Our elevators at work are made by Thyssen-Krupp. Krupp was formerly mostly known for making HUGE FREAKING GUNS that looked like this:

I think about this every time I ride the elevator.

From Joe Bell, a friend and local columnist:

In case you missed it, the mystery winner of a seat on the Orange Unified School District board surfaced last week. In his first public appearance since he filed candidate papers many months ago, Steve Rocco in person underscored the election lesson he hopefully taught all of us: Don’t vote in the dark. Or its corollary: When in doubt, leave it blank.

Rocco told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he couldn’t think of any educational issues he plans to address in his new role. But he added that serving as a trustee would give him public visibility to counter what he described as a conspiracy against him by a cabal of public officials who have stalked and harassed him and his parents for 25 years to force him to stop — according to Rocco — his efforts to uncover corruption and scandal in local government. There was more, much more of this sort of thing, all of it about as relevant to the cause of public education as Rocco’s conspiracy.

The good citizens of Rocco’s school district who voted him into office deserve what they got — but the students are the ones who will suffer. I don’t know who is more culpable, the people who voted for Rocco because the teachers’ union supported his opponent or those who bought into his flawed self-identity as a “teacher” or those who just flipped a coin. Rocco finally got it right when he told The Times reporter: “The only thing I did was run. I didn’t create this.”

Joseph Bell, Daily Pilot

Courtesy nrrd, here’s the Great Sausage Fanout of 2004. (NYTimes, use bugmenot if you don’t want to register.)

I’ve mentioned bzzagent before here, a couple years back I think. It’s pathetic to be a secret agent for marketers to start with, and even more pathetic when all you get is “points toward cool products”. If I’m going to sell out all my personal relationships and go into permanent shill mode, I want some serious cash please. That’s what the financial services business is about!

Imagine going around pushing sausage on your friends (lol pushing sausage lol), promoting it to grocery store clerks, reporting on everyone to the mothership, and being an ENTHUSED SAUSAGE ROBOT all so you can earn 30% of your way to an iPod.

We are all insurance salesmen now, and we’re underpaid.

Phishers rarely get their English right. Someone needs to hook them up with native English-speaking hoods so they can have a synergy thingy.

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WHAT YOU SAY

The other day at D’s a woman came up to a group of us at the end of the evening and asked for our attention. First, she asked if we were “Program” which made sense, since a lot of 12 step folks show up on that night, but we weren’t. Then it was time for the presentation. She gave her name and then launched into a prepared story. She told us that she had spent years on alcohol and drugs, and was also HIV and Hepatitis C positive, and had no doubt given the disease to many people.

Everyone else was uncomfortably silent and I said “Uhh.. Uhh.. I’m really sorry to hear that.” Hard to say what to do.

She then went on to say that she had hurt us all and she wanted to apologize to us for this. I understood what she meant but thought “shouldn’t you be apologizing to people with AIDS or Hep C?”. Not going to say anything though.

She then went into a hard-core fundamentalist Christian conversion script. Unfortunately the script called for her to put people on the spot, so that she turned to me and asked me what I believed, and waited. “That’s kind of personal”, I said. She asked me “Are you positive, though? Do you have a positive belief in your heart?” I had to tell her that was personal, too. There were three or four more questions like that, to which I kept giving the same answer. Finally she blessed us all and left, after warning us that the end was soon and the fire, etc.

I heartily wish her well, not least because she got herself into such a nasty medical situation. And I do understand what she was about, mostly. The canned religious script was really hard to hear, though. It felt as though she couldn’t just go and apologize to the world for the things she felt guilt about; she had to win something too. And in this case, winning meant being right about God and being the deliverer of the Message.

I still don’t know what I think about it, really.

That was courtesy the1withtheeyes and she got goatse’d in return. Just so y’all know.

Petism is now. Let’s learn!

On the news radio just now there was a bumper promoting an interview with a “Senior Ethical Hacker” at IBM named Joshua Lackey.

The future is Dickens as rewritten by Philip K. Dick.

I think that there ought to be an all-Christmas-music speed metal band called SLEIGHER. That’s what I think.

Move to Somalia, or somewhere else violent. You’ll have an edge!

This has been a public service announcement, with guitar.