04/28/05: American Idol "Controversy": This is for all folks out there who are bawling over the fact their presumably grungy-yet-cute and in their minds probably daydreaming "I hope he has wings on his back if he takes his shirt off because I think he's an angel oh I want to boff him" Grecian adonis named Constantine Maroulis that got the boot on American Idol last night. The simple truth is, he's not that good as a recording artist (I've done some studio engineering of vocals, I know what I'm talking about). He is a good stage performer. In the studio, however, I would have to break out the vocal pitch-correction programs Autotune or PitchDoctor on a daily basis. There are really only two vocalists in the competition that I'd have an easy time dealing when on the audio workstation: Bo Bice and Carrie Underwood. They can sing accurately in a live situation--which is a very difficult thing to do. Bo and Carrie both have good recording voices, and both will go far when singing careers. I would buy Bo's albums now--he is that professional already. Carrie just needs a bit of studio time to learn the process.
So many lemmings are bashing Scott Savol as some undeserving white trash git when in fact he has a singing voice that would be much easier to work with in the recording studio as opposed to, say, Constatine's. Savol reminds me of David Crosby, who is/was not a great live singer but in the studio he had the magic. Constantine is better seen live. In fact, Constantine getting off AI is really a blessing for him as it frees up valuable time for him to get a much more lucrative contract that what AI is offering. Constantine and his band need to tour to ensure success, and that success is just waiting for the tour to start. He'll make it, folks, he's fine. He doesn't *need* AI. Bo doesn't, either. He's done enough band gigs and studio recording to the point he just needs to get his CDs on the market. Carrie, Anthony, Vonzell and yes--even Scott--need some training, but all of them will get a billboard hit.
So lighten up, people, the pouty angelboy getting ousted is a good thing for his career...really!
09/16/04: Attention Ben & Jerry's ice cream company: STOP putting fudge chunks in every god-damned flavor! When the oatmeal-cinnamon flavor was introduced, it had no fudge chunks and was awesome. Now the standard issue oatmeal-cinnamon has been ruined by the ubiqitous chunks. Consider letting other components of a flavor do their job, without chunkifying the universe.
08/28/04: The only problem with the internet these days is that stupid people can still get access to it.
08/02/04: Another guest rant that explores once again how dopey the democratic party and their scary, er, Kerry candidate are:
What I thought was strange was that his [democratic national] convention speech was billed as his "introduction to the American people." Hello-ooo! The one thing everyone in the country knew about Kerry was that he fought in Vietnam! What about the 30-plus years since then? Dick Morris nailed it in his post-speech newspaper column: "Kerry's biography ends at 24."
By the way -- I can't let this slide -- one amazingly irresponsible quote from Kerry's speech:
"Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response."
What this means is that he will respond AFTER we are attacked! The reason we are in Iraq now is because we couldn't afford to wait until Saddam's weapons programs reached fruition, that is, till he actually made a nuclear weapon -- and he was trying, all right.
The Democrats still don't understand this war. They think it's all about getting even for 9/11. No. It's about killing Islamic fascists before they kill us.
Taliban control in Afghanistan showed the world what a fundamentalist Islamic government looks like: girls not allowed to be educated; women not allowed out of the house (even having a job was out of the question) without being accompanied by a male relative, and even then having to be covered up in a burqa. I'm not sure whether they required clitoral circumcision or not, but it is practiced in other Islamofascist countries, such as Somalia. Stoning as a legal penalty for adultery. Quasi-legal "honor killings" for female relatives "guilty" of consensual sexual behavior, and even for victims of rape. And WE are the "Great Satan"?
Of course, then there are Bill and Hillary. You can't put politics aside with these two. Here's why:
1. Activist Democrats are leftists.
2. Outwardly leftist candidates cannot (yet) win national or even statewide elections; they have to throw in a lot of phony conservatism in their campaigns in order to appear politically mainstream.
3. Bill and Hillary are successful in hiding their leftist policy leanings from the undecided voters in the middle, the people who swing the outcome of elections.
4. That plus their ability to say what people want to hear (the "I feel your pain" nonsense) means they win elections. And your agenda can't be implemented if your people don't win elections.
Of course, once in office, they temper their leftism when they have to to remain politically viable. For example: Bill Clinton vetoed welfare reform TWICE -- until the re-election campaign came up; then, upon its THIRD PASSAGE by Congress, he signed it. He must have thought that always vetoing it would damage his re-election chances. And that's why you don't hear Hillary criticizing the war -- she represents New York, which was the enemy's target in this stage of the war, so she has to stay "tough" on terrorism.
On the other hand, they still make mistakes. Bill's success in getting left-wing policies passed (the "assault weapons" ban and tax increases) and Hillary's miscalculation on her proposed government takeover of health care helped lead to the end of Democratic rule in Congress, which they had held in the House since the 1950s.
