Awesome Lifehack!

Never be late to work again by using this one easy hack:

• Leave for work in the pre-dawn hours of New Year's Eve.

Traffic will be almost non-existent and you can pretty much guarantee to cut your commute in half. Use the extra time you save in the morning to work on some side projects and wow your boss.

The drawback is that this can only be done once a year and you'll have to fit 2,000 hours of work into one day, so be sure to bring a well-constructed to-do list with you. If your job involves providing periodic updates - like issuing quarterly financial statements - be prepared for a healthy amount of educated guessing and outright fabrication. 

Also take time to schedule your calendar until next December 31st. You won't be able to attend any meetings so make sure you're booked solid.

Nibiru Ascends!

I try to keep a log of minor accomplishments throughout the year so when I'm feelin' down I can say "Hey! I got out of bed three days in a row! Back in June. I'm doin' pretty good!"

With that in mind I'd like to make public another accomplishment:

• 12/21/2012: End of world postponed.

You're welcome!

We Can Vote!?

Non-felony convicted Americans will choose the leader of the free world tomorrow. 

This is the human who will represent us when aliens invade and demand to speak to our leader. 

If you are reading this but are not in the free world then don't worry. You can skip this post.

According to the rhetoric, we are trying to select the candidate for the most important job in the human race. As such, we would want to be well informed. 

Google

To aid in that effort, Google has created an election center where you (Americans and curious foreigners) can go see what's up. 

https://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/home

It's very flashy and they have a lot of interactive maps and infographics you can poach but mostly it's good if you want to see what state was traveled to the most - and by whom!

There's a ton of links to news articles and some YouTube crap I'm not going to bother with but that's not really different than just using Google Regular. Although they do have info on your local polling spots and who's going to be on the ballots. That's good to know because in spite of popular belief, you can't just go to the courthouse and scream your vote at the top of your lungs. 

Also considering how many other people are on the ballot, you'd find you quickly tire of voting in this manner. They put judges and stuff on there. What's that about?

OnTheIssues.org

This next site is a .org so you're guaranteed total neutrality:

http://www.ontheissues.org/default.htm

But it's really ugly. I kept looking.

CNN

Here we go, CNN comes to the rescue:

http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/campaign-issues.html

You can click on a topic - we'll pick Guns - and then see what each candidate has said via direct quotes about it. There's also a pretty lengthy synopsis on each of their stances and whether there's any "buts" or "howevers" that need to be considered. Incidentally, both guys are way for guns. Totally. No one is taking any guns away or anything so don't go nuts for carbon fiber compound bows and hunting crossbows unless you're doing research for elaborate Walking Dead/Hunger Games fanfic.

Erotic fanfic.

Send me that fanfic when it's done - I'll proofread it for free.

Anyway I guess the lack of absolutes is fair, since they can't just say "vote for this guy 'cause we like him" and retain any semblance of impartiality. 

Fox News

Speaking of impartial, Fox News has something similar but it sucks. Not helpful. 

ISideWith.com*

You can go for isidewith.com. They have a quiz and everything and then at the end you can see who to vote for. 

Also helpful: You can see who 4chan is going to vote for and then, as in all matters related to 4chan, do the exact opposite.

The opposite of  the Libertarian candidate would be the anarcho-fascist candidate I guess... so that's a tricky one.

"I Side With" covers the tough issues, like whether or not you believe in evolution. 

Some insight into the algorithm* they use would be good, in the interest of transparency...

Especially since I just took the quiz and they told me to vote for the Green party! There may have been a "Come on, stop fucking around" button I missed that limits the results to Obama or Romney.

Or, as your uncle may call them, No-Bama and Willard. 

So in conclusion, I think ISideWith.com is going to be the best bet for what is an online quiz to help you decide who to vote for. There's very little reading involved.

In fact, of all the sites I listed I'd say there's the least amount of reading involved with that one. In that regard, I can't recommend it enough. 

