Posh and Gnosh

Well then, so all is done and done, quite beyond my control so I chalk it up as spilled milk. The perpetrator of my immediate pain recently asked me, "Can we still be friends?" Such a difficult question to ask someone who you have chosen to lie to in the most complete way, and equally difficult to answer said question. Time I guess, but these things for me are rarely forgiven and so far I have received no explanation or excuses to ponder.

There then I have spent a good amount of time diverting my attention from being mortally wounded to various distractions that come to mind and out of pocket. Bought a suit yesterday which makes me happy, but I will get to that in a moment. I bought some fencing gear, which also warrants its own paragraph. I will be rebuilding my computer. Of late it has been a lame duck, devices at random not working properly and lockups happening at random. I surely blame the power supply which could be replaced, but ever since the mini ATX motherboards have come out I have been yearning for a new case mod and an even more portable system than the current flashy incarnation. I should be able to salvage many of the parts of the old machine making it a fairly painless transition. And then how should I mod it? I have seen people put these in old NES cases and such. That, I guess, will be for later.

So the suit. My friend Brian has a plan. It involves entering in to a particular business establishment that is on the whole focused on the exploitation of masculine impulses. You may guess the nature of this place, but I am attempting to use high-brow big words in this blog and breaking character at this point would make me so very low. Previously Brian had made his foray into this establishment with an accomplice of his posing as a bodyguard of sorts, staving off questions of "who is he" and "could you sit down please", and additionally visually providing all of the required funds to partake in the general activity of the event. This that the effect of Brian looking quite the man. That is to say, quite the RICH man, to have a bodyguard fronting your coin for you while you lounge so in the presence of such an atmosphere. It eventually attracted quite a lot of attention, which is to be expected. Apparently as soon as coin and bill enter this establishment, it is instantly attuned to a sort of unscientific feminine magnetism. The assumption here though is that the air or riches the two of them were putting on so effectively extended that magnetism quite beyond the limits of his pockets, and into theoretical locations of vastness, nomenclated with specific numbers to identify their account. In the end of this, our man Brian had procured a phone number in fact without the nuisence of asking for it. The next day a meeting was arranged that proved to be the sort that usually requires more than a first date. So then, we are to make an appearance into this place with my recently purchased suit (which the purchase of has only partial relation to) and some nice clothes of his own. We plan on a somewhat similar expedition. Now as underhanded as all this may seem, do consider the place we will be. We are merely reversing the exploitation; from desire for pleasure into money to desire for money into pleasure. Quite simple really, and in my case I find it quite fitting.

Now the fencing equipment. This month I will be working with Mike Donegan at the Renaissance Faire at Casa De Fruita. In the fencing booth in fact and is do wish it of all things. For the chance to meet new people and make new friends is high on my list of priorities. Additionally there tend to be much in the way of un-modest displays of the ladys' bosom and the application of corsets abound. No doubt this makes my smile shine.

Rants:

As always, I am loathe to watch commercials. The latest ones I find offensive are the "Employee Discount" auto commercials that every auto manufacturer has decided is the most likely way to make people buy cars. Now, who among us, raise your hands if it is so, believes that there is actually a chance that there ever was an existing employee discount enforced by the auto manufacturers to the dealerships, and that they are now actually giving that discount to us the consumer? Anybody? I surely hope not. It is complete and utter crap. There is no such thing and I am personally offended that it is so widely believed that anyone, let alone everyone would be deceived by such a lame ruse. All of the schemes, the 0.0% financing, $5000 cash back, blah, blah, at least THOSE schemes were telling the truth, or at least obfuscating it with something tangible. This one is just a blatant lie!

Hacks. There is a recent term in the tech world, "hack". Never has a word spanned so many meanings before as this. It is used as a derogatory term for a computer criminal, a presige term for someone who is exceptionally savvy with computers, a term for someone who is completely inept at their chosen profession, and now the newest meaning is taking something and modifying it to do something else or do something better than it originally did. Now this is fine and good, but there tends to always be a little over-stepping of a term like this and now the term is everywhere. For example there was an article claiming someone had "hacked" a light bulb to glow after the electricity was cut off. In fact this object was never altered, it was manufactured that way and therefore not a "hack". I have no idea why this vexes me so.

Intelligent Design. Now I am all for everyone having freedom of religion, and I think as a country we pull it off rather well in comparison to others. The problem is I also do believe in the concept of church and state. Very much so. I am still quite unhappy that our money in fact supports a particular religion. I was wan to utter the "under god" part of the national anthem in school. I would actually go silent for that line because I believed it defied the basic principles of the country's founding documents. Not it's founding fathers obviously who hypocritically printed these moneys, but yes I think the founding documents themselves had it right. Lately these rights are being excepted and defiled and it doesn't make me happy. It doesn't make me proud to be an American. The latest affront to my senses is actually a combination of combining church and state, and combining church and science. Several state school boards across our nation are debating the forced teaching of Intelligent Design in our science classrooms. The summary of what that is: A "scientific" theory with absolutely no imperical evidence that states that the Christian god created the world 6000 years ago, dinasaurs and all. Carbon 14 dating, potassium dating, 'He' reaches down and changes those test results to confuse us. Really! That's what it says! It was fabricated entirely by the Christian church as a way to shoehorn Christian teachings into public schools. Attempting to fly the flag of science without actually being science, it relies entirely on the fact that the theory cannot be disproven. This is by definition, faith. That doesn't stop some very conservative states like Kansas from trying to vote this measure in and force science teachers to teach it along with evolution. Now what happened as a result of this is nothing less than amazing. I am completely floored! Please take the time to read about The Flying Spaghetti Monster, you won't be dissapointed. [This link isn't working for me right now, because of high traffic ot the Christian hackers are sending DOS attacks on it. Here are some other links on it: Wikipedia, some very creative person that makes me smile]. The gist of the FSM is it is basically a parody of the Intelligent Design theory with some words replaced with silly stuff (but not any more silly than the stuff in ID). The FSM created everything 6000 years ago, including midgets, and whenever anyone does a carbon 14 test his noodley appendage reaches down and changes the test results. His followers worship him in full pirate regalia because pirates reduce global warming. There is a graph PROVING this by showing the correlation between decreasing pirate population and increasing global warming. This is done in the spirit of the "scientific data" presented by Intelligent Design. Anyway, this Flying Spaghetti Monsterism is really taking off. It is on every blog, every web page, t-shirts, mugs, FSM shaped fish for cars. It is the greatest meme singe the badgerbadgerbadger song. Meanwhile, our beloved president has endorsed the policy of teaching faith based "sciences" in public science classes. Okay, so the FSM thing is a meme, but it is a little more. So many people are writing about it and using it to make Kansas the laughing stalk of the nation that there are high hopes that it will eventually dissuade the school boards from forcing our kids to learn about god in science class. That's enough on that, but yes I am really irritated by the ID thing on the whole.

Wow, I sure was long winded today. Until next time...

-Aaron