BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: March 2007
Thursday, March 29, 2007
The stuff of which lawsuits are made...
Scientific America provides an infuriating article on the poisoned cat/dog food recall, and Menu Foods' response to it.
The company had received reports of potential problems almost a full month earlier, on February 20. But instead of alerting the public, it initiated "tasting trials" on 40 to 50 dogs and cats. Seven of the study animals died of renal failure, beginning on March 2, five days after the testing started. The company still did nothing, waiting over two weeks longer before finally taking action.
Menu Foods attributes the deaths of 15 cats and one dog nationwide (including the test subjects) to the tainted grub. But others claim the numbers are much higher. The Veterinary Information Network, which boasts a membership of 30,000 veterinarians, reports that at least 471 animals were sickened and 104 died from eating contaminated chow. Sarah Tuite, a spokesperson for Menu Foods, refused to comment on the lag time between the first test animal's death and the date of the recall.
So they had reports of pets getting sick and dying, they did their own internal investigation which immediately killed nearly a quarter of the animals in the test, and they still did nothing for two weeks until mounting publicity forced their product recall? Wow. Astonishing incompetence crossed with blinding stupidity. Who runs this company, the Bush Administration?
The article is four pages long and goes into great detail about the cases and the likely causes. It also demonstrates that stupidity isn't limited to North American food companies.
China and some other countries, however, have approved aminopterin for use as a rat poison, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that the lethal concentration of the chemical is three parts per million (ppm) for rats; the amount found in the contaminated food samples was 40 ppm. There is speculation that the poison got into the chow because Chinese farmers sprayed their crops, including wheat, with it to protect them from hungry rodents.
So you're growing wheat for pet food, and you're spraying it with a pesticide that kills rats. Well, nothing could go wrong there. It's not as if rats have any similarities to cats and dogs.
The pet food recall is making everyone paranoid, too. Jinxie's been kind of listless the last couple of days, not wanting (demanding) to play as she usually does, and I'm already worried about her kidneys. Of course she's eating dry food (only wet was recalled), by a different manufacturer, and her symptoms aren't at all the same as those of renal failure... but I'm still kind of worried. After all, it's not as if I could expect the makers of Kirkland Select to admit their cat food was full of poison until the news grew too large to contain.
Update: All joking about poisoned cat food aside, Jinxie isn't looking healthy. I don't think there's anything wrong with her food, which hasn't changed in the past month, but she's been lethargic for two days and something's wrong with her back or hind legs, since she can hardly jump up onto a chair or bed now, when formerly she was capable of damn near leaping onto the refrigerator. I'm definitely leaning towards taking her to the vet on Friday. She's not fond of car travel or the vet's office, but I'm less fond of her dying or remaining crippled. Watching her sleep a minute ago her paws were twitching and it struck me as quite sad -- I bet she could still leap and run in her dreams.
Whatever happens to her at the vet, I can guarantee she'll be mellower than this cat. A warning, turn down your speakers before you click that link. Seriously. I'm not joking.
Update #2: Jinxie has a bladder or possibly kidney infection; the vet said her pee was cloudy and had some blood in it, but he couldn't see anything else wrong with her. She has to pee a lot, it probably burns when she does, and she probably got infected by rubbing up against something filthy. Paris Hilton syndrome, basically.
The vet ran x-rays and blood tests and kept Jinxie all afternoon, but I was able to pick her up in the evening and she's doing okay, though she's mostly spent the night sulking under the bed. She's not going to get a lot happier either, since I've got to give her a daily antibiotic pill for the next two weeks. They'll get word back on the blood tests and x-rays on Monday, but the vet didn't think it would be anything more than the infection.
The damage? $660. This is why I kept pet rats for years; they were fun in a herd and they only lived a year or two tops, so when one got sick or developed a tumor or whatever it was a moment of sorrow and then recycled as snake food. I would have preferred a real pet, like a cat, but this is the problem with real pets; they live long enough to be expensive. I just spent more on Jinxie's health care in a day than I've spent on my own in ten years, and she didn't even really require any treatment; just an examination and some tests.
I can't remember if I've already posted about this, but I have to admit that about the biggest perk of my new computer thus far is the ability to watch high definition movie trailers. I could watch them on my old computer, and saw the glorious image quality, but the fact that they played at about .1fps (yes, that 1 frame per 10 seconds) made it kind of pointless. The new computer is some incalculable (for me, anyway) exponential faster, and HD trailers play like butter. (Proverbially speaking.) The biggest bottleneck is downloading their bosom-bursting 150meg packages, especially since I only think to look at trailers every week or so, and then end up clicking about a dozen at once.
Seriously, a movie trailer in 1024 on my 21" monitor looks so much better than a DVD on my (old) 24" TV screen that it's not even comparable. Of course I'm sitting about a foot from the monitor, vs. across the room from the TV, and the TV probably has a resolution of about 480x320, but let's not quibble over details, shall we?
For some current trailer recommendations, (click names for links) I just watched Pirates of the Caribbean III and while it wasn't a great trailer, it sure as hell looked good. Ratatoille still isn't that good a trailer, but the animation is amazing in HD. Day Watch (which I've been assured was even better than Nightwatch, by a European, who of course got to see it like 8 months ago, when it was released everywhere in the world but the US) looks terrific too, which is an achievement since you know they filmed it on like, eight dollar pirated video camera software.
I don't know that I'd say a new $800 computer is worth it just to see movie trailers in higher quality, but it's definitely a welcome perk.
