A few weeks ago, I posted this image and wondered if it was pro- or anti-Obama. Well, the guy has a new sign in the back window of his Honda CRV, and I’m guessing he’s anti-Obama.

He’s also a fucking retard.

He’s not a retard for his opinion. He’s not a retard for choosing to support McCain. He is, however, a retard for sticking a gigantic sign in the rear of his car which is almost certainly impairing his ability to use his rear-view mirror, and hence is endangering the safety of everyone on the road with him. Maybe his next sign will read: “IF OBAMA HADN’T RUN I WOULDN’T HAVE HAD TO HAVE A GIANT RETARDED SIGN IN MY REAR WINDOW AND WOULDN’T HAVE BACKED OVER A LADY AT THE SUPERMARKET YESTERDAY. SORRY.”

As in … you can use it to “see through” things. No, really.

Peeling tape from a roll of Scotch releases tiny bursts of X-rays that are powerful enough to take images of bones in fingers and hands, researchers have found.

The unusual discovery was made by a team at the University of California in Los Angeles. They were intrigued after hearing that Soviet scientists in the 1950s found that sticky tape, when separated at the right speed, released pulses in the X-ray part of the energy spectrum.

Reporting in the British-based science journal Nature, the investigators used a motorised peeling machine to unwind a standard roll (25.4m by 19 mm) of Photo Safe 3M Scotch tape at a speed of three centimetres a second.

By placing the machine in a vacuum, they were able to measure X-rays that were strong enough to take images.

“We didn’t believe it. We really didn’t think it could be true,” co-author Carlos Camara said.

“We took some pictures of our hands to see the bones and prove that it was possible. We have a whole collection (of pictures)… it is absolutely remarkable.”

Cool!

Fuckin’ awesome.

(Found on Facebook with no attribution … so ….)

(Well, okay, it was actually e-mailed to me — and reprinted with permission, too:)

I was playing Fable 2, and saved enough money to either buy up the gypsy town or a 5 star blacksmith’s shop. My roommates were watching me play, and for the choice of slum lord versus businessman, one said “Besides necromancy, slumlord is my other automatic go to. Best part, you can work them to death, then raise their corpses to work for free!”

BLOG NOTE (11/3):

For some reason, my blog is not updating itself properly. I’ve written about a dozen posts since this one, they’re showing up on aggregator feeds, but not on the blog itself. Don’t know why, I think it isn’t updating itself.

Click here for the remainder of my October posts, and here for my November.

Good timing, too: the book club at The Office Job has chosen Watchmen as our next reading selection. This is the text of the notification e-mail the group’s organizer sent out:

Guy Fawkes Day Memorial Book Club Selection!

The next book we will be reading is Watchmen, by Alan Moore. It’s a graphic novel about superheroes, the Cold War, moral responsibility, and the end of the world, and is widely regarded as one of the classics of the genre. They’re also about to make it into a movie, so it is widely available from bookstores, libraries, and of course the faithful internet. The next meeting is at noon on the fifth of November. Hope to see you there!

I suppose it would make more sense to read V for Vendetta on Guy Fawkes Day … but, hey, nobody’s perfect.

This is an extremely awful story:

According to WTAE’s news exchange partners the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Ashley Todd, of College Station, Texas, was using an ATM at Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street in Bloomfield just before 9 p.m. on Wednesday when a man approached her and put a knife to her throat.

Police spokeswoman Diane Richard said the robber took $60 from Todd, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim’s car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter “B” into her face, Richard said.

But I don’t get how Instapundit can equate it to this. Perhaps Reynolds believes that Barack Obama was standing on the side of the street, urging the mugger on: “Hey, c’mon man, she’s a white chick trying to keep a brother down! Give her a carve we can believe in!” (Somewhat surprisingly Michelle Malkin doesn’t think the story is true.)

Back to Ashley: assuming her story is true (because I’m all for giving the benefit of the doubt), I hope they find the guy, and I hope they give him a nice long prison sentence.

