Nerf-Coated World

March 31, 2005

Sad day

Terri Schiavo died.

The Pope's been read his last rites.

And Mitch Hedberg was found dead in a New Jersey hotel room.

Mitch Hedberg was one of my favorite comedians, and I'm now kicking myself for not going to see his show when he came through Austin the last time. His official website is down for the moment (probably due to the mass amount of traffic), but here's a great site paying tribute to the guy.

Posted by Matt at 4:08 PM

March 30, 2005

Hilarious! And ballsy!

What would you do if a musical burst out while you were sitting in class?

I wish I'd had friends in college who would do this kind of thing.

Posted by Matt at 9:56 PM

Moment of frustration

Last year, I probably spent the better part of a day travelling to all the major stores here in Austin, looking for a pair of jeans. Just one pair, I'd have been satisfied with. One pair, with a 32-inch waist and a 36-inch inseam, in a decent color and in a decent style. That meant no tapered-leg or baggy nonsense. I wanted boot-cut. And not in bright blue.

Well the bright blue, turns out, wasn't even a consideration, because it appears, apparently, that my body type -- thin waist, long legs -- is not prevalent enough for even the huge, mass-marketed jeans manufacturers to bother with. Oh, I could find plenty of 36-inch waists. But 36-inch length? Only with the accompanying, aforementioned waists that are four inches too big.

This is why I hate shopping.

So I turned to this Internet thing I keep hearing about on the radio. I went to Levi's.com. Turns out they don't sell direct. So I surfed to each of the eight or nine stores they recommended. Anything in a length longer than 34? Nada. Thanks, guys, appreciate it.

Then I turned to the amazing powers of Google. Or, rather, Froogle. Aha! Success. I order two pairs of the 567 Low Rise Boot Cut -- one in a medium blue, one in a darker blue. And I wait. And I wait. And I get a call from the people saying that one of my pairs is backordered; would I like to wait, or should I just be content with the lighter blue pair? I sigh, knowing what this means: if I can only scrounge up ONE pair of jeans in my size, in a style and color that are moderately fashionable, then I'll be wearing this single pair of jeans until they wear out.

Is it too much to ask to have two pairs of jeans that fit, and that I would want to wear? Some variety?

Oy.

The situation is now much worse. The online source where I found that one pair of jeans now no longer carries them in my size. I'm pissed. Because you'd think that somewhere in this great economy, there would be some store that would carry something that falls within the same reasonable expectations that 99.99% of the population naturally has. I'm on the cusp between off-the-rack and custom-made. I'm not tall enough or rich enough or patient enough to justify getting my clothes custom-tailored. I'm in the freaking no-man's-land of clothes-buying:

• taller than the standard deviation cutoff that most clothing manufacturers employ to manage their cost/benefit return,


• far more in shape than the average tall guy, who, based on the availability of clothes featuring a 38-inch, 40-inch, or greater waistline, seems to be quite a bit big as well as tall,


• and I actually care about style.

Or, I probably just have a bad attitude.

Do you find something comical about my appearance when I'm driving my automobile?

Update: It could be much, much worse. I could be the world's smallest man.

Update 2 (4/1/05): Aha! I stumbled across a potential answer while running across this humor site. I will call the number... and report back my results.

Posted by Matt at 11:58 AM

Casuistry

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate:

I used to have horrible and exhausting arguments with supposedly "pro-choice" militants who only reluctantly conceded that the fetus was alive but who then demanded to know if this truly was a human life. I know casuistry when I see it, and I would respond by asking what other kind of life it could conceivably be.

1. a resolving of specific cases of conscience, duty, or conduct through interpretation of ethical principles or religious doctrine
2. specious argument: RATIONALIZATION

Thanks, Christopher Hitchens. You raise the bar beyond common rhetoric and enrich my mind in the process.

Posted by Matt at 9:47 AM

March 28, 2005

More red state redneck antics

An angry mom calls 911 because Burger King won't make her burger her way.

Guess you don't have to live in a red state to act like a regular on COPS.

Posted by Matt at 9:27 PM

Get off my back, please

Is there any source of income, no matter how small, that the IRS won't try to get at?

