Dr. Memnus Lagbane Soultooth the Mad

Dammit dammit dammit. No phone for me. STILL. Not even any phone for me at work, where I actually need one. Never mind the want-my-own part.

So lazy.

click

Apparently for the first time ever a woman has won an Indycar race. (I know this because the blinkybox says so.) The ESPN commentary is, well, confirming my suspicion that car racing would be a sexist sport. "Look at that trophy! I bet they won't expect *her* to lift it up older her shoulders!" Repeated comments about "girls" or "females" in the sport ... nothing about "women". "Just think -- she'll be a MOM someday! What a thing you could tell your children!"

Yeah, it's historic, but the comments. They're making *me* twitch.

click

Responses to a meme.

zhukora1 asks: Got any phobias or otherwise irrational aversions? If so, do they/have they ever affected your decisions or the way you choose to live your life?

I'd like to think it's not irrational, but I don't like wondering where my basic needs will be coming from, or relying on others for them. When I interned for NVIDIA for a summer, I didn't have confirmation about the room I was renting until the evening that I'd already driven into town, and I was parked on some friends' couch. That was not a fun week, and it prompted me to get whatever apartment I could before moving to Salt Lake, without any of this "visiting" nonsense. The apartment I ended up in was poorly insulated and not in the most convenient location. The same reasoning had applied when I had several job prospects in SLC and none in San Diego; fortunately that has been resolved.

ozzygoddess asks: What is the least desirable of all household chores and why?

Dusting, oh gods dusting. Either you just kick all the dust back up into the air so it can fall all over everything again, or you use some tool approximating a wet washcloth that can't get into all the tiny little crannies you find (never mind the ones you forget). There's always more places than you could have possibly thought, and anywhere there's a sharp corner you can't quite get into you end up with a margin of dust all around your clean surface. And you knock stuff over or otherwise make a mess in the process.

click

Depressing symptom of Utah #whoknows: Ever tried buying condoms in a Utah grocery store? Any other state, they're generally stuck innocuously between the tampons and the baby food, giving shoppers all their reproductive options in one place. But around here - at least at Smith's, the one store I'm familiar with - they're brought out to the pharmacy section of the store. Ok, makes sense I guess. But it's worse than that. They're kept in a glass case, generally right under the prescription counter, the kind you generally need to flag down an employee to get into. Once, I saw a sign on the case declaring it to be unlocked, but that doesn't change the fact that you have to single yourself out to get to them - and that scared kids are going to be that much less likely to use them. Worse, if you go in after pharmacy hours, the gate that blocks off the prescription counter (which DOES get locked) blocks off the condom case as well! That emergency midnight condom run might as well be foiled. Ok, yes, you can go across the street to Walgreen's, but there's no self-checkout there. A teenager buying condoms still has to look someone in the eye and, if not verbally so, say "I'm headed off to have sex soon." Combine that with an unhealthy dose of cultural shame about that fact, and you have plenty for LDS Family Services to do.

In today's news, Big Brother is watching Second Life (BBC News). Do they really think that ter'rists are going to set up a Bomb-Making Island? What, exactly, constitutes "suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world"? What virtual world or MMO actually has the backend available to do that kind of data mining?

I only wish this were in the Onion: U.S. Military makes purchasing decision on value of product instead of lobbyists; Congress vows to find out what went wrong. I sincerly hope that someone in the DoD has the balls to stand up for this decision. Ok, first I hope there was an honest decision process behind it. Since I can't be pissed that it had to be a decision in the first place, I have to start somewhere... right?

click

Dear CS[5|6]966 lecturers,

The singular of the word vertices is vertex. There is NO SUCH THING as a 'verticee'. I don't even know how you're trying to spell that word you keep saying. It hurts me every time you use it, and you have been doing this for long enough that you really, really should know better. The correct word even shows up on the screen in Maya every time you switch selection modes. Please read it as written.

Thank you,
Brian

click

zhukora1, this is ALL YOUR FAULT.

( Filk, short )

I'm so, so sorry.

click

"Manhat o'clock" has got to be the best CAPCHA phrase I have ever seen.

click

Man convicted for sex with bicycle (BBC News)

The headline would grab anyone's attention. The charge, "sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex," makes it sound like he was in the middle of the street at the time, which would be a different matter entirely. This turns out to be far from the case.

The act itself doesn't faze me. I've learned well that people do some bizarre stuff with their genitals. No, what weirds me out and makes this entirely fucked up is that this "breach of the peace" was performed in the man's own bedroom, behind a locked door. And for it, this gentleman has been placed on a sex offenders registry for three years.

Three years. For fucking his own bicycle, in his own locked bedroom. The hell???

(In the interest of fairness, this was a bedroom at a hostel. There may be rules in place at hostels regarding what is and isn't private space, but somehow I suspect that if the cleaners had walked in on him with another consenting adult, there would have been nothing more than a few blushes and a quickly closed door. Feel free to correct my assumptions here.)

Sex offenders registries help no one, when the innocent bicycle fetishist and the high school senior that happened to turn 18 before his high-school-senior girlfriend are lumped in with the serial stalkers and baby-rapists. That's a big gap, here, but two years from now nobody's going to look at this guy and see a guy caught in an embarrassing, but harmless situation. No, they'll see a sex offender, and treat him accordingly.

Sense of perspective, anyone?

click

While it's nice to be able to (legitimately!) play Half-Life 2 on lab computers, it'd be even nicer to be able to do so without getting motion sick.

click

The human body is like the internet, in that it is not just a series of tubes.