The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.

Rube's on the road. Rube's in Hamburg. Rube's enjoying the German summer, which luckily fell on Saturday this year. Today, in fact. It's warm, there's a soft breeze blowing in off the harbor, and I'm sitting here working. Blech.

So, even though I've not written anything in a few days, the page isn't dead. I've just been busier than a butt-legged man in a nun-kicking contest.

I haven't even had time to read the news. What's going on in the world? How you guys doing?

Everybody knows Jones. Jones is the bad. Jones chills outside; he ain't no Uncle Tom house-katze:

But Jones has a new buddy. And he's awesome-looking.

I haven't met him yet, seeing as they live 6,000 miles away, but he looks cool!

Rube's tips on a healthy workplace.

Click image to load

Shoulda seen this one coming.

Always happens right when you run out of lamb's blood.

Meryl Yourish is always a good read. She has that particular quality that would make her next to impossible to defeat in debate: An economy of words.

Yes, that's the difference between Israel and the [palestinians]. Israelis do not deliberately target civilians, and do their best to reduce collateral damage. The [palestinians] deliberately target civilians, and rejoice over their deaths.

There's absolutely no refuting the point. You can champion the cause of the Palestinians if you want, but be honest with yourself about who it is that you're defending.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Indeed. As the man says, read the whole thing.

Super. Hugh Hewitt got defaced by a bunch of idiot script kiddies. I hate this kind of vandalism. It's just another form of grafitti, which is one of my pet peeves. The world is not your canvas, and nobody likes you just because you're a 23-year-old virgin who knows where to download rootkits from USENET.

Maybe they should take the Artist Formerly Known as Baby-Jumping Chickenman's grandfatherly advice for misguided sociopaths:

I'd like to suggest a new, more straight-forward area of interest, The Friends Club. As a member of The Friends Club, you determine whether or not another stranger is a member by uttering the code words, "Will you be my friend?" If they are another member of The Friends Club they will respond, "Sure, wanna go bowling or something?"

Hugh's not their first victim. They've apparently got way too much time on their hands.

Doing some random blogination I wound up letting myself be psychoanalyzed by somebody I've never even heard of.

1. Lounge::Lizard
2. Photograph::Match
3. Catacomb::Brinkeley (1)
4. Crucifix::Dammit (2)
5. Fire drill::Chinese
6. Tube::Top
7. Dropped::Acid
8. LTD::BTL
9. Panther::Apple
10. Formica::Rotary Cutting Tool

1: I don't want to know if I was thinking of Christy or David on that one... 2: 'Crucifix!' is a German exclamation kind of like 'dammit!'. I guess because it sounds like 'fick's!' (fuck it!)

I'm still shaking from the excitement of last night's EU Championship match. O! you could've cut the tension with a knife! Greece and Czech went back and forth, up and down, requiring just 105 minutes of game time to score ONE FREAKING GOAL!

Jeez, soccer sucks. I just don't get it. I mean, I understand the rules of the game. I'm not one of the Americans that sit in the crowd and say, 'man, he better tuck that ball in and run before he gets creamed out there!" It's just that it's mind-numbingly dull.

It may be the way that the Europeans play it. I can't stand watching grown men trying to fake injuries to draw fouls. It's OK to take a dive every now and then. Lord knows, in my college hockey days I drew my fair share of bullshit penalties, but you have to draw the line somewhere. In any soccer game, there will come a point where play is stopped by somebody laying on the ground, literally screaming in pain, holding their knee while their teammates beg the referee to Put an End to This Carnage! This usually happens after the guy gets the ball taken away from him. When they show the replay, though, it's obvious that there was no contact whatsoever. Still, this guy stays on the ground, screaming and crying, until a couple of trainers come out and take him to the sidelines. Once play starts again, he'll stand up, start jumping up and down, and be back in the game within 5 minutes. You can count on it.

Bob Baun wins the Stanley Cup on a broken foot, then drinks a martini

Football's just as manly as ice hockey, if not more so. Linesman in football break every finger on their hands at least twice a game. Sometimes the fingers will just fall off, laying there on the field until someone notices they lost it and sticks it back on. And I don't think anybody who saw it will ever forget the infamous Lawrence Taylor/Joe Theismann pile-up. Taylor, who weighs about 300 lbs., fell on Theismann's leg, snapping it like a twig. Halfway between his knee and his foot, Theissmann's leg was bent at a 90 degree angle, right there on Monday Night Football. It was a sight so gruesome, you can't even find pictures of it on the Internet. Taylor damn near tore the man's foot off, and didn't even get a foul. Manly!

