the red-eyed jedi

Poll #1238941
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

russia waited till now to invade a strategically-valuable post-USSR satellite state because everyone is watching the olympics.

i care about it.

i NEED to be involved in this race series at some point.

http://jalopnik.com/391501/the-24-hours-of-lemons-altamont-2008-uber-gallery



also, e30 w00t! can i call the cheap-cars-to-thrash or what? if it weren't for the fast-and-furious driftmania, we'd be seeing nissan 240's running head to head at lemons too. now i just have to figure out what to do with my skyline-engined car, since it isn't smog-legal in california...

where is your f***ing helmet, dumbass?

i remember the news story about the parent falcons being rescued and raised, so this is sad.

life imitates robert heinlein novels. do want.

had been too long since i'd done a dj mix.

new handle, new genre (drum'n'bass this time... but with the feel/"abruptness" you'd probably expect from me).

pyramidhead - avulsion (~88mb, 192k/sec, ~1:03 duration)

enjoy & propagate, feedback appreciated. another will come after i get my next laptop.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Swimming Pool
The Believer

i've been on a movie binge over the past month, but these are the ones i've liked.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/news/2008/03/28/nhelmet128.xml

Jedi Master Jonba Hehol - known to family and friends as Barney Jones, 36, of Holyhead - was giving a TV interview in his back garden for a documentary when a man, dressed in a black bin-bag and wearing Darth Vader's trademark shiny black helmet, leapt over his garden fence.

Wielding a metal crutch - his lightsaber presumably being in for repairs - the Sith Lord proceeded to lay about his opponent, whose Jedi powers proved inadequate for the task of defending himself.

After besting Master Hehol in single combat, Vader, who The Sun reports was under the influence of alcohol, went on to assault the camera crew and a hairdresser.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13449

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

...

"I can still talk verbally at the same time," Callahan told New Scientist. "We can differentiate between when you want to talk silently, and when you want to talk out loud." That could be useful in certain situations, he says, for example when making a private call while out in public.

so the new york auto show is currently ongoing; and though i've been hot on the new dodge challenger for years now, i have to say the car(?) i'd rock is the new pontiac el camino G8 ST (for sport truck, obv):



unfortunately, army regs would prevent the growing of the otherwise-required mullet. fuckin'a, man.

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so who out there actually cares about the content/comment strike that's supposed to start in about 7 hours? just curious.

from the "what could possibly go wrong" file
even as one of the people who'd be granted such a license... srsly, how is this a good idea

from the "is breeding control really such a terrible idea" file

from the "coulda told you that shit 5 years ago" file

how did i not hear about this until day-after? i'm slipping.

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edit: ok i'm listening and the shit is good. this is a return to the layer-upon-layer-upon-layer complexity that i loved about the fragile. i'll send trent $5. i promise.

to those of you out there who drive four-wheeled vehicles-

please watch out for those of us riding on two wheels.

and if you happen to make a mistake, like failing to yield right-of-way to someone on a motorcycle or scooter because you didn't see them, and as a result have them lock their brakes up and slide sideways into your pickup's rear bumper-

it'd be a nice thing if you stopped to check and see if you've killed or maimed anyone, rather than just taking off.

because the law says you're supposed to do that; but then you shouldn't need the legal impetus, as it's what any human should do out of common decency.

thanks.

(i'm okay, but my left knee and shoulder are full of pretty colors right now.)

nsfw

from http://www.alternet.org/rights/64336/

On the first day of July, Satender Singh was gay-bashed to death.

The 26-year-old Fijian of Indian descent was enjoying a holiday weekend outing at Lake Natoma with three married Indian couples around his age. Singh was delicate and dateless -- two facts that did not go unnoticed by a party of Russian-speaking immigrants two picnic tables away.

According to multiple witnesses, the men began loudly harassing Singh and his friends, calling them "7-Eleven workers" and "Sodomites." The Slavic men bragged about belonging to a Russian evangelical church and told Singh that he should go to a "good church" like theirs. According to Singh's friends, the harassers sent their wives and children home, then used their cell phones to summon several more Slavic men. The members of Singh's party, which included a woman six months pregnant, became afraid and tried to leave. But the Russian-speaking men blocked them with their bodies.

The pregnant woman said she didn't want to fight them.

"We don't want to fight you either," one of them replied in English. "We just want your faggot friend."

...

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls.

...

In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

...

Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has "made an injection" of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. "In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin," Kusakin said.

...

Dennis Mangers, a gay former California state senator who now lobbies for the cable industry, said that when he met a prominent leader of Sacramento's Slavic community at a 2006 weekend reconciliation retreat, the Slavic leader told him: "You have to understand, we equate homosexuals with thieves, adulterers and murderers. ... You are an abomination."

