People who, when quoted, instantly invalidate any argument

A list, in no particular order and of no particular completeness.

• Noam Chomsky


• Ayn Rand


• Gandhi


• Winston Churchill


• Hunter S Thompson


• Pope John Paul II


• Jim Morrison


• George W Bush


• Milton Freedman


• Timothy Leary


• Adolph Hitler (by way of comparison)


• Dr Seuss


• Frederic Nietzsche


• any DJ other than John Peel


• Richard Stallman


• Ann Coulter


• Bill Watterson


• Richard Dawkins


• any anthropomorphized animal character


• Strom Thurmond


• John Lennon


• Karl Marx


• Adolf Eichman


• Anton LaVey


• Jerry Falwell


• any baseball personality


• Aleister Crowley


• Carlos Casteneda


• Einstein (if not about physics)


• Deepak Chopra


• William Randolph Hearst


• Bobby Fischer


• anyone with a blog


• L. Ron Hubbard


• William Shakespeare


• Robert Anton Wilson


• Mark Twain


• Bono, or anyone Bono would quote

Compiled with suggestions from Jason Goldman, Timoni Grone, Jeremy LaTrasse, Aziz + Rachel, and Craig Davis.

Knowing Where I Stand

Kineda’s Are You an A-List Blogebrity? widget will size you up and tear you down. In my case, the results were wholly unsurprising:

“Technorati places http://www.al3x.net in the middle authority group.”

I’ve been calling myself C-list since the emergence of the A-list. It’s low-pressure here.

Competition and Confidence

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to two of the baristas at Murky. Murky baristas regularly compete in regional competitions, and regularly win. I asked how they were feeling about the upcoming Mid-Atlantic regionals. One barista expressed humble good vibes about the event. The other, a young woman:

“We are going to fuck their mouths.”

And that, my friends, is confidence.

And Some Project Levity

Steven Frank had some funny wisdom about the impulse to start projects a couple days ago. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one with a tiny graveyard of things that seemed like really good things I’d want to keep doing at the time.

Interning In Selling Out The Poor

If you’re from DC nothing will ring truer than the latest Tom Tomorrow cartoon. I don’t normally like most political cartoons for their black-and-white simplifications of complex political issues but this is just too on the nose.

Jeffrey Rowland Knows My Life

Suffice to say that, for those of you who wonder, information security occupies much of my time.

Imitates Life

Questionable Content is so dense with references, slang, and characters from my own life that I really want to dislike it. But I cannot. It is also dense with humor. Humors, really. Geek humor. Indie rock humor. Young person relationship humor. Robot humor. Anime humor. Humors. Read it, and while you’re at it prepare yourself for the next installment of Krakow.

Costume

My Halloween costume this year was zombie Reagan, perhaps better described: Frankenreagan, given that I applied faux bolts to my neck. I wore a standard Reagan mask, the aforementioned bolts masked with a touch of greenish makeup on my neck, a black suit with a white dress shirt, and a red-with-blue-stripes-and-ducks old man tie from a thrift store down the street, and an authentic vintage “Your Next President: Ronald Reagan” pin from a political memorabilia shop in downtown DC. Political costumes are never the hit of the party, but people were amused once they had taken in the details.

Pictures exist, but I will not go out of my way to procure even digital copies. I didn’t wear the mask hardly at all, so there’s not much to see. Enjoy the festivities this weekend; it’s a good Halloween weekend that lets you carouse under a blood moon.

Hottest. Search Engine. Ever!

Why can’t I find a woman with the, uh, data retrieval capabilities of Clever Kate?

Why I Love the BBC 1xtra D&B Chart Show

The DJ, regarding a listener who couldn’t log into the show chat room due to security measures at his workplace:

“Oh no, firewall bizness!”

A sample for the ages.

