KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON

In this, the last weekend before the election, I am headed to Vegas to see some friends of mine get married. Everybody be good to each other; I'll be away from the internet until Monday. Keep it together for me until I return.

BECAUSE I'M WEIRD

I have some friends with pretty excellent business cards; one of them's got a line on it that just says "all-around great guy." I've always thought that was outstanding, but for some reason I feel like I want one that says "history's greatest monster" instead. I'm not sure why I think that's hilarious. The main reason I haven't done it is that I'm pretty certain I'm the only one who would.

I'M A BLACK BELT IN SPECULATION

Every time I look at YouTube comments, or the comments on high-traffic blogs, or even on news articles, my brain generates a hypothesis. Sometimes several. I don't know which one of these is true. Many of them might be true simultaneously. Help me out here.

1. For some reason, there are way more idiots now than there were X years ago, where X is a number between 20 and 50.

OR

2. The ratio of idiots:normal people is actually unchanged.

HOWEVER:

2a. Idiots use the internet more.

2b. Idiots like to comment on YouTube, blogs, and news stories more than normal people.

2c. Normal people don't comment on YouTube, blogs, and news stories very often for some reason.

God dammit, what if all of these things are true except for premise #2?

Then again, I don't know what it says about us if it turns out premise #2 is actually the correct one. Because that would expose a fundamental truth about our species, which is that the idiot:normal person ratio is something like 300:1. By my offhand calculations.

SEE IF YOU CAN FOLLOW ALONG

My blog makes more sense if you're me, I guess. Here's a timeline for you.

- Sometime in the past, a group of college Republicans makes Life in the Field, a groupblog that features, among other things,
-- A Twitter feed on its right-hand sidebar that displays Twitter posts tagged with "#litf08"
-- A user by the name of Ashley Todd

- Twitter makes "#litf08" one of the "Hot Political Topics" running through its ELECTION2008 bar on top of its homepage. (Last night was when I first became aware of it)

- At roughly the same time, Ashley Todd decides to try her hand at an amazingly retarded stunt that not even Michelle Malkin believes, claiming an Obama supporter attacked her at an ATM and carved a "B" for "Barack" into her face. A "B" which, by the way, was backwards. Backwards.

- Now, today, Ashley Todd owns up to being a liar, which was pretty much patently obvious from the get-go.

- Someone has the presence of mind to take her off the Life in the Field rollcall, but Google cache forgets nothing.
-- Life in the Field guys, doesn't this mean your site is now "a group blog starring the 49 College Republican field representatives and you"? Or you could keep it at 50, they way you've done, but maybe break it down as "49 College Republican field representatives + 1 lying piece of shit, and you." This is a free suggestion I'm offering you.

- The Twitter feed on Life in the Field's homepage is now gloriously, irrevocably polluted, perhaps for all time. The Flickr feed, btw, is getting there.

- Probably by around 8pm tonight, jokes about "I give this entire scheme ... a B" will oversaturate the internet.

ONLY WORTH THE TIME TO DECRY IT

I'm not suggesting you do this, but looking on Twitter for posts tagged with the enigmatic "#litf08" is to gaze directly into the suppurating eye of madness. As near as I can tell, it's a tag being used by a group of college-age McCain/Palin supporters. Do not bother looking. Curiosity spurred by the ELECTION2008 bar at the top of the Twitter homepage compelled me, and for my trouble I got a full-on stare into the goatse of the American psyche. Something I manage to forget every four years is that there are people out there whose vote counts just as much as mine, and at the moment I'm reminded, horror grips every cell in my body. I don't care even a little bit what "litf08" stands for, and I don't want to waste the braincycles necessary to come up with a joke version.

PROCESS DOESN'T CONCERN ME

I'm a high-level thinker.

Since I put the postcards up on their new Flickr home, a few people have said they'd like to have them in box or book form. Far be it from me to deny anybody something they want, but as I thought about it, some things occurred to me:

- I cannot overemphasize the crudely-executed nature of these cards, which comes through in the scanning -- tape everywhere, and sloppy pasting of pictures over their cardboard substrate, which is almost always a cereal box whose design sometimes shows through the lighter parts of the picture. Unless that's part of the cards' charm? It might be, huh.

- There are a bunch of cards I made a long time ago that I never scanned at a decent resolution before sending away, so they'd probably reproduce terribly. I'd have to exclude anything from that set.

- I would need to actually know something about books and printing, or spend a lot of time consulting with someone who does, in order to get a postcard book off the ground. I'm assuming it would be one of those postcard books with the thick, cardstocky tear-out pages you could actually use as postcards if you were so inclined. This is not an insurmountable hurdle, but I am not a dude with a whole lot of time on his hands.

- I'd have to figure out which postcards out of the reproducible set to actually put in such a book, which would probably involve setting up an online survey of some sort. There's no point in making something permanent if it doesn't include the popular ones, but I have no idea which ones those are.

Anyway, you should know that I'm at the "thinking about it" stage and not the "definitely going to do it" stage. These are just the thoughts I'm having.

BECAUSE WE ARE COMPELLED

If for some reason curiosity moved you to take a look at the "Postcards I've Made" link on the sidebar of this nonsense blog of mine, you should check it again, because I've changed it. I have no idea what moved me to start making those things in the first place years ago, but I recently started again, and I realized that instead of having to hand-code HTML pages and make thumbnail images and update a giant-ass table and all of that nonsense, I could just make Flickr do all the heavy lifting for me. Looking at all of them, it's still unclear to me why I do them beyond the simple fact that I find them amusing. Maybe that's all there is.

