"Something we're making for the Americans. It's called a 'ghetto blaster'."

I do not care who you are, that is gorramed hilarious!

Desmond Llewelyn, we miss you.

Just how stupid can you get?

I just had the... pleasure... of witnessing a complete dumbass in an SUV drive through my apartment complex with his hood so stacked with garbage bags from his residence that he had to have his head out his window just to be able to see where he was going. And this was an SUV with more than sufficient storage space in its bed for those garbage bags, and then some.

Do people even bother to try and idiot-check their actions any more?

Why do I want to carry a firearm for the protection of me and mine? Because the police are too busy dealing with morons like this halfwit.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - The sauce for a spicy Italian sandwich was apparently a must have for one Florida man. The man, Reginald Peterson, called 911 twice after a sandwich shop left off the sauce.

Peterson initially called the emergency number Thursday so that officers could have his subs made correctly, according to a police report. The second call was to complain that police officers weren't arriving fast enough.

Subway workers told police that Peterson, 42, became belligerent and yelled when they were fixing his order. They locked him out of the store when he left to call police.

When officers arrived, they tried to calm Peterson and explain the proper use of 911. Those efforts failed, and he was arrested on a charge of making false 911 calls.

To say this mental midget is a shame to his species and his society would be putting it mildly. I can only hope the city of Jacksonville prosecutes him to the fullest extent of the law, but something tells me that will amount to nothing more than a symbolic wristslap. This is unfortunate, given that the two (or more) police officers who had to respond to the call of this imbecile could have been better used preventing actual crimes and such. It is because of idiots like this man that the adage, "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away," continues to hold true.

Hat tip to WizBang.

A standard, mark 1 mod 0 MasterLock will NOT fit a Pelican 1200 case.

That might have been useful to know. Suggestions (for something that is going to contain a reasonably nice pistol and should be secured appropriately)?

Fuel prices are going up. The cost of a barrel of raw oil has more than doubled, and is working on tripling, since last year. Food prices have gone up accordingly, and other products seem to be following suit. Basically, this whole fuel price problem is turning into a thorn in the side of every American, no matter how rich or poor he or she might be.

So being able to run your car with water alone would seem to be a God-send, right? Just think, being able to pour basic tap water into your car, and have it run for miles and miles and miles, and then you can just pull up to any hose, faucet, or sink in America and fill her back up again. And just look at how low the price is... I mean, what could go wrong? It all seems too good to be true...

Yeah, well...

That is because it IS too good to be true.

See, back in college, due to the graduation requirements of my degree, I had to take thermodynamics. Beastly class. Hated every minute of it. But it did manage to teach me something about a little thing called "entropy", and, by correlation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, otherwise referred to as "Time's Arrow", or "The Mother of All Murphy's Laws." Simply put, the Second Law boils down to, "Entropy always wins," "Chaos always increases," or "In any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same."

So what does all this mean? Say, for example, you use a battery to power a DC motor. That DC motor spins a generator that is being used to charge another battery. Assume both batteries are your standard Mark 1 Mod 0 AA batteries - 1.5V batteries with, let us say, 1000 milliamp-hours (for the sake of simplicity, just say they have 1000 'units') of energy storage possible. Battery 1, powering the motor, is completely full, and Battery B, being charged by the generator, is completely empty. What will happen?

Well, in a nice-and-shiny perfect world, Battery 1 will dump its power into the motor, which will spin the generator up, which will charge Battery B, and all 1000 units of energy will shift from Battery 1 to Battery B without any problem at all. Sadly, this is not a perfect world. By any stretch of the imagination. Some energy is lost to overcoming friction, no matter how well lubricated the moving parts of the system may be. Some energy is lost to heat - after all, electricity moving through wires tends to warm things. Some energy is lost to sound, since the definition of sound is "mechanical vibrations [like a motor or generator spinning around] transmitted by an elastic medium [like air, or whatever the two are mounted to]". Some energy is just lost. But, the fact of the matter is, Battery B will only inherit a fraction of the energy that was stored in Battery 1 - how much is dependent upon how good the system is, but that fraction will never come anywhere close to 1/1.

So what does this have to do with running your car off water alone? Well, pretty much, everything. See, the system that webpage is proposing is one where you use your car's battery to electrolyze water, splitting it into its elemental hydrogen and oxygen molecules, otherwise (and rarely) known as "Brown's Gas", HHO, and oxyhydrogen. Then, still according to that webage, the car would turn around and immediately burn that "Brown's Gas" in its internal combustion engine (either with or without the addition of normal gasoline - the webpage is not particularly clear on that point). And, so, your car could run on (or with the addition of) water, right?

