entirely safe and fun

29 Oct ‘08, 8.01am PDT PST: by ccreitz

My XBox goes RROD the day before On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 2 drops. It only figures. le sigh

Vote Actual Lamprey — why settle for a metaphor! Image from wp marked PD.

The good news: loathsome pork-barrel parasite Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) was (finally) convicted of making false financial statements. He faces up to 35 years in prison, five years for each of seven counts.

The bad news: he will almost certainly not serve a day. He even gets to keep his pension! We may be quite certain that on the outside chance that he is sentenced to prison, he will not be treated as a member of the general population, searched intimately after each visit from his family, subject to the punishing depersonalization that prisons do and ought to impose on their inmates. Stevens was not completely wrong to believe that his seniority in the Senate — put plainly, his persistent, lamprey-like rasping and sucking grip on taxpayer wallets — would immunize him from the full force of the law. His status as a legislator, even as a convicted felon senator, may be counted on to overawe the human agents of the law.

Topping all previous displays of hubris, Senator Stevens did not make plans to suspend or redirect his re-election campaign in case he was convicted. In fact, he has announced that he will continue to run for the Senate despite the fact that, after his felony conviction, he can no longer vote for himself. Quoth the AP:

Despite being a convicted felon, he is not required to drop out of the race or resign from the Senate. If he wins re-election, he can continue to hold his seat because there is no rule barring felons from serving in Congress. The Senate could vote to expel him on a two-thirds vote.

“Put this down: That will never happen — ever, OK?” Stevens said in the weeks leading up to his trial. “I am not stepping down. I’m going to run through, and I’m going to win this election.”

He is depressingly likely to be right. So remember to do your part and Vote Freshman on 4 November. No matter how much you think you like your incumbents, the consequences of serial incumbency are so dire that you can’t afford to send them back to Washington. It’s best to blindly pull any lever that doesn’t have that fatal “(I)” next to it.

Oh, and when we get around to amending the Constitution to add term limits for Congressional representatives, can we please maybe add something that bars convicted felons from serving, especially if the felony in question is committed in office? It just seems like a good idea. Actually, I thought of an even better reason why convicted felons should be allowed to serve. Never mind.

Update again, 30 October: Turns out Senator Stevens will, by some tortuous legal reasoning, probably be allowed to vote.

18 Oct ‘08, 12.49pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Half Moon Bay

17 Oct ‘08, 6.43pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

In its larval form. Shallots, garlic, eggplants, tomatoes, chanterelles, zucchini, peppers, thyme, parsley, tarragon, oregano, and some weird French organic wine. So tasty!

“NO SOONER DO YOU DEFEAT THE TROLL THAN AN UMBER HULK APPEARS! ROLL INITIATIVE!” Photo courtesy Douglas S. Smith, found on wp

Surely it has happened to you: you’re out somewhere and need a random number, or a whole bunch of them. For me, this mostly happens at restaurants, when I would like to consult an Infallible Oracle as to which of N tasty possibilities is right for me on a given day. But maybe you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons in free-fall (this makes conventional dice less than useful). Perhaps you have found yourself diceless and kidnapped by a capricious yet mathematically sophisticated evil overlord, who will not free you until you have completed a Monte Carlo simulation by hand. I would like to help you, and if you’re that last guy I mentioned, buy you a drink.

Text “dice somestuff” to 41411, where somestuff is either a number or a D&D-style specification of how many dice to roll, and how many sides each die has. If you say just one number, you’ll get a reply with a random number between 1 and your number, inclusive, so sending “dice 6″ is like rolling a single, ordinary six-sided die; “dice 3″ will help you decide among the apple-glazed pork chop, the mahi-mahi on pan-fried noodles, and the five-spice steak. To use a D&D-style dice specification, put a “d” between the number of dice and the number of sides, so you would say “dice 3d10″ to get three random numbers between 1 and 10 (”three ten-sided dice”), or “dice 3d6″ to roll up your character’s stats old-school in that aforementioned free-fall role-playing scenario.

The way this was done is fairly cool, by the way: I used the free, ad-supported web service TextMarks to handle all the SMS-gateway logic, and then threw together a simple cgi script to handle the dice-rolling logic. Setting aside the time I spent figuring out that my newly-installed FTP client was set up wrong and mangling my script, the whole exercise took less than half an hour, which is nothing short of amazing - TextMarks 41411 is a marvel of simplicity.

16 Sep ‘08, 7.48pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

This one may also be worn as a stylish kepi, such as are sported by the French Foreign Legion.

12 Jul ‘08, 5.03am PDT PST: by ccreitz

At the (Irwin, PA) Big Mac Museum, which bills itself as the world’s most tasteful museum. The competition is the Silver Museum at the Pitti Palace, q.v.

12 Jul ‘08, 5.03am PDT PST: by ccreitz

Part of what makes the Big Mac Museum, which bills itself as the world’s most tasteful… well, so tasteful. Crystal Big Mac, crystal fries, crystal Coke. It is positively baroque!

4 Jul ‘08, 6.54pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Better shot?