Raging Infomaniac

Sunday. Lots to do.

While journaling yesterday I made a realization that my entire life right now revolves around three locations:

  1. At the gym
  2. With Ron
  3. At the computer

With the third location as the default. My default action has become working. Or rather ‘at the computer’ which may or may not include working. I’ve become a Wikipedia addict. Here’s a list of topics I’ve browsed: (I was going to link to them all but that will take another hour and I gotta get to the gym)

For future reference: Fascism.

Looking at criticism/research of Astrology (I’m a Taurus).

DOA (movie) was on PBS so I looked up film noir then Sin City (movie) and read more about comics in general including Maus and RAW magazine (which I actually had issues of as a kid but didn’t realize exactly their importance.

On PBS as well was a special about mummies leading to Egypt

I watch Drawn Together even when it repeats. I added in that Foxxy Love’s middle name is Shaquafafa.

I forgot exactly what DirectX did.

Gymbunny research on Hardgainers

The Kanamits are those tall big-forehead aliens from The Twilight Zone.

Heard the word – didn’t know what it meant: Panopticon.

I didn’t understand how Stargate the movie and the tv shows Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis all fit together

The Beggars Opera, John Gay, The Threepenny Opera, Recitative, Rapping, Freestyle Battle, Flava Flav, The Surreal Life, Charo, Celebreality, Strange Love, Marcus Schenkenberg

Been seeding OpenOffice lately with Bittorrent.

Just curious what the entries said for Movable Type, TypePad, The X-Files, Ultimate Fighter Challenge

Timeline of the September 11, 2001 attacks, 1n4dl01d81c212547, The Bathtub, Carol Lin, Criticisms of the 9/11 Commission REport, Project Bojinka, Fahrenheit 9/11, Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2

After seeing Night of the Living Dead mentioned in JJ’s comment about horror films, I remember that it is in the Public domain

Did anyone else see that great NOVA special on The Great Escape? That led me to Nazi extermination camp, Konzentrationslager and then Holocaust denial.

List of internet top-level domains

Andy Warhol, Interview (magazine), Timecode, Blow Job (film), Conceptual art

Down-low, Terminology of homosexuality, Men who have sex with men, Gay-for-pay, Latino Fan Club, Colton Ford, Blake Harper,

I can’t remember why I looked up Robert Fripp.

Looking for a WinXP version of the text-based browser Lynx I found this List of web browsers.

Prison planet: Abiogenic petroleum origin

Haiti: Jean Bertrand-Aristide, Democracy enhancement

No clue how I came back to Arli$$.

South Park, Recurring South Park characters, Token character, Pip, Orgazmo, Family Guy

A review of the Jack Abramoff lobbying and corruption scandal led to Grover Norquist.

Frontline‘s ‘Is Wal-Mart Good for America’ brought me to Rubbermaid, Minimum wage Wal-Mart, Economy of the United States and Trade, USA,

Downloaded Nethack which reminded me to look up Ultima.

Hindu, Hindi, Devanagari.

Discworld

Tattoo research: Ank, Djed, Pectoralis major muscle, Celtic

Sousveillance

Iraq research: Ahmed Chalabi, Pre-emptive war, Arab (vs Persian)

Dad asking about eBay auctions for Vanity Fair (magazine)

Wondering where rabbits with pancakes on their heads came from Internet phenomena such as Oolong (the rabbit) and Oolong (the tea) also The Million Dollar Homepage.

Problogging research: Pajamas Media

Rootkit, WMF Vulvernability, Apple Macintosh, Think Secret, Notable litigation of Apple Computer, Samurize, EOne, Desk Accessory, Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows

New Years Eve dessert: Baked Alaska (wasn’t exactly sure what I was eating).

Related to reading Freakonomics: Cocaine, CIA

For future reference: Free speech

Keep your enemies closer: Karl Rove

Third Wave, The Wave , Stanford prison experiment, the Milgram Experiment

What’s more: I’ve memorized the prefix of ‘http://en.wikidpedia.org/wiki/’ so I don’t even have to go throught the front page or use the search function.

When we were kids we always spent hours at the library (if you can teach your kids to love reading and the library, your job is half done).

I’m almost done hiring a virtual assistant. This will be a great step towards reclaiming my time. I’ve made a massive project plan in MS Project and have assigned much of the ‘grunt work’ – most of it ‘teaching assistant’-type stuff for my courses – that it will be nice to farm some of this stuff out.