WRONG.

The best-case scenario that could result from such a situation would be that you drained your car battery dry in the matter of hours, if not minutes, trying to electrolyze water. The worst case scenario is that you manage to blow yourself up, considering just how explosive pure hydrogen and pure oxygen are, especially when mixed together (take, for example, the fuels used for the Space Shuttle). In essence, if you tried to run your car like this webpage proposed, you would be running it exclusively off its battery, and even a complete backbirth can see how that would not work at all... especially once you mix in a notoriously inefficient heat engine (otherwise known as your car's engine) that loses copious amounts of energy to heat, sound, and friction with every stroke. Just remember, entropy always wins, or at least comes out even, no matter how perfect the system may or may not seem. And, trust me, even a deep-cell car battery will be insufficient to power your entire vehicle in standard cars (hybrids are another story entirely).

Simply put, this "run your car on water" website is a scam, pure and simple. It preys on the ignorant and uneducated, it is despicable, and it is a shameful way to try and collect a few hundred dollars from a few thousand unaware folks, and it should be denounced as such at every possible opportunity. Of course, if I were a lesser man, I might not feel too bad, at all, for all of the greenies that would fall prey to such a pathetic scam as this, but even that momentary entertainment does not make up for the horrible nature of this scam, especially given the "environmental" craze gripping America these days.

Conveniently enough, all of the fake weblogs that support this "technology" also do not allow comments... remind anyone of anyone else who cannot stand to have the truth exposed?

Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary's Thoughts, 123beta, Right Truth, DragonLady's World, Stuck On Stupid, Cao's Blog, Leaning Straight Up, Democrat=Socialist, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, Pet's Garden Blog, third world county, Allie is Wired, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, CORSARI D'ITALIA, , and Stageleft, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Now, I know a lot of you drivers down here in Southern Kalifornistan are unfamiliar with the below image, but it is damned well time for you to start recognizing it again.

Why would I say such a thing? Because you either do not understand what it means, or you just are not noticing it, and the sign is just too obvious, and you missing it is just too frequent of a problem, for it to be the latter option.

So here is the short-and-sweet explanation: That little sign indicates that your vehicle should cease all motion with its nose either parallel with the sign, or with a convenient white bar on the road that accompanies the sign. All motion. This means your wheels should cease rotating. Once your vehicle has stopped its motion, you then take as much time as is necessary to look both ways (or all three ways, if it is such an intersection) and ensure that there are no other vehicles in the intersection, or entering the intersection, or about to enter the intersection. Once you have determined the status of the other vehicles at the intersection, if you are the vehicle to your right, it is your turn to go. Otherwise, you yield to the vehicle on your right, let him pass through the intersection, and then you may go. If there is a vehicle directly across the intersection from you, the safer course of action would be to let him go first - other morons, like yourself, do not use blinkers, so there is no safe bet as to whether he is going straight across the intersection or turning. Finally, when you are driving through an intersection, do so in as expeditious a manner as possible.

Unfortunately, I was forced to use polysyllabic words in that explanation, so I am not sure if all of you drooling-at-the-mouth retards will be able to comprehend, but I am gorramed tired of you fraking morons simply sailing through an intersection and its stop sign without any regard for that sign, or, even worse, anyone else at or going through the intersection. Whether you halfwits like it or not, there are rules to driving, and disobeying them can result in accidents, injuries, and possibly even deaths, hard though that concept may be for your underdeveloped brains to understand. And while you may not give a damn about your misbegotten life or piece of crap vehicle, I and others like me do care about ours, so practice a little driving safety and be a responsible adult for one (possibly the first) time in your life.

And do not even get me started if you cannot actually read the word "stop"... it is the same God-blessed sign down in Mexico, just with the word "alto" on it instead. Its strangely familiar shape and coloration should make its meaning more than bloody obvious.

You. Have. GOT. To. Be. Kidding. Me.

That is the title of the next installment of James Bond? "Quantum of Solace"?!?

What the hell is next? "Modicum of Consolation"? "Iota of Lethargy"? "Measure of Mundanity"?