Funny Because It’s Painfully True

Bob the Angry Flower’s Lovebot discovers the truth about Internet dating and incompatibility. It’s accurate in that everyone trying to date via the Net is broken, but the cartoon girl in the strip is way too attractive to be a believable digital lonelyheart.

Awhile back I pretty much said that I’d rather be alone than suffer any more online dating fiascos. Self-fulfilling prophecy. It could be worse, is the basic premise.

Wait, Is API A Producer?

Being a junglist and a programmer simultaneously can be confusing.

An announcement on the general PHP PEAR newsgroup for a new release of the XML_SaxFilters package included this caveat:

WARNING: lots of API breakage!

If you don\’t get why that\’s funny, it\’s not worth explaining.

What? No Ear Plates?

If I was building a crazy nearly-life-size anime girl model with a computer inside her I wouldn\’t just use some random drawing. I\’d model it after Chii from Chobits, because then it makes sense that she\’s got cables running out of her.

Sigh. Once an anime dork, always an anime dork.

‘80s Retro Still Sucks

...even in Japan.

Best. Referrer. Ever.

I have to tip my hat to the person, persons, or bot at 205.244.251.84, whose search for (I kid you not) “metroid fuck stories” has to be the best referrer this domain has ever received.

All I Ever Needed To Know I Learned From Webcomics

• Being on the Internet isn\’t the same as being famous.


• You better watch that LiveJournal habit, \’cause pretty soon you could end up a real blogger (for the record, I think bloggers who give up their “real” blogs for LJ are even worse, and Suzy will back me up).


• The numbers are supposed to go after your name, not in them. Fuck.


• Samus from Metroid is a total bitch.


• There\’s no guarantee I won\’t spontaneously melt.

Amore

If I could meet a fly honey on this godforsaken campus you’d know I’d give that ho a Shit Bitch Bear. Mack squarely laid down.



Props to PHiZ for the link.



And, for the record, I mean meet. Not as in, “successfully ask out on a date,” implying failures of that nature, of which there have been none. None because I haven’t met any dateable females. This is what I get for picking the techie state campus.



Whatever. Whine whine whine. That bear is money.

Unix Joke!!!

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Today’s Jerkcity is a Unix joke! Woo!

<strong>Glomp!</strong>

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Krakow is my new bestest most favoritist webcomic. It’s got Japanese culture jokes, witty references a-plenty, great comic timing, and a sexy succubus (!) who allows for cute relationship jokes (perfect for sharing with an SO or Nazi ex-girlfriend).



Read the archives in one fell swoop and know my joy, epitomized in this strip.

In Homage To Richard&#8217;s AIM Convo Posts

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Brittany Martin: you’d look awful cute in that picture of you on there. if it weren’t for that face you were making, of course.

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Alexander Payne: i’m supposed to look pissed at my phone.

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Brittany Martin: what was wrong with it?

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Alexander Payne: [...] it was doing something silly that i had to work around.

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Brittany Martin: silly?

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Alexander Payne: Verizon had it appending basically an advertisement for their service when you sent a picture message. so i would send pics to my moblog, and the program i have set up to read a special email address and post to my weblog in the moblog category was posting that advertisement text along with the pictures

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Alexander Payne: i had to change some stuff in that program to throw out their text

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Alexander Payne: a minor hassle, and really not my phone’s fault.

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Brittany Martin: fucking Verizon.

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Alexander Payne: but yeah, that new sweater [...] is really nice. you can’t quite see in the pic, but it’s got a zipper on one shoulder

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Alexander Payne: and i like my bang-tastic rocker boy hair

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Alexander Payne: (which rocks only very slightly, but more so than when parted)

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Brittany Martin: it probably rocks just about enough.

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Alexander Payne: right. comfortable, manageable rockage.

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Brittany Martin: you wouldn’t want to go overboard with the rock.

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Alexander Payne: i can’t back up that much rock.

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Alexander Payne: limited rock delivery.

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Alexander Payne: i think this tangent is done.

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Brittany Martin: yup.

"