Just compare this:

To this:

If I were a soccer referee, things would be a little different. Every time some whiny little Brazilian throws himself on the ground after a near-collision, holding his leg and howling in pain, he would be forced to watch that Theismann video 10 times. "If that happens," I would tell him, "you may cry, scream, or do whatever you want. But if you try and pull that fake injury shit with me again, you mincing little dandy, you'll be wearing a tutu on the field from that point on."

If you live in Atlanta, pick up a copy of Creative Loafing. They're presenting an interesting set of articles this week, discussing the idea of patriotism. I don't agree with any of the writers, but at least it's written by people who don't work for the magazine.

I usually find the 'Loaf ridiculously patronizing. They're regular contributors are the most bland, stereotypical, predictable, and narrow-minded writers you can imagine. And not just the liberals among them. They have a token conservative who looks like Alex Keaton's bastard love-child, but I haven't seen him there in a while.

They haven't been worth reading since Boortz dropped his column. You may not like him, but at least he's interesting.

There's been a lot of activity about a certain paranoid lefty's webpage, which is motivating people to go out and vote (though probably not in the way they wanted).

The 'whois' of the page is shielded behind some anonymous registration hocus-pocus, but one name stands prominently in the source code. Just in case anyone was curious, it seems that the belongs sculptor/'artist' Richard Serra. The "Stop Bush" Abu-Ghraib painting is most certainly one of his.

Oddly enough, Richard Serra's name is already on the White House's website. Illegal profiling of dissidents, you ask? Perhaps a McCarthyist blacklist of suspected thoughtcriminals, compiled by John AshKKKroft? Not quote. It's actually a transcript of a speech made by Laura Bush, praising the purchase of one of Richard Serra's sculptures to the (presumably State-funded) Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Now, I'm not one to espouse kooky conspiracy theories, but this looks fishy to me. You've got a ridiculously overwrought political page, which is quickly exposed (perhaps a little too quickly) by the usual digital brownshirts, and which will certainly do nothing to pull the moderates towards the Left; it may, in fact, alienate them even more. And finally, after an attempted cover-up, the source of the sight has strong financial ties to the Bush family?

It's certainly not any worse than some of the other paranoid delusions that are floating around out there.

Update: Dang. I see that my sleuthing is substandard, as well as slow. The original source of all this had it figured out before I even got started. I smell a rat!

Another Update: This Guy seems to be on top of it. This should be fun to watch.

Acidman is now among the millions of Americans without health insurance. His is a sad tale of woe. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer; he was railroaded out of his job; then, he was railroaded out of his insurance coverage by an unfeeling and faceless bureaucracy. So what did he do?

He called another company, and got insurance there. Funny thing, that free market system.

As Acidman notes, health insurance is one of the phoniest crises there is. The only reason why anybody in the US wouldn't have health insurance is because they're too lazy or too stupid to get off their butts and get it. For that matter, that's the only reason you couldn't get anything in the US. People do not want to make the effort to take care of their own needs, and want the government to step in and get it done for them. If you've got half a brain, and the will, you can be or do or get anything you want in life.

If insurance is too expensive for you, get a huge deductible. You'll save enough money on your premiums to pay for the little things you might have to go to the doctor for, and you'll have your ass covered in case something catastrophic happens. There's no reason at all to turn this responsibility over to the government just because you fags are too lazy to pick up the phone and shop around. Or get on Google and type in "cheap health insurance". Within minutes, you'll find a policy with a monthly that costs about as much as your goddamn cable TV does, and a deductible of less than $500. But I guess it's much easier to just vote yourself insurance with a working man's money, isn't it?

In my twenties, I was in the hospital twice to get my head sewn back together. Neither time did I have insurance. The hospital never asked if I was covered: They just led me to a back room, sewed my face back on, and then sent me a bill for their trouble. One bill was for $900.00, the other for $600.00. (The second time I decided to forego the anaesthetic, which saved me some cash. Hell, both times I was drunk enough that I didn't need anesthetic. I think the first time I was just curious whether I'd get high off it.) I easily covered the bills, even though I wasn't earning much money back then. So, for 10 years I gambled that nothing would happen to me that I couldn't pay for, and it paid off. I probably saved myself about $10,000 in premiums, minus the $1,500 that I paid for the two visits.

