Busy day

Bought a bike rack for the back of my Jeep and went bicycle shopping. After checking multiple places, I think I've found a nice mountain bike. The serious MTB folks seem to think it's a nice entry-level mountain bike that can be upgraded with better/lighter components as needed i.e. the frame itself is a good stiff lightweight frame. This seems to be the lightest MTB I found for the price, anything of similar weight is at least $200 more...

I also bought a new digital effects pedal for my guitar, due to an upcoming gig. We really need to find a singer tho... none of us sing worth a flyin' flip :(.

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

World's youngest drummer?

Okay, this is just friggin' awesome. The little girl is five years old and has some righteous beats. The other two kids are 8 and 10 years old and handle their instruments quite well. This is a cover of industrial metal band Rammstein's song "Sonne", mostly in the original German. Happy to do my part to make this video go viral ;).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Condiments

What is it with cops and pepper spray nowadays? They seem to view pepper spray as the next best thing to sliced bread. I wouldn't be surprised if they sprayed it as underarm deodorant, given how much they seem to like the stuff. Well, maybe not under their arms, but, rather, under the arms of random non-violent protesters, college students, and miscreant tardy middle schoolers at Jack Robey Junior High School in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Dear cops: This is a condiment:

This, on the other hand, is an instrument of torture used by third-world dictators everywhere to punish those who dare protest their rule, an instrument of torture which causes enormous pain and suffering on the part of the victim along with respiratory distress and the possibility of permanent eye damage:

Are there any questions?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Black letter

Black Heart Procession, "The Letter", off their 2006 album Spell (Dig). These guys have been making music since the late 1990's, but apparently are well known only in Greece. Hrm.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

In the dark

Sitting in the dark typing into my iPad. Wind, rain here in the Sillycone Valley took out power to several hundred homes, including mine. I hope it comes back on soon, because my furnace is useless without power and it will start getting cool enough to pull out my sleeping bag...

Actually, not exactly in the DARK, since I have plenty of flashlights and batteries plus a crank radio/flashlight...

Badtux The Prepared Penguin

Update: Power came back on at about 10:47PM. Yay!

Time-traveling fetus

Arizona just declared that pregnancies in the state begin two weeks before conception.

What, fetuses in Arizona are equipped with tiny time machines to travel back in time to two weeks *before* sperm meets ova in the womb? What next, the Arizona lege defines pi as being exactly 3, and that carbon dioxide is a protected species?!

- Badtux the Baffled Penguin

Deep

Crooked Still, "Wading Deep Waters" from their 2008 album Still Crooked.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Wealth redistribution

Wealth redistribution is evil and is happening today. My proof:

If you look at the graph, you'll notice that the top 5% of the population holds 72% of the financial wealth of the nation. This despite the fact that even if they were twice as productive as the rest of the population (a laughable assumption -- Paris Hilton, anybody? -- but one that I'm sure they'll pretend is true), they only produce 10% of the nation's real wealth -- the goods and services that make up the nation's economy. So where did the other 62% of their financial wealth come from? Redistribution, my friends. They redistributed it using the "invisible hand" that extracts wealth from your pocket and mine and puts it into *their* pockets, which they pretend is all fine and dandy because this "invisible hand" (called market power) is private force, not government force, and thus isn't evil.

But of course force is force. If some goon shoves a gun in my face in the park and demands all my money, I don't care whether he's got a badge showing he's a government employee or not, either way it's still force being used to extract money from me at gunpoint. If some goon tells me to grovel and lick his feet and give all my productive output to him or he will make sure that I get black marks on my official record that will guarantee that I live the rest of my scant days as a starving homeless hobo, that is just as much force as if the government seized the contents of my bank account and told me that every dime I made above simple subsistence was going to them from now on, but for some reason the former (what the Fortune 500 tells every single one of their employees and every single one of the small businessmen who are dependent on Fortune 500 suppliers) is considered "ok" by the top 5%, while the latter sends shivers of horror up their spine -- yet from the perspective of the bottom 95%, they are one and the same -- application of force to redistribute their wealth for the benefit of a few! Sprinkling magic free market fairy dust over it doesn't make it anything other than what it is: redistribution of wealth. All that sprinkling free market fairy dust over this extraction of wealth does is change who gets the wealth -- a small percent (the top 5%), vs. the 95%. Hmm, now I wonder why so many of the top 5% embrace free market ideology? Gosh darn gee willickers, Batman!