I watched part of a fascinating lecture on Haiti by Kevin Pina of HaitiAction.net. He was detailing how US-backed gangs from the Dominican Republic were crossing into Haiti to rouse the people into violence so that we could claim that removing the democratically elected Aristide was within reason. We usurped a democracy. The US government still claims that Aristide consented to be kidnapped. Pina posited that much of this is to make Haiti safe for US manufacturing: keeping residential electricity unreliable, witholding telecom infrastruture development, even literacy. Before Aristide was elected the illiteracy rate was 95%. He formed a ministry of literacy and within years illiteracy was down to 45%. This is something Cuba has also done. Can you imagine if America had 95% literacy?

Wikipedia tells us that early highly literate societies were often because of the need to read religious texts. For theatre buffs – this is why the Church switched from outlawing theatre to using a wagon parade of tableaux and stories to educate an illiterate populace – granted, the faithful needed to remain a bit dumbed down since a priest had to be the intermediary between them and God (along with guardian of the Bible). Many Islamic countries and Jews in the Middle Ages had very high literacy rates. By the time of the American Revolution, literacy was at 90% in this region. If there’s one thing to force citizens to do… if there is one thing a dictatorship might be good for… if there is one thing that might crawl us out of this impending dark age it is teaching people how to read. Again, I’m the kid of public school teachers. But we were taught that education was a stepping stone – it’s own reward. I cringe at parents paying their kids for good grades. Our reward was the eventual scholarships to college that years of hard work did. Parents would glower over my sister and I and my parents would say, ‘Well, they work very hard.’ That wasn’t to take away from noting any talents but to tell parents that it wasn’t simple – it was the foundation.

Anyway this Haiti special was fascinating.

Then at 1am I stumbled across Alan Sears of BookTV laying into the ACLU. He contends that since the ACLU’s founders – nearly 100 years go – may have been socialists, that the organization is a terrible afront to the American way. He considers the ACLU fighting internet censorship and filters as being advocates of child pornography. He considers the ACLU fighting the Boy Scouts for their discriminations to be tearing at the very fabric of society. Something that keeps bubbling up is this faux-persecution of Christians. Fundies are seeing any conversation of separation of Church and State as an attack on religion – their religion. It’s the old victim-agressor stance that becomes all too familiar. The ACLU defended NAMBLA’s free speech rights after a 10-year old boy was killed by 2 man-boy-love enthusiasts. Sears mixes this with compliance and advocacy of child victimization. He again confuses constitutionally-protected (if that means anything these days) rights and defending even the disagreeables (even pill-popper Rush Limbaugh’s medical records privacy) with advocating a group’s ideology or interests. You either see full access to information as freeing or dangerous. You are either for free speech – or you aren’t. And if you are going to drape yourself in a flag made of Bibles you better get some clarity.

You either think ‘bad ideas’ decay when exposed to scrutiny and sunlight or you think they should be repressed (to fester and lash out). I am NOT advocating NAMBLA AT ALL. I think man-boy-love is absolutely repugnant and the purview of broken adult men who can’t manage real relationships with other adult men (or women). I think confusing pedophilia with consenting adult same-sex sexual attraction is one of the underlying reasons for homophobia and violence against gay men and women. I maintain that anyone that is that obsessed with the other people’s genitals, consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes, has a lot of problems to examine.

If you wanted to ostracize those complicit in the sexual victimization of children you’d be more successful targeting the Roman Catholic Church.


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5 responses to “Raging Infomaniac”

  1. Dr Fish Avatar
    Dr Fish

    looks like you have a box to exist in.Time to go to Europe with your energy.Expand let go of the safety net and see what life is all about.You comment on political interaction with people.Go and be one of the pourd and the few **** Politations*************

  2. JB Avatar

    Hardgainer? Know the feeling…

    DirectX is a typical Microsoft vehicle for squashing competition, see RenderWare and OpenGL. It’s partly for tunneling through all the Windows crap and enabling us games programmers to access the hardware as quickly and directly as possible.

  3. Jef Avatar

    I love it as well. My last searches included Crystal Waters and Morse Code.

  4. sam Avatar

    I enjoyed what it had to say about “cum shot.”

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