Update: Beware of Wikipedia spoilers! I clicked on the link for the Miss Potter trailer just to see what it was about -- Harry Potter's mom? Not quite. It's about the life story of Beatrix Potter, author of Peter Rabbit and various other children's books about clothes-wearing lower life forms. I probably knew her name from reading those books, but since it's been a while since I was seven years old, the author's name didn't really leap to mind. The trailer shows Beatrix as an upper class girl, oppressed by her parents and the 1900s English society, writing her books and drawing her pictures in private, and then finally getting them published with the help of a devoted printer. He and she court and fall in love and of course her upper class parents don't approve of a "tradesman," etc, but love wins and out they seem destined to end up happily ever after. At least that's what it looks like from the trailer.
Curious, I hit Beatrix Potter on wikipedia, and learned that the movie is very true to life, but that the happily is probably not going to be very ever after:
...She was encouraged to publish her story, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, but she struggled to find a publisher until it was accepted when she was 36 in 1902, by Frederick Warne & Company. The small book and her following works were extremely well received and she gained an independent income from the sales. She also became secretly engaged to the publisher, Norman Warne, but her parents were set against her marrying a tradesman. Their opposition to the wedding caused a breach between Beatrix and her parents. However, the wedding was not to be, for soon after the engagement, Norman fell ill of pernicious anemia and died within a few weeks.
Glad I wasn't going to see the movie anyway, since after reading that, what would be the point?
One of the great (ironic) truisms of human nature is the tendency of our species to condemn others for doing the same things we (guiltily) enjoy ourselves. The first blog entry I ever posted, more than five years ago, was a (poorly-written) piece offering the opinion that what we dislike most about others is something we see in ourselves. Humans generally maintain an internal narrative, in which we are the heroes/heroines of our own story. Hardly anyone believes they are a bad person, and that what they're doing is wrong; we always find ways to justify it in our case, with special circumstances, or higher understandings that we apply to others grudingly, if at all.
A more than perfect example of this can be found in an amusingly-depressing essay I read this morning. It's about abortion rights and protestors, and includes numerous anecdotes of anti-abortion women getting their own abortions, while continuing to rail against the "baby killers" who perform and receive abortions. A quote:
"I've had several cases over the years in which the anti-abortion patient had rationalized in one way or another that her case was the only exception, but the one that really made an impression was the college senior who was the president of her campus Right-to-Life organization, meaning that she had worked very hard in that organization for several years. As I was completing her procedure, I asked what she planned to do about her high office in the RTL organization. Her response was a wide-eyed, 'You're not going to tell them, are you!?' When assured that I was not, she breathed a sigh of relief, explaining how important that position was to her and how she wouldn't want this to interfere with it." (Physician, Texas)
"In 1990, in the Boston area, Operation Rescue and other groups were regularly blockading the clinics, and many of us went every Saturday morning for months to help women and staff get in. As a result, we knew many of the 'antis' by face. One morning, a woman who had been a regular 'sidewalk counselor' went into the clinic with a young woman who looked like she was 16-17, and obviously her daughter. When the mother came out about an hour later, I had to go up and ask her if her daughter's situation had caused her to change her mind. 'I don't expect you to understand my daughter's situation!' she angrily replied. The following Saturday, she was back, pleading with women entering the clinic not to 'murder their babies.'" (Clinic escort, Massachusetts)
I don't think this is really all that surprising. As I said in the intro, the things we hate most in society are usually things we hate about ourselves -- who hates cigarettes more than a smoker, or booze more than a suffering drunk? Furthermore, people who are virulently anti-abortion are generally buy into the whole pro-abstinence fairy tale too, and therefore are less likely to use birth control. It's a well-known factoid that Catholics have far more abortions than Protestants.
It does make me wish that doctors didn't have to adhere to ethical principles about anonymity, and amazes me with the level of cognitive dissonance humans can internalize while continuing to function. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to return to my crusade to ban the written word and computer games. There really are no greater evils in our society.
Any time I want a laugh, I can count on The Funniest to provide it. If not in the "which is funnier" voting, then surely on the top 40 images page. If you don't get at least half a dozen LOLs there, then you and I do not share a great deal of humor sense. Looking there tonight I had my usual fun, and just because I could, I grabbed my five favorites from the current top 40. Here they are in no particular order, and honestly, that cat/intelligence one is brilliant. Brilliant and painfully true, as anyone who's ever known the misfortune of hearing me talk to Jinxie when we're alone could attest. (Which is why I only do it when we're alone. Isn't that right, my wittle kitty witty bobo?)
I've not paid much attention to those pc vs. mac commercials with the nerd and the cool guy, but I have seen a few blog posts about them, mostly from defensive pc users. I have no links, but one pointed out, I thought somewhat convincingly, that the schlubby pc guy was actually the loveable, slightly bumbling hero, while the mac guy was clearly a slacker asshole with too much attitude. I haven't read that deeply into the meta-narrative, but I did think this English rant about them from a pro-pc (or at least anti-mac) POV was amusing. A snip.
PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.
I'm a PC user, but not a fan, and overall I'm pretty agnostic on the whole thing. I think the pc vs. mac commercials are cute and somewhat amusing, but they don't make me want a mac or want to get rid of my PC. I use a PC since I've had one forever, and I know how Windows works, and since I'm not an Internet noob I have antivirus and firewalls and spyware removers. The common pro-mac complaints, that pcs are harder to use and virus-prone and such may be true for non-expert users, but are irrelevant in my case. Besides, I've seen Malaya using a mac for years, and she's had a lot more crashes and technical problems than I have, though lots of those are in trying to get windows-written software to work properly with her mac OS. Which is too bad, and something you can blame pcs for... but it doesn't change the fact that I never run into software that won't work on my machine. And given that I'm currently in the Mythos alpha, and eagerly awaiting the HGL alpha, and those are both pc-only, a mac wouldn't be real useful for me now. Not that I could afford one anyway, which is obviously another key issue for many users.
