I hate the tv

Irony has fallen back through itself here in the Lower Greenville neighborhood of Dallas.  Today I witnessed perhaps the most active protest I have seen in my two years living in the Dallas area.  As I approached I wondered what could be the subject:  Is it the war? gas prices? food prices?  Is it the bad economy? Genocide in Sudan? Human rights violations in China? Human rights violations here in the US?!? Wiretapping?

No. My heart sank and my brain began to hurt as I realized that these people are out protesting to save……a Starbucks store. This particular one:

Prior to today I was only aware that anti-Starbucks protests occurred. This is through the looking glass people
-Glen

Some other stuff:
A map and the official list of closing stores across the US. Some other slightly different starbucks centric protests.

Starbucks location in Berlin behind the Brandeburg gate.
 The onions take on the news

Here’s a cool magazine based on the idea of collecting stuff from other people. They have notes, pictures, drawings, diary entries, love letters, etc. Very cool idea and it looks good.

There’s also a separate site for their “dirty” material…like this pretty tame example:

which is very amusing…but not worksafe.

Started looking around gootube for some dominos vides. Browsing around, I found some decent stuff:

Billards + dominoes

Too much setup time, but worth the wait: CDs, Cassettes, Boxes, etc.

People (Miller Comercial from a few years ago)

Awesome, looks like its from a kids show

When google calendar came out, I figured it was a privacy nightmare and I avoided it. My main concern was that google would hold a bunch of my information and then get suppoenaed or bought or accidentally leak the information out onto the net or something. Now I’m not an important person or anything, I just didn’t feel like it was a good idea.

So today I gave it a shot, after a friend suggested that I share her calendar. So I took a look and it’s got some cool features. Basically Google is taking a shot directly at Microsoft’s Outlook calendar program, but doing it server-side. It looks good, as their things typically do. The security model they’ve chosen seems fairly straight forward, but I will be that many many people will be bitten by this. I still think this type of program is best obtained clientside, but with the lack of development of non-MS calendars (is Sunbird ever going to pick up the pace?), maybe I will use gCal.

A calendar can contain many juicy pieces of information and google wants this, because it makes their program more powerful. I’m all for that, but again, I think people that don’t understand it will misuse it. Even those that do (like the semi-incompetant me) will probably accidentally post a copy of their social security card or something.

For instance, you can import a flight itenerary into google calendar directly. I haven’t done it myself, but I wanted to see what the process was like so I did a quick search for “google calendar flight”, and found this interesting blog post where a guy stalks (for demo purposes) some lady who left her calendar wide open:

Death By Google Calendar

Use with google with care folks. As they get bigger, we should all worry more.

Here...and they’re not shy about sharing the music (streamable) on their website.

On Kuro5shin, they’ve got a really interesting article on a guy who claims to have intentionally infected himself with hookworms to cure his asthma. That’s not all. He says he went to Cameroon to walk in latrines to get infected. Unbelievable, but very interesting.

Here’s what one looks like:

It brings to mind that story that came out a while back about a parasite, Toxoplasma_gondii, that controls the minds of rodents; it makes them fearless of cats which can kill them. Maybe this hookworm story isn’t so far-fetched.

Kurt Vonnegut announced during this presentation that it would be his last (paid) public appearance. Here’s a clipping of the transcript:

“Well,” says vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”

The students seem to agree.

“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”

“You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.”

Off to a flying start, vonnegut explains that this will be his “last speech for money.” He can’t remember the first one, but it was on a campus long, long ago, and this will be the end.

Still fiesty as an old man.

On YouTube I ran accross this cool little clip in which Franken retells some stories about Saddam that he was told by a guard at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  Apparantly Saddam likes dogs and horses,  but says cats are for women.

Click for larger Versions:

I ran into this ass-kicking piece at Gin and Tacos immediate after the 2k4 travesty of an election. I felt that it was dead on in many respects, but I didn’t have this site working back then….So It gets posted now. Here’s a Snippet:

These votes come from the suburbs (tax cuts) and rural areas (abortion, gay marriage). Can you think of two places more insulated from the regressive economic and international policies of this administration? Look at the decision-making process of a suburban voter. The war? Who cares. Junior’s in an expensive private school, and that ACT tutor is gonna make sure he gets into a 4th-rate college with two directional adjectives in its name. The economy? Come on, daddy’s the person who does the outsourcing, not the one who gets outsourced. Terrorism? Those attacks happen in big cities. Cuts to government programs? Well that’s just more urban poor to shuttle into the army. Or prison. Need more of those.