g00gl3 kan+ b eevul!

Plasma Pong. Like Pong, but with fluid dynamics.

The Pong game is fun, but the Sandbox mode is much more fun.

I was searching for a list of movies with Vanagons in them. I knew I’d seen it somewhere. But the benefit of searching on the ‘net is that sometimes you hit the motherlode. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

The Internet Movie Cars Database, which is exactly what it sounds like. And here’s their Vanagon page.

I got started on this because someone linked to a trailer for the mid-80s film ‘Mac and Me,’ in which the main characters are traveling in a Vanagon. I think I’m going to go rent it, because it took product placement to a whole new level. It was basically funded by the Coca-Cola corporation. The story is about aliens stranded on earth. They have to drink Coke or they die. There’s a scene in a McDonald’s where… Well, I’m just going to show it to you.

And also, thanks to this search, I find: The Wayward Saint (warning: Music):

[..] I’ve been alot of things in my life…husband, father, musician, magazine writer, youth leader, conspiracy webzine editor, maytag repairman, insurance salesman, and a print shop worker just to name a few. I’ve had the pleasure of traveling around the world more than most people, and I gotta tell you, it’s a wonderful, horrible, beautiful, ugly place out there. I love Guinness, Fine Cigars, Whiskey, my 86 Vanagon and Jesus. I suppose that should do it.

This makes me happy.

I’ve been fantasizing about walking across England, which would take me straight through the Lake District. Now I can sing a little rap about it.

If you use Mac OS X and you use Mail.app (as I do), then you know you can’t use the home or end keys to navigate the list of emails. Which kind of sucks and should be addressed by Apple.

But. There are a couple of workarounds I came up on my own, though I’m sure someone else did, too.

One thing you can do is click on the sort column header. So if you’re looking at the newest email, and you want to look at the oldest one, and you don’t want to click and drag the mouse, you can just click it on the column header to reverse the sort.

This sort of thing (pun intended) works on a lot of different apps, as well.

Another thing you can do is limit the amount of email in the list, by setting up a smart mailbox for the last 7 days (or whatever number makes you happy). Here’s what it looks like when you set it up:

The smart folder gives you an option for ‘in the last…’ and ‘in the past week.’ The week option stops on weekends, so if I used that, it would just show me a couple emails on Sunday, rather than the last week’s-worth. And if you don’t specify the Inbox folder, it’ll show you everything, even spam.

Note that you can see some of the emails so sorted, through the dialog box, because it’s a little bit transparent. Why does Apple do this? Beats the hell out of me.

Ted Rall’s comics sometimes rubs me the wrong way, but this strip really sucker-punched me when I saw it the other day.

A typo leads me to mile43.com, run by a guy who has a pretty sweet orange 1974 VW camper bus.

The right-winger want to say that the mentally-disturbed college student who bought some guns and killed some classmates did it because colleges are liberal and teach hate.

No, really.

I link only to this one piece because it’s easy enough to find others. And if you’ve been observing the right-wing conservative movement, you know that all the pieces fit. See, there’s this whole subculture that believes things like the media is liberal and that colleges are liberal hate training grounds, and that liberals hate God and want the US to be overrun by Islamism.

For real. Once upon a time, it didn’t matter, because these people were marginalized. But more and more, they’re finding their voice echoed in mainstream media and in the highest levels of government.

Here’s a taste:

Instead, Krugman takes this path: “In its April Fools’ Day issue, Scientific American published a spoof editorial in which it apologized for endorsing the theory of evolution just because it’s ‘the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time,’ saying that ‘as editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.’ And it conceded that it had succumbed ‘to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do.’” Furthermore, “The editorial was titled ‘O.K., We Give Up.’ But it could just as well have been called ‘Why So Few Scientists Are Republicans These Days.’”

Now we know why Scientific American has never been confused with The Onion. But still, its parody – and Krugman’s endorsing it – proves thought provoking. If the standard for debate is now that only people who are qualified to discuss a subject should be taken seriously when that subject arises, the Left had better be prepared to jettison about three-quarters of its most popular activist voices, up to and including Streisand, Turner, Affleck, Moore, Garofalo, Bono, Franken, Maher, Dowd, Krugman …

And if evolution is such a forgone conclusion, why are there still apes?

I want to bring this back to another story that’s making the rounds. It appears that, amongst the self-deluded right, an article by a British journalist (for some definitions of that word) is delivering great hope that the Iraqi WMD actually *did* exist, but were secreted away to neighboring nations by Iraqi insurgents. But here’s the best part: You haven’t heard about it because of a conspiracy by Republicans and Democrats. The Bush administration (and thus the Republican party) were embarassed that they were unable to secure the weapons, and the Democrats were embarassed that the weapons were found at all, so an unholy alliance was created to make the story go away.