I've seen this video linked on a bunch of sites, and stemming largely from a lack of energy or time to type up something more interesting, I'm throwing in the insert code myself. An Australian comedy program sent some reporters to the US to do street interviews with people, and cut out the dumbest answers into a highlight package. It reminds me of the old Howard Stern show bit when they'd interview models or porn stars or homeless people and ask them stuff like, "Who is the Vice President of the United States?" or "How many sides does a square have." and then bet on whether the idiots contestants would know the answer. It's more fun when they stop the tape to bet before playing the answer; it heightens the suspense, but this one is still pretty funny. My favorite part is when they show the rubes a world map with Australian labeled "Iraq" and no one seems to bat an eye.
The real tragedy of this is that any random selection of people in any country on earth are this stupid, at least about some issues. I'm regularly around otherwise intelligent adults with college degrees and such, and when any random subject comes up it's truly astonishing how completely oblivious many of them are to things I think of as common knowledge. On the other hand, if the conversation turns to current popular TV shows, or American Idol singers, or other such topics, I look as dumb as these people do when asked to name a country that starts with a "U." (Actually, I thought immediately of Uzbekistan, and then the UK. I didn't think "United States" until the interviewer pointed it out to one stumped woman. I suspect that's what most people on earth would say if asked that question, but here in the actual US, "America" is more often the name used. Plus the way the question is worded the tendency is to think of foreign countries with that name, rather than the one you're in. I wonder what people in Oz would say if asked for A-countries, or people in France asked about F-countries, etc?)
Dirk Baur has not paid the Patent DE 10000832 till now, the Germans have Stolen my Things and uppress me.
Joachim Müller has not Paid my Work 36000 Euro,
They have stolen from me the FNX codec Developed 20002 ( Fractal Codec first Order , "AFFEN" -1FRT = "F till N" X for Codec.
Fucking German Bastards, Please dont cooperate with Germans, from Laser Business.
That came to my flux@diabloii.net email, which doesn't see much action these days, but still turns up the occasional news tip or odd request for an explanation of ethereal items or horadric cube recipes. Needless to say, I have no idea who Dirk Baur or Joachim Muller are, or what this codec patent is about, and even if I did, my attourney would advise me to take no opinion on the views expressed in this random crazy email, etc, etc.
Finally, Tom Cruise's descent into madness does some good (other than providing endless material for tabloid writers). His Rasputin-like control of Katie Holmes has turned her into a mindless baby machine, which is kind of a shame for her, but now he's forced her to drop out of Batman 2, which is a great boon to the world's movie fans. I liked Batman Begins, and thought the only remarkably weak link in the quality film was Katie Holmes. She wasn't awful, just forgettable and overmatched, in a Winona Ryder in Aliens 4 sort of way. Any unknown attractive, competent, forceful actress will do as well or better than she did, without jinxing the film by bringing that creepy "Tom Cruise gritting his pearly white teeth behind the camera" vibe to things.
I'm not sure this whole driving thing is working out.
The automobile is one mankind's greatest inventions. It allows unprecedented personal mobility and freedom, and the relatively-inexpensive, easy-to-operate, easy-to-maintain nature of the modern vehicle makes it so almost anyone can cover long distances in a short period of time, without requiring physical strength, personal fortune, or technical knowhow. That being said, I'm starting to rethink the whole thing, since so many people just can not fucking drive!
Heading to and returning from martial arts class Tuesday night, I actively avoided four accidents. Literally, four different people would have crashed into my car, or caused me to crash into them, if I had not seen them coming and gotten out of the way. And I'm not even counting the lady in the Subaru SUV I saw hit another car while leaving a gas station, the Lexus SUV I saw slam on the brakes and swerve two lanes to the right to make an exit ramp at the last possible second, (it had to stop on the shoulder and wait for a clearing in traffic to merge), and the moving van that sat diagonally blocking two lanes of traffic on a three lane street, while cars backed up out of sight and the idiot truck driver waited for the one remaining lane to clear so he could turn left.
I don't know if people really are getting worse at driving, or I'm just in a statistical rut of seeing more than my fair share of idiots, but damn it's dangerous out there.
1) Heading to class, I was approaching an on ramp down a two-lane street. One lane of traffic flows in each direction, and as such if you want to make a left turn you have to wait for both lanes to be clear. I was driving about 27 in the 25 zone, in bright daylight (I hate daylight savings time), with my signal on, intending to turn left onto the on-ramp entrance. Just before it a woman in a big silver SUV was waiting to turn left, and after looking left and right, she pulled out directly in front of me. I mean directly; she wasn't more than fifty feet away, and for an instant I figured she'd seen me, seen my signal, estimated my speed, realized I was going to turn, and planning to stomp it and zoom through the space ahead of my silver sport car. It would have been kind of reckless, but she could physically have zipped through the space without forcing me to slow down, though her actions could easily have panicked another driver into swerving right and hitting her anyway.
She didn't zip though, and apparently didn't see me at all, since she rolled at usual creeping death SUV speed, and only looked over when the shriek of my skidding tires and blaring horn alerted her. I stopped about ten feet from her passenger door, with her vehicle blocking both lanes of traffic, and only then did she throw up her hands in a panicked kind of gesture and floor it.
