Vacation ending

Sigh! Tomorrow it's back to work -- at the new job, though, which will be exciting :). So this evening I'm getting everything together for moving into my new cubicle tomorrow...

- Badtux the Busy Penguin

Bedsheets

Shorter Tea Party: "We aren't racist because out of our hundreds of thousands of members, three or four of them are brown!"

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Kiwi Torch

New Zealand by way of London band Howling Bells with "A Ballad for Bleeding Hearts" off of their album Radio Wars. This relatively new band's output is somewhat uneven, but when they're good, they're good....

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Illegal immigrant crimelord caught!

A major illegal immigrant crime lord has been arrested. This illegal immigrant is notoriously vicious, known for beheading his enemies as he tried to assert control over a major drug cartel. But don't bother listening for Glen Beck or Lou Dobbs to use this guy as an example of why all illegal immigrants are criminals who should be rounded up and put into concentration camps... because "La Barbie" is an American, who committed his crimes in Mexico.

Yeppers. "La Barbie" is an illegal alien... in Mexico. The United States is the source of the guns, money, and in some cases even the manpower, that fuels the drug cartels in Mexico that have turned life down there into a living hell for many Mexicans. But for some reason ole' Weepy ain't so interested in that problem. Huh, go figger...

-- Badtux the Bedsheet-glimpsin' Penguin

Dashed hopes and regrets

Yes, I know I did a Dex Romweber Duo song just a couple of days ago, but this song just stuck to me because I know where Dex is coming from, us fat old farts know far too much about dashed hopes and regrets. This is the Dex Romweber Duo (Dex and his sister) with "People Places and Things" off of their recent album, Ruins of Berlin.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Breakfast of champions

Slaid Cleaves, "Breakfast in Hell" off his Broke Down CD. An old-fashioned working man's ballad.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

All it needs is an aircraft carrier and a Mission Accomplished sign

Just sayin'.

Anybody who thinks we're really leaving Iraq anytime soon is crazier than Weepy Beck. After all, there's oil in them thare sands... and Halliburton ain't finished suckin' it out.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Still alive

Just vacating. Err, vacationing. Getting body and soul ready for starting at the new job.

Here, have some fuzz on fuzz action:

Makes me sleepy just lookin' at it...

-- Badtux the Sleepy Penguin

Hopelessly sad

Townes van Zandt once said that his songs weren't sad, just hopeless. But can songs that make you cry be anything but sad?

This is "Marie".

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Fat man fuckin' *rocks*

Old fart Dexter Romweber and his sister (on drums) show what rock'n'roll is all about. He may be fat, and he may be old. But he knows how to thrash that antique axe of his and shout into the mike, and his sister knows how to pound them drums.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

It's a free country (*)

Today I made the trek to the Federal Building to apply for a replacement Social Security card. I made this trek because they need to see my government ID before they condescend to send me a card that isn't a government ID with a Social Security number that I provided them (i.e., I already know my SSN, all I need is the card to show my employer instead of my passport). I arrived at 1:30PM and promptly was directed to stand in a line outside the federal building. We were then called one at a time and subjected to the same screening that you get at airports to verify that we didn't have any stray nail files that might be used to gut a Social Security worker and that we had the proper papers to prove our identity to the satisfaction of the security screener. Then, and only then, were we allowed to enter the building and go to the almost-empty Social Security office (almost-empty because nobody was allowed to enter until somebody left the building). That was at 2:15PM for me.

I remember when you could just walk into a Social Security office, do your business, and walk out. But that was back when the Soviet Union was around, when the United States prided itself on being different from the Soviet Union. "In the Soviet Union", Reader's Digest proudly proclaimed, "you can't walk down the street without an armed police officer stopping you and asking you for your papers. We don't do that in free countries." For once, that right-wing loon DeWitt Wallace was right...

-- Badtux the Sovok Penguin
(*)For some definition of "free" that isn't in the dictionary.

Duty Meow for the Future

Only Devo would do a video where they play with a room full of cats in order to celebrate their first new album in, uhm, decades? Devolution, indeed! (Of course, the whole Bush II era is sorta proof of that, eh?)

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

BP and U.S. government colluding to protect BP?

Naw, it must be just a coincidence that independent researchers are being blocked from evaluating the effects of the Gulf blowout. Because the Obama administration is an eeeevil soshalist government thingy that hates big business, which is why they're making sure that nobody can independently refute BP and the U.S. government's claims about how peachy-keen everything in the Gulf is now that the well is capped...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Going to the beach....