Assuming Todd was mugged and made up the part about being mutilated because she was voting for McCain, I hope her mugger gets a nice long prison sentence and that she gets more than just a slap on the wrist for giving a false statement to the Police.

UPDATE: A commenter on Malkin’s post thinks he’s getting flicked off more on his DC commute because he has a “less government” bumpersticker on his car and is, thus, a McCain supporter. What he fails to understand is that he’s driving in Washington, DC, that alone accounting for the one-fingered salutes.

UPDATE II: She lied.

Ashley Todd — who has a backward letter “B” scratched into her right cheek — confessed to faking the story and will be charged with filing a false report, Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant said at a news conference Friday.

Todd, of College Station, Texas, admitted there was no robbery or attacker and said she had prior mental health problems, according to Bryant.

Well, clearly she has a mental health problem — look who she’s voting for! *rim*

You can’t go wrong with this.

If you are a trekkie that likes a beer now and again then this is a perfect gift for you. Styled on the original Enterprise (no not the NX-01, the NCC-1701), not even Kirk or Picard had a bottle opener this cool, although, Lieutenant Wharfs was pretty impressive but that’s not really what a bat’leth should be used for!

Yeah, it’s actually spelled Worf? Just so you know.

(Other Christmas ideas: an iPod — *hint*Mom & Dad*hint*).

This didn’t really both me before, but now that I’m living only a very short distance from the Big Cats at the National Zoo, that moat keeping them in is seeming to be less of a deterrent than I’d previously considered it.

I’ll never tire of posting pictures of Odin, The Swimming Tiger. (There used to be a photo on that post … but everytime WP gets upgraded my pictures don’t make it through…)

CNN wants to know if birth order determine your career. Whole article here, and my response to some of their specifics after the jump:

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I’m not voting for John McCain, but I’m not voting for him because I believe Barack Obama to be the better of the two candidates. Anyone who decides not to vote for McCain because an Al Qaeda website appears to be endorsing him should be taken out and slapped around a bit.

I’m not a big fan of pointing fingers at foreigners and saying, “Look, this is who they endorse, so we should or shouldn’t vote for this person based on their input.” I do feel it’s important to build and maintain our friendships with the world-wide community of nations, but in the end, an American election has to be about what’s right for America, and that’s what we determine by voting. Don’t let your vote be determined by terrorists.

I’m a somewhat recovering Star Trek dork. Somewhat recovering? Umm. I’ve actually got Classic Trek, TNG, DS9, and even Enterprise all on DVD. And all the movies (even Nemesis). And a diecast Enterprise. Okay, and action figures, buried somewhere in my closet. There might be a phaser somewhere too. And, on my bookshelves, if you can find them (because, seriously? I’ve got a literal shit-ton of bookshelves, most of them overflowing with, y’know, books), I’ve got William Shatner’s and George Takei’s auto-biographies (ghost written, I’m sure, although it’s been many years since I’ve actually read either one).

So, I’m a Star Trek dork, but despite the possibly misleading title, I’m not sad that I’m a Star Trek dork. It was probably the flashy effects and crazy adventures of The Next Generation which lured me in as a nine year old kid in ’87. As an adult, it’s the optimistic outlook for humanity, and the parallels to modern society that keep me hooked. Every episode of Star Trek is a morality play, okay, with Klingons and androids and spaceships instead of Shakespearean actors (well, Star Trek has those too).

Especially when I was younger, I was very interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff of Trek. Like, y’know, how Roddenberry started selling out the show in the third season to pimp his assorted product lines (which is how we got the Vulcan slogan, “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”), or how William Shatner was such a dick that most of his coworkers fucking hated him. And not just when they were filming the show, either.

There was a scene written and filmed for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Kirks tells Sulu that he’s been promoted to captain and will have his own command after they return from what turns out to be a pretty disastrous training mission. But Shatner was a dick and pretty wooden about his part in the scene, and so it was taken out of the film (Sulu eventually got his promotion — four movies later).

