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What else do you call someone that's a terrorist?

Dickhead.

Once again, or so the media exclaimed, silver is the most popular of car colors.

Well whoopie.

It's hard to bash consumers for favoring a "color" that is useful (digression: is silver really a color per se or a lack of color, along the same lines as black and white?). Useful meaning that it does hide the dirt, it's easy to touch up, hard to criticize as 'clashing', relatively cool in summer, etc. But on the other hand it labels the owner as a relative milquetoast.

"Well it was what they had on the lot."
"My last car was silver."
"I couldn't really decide on a color."

Excuses.

I hate it when people don't choose to use their brains to think. It's like "Well, I went to all the trouble to choose a manufacturer, and a dealer, pick out a model and haggle on the price but when it comes to color I'll just accept any old schlock." C'mon, it's your money don't you want something that looks different from all the other cars in the parking lot? So at least you don't have to read the license plate or look for the gum-wrappers on the floor to know its yours?

While there's a limited number of offerings, you'll note that car colors do vary, slowly yes, but they do. Back in the 80's blues and metallic blues were in. Late 80's saw the introduction of green. Maroons were all the rage in the 90s and then lately there's been a resurgence (thanks to the inevitable weirdness of aesthetics given to us by German brands such as Audi and Volkswagen) of grays, oranges and 70's era greens (avocado anyone?). Myself I was taken with the panzer-kampf-tanken-undercoaten color of the Audi TT's - truly a remarkable shade of gray that at once reminded one of the plastic in military models. Yes, it wasn't exactly a color - but unlike generic silver it was unique. It said something.

On one point alone I'll forgive silver-car buyers: insurance. Red and yellow cars are actually more expensive to insure, and silver is harder to track in traffic when they're trying to chase you down for speeding.

But still, couldn't you have chosen green or blue or maybe even beige?

No, no, no, no, no! Don't do it! Just don't do it!

President Bush said Wednesday that a law hastily passed in August to temporarily give the government more power to eavesdrop without warrants on foreign terror suspects must be made permanent and expanded.

[...]

"Without these tools, it will be harder to figure out what our enemies are doing to train, recruit and infiltrate operatives into America," he [Bush] said on a visit to the super-secret National Security Agency's headquarters in suburban Fort Meade, Md. "Without these tools, our country will be much more vulnerable to attack."

For the love of all things American, do NOT give Herr Bush a further extension on his attempt to reduce our rights and freedoms! It's yet another blatant power grab from an already overstuffed, dictator who has no respect for our country or the people it contains.

I realized the other day that there's a little-discussed aspect of MP3 players. It's the black-box, anonymity gained by putting a 'generic' face on something that is very revealing.

In the past you could get an idea of what kind of person you were next to by catching a glimpse of the CD titles in their car, on their desk, in their home...etc. But with the advent of all-digital, no-moving-parts music players these accidental insights are all but removed. Now the only revelation comes when someone chooses to share their playlist, and again, it's a choice.

I can remember raising an eyebrow when getting a ride to lunch with someone and seeing the cover of a cassette tape ("they still listen to Queen !?!" or "Whoa, My Sharona?"). There was a sense of peeping into someone's private self, sure they wear a tie Mon-Fri 9am to 5pm but once they get into the car they're howling to Stevie Ray Vaughan or having a moment with Tom Jones. Who knew?

Well for the most part, no one will - at least not by accident. With the enormous improvement in sound quality and portability it's hard, overall, to lament this change. Still there is a certain romance for those days when a show-tune 8-Track in the back seat meant you had a pretty good idea of whom you were dealing with and what to expect.

... Whodat? Why it's Alan Greenspan, one of the few men that can make women swoon just by the size of his... intellect alone. In his new memoir he lays bare the facts, without the comfy trappings of political rhetoric. And while he makes many points with razor-like clarity, I'm particularly fond of this one:

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

You tell it brother.

Truth.

On September first I posted this brief blog:

Let China Solve Iraq

Today I saw this article in the times.... Interesting timing.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Iraq Through China’s Lens
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: September 12, 2007

It is hard not to feel that China has spent the last six years training for the Olympics while we’ve spent ourselves into debt on iPods and Al Qaeda.

AI.

Artificial intelligence. Leaving aside all the jokes I could make on the intelligence of clearly artificial individuals such as Jack Thompson and Paris Hilton (they'd make a great couple wouldn't they? let's give them a hand folks!) I have to wonder why all the fuss about AI?

2029. That's supposed to be the year when humans finally create an independant, cyber-mind capable of decision, rationalization, and moral balance. The fear that's being injected is the question "well what if it hates us?"

On the one hand humans are pretty easy to hate. We shit all over our environment. We kill at random. We're greedy, destructive and anarchistic. We rationalize our decisions with irrational motivations such as "religion" and blindly throw garbage into the space around our planet. Rarely we have artists and visionists who create something truly spectacular. More often than not if The Gifted aren't also rabid capitalists (e.g. Bill Gates) then we kill them, or steal their ideas to make the money they didn't.

On the other hand, there's the Butlerian-Jihad-esque idea that we need to pre-program any machines to never cross the threshold of in dependant thought. There's other sci-fi classic concepts of building in a respect for all humans. But I have yet to really grok the idea that a set of algorithms can actually "think" in the human/irrational/inspirational/creative manner as to pose a genuine and unique threat.

Think of all the chess matches, Big Blue, etc. Yes the computer has access to all the documented material and the speed to process all the possibilities. But it's limited to what humans have chosen to document and that which has been included in the accessible database. It's bounded by default.

