If you had told me a year ago that the above headline would make any sense at all…

TechBirmingham’s Ecycling Day March 21@ Vulcan Park

Please join us for TechBirmingham’s Ecycling Day at the Clover Crawl on Saturday, March 21, 2009 from 10 AM to 4 PM in the lower parking lot of Vulcan Park.  Technical Knock Out will be on had to assist TechBirmingham with accepting all old electronics except for television sets.

Technical Knock Out will destroy hard drives of donated devices for you. Also, I’m volunteering. So don’t act like you ain’t curious.

Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. If he supports…denying [same sex partner] benefits to the San Francisco court employees, he risks agitating liberal groups that helped him win election. If he supports the judges and challenges the marriage act, he risks alienating Republicans with whom he is seeking to work on economic, health care and numerous other matters.

Risks alienating them? Roll the fucking dice, Barry. What’ll really happen? Hayseeds everywhere will think you’re a gay Islamic terrorist alien Socialist abortionist? Whip out a stack of Franklins and blow that political capital on coke and whores. Gay whores. Gay whores whose life partners deserve the same benefits ours do.

Is it lost on Obama that, owing to prejudiced laws like DOMA, his own parents wouldn’t have been allowed to marry in a third of our states until he was six years old? I don’t think it can be. I understand he’s pretty bright.

Gary L. Bauer, president of American Values, a conservative advocacy group, said that if Mr. Obama extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal workers, he would “provoke a furious grass-roots reaction, reinvigorate the conservative coalition and undermine his efforts to portray himself as a moderate on social issues.”

A “furious grass-roots reaction?” You mean like a “[S]econd American revolution” or something? Somebody call the cops (only hide the coke and gay whores first).

Fuck the bigots and fuck their votes. It’s 2009, and this is no less than a moral imperative.

“Today’s ‘poor’ are the rich Jesus warned you about: fat, slovenly, wasteful of their money and other people’s…”

– Psychotic Hellspawn Kathy Shaidle

I’m not sure any further commentary is called for here.

MSNBC: Stephen Colbert guns for space station title

I think it’s hysterical when stodgy, square, struggling-to-stay-relevant traditional* media try to cover hip, relevant things the better to appear hip and relevant.**

Anyway, this is where you go if you want to subvert what was likely a well-intentioned attempt by NASA to make the public more aware of the space program. You know, like I did.

* Since I’m sleeping with an editor, and to prove I’m not a heartless bitch: I found this column by Nancy Mitchell of the recently-shuttered Rocky Mountain Times quite poignant.

**Or when they do things like use Twitter. Or when they Twitter. Or Tweet. Or encourage you to leave a Tweet. Whathefuckever.

Dow Below 6,800; Lowest Close Since ’97

If not, tell me when it is. I’ll be cleaning out the bedroom my parents will move into.

Oh yeah. In my despondency, I almost forgot:

Your obligatory anguished trader reaction shot

They’re even better here.

Make an album cover. Do this. Do it now.

1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 – Go to Quotationspage.com and select “random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 – Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. You may need to do a screencap to get the picture.

4 – Use Photoshop, Paint, or similar to put it all together.

5 – Send or link me to sexy results.

via: Ruthless Forum’s [Stone Cold] Nerd Pen

Filmed on location in Hoover, Alabama: When did Han Solo get so old and where exactly is he taking my dry cleaner?

NYT: Crossing Over, Thorny Path of Immigration, Post 9/11

When it comes to politics and the big screen, American filmmakers tend to fall into two camps, the grossly exploitative and the earnestly instructive. On the earnestly instructive side are well-intentioned downers and uppers like “Grand Canyon”…

Stop right there. Stop right there. If this is going where I think…

…and their lower-budget equivalents, like “The Visitor” and “Frozen River,” which offer prescriptive lessons in tolerance. On the grossly exploitative are those films, like Wayne Kramer’s “Crossing Over,” that deliver their sanctimony with less hand-wringing and more fist-shaking, complete with lurid violence and, for no real narrative reason, periodically bared female flesh.

Okay okay okay. Now that I know I don’t have to watch a rehash of what was arguably the most sanctimonious cast ever assembled teaching me about the serendipity of thousands of small, wondrous connections that bring everyday people together in the So Cal wasteland, I’m still listening. Not that I’m exactly keen on the “grossly exploitative,” but as long as lurid violence and narratively extraneous flesh are all that’s being forced on me (which I regard as an assault nonetheless) instead of new-agey liberal overreach (which, because I’m  a liberal, I feel borders on battery), I can hang. For a while at least.

In general, the grossly exploitative flicks tend to be more entertaining or at least bearable than the earnestly instructive variant.

[singsong] Thank you. [/singsong] So it looks like what we have here is something like Crash (the self-righteous one, not the one that’ll really fucking blow your mind*) meets Lethal Weapon meets Babel meets Lethal Weapon 2 meets Traffic. In short, some mindless action helps the lecture go down. Yipeee!!! So where am I going with this, except to invent an excuse to once more decry the existence of Grand Canyon? Good question. It’s still some nebulous thing in my head, but I think it has to do with the message of popular cinema staying in time with the political pendulum (maybe a note or two behind). Or, to put it another way:

Reagan : Iron Eagle :: Clinton : Independence Day

::

Bush 43 : Bad Boys II :: Obama : (outcome pending)

If either this schematic or the title of this post makes any sense at all to you, I think we have some things to talk about.

To be continued.

============================================

* I mean this shit was censored in Europe!

Let’s do this.

PT Cruiser: From Hero to Zero

As part of the cuts associated with its viability plan, Chrysler recently announced that it would end production of the PT Cruiser. It was a pretty good run for the retromobile, introduced in 2000 and intended to evoke an old gangster getaway car or hot-rod Model A wagon.

Oh, that’s what it was meant to evoke. My bad; in my nightmares it was always a warped retro-futuristic hellscape wherein Mad Max chases  Toecutter through the set of Cars on crack (or maybe the set of Cars rolling; the set of Cars holding something good anyway). But I’m a layperson. Let’s go to the experts (with my emphasis):

“This car is like a classic,” [Dr. Clotaire Rapaille] said. “There are people who collect them and there are Web sites and clubs.” But the PT Cruiser suffered, Dr. Rapaille said, partially because Daimler, which merged with Chrysler in 1998, did not like the car.

Get yours before they’re gone. Nothing holds resale value like a car that’s like a classic.