By and large, the Internet as represented through big sites like reddit (and the aforementioned 4chan) seems to think it's going Libertarian this year. That can't possibly be right so I imagine they'll work their way down the list of candidates and vote for the first non-joke one.

Also, did you know that there's a Justice party and and Constitution party? That's a pretty good move. You might be able to not vote for a Republic in favor of a Democracy but can you really vote against Justice? 

I'm actually helping out with the "No Kicks in the Nuts" party in 2016 because if you don't vote for no kicks in the nuts, then you're voting for more kicks in the nuts. I'm pretty sure that election is going to be a blowout.

*Notes:

I hate typing stuff in camelcase but URLs can become unreadable if you don't. So, that sucks.

Also, ISideWith does allow you to drill down into specific statements candidates have made that figure into the maths they use. That's good if you like reading. Nerd. 

f(x) = George Romero

George Romero is hailed as a luminary of horror. This being Halloween, it seems appropriate to write about him.

Night of the Living Dead is widely regarded as a masterpiece and was groundbreaking for its notable blah blah blah. Everyone agrees it's good. I knew it was good before I even saw it.

Then I saw it and I thought, "Hey, that was pretty good."

And I assumed George Romero was dead because I am... often mistaken.

But he's not! He's very much still alive (as of this writing) and still putting out movies.

And that's where the problems arise.

People should listen to George Romero because he wrote and directed Night of the Living Dead. But people shouldn't have kept giving him blank checks to create heavy-handed quasi social commentary in the form of zombie movies.

His movies got worse. Not even like, "I read the wikipedia synopsis of them and they sound like they got much worse."

It's a fact, with numbers and stuff.

Regardez:

The data from Rotten Tomatoes for the "...of the Dead" series:

I didn't include 1990's Night of the Living Dead (written by George Romero but directed by Tom Savini) because it's a remake. 

I did include other films he did not direct but wrote if they fall into the same Noun of the Adjective Dead series because I feel like George Romero owns that and is ultimately responsible for it.

"...Of the Living Dead" Rotten Tomato Scores Over Time with Trend-line

Edward Tufte would kill me for using line widths greater than 1pt but i felt like splurging. The trend-line, in black, is clearly heading down. Wayyyyyy down.

In fact if we plot the x-intercept for this graph we find that his movies should already be getting Rotten Tomato scores in the negative numbers. It would have hit zero somewhere in the 2010 timeframe.

What I'm losing sight of is perhaps the most important thing of all:

He can really rock a pair of gigantic old-man glasses.

To be fair he did kind of create the iconic modern zombie that has absolutely saturated pop culture... and that's perhaps reason enough to let him keep directing whatever he wants. No matter how poorly it scores.

Terrible Idea IV

Martini Glass Coffee Mug

This wouldn't be a mug, as such, but a glazed ceramic martini glass.

Why is it Terrible?

It would possess a number of qualities that make for a terrible coffee vessel:

• Lots of surface area
• Doesn't hold much liquid
• Super tippy
• Difficult to hold without burning hand

Potential?

No. There's no potential to this idea. I'd hate to receive something like this, even as a gag gift. Too inelegant for a proper martini and too stupid to drink coffee out of. Let this concept be stricken from the minds of novelty glassware manufacturers in perpetuity.

MC Rhymesomuch

There is a large segment of the population for whom rap is synonymous with a caricature of Run DMC.

To rap, you kind of do something like:

I'm MC Punchful and I'm here to say/ I'm gonna rock the rhymes in a punchful way!

You do a back and forth thing with your hands and kind mug your face like you're trying to look tough.

Now you're rapping, now!

I try to stay away from any kind of analysis regarding rap/hip-hop because I'm still convinced that it's impossible to do without coming across as:

• pompous
• a failed satirist
• racist?
• funny ten years ago

I already paved the way in another post discussing the efforts of 2 Chainz and Kanye, and I've addressed an earnest desire to recognize some of Eminem's choicer work. That was relegated to Purgatory but I think it's time to let it through the gates.