I have said it before, and I will say it again: the new Casino Royale, complete with the undeniably atrocious Daniel Craig, was not worth the two hours I spent watching it. And with a title like this, the next iteration of the continuing Daniel Craig travesty can only be worse, which, when Casino Royale was so horrendous, will require the use of tactical nuclear devices to excavate an even deeper hole for this new "direction" of James Bond to travel.

I made the mistake of watching the previous movie simply for the "James Bond" name - thankfully, I occasionally (occasionally...) learn from my mistakes, and will not even come close to wasting the money this time around.

Nepalese aerospace engineers recently stumbled across a yet-unknown advance in aircraft technology. It turns out that goat entrails make damned good substitutes for electrical wiring in a 757.

Who knew?

If I ever make it out to Nepal (not terribly likely, granted), I think I might just splurge on chartering my own aircraft. One that I can inspect myself, or hire someone who knows what he is doing to look at it. Maybe it is just me...

Can someone in the civil engineering world please explain to me why my air conditioner / heat pump condensate drain pipe empties into my laundry room? A room which, so far as I can tell, does not have a floor drain. And, to be specific, it empties from the ceiling, onto the top of my stacked washer/dryer unit? You know, items that have 440V of electricity coursing through them on a regular basis?

I only ask, because the industrial engineer in me sees this and thinks, "Good fraking lord, that is just MASSIVELY stupid." I could be wrong...

"Right now, I could kill George Bush," she said. "No, I don't mean that. How could you nonviolently kill somebody? I would love to be able to do that." As she made her point, she chuckled and some members of the audience laughed.

Pop quiz time. Who spoke those words? And no fair using Google. So... are we talking a terrorist leader? Or maybe just some left-wing nutcase? Environmental whacko? Cindy Sheehan?

Nope. Possibly. Nope. And nope.

Those words were spoken by none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner - Betty Williams. Do not believe me? Check out the list of laureats - 1976, specifically. While you are at it, check out one of the winners for 1994.

If something can be said for the entire Nobel "Peace" Prize system, it is only that it is horribly misnamed - at least based upon its winners.

However, back to Betty Williams... She was, ironically enough, speaking at the International Women's Peace Conference in Dallas... while speaking about killing someone. That is peaceful, alright. Of course, the comment itself is laughable, at best. "How could you nonviolently kill somebody?" Give me a gorram break, twit - killing someone has to be one of the more violent things you can do to someone, especially since it tends to be the last thing. To say that her logic skills are lacking would be putting it mildly. To say that her common sense skills are lacking would definitely be putting it mildly. To say that her public speaking skills are right on the mark... well, that would be putting it perfectly. Catering to the crowd is great and all, and that is exactly what she was doing, but there are limits to even that - offering to kill someone, "nonviolently" or not, is over that limit.

Of course, once people started calling her on the carpet for her comments, she apologized for them:

"My feelings now and again get way ahead of me," Ms. Williams said. "I couldn't kill anybody, but I must confess that I'm extremely angry with the Bush administration and what they have done. To say that was wrong."

That is... after she tried lying to cover her tracks:

Questioned about her speech Thursday morning, Ms. Williams initially denied making the comment but reversed course after organizers confirmed the quote.

Funny how her course keeps changing any time anyone calls her out. And, to make it even better, this was not the first time she has made comments like these:

Last July, she made an almost identical comment about wanting to "kill George Bush" to a group of schoolchildren in Brisbane, Australia. She said her point was that it is hard to be nonviolent when there are so many atrocities in the world.

Uh.... what? What the bleeding hell do all of the atrocities in the world have to do with killing the President? Oh, wait, all of those atrocities are his fault, right? So killing him would just magically solve all of those atrocities, right? Pathetic.

She apologized. I will grant her that. But this is after lying about her comments, making the comments, and then making the comments previously to a group of children. Being of Irish descent as I am, I will certainly admit that what she did for the peace process in Northern Ireland was no doubt quite useful and important and all that good stuff - God knows that conflict was atrociously bloody. But nothing of what she did grants her the right to mouth off about killing people, especially since she is an example of someone who has won a prize for the propagation and advocacy of... well... peace. I must have missed where killing someone was "peaceful".