It's too friggin' hot to hang around here.

Edit at 7:30PM: And I'm *BACK*. The wind shifted and it's now 75F at my duplex, after getting up past 95F by 1PM. Here, have some birds... the full-size pic would make a great screen background. - Badtux the overheated Penguin

Love

L.A. dream pop duo Devics, with their song "Song for a Sleeping Girl" from their 2006 album Push the Heart. Sadly, it appears they're no longer active... a shame, they had a number of well-written and gorgeous tunes...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

It is 101F in Santa Clara, CA

And it is 88F inside my house, thanks to the thermal mass of a bunch of masonry for the fireplace and the tile base in the bathroom. I shut up the house at 7AM this morning, when it was 66F inside after the window fans had been running all night pulling outside air through the house. The sad thing is that even 88F feels good compared to the outside temperature...

-- Badtux the Overheated Penguin

And it is done...

Today was the last day at my prior employer, I cleaned out my office this morning and handed in my keys, the rest of the time until the 31st is going to be taken from my PTO and sick leave while I take a little de-stressing vacation. On September 1, I start at my new employer. I spent 4 1/2 years at my prior employer and worked on a lot of cool things there, but the last thing we worked on just didn't get any market traction, alas. So it goes. Change simply is.

- Badtux the now Happily-employed Penguin

Madness

Baltimore band Lower Dens with their song "Rosie" from their first album, 2010's Twin-Hand Movement. Nice atmospherics, a bit tedious if you're not in the right herbal mood beforehand (if you know what I mean)...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

What a day!

I was basically talking non-stop from 9AM this morning to 5PM this evening. But things are looking up for me. It appears that within the next day or two, I'm going to get job offers from two different companies:

Company 1: A small but profitable company with 10 engineers in their engineering department.

Company 2: A division of a multi-billion-dollar large company that originated as an acquisition, with about 20 engineers in the division, and which is semi-independent but which is important to the main company's core strategies.

In both cases I liked the people I interviewed with, they liked me, and I'd be working with some cool technologies. I think I'd do well in either environment. Now my problem is deciding which of these I will choose. Now *that* is a problem to have!

-- Badtux the Somewhat-relieved Penguin

Ode to roots

This is the Raveonette's tribute to the debt they owe to the Ronettes, "Ode to LA". Ronnie Spector, who survived the Ronettes and Phil Spector, sings some of the vocals. The Raveonettes are a Danish duo who in this tune have created a remarkably American sound...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The zombie apocalypse

Last night I had a zombie apocalypse nightmare, albeit more of a Robert Heinlein style "slug" zombie than a traditional zombie. That is, these zombies were caused by a brain-eating parasite that resembled a mouse-sized slug and drilled into your brain, not by some sort of virus that was spread by biting.

The first we see of the zombies is the hero and heroine are in a hotel conference room and suddenly black oozy mouse-sized things burst in through the doors, along with shambling zombies. The hero pulls out a pistol and shoots a path through the zombies to the emergency exit, with the heroine covering his back with another pistol and rushing out behind him.

From that point on, things got a little less cohesive. You see slugs oozing toward them as they run to their cars in the parking lot. The hero and heroine spend a few lines trying to figure out what's happening and what they're going to do, but spot the slugs and jump into their respective cars just in time for the slugs to start slapping against the windows, and they drive off in different directions.

The heroine is in a *very* crowded Mini Cooper pulling one of those small "mini-car" teardrop trailers. Apparently she's been on the road for a long time. She drives a ways, finds a secluded spot, pulls off, and sleeps an hour or so. After that she heads to the rural area where she grew up, thinking perhaps there's more of a chance they're not infected yet, especially since everybody is well armed out there. She pulls into the driveway of the property she owns, and notices a dead body hanging out the door and leaves in a hurry. Rather than taking the main road, she takes a back road that leads to one of her relatives' homes. She passes a Sheriff's car sprawled across half the road, red lights still blinking, windshield smashed in, she can't tell where the deputy is, so she just speeds past. Finally she arrives at her relative's house, and the relative lets her in. The relative then tells her that a slug is eating into his brain, and she has only a minute or two to grab his deer rifle and blow his head off before the slug takes over and tries to kill her. She does that, and the spattered slug writhes a bit then dies.