I stopped for gas before class (How did gas jump like 30 cents a gallon in the past week? Did Bush invade another Middle Eastern country, or what?) and saw the aforementioned woman in an SUV hit another car trying to turn out of the driveway, and the moving fan fun. The rest of the drive to class was uneventful, though I always expect some crashes going through downtown Oakland; there are just too many stop lights at every block and one-way streets. I didn't see any today, though.
2) I've got the nagging feeling #2 was on the way to class, but I've grown so inured to people driving insanely that it's all a blur. After class though, I was driving home and saw the aforementioned SUV swerve from the #3 lane across #4 and #5 onto the shoulder (he would surely have hit any cars in them, if they hadn't been vacant) trying to make an exit. If there's one thing they should teach people in driver's ed, it's to just miss your exit, if you see it too late. You go a mile, you exit, you turn around, you come back. What's the big deal? Swerving causes hella accidents. And if you don't know where you're going, you stay in the right lane in the first place, where the exits are. Is that so hard?
Anyway, about five minutes after that swerving idiot I was approaching a freeway merge in the right lane. The right two lanes exit, and there was, you guessed it, an SUV in the lane to my left. He was going about 70, I was going about 72, and not in any real hurry in the 65 MPH zone. As we got near the exit, the right lane gained another lane to the right, and as we passed a sign informing us the exit was coming up in .5 miles, the SUV jerked to the right, straight at me. I was already merging right into the new lane, so he would have missed me anyway, but he must have seen me at the last minute since he jerked back and braked hard enough that he soon vanished in my rear view mirror.
It sounds like I'm singling out SUVs, but it's just how things happened. They are dangerous vehicles; I don't know if the drivers are as clueless as some news reports would have us believe, but they make up about about 40% of the cars on the road up here, and involved in about 85% of the dangerous driving I see. I've learned to watch them closely when passing them, or changing lanes, since SUVs never see my sports car to their side. The trucks are up high and can't see a sports car with a glance over their shoulder, and few drivers are competent to correctly-align their mirrors, and check them before changing lanes. The one tonight though, I didn't worry about since I'd been behind him for at least a mile, and only very slowly gaining on him. There weren't any other cars in sight either, so he had to have noticed my headlights behind him. I could see the blue glow of a TV screen in his windows, so we'll assume it was some parent distracted by their kid and the TV, or possibly someone stupid enough to try and watch TV while driving.
3) Not five miles further on, I was in the left lane near a freeway merge. Another single lane comes in there on the left, the fast side of the freeway, and I've driven that exit before, and know there are about 10 signs telling you to watch to the right, to merge into traffic, to beware of cars, and so on. So I'm tooling along in the left lane at about the speed limit, in moderate traffic, and I see a car coming along on the left as the other lane slowly merges towards mine. It's not an SUV for once; it was some kind of crappy Chrysler mid-size sedan, and as I watched it gradually moved towards my left side, as the lane merged into the main freeway. I had a car about six lengths ahead of me, and another about five behind me, and I kept thinking, "Any minute now, that Chrysler is going to speed up or slow down and get ahead of or behind me."
I didn't care which, the road wasn't crowded at 9:30pm, a fact I made sure of by checking my right side mirror. No one over there, and that was a good thing since over the next five seconds the Chrysler slowly merged into my lane, eventually taking up exactly the spot I'd been in. It was kind of eerie; nothing blocking their view, I wasn't behind them in their blind spot, my headlights were on, a car was behind me so I should have been clearly visible in their lights, etc. Nothing, no reaction at all, and there is an absolute certainty they would have banged into the driver's side of my car if I hadn't seen them coming and changed lanes.
The funny part was that the car behind me saw it and as I got over he honked twice. The fast pair of blasts of noise must have unsettled the Chrysler driver, since it slowed down rapidly, dropping to about 55, which enabled me to effortlessly slide back into the lane I'd been in, in the position I'd been in. I just feel bad for the guy behind me, since he was then stuck way below the speed limit, behind the idiot in the Chrysler, while I zoomed on into the night.
4) Actually, the really sad part is that I know there was a 4th incident, since when the SUV almost hit me on the way home I laughed and told myself, "That's three!" And then the Chrysler came along five minutes later. That I can't remember the fourth near accident in 45 minutes of driving is either a bad sign about my memory, or the quality of drivers on the roads today.
Just in case anyone out there is actually buying the spin put out by the Cheney White House about Iraq and the "surge" working and brighter days to come, you should have a look at this roundtable discussion of Middle East experts put together by RollingStone magazine. A quote.
What happens to the civil war between Iraq's Sunni and Shia Arabs when we leave?
Juan Cole: The civil war will go on for five or ten years -- that's inevitable. But the best-case scenario is, at the end of it they find a way to come back together as a nation-state, like Lebanon did in 1989.
Rosen: People are talking about a reconciliation process, but Iraqi Shias don't want to compromise with the Sunnis. They don't have to. There's going to be a genocide of Sunnis in Baghdad. The Shia have the numbers to do it; they can absorb all the Sunni car bombs it takes. The Americans aren't capable of stopping it; they can't tell a Sunni from a Shia. The best you can hope for is that it doesn't spill into the neighboring countries.
