doubleplusundead

An unbelievably expensive piece of speaker wire gets the ridiculous comment send up:

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.

DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the… whispers… began.

Were they Aramaic? Hyperborean? Some even more ancient tongue, first spoken by elder races under the red light of dying suns far from here? We do not know, but somehow, slowly… we began to UNDERSTAND.

No, no, please! I don’t want to remember! YOU WILL NOT MAKE ME REMEMBER! I saw brave men claw their own eyes out… oh, god, the screaming… the mobs of feral children feasting on corpses, the shadows MOVING, the fires burning in the air! The CHANTING!

WHY CAN’T I FORGET THE WORDS???

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

Do not use the cables!

There are tons.  They are hilarious.

Bradley Manning and Julian Assange continue their two person campaign to destroy US foreign policy with the release of 251,000 documents from the State Department’s SPIRNET. 

Obviously I haven’t read all of the documents, and frankly I don’t know if I will try, but the snippets I have seen so far don’t really reveal anything new.  In fact the most interesting thing I have seen so far is this comment by the editor of Foreign Policy magazine:

Wikileaks says data dump "reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors"

Actually, to me it reveals that the U.S. is remarkably consistent in what it says publicly and privately

He goes on to say that regardless these leaks will be damaging and I have to agree.  If for no other reason than people never really want to know what someone truly thinks of them deep down inside.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple weeks.  the press is already slobbering about how President Obama’s massive popularity is helping to mitigate the damage, but my understanding is a good number of the leaked documents were written on his watch.  If that’s the case what happens then?

Great send-up of Al Gore.

h/t

Something tells me the Obama administration is going to be hating life pretty soon.

Since we’re all spending the holidays with relatives, I propose a new dinnertime game of speculating what awful reveals are going to come out in the “private, candid assessments” bitchy, whiny bellyaching.  It’s a nice way to talk about politics without actually talking about politics, unless you have that crazy Aunt Suzie who still insists that President OMGWTFBBQ would conduct himself with nothing but the highest decorum and would nevereverever say or do anything snide or rude behind someone’s back.

Recently Monty has been posting his Sunday morning book thread over at Ace of Spades and I always feel a little bad when I read it.  His selections are always so intellectual that I feel bad for reading discarded Harlequin romances that I find in the trash.  So inspired by Monty I have returned to my intellectual roots with this the first of one or two such reviews:

Some of you may be familiar with the term Gorean, as in living a Gorean lifestyle, particularly in relationship to sexual practices.  This is the book that gave rise to the series that coined that term. Usually that would be enough to make me stay away but I read the book in 10th grade and the next 6 or 7 in the series after that over the course of that year (my parents really didn’t pay much attention to what I was reading, as much trouble as they had keeping me in school they were probably just happy I could read), and my memories of the book were a little different; so, when I saw this book on the shelf at a used bookstore I went ahead and grabbed it.

My memories were essentially correct.  This was a strong start to a series (28 or so books) that unfortunately started going off it’s track around book 5.  Combining elements of high fantasy and sword and sorcery it is the chronicle of the adventures of Tarl Cabot, an Earth born professor of English history who, in the tradition of John Carter, finds himself transplanted to another world where he discovers his true calling as a warrior.   After that he indulges in the usual warrior things kidnapping and falling in love with the princess, fighting impossible battles, escaping impossible odds, only he does while riding around on a giant bird.  (That’s where the title comes from.)

Beyond that the book is competently written.  It’s not epic prose, but it’s straightforward and easy and the characters have enough development to draw you in.  Norman will never win any major prizes for his style but he also won’t turn off many readers because the books are too dense.  And, on the plus side he doesn’t appear to be a frustrated songwriter so unlike Tolkien his characters don’t burst into song every three pages followed by page after page of discussion of the rhyme, meter, and meaning of the lyrics.  I swear that entire series would have been a short story if it hadn’t been for the constant minstrel shows, but I digress. 

In closing – Decent book, good story, but don’t bother following up with the rest of the series unless you are into the whole dominant / submissive lifestyle.  If that is the case reading the books aren’t going to damage you more than you already are.  (Just Kidding, to each his own you sickos)