Josh: OC comes on soon 🙂
Josh: have you been watching that Reunion show?
Josh: I like it
Me: Sweet – maybe I’ll watch it on my new iPod while I’m taking a dump 🙂
Josh: lmao…nice
Josh: you bought a fancy one eh?
Me: I took the biggest dump ever today.
Me: Yeah.
Josh: FYI that’s GROSS
Me: A black one.
Josh: iPod or dump?

1. Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4. Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal. Check over here to find ways of resolving family issues.
5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

Via drunkbunny.org.

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily
briefing. He concludes by saying: “Yesterday, 3
Brazilian soldiers were killed in an accident.”

“OH NO!” President Bush exclaims. “That’s terrible!”

His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion,
nervously watching as the president sits, head in
hands. Finally, the President looks up and asks …

“How many is a Brazillion?”

Q: What is Bush’s position on Roe vs. Wade?
A: He really doesn’t care how people get out of New Orleans.

Thanks to Cameron.

If I were the type of person to have a “Hero” tag with an American flag behind it, I’d be using it for this post. Colgate College has decided that hovering parents have gotten out of hand and that they’re undermining important lessons learned outside of the classroom.

… at freshman orientation here last week, parents heard a different message: Colgate is making educating students a higher priority than customer service. The liberal arts college of 2,750 students has concluded helicopter parenting has gotten out of hand, undermining the out-of-the-classroom lessons on problem-solving, seeking help and compromise that should be part of a college education.

I’ve said many times that I learned just as much, if not more, about life outside of the lecture hall than I did inside it. You learn to multi-task. You learn to be accountable without your parents holding your hand. You learn that red gym shorts and white socks don’t mix. You learn that hangovers suck. You learn that slushies at 4AM from 7-11 can sometimes fix even the worst problems. Most importantly, I learned two things with regards to my parents and life in general.

1. I could, afterall, survive without them on my own two feet without getting killed.
2. Begrudgingly, I learned they did know quite a lot about life and they did a great job preparing me for the rigors of daily life.

As Denis Leary puts it, “Life sucks, get a fucking helmet, okay?”

Lots of people have heard of Ann Arbor thanks to the University of Michigan, however, not everyone has so sometimes I just say I’m from the “Detroit area”, which is accurate enough. People sometimes ask me if Detroit is as bad as it’s portrayed in movies, TV, news, etc. To which I normally say “worse.” As of now there are over 12,000 abandoned homes in Detroit. The city is hemorrhaging money. Here are some sad facts about a once great city.

1. It’s the only city in the history of the United States to hit a population of over 1,000,000 residents and then subsequently fall back under that number.
2. The city has lost more than half of its population since the 1950’s.
3. Over 30% of the city’s population lives below the poverty line.
4. Over 36 square miles (58 square kilometers) of land sits vacant, which is roughly the size of the city of San Francisco.
5. The city tears down between 1,500 and 2,000 homes a year, which only keeps pace with the problem and doesn’t cut into the backlog of the 12,000 abandoned homes.

Things are getting so bad that people are moving their deceased loved ones’ bodies out of the city into other cemeteries.

“Suburbanites are taking the bodies of their relatives out of cemeteries because they’re afraid to come to the city,” Vogel said. “There are about 400 to 500 hundred (being moved) a year which shows you the depth of racism and fear.”

You know your city sucks when even the dead people are leaving.

The NCAA has recently imposed a ban on post season displays of mascots that are based on Indian nicknames (ie. Florida State Seminoles). As can be expected, FSU is not very happy about this. The school I attended used to be called the Hurons, however some PC idiots decided to change the name to the Eagles. This, despite the okay from local Huron tribes in Michigan.

Aren’t there governing bodies for these tribes? I suspect this is the case since they are independent nations of sorts with special provisions under US law. If this is, in fact, the case and said governing bodies approve the use of said mascot then what’s the beef? Now, if the name of the team is the “Reds” or “Redskins”, which many Native Americans find offensive, I can see the point.

What the NCAA should do is require schools using Native American mascots to get approval from the governing bodies referred to by said mascot. If the Native Americans are okay with their namesake being used as a mascot then who cares?

Ran across a rather amusing story today talking about the serious dangers of wearing flip flops. You read that right; an entire article devoted to the serious dangers of wearing flip flops. Researchers, and I use that term lightly, have found a wide range of problems associated with flip flops including the following.

1. Flip flops can cause accidents by getting stuck under the pedal or “foot slipping off the pedal altogether.”
2. Toxins in flip flops can cause lower sperm counts in men and are known to attack the liver, kidneys and reproductive organs.

They even have some in-depth first hand experience about just how dangerous this type of footwear can be.

Leigh Purves, gossip columnist for the Daily Star, is among those to have had a close call while driving with designer flip flops. She has told how, while travelling on the M1, her sandal got stuck under the brake pedal and she missed another car “by millimetres”.

I wear flip flops probably every day during the summer. Now that I live in Seattle, I wear them pretty much year round. According to this “research” if I’m are drinking with my friends at the beach I can pretty much kiss my liver goodbye (not that five years in college and a fraternity didn’t help with that effort).

But the ongoing scandal of wearing flip flops doesn’t just stop here. Oh, no, they can lead to international incidents as well! Recently, the Lacrosse team from Northwestern University, caused an international stir when they wore flip flops while attending the White House to meet President Bush.

The entire debacle unfolded after a player’s gay brother (he has to be gay; who else besides a gay man would notice a girl’s footwear in a photo?) sent her an email titled “YOU WORE FLIP FLOPS TO THE WHITE HOUSE?!” Oh the shame!

So there you have it. Flip flops cause car accidents, organ failure, the shooting of proverbial blanks and, quite possibly, the use of a CIA hit squad to kill you.

I was reading about the new Ford GT, which I was lucky enough to drool over in person, when I read this little tidbit. If this doesn’t get your testosterone factories burning I don’t know what will.

You can reach 60 mph — without leaving first gear — in an amazing 3.4 seconds. Second gear is good for 95 mph, third for 135-plus. That still leaves three more gears.

Holy. Shit.

Despite supporting XSLT Safari 2.0 ignores XSLT when it comes to RSS/RDF (I would assume Atom as well) feeds. This means that, if you have an XSLT transformation on your site’s various feeds, Safari will ignore the XSLT and render it within its native RSS viewer. Needless to say I’m not happy about this.

I’ve also discovered that Mozilla’s XSLT parser ignores disable-output-escaping, which, in their defense, is deprecated. In order to properly output XHTML/HTML that may be present in your <![CDATA[ ... ]]> you need to do the following.

1. Remove your <![CDATA[ ... ]]>
2. Make sure the markup inside of the <![CDATA[ ... ]]> is valid.
3. Use <xsl:copy-of select="./*"/> to copy the content of the valid XHTML (it’s no longer HTML once it’s valid XML) into your output.

I’ve got an example (tested in Firefox, but not IE) of my RDF feed here. If you’re using Safari you’ll notice that it uses the new RSS reader instead of displaying my XSLT output. Thanks Apple. The odd part is that XSLT works just fine with non-RSS/RDF XML. The only thing I can guess is that Safari recognizes certain RSS tags and switches to whatever the RSS/RDF reader is.

I’ve been thinking about redoing the site so that it’s just XML/XSLT. This was the initial test to see how things would work in various browsers. Things look good, but in order to support Safari, I’ll have to use non-RSS/RDF XML.