Pancake City

One-third of Americans want more math taught in school: poll
I don’t care what 40% of Americans say: we have enough math as it is.

Stimulus checks boost gains in after-tax incomes and spending
In other news, sun burns brightly, is hot.

Mars Soil ‘Friendly’ to Life, Tests Show
If Mars is friendly to life, it better hope it’s not friendly to oil too. “This just in: Exxon-Mobil has developed  a faster-than-light spaceship in under six months. Industry analysts say it may be too little too late as BP finished its intergalactic Space Straw over a month ago.”

“Hey, Martians. It’s pretty cold here. Have some welcoming blankets.  On us.”
SPACE INDIAN: “Don’t do it!”

New law prevents Ohio woman from bringing bear cub to work
New law?

(Video link)

That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Launch that shit into space.

One thing I loved about Season 1 of “The Wire” is that it seemed authentic. There’s no way for me to know if it is.  My penchant for ass-kicking aside, I never worked in an inner-city policy department. (After I typed “penchant”, I voice in my head started chanting “Bic, Bic, Bic!”) But I reason it’s more likely for police work to be filled with paperwork, boredom, cursing, and office politics than non-stop wild gun battles because there’s a lot more of the former in real life than the latter.

The jargon and slang the characters used seemed authentic too, like the show’s creators talked to a lot of police officers and drug dealers before writing. I highly recommend watching the first season.

I’ve only watched two episodes from Season 2, but it’s disappointing so far because it doesn’t have that same sense of authenticity. The main setting moved to the inner harbor docks and focuses a lot on the life of the dock workers. A lot of the dialogue seems contrived and the camaraderie among the workers forced, like the show’s writers aren’t too familiar with that world.

Again, my penchant for moving shipping crates aside, never worked at the docks. But the depiction doesn’t ring true anymore.  Also, there’s this new obnoxious character, Ziggy, who I hate. Part of what doesn’t ring true to me is that fact that he reached his mid-20s and no one has killed him yet. He’s not even missing a limb.

Hit up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B A.

The Song of the Week was as buried on my Zune as it could get. The song info got corrupted. All it said was “Album, Artist”. I was browsing through my songs and played it out of curiosity. It turned out to be a beautiful Scottish song.

I know it’s Scottish because my keen ear can discern the sometimes subtle differences between traditional Celtic and Gaelic music. Also, when I found the song on my hard drive (”Assorted MP3s\Irish Music”) I noticed the file name was “Scottish Ballade” by Christiane Cargill, who should add an ‘e’ to her last name to make it extra Scottish. So says the Encyclopedia of Gaeity.

This is brilliant. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,  recut.

1. That’s what people with swords tell people with pens so they don’t go out and buy a sword.

2a. Action-hero movie line:

REVOLUTIONARY: “You can’t suppress our ideas. The pen is mightier than the sword.”

SCHWARZENEGGER: “Gun beats both.” [BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM]

2b. Who is the next name in the action hero business? The next big, dumb guy that blows stuff up first and ask questions later. All of the big ones–Segal, Van Damme, Schwarzenegger–haven’t made anything notable in the genre since the 90s. Did Bush kill the action hero? “This blowing stuff up for no good reason isn’t as cool in real life.”

First impressions mean everything. M. Night Shyamalan has been riding on the success of “The Sixth Sense” for almost ten years now.

…but this put me in full rant mode when I saw a commercial for it.

It’s Mountain Dew’s “DEWmocracy“. In the commercial, three groups of people are tugging a rope against each other. What are they fighting for? The right to pick a new flavor of Mountain Dew.

I didn’t know one ad campaign could encapsulate so much that is wrong with our culture. It’s like a neutron star of crapiness. What set me off is how completely they co-opted the language, ideas, and spirit of democracy to sell a can of soda.

You want to hold a vote, fine. But “campaign tools” to promote your favorite soft drink? Phrases like “Keep the Movement Alive”? Yeah, you better get off your seat and start helping out. The corporations and media giants that control our society are really trying to squash the grassroots Mountain Dew movement.

