Scientology

Andrew Sullivan today calls for a boycott of the Tom Cruise vehicle Miss:ion: Imp:oss:i:ble: 3.

How creepy is Tom Cruise? The Washington Post asks; and readers answer. All I can say is: after the way this guy treated South Park, we owe it to ignore him and any movie with which he’s associated. The Boycott “MI:3” movement starts here. Blogospheric solidarity much appreciated.

Well Andrew, I am completely with you on this one, but the boycott does NOT start with you. I was walking around Manhattan with my camera on April 16th and snagged this photo on 9th Avenue somewhere between 45th and 50th Street.

It seems that some people have already had the idea.

As it so happens I ended up passing through Times Square a few minutes later, where there was a pair of tables full of copies of Dianetics, a pair of e-meters, and a bunch of money-crazed bad pulp scifi worshipping Scientologists trying to indoctrinate passers-by. (I normally avoid Times Square, but I wanted to stop by Midtown Comics on the way home and couldn’t remember exactly which cross-street it’s at, only that it’s near the corner of 7th and 40-something. For the record, it was 40th Street.)

All of the following photos taken on April 16th on the west side of Times Square with a Canon EOS 300D and 65mm Hartblei Super Rotator lens.
Continue reading Scientology

Plumber wanted

I get a couple of email newsletters on jobs in Japan. I noticed that today’s Gaijinpot has the following job listing.

Shin-ei is looking for a Plumber who has at least more than 5 years of experience. Must be experienced in welding and plumbing works.

Description:
Plumbing work for the American Embassy building facilities.

Salary is negotiable based on your skill

Working hrs:
08:30-17:30

Why do they need a foreigner to do the plumbing? Are they flushing classified documents down the toilet?

Put a Statue of Dave Chappelle in the Capitol!

This just in! DC’s non-voting representative in Congress is sponsoring a bill to put two statues of famous DC natives in the Capitol building’s rotunda among statues from the “real” states.

You can vote for your choices here. The site provides a bunch of boring “historical” figures, but I personally recommend you write in master comedian and DC native Dave Chappelle. Why? Cuz he’s rich, biotch!

Story here. Thanks to NPR.

What are you waiting for? Get out of here and vote already!
Note that if you write a candidate in you cannot check the other choices.

UPDATE: Great article on Slate (“Dave Chappelle’s Problem – He Can’t Escape White People”) from a couple weeks ago on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party movie. The article describes the movie as Chappelle’s attempt to create a black audience for himself, which is basically an unnattainable goal. I’m not doing the article justice, so go read it for yourself!

Watchung Plaza {not} in miniature [Photo]

A week ago I finally recieved my Hartblei 65mm Superrotator tilt/shift lense. For only $350 you can get an imported Ukrainian-made lense of excellent quality, that matches, and in some ways even surpasses, the features of the Canon T/S lenses that retail for about $1100. I posted a set of photos I took with this lense right after it arrived. These aren’t by any means the greatest photos I have taken, but I want to show off some of the strange focusing effects you can get from a tilt/shift lense.

watchung
Watchung Plaza (from train bridge)
Notice the “dollhouse effect”


Watchung Train Station


Flag on the local Chase bank branch


Street sign after car crash
Notice how only the center is in focus, despite the fact that I was facing it squarely


April 5, 2006
Canon Digital Rebel w/ Hartblei 65mm Super-rotator

Secrets from Inside the White House! from the Something Awful forums

MUST READ!

AMAZING stuff from a thread at the Something Awful forums. A White House staffer has apparently snapped and decided to spill the beans, albeit in a carefully guarded way. It starts like this:

This is all good information, personally verified or witnessed by none other than me, but I will not answer any questions about it or go into any detail other than what I’ve already typed out. I may reply with more information or anecdotes if I see fit, but I’ve pretty much already scraped the barrel of my experiences.

These are some facts I have witnessed and learned through my employment. Take it at face value, believe it or don’t believe it, because I’m not providing corroborating pictures, details, or evidence beyond my own testimony.

Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.

Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.

President Bush uses anti-depressant medication, a lot of it, at a stupendous dosage, and he is hiding it from the American public. This is the real reason he stopped drinking. Because of the dosage, he is also impotent.

