Offsite Comments

I posted this at the butt-end of another thread where you didn't see it. Wait a minute. I'm doing it again!

Approved Border Patrol Weapons
Other than bean bags
http://bit.ly/spitballs
A mindful webworks original video
based on remarks by Ace commenters
stealing images and sounds from the web
but it was my business parter De Gummint that did it, really.

Here's another little idle time graphic I did:
A Perfect and Certain Pattern
Collapsed and crumbled around you
http://bit.ly/tiredBO
A Steinbeck quote and a _Resident
Don't you think he looks tired?

We're so messed up, I'd actually appreciate it if the Gummint would take the blame for our failures and problems. Alas, not being an Obama-contributing Green Business, that seems unlikely.

But it's true. The roads, the infrastructure, the defense (such as it is left) of our country, the courts, all are significant factors in our ability to live and work. We can thank the founders, all the people who fought for this country, every supplier and other business person. We can thank our families for raising us, and feeding us. We have so many partners who have made our success possible. We stand on the shoulders of giants, who stand on the shoulders of giants, and it's giants all the way down... to the Chief Giant, who made space, time, life, mind, and personality possible. As Obama might say, so we should be thanking him. By him I mean the Almighty Creator, of course. (Thanks, Dad!) I don't suppose BO has fully extrapolated his ideas to glean that appreciation. Maybe if Liz Warren had said it first. :P

Once upon a time, long, long ago in the dark ages of the world, before Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Geocities (snirk), the poor lonely little baby Interwebz could only send text. Strings of dull, boring letters, words, punctuation. Then one day, everything changed. That day was twenty years ago Wednesday (1992 July 18). That's when the first pornogr///// uh, photograph was posted to the web. Yes, there was a first photograph, and yes, we do know what it was. Kind of like having a recording of the first phone call.
"Watson, come here! I need you."
"Not now, Al, I'm eating lunch! (Why do they always call at mealtime?)"

Here's a link to that first web pic http://bit.ly/webpic1
Here's the link to the article http://bit.ly/pix50

Video inspired by comments in this thread
Approved Border Patrol Weapons
Other than bean bags
Full credits at link
http://bit.ly/spitballs

Just before I read JJ's blog entry, I'd been directed to an article in The American Thinker, Pay Attention to a Warning from Newt Gingrich" (if Al Gore and Newt Gingrich were in a boat... uh, anyway I wouldn't want to be on it...)
"...a solar flare in March 1989 disrupted electric power transmission from the Hydro Québec generating station in Canada, blacking out most of the province and plunging 6 million people into darkness for 9 hours. Aurora-induced power surges even melted power transformers in New Jersey. ...miniscule compared to the Carrington Event [1859]... [In a similar event] landline and satellite communication links [could go] down, sensitive computer circuits [melt], and even electronics in cars and trucks [fail]."

Modern Survival Blog: Solar SuperStorm 1859 – It could happen again
"...much of the world was witnessing a massive and tremendously bright display of the aurora, even at latitudes in the tropics.... telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed while spraying out sparks from telegraph poles and igniting widespread fires."

Wikipdia
"Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies." (Cue Weird Universe theme music.) "...occur approximately once per 500 years, with events at least one-fifth as large occurring several times per century."

I said the other day I remember how it was said it took the ICBMs 19 minutes to get from Russia to the USA? The Carrington Event took just 17 minutes from eruption to hitting us (a first blast having "cleared the way").

Imagine, 17 minutes from anytime, the entire power grid down for over a year, but who cares, your computer melted anyway. Got those DVD backups of everything? 8O

tl; even I dr

It's Midnight in Mid-America.

Do you know where your old dead thread is buried?

Now, see, that belongs on the book thread, right?

Wait, nothing but a book thread and gaming thread above and no one's here?

Teej, I know what you mean. I have moron-ready links to post that just won't fit on the book thread, and this thread is so stale it's all crumbly around the edges.

I think I can now summarize this thread:

A bountifully-endowed woman in a wildly alluring and revealing costume based on testosterone-driven cartoons and videogames is safer at a mass gathering of incredibly horny nerd-boys than a (presumably) plain-looking, business-attired woman would be at a convention of anti-theist and inhumanist stiffs.

O/T - I can't believe I just commented on a thread from February. Now and then I go back over past posts I missed. Usually I remember whether they're fresh or stale. Well, truth never ages. Or something. :D

[Infographic by chrissythehyphenated]
"Ineptitude" is a matter of perspective. The day Reagan was shot, a fellow I know was first out of the gate with a cynical remark: "He only used a .22?"

I think Mr Reagan and James Brady could both testify to the effectiveness of a .22 at close range, though, as that Molotov guy suggested.

Um… something I realized recently and have meant to mention:

Time does not permit me to peruse the comments as often and as thoroughly as I might wish, alas. So, I’m an infrequent commenter here. Also, my late-to-the-buffet, drive-by postings rarely garner responses (nor, admittedly, merit any). However, just in case anyone ever responds to me, please do not abbreviate my moniker as “MW”!

