The chick looks like Meat Loaf, too, although probably that is not relevant. Or is it?

Apparently, not trying to slaughter your girlfriend is insufficient qualification for public office, even in Illinois, and even at a time when Sarah Palin is considered a serious presidential contender.

From here. With a beginning like that, this thing has got to be awesome.

UPDATE:

Okay, I have to quote another part, just because it’s the first time I’ve seen in print the same thing I rant about myself to anyone who will listen to me, which means Monica, and Peaches:

Consider the incoherent platform of the tea party’s new “Ensuring Liberty” PAC. It will “choose candidates based on their fidelity to … the ‘first principles’: less government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, states rights and national security,” Ensuring Liberty spokesman Mark Skoda told The New York Times. Really? How do you reconcile the demand for less government with a right wing vision of national security that includes a federal bureaucracy empowered to monitor our travel, our reading habits (on and offline), and our communications (enlisting the aid of telecoms in doing so)? How do you reconcile less government, fiscal responsibility, and lower taxes with support for continued war, not to mention a government that “keeps its hand off” Medicare and Social Security?

Hands off my Medicare indeed.

Also, global warming? Total effing letdown. Americans are no longer believing in it. Do you know why? Not because the mountains of scientific proof aren’t there. Not because it’s not happening. But because it’s not yet happening to us like they said it would in the movies and those worst-case scenario books. Where are the zombies? The ice forests? Where’s the tidal wave crashing over the Himalayas? I want my goddamn apocalypse, and I want it now.

Here’s another:

My God, did you hear that pathetic State of the Union? That guy, that President Obama? Disappointing times a thousand, am I right? What the hell happened to him? Why is he so weak and ineffectual? Why the hell can’t he step up and fix the entire planet in under 400 days like he promised he would, in my dreams and fantasies and impossible liberal grass-fed organic tofu greengasms? Doesn’t he know I put a goddamn bumper sticker on my Subaru for him? I’ve never done that for anyone. Bastard.

He’s only accomplished what, about 100 of the things I expected him to accomplish by now? Big deal. I have, like, 5,000 more. Health care reform has failed. Guantanamo is still open. Wars are still warring. Jobs are still sucking. Gays are still unhappy because the entire human understanding of love and gender in this nation has not completely transformed within a year. Infuriating!

And finally, this one really captures the heart of it:

You have but to take a peek in the comments section below this column, any column, any article on this or any news site whatsoever, to see just how mean and nasty we have become. It does not matter what the piece might be about. Obama’s speech. High speed rail. Popular dog breeds. Your grandmother’s cookies. The anonymous comments section of any major media site or popular blog will be so crammed with bile and bickering, accusation and pule, hatred and sneer you can’t help but feel violently disappointed by the shocking lack of basic human kindness and respect, much less a sense of positivism or perspective.

I remember when we started Brain Harvest and at first we had open comments. Good sweet Jesus what a bunch of fucking tools came out of the woodwork, dissatisfied unto the core of their very beings with the stories they were getting for free, after they came to our site of their own volition, and which no one was forcing them to read. The most surprising thing about the whole affair was how much it _bothered_ me, how much I cared as wave after wave of vitriol and condemnation washed over us for incubating in our hearts the abominable notion of paying people money to write good short fiction.

Ugh. What a diagnosis.

From here via Kottke.

I remember when, if you went to a cafe, it was filled with weirdos and creative people — wannabe writers, idiot philosophers, the occasional friends catching up or couples on a date. Now it’s filled with all these business choads having their ‘meetings’ and talking about their ‘opportunities’, and semi-literate retards browsing the web and playing minesweeper.

You fucking choads are taking up the tables which I was sitting at before you even knew there was a fucking internet, okay? When you were investigating the possibilities of network marketing and selling crap jewelry, I was doing Important Work over there, and now all the spots are taken up by your gay briefcases and stupid Dell laptops that you barely even know how to use.

Fucking dicks. Go back to your stupid offices to make your stupid phone calls.

Unfortunately for celiac patients, the extra cost of a special diet is not reimbursed by health care plans. Nor do most policies pay for trips to a dietitian to receive nutritional guidance.

In Britain, by contrast, patients found to have celiac disease are prescribed gluten-free products. In Italy, sufferers are given a stipend to spend on gluten-free food.

Some doctors blame drug makers, in part, for the lack of awareness and the lack of support. “The drug makers have not been interested in celiac because, until very recently, there have been no medications to treat it,” said Dr. Peter Green, director of the Celiac Disease Center at Columbia University. “And since drug makers are responsible for so much of the education that doctors receive, the medical community is largely unaware of the disease.”

My hackles raise. I’d rather have no health care at all, like during those years when Monica and I had no health insurance, then subject myself to this crap.

(From a Times Article via Steve.)

To summarize: they call me, and then expect me to wait till it’s convenient for them to process me. This practice isn’t unheard of – in other corners of reality sometimes Important People will have their Personal Assistants make calls for them; the phone rings, you pick up and hear: “Please hold for Ryan Houle.” This is annoying but way less so. First, because at least you’re being called by a real human who you could presumably yell at or tell to fuck off. Second, you only have to hold for Ryan Houle for five seconds. In the case of my robo-caller, I once waited for a minute and a half before hanging up.

If I’m not careful this will drive me into a rage out of sheer principle. Imagine someone showing up at your door, knocking, and when you answer it he’s on his cell phone and lets you know, via hand gestures, that he’ll probably be with you pretty soon, or maybe not, but you should just stand there and wait patiently till he is.