Posted by Matt at 8:32 AM

March 25, 2005

Cats

Posted by Matt at 6:24 PM

Found poetry

it isn't as though i am looking
for my missing piece to complete me,

but like i am missing
that nice roll-y companion that can go out with me
and discover the world and get into trouble
and tumble naked-wise into a field of dandelions
and laugh till my innards turn outwards,

and i think that there are soulmates
and i don't know what i am more afraid of--
that i am so picky that i will never find mine
  because i dismiss him automatically,
or that i have found mine and i let him go
  because of something stupid and small.

Posted by Matt at 2:13 PM

March 24, 2005

What's your seduction style?

It's a quiz. It's short.

Here's what I got:

The Natural You don't really try to seduce people... it just seems to happen. Fun loving and free spirited, you bring out the inner child in people. You are spontaneous, sincere, and unpretentious - a hard combo to find! People drop their guard around you, and find themselves falling fast.

H/T: Ace.

Posted by Matt at 11:28 AM

March 23, 2005

Success

To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Posted by Matt at 11:28 PM

Crickets

The lack of updates lately is due to my energies being expended on real-life projects at the moment. For one thing, I got a new camera, and I've been shooting the hell out of stuff lately, working on my photography skills. Any particular reason why I'm doing this? Just because I've always wanted to learn photography.

I'll post some pics as soon as I have some good ones to show ye.

Posted by Matt at 12:51 AM

March 15, 2005

Revise your maps

Death Valley now has a lake.

The wettest year on record here has transformed this forbidding wilderness of scruffy mountains and buckled earth into a vividly unfamiliar world of wildflowers and reflecting pools, triggering ecological cycles not seen before on so large a scale. ...

Another surprise: Badwater, usually the site of a salty pond nearly encircled by massive gray cliffs, features a lake 5 miles wide — and kayakers and wind surfers gliding over its whitecaps. ...

The dazzling panoramas are drawing huge crowds of tourists, including first lady Laura Bush recently, and some scientists, eager to take in the scenery before the millions of desert flowers die in the harsh summer sun.

"It's our best bloom in history, and the flowers are getting better by the day," said park naturalist Charlie Callagan, who accompanied Bush on several hikes. "I'm telling folks, 'Hey, you may not see it this good again in your lifetime.'"

Non-news-related Matt memory: I drove through Death Valley on I-10, on my way to L.A. in the middle of a July day in 2001. It was hot. Really hot. My Volvo's thermometer said it was upwards of 115 degrees, but the hot air convecting off the road made it feel a lot hotter than that. Whereas along normal highways, you might see a sign saying "Watch for falling rock" or "Don't pick up hitchhikers," in Death Valley, there are signs telling you to turn your A/C off and to roll your windows down so your engine doesn't overheat.

And now there's a lake.

Some pics: Here, here, here, here.

An assortment here.

Posted by Matt at 10:09 AM

March 14, 2005

Take that, biatches

"Not so fast, FREEDOM!" cry the supporters of Hezbollah and Syria. "We got 500,000 people to come out in favor of the Ba'athists! Where's your democracy now?"

To which the democrats reply: "All your Lebanon are belong to us."

Posted by Matt at 9:41 AM

March 11, 2005

Courage

Wow.

With all the positive news about the potential for reform in the Arab world, it's truly discouraging to see stuff like this:

The Arab street erupts.
Lance had to get right in the faces of the demonstrators to take the
photo, which takes a lot of courage when you're a member of the U.S.
military. The kind of courage military guys have but members of the
U.S. news media often lack when it comes to this kind of photo from the
middle of a war zone.

Posted by Matt at 1:11 PM

March 10, 2005

Hypocrisy? Nah.

The AARP claims that privatization is a bad thing.

Call it what you want-"privatization," "personalization," "carve-outs," "private accounts," or "personal accounts"-the fact is that this would hurt the financial health of Social Security and poses a threat to the retirement security of millions of Americans and their families. (Emphasis added.)

Can't I do better by investing on my own?

Maybe, but maybe not. Market averages are just that-averages. If you put one foot in boiling water and the other in ice-water, on average the water is comfortable. The reality, of course, is very different! Personal accounts come with a host of risks. The majority of mutual funds under-perform the market average. The stock market goes down as well as up, and sometimes it stays down for quite awhile. Many retirees who thought they were set financially are having to cut their budgets dramatically or even return to work because the value of their portfolios has declined significantly over the past few years. (Emphasis added again.)