Given that Takei had a fairly large bit in the Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner a couple of years ago, I sort of figured that they’d patched things up.

So this article makes me sad.

In a video posted on Shatner’s Web site Wednesday, he lashed out at Takei for not inviting him to his wedding last month. The 77-year-old Kirk said Takei, who played Enterprise helmsman Sulu, apparently harbors a grudge against him that kept him from being invited to Takei’s nuptials.

“The whole thing makes me feel badly,” Shatner said in the video. “Poor man. There is such a sickness there. It’s so patently obvious that there is a psychosis there. I don’t know what his original thing about me was. I have no idea.”

“It is unfortunate that Bill was unable to join us for our wedding as he indeed was invited to attend,” Takei responded.

Because Star Trek is, essentially, exactly what Martin Lawrence meant when he lamented, “Can’t we just get along?” Regardless of skin color or national (well, planetary) origin, regardless of whether you’ve got pointy ears or a bumpy forehead or mottled blue skin, getting along if you’re a bloodthirty warrior or a sentient rock: you’d think Bill Shatner could be a bit more gracious to his former co-star (or maybe Shatner’s just laying it on thick and the article writer had the wrong impression of the bit).

My own thoughts on the specific cause of this new rift is that invitation probably got lost in the mail. It has, in fact, been known to happen.

To a point, I think this whole up-cry about ACORN is a little silly: there’s a difference between voter registration fraud, and voter fraud. Which is to say that it’s a lot easier to register fraudulent people to vote than to actually get said fraudulent people to cast a vote. That said, I think this whole scandal is ACORN’s fault. This article on CNN.com caught my eye.

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The batshit crazies:

Two days ago, I listened to a 9-6-08 message by Bree Keyton, a young woman evangelist who had just traveled to Kenya and visited Obama’s home village and what she found out about his relations with his tribal people was chilling. And his “cousin” Odinga was dreadful. She said the witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected…

News flash: the biggest curse McCain has to worry about is his choice of running mate. Mmm-hmm.

HT: RTftLC.

I’m not the most productive worker at work. I won’t deny it: sometimes, yes, I am trying to keep the information desk from floating away. I do scan the backs of titles I find interesting. I’m not always the first person to respond, “On my way up!” when people page for assistance to the registers. Still, when it comes to customer service? You’re in very good hands with me. “Above and beyond”, that’s my motto. I mean, I’m not going to run ten blocks to our sister store to find you a copy of the book that we’re sold out of, but I will give them a call and see if they can hold it for you.

Tonight, a customer was looking for the three-disc Hulk DVD release. Regular DVD, not Blu Ray. The computer said we had some, but it doesn’t update for a few days — I couldn’t find any on the shelves, and having checked the section, and every end cap, I apologized and told him he was out of luck. A few minutes after he left, I was straightening DVDs on the front-of-music display when I found a copy tucked behind another movie. I wasn’t about to go running around the store looking for this guy — well, I would’ve — but I did a store-wide page, and a minute later he came back downstairs and shook my hand.

Last night, we had an author signing. A customer had a book personalized and signed, then left it on hold overnight. She returned this evening to purchase it, but the book had inadvertently been pulled by the morning crew and re-shelved. I went through every copy on the shelves, looking for a personalized sticker, and I didn’t find it. I went to the information desk, and went through the re-shelve cart looking for it, but didn’t find it. I was telling her that I was sorry, someone else must’ve bought it, when I had an idea, and dashed downstairs, where I found it on the stickerless shelf in the back (which involves a long story — stickers? What? Yes, unless they’ve just come in for an author event in which case “Maybe not”).

Unfortunately, there are customers with whom there is quite simply no pleasing. There are customers who walk into the store and I wish I’d thought to call out. These customers make me want to, alternately, throw myself in front of a speeding Metro train, or bash their skulls in with large blunt objects. There are a few customers who, on sight of, I will do everything in my power to avoid. As in, I’d contemplate throwing myself head first down the elevator shaft if it was only chance of escape. The customer that this anecdote revolves around is one who I fucking loathe. Not hate. Loathe.