This is from "A Kiss" from Hell: The Sequel. The song is (the album, really) split between Eminem and Royce da 5'9". 

Okay I already feel like I'm in over my head.

No! I will remain resolute and continue. 

Here we go, "A Kiss". 

A one-night stand is all he wants with a female fan, yeah one like Stan/ And he's so about a one night stand, his bedroom has two lamps/ And only one nightstand(...)

There's no antecedent to the pronoun in the first line but he fixes that by describing "he" as "one like Stan". Stan's Eminem's alter ego - lot's of rappers have one so that's not too big a deal.

The rhyming here is solid but the part I really enjoy is the one night stand/one nightstand bit.

Night stand and nightstand are homonyms kind of except it's spread across two words. I'm more impressed with this kind of visual pun. You got a bedroom? Reading lamp? Stick it on a nightstand. So if you have two lamps and just the one nightstand your plan would then involve bedding women who were so perceptive that their train of thought would go: "Bedroom, huh? That's odd that there's two lamps in here but only the one nightstand. One nightstand? Wait, this is a one night stand!"

Pretty good.

One more song from the same album and then I'm going to go crawl back into obscurity. From Lighters:

I love it when I tell ‘em shove it/ cuz it wasn’t that, long ago when Marshall sat flustered lacked luster/ cuz he couldn’t cut mustard/ muster up nuthin’, brain fuzzy cuz he’s buzzin’ woke up from that buzzer/ now you wonder why he does how he does it, wasn’t cuz he had buzzards/ circlin’ ‘round his head waitin’ for him to drop dead was it?/ or was it ‘cuz them bitches wrote him off, little hussy ass scuzzes/ fuck it, guess it doesn’t matter now does it?/

The king of this verse is [z]; the queen is [s]. Every line has a "z" or "s" sound and they all kind of flow together to make this very dense sounding verse. It stands out from everything before and after it. It's delivered quickly but not obnoxiously fast. It's just... all of those alveolar fricatives (voiced and voiceless) hit the ear in a very unique way.

And he wrote it! And it's not apparent from how it's written how it will end up sounding. You have to say it out loud (to yourself, quietly) to really get it.

"Does it", "was it",  "...it cuz" etc. He's fully taken the way we turn these phrases into words; we mash them together in most informal speech - and brought them to fit right in with "scuzzes" and "buzzards" and "fuzzy". Very good. It's very clever, I think.

Conclusion

Peace! We outta here!

::drops mic::

Skinny Cow

I've never really been sure how to write this post, which would be why it has sat empty, in my drafts, for nearly a year.

I've decided a direct approach is best.

Skinny, the cow from Skinny Cow, is hot.

Proof?



Sourcey!

She's a stone cold fox, whether perched coyly on an ottoman or lounging poolside.



This is their 404 error page!

And she's not above sharing some saucy Polaroids, either.



"Media" page

She keeps that measuring tape strategically positioned though, right? Or... I dunno. Skinny seems to possess only the female form and - for better or for worse - no anatomy that would require any unpleasant compromises.

Actually the more I look at these pictures the more I can imagine the mind of Skinny's illustrator; their brainstorming checklist:



Coffee stains and everything!

How well did they do?


No resemblance!

Thanks, college!



More importantly (most importantly,) could I have done better?

Part of what kept me from writing this post was that I kept thinking I was going to redraw Skinny, but chestier. That now seems like it's territory better left undiscovered. I find solace in the fact that if I had a client ask me for a "sexy, fit cow-lady" I could do no better than Skinny.

Although if we're talking about non-human food mascot relations, I think you could do better than Skinny.

I'd go with 50's era Chicken of the Sea Mermaid.

Hell yes. And that sailor would too.

source

New and Noteworthy

Dante's pal Virgil was born today. Thanks to him, Dante was able to escape from a series of allegory-heavy vignettes of sinners and then do whatever happens in the third book of the Divine Comedy that no one reads.

It's Heaven, right?

