Category Archives: arts/entertainment

“Let them pop a pain pill” – Marie Antoinette

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Monica Crowley has found a useful analogy to explain just how out of touch congressional democrat leadership has become on the health care debate.  What’s the analogy, you ask:  Marie Antoinette (portrayed beautifully by Kirsten Dunst in her recent film) and the French Revolution.  Now, you may laugh, but I think in a limited sense, this analogy helps one understand not only the enormity of Washington’s foe-paw, but also the level to which the American public is angry… and we are REALLY ANGRY.  Here is just a snipped from Monica’s article:

Democrats’ “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment No. 1: This week, Mrs. Pelosi and her deputy, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, wrote an op-ed in which they called everyone who opposes their plan for socialized medicine “un-American.”…

Earth to Democrats: Displaying contempt for the American people when you are being paid by those people to serve their interests is generally not a good political move.

Democrats’ “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment No. 2: This week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the deficit grew by $181 billion in July alone, to $1.3 trillion. The massive spending, bailouts and collapsing tax receipts (individual tax receipts fell by 22 percent and corporate tax receipts fell by a staggering 57 percent) have led Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to ask Congress to raise the $12.1 trillion debt limit, so the government can spend and borrow even more.

If you were rational, you would see in these numbers an impetus to restrain spending. But among Democrats, such rationality doesn’t exist….

Democrats’ “Let Them Eat Cake” Moment No. 3: Mrs. Pelosi and her gang used the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill to sneak in funding for three luxury jets for their personal transport. Total projected cost to you: hundreds of millions. These are the same people who profess a love of the environment, a desire to minimize America’s carbon footprint, and concern about spending.

To put Marie Antoinette’s phrase in a more popular vernacular, it might sound something like this:

“let them pop a pain pill”.

The Devil’s Dictionary – heavily abridged

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I recently stumbled onto the writings of Ambrose Bierce… and was immediately sucked into reading the entirety of his work “The Devil’s Dictionary” — which, evidently, is out of copyright and available on the web…   I simply cannot remember the last time I read such a cynical author… or had as much fun with a book.

Here are but a few of my favorite definitions:

ABSTAINER, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

ACCIDENT, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.

ACQUAINTANCE, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.

CONGRATULATION, n. The civility of envy.

CONNOISSEUR, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.

DECIDE, v.i. To succumb to the preponderance of one set of influences over another set.

DICTATOR, n. The chief of a nation that prefers the pestilence of despotism to the plague of anarchy.

ENVY, n. Emulation adapted to the meanest capacity.

INDISCRETION, n. The guilt of woman.

INFLUENCE, n. In politics, a visionary quo given in exchange for a substantial quid.

INTIMACY, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

JUSTICE, n. A commodity which is a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

NIHILIST, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi.

NON-COMBATANT, n. A dead Quaker.

OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.

OWE, v. To have (and to hold) a debt. The word formerly signified not indebtedness, but possession; it meant “own,” and in the minds of debtors there is still a good deal of confusion between assets and liabilities.

PLAGIARISM, n. A literary coincidence compounded of a discreditable priority and an honorable subsequence.

PLAGIARIZE, v. To take the thought or style of another writer whom one has never, never read.

POLITENESS, n. The most acceptable hypocrisy.

PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

RESOLUTE, adj. Obstinate in a course that we approve.

via The Devil’s Dictionary (by Ambrose Bierce).

book banning and other misadventures

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For those of you who are unaware, I recently got into a huge blog-fight with a friend of mine on her blog. Her post, entitled “Ban Books…..yeah….fu** you!!!” was essentially an expletive-laced, rant about how backwards and dangerous Sarah Palin is for ‘banning’ books from her local library. She concludes, in a moment of exasperation, “What century is this crazy as* bi*ch living in?”

Being the good friend that I am, I thought some illumination was necessary. I proceeded to explain to her that:

What’s wrong with certain books being banned by library staff anyway? Surely even YOU would ban certain books if you were a librarian… for example, I doubt you would get a hustler subscription for your local library…

Librarians MAKE EDITORIAL SELECTIONS TO THEIR BOOK CATALOG ALL THE TIME. That’s why you have any given book in your library is BECAUSE of a conscious choice to PUT IT THERE.

This obviously was not convincing enough for her as she proceeded to say:

What the hell do you mean? Please tell me which power enumerated in the Constitution of the US or in Alaska’s laws give that idiot that right to ban books… I’d love to see Sarah Palin even begin to comprehend a casebook, lmao!!! She can’t handle children’s books in the local library, without getting offended. What a simple minded fool.

Banning books, wanting to teach a non science like creationism in schools, knowing nothing about how the constitution or goverment works, time and time again showing that she thinks she can be the arbiter of values for people who have the right to choose those things for themselves, I consider that i huge fuc**ng issue.

But I guess that’s why I’m a libertarian Joel, I believe in freedom, and people’s right to choose for themselves, and not have some half wit poorly educated blow hard tell me what I can or can’t do.

I’m sure you are getting the picture here; my logic didn’t make a dent. But, being the good friend I am, I concluded I just hadn’t explained it clearly enough:

libraries are not protected by the first amendment you IDOT. People are. Go ahead… explain to me how the constitution prohibits taxpayers from voicing their opinions about how their tax dollars are spent… LIBRARIES do not have first amendment rights!!!!!