McPeak: You have to hope that Iraq devolves into a federal state with three strong regional governments. But that has its downsides: The Turks would go berserk. They would see Kurdistan as a base for the Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey, which has bedeviled them like the IRA in Ireland or the Basques in Spain. And if Iraq devolves into three separate "stans," then it's going to be pretty tough for Sunnistan not to provide a retirement home for Al Qaeda agents. It's got warts all over it -- but among the "don't call my baby ugly" possibilities in this world, that looks the prettiest.
And those are the best case scenarios. Really. The expected and worst case scenarios are astonishingly far into "can't unshit the bed" territory. Of course none of this will change the denial and "clap louder" strategies the media unquestioningly passes on from government officials, despite the fact that every opinion poll finds that solid majorities of Americans want to end the Iraqi occupation and bring home the troops ASAP.
Kind of on the same topic, The 300 had a enormous debut last weekend, pulling in $70m, breaking debut records for the month, and vastly exceeding expectations. The movie is about a small group of Spartans who defend their homeland by dying nobly in battle against a the vastly superior, more technologically-advanced invading army from the world's strongest empire, who wants to overrun their homeland, depose their leaders, and rule them from afar. The parallels to the current situation in Iraq seem obvious, until you learn that some pro-war types are getting behind the movie because they see the Spartans are like the Americans.
Um, what?
What part of a smaller force, outgunned, outnumbered, defending their homeland against uber-powerful foreign invaders applies to the US military in Iraq? The comparison becomes even more laughable if you consider that the Spartan king fights and dies with his soldiers, and compare that to how George "Daddy's friends got me into the Texas Air National Guard" Bush and Dick "five student deferments and a baby nine months after those ran out" Cheney spent their formative years during the Vietnam War.
I honestly thought, some months ago when I heard the plot of the film, that it would be protesed by pro-war types who would say it was glorifying the Iraqi resistance terrorists. Sure, the invading army in the film is Persian, but it's not like they're invading Detroit; it's 2000 years ago, in Greece! But hey, if you were dumb enough to still think the Iraqi was going well, while hoping for a new war with Iran to change our luck, you'd be grasping at any metaphorical and cinematic straws you could find too.
New Rolling Stone has an interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of South Park. Three pages of it are excerpted online and while the article isn't especially scintillating, I did enjoy the Top 25 Moments in South Park History feature, which has summaries of various outrageous shows and generous clips from them. The order of the top 25 is pretty much random (though I have to agree on #1), and as the feature admits, they pretty much ignored the first four seasons to focus more on the "ripped from the headlines" stuff in recent years, but it's still a fun watch/trip down memory lane.
Also, it's nothing to do with South Park (though I think this would have been an upgrade over most of their list), but while I'm on the subject of top 25 lists, here's Primiere Magazine's top 25 movie posters ever. While you glory in the preponderance of forgettable posters for 50-80 year old movies you've never heard of, you may wish to reflect on some possible connection between the editorial judgment demonstrated by this top 25 list and the fact that they just shut down their US print magazine.
I haven't mentioned it since I figure if you care about Hellgate: London, you're reading my HGL site already, but yesterday the wiki I've been toiling on for the past couple of weeks went online, and it's pretty shiny. The main page is here, and it'll mean nothing to you if you're not a gamer or interested in HGL, but it's far and away the best source of HGL info online. At least the best in English; there are some pretty good Korean and German sites, but while my monolinguistic self isn't in a position to judge them accurately, from the content I've seen they can't offer anything approaching the depth and breadth of the wiki I've created.
And yes, I'm comparing the quality of fansites, in different languages, for a computer game that doesn't technical exist yet. This is the Internet, what did you expect, reality?
There are like a dozen other large HGL sites, and most of them have wikis, but most of them are run by people who can't write content, or who are lazy, so it's no real chore to have the best content online at this point. Whether that will translate into the busiest site remains to be seen; several other sites are busier now, largely because they were online a year or more before the one I'm working on and pre-release fans tend to be loyal to their original favorite fansite, but realistically we're all just trading the same few thousand fans back and forth. When the beta begins and then the game gets released later this year; that's when it gets interesting, since there will come an enormous influx of new fans, and at that point the best site may well win by velcroing most of the new eyeballs.
Things were like this pre-Diablo II as well, and then once the beta started we (diabloii.net) had more traffic in a day than we'd had in previous months, and were soon the unchallenged leader in the D2 fansite world. I was there when it happened, and a chief architect of it, but in retrospect I don't really know how or why it happened. Our site had the most content and we were as good as anyone else on news, but there were a lot of other D2 sites trying just as hard as we were, and providing pretty good coverage of the game. Why did Dii.net win so decisively in the site wars? I think we did the best overall job, but since when, outside of the fantasies of free marketeers, does that really matter? Great restaurants and movies and music fail unnoticed every day, while McDonalds, Wild Hogs, and The Pussycat Dolls are massive successes.
I wish I knew, since I'd like all my hours of work on the HGL site to pay off in traffic, popularity, influence, and maybe even some ad revenue, one of these years. And it would help if I had a blueprint to follow from last time. On the other hand, I haven't looked at any site stats in months, I never look in the forums of the other busy HGL sites to count their posts or visitors, and I don't really spend any time scheming how to hook more readers. I think I'm more interested in having the best site in an abstract sense -- I want to know it's the best, and I'd like people to come and view it, but it's not a real burning passion at this point. Too many other things to worry about, which wasn't the case back in like 1999 when D2 and the D2 site were my life.
