Dick Cheney's chamber of horrors

From inside the nightmarish lair of Dick Cheney, come these photos.

Nesting Russian dolls of the Bush I cabinet, and a 'CHENEY' branding iron. Momentos from fun times at Guantanamo, or just sex toys? You decide!

(He also has a book with an Arabic title, in the doll photo! Of art! Sarah Palin will be over shortly to show him what PROPER AMERICANS think of his terr'ist picture books.

Bizarre insight into Creationism

Here's an amazing Dawkins interview with a Creationist. She's painfully stupid; they generally are, but there is one interesting point.

Did you know that God is involved in the creation of each individual human at conception? This is apparently something that some Creationists believe! I must say, it has never occurred to me that anyone would think that, that the idea was even on the table.

New advances in statistics for liars

Bill O'Reilly, noted insane American who appears on the popular propaganda entertainment channel Fox News, on being presented with figures indicating that Amsterdam, which he referred to a cesspool of drugs and violence, was actually rather less druggy-violent than America:

"The way they do statistics in the Netherlands is different"

Yes, decent God-fearing PROPER AMERICANS like Bill O'Reilly do not use your Euro-communist 'mathematics'; they use intelligent counting.

And when Sarah Palin mounts the Moose Throne to rule over America, the budget will use intelligent counting, too! That will solve all of these naughty recessions!

Google/IE UI horror

You really need to click the image for a fullsized view to see what is weird here.

Note the combo box at the top. See, it has a normal Windows combo box control.

Now, see the combo box on the Google search bar. Note that it is a different type of control; I think it may be a .NET refugee.

Ugh, ugh, ugh. Is UI consistency within a single app too much to ask?

Obscene Railway Verse

From a 'Poetry Corner' poster on a DART: (Click for bigger)

Goodness! It's a pornographic poem about Daddy Long Legs (a crane-fly is the version of a daddy long legs which is actually an insect; other things given that name are either weird arachnids or even proper spiders!) sex, on the wall of a train! That is the poem is on the wall of a train; the insect sex isn't, though I suppose there's no reason it couldn't be, too. Won't someone think of the children?!

Bonus minor oddity:

"Image recorded may be used in legal proceedings against any person in breach of any railway bye-laws which may result in a fine and/or imprisonment"

Weird wording there, I feel. The implication is that the images may only be used in breaches which may result in a fine and/or imprisonment, but not those breaches which simply result in a ticket collector glaring at you. Excuse the wavy image; iPhones do that sometimes when overstrained.

Stimulate this, Obama!

Above is the Ares V, the planned super-heavy rocket for the US moon mission and, with the exception of the Soviet UR-700 (cancelled due to hydrazine being extremely nasty, seemingly), the heaviest rocket ever seriously worked on. 188 tonnes to LEO; that's about half a space station.

The Augustine Commission is due to deliver a report stating that, effectively, the current NASA moon mission is financially impossible. A lot of money has already been poured into this programme already, but NASA's budget is not what it once was and the development of the Ares I, the smaller rocket intended to do the manned transport, has not been what you would call successful so far.

The thing is, this is a worthy project. It could lead to a permanent base on the moon, and a potential Mars mission. It's a sort of super-Apollo; bigger landers, designed to stay for months, with the potential to ship a base separately. At worst, it should produce some commercially useful technology; these things generally do. At best, it could open the Moon and Mars to humanity.

Now, the US is currently pouring billions and billions of dollars into infrastructure projects under the stimulus plans. These are useful projects, no doubt about it, but might it not make sense to build a few fewer roads, and instead put the money saved towards finishing this amazing project on time, for 2020?

I've no idea how the American people would react to such an idea. I suspect, by and large, not terribly favourably. It's a strange world where no-one bats an eyelid at the many billions spent on developing fighter jets and AEGIS missile cruisers for use against those highly imaginary enemies of the US who presumably have such things of their own, but would have a fit if a fraction of that was spent opening up the moon.

