Dan Savage is an advice columnist focusing on questions about sex and relationships. When pushed, he knows how to throw down with the best of them.

Werner Herzog has made many films and not one of them was boring, either to watch or to film (he famously “haul[ed] a boat up a mountainside in [his film] Fitzcarraldo … in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest, [because] audience will know if the shots are real”. His latest is Little Dieter Needs to Fly—a documentary about the only successful escape from a POW camp in Vietnam—with the unparalleled Christian Bale in the lead role. Roger Ebert wrote him a magnificent letter (linked below)... [More]

The strips from October 2007 (MNFTIU) have some pretty good lines:

“I used to have a friend who was skeptical about whether bombing the shit out of people was the best way to fight terrorism. I bet he feels pretty stupid now.”

“If Turkey invades Northern Iraq, we should try selling them a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner. I know where you can get one cheap. … You know, if enough countries invade Iraq, maybe we can just slip out the back…”

In response to the possibility that Blackwater employees might be... [More]

It would be nice if all of the faithful in America would apply their faith constructively for once. Instead of shopping amongst the meatheads on the Republican side or the non-commital shysters on the Democratic side, they should take a look at Kucinich’s platform and believe that he could make it work. Vote him into the presidency and give him four years—if he only accomplishes half of what he would like to, America will be on its way to being the country we were all[1] taught it already was.

Debates... [More]

The internet is lately being overrun by pictures with captions. Most of these pictures features cats with bad grammar, but not all of them. For some unknown reason, some are incredibly, laugh-out-loud, tears-in-your-eyes funny. Most of the images are from 100 Top Internet Pictures by TheWalkingDude.[1]

Exhibit (A) below is an image that originated somewhere on the internets—most likely Something Awful or Fark (browse at your own risk/not for the faint of heart/your mileage may vary), but which indicates that it... [More]

This picture showed up when you clicked through on this link title: AP Photo of the President and some fucking asshole that bankrupted our country and killed 1,000,000+ people. (Reddit)[1] Sure, it’s a cheap trick, but funny as hell.

There’s a fun little video called What We Call the News (JibJab), which lampoons the state of American media today, which has degenerated from “anchors of integrity and three channels to choose” to “a ratings race, with the anchors replaced by blondes with big, fake boobs”. To be fair, it’s not these superficial qualities that form the crux of the problem—Lou Dobbs, for example, is neither blonde nor especially busty. But he exemplifies the problem with the news with his shocking incompetence and... [More]

This guy kicked off a [a] better design to fit a year calendar comfortably within a business card. (ELZR) There are a lot of, shall we say, unique, entries. Many of them are interesting only in that they actually work, not that they would be more useful than the standard pocket calendar, which uses text too small to read. The winning entry is the Thumb Calendar by Adam Sporka, which is clean and clear:

Here’s how it works:

First half of the year is on one side of the card, the rest of the year is on the other.... [More]

The International Photography Contest (National Geographic) selected the following picture as the winner in the Animals category of their annual competition. This is wrong on so many levels, not least of which is that a lot of people (yours truly included) tend to have much stronger reactions to the suffering of animals that fellow human beings. Why is that? Is it their helplessness? Their relative innocence? Are people not accorded a similar guilelessness, by default? Or do we just assume that they, while not... [More]

Fast Food Restaurants & Nutrition Facts Compared (A Calorie Counter) took the time to painstakingly combine the published nutrition (if you can call it that) information for the largest fast food chains in America.

A few tidbits:

• In the french fries department, Dairy Queen at 1530mg delivers almost five times the sodium of McDonald’s fries and 730 kCal for their large size.
• Carl’s Jr weighs in with a regular hamburger that has 470 kCal and 1060mg of sodium.
• The unlimited weight class for sandwiches/burgers has... [More]

The Writer’s Guild started their strike this week, bringing all new television production out of Hollywood to a screeching halt. For those who haven’t followed it too closely, the Guild have put together a video covering the main points.

Why We Fight (YouTube)

Another member of the guild involved in the negotiation wrote Why We Want Our Words’ Worth by Michael Winship (Common Dreams), which noted that much of what is breathlessly reported by the media is vastly distorted or flat-out incorrect—pretty much par for the course for the new channels,... [More]

As cities in America grow bigger and bigger, with suburbs being surrounded by exurbs and people travelling around, through and between city centers regularly, the question of public transportation arises. It’s only really in the States that large cities look at public transportation as a question rather than as a right. It’s only in the States that trains, subways, light rail and metro commuter lines are discussed in terms of profitability instead of usefulness, environmental friendliness and... [More]

The Congress spent the weekend proving, once again, that they have no idea what the safe word is in the sub/dom game they’ve been playing with the executive branch since early 2001. And, despite the title of this article, Hillary Clinton Votes for War — Again by David Bromwich (Common Dreams), it’s not just Hillary grinning madly around the ball gag, either: she’s joined by 75 close friends in the Senate who also saw fit to approve the following language[1]:

“…that it should be the policy of the United States to stop inside... [More]”

Often quoted by the now-silent Billmon in response to stunningly undetstatements offered by politicians at large. The most recent spate come from the king of rhetoric, George Bush II, S = r * t (My Alter Ego Speaks) cites him: “I do know that we have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed”, with other variations being “I thought we would succeed quicker than we did” and “I am disappointed by... [More]”

Statetris is Tetris, but with countries or states/counties. You can choose from the following difficulty levels:

• Easy – States/countries are labeled and already rotated to the correct position.
• Medium – States/countries are labeled and are rotated to a random position.
• Hard – States/countries are not labeled and are rotated to a random position.

Some of the countries are really small and must simply be placed into one of the magnifying glasses. It’s a pity that they don’t leave the... [More]

Played by Hugh Grant; the quote is twice as good when you hear him deliver it.

On the subject of the suspiciously quiet home front in the war on terror, there’s Things I Used to Know by Scott Adams (Dilbert Blog):

“We Americans know that Al Qaeda has cells in America planning to attack. And we know that there are more terrorists than ever, thanks to the Iraq war. It’s easy to get people and explosives into the country on private boats or across our porous borders. The woods must be full of terrorists by now. Apparently all the slow ones came to America. I mean, Iraq has almost as many car bombs as... [More]”

Every once in a while, there’s something on Slashdot worth reading. More often than not, it’s in a comment rather than one of their “articles” (quotes intended to convey ample contempt for the editing process there). There’s a discussion there, High Court Trims Whistleblower Rights (Slashdot), in which one participant got pretty shrill in responding to a troll[1], trotting out all of the arguments that trolls dearly love to feed on (as well as those ever-delectable tears of frustration and rage).

Some... [More]

The application tar is ubiquitous in the Unix/Linux world. It rolls multiple files and directories into a single “tarball”, which can be transferred more easily and expanded at its destination. A single option, -z applies a compression to the resulting tarball, giving the file the by now well-known extension .tar.gz (for tar-balled and g-zipped). Extracting this file involves two operations, in which first the compression is removed and then the tarball unrolled.

The easiest way to back up a... [More]

“OOP without generics is like a car that only turns left – sure you can go right, just take three lefts.”

Googlewhacking—finding a search combination that returned exactly one hit—used to be all the rage, with some people devoting astonishing amounts of time to it, only to report it on a blog, have Google index it, immediately invalidating it (because now there are two results). Below is one that I stumbled on recently:

Googlewhack May

At the time (May 12th, 2007), it returned exactly one result and, amazingly, has stood the test of time, returning only one relevant result today (as shown below):

Googlewhack July
... [More]