:D

• 75 Nehemiah Scudder July 15th, 2012 at 1:38 pm
Dear MW: I didn’t have time to read your post all the way through, but just wanted to say that you are always welcome to comment here. Enjoy!

• 137 Cloudbuster July 15th, 2012 at 3:56 pm
Dear MW. Your doom is sealed.

• 196 A Mindful Webworker July 15th, 2012 at 6:39 pm
@Nehemiah Scudder (#75) and @Cloudbuster (#137):
Doomed! Will have to change handle to Funny Webworker. Oh no, wait, wait...

• 203 Nehemiah Scudder July 15th, 2012 at 6:57 pm
@A Mindful Webworker (#196): Well played. Like Falstaff, not only witty in thyself, but the cause that wit is in other men.

Pats, there's no link to the Yahoo larger image.

Here's an old cartoon of mine, less colorful and detailed than the above, and not quite similarly themed, but.. uh.. it is zodiacal! :/
The Nodiac — Constellations for the Computer Age

I would say "humbly submitted," but self-promotion never feels humble.

9 There is no such thing as an "overzealous computer file" and computer files do not "overlap".
Posted by: Brainpimp

^ this

I'm no pro, but I've been making computers my b.. uh.. programming since before there was MS-DOS. Hardware has generally been astonishingly dependable at doing just what the software tells it. At the grocer when their new system doesn't recognize the self-serve lanes (night before last), when the bar quits serving because the cash registers are down (I almost got kicked out for harrassing the owner about that one), there is one song, one mantra, one great truth to shout aloud:

BLAME THE PROGRAMMERS!

I was raised in Oklahoma, taught how Woody Guthrie was some kind of folk hero or something. We were taught to sing This Land is Your Land in music class. Honestly, I always thought "and on the other side it didn't say nothin', that side was made for you and me" was about as stupid as it gets, but it's hard to put those critical impressions into words when you're a kid told to sit down & shut up.

Cuz BD writes
Today would have been Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday, and FOX 23 reports that the George Kaiser Family Foundation has announced the name of its new park in the Brady Arts District -- "Guthrie Green." Meanwhile, we learn in the Tulsa World that Tulsa is becoming a Woody Guthrie research destination.

"Despite a lack of consensus on whether Woody ever officially joined the CP [Communist Party], he remained largely supportive and uncritical of the U.S. CP during the many twists and turns of the 'party line' before and after the Second World War," Nicole Colson wrote this week at SocialistWorker.org. "Woody also repeatedly expressed a fondness for Stalin -- something he never renounced." As he said in a letter to his aunt, "The Communists have always been the hardest fighters for the trade unions, good wages, short hours, nursery schools, cleaner work shops, and the equal rights of every person of every color. ... So you can call me a Communist from here on." Indeed, Guthrie wrote a weekly column for the The Daily Worker.

All of which brings to mind something Kevin D. Williamson wrote in the current issue of National Review:

It is unlikely that we ever will have a proper reckoning of the American Left's culpability in the worldwide Communist enterprise -- the gulags and laogai, the Stasi, the Holodomor, the 100 million corpses. It is a testament to the perversity of human nature that in the two main political efforts to uproot Soviet agents from U.S. institutions, the villains in the popular mind are not those who enabled the enslavement of entire nations but the imperfect men who tried to stop them. We never had a Nuremberg trial for Communists -- we would have had to hang too many veterans of the Roosevelt administration.

What once was hawt is later just weird.

The clatter on that little thing reminded me of The Thunderer, my first computer printer, a daisy wheel purchased, yeah, about 1981, for about twice what you'd pay today for a complete desktop system with printer and a big screen. It even had a big padded clamshell case to cut down the sound, but after paying for the printer, I couldn't afford the soundproof box. Sure burned up a lot of fanfold paper back in those days.

A picture of one of those things

Friday the 13th is my lucky day!
I walk under ladders laughing.
I love it when black cats cross my path.
Break a mirror? Seven years good luck.
Figure, if you're gonna believe, believe in good superstitions. Placebo effect may work.
(He said, crossing his fingers.)

Hello I must be going.

"Maybe they can hitch a ride with a Volt driver. If we still have electricity by November."

¡No problemo! We've got plenty of coal to produce that electricity. Oh, wait, wait a minute....

[Mindful Graphic reposted on PoliNation]
Inspired by a cynical remark made by some blog commenter whose moniker I forgot to note. I slapped it together quickly, thinking, this one is so obvious, surely in this wide web of incredibly creative graphics manipulators, it'll be done by others. Haven't seen it (yet), but I've been beaten to the punch line (and bettered) before. Ideas, after all, have a life of their own.

200th! (or so)

That's all I've got.

Sad, isn't it?