Loaves, fish, compact discs

Always and forever catering to the least of these, my bretheren [in this case, those without CD burners], Wal-mart is now offering to burn their digital music selection to CD for you.

The cost for a customized CD of three songs is $5 plus 88 cents for each additional song.

A three song CD is pretty much pointless unless the selections are from The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Tain and . . . say . . . Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Of course, assuming you have even the crappiest of computers, you could just buy a very good burner and break even [using Wal-mart prices] in like 4 burns.

Whichever.

Manufacturing outrage

William Saletan thinks the dust up over a pharmacist's right to deny prescriptions is being exaggerated by pro-choice groups, not pro-lifers. Scintillating.

It seemed strange such a ground swell was occurring around a birth control device in a country roundly at ease with contraception.

Funny how, while the deceitfulness of the judiciary recall movement reeks with demagoguery and ignorant fundamentalist rancor, this just smells sweet.

Faintly like one's own medicine.

Ask Dr. Bill

During the height of the Terri Schiavo murder fracas, Bill Frist, a doctor, concluded, via videotape, that she was in fact responsive and was not, as a slew of neurologists had concluded, in a 'persistent vegetative state'.

Now you can ask Dr. Bill to diagnose your ailments, presumably contradicting your high paid specialists.

This must be the place

David Byrne has a blog. Like his music, it's artsy and informed and critical and fluid and good without being pretentious. He critiques contemporary art without sounding haughty and offers measured socio-political analyses of current events.

He's still cool.

I smell your lightsaber

It didn't seem possible that an article on force feedback cell phones would contain a candidate for best word ever.

teledildonics

It's better if you put the emphasis on the syllable with the 'O'. Creates a kind of grandiosity.

Dildonics is not a new word, and this is just a spliced compound of that [the quicker we finish shuffling off the Latinate conventions that prevent us from creating words like zeitgeist, the better], but I've never seen it in pseudo-print before. Publication lends a word gravity.

Roosters over women

It will soon be a bigger crime in South Carolina to abuse a male chicken than a female human:

Both cockfighting and domestic violence are currently misdemeanor crimes, punishable by 30 days in jail. If the bill passes, cockfighting will become a felony, punishable by five years in jail. Domestic violence crimes will remain a misdemeanor.

WIStv.com via Fark

Predators and prey

"If we can find its natural enemy, we can control the spread of HIV naturally and cost-effectively, just as we use cats to control mice."

Sweet.

Let there be white smoke

. . . and there was.

Update [9:58]: "Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany Is Elected
265th Pope, Taking Benedict XVI as Name"

God help us all.

Choose them wisely

Honest to God, this is how my friends start conversations with me:

"Want to hear something interesting about logarithms?"

Thing is, I did.

[If you want to hear something interesting too, you're going to have to leave a comment begging for it--let me tell you, it is hella interesting]

You fall, slain

Wired News has an interesting article on the dogged presence of text-based gaming in a graphic oriented world. Accolytes say text-based gaming is analogous to reading a novel:

Elizabeth Price, moderator for OneRing MUSH: "The text-based format for role-playing allows the same kind of immersion in the story as a book does -- with the added ability to interact with it and shape the story as you go along. There are no images on the screen to limit your imagination's interaction with the story and with other players."

'Novel-like,' some say. Others, 'mind-numbing.'

The limits of imagination gandiosity of such games is obviously stunted in some users, like myself, who have no imagination at all.

I was born too late, I think. By the time I got my hands on Zork I'd been ruined by Coleco Vision and the first Monkey Island. Unfortunate, I needed another time-intensive hobby.

I salt and pepper my mango

--MIA : Arular--
MIA has a sultry, flirty voice and an eclectic sound that assembles and deconstructs music from the East, London, Africa, and South America. Breathless and bilingual, she grows this diversity into something that is dissonant and ruthlessly original.

Caribbean beats appear here as well, giving MIA a sound Gwen Stefani might aspire too if she didn't have the burden of cross-promoting her albums with slash-and-wear thrift store couture clothing lines. Lacking that, MIA has found plenty of time to make music that is both danceable and pertinent.

The effect is as hot as Stefani used to be, but not in that pouty, vulnerable way. It's passionate [love, violence, politics], rich and deep. You might find it odd that this girl, talking revolution and populism, is kinda turning you on. Soon though, you'll wonder how you lived without her alluring earnestness. Or that steel drum and those Donkey Kong bleeps.

If you like to shake your ass--and I mean really shake it--you're strange to me and I regard you with suspicion. Normally, body parts swaying in time with a rhythm makes me vomit with embarrassment. This album, though, this lilting, intrepid mish-mash, definitely made a limb or two flail.

Calling MIA's beats infectious is a disservice to both the beats and that word. She's post-infectious. Arular is a retrovirus that fuses to you, leaving you changed in a way you'll be reluctant to tell your friends about. They wouldn't get it. They don't get you. Not anymore. Not after this.