Here in Germany, you pay a percentage of your income into the Government-controlled insurance rackets. Since 2000, I've paid well over 20,000 Euros in health insurance that I've used exactly twice, both times for snowboarding accidents that weren't serious. You have NO CHANCE to haggle it down; you have NO OPTION to increase your deductible to lower the rates; and you have NO CHOICE but to buy the insurance. And you never really know how much it costs you, either. You just get your paycheck electronically transferred, and 55% of it gone. This 'free' insurance will put you in the po'-house.

Universal Health Care is an odd euphemism. If you're not sick, you don't need health care, so why 'Universal'? Well, because 'Health Care' really means 'Health Insurance'. And 'Universal' means mandatory. And don't worry: If you can't afford it, we'll just suck another 5% out of the upper income brackets to pay for it. They got rich from oppressing the unwashed masses, so let big brother take care of your needs.

It's beyond irony that all those lefties who scream about keeping the Government out of their wombs have no qualms whatsoever about letting Washington control the rest of their body.

Earlier this week, the Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine had this little gem:

Michael Moore plans to tackle health care next. Well, the good news is that health care is a subject that damned well needs tackling. It's shameful what's happening in this country: millions uninsured; people trapped in the wrong jobs just because of health benefits; money wasted on exploding insurance bureacracy; doctors' time wasted with insurance time-wasters; proper and necessary care withheld from the sick; costs skyrocketing; malpractice rates driving doctors away.... Oh, Lord, it needs tackling.

Now, Jeff's a smarter man than I am, but here he's just talking out his behind. Government intervention is not the answer to bureaucratic overload. And what in the world is he saying about people being trapped in jobs because the benefits are too good? Huh? Now I've heard everything. Poor people having to make a choice between good benefits or bad jobs or shopping themselves around for a better job or what, exactly?

You'd think people were dying in the streets, the tell-tale pustules of the black death covering their famished, gaunt faces; these turned up to an uncaring Dubya, riding by in a Cadillac lighting his cigar with a twenty.

Y'know, sometimes I hit the Expos button just to watch the little windows fly around.

Ok, you've got a cup. That's like a coffee cup. No, a real coffee cup, not an espresso shot-thing. Ok, two of those make up a pint. What? No a pint is 2 cups. It's called a pint because it's sixteen ounces of water, which is a pound. Pound and pint are the same, somehow. I guess they just started saying it differently. Ounces? Oh, I forgot ounces. An ounce is an eighth of a cup. A fluid ounce, I mean, not a...solid ounce or whatever the other one's called. It's a unit of volume, see. Then, you've got something called a long pint, which is 20 ounces, but I'm not sure that even exists except for Guiness glasses. Anyway, OK, listen, 2 pints, regular pints, is a quart. That's 32 ounces. And it weighs two pounds, I think, but I never really tested that. 4 quarts is a gallon. After that it gets hazy. Barrels I think is the next one up, and that's like 50 gallons or something like that.

Steve Jobs' Apple WWDC Keynote (link may change) is on the web tonight.

I wasn't expecting much, being a fairly recent purchaser of the Powerbook; and, if you'll pardon the unseemly outburst, jumpin Jehosephat! Man, that new Tiger's got stuff I ain't never even heard of! You got little calculators and calendars, see, zooming in and zooming out; that's what they call, er, what was it now, aw, I don't remember what. The tagline was Expos for Widgets. Which is kind of strange, considering that widgets is a fairly new thing. Sort of like on of those recursive acronyms everybody's been talking about, like GNU or LAME, it's a recursive unveiling. Stick with me, I'm a conceptual person.

Then you got OS-Level Photoshop-plugins, see? That means, basically, that you can make Photoshop-like changes to everything on your screen. And it all happens at the NS-Widget Level. Not 'widget' like before, though, this is something different. See, now, all those buttons and sliders and boxes that you see on your screen, those are called 'widgets'. And the 'NS' before them, that comes from NextStep. NextStep was the early-90's version of OS X, but for a company called 'NeXT', who produced sexy little over-priced UNIX computers to sell to universities. Too. Anyways, now Macs are UNIX machines, without all the scary free-ness of Linux computers.

Ok, so, Photoshop-plugins were the point of discussion. Oh, one more thing: Steve started NeXT after The Other Steve screwed him out of his share of Apple. Then Apple came crawling back after 15 years-too-long of MacOS 1-9 cutesiness that would've ruined any other company. No, man, Apple's got an advantage. Their entire market is made up of drug-hippies who haven't run out of money yet. Probably 90% of their user-base is between the ages of 16 and 30, which is, as we all know, Prime Hippy Demographic. And don't say "Oh Ess Ex". That makes Steve mad. Say, "Oh Ess Ten". See, that 'X' there is a roman numeral, I understand.