At any rate, the HellgateWiki.com portion of the site is fully-stocked and has a tremendous amount of updated content about the game, so if you liked D2 and have been thinking about checking out HGL, now's not a bad time to do so. There's brand new news about Templar subclasses, and a new cinematic, and lots of new, really nice screenshots, etc. Though most of that stuff is on the main site, not in the wiki, so I'm not entirely sure why I'm mentioning it. Still no word on the beta starting, and they'd hoped to be into the alpha 3 months ago, and it's still not ready, so maybe we should get less bullish on them making their promised "Summer 2007" release window?
So I'm washing dishes today, in the sink, with a sponge. I don't use the dishwasher more than necessary, and if I've eaten alone, then there's just a plate and fork/knife and maybe a glass dirty, so why not take 30 seconds to rinse them off? Anyway, I'm washing a glass I've washed a hundred times over the years, and not really thinking about it or looking at what I'm doing, when suddenly there's a weird clinking noise and my right hand, with the sponge in it, comes to a sudden stop. I look down, and see a big chunk missing out of the rim of the cup, two pie-shaped pieces of glass in the sink, and blood more or less gushing out of my right hand.
Here's my hand afterward, and the cup. I don't know how or why it happened, since the cup was not visibly cracked, and I certainly wasn't squeezing it violently, but a piece of the glass broke off as I was washing it, and the right side of my right hand dropped down the ramp and stuck on the point. That's the bigger cut, just below my pinkie on the side, and it's kind of divot-esque. I sliced open the side of my pinkie too, but not as bloodily.
It was funny too, since I tried to keep washing the dishes, but I was bleeding so much that I had soap on the dark gray plates, and it was pink with blood, and I kept trying to rinse them off with my left hand on top and my right hand underneath, so I wouldn't bleed on the clean plates before I put them in the drainer. I wasn't injured enough to say I was in shock, and the cuts didn't really hurt, and I'm pretty indifferent to the sight of blood, (especially my own) but I eventually realized that I could not successfully clean dishes while bleeding all over them.
The problem then was how to stop the bleeding and dry off my hands. Malaya wasn't around, I had on light blue pants and a white t-shirt, and the dish towel was beige, so I had nothing handy with which to try direct pressure. I settled for squeezing my right hand with my left and rinsing off, then turning off the sink with an elbow and hurrying to the bedroom for an old black t-shirt I could press over the wound and squeeze with, drying it and stopping the bleeding. Hoping I was dripping water, rather than blood, along the way.
I was successful on the movement, since I didn't see any blood spots later, but as it turned out I just slowed the bleeding, since as soon as I quit squeezing blood welled up out of the divot again. I finally stuck a piece of gauze over it and stretched medical tape over that, since I had lots of work to do and, like Jessie "The Body" Ventura in Predator, I didn't have time to bleed. It stopped, eventually, after seeping through enough to make the tape pretty gruesome, and when I showered later and put on fresh tape there was no more bleeding.
The broken cup still vexes me, though. Was it cracked and I didn't notice? How could it just break like that, in my hands, with no more than light pressure from a sponge? This sort of incident is why Malaya won't let me have nice things. It's styrofoam cups and paper plates for me, since I always ruin the nice china.
The weird part is that my martial arts class is Tuesday nights, and this cut hand makes it like four out of the last six weeks that I've suffered some kind of injury on Wednesday or Thursday that would have made full participation in class impossible, had I hurt myself on Sunday or Monday. We did a bunch of parry/check open-hand punching stuff Tuesday, and I couldn't have done that with a bleeding cut on the outside of my right hand. The week before we did almost all stick fighting stuff, and then Wednesday afternoon I got a big cut on my right palm while moving plant pots around that kept me from gripping properly for a couple of days. The week before that I stubbed my toe Tuesday late at night and could hardly walk Wednesday and Thursday. A week or two before that, I strained my shoulder lifting weights Wednesday afternoon, and couldn't lift my arm for two days. And so on. Every injury minor and forgettable, but located perfectly to make some major aspect of kali class impossible, if I didn't always get them with 4 or 5 days to heal up.
The good news is that once I make it to like Friday, I figure I'm safe over the weekend. The bad news is that my kali teacher is going to be vacationing in France for a couple of weeks in April, which means I'm probably due for a near-fatal car crash the day after her plane takes off.
It's time to short observations of recent events together thematically! All we need is a bridging device... cars! They'll do. They'll do nicely.
So, sloth and gluttony drove me to fast food on Wednesday night, and as usual on such an unusual occasion, my destination was Jack in the Box. I always get a #4 combo (Spicy Chicken Sandwich) and I usually do the drive thru, especially when I'm just buying for me, rather than Malaya as well. I didn't hit the lights on the way, and got there right after someone else reached the drive thru. And that's where the trouble began.
Like most drive thrus these days, this particular Jack's had a big lit menu on the right side, a couple of car lengths ahead of the big lit menu with the speaker box, on the left. (I suppose those are backwards in countries where they drive on the other side of the road. Assuming people eat the same type of shit while sitting in the cars to order it in those countries.) The car ahead of me, a white Civic, was sitting next to the one on the right, with no one in front of it. There wasn't room to scoot past that car and get to the order menu on the left, and I wouldn't have done that anyway, but I was soon tempted, when 30 seconds passed and the civic remained motionless. I could see a woman's head inside, as she leaned way over to the right and looked out her passenger window at the menu, and she didn't look like she was asleep, so I didn't honk or plan to get out and ask her "WTF?" since you gets shot doing this like that in my country.
I should stress that no one was in front of her, like no one in the entire drivethru, so it wasn't as if she'd been reading the menu and just hadn't noticed the car before her move up a minute earlier.
