Tag: doom

The Fall of the House of Steinberg

Mold sends homeowners packing

Super extra famous sports agent Leigh Steinberg had to move and then got screwed again in his second 5 million dollar house. Oh no! Why? Well, the mold showed up again.

The Ambe family blew 3.5 mil on a house only have their 18 month old baby covered in a rash and “listless” due to the same mold.

Oddly, the same building company didn’t seem to have the problem when giving away their services for a TV show in which they fixed up a house to save a mold-threatened child.

Best quote in the article:

“My poor husband — he’s a plastic surgeon — he’s having to do five surgeries a day … where typically it would be three,” she said.

I wonder if a Tulpa can take the form of mold?

Today’s radio monitoring quote: Alfred E. Neuman in peril on the sea

Pan pan, pan pan, pan pan. This is United States Coast Guard station Long Beach with an urgent marine bulletin. The United States Coast Guard has received a report of a 28 foot pleasure craft named “What, Me Worry?” overdue on arrival from Catalina Island to San Pedro. All vessels are requested to keep lookout and render assistance as needed. This is United States Coast Guard station Long Beach, OUT.

What Would Amos Say?

Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. […] The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing. Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap? — Diedrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

apostle to the dudes

From the Register article I cited yesterday about the “SWAT Team” kids preaching on the beach. Photo credit to Andy Templeton for this excellent piece of photojournalism. The other pics with the article are good also.

The perfectly scrubbed whiteness of these people — even when they’re not white — is alarming. They exist in a perfect bubble of privilege and cultural isolation. Their friends and family are all like them. Their ideal world is a kind of 1903 Tennesse where everyone is inexplicably 2006 “cool”: chastity, whiteness, conservative politics, extreme sports, rock ‘n’ roll music, TV, great new snacks, and women in their place, obediently following behind their husbands even while surfing some massive waves.

The place where dogmatic evangelical religion and cluelessly neotenized teenage privilege meet is the best-gilded turd you’ll ever see. But you’ll smell it, too. Smell is pretty strong around these parts.

this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a Hummer

  1. Welcome to Orange County, where being a summer reading star gets you deadly, lead-tainted toy prizes from the library!
  2. Welcome to Orange County, where a nice crab roll at Riptide Sushi fills your lungs with ravenous, deadly parasites! Edit: link fixed
  3. Welcome to Orange County, where even the [correction] guy who looks like a carnie biker to the Register, who fixes cop cars and drinks at Skosh Monahan’s thinks that the mayor of Costa Mesa is fucking shit up with his anti-Mexican pogrom.
  4. Welcome to America, where we push our children through our gigantic supermarkets in remotely managed mind control devices on wheels.
  5. Welcome to New Orleans, where a night in jail turned into the Raft of the Medusa last year.
  6. And now, welcome back to Orange County, where the richest, whitest, prettiest kids in the world will try to convert you you a religion they cannot in any meaningful way understand.

all the leaves are brown

The SF Chronicle reports the gloomy bullet points from a doomy official state report about climate change in California.

Without serious reduction in emissions:

California will become significantly hotter and drier by the end of the century, causing severe air pollution, a drop in the water supply, melting of 90 percent of the Sierra snowpack and up to six times more heat-related deaths in major urban centers, according to a sweeping study compiled with help from respected scientists from around the country.

The weather — up to 10.5 degrees warmer by 2100 — would make last month’s heat wave look average. If industrial and vehicle emissions continue unabated, there could be up to 100 more days a year when temperatures hit 90 degrees or above in Los Angeles and 95 degrees or above in Sacramento. Both cities have about 20 days of such extreme heat now.

Nail the license key to the mast

From a tattered diary page found floating on the mucilaginous ooze of the Salton Sea, June 28 2006:

Day 3 of the Windows XP install. Aft #3 torpedo tube is flooded. Captain refusing to leave his quarters. Lt. Zip has not returned from installing the Com+ Deep Fryer and Full-Service Hapax Legomenon (Disabled) (Automatic) (Brazilian). I know that I shall never see my true love or my dear parents again. A watery grave awaits.

Good morning. Here’s your paranoid thought of the day.

We have a quasilegal military prison in Guantanamo Bay. The status of the prisoners there is precarious. Military justice applies, and events are recorded and public records made.

We also have a murky gulag of international detention centers, to which various foreign terrorism suspects are flown in unmarked planes. It is not known how many prisoners there have been or what their fates have been. Nothing is publicly recorded.

At least one U.S. citizen has been detained in an irregular manner in a military prison, and his case has been well-reported and debated.

How do we know that U.S. citizens and others are not being simply picked up off the streets and disappeared? Any witnesses could be threatened into silence with the Patriot Act.

And if it isn’t already happening, how will we know? People go missing all the time. It’s a big country. They could try it out with some random people who don’t seem to matter before they went after someone who might be noticed.

The Prescription

This is the story about how refilling one generic prescription that I have been on for more than a year has taken the whole week so far and is not done yet. I present to you the combined effects of: tightly coupled systems; similar numbers; incompetent yet confident clerks; persistent computer errors that are not corrected; supply chain mishaps; and poorly handled mergers. Ladies and gentlemen, come with me on a fantastic voyage to: THE PHARMACY!

cut for length, this was so crazy