She stocks up quickly on more guns and ammo, as well as filling her car from fuel cans, and heads toward the nearest city. She isn't breaking any laws but a patrol car comes up behind her with its bubble lights flashing. Remembering the Sheriff's Department car and the possibility that these might be zombies like her cousin that she had to kill, she keeps going until there is a second patrol car coming towards her with bubbles flashing. At that point she figures zombies don't coordinate well enough for that and pulls over.

So of course they pull her out of the car and roust her and she tries to explain what she has seen, including the slug in her cousin's brain (though in her version of the story the cousin pulled the trigger himself to commit suicide). They don't believe her.

And then I woke up.

What do penguins dream when penguins dream? Well, now you know. Nope, no idea how this story ends :).

-- Badtux the Nightmare Penguin

Okay, this is just crazy

From the Korea Times, we find that the U.S. government opposes a South Korean government desire to sell all their warehoused obsolete old M1 rifles and carbines to U.S. gun collectors.

At that point, the question is, WHY? Look at the two photos above. One is a popular semiautomatic .30-06 deer rifle, the Browning BAR ShortTrac. The other is the M1 Garand, a rifle designed in 1936 which is similarly a semiautomatic .30-06 rifle (semiautomatic means one trigger pull per shot -- like the deer rifle, the Garand was designed for people who were aiming, not for "pray and spray" dipshits). They have a virtually identical rate of fire. The BAR is slightly lighter, probably a bit more accurate due to its tighter tolerances (the M1's were stamped out by the millions during WW2 in factories that cared more about volume than about quality) and, because it is newer, the BAR is capable of accepting +P (high pressure) ammunition and thus has more stopping power than the M1 Garand.

In other words, there is no (zero) reason to disallow (re)importing the M1 Garand, other than typical Pentagon intransigence when it comes to our allies selling off military surplus weapons (most of the sales agreements we force upon our allies forces them to either destroy or return weapons for free to the Pentagon for disposal once they're no longer needed, a protectionist racket on behalf of U.S. arms manufacturers who don't want to have to compete with their own used weapons on the international market). And that intransigence doesn't even make sense in the case of the M1 Garand -- due to all the millions that flooded the market after WW2, the thing hasn't been manufactured for over 60 years, and compared to modern combat rifles it's a heavy slow-firing relic that nobody would want to use in combat, especially when you can buy a cheap stamped AK-47 made in any of a dozen nations that the Soviets gifted with AK-47 stamping plants for under $50 in most 3rd world marketplaces.

But my guess is that the Pentagon just jerked their knee and pointed to the lines in the policy manual that disallow reselling (foreign) military surplus to civilians. The problem is that this is giving the right wing yet another "Obama is banning guns!" headline. My advice to the Secretary of Defense: Find out who in your department is refusing to give clearance for the Koreans to resell these guns, and kick his butt until he issues a special waiver to the Koreans. Otherwise this is going to turn into a political nightmare for the Obama administration, because if you ban the bottom gun (the M1 Garand), it's really, really, really easy for political opponents to say that the Obama administration wants to ban the top gun (the Browning deer rifle) -- something that, as far as I know, is contrary to every policy position that has ever been released by the Obama administration.

-- Badtux the Well-armed Penguin

Lights

The Walkabouts, "The Light Will Stay On", a 1996 single collected on their 2003 "best of" album Shimmers. These folks were active from 1985 to 2005, yet nobody seems to have heard of them. Carla Torgerson can actually sing (and can *still* sing, there's an acoustic version of her singing this song in 2008 and it's just as good as the original), unlike the modern generation of pop tarts, and their music is gorgeous. Just chalk it up to another case of the music industry not being able to recognize quality...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Magic

90's indie band Drugstore with their song "White Magic for Lovers", off their 1998 album by the same name. For some reason these folks never got any love even though their music is pretty good....

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Phew, what a week!

I had two interviews this week which have led on to second interviews. I did the second round of interviews with one of those employers today. I do the second interview with the second employer Monday. And to make things even more complicated, I talked with another employer today who said he wants to arrange a round of interviews for me.

Of all these guys, the one I did today is the one I'd most like -- it's with a small but profitable company doing interesting things where you get to play with lots of cool technology and make it do things that make people want to buy. The second employer is a big company, but the division that I interviewed with has a strong manager and seems to be doing interesting things with network infrastructure and virtualization. The third employer is a startup, and is going to try to do what we originally wanted to do at my previous employer before the board of directors forced us to try to fit square pegs into round holes and sell into a market that the technology simply wasn't well suited for. I wouldn't mind trying to actually make that original vision work at a new company.