So if stocks and mutual funds so risky that the AARP feels compelled to warn its members against them, then what the hell is it doing advertising and taking a cut from selling its members mutual funds? James K. Glassman calls bullshit.

[The AARP] says that stock and bond investing is like playing a slot machine at the same time it promotes stock and bond investing by selling 38 mutual funds to its members and taking a cut from each sale. ...

AARP Services, Inc., the lucrative business arm of the AARP, entered into a deal with Scudder Investments to sell mutual funds to its members as part of a special affinity program. According to a prospectus, Scudder pays AARP an annual fee for the use of its trademark that ranges from .05 percent to .07 percent of assets. That can come to a lot of money. One fund alone, Scudder Growth & Income AARP, manages $5 billion.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Posted by Matt at 5:21 PM

March 9, 2005

Great way to make some bucks

This is just sick. Creative, and funny, but sick:

Toby is the cutest little bunny on the planet. ... I rescued him several months ago. ... I took him in, thinking he had no chance to live from his injuries, but miraculously, he recovered. I have since spent several months nursing him to health. Toby is a fighter, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, on June 30th, 2005, Toby will die. I am going to eat him. I am going to take Toby to a butcher to have him slaughter this cute bunny. I will then prepare Toby for a midsummer feast. I have several recipes under consideration, which can be seen, with some pretty graphic images, under the recipe section.

I don’t want to eat Toby, he is my friend, and he has always been the most loving, adorable pet. However, God as my witness, I will devour this little guy unless I receive 50,000$ USD into my account from donations or purchase of merchandise.

In related news, March 15th is National Eat an Animal for PETA Day. Mmmmm, meat!

Link via Alex Knapp.

Posted by Matt at 6:22 PM

Vocab quiz

Okay guys and girls, get out a #2 pencil. Scantrons are making their way around the room. It's time for a pop vocab quiz.

Today's quiz will test your understanding of commonly confused words (such as your/you're, hardy/hearty, hung/hanged). I scored as an English Genius (100% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 93% Advanced, and 83% Expert). See if you can beat that, o, throng of people who far less ridiculously competitve about stupid crap than I am!

When you're done, pass your scantrons to the front.

Oh, and we're on the honor system here, folks. If you look at the answer key before finishing, you are a bad person. And you're expelled. Somehow.

Posted by Matt at 4:14 PM

March 8, 2005

Weirdness on the elevator

As I left work today, I had a very odd encounter with someone I can only described as an Unhinged American.

First, some relevant background. I work on the fourth floor. To leave my building, I have to take the elevator down just one flight to the third floor, which is connected to the parking garage. This quirk of my building's design is a frustration for other elevator passengers coming from the upper floors, almost all of whom would prefer to make the trip down to the ground floor uninterrupted. Yokels like me make the car stop twice.

As I stepped onto the elevator, there was a man who was coming from one of the floors above. He was going down to One. I stepped onto the car and pressed Three.

He was staring at the ceiling panels. "You know, they say in the towers, that the jet fuel came through and burned all the steel? And that the jet fuel was what made the building collapse."

My first thought was: huh?? The guy wasn't your typical weirdo. He was an older man -- probably about 55 or so, dressed in a knit polo shirt and slacks. He had gray hair and wore glasses. He looked at me, wanting an answer to his statement.

"Right. Well, it was a lot of jet fuel." Fortunately, the doors opened. I was out the door before I got the sentence out. Grandpa Creepy followed me.

"This isn't the ground floor, sir," I said, smiling.

"They say the jet fuel is what caused the building to burn? But I saw that tower in Spain, the one that was as big as the World Trade Center, and it burned all night and I saw it -- the steel frame is still there. They want us to believe that the gasoline is what brought the building down, but I saw that frame, and there's no way it happened the way they told us."

I took a few steps toward down the hallway. He started following me. I did not want this guy following me to my car. I pressed the Down button.

"Well, jet fuel burns at about 2000 degrees," I said -- I figured there was no way to walk away from this conversation; I was engaged, for better or worse. "And steel starts to lose strength after a couple of hours at those temperatures."