-- Badtux the Redistribution Penguin

Coked hands

Woven Hand, "Sinking Hands", off their 2010 album The Threshingfloor.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

The Romneybot vs. the Obamanator

Talking about Sick Rick, that's the November contest, since Mr. Man on Dog quit, after polls said he'd lose his home state of Pennsylvania big-time to the Romneybot. So in the fall, we have the Romneybot vs. the Obamanator. What a contest. I'm gonna have such a hard time deciding who to vote for... will I vote for the soulless robot from planet Sociopath? Hmm.

It will be so appropriate getting robo-calls from the Romneybot campaign this fall...

- Badtux the "So long, Ricky!" Penguin

Like, DUH!

When viewing lesbian sex and straight sex, both the homophobic and the non-homophobic men showed increased penis circumference. For gay male sex, however, only the homophobic men showed heightened penis arousal.

Heterosexual men with the most anti-gay attitudes, when asked, reported not being sexually aroused by gay male sex videos. But, their penises reported otherwise.

Homophobic men were the most sexually aroused by gay male sex acts.

As I've repeatedly said of Rick Santorum and his ilk, the only kind of people who obsess about gay sex are... well... GAY. Just sayin'.

In other news, studies find that racists dislike President Obama because he is black. Like, DUH?

-- Badtux the "Like duh, man!" Penguin

Indie grave

Mark Lanegan is the "n" in "indie", having lent his distinctive voice to a wide variety of indie projects over the years. This is "The Gravedigger's Song" off of his brand new album Blues Funeral.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Pink slime and salmonella

You've heard by now about "pink slime", the ammonia-treated meat trimmings that make what goes into a wiener look wholesome. The whole point of treating meat trimmings with ammonia (thereby turning it into a pink slimy substance) was to reduce the bacterial count and thus hopefully reduce the incidence of food poisoning. And it apparently worked -- during the time that hamburger meat was adulterated with this "pink slime", incidents of food poisoning went down by almost half.

But it's wise to remember why we have this problem with food poisoning to begin with. It occurs because meat from dozens of cows is mixed together and ground together, meaning that it takes only a single contaminated bit of cow meat to contaminate thousands of pounds of hamburger meat. Industrial food production, in other words, is responsible for the food poisoning problem.

I'm thinking, now, about a novel new idea. What if entire dressed cows were sent to some place local to you, and when you wanted a cut of beef, or just wanted some less expensive cuts ground into hamburger meat, some guy cut it off the haunch of beef right there in front of you and packaged or ground it right there in front of you? Then you'd be able to inspect the beef to see whether it's clean *before* it gets ground into hamburger meat, and if some other cow is contaminated, well, so what, the cow you're looking at isn't contaminated so that's of no concern to you. What could we call this place and the person who does this strange and innovative thing of, well, cutting meat up in front of you instead of getting it pre-packaged from some industrial facility? Hmm...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

They still don't give a damn, Spanky

This was a controversial minor hit in 1968 by the folk rock group Spanky & Our Gang, which was led by Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane with major assistance by lead guitarist Malcolm Hale who wrote most of the songs, did most of the arranging and handled most of the business end of things. "Spanky" was a contemporary of "Mama Cass" Eliot and had a similar big voice (and wasn't petite by any means, though not as big as "Mama Cass"), but there really wasn't much pollination between the two bands because Spanky was a Chicago band while The Mamas & The Papas was a West Coast band. The band released two albums, then Hale died and the band pretty much dissolved at that point.

I mentioned that this song was controversial in 1968. The title, of course, was one source of controversy. But there were quite a few radio stations run by right-wing nutballs who refused to play it based on its content too. Hmm, the more things change...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Death of a scam artist

Thomas Kinkade dies. And art critics everywhere rejoice that finally the supply of kitsch that his assembly line operation turned out is going to dry up.