A true cynic will argue there’s no difference between selling a product and selling a candidate, but there is. I’ll admit, a lot of the marketing is the same. But behind the marketing, and the usual BS that’s part of politics, there’s still a person there. There is still something real, A can of soda isn’t going to change anyone’s life, much less the future of our country. But for better or worse, a President will.

The message board is as disheartening as one would suspect. Maybe there really isn’t much difference between a soda campaign and a political campaign. A sample of posts:

WHY VOTE?! (Quote: “THEY ALL TASTE SO GOOD”)

Why can’t we have ALL the flavors? (Unity ticket!)

Why ‘Revolution’ is the only logical choice (Political analysis by one of the country’s top minds)

I think we need to stop fighting. (Yes! A message of peace.)

Where Were you when You first Tried the new Dew’s? (”When I heard Kennedy was shot, I driving home on…wait, what???)

When I have an unpleasant task to do, I’ll read blogs obsessively to avoid starting it. Now I can do so while being ironic. The procrastination blog.

I’ve been gettigg gibberish spam the past few weeks. I’ll leave one up (see “Recent Comments” on right) for a few days.

I don’t get gibberish spam. It’s like a spam bot gone rabid and started mashing on the keys. There’s nothing being advetised, no backlink to a working site, no Google key words in the text. Maybe this is the first sign of artifical intelligence, like an ape trying to speak without a larnyx.

Another possibility is that the person was sexually frustrated. The post with the comment is titled “Sizzlin’ Hot Girl on Girl Action”. It’s about social security. If I were a straight man searching for GoGA and saw that title on site Pancake City (ooh, sexy cakes!), I’d end up frustrated too. And informed about social security! But frustrated as well.

Time for a three-minute web search. Let’s see if there’s any info on gibberish spam:

***

This is the best explanation I’ve found so far.

“The main reason is the Spammers are pushing out millions of gibberish messages is to confuse the anti spam blocking filters. Spam filters that use statistical analysis or Bayesian antispam filter are prone to being fooled by these as “good” messages and therefore change their threshold for allowing such messages to pass. This threshold or scoring method is what many spam filters like SpamAssassin use to determine if a message is spam or not. This is also known as stuffing the statistics and are simply self serving to the Spammers.”

A commenter on another site suggested it may be a way to test if your site is a good target. You put a unique nonsense word string, search for it on Google a few days later, and if you get a result, it means the blog owner hasn’t taken the spam comment down. Using real words woud give you thousands of results back; using “asfosd fssf werwer” will likely only give you one result.

I heard this song a few months ago and meant to make it a Song of the Week then but forgot about it.  “Countdown” by Dance Party is catchy and a lot of fun. I love the break that comes around 2:20. Play this one at your next dance off.

…but if I’m fighting stereotypes of being out of touch with the economic concerns of the poor and middle class and only focused on the interests of the rich, I’m not putting a “Golf Gear” tab on the front page of my web site.

Some sneaky liberals wrote fake user reviews for the McCain Father’s Day Golf Pack.

Update: The fake comments became too popular and were taken down. Someone archived the comments, which you can read here.

“In S. Korea, Anti-U.S. Beef Protests Stir Backlash Against President”

As tens of thousands of people waved candles in central Seoul and other South Korean cities, a month of street demonstrations against the purported danger of U.S. beef broadened on Tuesday night into a populist backlash against the country’s fledging president, Lee Myung-bak. [...]

Despite repeated assurances from Lee’s government and the United States, many South Koreans continue to fear that U.S. beef would infect them with mad cow disease.

A month of demonstrations against Grade A American chuck, roast, rib, and sirloin? That’s silly. Our beef is 100% safe and delicious. Some would even call it crazy good. Now, our tomatoes, those you have to worry about. They’ll give you salmonella. It’s spread from feces that comes from non-beef related animals, like cows. Better eat some more beef to make up for the hole in your diet.