"I saw the frame of that building in Spain." Ding. The doors to the elevator opened. He stepped in. "And I've seen a welder. That arc gets up to 10,000 degrees, and the steel doesn't even melt then." He kept talking even as the doors closed.

The guy probably meant well. But really: what kind of person starts up a random conversation with a stranger in an elevator, with the intent to sell him on a conspiracy theory? The man had some confidence to just come right out with his moonbattery without being at a rally or some such. Further, I would never have had him pegged as such a weirdo if I saw him in a lineup; he looked perfectly normal until he started talking about jet fuel. Completely out of thin air.

As for me, I'm exhausted.

I've had a really stressful day, for reasons I won't get into. Let me put it this way: Over the last year, I went through breakups and personal drama, career issues, and other significant craziness, and not once did I get a stress sore on the inside of my mouth. But I got one today. Hopefully it'll be cleared up soon. In any case, the day's events just punctuate the fact that I need some serious change in my life, and that it needs to come sooner rather than later.

Posted by Matt at 11:56 PM

Uh, oops

A hacker figured out how to get Harvard Business School's online application system to give up whether a student had been accepted a full month before the acceptance letters were to be mailed out. He then posted step-by-step instructions for applicants so that they, too, could determine whether they were in.

119 students who had been accepted followed up and got the good news. All 119 got their acceptance revoked.

Posted by Matt at 9:05 PM

March 7, 2005

Deflect and deny

Hm. I guess when you're accused of something serious -- say, assassinating political threats in a country your troops occupy -- and you don't want to answer, just deflect the accusation:

When asked who had killed Hariri, Assad told the weekly: "The most important question is, Who had the benefit of it?

Posted by Matt at 6:28 PM

Holy admission of homosexuality, Batman!

I almost can't believe this is real. But it is.

Found via INDC Journal.

Posted by Matt at 1:57 PM

Please let's do this

A consumption tax -- otherwise known as a national sales tax -- sounds scary, but it shouldn't be.

It's not going to hurt poor people. Poor people are already getting stuck with high taxes taken straight from their paychecks. I'm in a low tax bracket, and I get 17% taken out for federal income tax, Medicare, and Social Security. If I can afford to have 17% taken out of my paycheck without me ever seeing that money, I can afford to spend that same 17% at the cash register, and consciously see what the government is taking from me. Heck, I might even be persuaded to save more of that money, or invest it.

And check this out: the math actually works out so that if we replace withholding with a sales tax at the same percentage rate, you actually end up with slightly more money. Say I make $100 a week for simplicity. The government takes 17% (or $17) of that. That leaves me with $83 to buy stuff.

Now let's get rid of withholding and replace it with a 17% consumption tax. I now have a full $100, and I use it to buy the same $83 worth of stuff. What's the tax on $83? Not $17. $14.11. So I've now spent $97.11 on the same $83 worth of stuff. That leaves me almost three extra bucks for every $100 I make. That's more stuff I can buy, or more I can save.

We're still concerned about the poor though, so let's make it even easier. Some variations of the consumption tax propose a rebate to the poor. Some variations propose not taxing the essentials in the first place, like groceries. I can get behind that. I can even get behind it not being applied to things like rent and basic clothing. Who wouldn't? The poor are not going to get shafted by a consumption tax.

You know who will get shafted? The rich. But not unfairly. The super-rich can move their money around so that they pay the least amount of taxes possible and still not do anything illegal. Heck, ask Teresa Heinz-Kerry -- last year, she paid an effective tax rate of something like 12% on hundreds of thousands in income. Institute a consumption tax, and any time the super-rich want to spend money, they'll pay what they've been avoiding.

As for the rest of us, we'll keep paying almost exactly what we have been all this time. Only we'll see it at the cash register. Heck, we might even pay less, if the legislators set it up right. People will probably get pissed about the extra money they're spending -- but that's good. Let them see just what withholding has been taking from them without their conscious acknowledgement all this time. Give them some choice over how much they want to pay in taxes. It might even make people more willing to press their congressmen for more fiscal restraint. Once people realize that they're personally footing the bill for all this spending, it'll make 'em think twice about voting for the feel-good altruism that bloats our national budget and sends us further into debt every year.