I certainly do not agree with everything that President Bush has done in his time in office, conservative Christian and flaming heterosexual though I may be. However, offering to kill someone simply because of their viewpoints... That makes Betty no better than the terrorists and murderers on either side of the Northern Ireland conflict that she so nobly helped make peace between. Her words were disgusting, and she is affront and an insult to anyone else who received the Peace Prize - meaningless though it may have been rendered by other laureats.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway , Perri Nelson's Website , Blog @ MoreWhat.com , Committees of Correspondence , Mark My Words , DeMediacratic Nation , Jeanette's Celebrity Corner , DragonLady's World , Webloggin , Cao's Blog , The Bullwinkle Blog , Pursuing Holiness , Conservative Thoughts , third world county , Right Celebrity , Stageleft , The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns , Nuke's news and views , Pirate's Cove , The Pink Flamingo , Dumb Ox Daily News , and High Desert Wanderer , thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe .

So I have been out of the news loop for quite some time now, but a headline on Drudge Report caught my eye, and I just had to take a look.  Apparently, a certain Muslim by the name of Salman Rushdie was knighted by the spunky old Queen Elizabeth II recently.  I do not know what he did to deserve that honor, but any way you look at it, it is an honor.  Hell, I am not British, I find the entire concept of a figurehead monarchy borderline laughable, and I am quite proud of my American (I guess I should say Native American, since my family and I were born here) heritage, but I would still consider it to be an honor to be knighted by the English Queen.  I mean, she's the Queen, for heaven's sake - figurehead or no, that woman has bigger balls than most of the male population of the world, and being a knight would just be all manner of nifty. 

But that is just me.  The Muslim world's response? 

"If someone exploded a bomb on his body he would be right to do so, unless the British government apologises and withdraws the 'sir' title."  - Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq, Pakistan's religious affairs minister.

...

In the Iranian capital Tehran, officials of a group called The Organisation to Commemorate the Martyrs of the Muslim World said a £80,000 reward should be paid to anyone 'who was able to execute the apostate Salman Rushdie'.

...

"The British and the supporters of the anti-Islam Salman Rushdie could rest assured that the writer's nightmare will not end until the moment of his death and we will bestow kisses on the hands of whomsoever is able to execute this apostate." - Forouz Rajaefar

...

About 100 students carrying banners condemning the author also chanted, 'Kill him! Kill him!'

Just remember, everyone, this is the "Religion of Peace". 

Now, I confess, I know next to nothing about this Rushdie character, but threatening a man with a suicide bomber just because he wrote something against a particular religion?  Only a Muslim could come up with something as inordinately, exceptionally, atrociously, and pathetically disgusting as that. 

So I recently filled a contact prescription I had laying around for the past six months or so...  Always meant to, just never bothered to sit down and do enough comparison shopping to come up with a  price I liked (I need toric lenses, and the brand my eye-doctor recommended to me are not the cheapest things in the world).  However, my local (and brand-spanking-new) Super Target ran a buy-one-get-one deal on contacts, and I figured "What the hell?", especially since my prescription will be coming due in another six months, and will probably change knowing me, so going the 1-800-Contacts route of four-boxes-for-maximum-discount would not work well. 

Anywise, after a short delay, my contacts came in today, so I went to the store and picked them up.  Conveniently enough, Target had affixed stickers on them indicating which box was for my right eye, and which box was for my left, saving me the trouble of having to sort out the prescriptions (of course, I checked the prescriptions anywise... my mother did not raise a complete fool).  All very useful and nice of them.  The large orange thing to the right is an example of one of those stickers. 

Now, can anyone tell me where they really screwed up in designing the bloody things?  The thought was great...  the execution was... somewhat lacking. 

Pelosi became yet another Democrat to violate the Logan Act, one of the least remembered and most abused laws on the books. 

Iran released the British hostages, calling it a "gift" to the Britons, while the news of what the hostages actually went through while in captivity is finally aired.  Needless to say, the Iranians lied.  A lot. 

And John Edwards is capitalizing upon his wife's illness for personal, monetary, and political gain - as if anyone was expecting anything else. 

I have to admit, as a week's news goes, this one is pretty...  uninspiring.  Do not get me wrong, I am very, very happy for the British soldiers and sailors, and more than a little surprised that the Iranians actually, voluntarily released them.  But that is tempered with the knowledge that the British government hung those soldiers and sailors out to dry... as well as Iran's proclamation that their return is a "gift" - just like if I steal your car and give it back to you, that is a "gift".  As for the rest... well, business as usual. 

