of methane (from clathrates) led to a massive increase in "atmospheric carbon". Methane is not CO2. It contains carbon--each molecule contains one atom of it--but it's not CO2. It's more accurate to say that such an event would end with a large increase in "atmospheric hydrogen", for crying out loud, since each molecule of methane has four hydrogen atoms in it.
And--of course!--throughout history, the sun's output has always remained perfectly constant with no variation whatsoever.
* * *
Okay, American left! Obama's taking prisoners-of-kinetic-action and interrogating them aboard naval vessels, in direct violation of the Geneva convention. You hated George Bush for this kind of thing. Remember? So let's see the signs and the protests ramp up now, unless you want people like me to (continue to) dismiss you all as a bunch of lying hypocrites!
* * *
GOP is getting ready to cave to the Democrats on the debt ceiling. Of course.
* * *
"No wings, no rotors, no jets!"
...the rotating drums that form the "turbines" are, in fact, rotors. Interesting idea, though.
* * *
I agree. No-knock raids are a very, very bad thing.
* * *
WORM's got a good one here. It's about minorities presenting ID to vote. Actually, it's abouut Bill Clinton (and Democrats in general) thinking minorities can't handle doing same.
* * *
Well, the desktop was off-line for most of yesterday while I ran antivirus (AV) scans. Avast! found five infections during the regular scan, and it found more trouble with a boot scan. Afterwards, I uninstalled Firefox and installed version 5, and uninstalled some other software I no longer use anyway.
I'm hoping that'll do for all the malware, for a while. *sigh*
...but I'm starting to wonder about this system. It's like there's something wrong with the way AV stuff works on it; I get a lot of malware infections and I don't know why. Last night I read about half the extant chapters of Family Compo on MangaReader.net from the laptop without any trouble whatsoever, and even after I was ready to shut the thing down a quick check of the registry and such showed that the junkola that's been popping up here was nowhere to be found.
In other words, my desktop--despite all my efforts to the contrary--is wide freakin' open, and I don't know why.
So I'm still working on trying to hack around the issue--though things look clean now--and more and more I'm wondering if I shouldn't just back up the C: drive, scrub it down to bare metal, and install Win 7....
* * *
The new version of Firefox is just different enough to be maddening. For example, when I right-click on a link in order to open it in a new tab, my hand automatically moves down two spaces, because with the old version there was something above "open in new tab". Now, however, "open in new tab" is on top. *sigh*
The rest of the changes aren't too hard to get used to, but that one--man.
* * *
Eh? "What's Family Compo?"
It's another manga series I found over at MangaReader. This one--hoo boy.
The story is about Yanagiba, a freshman in college, who ends up going to live with an aunt and uncle he never knew he had. He never knew about them because his mother's family had severed all ties to her brother...because he's a transvestite. But he's been recently orphaned and has nowhere else to go, so he leaps at the chance to actually live with family rather than struggle to support himself and attend college. Besides, his mother died when he was young and his father was always at work, so he never had a normal family life.
This guy meets someone who he thinks is an aunt he never knew; and after moving in with them he learns that his "aunt" is a dude and his "uncle" is a woman. He makes them wear appropriate clothing to his entrance ceremony at college, and everyone thinks that the big one is a guy dressed up like a woman (when it's a woman dressed as a woman!) and the small one is a man dressed up as a woman (when it's a man dressed as a man) and there's a big fuss about it.
He never repeats that mistake; and from then on, the manly woman is "uncle Sora" and the girly man is "aunt Yurika".
And his cousin Shion? He has no idea what Shion is. Shion appears female (and she has breasts and takes her "father" to task for using her tampons) but the reader is given no special insight into what sex Shion actually is; we know what Yanagiba knows. (Personally, I think Shion's actually a girl; at the beginning of the series she's too young for breast implants. IMHO--don't quote me.)
"Uncle Sora" is a famous manga artist, and has four assistants, all of whom are transvestites--men dressed as women--and they all work up on the second floor of the house. (One of them is a real transsexual; he returns from the US somewhere in the middle of the extant story having had his male equipment surgically converted into female equipment.)
Surprisingly, it's a good story; I wouldn't have read the 73 extant chapters if it wasn't. Yanagiba himself has approximately normal reactions to all this insanity; he's a straight male. (Though he ends up being forced to cross-dress all the time, for various reasons, and of course he looks so good as a girl that he has a fan club.)
Still--man, WTF.
Continuing the theme of sexual deviancy, then, I ended up watching the Hen Zemi OAD last night. I'd intended to watch some other fansubs but by then the interminable AV scans had finally finished and I was able to go to bed.
The next time I have a nightmare, I bet the professor character from that series is in it. It's not often a mere drawing can inspire the kind of terror that guy engenders. Holy shit.
...but it was pretty funny and had some "eew!" moments in it that were just funny enough to excuse them, so I expect I'll watch the TV series and laugh a lot.
* * *
Complete lack of motivation: all I feel like doing is going back to bed. I don't know if it's the weather or what.
I could have slept better. I was in bed by 2:30, but a dry cough woke me at 6 and I was up just long enough to get a drink. The phone woke me up twice (must remember to put it on "do not disturb") and so I ended up getting a few hours of broken sleep. Argh etc.
I'm not kidding: I'm tired enough that I feel like I could fall asleep right here.
But today is Thursday, and it's Tanabata. I should write wishes on strips of paper and hang them on my bamboo plant. Maybe in 16 years or so they'll come true.