According to my "This Day in History" applet in Dashboard, on May 13, 1846 the United States declared war on Mexico. Davy Crockett eventually had to get involved, unless I'm not mistaken.

I'd heard the belly-laughs rippling through the so-called "blogosphere" about the Huffington Post, so I figured I'd check it out. I've never seen a more wretched hive of shallowness and drivelry. It's like a high-school newspaper consisting of only an uninteresting entertainment section. It looks more like a National Lampoon spoof of a group-blog than an actual one. For example, check out these unintentionally hilarious concessions from, ahem, Ze Frank:

i agree that if we all start shouting about anal intercourse all of the time our country will fall into ruin.
...
I told a guy at Starbuck's to go f*ck himself when he cut me in line. I also peed on a car that took my spot outside my apartment. Might I not also symbolize the Left's flirtation with the Demon's of Anarchy?

Ignoring for the moment the hideous diction abuse rampant in this post, I'm happy about the anal intercourse thing. Shouting about it won't make it happen, and it's good that we're all in agreement. Other than that, I have to say I'm actually dumber for having read the entire entry. I'm still reeling from trying to figure out what the point of writing it was. I think if I got the chance to write for such a highly-visible page like the renowned Huffington Post, I'd actually, you know, try and say something; give advice; help the children.

The American Left needs advice, that's for sure. They're getting squeezed out of Washington about as fast as those hump-backed Caribou in Alaska will be once Smirky McHallibush gets the oil contracts for his oil-drilling cousins. The reason, of course, is that they're getting all their advice from absolute knuckleheads. For example, just get a load of the mental game of Twister that some nobody who goes by the obvious pseudonym "Deborah Rappaport" has to say:

Myth #1 We need the right candidates: If the Republican Party has taught us anything, it is that with a clear purpose and a well-defined, consistent message delivered over a long enough period, anybody can be elected president. Your mommy and daddy were right. Any child in the United States can grow up to be president. We can’t wait for the second coming of Bill Clinton or John Kennedy or FDR. We need to create the environment that allows a good enough candidate to win. We need to trust that the electorate is smart enough to understand us when we talk about progressive values and ideals. And we need to trust that when we speak authentically about those values and ideals, the electorate will respond by electing our candidates.

Myth #2 We need to win the next elections: Well, duh. But if all we do is worry about the next election, we have taken our eye off of the ball. A coherent party, speaking from the gut rather than the brain, will lead to winning elections. A strategy of trying to just win the next one, and then everything will be OK, has led us to where we are now. What we need to win are the hearts and minds of the people. The Democratic Party has done a woefully bad job of speaking to the truths of people’s lives. Instead of standing up and talking about what we really believe in--society’s responsibility to all of its citizens, fairness, equality--we get dragged into arguments that serve no purpose but to cause us to lose sight of what we were fighting for in the first place.

Got that? I'm assuming Debbie works like I do, when I actually feel like writing a document someone will read. I start with an outline, then flesh it out, just like in 6th grade English. However, I can't believe I'd run with an outline that started out with A) we don't need the right candidates, and B) we don't need to win the next elections. Nobody could seriously write this kind of stuff and actually think it made sense. You'll notice that she states obvious inanities in bold print, then burns through 1200 characters a piece trying to justify them. That's modern Democrat thinking for you: You can bullshit your way out of any jam, as long as your audience wants to believe you. But that audience is getting smaller.

So here's the deal, Deb. Assuming you want to supply America with a viable, democratically necessary loyal opposition again at some point in the future, you do, in fact, need the right candidates. You also very much do need to win the next elections, because that's what defines success in politics: Winning elections. But that's just politics. Maybe if you change "Myth #1" to "Rule #1", Myth #2 will just disappear.

Letting the courts decide elections, ceaselessly filibustering important congressional decisions, and spending more time on the road whining about why you lost instead of doing the job you actually got elected to do is no way to run a party. I mean, it was amusing for a while, but it's turning into a one-joke show.

I'm sitting here watching my temporary doghouse roommate play what has to be the second most boring racing video game I've ever seen, Forza Motorsport. It's. Soooooo. Sloooooooow. It's like watching a NASCAR race consisting entirely of '84 Buick Regals. There are no pedestrians to run over, no nitro button, and you aren't even allowed to run the other cars off the road into the woods.

Another snoozer is Microsoft's Flight Simulator. I just got through flying 11 hours over the Atlantic in the real world, and I think it's insane anyone would even imagine making a game out of it. Only Microsoft could get away with such blatant perversity.

The award for most boring video game ever, though, goes without a doubt to 18 Wheels of Steel. It's like Flight Simulator, except you're driving a semi truck across the United States in realtime, and you get bonus points for staying within posted speed limits and delivering your load of photocopiers or whatever on time. Jesus, why not just get a job as a truck driver and actually get paid for the same amount of wasted life? A co-worker of mine would actually come in with bags under his eyes from playing this game all night, and bitch about the way people drove on the American Interstate. That's just wrong, wrong wrong.

I noticed this entry a while back at Velociman's place, and finally got around to taking the draw-a-pig test. Apparently, the guys who run this page can tell all about your personality by what your pig looks like. Here's mine:

(click for full-size)

It didn't give me an answer right away, so I sent it off to the admin of the site. As soon as I get an answer, I'll be sure to post it here!

Hugs,
Rube

I've got this recently-was-hot 2.8GHz Pentium 4 hyperthreading processor in my Windows box. There was a time when that much processing power was too bad to be had. But it's slow now. I thought maybe I was just getting used to the performance, and that the 2-year speed-freak fix time was coming up. But now I'm not so sure.

I wonder what the efficiency level of a patched, firewalled, and virus-protected Windows box is. I mean, every byte you read off the disk has to be read at least once by the virus scanner. Every accessed byte of memory has to be scanned; every email you send goes through the virus scanner, the firewall software, and then gets scanned by every single mail server along the way, just to make sure. And that's in addition to the normal operations that have to be performed on a message, like typing it, spellchecking it, and looking up all the nifties that it takes to route an SMTP message from here to yon.

It's not just for email, either. Every web page you load gets scanned. Every document you open, every jpeg you view, and every movie file you watch has to be scanned and monitored before you ever see it. Every byte that gets read from your hard drive or from the network has to be compared to a table of hundreds of thousands of Windows-based viruses for similarities; and, if you've set your virus software up that way, heuristically analyzed against a second table of virus patterns. Your firewall does it, too. Every connection you try to open gets put through a series of tests to make sure that the program opening the connection is authorized to connect to that address, at this particular time, and for how long. I'm sure these programs are well-written, and as efficient as they can possibly be under the circumstances, but still, it's a huge amount of overhead.

Basically, I'm wondering just what percentage of the world's CPU cycles are actually spent wiping Bill Gates' ass for him.