No, I'm not a member of the Cult of Steve. I have a Mac, and I love working on it; but I'm not yet a card-carrying brainwashed MacZombie. That's because I realize that it's a slippery slope that will lead me to using GoLive, kicking Hacky-Sacks, and, finally, paedophilia.

Stupid Mac.

The followers of Allah are Terrorists. All of them.

In the 70's, there was a standard disclaimer that ran on television stations, that went something like: "We do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, or national origin". Which of these things is not like the other? Race and national origin are things that cannot be helped: your parents are who they are, and you're born where you were. But creed? Is that some kind of reference to Jews? Is judaism a 'creed'? Or do they mean Southern Baptists? Or Catholics?

According to Wikipedia,

A creed is a statement of belief -- usually religious belief -- or faith.The word derives from the Latin credo for 'I believe'.

So when did it become illegal to discriminate against people for what they think? Klansmen and Black Panthers are ideological ne'er-do-wells that are discriminated against, and rightly so. Is that illegal? Of course not. It's worthless pork-language tacked onto an otherwise acceptable policy. You should definitely be able to deny services to people whose beliefs are offensive to you. Would a black architecture firm be sued because they wouldn't bid on a contract for a new KKK headquarters? Wouldn't that be a violation of the "race, creed, color" code? It would.

'Creed' should be stricken from the taboo list. 'Creed' is a choice. You decide if you want to believe something. You have that choice. Otherwise, you are not human, and are therefore legally edible. Islam is a creed; it's a cult, not a belief. You are all terrorists, and should be treated thusly. It should be legal to eat muslims.

In the last week, there were 2 bus-bombings in Israel, which involved the murders of numerous women and children; there were 2 plane bombings in Russia, there is so much shit in Iraq that I can't even count it here, and, to top it all off, now Muslims have kidnapped 200 children in Russia, and are threatening to kill them unless some jews are killed or something or other.

There is a boil on the ass of the world, and his name is Mohammed. When will you moon-worshipping philistines wake up? When will the christian-hating liberals of the western world smell the coffee? In every country in the world, there is a violent struggle between the modernists and the Muslims. Islam is hell on earth. Sickening...

Sounds like Cobby had a more interesting weekend than I did.

What's amazing about that entry is that her high-school has a liquor license. But only until 1:00 AM.

Ah, Europe.

The metric system makes you fat. I stepped on a scale a week or two ago, and I'll be damned if I didn't weigh 74,000 grams. That's unbelievable, when you think about it. If Rube were made completely of heroin, he would have a street value of US$8,299,100.00 (€6,915,916.67), according to this undoubtedly bogus heroin price trend analysis I randomly Googled. Any page that contains the word "truth" in the title is guaranteed to have more distortion than a Hüsker Dü closer.

Now, when I was a boy I was really fat, even in the good old Imperialist System. According to the above study, my dwindling stores and the relatively high prices I could've fetched in the early 80's have conspired to reduce my worth by more than 65 million dollars. But even at my rosy-cheeked plumpest my weight never had a comma in it.

Jeepers, man, they'll let anybody blog these days!

That's like Nixon going to China. In case you're wondering, it looks smashing in Konqueror.

Oh, well. I didn't want to go outside any more this month, anyway.

I was sitting on the bank of the Elbe with friends last night, watching the huge container ships going by. It's just down the river from the main Hamburg harbor area. There's a steady stream of large and small vessels, carrying containers stacked high on their decks. The river's not that wide, so when a really big ship goes by, it looks quite surreal, blotting out the other side of the river completely.

Most of the bigger ships went by after dark. I usually get a little romantic watching freighters. I think about the old Kerouac stories of his time in the Merchant Marine, of steaming across the Atlantic in the days before intercontinental air travel. I think about all those sailors saying goodbye to the stevedores they probably all know by name, and preparing themselves mentally for a weeks-long trip by sea to America, Asia, or South Africa.

But last night, a strange ship came by. It was a huge, black, covered-deck ship, looming over us like something the Galactic Empire would be driving around, like Vader's Star Destroyer. The nose was sharp and low, not far above the water, and the body was a wedge driven into the moonlit sky. There was no sign of the unevenly stacked containers, the jutting cranes that usually mark the ships. The windows were all lit, running perfectly even along the waist-line of the vessel, flourescent white-green in color, instead of the usual incandescent yellow. The deep rumble of the engines drowned the conversations, one by one. Deep rumbles are the sign of the bad guys; there is no bass in heaven.