So I, along with most of the local, regional, national, and global news agencies around the world, reported a few days ago that Iranian forces in the Persian Gulf effectively kidnapped, at the point of a set of very large-caliber firearms, a group of 15 British sailors and marines.  Unfortunately, Iran has yet to return these individuals to the British, and, in fact, are considering bringing them up on charges of espionage - something that completely violates the Geneva Convention, which, oddly enough, the Iranians did sign. 

But it gets better - as it always does.  Consider this news article from the World Tribune, and, more specifically, the second paragraph of said article: 

Iranian sources said the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] abducted British sailors in Shatt Al Arab on March 23...

Well, ok, that much those of us who have the faintest of clues about Iran already figured out...  The probability of the British sailors actually being within Iranian waters is remarkably small - they are far from being untrained doofi (plural of "doofus"), and the chances of the British actually intentionally poking Iran just to get a rise out of them is effectively non-existant, especially considering how anti-war in general they are recently.  But wait...  It gets even better-better, as the article continues on to expound upon the "rationale" for these illegal kidnappings: 

... to retaliate for the defection of senior Iranian officials and officers.  They said the IRGC has blamed Britain and the United States for the defections of senior members of the Quds Brigade. 

*blink*  Come again?  Let me get this straight, just for the record.  The Iranians had some of their own people, of their own free will, defect over to the Americans and/or British (no doubt for any number of a host of reasons a rational person would choose to do so).  Due to this decision on the part of those officials... 

... [the] IRGC planned to abduct British and U.S. military officers in Iraq.  At that point, the IRGC would offer the return of the coalition officers for the Iranian defectors or detainees.

 So not only do the Iranians blame the United States / Britain for the actions of their own people (I guess the concept of personal responsibility is not a strong one in the Islamic religion, which seems somewhat strange, considering the remarkably drastic and excessive viewpoint it takes on criminal punishment), but they were willing to commit an act of war just to get those people back?  And they honestly believed that this (a) would actually work, and (2) made sense? 

Just remember, everyone, the militant Islamics out there, in fact, do not hate us, and would very much like to sit down and have a nice little chat with us about the differences we have in religion and culture, and try and find some way to meet on common ground, with efforts towards a more peaceful resolution of those differences, for the betterment of all.  Of course, in their viewpoint, suiciding while killing those of you foolish enough to actually sit down with them is in their betterment, but that is neither here nor there. 

I honestly cannot wrap my head around this degree of idiocy.  My brain simply cannot make the necessary logical jumps to come to the conclusion that (1) the Iranians who defected/deserted from the IRGC were somehow forced to do so by the Americans/British, (b) that those defections were therefor somehow the fault of the Americans/British, and (III) that kidnapping British sailors and soldiers to hold as a trade for those defectors would, somehow, improve the situation.  That kind of "logic" distinctly represents a remarkable break with reality - which, in the end, is only a continuance of the theme constantly emanating from Iran. 

As I said in the title, I am not at all surprised that the Iranians were the agressors in this situation, nor that they were actually planning it out some time in advance.  What does amaze me is that they honestly believed, from all outward appearances, that this course of decision would actually help.  If people's lives did not hang in the balance, I would almost consider this situation laughably absurd.  For the sake of those 15 soldiers and sailors, I honestly hope someone in the Iranian government, or IRGC chain of command, comes to their senses (preferrably by means of repeated and forceful application of a 2x4 or other such implement to their cranium) and hands the troopers back to the British, before someone else decides to do something remarkably stupid... or at least moreso than they already have.  Regardless, at this point, I think any half-assed attempts at conspiracy theories are about as useless as a screen door on an interstellar warship. 

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson's Website, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, Wake Up America, basil's blog, DragonLady's World, Leaning Straight Up, The Amboy Times, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, Conservative Thoughts, LaTogaStrappata®, third world county, Allie Is Wired, stikNstein... has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Overtaken by Events, Pirate's Cove, Dumb Ox Daily News, High Desert Wanderer, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe, as well as Wizbang. 

As I have often professed, I really do not pay a whole lot of attention to the news.  It just tends to really piss me off, get me all annoyed, and reduce my view of the world around me, and all of those things happen more than enough when I am concerned about just my life, much less other, stupider people's lives.  However, a certain portion of the news caught my eye. 