Finally, her brake lights flashed and the Civic jerked to the left, lurching twice before stopping just as it banged into one of the metal posts that guarded the ordering menu. She was pointing right at the menu, with no way to turn back to the right and get into the drivethru lane. And as I giggled and the prerequisite accented voice said, "Can I take your order?" the Civic's lights went out, and then came back on as the driver put it neutral and slowly rolled back about a foot. The car then restarted and lurched forward, just missing the post for a second time. The voice comes again, "Can I take your order?" and the Civic stops again, the lights go out as the engine dies again, and it just sits there. Not running, two feet from the order mic, window up.
At this point I knew it was hopeless. I'd stopped a good 15 feet behind the Civic from the start, when I saw it at the wrong menu. Cars turned half sideways at the wrong menu in an empty drive thru is one of the ways nature says "do not touch." Or pull up close behind. By the time she hit the other sign, I was planning to go inside and order, since I was not about to get my car behind hers in a narrow drive thru lane. She'd stall her car out and not be able to restart it, or spend ten minutes trying to pay with Canadian coins, or vomit and pass out in it, etc.
I waited a bit longer to enjoy the show though, and things went as expected. Her engine finally came back on and her window went down, and as the poor clerk asked if he could help her again, I rolled down my window and turned down the CD just to hear her talk. I wish I'd recorded it.
Customer: "Jumbo jack..." Cashier: "Anything else?" Customer: "One taco." Cashier: "You want cheese?" Customer: "Sprite. Do you have Sprite?" Cashier: "Um..." Customer: "The salad. Does it have chicken?" Cashier: "Which salad?" Customer: "And Sprite. Cheeseburger too."
I had to quit at that point before I took a marital arts weapon up there and put that woman out of her misery, so I turned left and parked, and walked inside. It took me at least thirty seconds to do so, and when I got into the restaurant the cashier with the headset was still talking to her. I could hear her wandering, spaced out voice mumbling along, asking something about chicken, when the cashier finally gave up and asked her to pull up to the window. He was Indian, about 30, clean-shaven, and probably had an MBA from the U of Bombay and was on track to own his own mini Jack in the Box empire in 10 years.
In the meantime, he was stuck working nights on the drivethru since the other employees were short Mexican women whose accents were even thicker than his. Another guy was waiting to order, and he did so, and when I walked up the cashier was still, understandably, ignoring the woman who had successful navigated her way to the closed drivethru window.
"How stoned is she?" I asked, leaning over the counter a bit to try and see her out the window. I could not, since her car was too much lower than the window.
"She's drunk." he said, intuiting my meaning.
"I was behind her in the drive thru." I said, laughing. "She was over on the right side, then veered left and hit the post in front of the sign. I could hear you asking for her order while her windows were still up."
He laughed and shook his head, and looked over at her car and laughed again. "She asked me if the salad had chicken for the third time and I told her to pull up to the window."
He kept ignoring her, and when he asked me to order I did so, with appropriate brevity. "Number four combo, large, no cheese, to go." There was no need for me to specify a beverage since they had a fill it yourself soda fountain beside the counter, and I'd seen the guy ahead of me get an empty cup to fill as he saw fit. And to my amazement, the cashier got it all. He didn't squint at the register and fumble for buttons, and he didn't input half of it and then ask me if I wanted large or small, or cheese. On second thought, I'll put him on track to own his own division of Jack's in 8 years. Maybe 6.
I assume the woman finally got her food, or something resembling it (not that she'd ever know the difference in her condition), but her car was still there when I went out, and I watched to see if she was going to come reeling out of the drive thru as I exited the restaurant, since half of successful driving is just being able to stay out of the way of drunks/junkies/maniacs.
Speaking of...
One evening last week I was driving up to the North Bay. The road up there is pretty easy, you just take I580 for about 10 miles, go over the toll bridge to Marin, and then continue along 580 for a bit further until you reach San Rafael and a pain in the ass one-lane merge onto 101 where construction has been ongoing for as long as I can remember.
Long before that point, I was zooming along 580 at about 65, going uphill towards the bridge toll booths, in the right lane. I normally drive in the left lane since I'm normally faster than other cars, but in this case I had to get right to use the Fastrack lane (automated toll payment = no waiting for some guy in a white pickup with a tool box in the back to fumble out $4). Plus it was late and there wasn't much traffic, and 580 drops from 65 to 55 there, in a kind of mini-speed trap.
There's a busy onramp just at the base of the hill, and as I went past it I saw a minivan chugging up the slight incline at about 25, while some little Mustang (one of the cheap late-90s plastic versions before they got redesigned and muscly) tailgated so closely I looked over, thinking it must be attached in some home-made towing operation. Nope, it was just some asshole tailgating, which, as every sensible person knows, only makes the slow car in front of you go even slower, as our basic human urge to punish an asshole kicks in.
I didn't spare him much more thought as I zoomed up the hill and through the Fastrak, but once I was about halfway across the long, two-mile bridge, I saw a pair of headlines coming up fast behind, weaving in and out of traffic.
"I bet that's Mr. One Inch in his plastic Mustang." I said to myself, and sure enough, he overtook me a moment late at about 80. The bridge speed limit is 50, but most people go 60 or 65, depending on conditions. I was doing 73ish, but I'm like that and at any rate, the bridge is almost perfectly straight, two lanes, and without any turns or on/off ramps, could be driven safely at about 150. Assuming you weren't weaving around slower cars, the way the plastic Mustang was.