So anyhow, that was my week, and is why you didn't get any music this morning -- my queue finally ran empty. Here, have a pair of cats instead:

-- Badtux the Tired Penguin

Bonus new music: Saskia Sansom. Nothing of hers on Youtube yet, but click on the "music" tab and you can listen to some of her songs there...

Another creep

So I got some email from an Arizona Republican who wants my vote:

“While SB 1070 is not a panacea for illegal immigration, it is one of several tools at our disposal,” says Conservative Republican Bill Montgomery, who’s running for Maricopa County Attorney in the August 24, 2010, primary election. “I fully support SB 1070 and its full and fair enforcement

My reply:

I am not interested in receiving emails from bigots and liars. Please remove my email address from your list.

Yes, I was feeling polite today :).

-- Badtux the Polite Penguin

Blue

The band Chairlift with their song "Bruises"...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Headlines you don't expect

Now *this* is a story from from World Nut Daily that I didn't expect to see:

Ann Coulter has been dropped as a keynote speaker for WND's "Taking America Back National Conference" next month because of her plan to address an event titled "HOMOCON" sponsored by the homosexual Republican group GOProud that promotes same-sex marriage and military service for open homosexuals.

Wow, the wingnuts really *are* into purity testing, eh, when even Ann Coulter isn't conservative enough for them? Pretty sure the only people pure enough to be a real conservative will all be able to fit into a Volkswagen Beetle...

-- Badtux the Wingnut-observin' Penguin

Historical lettuce

1990's indie band Salad, with "Man with a box"... Marijne van der Vlugt had some real pipes on her, hmm?

- Badtux the Music Penguin

Markos Moulitsas is the world's dumbest political operative

Just got an email from ole' Commodore Markos today where he comes out for doing away with the filibuster. WTF? Does he not recall the Bushevik years, where the filibuster was often the only thing between America and utter disaster at the hands of idiot Republican majorities? There's something to be said for making the filibuster harder (WTF is this modern stuff about simply saying "I filibuster!" and that's it? Even Strom Thurmond had to don a diaper and pontificate from the Senate floor for several days to filibuster civil rights legislation!), but doing away with the filibuster is not something that makes me feel good about the future of the United States -- especially since the composition of the Senate is profoundly undemocratic, giving small Republican-dominated states a larger voice than they should have. Way to guarantee Republican domination, Commodore Markos!

-- Badtux the PoliSci Penguin

The End

is starting...

Nine Inch Nails, "The Beginning of the End", from their apocalyptic album Year Zero. This is a techno-ish remix, not the original version. Both are good.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Fear

Lucinda Williams, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" from her album of the same name.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Busy penguin

You may have noticed not much blogging at the moment. This is because I spent Friday doing phone screens with four different employers, and will be doing on-site interviewing with two of them, and there is a *ton* of prep that I need to do for these interviews so that I don't look like an idiot...

- Badtux the Stressed Penguin

Who is wrong?

Leonard Cohen doing a live version of his early song, "One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong". Sheer poetry...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Skin

British post-rockers Her Name Is Calla, with their song "The White And The Skin" off of their new EP, Long Grass.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Meh

The Mighty Fang is unimpressed by his new digs.

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Heavy thievery

The Rosewood Thieves, "Heavy Eyes". This version of the song happens to be a demo that, as far as I know, is not on any album. But it's probably well worth tracking down.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

No racism here, nosiree!

When I was a youngster in the segregated South, it was common to hear something along the lines of, "those niggers are just violent and lazy, we ought to send them all back to Africa" from the sort of people who, well, regularly frolicked in the woods at night while wearing bedsheets and burning crosses. The more genteel amongst them would state, "Negros are not happy here in the United States, so we should help them emigrate back to Africa where they can be amongst their own kind, it's only the Christian thing to do." Yeppers, how Christian... no racism here, nosiree, nevermind the frolicking in the woods in bedsheets thing!

So now we hear from the rabid right the same damned thing, just a different ethnicity filling in the blanks:

The most compassionate thing we can do for Muslims who have already immigrated here is to help repatriate them back to Muslim countries, where they can live in a culture which shares their values, a place where they can once again be at home, surrounded by people who cherish their deeply held ideals.

No racism here, nosiree, just good Christian compassion for those heathen niggersMuslims! Can anybody doubt why EBM now refers to the Republican Party as "the Party of the Confederacy"?

