“In another attempt to ease the crunch on motor fuel supplies, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would temporarily allow retailers nationwide to sell gasoline and diesel that does not meet stringent summer air-quality standards.”
Archive for August, 2005
This article is worth the price of admission for the following quote alone:
A piercing scream cuts through the quiet of the countryside as a chav receives a buttfull of plastic ball bearings.
I’ve posted about the ramblings of Silver Jews’ frontman, David Berman, before and I thought this recent Pitchfork interview might be interesting for people to read as well. It’s full of typical Berman nuggets like the following:
On his future wife:
“I had seen a picture of Cassie in Melody Maker. She was playing bass with M somewhere in Europe. I really got a heavy feeling looking at the picture. There’s probably a German word for it.”
On food:
“Right now, I’m always thinking about this place on Gallatin. Eastside Fish. They have a sign says the ‘crunkest fish in town.’ The crust is fuckin’ out of control.”
On AIM:
Berman: My arguments against AIM:1. It’s gay.
2. You got a lot of stuff already.
3. The finish line was July 31.
Great article here about the Cabazon Dinosaurs (as seen in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure!) and how their new owner is turning them into a creationism-themed museum. Also some great stuff from a guy who is trying to prove that live Pterodactyls exist in Papua New Guinea. He claims that he’s made several sightings, “but all the sightings were made after dark, and we were not able to capture the creatures.” LOL. The best part of this article though is the name of the kid in the last two paragraphs.
Well, The Pretenders were talking about suburban sprawl, but despite twenty-five odd years of end-stage capitalism run amok it seems that nature is still much quicker and more effective at utterly wrecking a city.
Good coverage here and here. And they’re taking donations here and here (Though the Red Cross one seems to be slow as hell. Hopefully that’s a good sign. =)
“We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.”
- James G. Watt, 1983
“I’ve got several gay men, a couple of lesbian women, a couple of Islamic volunteers, I’ve got a physically handicapped woman, and a woman who has been living on social security benefits for many years in real poverty.”
- Jan Krol, 2005
[UPDATE] A bit more explanation is perhaps in order here. The first quote is something I heard on a tv show about Reagan at some point. The guy who delivered it (Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior) was a total dick and was forced to resign about 10 days later. (Though in a lot of ways his nutso evangelical Christian background would probably fit in real well with the current administration). Anyway, his delivery of the line was so odd that it stuck in my head, and it’s one of those things that whenever I hear somebody listing stuff off, I subconsciously add “a woman, two jews and a cripple” to the end of it. (In the same way that say, “Dogs & Cats… Living together!” from Ghostbusters is my mental sort of shorthand for, “Man, this situation is getting totally screwed up!”) So the point of all this is, when I read the second guy’s quote on BoingBoing yesterday, it instantly reminded me of the first one. But it’s sort of amusing, since the second guy is actually trying to do something sort of admirable with his lesbian and islamic volunteers. Well, that about does her, wraps her all up, I guess. Oh, except the first guy’s middle name is Gaius. So there’s that. =)
From the introduction to The Outbursts of Everett True (1906):
We’re all of us mollycoddles—more or less.
We have a valuable hour which somebody wearies away in recitals of troubles with his furnace. We look pleasant when a neighbor hurls at us the “bright sayings of his little Willie (ed. hehe). We graciously permit a man to give the hot air treatment to some question of politics—and dinner growing colder every minute. We tolerate the nuisance and the boor, even smiling, at times, instead of resenting intrusions and impertinences.
And all for the sake of peace.
Everett True lacks our weakness in treatment of the human pest. He is a living protest against the incarnate irritants that are with us always. He is not a reformer, but rather an executioner, inflicting punishment where he comes in contact with fit subjects of penal treatment.
Mr. True’s victims call him a “grouch.” In reality he is a humanitarian.
Everett True kicks so much ass it’s unbelievable!
(via BoingBoing)
Previously there have been two RSS feeds available on antinomian.com, one was RSS version 0.91, and the other was version 1.0. Neither included complete entries, graphics or even HTML links! Well, the 0.91 version was not doing anybody a damn bit of good, so I just converted it to RSS 2.0 the other day (as the acronym implies, it was really simple… All I had to do was replace and rename my existing 0.91 template with Movable Type’s default RSS 2.0 template) Anyway, the point is, if you were subscribing to the 1.0 feed, as the lesser of two evils, then you’ll probably want to switch to using the 2.0 one, now that it’s available. If you were using the 0.91 one, then you should have noticed the change already. To figure out which one you were using, note the filename extension. RDF is for the 1.0 feed, and XML is the 2.0 one. That is all. We now return you to your regularly schedule programming, already in progress.
You may recall my long-winded rant about getting fucked around by various medical records companies a few weeks ago. Well I’m happy to report that I got most of that stuff cleared up, but what’s really fantastic is this. As I mentioned in the original post, Unicare and ENH Medical group actually turned out to be quite helpful, meaning that the true asshole in the process was the mysterious “RSA Medical” group, that was supposed to retrieve the records from ENH and deliver them to Unicare. Well, when I tried finding contact info for them on the web, the only site I could pull up was some vague and unhelpful thing at rsamedical.com, which I’m not even sure if it’s the same company, such is the unhelpfulness of the site. So the great thing is, there must be a lot of other people in my situation, trying to get a hold of RSA Medical (presumably so they can call and scream at them for being total douchebags =) because my entry *about* RSA Medical is now on the first page of results that comes up when you search for them on Google! Eat Santorum, you dicks!
At Borders (and every other store nowadays) they’re always saying, “Do you want to sign up for our email newsletter? It contains valuable coupons and other promotions!” And I’m always like, “No thanks. I’m sure you guys are being straight with me about this, but since there are a lot of guys out there that aren’t so reputable, I just usually don’t give out my email address for any mailing lists.” However, that’s not to say I wouldn’t be interested in reading the Borders newsletter (and using its valuable coupons!) I just don’t want to have to give out my personal info in order to do so. I know what you’re thinking. There’s an easy solution to this: RSS. Why doesn’t Borders just offer a newsfeed that I can subscribe to, and post their promotions and coupons in there? Well, rather than holding my breath waiting for that to happen, the idea of using an email to RSS gateway recently ocurred to me. And I just happen to know of a free one, located at the world’s most awesome website, dodgeit.com!
For those of you that don’t know, Dodgeit is a site where you can enter any username you want, and instantly receive email with that account. It’s totally unprotected, and it goes down a lot, but when you just need a phony email address for the purposes of signing up for some reg-required site (i.e. NYTimes), and you need that phony email to actually *work* (if only temporarily), then Dodgeit is the site for you.
Anyway, what makes Dodgeit really useful is that any email address you create there, gets an automatic RSS feed! So I signed up for Borders email newsletter with a Dodgeit address, and here’s the RSS link, if you feel like adding it to your newsreader:
http://dodgeit.com/run/rss?mailbox=borders
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