Consider this situation:  An naval unit, from Nation A, operating in the territorial waters of Nation B, waters it was invited to operate in, sent off a couple of boats to perform a routine boarding operation on a vessel suspected of smuggling.  The boarding operation went along without a hitch, the ship was cleared to proceed along its declared route, and the boarding team debarked the vessel.  On their way back to their mothership (using that term loosely), the boats are surrounded by well-armed (at least, compared to the boarding boats) ships of Nation C, those latter ships stating the boarding boats are within Nation C's territorial waters.  The well-armed ships "escort" Nation A's boarding ships back to a "place of safety" for questioning, and eventual detainment.  Nation A is firmly convinced they were well within the territoral waters of Nation B, while Nation C continues to proclaim they were, in fact, within Nation C's waters. 

A troubling situation, to say the least.  However, further information comes to light.  It turns out that the boarding vessels were, in all likelihood, indeed operating within the territorial waters of Nation B, and Nation C's ships in fact "escorted" (read: "forced") Nation A's boarding boats to go where they forced them to - Nation C's waters.  So, yes, after a fashion, Nation A's boats did violate Nation C's waters...  but only after Nation C's ships forced them to.  Sure, no one can force you to do anything, but when a larger boat threatens to run over your smaller boat unless you go the direction you want them to... you tend to go the direction they want you to. 

Now, what do you think of that situation?  Nation C taking Nation A's sailors hostage, all because Nation C's boats forced Nation A's boats into breaking territorial water boundaries.  If that does not ring alarm bells in your head, I have no idea what would. 

Well, for clarification, Nation A is Britain, Nation B is Iraq, and Nation C is Iran.  (Just imagine the international outrage if Nation C was the USA...  and yet almost the entire world remains effectively silent concerning this incident.  Double standards?  You are damned straight.  And people say we make this crap up.)  Yes, Iran just took British sailors hostage, all because Iranian boats forced the British boats into Iranian waters.  Does that make sense to you? 

Well, it makes a certain amount of sense if you consider the fact that they may have accidentally... missed.  Something tells me they were aiming on capturing some American sailors, just to push the situation over into complete stupidity, as opposed to the general purpose idiocy their relations with us generally devolve to. 

One can only hope that they will come to their senses and return the British sailors in short order...  Forcing a boat into your national waters is not cause for a major blow-up ("misunderstanding" kind of thing...), but taking sailors hostage is.  As in "act of war" kind of blow-up. 

Alright, despite being a somewhat staunch conservative, I have absolutely nothing against the concept of personal destruction.  In that vein, I have absolutely nothing against the legalization of drugs - make them publically available, easily procurable, and taxed just like cigarettes.  However, if someone were to commit a crime while on drugs, or due to the drugs, or for the drugs, I firmly believe in a one-strike-you-are-out protocol.  Granted, that kind of process could not exist within the current construct of America, but I can dream.  In the same vein, I have nothing against suicide being legal...  I have never particularly understood how killing yourself could potentially be illegal.  Unbalanced and insane, yes.  But who owns your body except yourself?  And if you, for some reason, grow tired of it, who is to say that you are not permitted to terminate it?  Only stupid politicians who have no business sticking their noses where they do not belong. 

Unfortunately, that concept has only been gaining steam over the years.  Personal rights are disappearing by the boatload on a daily basis, all in the name of "safety", "security", or other such nebulous, and ultimately undefineable concepts.  Take, for instance, the absolutely insane amount of difficult pain one has to undergo to procure a firearm.  Two hundred years ago, not only was it a relatively simple matter to do so, but it was also somewhat irregular for any grown man to be without one, both for the purpooses of self-perpetuation (food and the like), and self-defense.  However, due to the government's understandable fear of an armed population, firearms are kind of like your retarded, Turretts-prone cousin - something you hide away, and never let out in public. 

Regardless, do not let me get stuck on that topic too much.  What prompted this particular post is a somewhat odd chain of events.  As pretty much all of us are aware, sexual independence legally occurs at 18 years of chronological age.  As such, relations, dating, or anything more than knowing the other person is pretty much completely and utterly discouraged when one person is on one side of 18, and the other is on the other side (or if both are on the low side).  I am not entirely sure I agree with the concept, the age, or the execution, but much like driving, voting, enlisting, and drinking, it is just one of those age things we are going to have to live with.  However, unlike those four things, the "age of consent" laws generally require two individuals to be involved - it does take two to tango, so far as I can tell (though greater numbers are occasionally involved, from what I understand). 

So what happens if someone, under the age of 18, is doing something of a sexually illicit nature with only themselves?  Say, perhaps, the person was taking pictures of themselves in the nude, and then broadcasting them online.  Were these pictures taken by an outside individual, it would almost instantaneously become a matter of sexual abuse of a minor.  But the person taking the pictures of themselves without any external... er... assistance?  Well, according to this news article, that would qualify as sexual abuse as well. 