Everyone sat still then, watching the ship approach and eventually eclipse last night's blue moon. In the shadow of that ship, I started thinking about the places of the world which spawned it, and the true misery which is its fuel. I could picture tortured wretches pulling the oars that drove it forward, the deep drone coming from the drums of the galley-masters.

Eventually it passed, letting the moon light up the riverbank again. It disappeared off to our right, around the riverbend. But I couldn't get the ship out of my mind, and it invaded my dreams last night. A black shape with glowing white letters on the side: The Yang Ming Line.

Microsoft revolutionizes desktop graphics!

Amazing! Unbelievable! I was absolutely stunned the first time I heard about it.

Now there's a bit of slang that everyone should have in their vocabulary. A "wig" is the ugly girl that almost-pretty girls go out with to make themselves look better. This is the ugly chick that a wingman has to pretend he likes, so that his buddy can make time with the half-way decent chick.

It's sort of like a "beard". A beard, as most people know, is the hag a gay guy goes out with to make it look like he's straight. So, when you see him dancing in a club with another man, wearing leather pants with the butt-cheeks cut out, you can look shocked and say, "sorry, man! I didn't recognize you without the beard."

I just saw a perfect example of wigiitude walk by. It was two girls: One of them was rather plain, but the but other was an out-and-out dogie, ripe fer punchin'. The dogie was rattling on about something, and the normal one had a look on her face like, 'Dude, it's Friday. I'm just bringing you along so I can get laid. Don't talk to me.'

Chicks.

I'm going to start chaining myself to marijuana plants.

I hate hippies.

I'm now no longer in a bar. I'm sitting in a caf in the Portuguese section of Hamburg, drinking coffee and working. Well, blogging. I don't like crowds of people. Well, let's not be negative. I like working in closed, empty spaces. I'm not an agoraphobic; I'm a claustrophiliac.

It might have something to do with working over the local wireless hotpoint here in this part of town. Public Wi-Fi hot-spots are just...unclean. It's the computing equivalent of a 70s bathhouse sex-romp. Every virus in existence is probably swimming around in these soupy, goldfish-infested airwaves. Sure, I'm using OS X, so there's not much chance I'll get glory-holed by some lame-ass XP user who hasn't installed a patch since his 'partner' caught MyDoom in that San Francisco coffeehouse last week, after a drunken AIM session that he neglected to mention. Pervert. Not to mention the fact that any schmo within 100 yards can just fire up Kismet or tcpdump and get a free peep-show.

Boy, they don't make a fuss about bringing you a beer here, do they? My little gay skirt-wearing glass has been empty for about 10 minutes here, guys. Little help?

I've never won anything in my entire life!

Things are going to start happening to me now.

/Navin Johnson

Of course, as soon as I get five of these mysterious "points", the dude throws them right back in my face.

Bastard.

Don't be such a poser.
Don't talk so much about yourself.
Don't criticize everything and everyone; you're the asshole here.
Don't try to top everybody's stories. Blame it on marine training. Don't live down to everyone's low expectations.
Do it for yourself, not for her.
Make a decision and act upon it.
Get the monkeys off your back; all of them.
Improve your handwriting, for the love of Christ.
Drink moderately.
Find something you enjoy doing, and really enjoy it.
Smile more.
Call your mother.
Before you follow your star, examine the path and make sure you know what you're getting into.
If you don't like something, don't eat it.
If you resist something, try to think of its advantages. If you can't think of anything good about it, you're probably just afraid of it.
Prioritize your time. You'll be surprised how many hours there are in a day.
Never be afraid to show people what you're writing, unless it's about them.
Don't let people fuck with you; you're smarter and more experienced than they are.
Nothing helps you win an argument like being right.
There's nothing wrong with a little hanky-panky every now and then.
Don't cry over movies unless you're drunk or something; no matter what she tells you, your girlfriend will think you're a pussy.
Don't trade in misery; it has no worth.
Don't underestimate yourself.
Don't watch television.
Don't drive unless you have to.
You do not have a monopoly on cool
Write letters to your friends; they like hearing from you.
Visit your cat again before he dies.
Do your paperwork.
Don't be a snob.
Work everyday.
Get your soul back.
Think in nodes.