NO THANKS, REALLY

Every time I check my spam folder on my Yahoo mail account (the one I basically only use when I need to register for a website to buy something or whatnot), I seem to have a pile of messages from "Michael Vincent" and just plain "Human Resources," who both want to let me know I'm hired. I'm hired! They found me a new job! How about that. Spam, you must give up. Give up now!

KEEP DIGGING THAT HOLE

What prevents every political pundit in this country from just throwing their hands up in the air and yelling "You are fucking kidding me with this bullshit" until some guys come to drag them away? To say nothing of the PR people who actually work for a campaign. Are they missing some vital chunk of brain tissue?

McCain campaign people: just own up to it. Your rallies look and sound like the fucking Klan organizes them. Yeah, yeah, we all saw this. Too little, too late. Your guy should've had the stones to say something when this ugly nonsense started getting shouted out. But I'm actually kind of glad he didn't, because it just makes him look worse day by day. John Lewis is right about your organization's tone.

McCain defended his audiences, saying most who attend the rallies are "good and decent and patriotic Americans."

"To somehow intimate that the overwhelming majority of those people, with rare exception, are somehow not good Americans or are motivated by anything but the most patriotic motives is insulting and I won't accept that insult," he said.

Really, dude? Have you seen the videos? I'm not coming within a hundred yards of these gene disasters you want to call "good and decent" without a self-contained suit of fusion-powered titanium battle armor.

VOTING WITH PANACHE

Here are some things I have to say.

- I want to send a dollar to the guy who managed to get things organized such that Proposition R actually made it onto the ballot here in San Francisco. For those of you not in town, this is the one that would rename our sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush. I wish there was a way to not just vote "Yes," but more like "Hell yes."

- I also wish there was a way to vote "Fuck this, and fuck you" on Prop 8, such that it would also cause birds with terrible diseases to shit on the heads of whoever signed the petition that got this piece of trash on the ballot. You're wasting state time and money on this bullshit? Die in a fire.

- This amuses me. Although I have to say "Troopergate" sounds more like something you'd hear in relation to a Star Wars fan convention.

NEXT WEDNESDAY

You have somewhere to be next Wednesday, and that is at my band's show. The Rickshaw Stop has put together a fucking smokin'-ass bill and this should not be missed by anyone. This means you! This is a venue easily reached via public transportation, suckers.

Wednesday 10/15
The Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell St
8pm

Brookhaven
The Definite Articles
The Dead Science

You may be assured this is worth ten bucks.

EXCELLENCE QUOTIENT RISING

Some funny motherfuckers are working to make our interactions with the internet more awesome. Mail Goggles for Gmail are great, but have you also looked at YouTube lately?*

Hint: did you read this xkcd strip?

This thing actually works. And you can make it say the most ridiculous shit imaginable. Not being a software engineer, I can only assume that it either generates these things on the fly based on phonetics, or it has an unimaginably vast library and supernatural search capabilities (response time is very fast). It knows how to pronounce "Darkseid." I don't know what else you want.

* Yes, I know they're owned by the same people. This is probably not a coincidence.

ENDLESS POLITICAL DEBATE RASHOMON

Although I enjoy seeing the specific reactions of my friends on Twitter to the presidential debates, I'm pretty sure it's damn near useless to try going to the larger world for a general read on how the candidates did. Sources on both sides will claim unequivocal victory for their dude of choice, creating a featureless gray no-space of opinion where nobody can truly know what occurred.

Here, for instance, is what I think happened. Does this align at all with your perception of reality:

For at least the first hour, Obama's words kicked McCain's words in the face and then stomped on their genitals. McCain kind of -- kind of -- got his rhetorical game back in the last 15 minutes, by which point it was (thankfully) too late.

I watched it on CNN and seemed to observe the +/- squiggle line of undecided Ohio voter opinion skew decidedly in Obama's favor. I found myself missing the six pundit scores on the sides a little, though, if only to see what resident space alien "Rollins" would have made of the whole thing. But only a little.

SECRET MISSION

I don't know if the man is trying to keep this a secret from you or whatever, but Target somehow got a license to use NHK TV mascot Domo-kun in their Halloween marketing, and shit be crazy over there. Here's the thing, though: there's a giant stuffed version of the dude hanging from the ceiling that apparently isn't for sale. Does anyone know a manager at a Target who can be bribed. Let's get this going.

WAY PAST TIME

Weather reports for today and tomorrow indicate rain. Seriously! Rain! We really need some, so I'm looking forward to it, but I also had something to do outdoors tomorrow, so I hope it doesn't happen until later. It probably seems weird for someone to be eager for rain, but I honestly can't really remember the last time it rained here with any clarity. That's how long it's been, and that's fucked up.

SKY, COLOR, ETC

Watching the VP debate tonight on CNN, I got exposed to a lot of utterly useless extraneous information -- like the scores being slotted in real time by six ... pundits, I guess? ... on either side of the actual debate screen.* Who in the name of gibbering fuck is the "Rollins" person who gave Palin such a ridiculously high score? Did you see that shit? What the fuck color is the sky in this person's world? Is this a question whose answer I really want to know?

* For your consideration: an informal poll amongst friends confirms that political pundits are the lowest form of life, a step below even "impression" comedians and sports commentators.

I AM THE DEADLINE MASTER

I didn't say anything about it here last night, but I updated the Dogblog last night a scant three hours before it became October. This may or may not be the closest I've ever shaved a self-imposed deadline. Next month's will be earlier, because I already know I'm not going to be in town for the 31st. This is the life I lead.