Further, I don't believe that there has been any demonstration of 'spontaneous' thought by any algorithm, and just like irradiating plants to see if you can get a viable mutation, I don't think that randomly scrambling code will suddenly produce a viable sentience.

For all their trappings of science and education I have to laugh at the notion of a malevolent AI taking over the world. Here's why:

Vista 2029: Service Pack 1.

The only thing criminal about receiving an overly salty hamburger is the fucking retard who ate it all. Who's that? It's Police Officer Wendell Adams.

Get this, he arrested some poor kid who spilled salt on the burgers - one of which he got by accident. And it wasn't exactly like it was her decision either - she told her supervisor and a coworker who attempted to remedy the situation by knocking the excess salt off.

If you ask me the intelligence of police officers in Georgia is only slighly below that of a meat-patty. Anyone willing to yank some fast-food worker off the job and try and arrest them for serving a "too-salty" meal is a fucking retard.

Hell if you can't figure out not to eat something that doesn't taste right maybe you shouldn't be carrying a gun.

I'm pretty damn tired of the media powers-that-be waving the red flag over the latest story of excess. See that's just it - excess is *not* something most of us have to worry about. Take the latest headline burner "MAN HOSPITALIZED BY POPCORN FUMES". Well fuck, he ate multiple bags of the shit a day... A DAY. Apparently he'd cram his face into the bag and huff the fake-butter flavor too.

... and so he got sick. Of "Popcorn-Lung". Really. It's what they're calling it now.

Well hell, if you do any damn thing in excess you're going to get sick. I remember some health-freak when I was a kid who died of an O.D. of carrot juice. Apparently he even turned orange as well. I don't remember what exactly killed him, but basically it was another story of excess run amok.

Unless you're a professional lab-animal there's really no reason to freak out and toss all your food so long as you eat-within-reason. That's the key right there, *within reason*. Do anything to excess, even drinking water, will kill you.

Honestly some people just aren't bright enough to be called mammals.

Convertibles. The word conjures up wind, sun, and sky. Let's go back to that first one however, wind. Rag-tops are notoriously gusty, think of the women with scarves in their hair and men with their ball-caps on backwards. Of course that's the point, to enjoy the tactile sensation of speed through the air whipping and lashing all around.

So, please, would someone explain to me how in hell they can use a cell phone while driving along at sixty, seventy or eighty?

Seriously, how does this work? When I'm on my cell phone I typically have to turn down the radio, close the windows, shut the sunroof. Then I can talk and (naturally) be heard. And no, I do not have a convertible. How is it exactly that these people can communicate in gale-force conditions? I mean hell, putting aside wind, there's road noise, sirens, and the roar through underpasses where all sound gets tossed into an Oscar blender of cacophony.

I think the real answer is "it's just for show". Either there really isn't anyone on the other end, or the driver just doesn't care if they're listening or not. Frankly there isn't another explanation.

Nothing sucks worse in a friendship than empty promises.

Everyone has a friend of this kind of caliber; where in their presence everything is grand, everything is peachy and the time for doing {insert activity} is now, now, now! Effusive commitments are made, the chisels are taken out to engrave the engagement in stone. You make plans, arrange your schedule, wait… and…

Nada.

No call, no forewarning, and of course, no show. Why? Well inevitably the excuse is “I didn’t know you were serious.” Or “I thought you had something else that day.” Or some other equivalent schlock.

True, most of us know, when dealing with these types, that it’s best to have some sort of fallback plan but still, giving them the benefit of the doubt is just providing more rope to swing from in the end.

Still there’s a worse sort, imho. The type that are more insidious in their promises. These are the friends that *expect* you to keep after them when a commitment is made. Chasing them around with a handful of “Post-its” reminding them of what to do, and when to do it, and if you don’t then *you* were the one that wasn’t serious (because you know how forgetful they are).

The horrible, awful part about this all is the fact that really these are nice people whose company you do enjoy when you’re with them and so you’re willing to put up with the angst because: a) you’ve done it before and b) they really don’t mean you any harm. And it’s true, they don’t… but the better question is – why punish yourself by dealing with them in the first place?

Think about it next time, wouldn’t a good book be more rewarding?

I've always thought it rather arrogant when people insist on pre-warming their vehicles before they get into them. I can understand when you have small children, perhaps warming up the car for a bit, since they're strapped into car seats barely able to scratch an itch. But for a healthy adult to warm their car for a good five to ten minutes before getting into it, well it's a blatant waste of energy.

There's a woman at work who insists on doing this with her SUV. I'd be walking out to my car, and always notice this empty, locked vehicle with the engine running. It pisses me off because not only is she wasting gas, polluting the air but because she's so spoiled that she can't stand being out in the cold for the time to walk all of fifteen feet from the door to her parking spot. Still, there's a little give there because I hate being cold, and it does take the engine a bit to start producing heat so fine, whatever.

The other day it was a balmy and beautiful eighty degrees. Perfect temperature to be outside, nicer even than being in the arctic ice-station of the building. As I walk out the door I'm dumbfounded. The bitch has her car running again! This time to crank the AC. Wtf?!?! Hello? It's perfect outside?

All I can say is Energy-Whore better be going through hot-flashes because there's just no fucking excuse for the fuel she's wasting five days a week.

They seem to have a way with developing nations, in fact ones that are in massive turmoil. They know how to do this *and* turn a profit. As a result my (albeit novel) solution to the Iraq crisis is to hire a contractor to deal with the problems and sort it all out for us.

And I bet they would, for the right price.