Tom Ridge carries 20 credit cards with him at all times, each one with a very low limit. I have never heard of him using one, ever, but he has them. He also wears his socks inside-out, and will flip the fuck out and walk strangely if he is forced to wear them properly, because it drives him crazy. All of his socks must be laundered right side in and then turned inside out before they are returned to him. He gave specific instructions about handling his food, and not allowing his vegetables to touch any other food item on the plate. His utensils must be steamed over boiling water. He will not eat soup which hasn’t been boiled within the past 20 minutes or which he has not prepared himself. If any of these rules are violated, he flies into a rage, turns beet red, and will not eat a single thing. He has his personal attendants confirm over and over that the food is as he likes it. He also shaves his forearms and hands because he can’t stand the idea of body hair on his arms. He demands that his bedsheets are bleach white and changed fresh every night and he sleeps in a separate bed in a big, tight, body-length nylon sleeve, with a fan blowing over him at full power. He is terrified of animals which have fur or hair longer than one inch, and will not go near curly hair of any kind, even on people. At one time he ran from his office and demanded that someone look under everything for a rodent which did not and could not exist, then he had the entire place wiped down with disinfectant and vacuumed twice. While this was done he couldn’t even bear to look at the door, or come within 20 feet of his office. He was in hysterics.

President Bush, when dining at the white-house, does not eat any item of food which has not been first sniffed by a trained dog before being prepared. Think about that.

Word among the staff is that Cheney was drunk when he shot that lawyer, and secluded himself for a day to sober up and avoid felony firearms charges. I don’t have any direct information on this because the guys with him at the time are not talking. This is totally unconfirmed, but I think it is plausible.

Dick Cheney has chronic gum problems and his breath smells like shit as a result. He is also a CLOSE TALKER. He keeps a small bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide which he rinses with every hour on the hour, and he swallows it instead of spitting. He also picks his nose vigorously (violently) and hums loudly and tunelessly to himself while taking shits.

There is a sealed room in the whitehouse which once held a half-ton block of cheese for about 30 years.

The White house is planting its own men among the press agents at press conferences.

The white house lawn is mowed every other day by the same man humming the same tune.

Despite all of this craziness, there is nothing strange whatsoever about Condoleeza Rice. She is completely balanced and normal, if slightly robotic in her personal demeanor. She smells very nice at all times. She does, however, constantly check her investments online from her office when she thinks that nobody is looking, and she has slept at her desk on multiple occasions.

There is an administrative law judge who sits in an office in a building near the white-house, earns around 200k per year and has a secretary, and he does nothing except sit, read, and listen to classical music all day. His secretary likewise does nothing. He gets meals taken to him from the White-house kitchen, and is so lonely that he latches on to whoever gets sent and talks to them for hours about the korean war. His family is all dead and his secretary hates him. In a drawer in his desk he has an old revolver, which he got in there somehow despite that he shouldn’t have been able to bring it in. I think he will shoot himself one day.

The “undisclosed location” is usually a local police officer training ground or state trooper college. Shh.

I can’t tell you if much of it is true or not, but it certainly rings true. Plus, it’s funny as hell!

What convinced me he knew what he was talking about was when he mentioned that a lot of our “foreign policy” is us using our economic power to twist foreign govts into enacting policies that benefit US companies. If you know anything about the USTR, that should hit home.

More Kabuki PLUS – Blast and Slam: My two favorite news cliches

I hereby present my dear readers with yet another example of the growing usage of “kabuki” as a political metaphor for either boring deliberations or carefully calculated horse-and-pony shows (if I may use one cliche to explain another). This was linked to on the front page of Slate.com:

The Full Kabuki: Everybody’s happy, nothing changes.
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Thursday, April 6, 2006, at 6:36 AM ET

The Full Kabuki: On immigration, the stage is set for a classic Washington stalemate in which all the actors–at least the Republican actors–get to position themselves as advocating their desired brand of bold action, and nothing gets done. … As Charles Peters has written, in Washington, “Make Believe = Survival.”

I don’t really remember kabuki having many happy endings. Someone needs to decide on a real definition for “political kabuki” or perhaps just officially ban the term from public discourse. It’s lame!

What’s never lame, however, is the use of the words “blast” and “slam” over and over again in headlines to describe any kind of criticism. I mean, it does get a little stale, but I still get a kick out of shouting SLAM!!! whenever I read that a think tank isn’t into Bush’s tax plan. And remember what Slate’s Jack Shafer said: “If journalists weren’t allowed to recycle headlines every 10 years they’d run out of them.”

Here are some fun examples from recent news:

  • Ugly apartments SLAMMED into the stone age!
  • An artist's impression of Jurys Inn at Kings Dock

    Experts slam Kings Dock hotel design

    Apr 5 2006

    By Nick Coligan, Liverpool Echo

    TWO hotels earmarked for Liverpool’s Kings Dock have come under fire from architecture experts.

    The three-star-plus Jurys Inn and smaller Staybridge boutique hotel are dubbed “disappointing” and “not convincing”.

  • Moby BLASTS xenophobia with his techno-laser-glasses!
  • Continue reading More Kabuki PLUS – Blast and Slam: My two favorite news cliches

    Three cheers for Lin Wuei-chou

    From The Taipei Times:

    To highlight his disappointment with what he called the ongoing political confrontation within the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its all-round degeneration, DPP Legislator Lin Wuei-chou (林為洲) yesterday quit the party, urging voters to quit political parties, become neutral and avoid getting caught up in the “partisan squabbles” provoked by politicians.

