Category: Life

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Support The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: 1-800-99-CBLDFYou might think nothing of going down to the store and picking up a comic book, but there are people out there who want to limit your choices to books aimed at 10-year-olds. (Admittedly, there aren’t enough books aimed at 10-year-olds right now, but that’s another rant). Imagine if all movies were G-rated. Because, after all, everyone knows, movies are just for kids, right?

There was a time when all comics had to be approved by the Comics Code Authority, because in the 1950s, comics were the trendy scapegoat for juvenile delinquency (much as video games are often blamed today). While writers and artists of the day managed to produce classics within those constraints, one can only imagine what the world missed out on that it wouldn’t see until publishers began to risk non-code books in the 1980s. The now-classic Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing, for instance, or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, could never have been produced under the limits of the Comics Code, even under its current incarnation. (Back to movies briefly: did you know that It’s a Wonderful Life broke the rules of the motion picture code? Mr. Potter may have failed to take over the Savings and Loan, but he was never punished for his misdeeds — a requirement under the film codes of the time!)

Even now, there are people who want to keep everything “safe” and innocuous — for everyone, adults as well as kids. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is dedicated to protecting freedom of expression in comics from this sort of attack. They’ve defended writers, artists, even retailers over the past 15 years.

So if you like books like Fables or Powers, or books like 100 Bullets or Y, The Last Man — check out the CBLDF. Read what they do, and why. Consider joining, or making a donation, or just buying a T-shirt. And if you’re going to San Diego for Comic-Con International this weekend, drop by their booth and see what’s going on.

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I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this takes the cake:

Sometime last night I received three copies of the same notice from some system in Brazil. They had written their virus warning in Microsoft Word, saved it as HTML without cleaning up all the extra junk, and made it the only part of the message… in Base64 encoding!

If you’re going to send any kind of diagnostic notice by email, you want it to be as simple and widely readable as possible. That means plain text (not HTML or Base64, and certainly not both!) It also means if you do want to use HTML, at least clean it up and include a plain-text alternative. For all you know it’s going to be read by some admin logging into a GUIless server through SSH over a modem connection on a hotel phone line!

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1. Obtain a gun.

2. Provide ammunition.

3. Vote to pull the trigger.

BANG.

And the Democratic party drops off the House floor.

At least, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. If I lived in Nuñez’s district, I’d be royally pissed that I voted for him (because I probably would’ve) and would be willing to sign any paper that would kick his ass. Democratic party leaders don’t seem to realize that they’re in danger of dying out without this kind of stunt. If you’re going to assert your belief in balance and diversity, you better damn well show it, because it isn’t just voters who write letters to congresspeople.

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As the topic has come up frequently in The Illuminatus! Trilogy (which I am reading right now), I thought I’d post a good quote I read recently about the human tendency to find patterns where none exist.

The only problem is I can’t find the quote. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, I don’t remember for certain who said it — I think it was either Neil Gaiman or Warren Ellis, but it could have been one of them quoting someone else — and I can’t even nail down enough words to get a decent search going.

Anyway, it finished up with something like “If you believe there is a vast alien conspiracy to take over the world through teddy bears, you’ll start seeing evidence of it.”

In my efforts to find the quote, though, I came across some interesting information. It turns out I’ve been misusing the word all along. I generally use it as a synonym for coincidence, or possibly to mean interesting coincidence. But synchronicity actually refers to a theory by Carl Jung that such coincidences actually have meaningful connections.

People do have a tendency to perceive order in chaos. It’s what makes us see horses in clouds, or people in mountainsides, or faces on Mars. It’s why faces on cartoon cars make more sense than faces on walls, and it’s almost certainly a factor in the popularity of numerology. I found the technical terms for this. Apophenia, or Type I error refers to seeing connections where there are none. Pareidolia refers to seeing something vague, but perceiving it as if it were something clear. I also found a very nice collection of pareidolic illusions [link gone].
Continue reading →

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Today’s recipe:

LIVERWURST PATE

1 lb liverwurst
1/2 t basil
1/4 c minced onion
1 (8 oz) pkg cream cheese
1/8 t red pepper sauce
1 t mayonnaise
red or black anchovy paste
salt and pepper to taste
2 cloves garlic, crushed (keep cloves separate)
parsley

Mash liverwurst with fork. Add 1 clove garlic, basil, onion, salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly. Mound into an igloo shape on plate. Cover and chill. Blend together cream cheese, 1 clove garlic, red pepper sauce and mayonnaise. Spread over liverwurst. Refrigerate for 8 hours. Spread with anchovy paste right before serving and garnish with parsley. Serves about 15.

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Typist’s note: I actually like liverwurst, but this sounds disgusting. I assume there are people who would beg to differ, but I don’t know any.

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