I remember the first time I had a problem with her. Up to this point, I thought she was just you average, old lady. Then, as I checked her out, I made the mistake of asking her if she wanted one of the Bookstore’s Frequent Shopper cards. She did not say “No.” She did not say “No, Thank You.” She screamed. Top of her lungs. From nice old harmless lady to holy-shit-this-old-bat-is-batshit-insane: ranting and wailing about lists, and charts, and tracking, and blah-blah-blah, and how dare Bookstore expect to track her in such a way? (Fun fact: she paid with a credit card.)

From that moment on, I’ve tried my best to stay out of her way. Usually, I’m successful. She’s in the store a couple of times a week. I’ve had three bad encounters with her: the first was the one mentioned above. On the second encounter, she was leaving the store when I was the only person working the register. She came through, I didn’t offer her a card, and I rang her up for several DVDs and CDs. There’s a black box on the floor by each register which, when stepped on, activates the giant magnet thingy under the counter which de-activates the security chiklets. Apparently, I missed one, because not fifteen seconds after I thanked her for shopping, and she thanked me for ringing her up, the gates at the front of the store went off and she stormed into the register queue screaming at me for all but accusing her of being a thief. I tried apologizing, but she stormed right back out of the store, cussing me out the whole time.

So flash forward to Monday night. I’m doing recovery on the bottom floor, and she’s being assisted in the movie department. She’s looking for a box set that isn’t going to be released until the next day (the only one of said box set that we show we’re going to get, also). The smart thing to do would have been to let the employee helping her out — still somewhat new — explain to her that she’d just have to call first thing and see if it was on the shelf, and then we could hold it for her. But no. I couldn’t let him do that, because even though I know she’s a fucking spoiled bitch who flips out when she doesn’t get exactly what she wants when she wants it, I figured I’d try to provide some great customer service. What did I do? I told her I’d go look in the back, and see if I could find the set in the back. I told her I’d be a minute, took a reserve slip, and did, indeed, find a copy of the set in the backroom. I stuck the reserve slip on the box, trusted that the overnight crew would put it on the back counter behind the registers, and informed Moody McBitch that she could pick it up anytime the next day.

Too bad for me, Moody McBitch came in at 4 on Tuesday, which was also when I came on the clock. Nightcrew left the box set in the back. Moody McBitch got in a screaming fit with whoever was at the register, then came down to the Music Information desk, where I was working, demanded to know if I was the person who’d helped her the previous night (I should’ve said “No, sorry, I wasn’t working”, but I said “Yes!”), then screamed and bitched me out. Meanwhile, a manager had gone into the backroom, located the box set, and taken it up to the registers. I informed Moody McBitch about this, and you think, you might think, you might think (and you’d be totally fucking wrong) that she might say, “Oh, great!” That she might’ve been like the guy looking for the three-disc DVD who extended his hand and shook mine, thanking me for my help. Could’ve been like the gal who got her personalized book back and jumped up saying “Great! Thank you!” Nope. Instead, Moody McBitch bitched me out, because now Moody had to waddle her fat retarded cunt ass back into the elevator and make the trip back up to the fucking registers. And why? Because she’s Moody McBitch, that’s why.

I fucking hate her.

The next time she wants me to help her find something, I’m going to pretend that the only language I speak is Klingon. And then I’m going to stick a bat’leth into her fucking skull.

As a fan of Battlestar Galactica, it’s nice to see the really awesome representations of the show’s iconic Viper Mark II fighters showing up on Brickshelf recently. What really caught my eye was a diorama, a collaborative work among many AFOLs:

Peruse the entire gallery, here. While the individual builders certainly took liberty with the color schemes of all of those Vipers, I was excited to see the short-lived Blackbird represented … and those Raptors are beautiful. I’d love to see detailed photos of them. In the meanwhile, and in traditional livery, here’s what looks to me to be a Viper constructed in a very very very similar manner to those featured above:

More here.