Happy Birthday too to Friedrich Nietzsche, writer of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Without him, we wouldn't have a title for the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Also today, Lee Iacocca was born! Iacocca is best known for creating wheeled fuel-bombs known as "Pintos" and sending them zipping around America's roadways. Also he designed the Ford Mustang so, that's something. That was before Mustangs sucked (Mopar all the way, baby!).

Lee Iacocca shares a birthday with Emeril Lagasse.

Boooooooo, Emeril Lagasse!

You do a disservice to other October 15th birthday celebrants.

October 15th is also the feast day of St. Hedwig of Silesia! This is not noteworthy in any specific way, and St. Hedwig is not the patron saint of anything. But I figured I'd give her a shout out as I imagine she doesn't come up much in conversation.

According to the New York Times, on this day in 1860,

"Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, N.Y., wrote a letter to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, suggesting he could improve his appearance by growing a beard."

Growing a beard is fine advice, regardless of whether or not you're President!

Happy Birthday y besos to all other October 15th Libras.

The Houston Connection

Or, further proof that everything old is new again.

88 Lines about 44 Women came up in my running play list the other day. The playlist is generated based on BPM; I'm not sure that I would have picked that song otherwise.

It's pretty good though, it's got a very persistent beat. Good for running.

Anyway the song is a series of couplets - 44, specifically - about 44 different women. Wikipedia tells me it's by The Nails. It's possible the only thing of note they contributed to the musical landscape but I can't attest to that.

You get lines like:

"Zilla was an archetype/ the voodoo queen, the queen of rap."

or 

"Jean-Marie was complicated/ like some French film maker's plot."

Ho ho ho. The song is all very New Wave and clever and then I hear:

"Patty had a house in Houston/ shot cough syrup in her veins"

Houston!

Syrup!

Alright, so this song came out in 1984. That's the first reference to Houston and cough syrup that I'm now aware of. Before that, it was the entirety of Three Six Mafia's discography, but specifically 2001's "Sippin' on Some Syrup". 

What the hell were they talking about? Being in high school and also not living in Houston or having an encyclopedic knowledge of regional US drug culture I had no idea about the close ties that Houston-area rappers had to codeine (or similar) cough syrup (mixed with soda, I forgot that part). "Lean" - on account of it makes you super sleepy and you're leaning over. Tremendous! I then went through a brief period of downloading chopped and screwed remixes of songs from Napster. That would be - playing songs at have speed and chopping them up on turntables. It's sounds like what "about to fall asleep" feels like. I'm sure it's an excellent complement to being out of your mind and struggling to stay awake on prescription strength Oxycontin cough syrup.

In fact... I remember now that one of my earliest blogs (which was then known as a homepage (which furthermore was hosted on AOL or somewhere shitty)) had a rather lengthy rant regarding censorship of references to weed on the radio and MTV - but no problems with an entire song about what amounted to just another drug. I wanted to be the guy that said "Hey! You know that song? About syrup? Did you know it's called drank and it's about this cough syrup that these rapper guys drink? And it's Houston?" I was that guy in high. I still kind of am that guy, unfortunately. 

I think this post attests to that.

Continuing: Cough syrup! I had no idea that this was even a thing and then it turns out that there had been a whole subculture surrounding the abuse of cough syrup that I wasn't privy to. It was like a curtain had been opened. 

Then, eleven years after that song came out I hear an even older song that further cements the ties between Houston and cough syrup. The curtain is pulled back further! But also I realize that Three Six Mafia wasn't onto anything new in 2001 if The Nails beat them to it by fourteen years.

Wheels within wheels, man.

But Why?

Houston is awful. It's 100 degrees year round and the humidity tops 100% most days, based on my exaggerated impressions of a town I've been to once. 

I imagine the bay is slick with a rainbow sheen of oil and everyone there who doesn't work for a struggling energy company lives next to Paul Wall and Mike Jones and hangs out with Slim Thug and UGK at 59 South Lee. 

Why cough syrup? Why mix it with soda? Why does Houston make people want to escape reality in such a unique and candy-sweet fashion? 

I expect I'll never know.