    Lin, who joined the party in 2000, released a three-page statement yesterday announcing his decision to quit.

    In the statement, Lin said he was loath to see both the pan-green and pan-blue camps take advantage of people’s passions to mobilize them to join large-scale parades and rallies that actually serve no concrete purpose whatsoever.

    Partisan politics in Taiwan are notoriously, nay, hilariously bitter. What exactly is Mr. Lin Wuei-chou trying to escape from? Here are a couple of examples that I have blogged in the past, plus one new one from the very newest issue of the Taipei Times.


    DPP Legislator Wang Shu-hui, left, attacks KMT Legislator Kuo Su-chun, right, after Kuo tore up a copy of Premier Frank Hsieh’s policy report that he was scheduled to deliver yesterday at the opening of a new sitting of the legislature.

    Speaking at a separate event, TSU Chairman Shu Chin-chiang (蘇進強), however called the government a “liar” in front of DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) at an activity held by the Hand-in-Hand Taiwan Alliance that both men attended yesterday morning.

    Shu’s remarks immediately made the atmosphere awkward.

    […]

    Sitting beside Shu, Su looked embarrassed and did not respond to his criticisms.

    The two men did not talk to each other and left the news conference separately.

    And from today…

    Friday, Mar 31, 2006,Page 4

    Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝) yesterday told reporters that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lee Ching-hua (李慶華) had been acting like a three-year-old, one day after Lee called him “Dick Minister” and “Pert Minister,” referring to a shampoo brand, during a legislative committee meeting. The heated exchange of words arose over Lee’s discontent with a ministry-published high school sex education pamphlet which contained explicit sexual references. “If Lee had carefully read the pamphlet, he wouldn’t have noticed only the [explicit material]. Only three-year-old children would see nothing but [that material] in the pamphlet,” Tu said, adding that Lee was not a “well-educated person” and that him being a lawmaker could only waste the nation’s resources. When asked for comment, Lee said he had suggested Tu and his wife make public images of the two copulating in the pamphlet.

    United States partisan politics may not have quite yet reached this level of clownishness, but it’s close enough so that I’m disgusted with the whole business. Therefore, I am swearing an oath-if any major partisan politician running in elections for which I am eligible resigns from their party and severs all financial and organizational ties with the party, I will vote for you. I don’t care which party it is that you are leaveing, I don’t care how you feel about the Iraq War, or Medicare, or abortion, or school lunches, or even if you’re a holocaust denyer or a convicted rapist. If you follow the brave lead of Lin Wuei-chou in Taiwan, and tell the Washington based political party establishment to go fuck itself, I, who am not, never have been, and never will be a registered member of any political party, will vote for you.

    More on Lenovo

    A few days ago I discussed the US State Department/Lenovo deal and the theoretical security implications that have led some congressmen to get rather hysterical about the whole thing. Since then, the story has only grown, being featured on the front page of the BBC News site, among others. The BBC piece mentions the following.

    The State Department is spending about $13m (£7m) on the Lenovo computers, which are assembled at factories in North Carolina and Mexico.

    Mr Carlisle added that the circuit boards are originally made in US ally Taiwan, and not mainland China.

    According to an article on Dailytech.com, computers assembled entirely outside of the PRC are in fact “an oddity in the PC manufacturing business.” They go on to say:

    If US companies are intimidated by probes of the USCC, such probes could be easily applied to virtually every PC manufacturer in the US: Intel motherboards are built by Taiwanese Hon Hai Precision Industries from facilities in Shenzhen; Acer components are built by component manufacturers in Shanghai; Dell PCs are assembled in factories in Suzhou and Shanghai. The same spokesperson went on to say “We [Taiwanese manufactures] do more work in China than we do anywhere else in the world. I don’t even want to think about what would happen to our US clients if we got a USCC probe.”

    CDW Government, the company originally contracted to fill the orders for the US government also carries several brands that are assembled in the PRC including Acer, BenQ, D-Link, HP, Sharp and Toshiba.

    Really, this entire minor uproar is at best absurd and at worst moronic and insulting. In my previous post I briefly discussed some theoretical ways in which the Lenovo PCs could be bugged, but I don’t in fact believe that there is any more of a real security risk in purchasing Lenovo computers.

    Various PC components are manufactured all over the world. Here’s a brief listing off the top of my head of country of manufacture labels that I have personally seen on hardware that I have owned and used.
    Hard drives: Japan and Thailand
    CPUs: AMD, Germany Intel, Singapore, Malaysia
    RAM: Korea, Japan, Germany, Taiwan
    Motherboards: Taiwan, China
    LCD Panels: Korea, Japan, Taiwan

    While this absurdity may not go anywhere, Lenovo may have far more serious problems down the line, of a non-political nature.