Imagine for a second that I do wait on hold, I do talk to them and tell them to quit calling me, and they don’t. What can I do? What recourse do I have? For all practical purposes nothing can be done. I could rant and rave to the person on the other end, and the person on the other end would say: hey, I just sit at this desk and take calls when they’re switched to me, I don’t have any control over anything, don’t blame me, I just work here. And in a way that person would be right.

In a way everybody’s right: the Somali pirates are right, the guys at the power company who come out to repair the exchange for the electric chair to electrocute people for crimes they didn’t commit, they’re right, the guy at the gun shop who sells to the drug runners is right, the guy who finds an unpopulated in nook in Idaho where his company will dump its waste, he’s right. Everybody’s right. Everybody’s justified, everybody’s just doing his job.

Hi -

Here are your password guidelines:

Passwords must contain at least:
Eight to fourteen characters (letters, numbers, and symbols)
Two numbers or symbols in the first eight characters
3 letters in the first eight characters
Five different characters

Passwords must not contain:
The following symbols: @, #, &
Doubled numbers or symbols (e.g., 99 or %%)
Words or names spelled forwards, backwards, or in a foreign language
A Social Security number in the first nine characters of the password
Words constructed with similar-looking number substitutions (e.g., 0 for O, $ = for S, 1=20 for i), as in: capta1nk1rk, mr5p0ck=20

I realize that you, whoever you are reading this, probably had nothing to do with coming up with these guidelines. But I just wanted to take a minute and point out how completely stupid they are, and perhaps you will be motivated to find whoever _did_ come up with them and staple his or her head to his or her desk.

Guidelines like these make idiots feel good because they seem very “secure.” But they are less secure, by a lot, because they require so much contorted password construction, so unlike your normal password construction, that you have to write the thing down in a Google document because you have no chance of remembering it along with the ten thousand _other_ passwords in retarded formats other “experts” have decided that you need.

So at the end of the day you have a very insecure system, far less secure than if you omitted the hardassed policy.

Short version: this isn’t the fucking Pentagon. Pretending that it is makes everyone LESS secure, not more.

Naturally this won’t change anything, but now I feel better.

Shane

Despite the tone of this letter, I am actually doing very well.

…the persistence of these educational achievement gaps imposes on the United States the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.

A quote of a quote. See it here.

The point, less subtly: a hell of a lot of people don’t get that when liberals are whining about educating the poor and giving health care to the unwashed masses, it’s not just about touchy-feely human decency. PEOPLE WHO ARE EDUCATED AND HEALTHY ARE THE BIGGEST RESOURCE IN ANY COUNTRY. ESPECIALLY NOW. PAYING CASH UP FRONT TO INCREASE THE NUMBER OF HEALTHY EDUCATED PEOPLE IS LIKE BUYING DOLLARS FOR NICKELS.

Whew. Sorry.

In the interests of the fairness for which I am so justly famous, I will admit that if you make a lot of money and have stable employment and will continue to have stable employment until you die, then this is Not Your Problem. Congratulations to you.

So if you find yourself saying the “aches and pains” are just a natural part of getting old, time to stop and realize that it is NOT natural. There is nothing natural about increased inflammation and joint pain. There is nothing natural about someone’s memory going as they get old. There is nothing natural about sexual impotence in your 40s. These are all signs that the body isn’t working correctly and steps need to be taken. But first we need to stop thinking that getting older means we have to experience these problems. There are many people who are still sharp as a tack, energetic and have no need for pain killers in their later years. As an old saying goes “It’s ok to get older….just don’t age in the process”.

Now, obviously a lot of health problems are elective, and come back to diet. If you’re an idiot, you will go on to say that they are all elective. If you’re not an idiot, and you know anything about memory research (for instance) or brain physiology you’ll know that actually, there is something eminently natural about memory getting bad as you get old. Even the older “sharp as a tack” people you know have very obvious and measurable signs of cognitive decline. Does this mean we’re all destined to become doddering fools? Obviously not. Does it mean that a great deal of improvement is possible? Obviously so. But of course that doesn’t make such good copy.

For an even stupider and more obviously ridiculous example, see his point #3.

Different person, different topic, same stupidity.

But the problem of saying “I don’t have time to read that” applies to anything – it could be blogs but it could be those really long articles in the Atlantic that scream: “I know no one is reading this article! I only wrote it to get a book deal!”The reality is that you have time to read everything.

Here’s what to do if you feel like you can’t get a grip on your reading pile:

Stop talking about information overload. That term is for weaklings. Guess what? Generation Y never talks about information overload. That’s because they know how to process information better than anyone else. That’s actually what they were doing when their parents told them to turn off the TV and the music and log off of IM and do their homework.

If you think you have time to read everything worth reading, you’re not a savvy information consumer, you’re a fucking retard. A hundred years ago nobody could read everything worth reading, and now you can’t even read everything worth reading in your own field, whatever that might be. Pretending that you can use some badass “Generation Y” strategy to get around this means only that one of the defining traits of Gen Y must be brain damage. And don’t even get me started on this “multi-tasking” bollocks. Unless you define multi-tasking as “doing a variety of things at the same time except slower and worse than if I had done each of them individually one right after the other” then common sense, and all the research, points the other way.

I don’t mind so much people saying stupid shit; what gets to me, for some reason, is the legion of commenters who always pop up saying: “thanks for another great post!1!! this is exzactly what ive always known and im frowarding it to a thousand of my frendz!! u r an inspiration to everyone!” These people should be rounded up and sent to work camps, where their reality-denying could be put to better use.