georgeland: the blog

Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but this can’t end well:

Eugene Terre’blanche hacked to death this weekend

Any hate-man that high-profile getting whacked, that’s not going to leave his remaining compatriates in a particularly JOLLY mood.

so very tired. adjusting to daylight savings time, but not yet there. most of my waking thoughts are comfortably obsessed with eating and sleeping.

Mmmm…nuts.

Then: Falkland Islands’ penguins (probably mostly the Rockhoppers) rendered for their oil (eggs also delicious)

Now: homes in Sweden heated by thousands of dead bunnies

First there was BPA’s Toe Jam (the censor bar as animation medium)

Then, there was Make the Girl Dance’s Baby Baby Baby, the censor bar as karaoke medium

And now (a direct answer to Baby Baby Baby), there is Sexy Sexy which is…something else entirely.

Still not fully explained, how Finland went from being the world’s leading consumer of heroin for over a generation to…not

One interesting point was that, prior to sulpha drugs, let alone penicillin and its cousins, heroin was one of the only effective treatments of tuberculosis. Not a cure at all, but as a palliative and cough suppressant, it was something. They actually make the fleeting argument in this article that due to the epidemic of TB at the time in Finland, virtually the only way the country functioned was through this large scale treatment of symptoms.

Every year I remember this, every year I forget to link it. Here you go, finally:

The [tomato] press my grandfather owned was a baroque contraption of brass, steel and iron that looked more suited to eliminating human remains than preparing food…

Facebook is the blog-killer.
Facebook is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my Facebook.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where Facebook has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

In other news…wow, two months? Really? Apparently I just don’t have enough to say, usually. More to come, life is slowing down a little.

As I like to do every Memorial day, I would like to talk about past soldiers who did great things by not getting people killed.

In 1944, Private Guy Gabaldon, a skinny 5′4″ kid from East LA set out every night during the brutal three-week battle for Saipan, armed with intermediate Japanese-language skills (and a rifle, he wasn’t stupid) to do what the rest of his 2nd Marine Division couldn’t accomplish with larger artillery: convince a hefty portion of the occupying Japanese forces to surrender. Reports vary from 1000 and 1500, but his successes were far from trivial. It also sounds like he was one of the lucky ones who wasn’t just sort of lost after the war; he ran a successful seafood business (which included, appropriately, a branch in Saipan), and married twice.
A compilation of interviews with Gabaldon from the War Times Journal
2006 obit from the New York Times
A Friendship Like No Other (from the Pacific Citizen)

The great Hargeisa goat bubble, also to be listenable as a radio-play at the BBC’s site, here

Russell T. Davies, reporting live from the TARDIS on his last day of filming

Enough of content, now back to links of cute things:

cat and box

I’m going to go out on a limb and guesstimate that I have more debt than any of my friends. Even the kids in grad school, unless they got their student loans from the bank of Vinny-behind-the-pool-hall, will probably come out of it owing half to two thirds what I do now.

But, I’m getting a house out of it. Even now, with all the superfun imploding bubble economy crap, I’m still doing okay, in the long run. But getting back to the kids with the student loans…

Increasingly, it’s looking like a lot of people are going to be highly in debt for education which won’t get them into jobs which can even begin to pay for how much they’re in debt. If you can’t pay your student loans, in many cases even bankruptcy won’t get you out from under from student loan debt. If you can’t make house payments, you can just walk away, leaving the house and its attendant debt behind, and increasingly, home ownership is seen as such a goddamn precious and inalienable right that if you can’t make payments, even that might not be enough to really lose it.

Where am I going with this? It just seems interesting that the system seems almost rigged to be going feudal again, with homeowners tied firmly to land that they don’t really have title to (hello, banks), and only a feckless few making it to higher education (rich or determined or both).

I may be reading too much into this, of course…

Bootleg cheese confiscated

There’s a post I keep meaning to track down from gordonzola, about the cheese foundry whose workers used some of the big cheesemaking vats as hot tubs after hours. I think listeria would be the least of your worries after one of those…

Owen and I finally poured that all-important new step for the front stairs. Now that it’s all done (setting overnight, if all goes well), I am reflecting on the fact that we shifted 400 pounds of concrete, and it doesn’t add up to much volume at all. I wonder how many tons the foundation of my house is?

I have this pathological tendency to think of intelligent things to post here, content not consisting entirely of links. I think of these things in the shower, or on the way to work. They’re so vivid that I don’t bother to write them down, since how could I forget?

I had a good one this morning. Gone for good, I think.

MILF versus cougar.

I have given some thought to the matter. I think on the whole, despite the inherent passivity of MILF (the name itself is objectification), it is less offensive than cougar which (to my ear at least) implies a negative kind of predatorship. How many people get mauled by MILFs when they go hiking up in the mountains?

I rest my case.

Yes We Will. Barack Obama + the end of days.

But don’t be afraid: after all, as President Obama himself said, “…if there were…anything to be afraid of, don’t you think I would’ve worn pants?”

Alles Neu by Peter Fox. In German, but it shouldn’t hurt you. With monkeys, drums, and batter.
via filthy internet jesus

Many Moons by Janelle Monae. Android funk. via little. yellow. different.

Going on by Gnarls Barkley. Interdimensionally Jamaican, signed version courtesy of a cease-and-desist by Warner, apparently. Thanks, corporate!

As you can see, without the joy of internet, I would probably still be living under a rock listening to Barry Manilow, apparently.

Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys: There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama
Note: allegedly they’re to play on the Irish American Democrats’ float during the inaugural parade this weekend. Maybe we’ll see them on the telly?

VIVA OBAMA: the norteño version (courtesy of Los Dorados del Norte), and the original mariachi version (Mariachi Aguilas de Mexico)
(Note: the reggaeton version is not actually a cover of the above and, like all reggaeton, something of an acquired taste; I haven’t been able to find out who performed it)

Paint the White House Black: George Clinton and his entourage.

Wasn’t software supposed to make our lives easier, somehow?