Kinkade was a millionaire who made his millions the old fashioned way -- by scamming rich investors who were required to buy half a million dollars in inventory to open one of "his" Kinkade Galleries, money that they'd never get back when the works didn't sell and eventually were liquidated at Costco for pennies on the dollar, and by running an assembly-line operation to create "originals" that his brush never touched other than at the end of the assembly line to sign "his" originals, then convincing hundreds of thousands of Americans with more money than taste to spend hundreds of dollars on one of his "originals". He claimed this was legit because he "directed" the brush strokes of the low-paid art students who really painted the kitschy landscapes, but in the art world it was a minor scandal. There was a sense, in the art world, that if you were to declare that something was an "original", it should be something that your brush touched for more than your signature.

And now the scam is finished. Or is it? If you think his heirs are going to stop the scam simply because the originator of the scam is dead… hah! They’re going to be discovering "unknown works” for *years*! Watch and see.

- Badtux the Bad Art Penguin

What Easter means to me

I needed gas, and Costco was closed.

That is all.

-- Badtux the Non-observant Penguin

With and without

Well, drove around in my Jeep. Worked reasonably well in the unzipped position, though I had to put small bungees around the rear sail panels to keep them from flapping annoyingly. But once I did that, no flap, and just a nice draft in the front cabin when the front windows were rolled up. Rolled down, of course, was plenty of breeze.

Clouds rolled in, so I decided to zip the windows in rather than risk needing to pull the drain plugs on the bottom of the Jeep. After I did that, it of course turned sunny again. Of course.

-- Badtux the Jeeping Penguin

Electronic ghetto

New York electronica duo Creep meets the ghetto Tegan and Sara of rap, Nina Sky. The results? Uhm... odd. You have the electronica meeting the rap, but it's not quite trip-hop. This is "You", which as far as I know is only available on iTunes.

Yah, this isn't my usual fare. What can I say, this is where the connections led me, and it was striking enough to listen all the way through so (shrug)...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

WTF?!

So John Derbyshire, the World's Dumbest Conservative Asshole, tries to be, like, racially progressive with a "conversation on race" and makes himself look like a racist moron.

Here's the only conversation that John Derbyshire needs to have with his kids: "Black people are people."

That's it. And his kids, if raised in a multicultural area, would just reply, "Duh!" because they have friends of all races and ethnicities already and that's been true since an early age.

But of course, John Derbyshire's kids weren't raised in a multicultural area, they were raised in a gated community that might as well have had a sign at the entryway saying "no blacks allowed", and not allowed to go out and play with any children of another race because they might get hurt or snatched or something. Because, y'know, there's all those scary brown people out there, and they're all criminals who want to hurt white people, so our precious little white snowflakes must be protected from them, yo...

At which point John Derbyshire chimes in with, "but... but... crime statistics!" Uhm, statistics describe probabilities across an entire population, not probability that any given person is going to do something. 90% of spree killers and mass murderers have been white. But I can assure you that the chance of me becoming a spree killer and mass murderer, considering I have difficulty with killing a cockroach and when dealing with a mouse humanely did catch-and-release to make him someone else's problem, is somewhere between none and zero. Stereotyping all white people as mass murderers because they've historically been the perpetrators of mass murder is wrong. Same deal as stereotyping all black people as thugs. People are people, and you have to deal with the person in front of you, not the stereotype. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Un-stereotypical Penguin

Mission accomplished

Today was frustrating. It was a beautiful Jeeping day, temperature in the mid 70's, clear, sunny, but... that bleepin' HARD TOP was harshing my mellow, man. I took off the "Freedom Panels" (the front removable panels of the hard top) to get more air and sunshine but the air just buffets around the back of the Jeep when I do that, because that *hard top* was back there still.

I gave up on lowering the hard top to the ground and decided to just leave it up on the ceiling, which means the ratchet straps had plenty of working distance, at the expense of having a hard top hanging in the middle of my garage:

I can walk under it, so (shrug). It's not as if I use the garage as anything other than a workshop anyhow, I never park the Jeep in it because it's too much a PITA opening and closing the old-school garage door and besides it's too cramped.

Oh yeah, the extra yellow strap running down the middle is just a safety strap in case one of the ratchet straps decide to let go. Not that I expect that to happen, this plastic hard top isn't all that heavy and those eye bolts go all the way through those 2x4's, which in turn are part of a boxed structure that is fairly strong.

Tomorrow I show you pics of the Jeep with the soft top on, it was too dark by the time I finished putting the soft top on it tonite...

-- Badtux the Jeepin' Penguin