-- Badtux the Racism-sniffin' Penguin

Stress diet continues

Yesterday, no phone calls, no nothing. Today, two phone calls, set up for two phone interviews tomorrow. Extracting myself from chair difficult due to pucker factor...

-- Badtux the Involuntarily Dieting Penguin

Velvet

Shoegazer band Slowdive singing "Some Velvet Morning". This was of course written by the late Lee Hazlewood for Nancy Sinatra during the late 60's, but it certainly seems to survive the acid treatment well... of course, the original was pretty trippy too. Here we are...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Thought for the day

People who argue with penguins generally end up looking silly no matter how much they fancy themselves as being Serious People.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Trickle down economics

So yesterday, the Federal Reserve basically said that the economy is double dipping. That's great if you're on a roller coaster, not so great if you're part of an economy that has lost millions of jobs over the past three years. So now the Fed is going to start printing some money by buying Treasuries.

Will that work? In the fever-fogged dreams of Ben Bernanke and Milton Friedman, it might work. But as has been repeated multiple times before, when you're at the zero bounds printing money is merely pushing on a string -- it all disappears under mattresses as fast as you print it. Unless some entity actually takes that money and spends it, at which point it starts contributing to economic activity.

Now... what kind of entity could take that money and spend it? Let's see, I'm thinking about this really big entity, that is actually receiving the money that the Fed is printing... gosh, what could that entity be called? Certainly nothing as mundane as "Federal Government of the United States of America", everybody knows that governments can't spend money, they can only consume money into a black hole of suck after which it disappears forever from the economy. Well, everybody who is a total fucking moron or a dishonest partisan hack knows that, anyhow... the rest of us knows that the money gets spent and goes to, like, people, in exchange for goods and services. And that when there's slack goods and services in an economy -- like, say, in ours, where factory utilization is low and unemployment is high -- this means that goods and services that otherwise wouldn't be moving in the economy start moving in the economy. But sadly, it's only us sane people who know this, and the lunatics are in charge of the loony bin... a.k.a., WASF.

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

Naturally Lush

Lush, "Nothing Natural", off of their album Spooky. Lush was a dream pop band from Britain that was briefly popular before Nirvana swept all non-grunge music off the pop charts. But even today, their music is dreamily lush and well worth listening to when you're in one of your more, uhm, herbal moods, if you get my drift...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The art of the non-denial denial

Rand Paul states, "I never kidnapped a girl and I never forced a girl to use drugs." Of course, the woman never claimed that she was kidnapped or forced to use drugs. There is nothing in her statement to say that she didn't voluntarily (if perhaps a bit sheepishly) go along with Rand Paul and his buddies, perhaps because they said something along the lines of, "Hey, you want to do something hilarious? Here, put on this blindfold...." or something like that. In short, Rand Paul denied something that the woman never said. And he didn't say a darn thing about telling her to bow down to Aqua Buddha or merely encouraging her to use drugs...

And that, my friends, is the art of the non-denial denial :).

-- Badtux the Amused Penguin

Raw Right

Some raw Shannon Wright from 2001. She's playing in the attic of a club in Houston, singing (and occasionally screaming) some creepily emotional songs into a crappy SM-58 vocals mike. Later in her career she has moved more towards Tory Amos style piano... and has red hair, in case you're wondering, JzB :).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

On why social safety net programs are a subsidy for employers

At some point in the past, I mentioned that the poor paid a higher percentage of their income as taxes than the rich do. At that point, the babbling began... "but... but... The Tax Foundation! Transfer payments!" At which point I said, "Nonsense. Not only do these people never see the money -- it goes to stores and doctors and such -- but transfer payments like food stamps and Medicaid are welfare for their employers, not for them."

The deal is that we run into the most fundamental Iron Law of Economics here: People will not work for less money than is necessary to provide for their basic survival. They won't. Because if they do, they die. Yet minimum wage here in American is not sufficient, in and of itself, to provide for the basic survival of most of those receiving it -- you simply cannot provide food and shelter for yourself, much less your family, with a 40 hour per week minimum wage job (or, more likely, two 20 hour per week minimum wage jobs). Yet employers are having no problems recruiting sufficient minimum wage workers to keep their doors open. WTF?!

The deal is that these employers are being subsidized. These transfer payments are a subsidy, allowing these employers to pay less than they'd otherwise pay. If not for the transfer payments, these employers would have to raise their wages to a "living wage" -- one that is sufficient for the basic subsistence of their workforce. In short: the modern safety net is welfare for the employers of service workers.