Now would be the time. I hope the guys in D.C. follow through with this.

Posted by Matt at 10:23 AM

March 4, 2005

Another former athlete making a run at governor?

I just found something interesting from Carpe Bonum: Lynn Swann is considering a run for Pennsylvania Governor.

Who's Lynn Swann? He's a former Pittsburgh Steeler, Hall-of-Famer, and black Republican. Makes for an interesting combination.

I also find it interesting that, like Arnold before him, Swann is the chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness. Is this a previously unheralded stepping stone to becoming the governor of a large state? I think further investigation is warranted.

Posted by Matt at 1:26 PM

March 2, 2005

Rudy in 2008

He's universally respected and admired -- and he accomplished a lot more conservative an agenda than the current incumbent. Granted, you can get a lot more done as a powerful mayor, but he was passionate and committed to achieving his political goals there. Not a single person can argue that New York isn't better off after Giuliani's tenure; I thrill to think what he could accomplish in D.C.

Posted by Matt at 11:40 AM

March 1, 2005

Mournin' everyone!

Ward Churchill, smug plagiarist/fake scholar that he is, mourns for the victims of Sept. 11th, the way he also mourns for a select long list of dead people, presumably at the hands of the Evil White Western Capitalist Machine. Thus, Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities bitch-slaps him upside his fake Indian head.

In an ironic way of course.

Posted by Matt at 1:30 PM

We're living in Toonville

A ten-year-old kid was crushed by a giant snowball:

The primary school pupil apparently died playing with a friend after a "giant snowball" rolled down a hill and engulfed him.

Local minister Norman Nicoll told the paper: "It seems there was a giant snowball the boys had made themselves.

"Apparently it rolled and unfortunately Peter was caught under it.

Incidentally, while searching for "Toonville", the mythical city inhabited by toons from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, I learned two things:

1. In French, the movie is called Qui Veut La Peau De Roger Rabbit?, which translated literally, means: Who Wants Roger Rabbit's Skin? Or, Who's After Roger Rabbit's Hide? Translation is endlessly fascinating to me.
2. The movie was directed by Robert Zemeckis, which for some reason was a fact that had eluded me for years. I love this guy. The Back to the Future movies, Contact, Forrest Gump... the guy's done a lot of great stuff.

Posted by Matt at 11:32 AM

Thanks, Ace!

Muchos gracias for adding NCW to your blogroll!

Posted by Matt at 10:40 AM

A Segway for the golf course

Okay, now this Segway makes sense. The Segway GT (Golf Transport) features "extended-range batteries, a golf bag carrier, enhanced traction tires, and a special standby key." It's a golf cart for one.

I rode one of these things at the Segway store in the Galleria in Houston. Lot of fun, but I couldn't see spending $6000 on a glorified walker. On the other hand, country clubs and private golf courses can justify spending this kind of scrilla.

And while I'm on the subject: I think Segways are bad-ass. But the company is ultra-lame. I mean, look at the image they present:

Buy a Segway, and you, too, can look like a f*ckin' retard in your helmet.

Gimme a break, man. These things go 12 miles an hour. I guess they're going for the young, smart, sensible parent-types who have craploads of money from their jobs in the tech biz, and who bundle up their allergic, nosebleeding kids in eight layers of hardened plastic before sending them out in the yard to play.

Show me a couple of sexy young late-20-somethings riding one of these through a park or by a lake, and I'm sold.

Posted by Matt at 10:02 AM

Odd headline

From a headline like Federal judge finds 2 bodies in her home, you'd think the judge came home to find two random bodies:

A federal judge who was once targeted for death by a white supremacist leader found two people dead inside her Chicago home when she returned Monday evening, police said.

Local media reports said the victims were Lefkow's husband, attorney Michael F. Lefkow, and her mother, Donna Humphrey, 89.

Am I nitpicking? I don't think so; the headline completely minimizes the story. It's bad writing. And stuff like this ought to be dealt with seriously.

Okay, CNN, I'm going to do your job for you and write a better headline:

Husband and mother of federal judge found dead
Federal judge's family found dead at home

Posted by Matt at 9:41 AM

Build your own South Park character. Why not?

September 2009

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