Beg pardon?  I mean, I understand the charges of possession and dissemination of child pornography - she obviously did both.  But how can one person sexually abuse... herself?  Who is the abuser and who is the victim, or does abuse no longer require both?  Of course, being under the age of 18 as she is, she is legally incapable of making decisions for herself (for all intents and purposes), but, come on...  this is all manner of idiotic.  Her parents should ground her until she is 18, and she has probably irreparably damaged her chances of being taken seriously for the next few years (until such point as no one can recognize her from her...  special pictures... any more), but does this really call for Big Brother Government to step in and smack people around, when she did it to herself? 

God save me from governments who only want to help. 

So, in light of my continuing tradition of making a new category for every concept I create at least four posts on, I now present you with the "urk" category.  Do not worry, "fools and jesters" is still around, and will still be used for the general-purpose news of the world, but this new one will be primarily the repository of really, really stupid nonsense I stumble across in real life, the internet, and wherever else my eyes and ears may wander. 

Case in point, the following news story.  Being an American, I am somewhat used to the people of the world complaining about all of the various things going on in my country.  Hell, I do my own fair share of complaining about those things as well (that said, I do have something of a right to do so, since I am a citizen and all).  Of course, in a lot of the complaining cases, one has to really wonder what is going through the complainer's mind...  In others, you have to wonder how the topic of complaint ever came to pass to begin with. 

This would be one of the latter cases. 

Sometime in 1947, the people North of the Border decided to pass a Citizenship Act.  This act, possibly among other things (such as establishing Canadian citizenship), had an interesting clause contained within it.  This clause dictated that all Canadian citizens (those new ones it just made) had to celebrate their 24th birthday within the borders of their country...  or they would automatically lose their citizenship. 

Do you not believe me?  Honestly, I would not blame you.  However, this Fox News article, and this CBC News article, tend to give a little credibility to my words. 

To be fair, the Canadian government did give their citizens (well, ex-citizens, in this case) a loophole - if they filled out the appropriate paperwork, they would have been legally allowed to celebrate their 24th birthday out of the country.  But, let us be honest with one another for a moment - just how many national laws, statutes, and regulations are passed each day that you and I actually know about?  Two?  One?  None?  And can you quote the specifics of each of those laws?  There are all kinds of absurd laws on the books - how many do you know about? 

I honestly feel sorry for those ... kind-of-Canadians who fell subject to this law, and I am frankly amazed that it took the Canadian government this bloody long for them to notice what was going on.  Thirty years is a bit of a stretch for this particular subsect of their population to go without doing things that would require citizenship...  Or was the Canadian government just stringing them along, waiting to spring this particular trap on them at their convenience?  If this is not a case for false advertising, I honestly do not know what would be a better example...  Regardless, I do believe this is a perfect opportunity for those "Lost Canadians" to tell the Canadian government exactly what they can do with their citizenship offer.  Those people have been paying taxes and living under the Canadian government for the past 30+ years, only to have that suddenly yanked out from underneath them.  I would bloody well want all those taxes (and, in Canada, they pay a lot) back, and then I would just pack up and head for greener pastures, where people are a lot less intent upon making other people's lives miserable all over a technicality that suddenly got entirely enforced.  Not entirely sure where that would be, but come on people... how trivial is something like this?  And how much better could this have been handled by the Canadian government, rather than leaving these people in limbo for months or years? 

So, as an inaugural stupidity, I think this works pretty well.  Look forward to more plain stupidity in this category in the future.  Oh, and go Canada! 

You know, I really should just add a category called "urk". 

Seen today at Best Buy:  A display with the graphic "Get the artists your friends have never heard of... first!" and "Find Them First" written on it, in bold yellow font, placed over a rack of CDs.  On that rack was this CD. 

I had to do a double-take to ensure that I saw it properly...  You have got to be kidding me.  Are the classics so well lost now that Frank Sinatra is considered un-heard-of?  *sigh*  I cannot describe just how sad that is. 

So as you all are probably aware by now, I have been taking a rather lengthy Christmas/New Year's Eve break from blogging... still am, really, but I thought I would go ahead and put this one up for the world to view.  I should be back sometime next week, though I certainly offer no guarantees on that part. 

