yanoblog

I spotted a moth in my closet this morning. Sigh. Searching for solutions, I came across this review on Amazon for this moth product

GOODBYE Moths, November 14, 2007

By Deborah Snyder

This is the first time I have tried this brand. I have a moth problem that I haven’t been able to get rid of for several years. :(

As soon as I opened the lure for these, moths started swarming. Within 5 minutes, there were a dozen or so moths caught, so this definitely attracts them and traps them.

I am sure, with diligent use, this product will help me rid my home of these relentless pests.

This seems like an odd product to Astroturf, but it’s either that or this woman’s house is swarming with thousands of moths (insert visions of a 50s horror movie here). “Several years” of moth problems? WTF?!?

I fear this woman’s home and all that it represents.

As usual, Google know something I don’t. Unless this is some weird Department of Defense tie-in. I got these country choices when signing up for a Google product:

1991: The USSR ceases to exist as an entity.

1997: Google.com is first registered as a domain.

2008: Google leaks plans to reestablish Soviet Union. Sergey is a closet Stalinist?

I, for one, welcome our time traveling galactic overlords at Google.

Recently, I was at my favorite bookstore-with-attached-cafe, the Montague Book Mill (thus combining three of life’s great pleasures, coffee, food and books). Apparently, they have some trouble with their century-old plumbing. Great haiku. And people, PEOPLE, Please Use The Trashcans for Pantyhose.

Exhibit A:

He’s have to become a Methodist, but he’d probably be happy to do so to live in this retirement home:

Here’s the AP story by Jay Reeves:

From the ground, the Wesley Acres Methodist retirement home looks like any other building. But fly over in an airplane, and the outline is unmistakable: It’s one big swastika.

Prompted by complaints from a Jewish activist, the agency that owns the government-funded building is planning to alter its shape to disguise the Nazi symbol. The move comes just a few years after a $1 million design modification meant to quiet similar complaints from a U.S. senator.

“The difficulty is there are a limited number of options for fixing a building that has been there for some time,” said Mike Giles, counsel for the Methodist Homes Corp. of Alabama and Northwest Florida. “We have to come up with a way to fix an appearance that we want solved and not hurt our residents.”

Wesley Acres provides government-subsidized housing for 117 low-income people ages 62 and above. Most have no reason to suspect their hallways take on a sinister shape.

The one-story building, designed in the mid-1970s and completed in 1980, underwent a $1 million alteration in 2001 with funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development following complaints by Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin, who has since died. But the addition of two wings did little to hide the offensive shape, and in some ways accentuates it.

Options for the new renovations include the addition of covered porches or other outdoor areas.

The latest push to rid the landscape of the broken cross shape follows complaints from Avrahaum Segol, the same Israeli-American researcher who last fall helped publicize a swastika-shaped barracks at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. The Navy said it would spend about $600,000 to alter the building, which opened in the 1960s, but the work has not yet been done.

Segol calls the Alabama retirement home a “sister swastika” to the building in California and says they were both part of a tangled, government-funded conspiracy to honor Nazis.

Segol claims the swastika shape of Wesley Acres in Decatur pays homage to the German scientists who came to nearby Huntsville after World War II and designed the rockets that put Americans on the moon.

Methodist Homes’ Giles said Segol’s conspiracy claims are ridiculous. The building was originally designed to be much larger, he said, and cutbacks resulted in a shape that resembled the four-armed swastika used as the symbol of German Nazis during World War II.

“It was certainly not intentional,” Giles said.

The shape of the retirement center is evident in satellite photos available on the Internet. But it is located in a residential section in a city with few tall buildings, and many in Decatur have no idea Wesley Acres resembles a swastika.

Giles said any changes to the building must be relatively inexpensive since the agency lacks money for an elaborate solution. Planners are considering modifications, he said, “so that from the air it takes your eye away from what was originally there.

Today’s entry is Gangster Rap. It’s a mashup of Eazy E and The Game called Still Cruisin’. It had to be a mashup because The Game was only 16 when Eazy E died.

What’s interesting about this song is the beat is amazing and there is no misogyny or homophobia. Neither rapper is (was) a card carrying member of Pro-feminist Men of America, but for whatever reason, they just go with the other classic old-school gangster rap themes.

(I thought about trying to write a pseudo-babble post-modern analysis of the song, but I don’t have the energy to problematize a sub-text that has been inscribed on popular consciousness…Sorry!)

Anyway, enjoy. Be warned–that piano hook is gonna stick in your head.

There is a growing phenomenon (that’s how I defined a sample size of 3 spread over years–the Bush approach to science is catching) of taking well-known comic strips and mucking with them to produce a new, often more humorous, result. Take three of the most annoying cartoons there are, Family Circus, Marmaduke, and Garfield. Now make them funny:

Exhibit A: The Dysfunctional Family Circus. This one has been around for a while. It involves taking a Family Circus cartoon and re-captioning it:

(If you are in a Family Circus mood, make sure to go appreciate the Amazon reviews of Family Circus books. Proustian introspection with Munch’s visual conundrums is amazing.)

Exhibit B: Given the strip’s often impenetrable “humor”, Joe Mathlete provides the service: Marmaduke Explained (in 500 words or less).

Marmaduke shits his bones.

As my friend Peter (who for some reason, really likes No Country for Old Men) pointed out to me, this is the best one ever.

Exhibit C: It turns out Garfield is actually pretty funny if you take away Garfield. Garfield minus Garfield photoshops out Garfield for each strip. Here’s a sample:

Do yourself a favor. Take 10 minutes to go read through these strips. They are amazing. Especially in their aggregate.

(To quote the author: “Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness in a quiet American suburb.”)

If you want to try your hand at captioning random cartoons, go check out the Caption Contest at the New Yorker.

It’s funny enough that my order for a “Time Capsule” (a remote disk Apple product to manage their OS 10.5 backup solution called “Time Machine”) has been delayed. But even better was the approval cutoff date. I need an actual time machine to make the cutoff.

(For those that don’t know, Unix represents time as the number of seconds since midnight January 1, 1970, GMT (which is late evening, Dec 31, 1969 on the East coast of the United States). Clearly, the approval time somehow had a value of “0”).

Well, it’s the holiday that Ronald Reagan vetoed.

Happy MLK Day.

If you haven’t listened to or watched Public Enemy, By the Time I Get To Arizona, this is a good day to do so.

I would embed the video, but the person who uploaded it to YouTube won’t allow that.

So, Click Here

Enjoy!

(If I wasn’t feeling lazy, I’d upload and embed the audio of the song, but I am feeling lazy, so sorry..)

Annie and I saw Juno last week. It’s a great movie overall. There were two annoying parts (highlight text to read partial-spoilers: There was one use of “gay” as a pejorative and it was a bummer she didn’t just get the abortion (of course, then there wouldn’t have been a movie. that’s a longer discussion of how to script that in a non-anti-abortion way).).

Anyway, the opening credit sequence is amazing and the song is great. If the job of credits is to get you in the mood for the rest of the film and feeling pumped to be in the theater, these credits are a solid 5 out of 5.

Fresh Air also had a long interview with the writer and director.

Here’s the song: “All I Want” by Barry Louis Polisar.

Enjoy!