Freedom of expression isn’t at issue here. Local communities can decide what they want in their library and what they DON’T want. Why is Palin unable to voice her opinion about what is in her community’s libraries??? Why should HER OPINION about this be stifled? You want to talk about stifling… let’s talk about the assumption SHE CAN’T GIVE HER INPUT. This is Orwellian doublespeak here.

[T]his whole thing is basically an argument that non-religious people are better-suited to decide what we should be learning at our local library than religious people. This is al basically just an attack on Christians and christian beliefs…

This was about as much as I could take. After a few more exchanges of (mostly) personal attacks, I felt my time would be better spent on other things).

Continue reading →

new jquery project

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flickr post

new jquery project, originally uploaded by jrossol.

so… havent’ been blogging in a while…. well… there is a GOOD REASON. Just finished teaching myself some basic jquery so I can be more marketable as a web developer. FUN STUFF.  Basically, I built an interactive library of ALL the music I own so people can take a look at what I like, read my reviews… etc.  I used a very powerful yet surprisingly simple-to-use javascript library called jquery, and also implemented some asynchronous database calls that populate the meta-data without requiring a page refresh.  It’s still a work in progress, but I’m excited about its potential.  I will continue to update it with more cd’s, better effects, and more of MY OWN reviews (not the stock Amazon filler that’s currently there).  I’m probably breaking some copyright by doing this but what the hey… FAIR USE!

Check it out @ http://www.blogstitution.com/CD/index.php.  Click on an album to see the effects.

*** YOU will NEED safari or Firefox 3… or else you will have rendering problems.

FITNA

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Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician and member of the Dutch Freedom party has just released a documentary CRITICAL of radical Islamists called FITNA.  As expected, muslims around the world have condemned Wilders for releasing the film–threatening Wilders personally as well as the lives of any internet site complicit in its broadcast.  LiveLeak.com, a site famous for airing controversial footage was forced to remove the clip from their servers citing “very serious threats“.

If this were not distressing enough, WESTERN leaders also joined with the exreemists in condemning the film.  The EU’s Slovenian presidency said the film only “inflaming hatred”.  The U.N. Secretary-General, Mr. Ban, “condemned” the film “in the strongest terms”.  He also said that, ”The right of free expression is not at stake here… Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility.”  Even the Dutch Prime Minister Mr. Balkenende said the film ”serves no purpose other than to offend”.

Mr. Wilders has just proven himself to be one of the gutsiest men alive.  The threats directed at him and at the free press outlets of the world only reinforce and validate his criticisms.  Mr. Ban just doesn’t get it:  Because those exercising free speech are being threatened with violence, free speech is VERY MUCH at stake here.  The basic message of the film film-that radical islamic terrorists are a very real threat-is what terrorists are affirming at every turn and what European leaders are in denial about.  As Eric Cartman so poignantly pointed out, using fear to get people to do what you want isn’t like terrorism, “it IS terrorism”.  I applaud Mr. Wilders for standing up for these principles… not many people do anymore.

Itunes design flaws…

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I’m a pretty avid itunes user, but lately I have been noticing there are fundamental design issues that cripple the itunes interface. As I have been adding more and more movies to my itunes library, It has become quite clear that this portion of the application needs a facelift.

The Movie Preview Page

I must admit, this page baffles me.. on any number of levels. The thumbnail view is completely lacking in design and usability. Not only is its jet black background fundamentally out of place in the Itunes white/grey design scheme… but with your typical widescreen movie, you are limited to a preview image approximately 100 pixels long — hardly enough information to make out a face, much less serve any preview purpose.

To make matters worse, itunes insists on providing you unnecessary metadata for what is essentially a visual preview mode… without providing room to display most of the data it insists upon. If you look a the example screen-capture, you will see that most titles more then 20 characters long get cut off. This is especially true with the Stanford university video where nearly every piece of information in each content area.

What bothers me about these problems is that there is more then ample space in this view to display twice the information, with a much larger preview, but instead we get huge gaps of black background. Let’s do some quick math… with an average size window (800w x 600h)… you have an area of 480,000 square pixels. If each preview image is 100w x 50h (average approximation for DVD movies), and you only put 15 previews in this area (3 across, 5 down) , you end up using only 15% of the total useable space for preview purposes! (75000 [100*50*15] / 480,000). And this is IN PREVIEW MODE!

I would love to see a movie preview page that did movie previews well. In fact, I would prefer navigating my video library visually instead of textually but alas, Apple’s implementation just isn’t worth using. Apple, you can do better.

I have my issues with coverflow as well; but perhaps that is better saved for another post.

For your next wine & cheese event:

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Just because I’m up to my eyeballs in law review articles doesn’t mean I don’t take some time to enjoy the finer things in life. One of those finer things is the music of an Estonian artist all of you should be aquatinted with: Arvo Part.

Also, if you want to bring the best bottle to your next event: I want to highly recommend the “Joel Gott” Cabernet Sauvignon (For father’s day I gave my dad the bottle with an added message “Joel Gott… you a father’s day present… clever, no?) I think the ’05 year is the better year then the 06… but I would imagine both are very good.

I’d love to hear from someone else on their opinion of this bottle; it’s currently my #1 Red wine in the under $20 list (which is the only kind of wine I have a list for)

As for the cheese? I’m partial to aged asiago.