He didn't weave around me, since I was in the right lane, and I watched him go past, then laughed as he had to slam on his brakes a minute later when he met two cars moving the same speed. They'd been side by side for a while; it wasn't like one swerved over or something, so any brakes that had to be applied were just a sign of a shitty driver in the Mustang. Not that we needed further confirmation of that fact.
There was about half a mile of bridge left, and I ended up behind the Mustang since the right lane traffic was slower. I didn't care about that; I don't drive with a small penis and don't need to be the fastest car on the road (as much as I used to *cough*) and if cars want to pass me that's fine; the cars/drivers that annoy me are the slow ones who can't stay the hell out of the way. So I stayed behind the Mustang as he got clear of the slower traffic, and when the cars ahead of him moved right, likely planning on taking the 101 merge exit at the end of the bridge, I expected Mr. Mustang to rocket up to about 90 and either pass everyone, or pass most everyone before swerving right at the last second to make the 101 merge.
He started to do so, accelerating to about 80 on the long downhill at the end of the bridge, and I clicked my cruise control up to about 75, and rolled happily along. Happily until we got up towards the 101 South exit, when the Mustang inexplicably slowed from 80+ to about 60, without anyone in front of him, slower cars moving over to exit on his right, and nothing but a concrete medium to his left. I disengaged my cruise and rolled, assuming he'd start driving again, but he just stayed at 60ish, and I soon had to hit the brakes to avoid running into him. Again, there wasn't a car in front of him for half a mile, and as soon as he was past the 101S exit he stomped it and zoomed up to 80 again. I got in the right lane at that point, since most of the other cars had exited, and only noticed the Mustang again when he started weaving from left to right lane, tapping his brakes randomly, and slowing down. Ordinarily I would have blown past him, since my car was both newer and faster than his, but he looked crazy, so I just rolled along, and before long, as we approached the 101N/580N merge where it goes to one lane and construction, he was doing about 30. In a 55 zone.
So he was inconveniencing me, and he was crazy, but at the same time his car was just fast enough that I couldn't blow past him with blissful impunity, since I couldn't rule out the possiblity that he might be crazy enough to try and hit me. Plus, with the one-lane construction area coming up, I was sure to have to slow down behind some SUV merging in from 101. I was considering taking the last exit, if he went straight onto 101, since it's just a surface street that goes parallel to the freeway and woudln't have taken me far out of my way. Happily the Mustang went that way, and as I accelerated back to speed on the freeway, I could see him over to the right, flicking me off through his window.
I laughed heartily, in an, "Of course! I'm the one who should fuck off in this situation!" sort of way, while wishing Malaya had been with me. A middle finger an effective insult to junior high students and adults with a mentality on that level, but nothing cuts to a man's core like a hot chick holding up the extended pinkie finger with her thumb about an inch from the tip of it. And Malaya would have been happy to oblige him that favor.
In one last (vaguely) car-related item, check out this YouTube fun. I don't play WoW and can't imagine I'll ever have the time/inclination to do so, but I am at least perhipherally aware of the Murloc phenomena. They're frogmen who are more annoying than dangerous, with really cute and amusing voices. It's the voices that are making them pop culture stars, and that's what makes this video so funny. It's a guy singing, "If I had a Murloc" to the tune of, "If I were a Rich Man," and while the one guy sings his musical song, someone else operates a ridiculous little Kermit the Frog-esque Murloc pet, complete with a little spear and hilarious "Rabble grabble grabble rabble rab!" lyrics, that are someone in tune and in time with the rest of the song.
The various sketches and antics are cute, in a very amateurish way, and I laugh at the Murloc's dialogue (which is not from the game; one of the guys just does it live as the camera is rolling, I think), but it's the very brief car section at 1:44 that puts the video over the top. When the Murloc starts to bounce... to angry, N-word heavy Dr. Dre... in the whitest white guy's safe, sensible, silver import sedan.
Although the spear into the electrical outlet is a nice touch too.
I've posted my fair share of "lottery winner goes bankrupt, commits suicide" type stories, so here's one about a smart guy who won, and is doing the sort of stuff we all like to think we'd be smart enough to do if we won. He won $220m, took a lump sum payout of $85m, and went to work from there:
He spent the first month of his new life assembling a team of financial advisors. His goal: to use his winnings to become a billionaire. Here's what Duke has done with his money so far.
$45 million: Safe, low-risk investments such as municipal bonds
$35 million: Aggressive investments like oil and gas and real estate
$1.3 million: A family foundation
$63,000: A trip to Tahiti with 17 friends
$125,000: Mortgage retired on his 1,400-square-foot house
$18,000: Student-loan repayment
$65,000: New bicycles, including a $12,000 BMC road bike
$14,500: A used black VW Jetta
$12,000: Annual gift to each family member
He's turned $85m into nearly $130m in just two years, while continuing to live a life he enjoys and taking care of his family and friends. Not bad. I do wonder what his goal is, though. He wants to be a billionaire, but why? Just for the big round number? What will he do then that he can't do now, with $100m? Buy an NFL franchise?
It's kind of an interesting issue, since he made his money playing the lottery, while managing a Gold's Gym. So it's not like he's Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or Mark Cuban; someone who made his fortune through work that is his passion, and who continues in that same work, inevitably making himself richer in the process. This guy is still teaching a spin class at the gym since he enjoys it, but it's obviously less than a drop in the bucket of his actual worth. He had to totally change his investment/career paradigm to try to grow his money, and he seems to be doing pretty well at this thus far.
The real question though, is one the article does not address. How's he doing on poontang? After all, what's the point in a billion, or even a hundred million, if you're not knee deep in Asian girls?