[This is a draft of a capsule review I'm writing. It's real hard to only write a few words . . .]

Falsies to polyurethane

Slate has a pretty awesome pictorial history of American breast enhancement from 1858 to last Tuesday, when a Mr. Matthew Lamar Turner of Gainsville submitted a patent for an accordion-like implant that allows the woman to fill her breasts with any "suitable filling material" and can be "pumped up and deflated" depending on how much back pain she wants to experience.

Finding Bobby Fischer

He's in Iceland now, and various other places, including the internet.

After reading his 8463 word, single paragraph, statement of facts regarding being "Kidnapped and railroaded to his imprisonment torture and death in the Jew-controlled U.S.A." [strangely written in the third person] I can conclude, irrevocably, that motherfucker is Kuh-razy.

Fisher became the world's youngest grand master at age 15. He was world champion by 22, then set off making a more tawdry name for himself by associating with various doomsday cults [becoming disillusioned when 1975 didn't bring the destruction of America at the hands of the United States of Europe] and virulently voicing his hatred for Jews despite, strictly speaking, being one.

Ladies and gentlemen, the official website of America's only world chess champion.

Fisher is rumored to have backed out of an exhibition match with the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue saying, "didn't like the looks of that big Jew mainframe."

Hitchhiker's guide: snap!

Besides the movie itself, the best part of Sin City was the extended and quite funny trailer for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which looked to be coming along nicely. The third best part was hearing the fanboys concurrently loose their bowels in excitement. A sloshing sound, momentary relief, then a kind of nervousness. Not regularly showering, though, they already smelt bad, and this new pungeance wasn't noticed.

But this review of an early screening, by some vaguely British-writing fellow, suggests, like Star Wars Episodes I, II and [inevitably] III, Hitchhikers just sucks ass.

The problem--also like I, II and [inevitably] III--is the abysmal dialogue and nonsensical plot. Mostly, though, it's the dialogue.

If there's one thing fanboys get right, it's passion.

Envy and greed ended communism

Marc Fisher says sins--deadly ones--had more to do with communism's fall in Eastern Europe than sin's arch-nemesis, Pope John Paul II, did.

His personal account of how materialism and a desire to keep up with the Jonesenbachers freed East Germany is at Slate.

[M]any demonstrators felt that they would be shot at that night.
. . .
I always asked: Why are you doing this? And the answers came in a torrent, as if decades of silence had been unplugged. Especially in East Germany, where almost everyone could watch West German TV (though they had to keep the volume way down because it was strictly verboten to watch, and if the neighbor heard, there could be trouble), people talked about their jealousy for the material goods that Westerners enjoyed—the clothes, the shoes, the cars, the food.
. . .
Even when I sat in churches for hours on end, talking to ministers, priests, and the generally nonreligious people who came there because of the more open atmosphere, the talk was of political freedom and consumer goods, not of faith.

Fisher also notes that by the 80's, except in perhaps Poland, the people of both communist and capitalist countries had become "detach[ed] . . . from their religious traditions." The same ambivalence seen in the Bloc countries took root in Western Europe "without any official atheism or overt state antagonism to religion." Kierkegaard surrenders.

Fisher was the Washington Post's Berlin Bureau Chief from 1989 to 1993.

Mormons still baptize dead Jews

Or at least, Jewish leadership is unconvinced that they've stopped, despite a prohibition on proxy baptisms dating to 1995 and a face-to-face last year between Utah senator Orrin Hatch [Mormon] and New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton [anything you want her to be]. Quoth WiredNews:

"We have proof, and we are bringing that," said Ernest Michel, chairman of the New York-based World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

While utterly pointless and probably deeply unsettling for families of the post-life converted, it's super-hilarious to me, given the stark differences betwen the two religions. Orthodox rules are set in place to specifically discourage conversion to Judaism, while Mormons are so desperate for big name play they'll take people against their will and after their death.

Joseph Smith has a nice ring to it, but it's nothing compared to "Anne Frank . . . Ghengis Khan, Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin a Buddha," all of whom are now Mormons.

Lysol makers fight Heroin

Buprenorphine, a drug that is as effective as methodone without the associated high, was discovered by the makers of Lysol, Woolite and French's mustard. Quoth Wired:

He didn't feel high, didn't feel withdrawal symptoms, didn't even feel medicated; he just felt better. "It took away the pain," he says. "It even took away the craving. I had my strength back, and I was eating sooner than I ever had in detox. I got clarity when I took that first pill."

The federal government, unsurprisingly, is dragging its feet.

Rumors have surfaced that 'bupe' was originally intended as an additive for the company's world famous mustard, but was shelved because consumers didn't like its pine fresh taste or its effect on their delicates.