Converting America into a socialist state is a sneaky business. Leftists can't come right and say what their real intentions are because mostly they will lose. They nibble around the edges -- court decisions that create "rights" that never existed, such as abortion and the Miranda warning; court decisions that grant power to the government that the Constitution forbids, such as expanding the definition of "interstate commerce" to include mandating the size of your toilet tank -- they nibble until the culture changes to the point where a lunatic like Al Gore can win the popular vote and a fascist like John Kerry can appear to be leading at this point in the race.
Rob
10/26/03: STOP USING BLUE LEDS. They are now CLICHE'. They were cool on a circa 1998 Playstation 2. They have not been cool for years. RGB LEDs *are* cool, however. Do something with those instead.
07/04/03: A Special July 4th rant ("art" theft)
07/03/03: ATTENTION ANGSTY TEENS WHO USE LIVEJOURNAL.COM
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your angsty, woe-begotten life is not secretly being filmed by Kevin Smith, so stop writing as if anyone gives a rat's ass about the day-to-day minutae of your non-descript lives.
06/26/03: a guest rant by a friend for all those left-wing rat-fuckers who think Bush should be tried for (I just love this one) 'war crimes':
(Note: written in March 2003 just as the Gulf war part 2 got underway)
I'm tired of people mixing up the issues at hand Those that hate Bush still hate Bush. That's fine. Hate as you want But is that why they are protesting this war action - because Bush ordered it? What would Clinton or Gore have done in the last two years differently? Would anything the Democrats had done stopped those two planes from hitting the WTC? Would Clinton's or Gore's diplomacy have disarmed Saddam?
I don't see how anyone in the US could be against disarming a terrorist nation who just three days ago had it's leader, Saddam Hussein, say that the American soldiers "wives and children are not safe no matter where they hide." You want proof of state sponsored terrorism? How's that quote for measure?
"No blood for oil" is just a "hip" translation of "I hate anything George Bush does." If Gore was president and he had ordered this action - and he would have as this is not a Republican action, but an American - would they all be cheering the USA on?
For gawd's sake, they had to dig as deep as Sean Penn, Elizabeth Taylor and Jeannine Garafalo to find hardcore Hollywood dissenters. Barbara Streisand hasn't even spoken up.
Furthermore, when has the world NOT bitched about the United States about everything? Just because we finally are spending our time, effort, and money on our OWN national security as opposed to some other schlub nation, they've all got some problem with it. What's wrong with protecting AMERICANS for once?
My friend Chris is a card carrying liberal with major anti-war views. I've been hearing it left and right for days now ad nauseum. He quotes from left wing websites, Michael Moore books and has been trying to equate this to Nazi Germany which obviously pissed me off and I told him so. When it came down to it, he said that he was "deeply wounded by the travesty in Florida" meaning the election stuff with Gore and Jeb Bush.
When questioned about if that was his reasoning, he immediately deferred me to more pink tinged websites bolstering his point - which I, of course, never read. He also was telling me about the "world's majority" of citizens that are against this war.
I replied, "of course they are. It just means less cash the US can spend on them. I'd bitch, too. They're watching their meal ticket being spent on someone else." Of course, I also threw in, "good thing that for once, we aren't taking any stock in world opinion on this matter. It's about keeping our own kids safely asleep in their own beds. If it was up to world opinion, the city of Chicago would have to have been nerve gassed with hundreds of thousands dead and even then, there would have to be a UN vote to see if a US reaction would be warrented. Even then, there would be dissenting nations as there always are. Just like now."
It's a moot argument at this point anyway. No nation is going to jump in on Iraq's side; not even from the Middle East. We go in, punk the bastards, disable the terrorist networks from the inside and that's that. Let the world bitch like a castrated puppy. What are they going to do about it now? Take a vote? It's our time, our money and our lives at stake.
Let's just be clear about this.
K
06/17/03: so-called "software engineers". If you went to a college of engineering, got an engineering degree, and you write software, OK--I'll let you call yourself a software engineer. If, however, you are some computer science graduate DO NOT call yourself a software engineer. Engineering is a first and foremost a design field, and, clever as one may be prior to university, there are some things that engineers learn *only* in engineering school. Mostly it is all the rat-crappy paperwork that prolifierates around a design, but at the fundamental level engineering and programming are not the same thing. If you write software and are not a engineering graduate, you're a programmer. There is nothing wrong with such a title, use it with pride! Just don't go around diluting the term 'engineer' if you're not an engineer. (And don't flame email at me, it just gets deleted unread. Really.)
05/10/03: this '2ch' crap. ATTENTION JAPANESE SLACKERS: Stop making these stupid stupid STUPID '2ch' flash animations that feature Fidonet-era ASCII cartoon characters that overuse the inverted 'A' and that really annoying Cyrillic 'De' symbol for a cat's open mouth. It's god-damned irritating. STOP IT.
07/31/02: one of my great pet peeves is the misuse of the word "copyright". Folks, attention please: the past-tense verb form of copyright is NOT 'copywritten'. This is a ridiculous bastardization of the term used by those with nary a clue. The correct form is copyrighted. You see, the term copyright refers to the rights of ownership of the individual or group involved in the creation of media content (document, film, recording, etc.) It has nothing to do with the act of writing itself.
Copyrighted, folks. Copyrighted.