You want to see the perfect example? Wal-Mart. When you go to work for Wal-Mart, you are given directions on how to sign up for Medicaid and food stamps. It is understood that working for Wal-Mart is not sufficient to provide for food and healthcare for you and your family. It's formalized. Without this subsidy, people wouldn't work for Wal-mart, because they couldn't survive.

So anyhow, now you know why, unlike The Tax Foundation, I count programs like Medicaid and food stamps as transfer payments to employers, food stores, and doctors, not transfer payments to the poor who never actually see the money. 'Nuff said on that one...

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

Liberal plot

EBM discovers that the laws of physics are a liberal plot. According to Conservapedia, at least.

But of course, to the true home-grown Christian Taliban, all of science is a liberal plot. Didn't you know that science, in general, is inherently a liberal conspiracy to divert people away from the Bible? Sheesh! Get with the program! What has science ever done for us, anyhow? Other than, well, planes, computers, communication satellites, cars, hot and cold running water upon demand, indoor plumbing, modern medicine, y'know, unimportant stuff?!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Curvy Dreamtime

Some nice dream pop for your morning enjoyment: Curve, "Low and Behold". Curve is one of those bands that for some reason nobody seems to have heard of despite the fact that they had a fifteen-year career. They tend to be lumped into "shoegazer", "dream pop", or "electronica", and were one of the inspirations for the band Garbage, one of my other favorites.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

Widow of a different kind

Suzanne Vega sings about her failed marriage in "Widows Walk" off of her album Songs in Red and Grey, which sold about five copies, four of which were to her immediate family. Which just goes to show that the 'oughts (from 2000 to 2009) had absolutely no taste, that they refused to listen to brilliantly cool stuff like this...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Pearl clutchers hyperventilate on Prop 8 overturn

So we got the usual pearl clutchers -- the magic undies bunch, the holy babbler bunch, and so forth -- hyperventilating over the fact that a Federal judge ruled that a state ban on gay marriage violated the Constitution. At which point, I gotta say, WTF?

Look. I don't give a shit whether your mate is black, white, male, or female. Whatever kinky shit you get up to in your private time is your business. Gay sex? I ain't gay, so WTF would I think about gay sex for?

Y'know, for some supposedly non-gay people, these folks sure do have an obsession about gay sex. I mean, they obsess more about it than the gay mayor of Gaytown. That's just, well, squicky. Look: Most normal straight folks, we don't go through every day thinking about gay sex. I mean, we got lives. We think about our families, we think about our jobs, we think about the grass needing mowing, but the only time we think about gay sex is when somebody brings it up in our presence, at which point our reaction is probably squick! (since gay sex ain't what moves our rod, if y'know what I mean), but once that moment's over, we ain't thinking about gay sex no more because, well, we aren't gay. So what does that say about the magic undies wearers and such who are doing such pearl-clutchin' about gay marriage and whinin' about how that mighty supervillain The Gay Agenda is gonna shoot everybody with his magic Gay Ray of Gayness and, like, make everybody gay? Dude. Gay. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Update on the Stress Diet

I have now lost seven pounds on the Stress Diet, thanks to a stressful yesterday where I ate very little for lunch and not much more for supper due to an interview. Only four pounds left to hit my goal!

-- Badtux the Involuntarily Dieting Penguin

Born when?!

So, uhm, what happened?

The Fruit Bats, "Born in the 70's".

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Sleepy Salad

90's indie band Salad with a sexy dreamy song...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Commie plots *everywhere*!

General Ripper knows the truth about flouridation, and now the Colorado Republican Party has identified the next Commie conspiracy against America: Bicycles.

Yes. Bicycles. Bet you didn't know you were riding a Commie plot to destroy America back when you were a kid riding your bicycle around your neighborhood, did you? That's why kids aren't allowed to ride bicycles nowdays without being swathed in so much gear that they can barely see and only if their parents are accompanying them -- the children! Oh the children! They must be protected from this vile and horrid Communist plot against America! And Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes says he's just the one to do it!

-- Badtux the Bicycling Penguin

Stale Air

The French duo Air had a brief moment of fame four years ago when one of their songs was featured on the show Veronica Mars. Indeed, it was this very song, "Run"...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Feds lied?