Well, part of that break was spending a week out at my parent's for New Year's...  This does not sound like a particularly extraordinary thing, except that my parents live on the opposite coast from me, in what almost amounts to being the diametrically opposite corner of the United States from me (not counting Alaska and Hawaii, of course).  Basically, a long set of flights, though the western direction is always longer than the eastern one - yay jet stream. 

Over the course of the two flights in either direction, I had the opportunity to fiddle with Delta's new onboard videoscreen system they have installed in some of their aircraft.  Basically, it amounts to what appears to be a maybe five inch by seven inch screen installed in the headrest of the seat ahead of you, which allows you to access live television (they seem to either have a mini-dish on the plane, or have it beamed to the aircraft in some other manner), CD-based music (or, at least, the system groups the music by style, then by CD... I somehow doubt that the CDs are actually on the plane, but Delta owned them at some point - at least I am hoping so... God save them if they provoke the ire of RIAA.), a collection of movies (some free ones created for Delta, and then some mainstream ones, for which you have to pay), a set of games (a single free one - trivia, that pits you against any others of the passengers who may be playing, and then some pay-to-play ones), and a nifty little gadget that allows you to track the progress of the aircraft along its route.  Being the poor cheapskate I am, I exhausted the supply of the free movies (some of which were actually rather good, if barely earning the moniker "shorts" due to their length), and spent some time pitting my collection of useless data against the other riders in the aircraft.  However, that eventually did get tiresome, though we came within 50 points of being ranked among the top ten people ever on that particular aircraft (how sad is that?), and I basically spent most of two flights staring at the flight-tracking system. 

Basically, it gives you a few shots of the map of your route, from varying altitudes, what your route was planned to be, what your route actually was/is, where the plane is, its groundspeed and altitude, the miles travelled currently, and the temperature outside.  Watching the temperature drop to -40 degrees Fahrenheit at 36,000 was certainly sobering... not a good time to step outside.  However, more interesting was the map.  Of course, there is the obvious initial interest in seeing how our actual flight does not match the planned flight path, due to cities, weather, and whatever other reasons, but then there was a slightly more entertaining thing to examine as well. 

The map generally showed you two to three different shots, at different levels of zoom... but what Better Half caught was that each level of zoom was displayed twice, once in English, and once in Spanish.  Now, the Spanish "translation" was not entirely complete...  New Orleans became "Neuvo Orleans", and likewise for New York, but such other places as Garden City and Lake City were not translated at all, despite there being Spanish words for "garden", "lake", and "city".  I can probably blame that inconsistency on Delta, and whoever did the translation not wanting to go through every major and minor city in America.  Understandable, after a fashion... 

But, hold on.  I think I missed something...  Are not every city, state, and town name, much less the name of the country itself, a proper noun?  And are not proper nouns one of those things that you simply do not translate?  I mean, you certainly do not see American maps of Mexico renaming Tijuana, Chihuahua, Veracruz, Nuevo Laredo, and Puerto Vallarta to names more palatable to the American version of English (granted, Mexico City was translated - no defense for that), so why on earth is "New York City" now "Nuevo York"?  Do Spanish-speaking tourists honestly refer to it as that, or is it actually "New York City" to them, as it should be to everyone?  I, assuming I was a Mexican, would honestly be somewhat peeved if the Americans tried renaming my cities to American-ized or English-ized versions of their names - it somehow dilutes their identity, much less the cultural meanings of the cities.  Nor do I see that kind of thing happening with Mexico, much less any other nation's cities.  So why is it such a common occurrence for American cities and locations? 

I am sorry, but the rallying cry of "multiculturalism" can only be carried so far...  If we carry this chain of reasoning farther than that arbitrary line in the sand, America will eventually turn into a wonderfully multicultural Eden - kind of like how Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania did in the past.  Melting-pot or no, are we really willing to sacrifice what little we have in the way of cultural and national identity all for the sake of appeasement and "diversity"?  There is a marked difference between "tolerance" and "approval"...  it is about high time for the American populace to realize that "diversity", in any form, requres the former, not the latter. 

So would someone please explain to me the logic of having "Cinco De Mayo" on the official, Google-constructed, "US Holidays" (emphasis added) calendar contained within Google Calendar?  Did I miss the addition of some more states, somewhere along the way?  Does my flag need to be replaced?  Huh?  Multiculturalism is all good and well, but when you start redefining the basic definition of "US", I start getting a wee little bit concerned.