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it's unfortunate that i read this at 1am, because i should be asleep and now i'm fucking pissed.

i'd like to know exactly how it's okay that we let these people immigrate into our country, and then they're going to tell our citizens what is and is not an acceptable way to live our lives.

the majority of my friends here in seattle are members of the LGBT community.

let me catch any of them threatening violence upon people close to me, or anyone else i've sworn an oath to protect.
if they live, i'll turn them over to homeland security as hate-crime terrorists.
if being the operative word.

much more goodness in the image galleries

first, qwest, I LOVE YOU, for leaving my torrent/soulseek traffic alone.
a solid 100k/sec down is really all i ask for out of a broadband connection.

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second, i've done some bitching about tv shows lately.

tv shows i do not hate:
house, MD- if it's medically inaccurate, they've done enough research that the mistakes are over my head. and the main character is verbally ruthless, which is really my favorite part.
burn notice- equal parts intel, tactics, and the incredibly hot ex-gf. i'd do things to her that are probably illegal in amsterdam.
dexter- murderous sociopath, working in a police department, focuses his intent on other killers. can't go wrong.
californication- a great commentary on LA, and the only chance duchovny has had to actually act.
numb3rs- maybe the least of what i've listed here, but they're creative with each ep's plotline, and it's a crime-drama that tries to make you think, if nothing else.

and thanks to bittorrent, i can enjoy all of the above without commercials. god bless the internet.

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the third is tool's latest album, 10,000 days.

i felt notably unimpressed with this album when it was released last year. i don't remember why, exactly, but i just didn't give it a chance.

now that i've put myself through the past year's experience, vicarious, jambi, and right in two speak to me on levels i can't explain here.

roommate made me watch the season premiere of grey's anatomy tonight, and i lol'd hard.

first of all, EMT shows up with an arm amputation, and says "i put a pressure dressing on it".
yeah, good job, bud, cuz you wouldn't need a torniquet to tie off an open brachial artery or anything.

and then the last scene, about how delivering a baby is such a miracle to all the new interns-
come on. once the head is out, keep it straight with the rest of the spine, and once the shoulders clear it's pretty much -foop- and the kid is out.
(assuming the placenta didn't attach somewhere inconvenient and the cord didn't get wrapped up, in which case you do actually need an MD. there are other possible complications, but for the sake of brevity.)
sweep the umbilical towards the neonate, clamp, cut, wait for the afterbirth.

come on, do a little research- if the shit were that hard they wouldn't teach it to EMT-Bs.

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i left work early today so i could be @ home when the qwest tech got here to set up our clearwire-replacement DSL.
he did a fantastic job- checked every part of the line from the street, to the junction box, all the way up the side of the house to our 3rd-story apt.
he replaced all of the corroded connections in between, and in the end tested the phone jacks he installed and got 7mbit down/1mbit up; all we could have asked for- we lucked out being just a couple blocks away from the co-lo.
the only problem? qwest didn't deliver the DSL modem... so now i'm staring at a perfectly-functioning jack on the wall with nothing to plug into it, and we're still connecting through (four-expletive-string) clearwire tonight.
kinda feels like a wasted half-day that i could have spent making money.
wtvr.

sir_montag inspired me to try and recall the list of cars i've owned since i started driving 13 years ago.

in reverse order:
2002 subaru wrx wagon (awd + turbo = love)
1989 bmw 325is (twitchy lil bitch)
1991 nissan 240sx coupe (bandwagon yay)
1995 nissan 240sx (bandwagon yay)
1985 toyota mr2 (never ran, but whatever)
1987 vw gti 16v (technically still own this one)
1991 nissan sentra se-r (yes, another)
1997 vw gti-vr6 (shouldn't have tried to revive the dream)
1997 vw golf 4dr (bought for gf, her mom wrecked)
1989 toyota celica turbo all-trac (awd + turbo = love)
1998 vw gti-vr6 de (still haven't forgiven myself for wrecking it)
1992 vw jetta 4dr (lil' tank, beat on this thing mercilessly forever)
1986 toyota celica gt-s (sad substitute for an se-r)
1991 nissan sentra se-r (inspired by reading grassroots motorsports)
1984 toyota celica gt (thanks dad, this car taught me to drift half a decade before i knew that's what it was called)

averages out to a little over 1 per year since age 16. yes, i have car ADD.

alright car-geeks, let's see how much you can recollect.

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tonight, i agreed to send a deposit on the next car on the list. (since foobiwan will be concerned, purchase price is $2100 if both parties agree to finalize.)

tomorrow night; decibelfest and speedy j, mf'er!

hypothesis:
we don't really have a 2-party system.
both puppets are on the 2 arms of the same person.
kerry never intended to win the election. he was a weak candidate put out by the democratic party so that bush wouldn't have to fight too hard to win in '04.
even though the results were very close, during the post-vote drama he quickly conceded under the premise of "not wanting to be another '00 gore", but actually because he was never supposed to be president.

theory:
so- when andrew meyer starts asking awkward questions, he gets tasered because kerry doesn't want to own up to being nothing more than a strawman, used to ensure an 8-year term for bush.

why did kerry stand idly by while this kid's 1st-amendment rights were abused like a roofied sorority girl?
well, who's more important to the senator- random journalism student, or fellow skull & bones member president bush?

just sayin'.