by Mike Shea on 23 April 2004
I joked with a coworker today saying that he should work on legislation to outlaw his daughter's midriff shirt since he appeared to no longer have control over the situation. Today I got home and found out that a <a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/pants_too_low">Louisiana legislator wants to outlaw low-riding pants</a>. This quote is the important one:
"if parents can't do their job, if parents can't regulate what their children wear, then there should be a law." - Derrick Shepherd, Lousinana State Representative
Few right wing fascists have the balls to say such things out loud but they all think it. They want the government to protect, guide, and control the American people. This is why the FCC department of thought control exists. This is why the MPAA exists. This is why we have helmet laws and seatbelt laws. The right believes you are too stupid to protect yourself so the government will wrap you in pillows and make sure you only read nice light stories about happy things. Oh yes, and propaganda films about how great our war is going. Oh yes, and the Al Qaeda is responsible for your daughter's habit of showing off her purple g-string. Time to up the threatcon to <a href="http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/">Elmo</a>!
We should be reducing the idiotic laws we have, not increasing them.
After about seven months I've come to the conclusion that one cannot do much better than a Pilot Dr. Grip Gel for a fancy pen. Here is a post I made on <a href="http://www.moleskinerie.com/2004/01/moleskine_pens.html">Moleskinerie</a> about it.
The Pilot G2 ink (I prefer the .7mm but others like the spidery .5mm) doesn't bleed through on either the journal or the sketch book. You can get G2 pens just about anywhere. Grocery stores, drug stores, stationary stores, and office supply stores all have them.
There are a few different Pilot pens that are built around the G2. The <a href="http://www.pilotpen.us/detail.asp?PenID=7">G2 pens</a> themselves run about $1.20 a pen in packs of four or about a buck a piece for 12. The <a href="http://www.pilotpen.us/detail.asp?PenID=3">Pilot Dr. Grip Gel</a> costs about six bucks and its worth every penny. It has a rubber grip up at the top and a nice thick base. Yesterday I found a pen called the <a href="http://www.pilotpen.us/detail.asp?PenID=70">G6</a> which is a thicker G2 pen with a rubber shaft. It ran about $3 a piece. All of these us G2 archival ink.
I've used G2 based pens for about six months now and I love them. They're cheap, they write well, they use archival acid-free ink, and you can find them just about anywhere. If you're a snob you can put G2 ink inside of both Rotring and Waterman Rollerball pen casings. It's hard to justify the extra money, however, when a $6 Dr. Grip does the job just fine.
We won't know for about five hundred years if the ink is really archival or not but in the mean time we must trust the logo on the package.
If we're the strongest military force in the world, how come we <a href="http://slate.msn.com/id/2098571/">hire mercenaries</a> to <a href="http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2426405.php">shoot Iraqis in the ass with exploding bullets</a>? Here are a couple of context-free quotes:
"It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower left section of his stomach ... everything was torn apart," Thomas said. ... The bullet is so controversial that if Thomas, a former SEAL, had been on active duty, he would have been court-martialed for using it. The ammunition is "nonstandard" and hasn't passed the military's approval process.
The source for that, by the way, is the right-wing fascist propaganda of the Army Times.
Here's the first paragraph George Orwell's <a href="http://mikeshea.net/orwell">Politics and the English Language</a> fed through the <a href="http://ssshotaru.homestead.com/files/aolertranslator.html">AOL Translator</a>. I feel like I've combined matter and anti-matter.
MOST P3OPLE WHO BOTH3R WIT TEH MATER AT AL WUD ADMIT TAHT TEH ANGLISH LANGUAEG IS IN A BAD WAY BUT IT IS GEN3RALY ASUMAD TAHT W3 CANOT BY CONSCIOUS ACTION DO ANYTHNG ABOUT IT!11! OMG LOL OUR CIVILIZATION IS DECAEDNT AND OUR LANGUAEG - SO TEH ARGUMENT RUNS - MUST IENVITABLY R IN DA GEN3RAL COLAPSA!111 OMG LOL IT FOLOWS TAHT ANY STRUGLE AGANEST DA ABUSE OF LANGUAEG IS A S3NTIEMNTAL ARCHASEM LIEK PRAFARNG CANDLAS 2 ELECTRIC LIGHT OR HANSOM CABS 2 AEROPLAENS1!111! WTF LOL UNDERNEATH THIS LEIS TEH HALF-CONSCIOUS BLEIF TAHT LANGUAEG IS A NATURAL GROWTH AND NOT AN INSTRUMENT WHICH WA SHAEP FOR OUR OWN PURPOS3S!1!! WTF LOL
Thanks to <a href="http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/">MT Blacklist</a>, an anti-spam plug-in for MovableType, I turned commenting back on. You can now add comments to any blog-entry but not if you want me to buy your big-dick cream.
I'm reading <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1592400876/">Eats, Shoots and Leaves</a>, a book about the horrid misuse of punctuation in modern Europe. The New York Times has a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/25/books/review/25MORRIST.html?ex=1083470400&en=1adbddff62b2e2ab&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE">great review</a> about this crazy lady who chase's down movie poster's with a marker. She calls all punctuation fascists to war, storming grocery store's and bus billboard's with huge apostrophe's on stick's. So far its a great book. Yes, jackass, I purposefully mis-apostrophe'd the previous paragraph.
I don't like Howard Stern, but his website is useful for ways to combat the FCC. Here is <a href="http://www.howardstern.com/action.html">Howard Stern's Action Network</a>. <a href="http://www.aclu.org/FreeSpeech/FreeSpeech.cfm?ID=15280&c=83">Fax your Congressman for First Amendment protection</a>. Don't let the government decide what you find or don't find offensive. Cable successfully self regulates its content, so can everyone else.