Glenn Greenwald is covering this story while trying not to laugh, but there is some seriously creepy stuff attached to it. Like, for instance, ‘Mapping Sharia In America:’

Mapping Shari’a in America: Knowing the Enemy

That is where this highly specialized and professional program comes in. It is our task to conduct an extensive mapping of all the Islamic day schools, mosques, and other identifiable organizations in the US and to determine which ones teach or preach Islamic law, Shari’a. Further, the mapping will scale the Shari’a threat by identifying to which school of jurisprudence it belongs, its historical and contemporary call for Jihad, and whether the Jihad includes violent Jihad against non-believers.

This investigation will also map the leadership of these Muslim organizations and their other affiliations. We will also attempt to uncover any related businesses used or run by the organizations as fronts for money laundering and other illicit activities.

Finally, we will examine and map any potential targets situated near these organizations, such as city, county, and federal government buildings, schools and universities, US military installations, major utility or infrastructure sites (i.e., nuclear installations, pipelines, water supply, etc.), and transportation hubs.

Program Goals:

[1] To conduct a thorough mapping and indexing of Shari’a in America. This will be the first of its kind Islamic threat analysis conducted on the US Homeland based upon open sources and intelligence gathering.

[2] To produce an interactive map that allows a macro- and micro-analysis of the current Shari’a-based Jihadists in the US, together with a fact-specific threat level analysis. This map will be updated bi-annually by a team of investigators, researchers and analysts working under the supervision of SANE’s senior officials.

[3] The detailed and person-specific information will be provided to the appropriate authorities, both governmental and civic, and will also be available upon subscription to the media, educational and research institutions, and other appropriate organizations, which will include the annual updates.

This is undertaken by an organization called SANE, or Society of Americans for National Existence, and that organization is really a guy called David Gaubatz, and David Gaubatz is the guy who says he saw the WMD in Iraq before they were stolen.

Now, I’m trying to be cool about this stuff. I really am. I’m trying to calmly state that we live in a nation that has violence right under the surface, and not the kind of insanty we saw at Virginia Tech. Another kind of insanity altogether. And the problem isn’t so much that these crazy people believe this stuff, or that they’re taking it upon themselves to ‘map Sharia.’ The problem is that they have more power than you’d think.

And I’ll leave you with this, which I haven’t been able to finish yet:

Oregon Natural Desert Association. A bit of a nascent all-volunteer web site that could use some more content. Mostly they’re covering proposed wilderness status for various regions. They’ve also got volunteer gigs, mostly fence-pulling in remote areas.

I’m kindasorta fascinated with that region at the moment. And fence-pulling sounds nice and cathartic.

I’m digging the Campaign for America’s Future, despite its vague and thinktank-y name. They really seem to ‘get it,’ which is probably very much calculated on their part.

But it’s time there was a thinktank that spoke this kind of vernacular, and it tickles me in just the right way. Especially Rick Perlstein’s series on E. Coli Conservatives. And I like that article because it combines many things I love: Well-spoken criticism of the Free Market Fairy and today’s faux-conservatism, subversive criticism of industrial food, and the issue of food security[1], which is really kinda sorta more important than the terrorists-with-bombs kind of security.

So what I like about Perlstein’s writings in this case (and others I’ve read by him) is not only that it makes a sharpened point, but also frames further discussion. And it’s really about time liberals/progressives/lefties started doing that effectively.

[1] Food security in a nutshell:

Agriculture, which is the economic activity most clearly and directly related to national security—if one grants that we all must eat—receives such scant and superficial treatment as to amount to a dismissal. The document proposes only:

[..]

This is not an agriculture policy, let alone a national security strategy. It has the blindness, arrogance, and foolishness that are characteristic of top down thinking by politicians and academic experts, assuming that “improved agriculture” would inevitably be the result of catering to the agribusiness corporations, and that national food security can be achieved merely by going on as before. It does not address any agricultural problem as such, and it ignores the vulnerability of our present food system dependent as it is on genetically impoverished monocultures, cheap petroleum, cheap long-distance transportation, and cheap farm labor to many kinds of disruption by “the embittered few,” who, in the event of such disruption, would quickly become the embittered many. On eroding, ecologically degraded, increasingly toxic landscapes, worked by failing or subsidy dependent farmers and by the cheap labor of migrants, we have erected the tottering tower of “agribusiness,” which prospers and “feeds the world” (incompletely and temporarily) by undermining its own foundations.