Weird BBC article illustration

A burkini is apparently a burka-like bikini, and a French swimming pool has banned them! Here is the photo from the article.

Yes, it is a photograph of a man using a laptop to view a website which has photos of burkinis. Layers! My theory is this. A burkini is apparently not a common item. Thus, possibly, there may have been no photos which the BBC could license in time for its important article. But BBC articles must have a photo! They have a special image for breaking news which usually goes away after a few minutes, replaced with an appropriate image. Now, there are photos on that website, which is selling the things, but using them would be clearly copyright infringement. A screenshot of the website... Hmm, might be copyright infringement. But take a photo of a person viewing the website... The icky copyright has dissolved away, in a sea of Macbooks and turtlenecks!

The amazing thing is that they clearly actually took a photo of someone looking at it; it's highly unlikely that they have stock photography of someone looking at the burkini website.

Bonus; the mayor of the town with the swimming pool says that the ban is okay because burkinis aren't mentioned in the Koran. I submit that that's simply because Mohammed didn't have the materials technology required.

And now, from the land of the free (apart from suspicious-looking brown people, naturally) comes the Great American Healthcare debate! If you haven't been paying attention, Obama wants to bring in a limited form of free health care. Or, if you believe the Moose Queen, death panels! Public death panels, that is; the private ones at the insurance companies are good enough for Sarah and should be good enough for you. The BBC's take:

Oooh, there is going to be trouble! Liberal bias at the BBC! 'Conservatives', here, does not refer to the beloved wacky Tory party, but to American far-right loons. But I have no doubts that there will be complaints. There's a fuss at the moment because someone said that if noted English person Stephen Hawking had lived in COMMUNIST ENGLAND, a death panel would have had him killed, or something.

A defence of the idiot who wrote this:

"The point the IBD writer was trying to make would have at least been theoretically plausible if, as the writer believed, Hawking was not British," Mr Zengerle wrote.

That's right! It is unfair to call the writer a lying propagandist; he is simply an incompetent propagandist. If he had only picked a non-English person for the English to kill, then stupid people might not have been fooled. As it is, even idiots know he's just a slimy propagandist liar! Those same idiots who think that Obama is from Kenya, or that Hawaii is not a state, or that Saddam blew up the World Trade Center, or that Bush is articulate, or whatever old crap! Even they, or at least most of them, will find this stupid argument offputting!

Unusual item on Seinfeld

Note the kitty oven glove.

This sort of thing actually seems to be common; I think I've mentioned it before, but in an old episode of Will and Grace there was a giant cushion shaped like a green olive with one of those red thingies in it. That oven glove is particularly mad, though. Presumably there is someone whose job involves finding and placing improbable items in the fake apartments used for those sitcoms which are based almost entirely in apartments in New York. That's about three quarters of all sitcomes.

Alarm-related lunacy

Last week, we had a late-night powercut. The whole street, causing fire alarms, including our own, to go off, for fire alarms do not like to be deprived of life-giving electricity. The ringing of the bells subsided after a while, but it has been beeping disconsolately to itself ever since.

And then, this morning, well...

What does the note say? The note is signed by the resident of another apartment.

I'm a little bemused. The poor little thing has been brutalised, presumably by the author of the note. It isn't as if it actually went off; I would have noticed. Presumably they just got tired of its beeping and decided that the best solution was to forcibly wrench the front cover half-way off, which has done nothing; it still beeps, though a few extra warning lights have lit up.

So, if I suddenly vanish and stop posting in the next couple of weeks, it is probably because I have burned to death due to idiot neighbor trying to kill the horrible beeping device. Fun!

Evil, naughty old NTL

NTL's DNS servers are acting up. Only days after Eircom's did! And O2's 3G was having some trouble on Saturday when I was trying to use it in the train station, though I think that was just congestion, as it was fine once the train was underway. Which large Irish ISP will be next?!

Also, goodness, EDGE is slow in this building; normally I'm on wireless when I'm at home, but the O2 signal is marginal; there's not only no 3G, but there's barely EDGE.