You don't say! The Feds said the scanners weren't capable of storing pictures. They, err, lied. Turns out the Feds are storing your nudie pics that they make when you go thru the full-body scanner at some courthouses. Which is pervy enough when talking about grown adults, but when you're talking about children, it's child pornography and, err, quite, quite, quite illegal under the laws of pretty much every nation other than maybe Japan...

-- Badtux the "If it's a U.S. security agency, it's lying" Penguin

WASF

The Misfit has the word. And it ain't happy happy fun time.

-- Badtux the Waddling Penguin

Tube Feeding

Halou, "Tube Fed". Halou later shed the DJ / trip-hop sound and went more hard rockers as Stripmall Architecture.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

Digby doesn't get it

Digby notes another young man executed by Taser -- he was riding a bike, and when he didn't stop for the cops, they shot him with a taser. He fell off the bike and the cruiser ran over and executed him. And of course Digby says, "gosh, it's nice that the media is finally catching on that these tasers are being wildly abused, maybe there will be public outrage!"

Utter nonsense. Not happening. There will be no general public outrage, any more than there is for the fact that the United States is the world's biggest prison state with more people behind bars than any other nation on the planet, because most of the people involved are those people. You know, those people, unseemly people who have the audacity to be poor, or brown, or have disabilities, people who aren't like us. It's the same thing that allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power despite being a brutal dictator... sure, he was brutal, but he was brutal against those people, people who weren't good citizens, as long as you kept your head down and went along with things life in Saddam's Iraq was a lot nicer than life in today's Iraq... thus why the Iraqi government had to execute Saddam, because he was a threat to their power every moment he remained alive.

Monkeys. That's what we're talking about, mostly-bald monkeys with delusions of not being monkeys. Monkeys don't view any monkeys who aren't part of their own troop as having any value. Same deal with the Americans who don't get irate about cops killing brown people or poor people or disabled people because said people are "not like us". We were monkeys for 2 million years before civilization was invented, and the veneer of civilization is now starting to rub a little thin...

- Badtux the Avian Penguin

Any Seattlites out there?

If I got the chance to relocate to Seattle, what's it like living up in the Northwet compared to Cah-lee-foh-nee-ah? Other than wet, that is, which is hardly an issue for a penguin? ;)

-- Badtux the Aquatic Penguin

Fluorescent Glow

Stereolab, "Fluorescences". Retro synths from the 90's, harking back to the 70's...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Hey, that's *my* family crest too!

From Overheard in New York:

Upper East Side girl reading book about knights: Mommy, what does our family crest look like?
Upper East Side mom: Poor people being crushed by a boot.

-- Badtux the Peasant Penguin

H/T

Alert cops foil terrorist attack

Alert cops in Cumberland County, PA, foiled a terrorist attack yesterday when they arrested two suspects who were gathering together terror weapons in hopes of overthrowing the government of the United States of America and imposing sharia law upon the land.

Oh wait.... Raymond Peake and Thomas Tuso are white. And not Muslim. So they're not terrorists. They're just common criminals. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Is negative opinion of Iraq/Afghan wars a crime?

U.S. Customs appears to think so.

Jacob Appelbaum, an American working with the Tor Project and a sometime-volunteer for Wikileaks, was stopped at the border by U.S. Customs while entering the United States from Canada, and detained for a couple of hours while being interrogated by Customs and by FBI agents. He did not answer their questions, but, rather, repeatedly requested access to his attorney.

The Wikileaks documents are all over a year old. There is no damage to national security from such out-of-date documents -- only a damage to the job security of the apologists for the Afghan war. And we can't have that, can we?

- Badtux the Security Penguin

The End is Coming

The Raveonettes - "Here Comes the End", off their EP Beauty Dies.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Them ole' deflation blues

I got my salary
goin' down the hill
my income
don't give no thrill

I got the blues
uh huh
I got the blues
yes indeed
I got them ol' deflation
got no money in my wallet blues.

Well ole' price stickiness
keeps prices up
while income deflation
keeps my wallet down

I got the blues
uh huh
I got the blues
yes indeed
I got them ol' deflation
got no money in my wallet blues.

And if Paul Krugman
ain't always right
how come he's the only one
who called this one right

We got the blues
uh uh
We got the blues
yes indeed
We got them ole' deflation
got no money in our wallets blues....

-- Badtux the Blues Penguin

Wasted Kills

'Black Balloon' by The Kills, off their album "Midnight Boom".

-- Badtux the Music Penguin