"Well, he found out how to quit you."

Fox News' John Gibson on Heath Ledger's death (over funeral music)

Aww. He's just bitter because nobody'll fuck 'em. Not even with a bullseye superglued to his rectum and a fist full of drink tickets, my god would you just look at those teeth...

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks. The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

Turn your labia into a YAYbia!

So I'm thumbing through this month's issue of Wired and the cover has a blurb that reads "how to survive on two hours of sleep." If you know me at all you realize that this is a kind of life-long dream so I buy the magazine. I figure the five bucks will be worth that article alone.

Long story short, each night we pass through five distinct types of sleep and each complete cycle lasts about an hour and a half. The fifth stage is known as "REM," the stage during which we sleep and, apparently, the brain does mysterious shit that's necessary for us to keep functioning. Earlier in the evening the REM period lasts perhaps ten minutes and as the night progresses the REM period increases in duration, lasting perhaps as long as an hour during the last cycle.

Seems there's this thing called "Polyphasic sleep." The basic idea, as I understand it, is to view the first four stages as functionally useless. The goal is to train the body to get to REM as quickly as possible and this is accomplished by sleeping, for example, 20-30 minutes, 6x per day. The downside is that you feel like dogshit for a month. The upside is obtaining an extra 5-6 hours per day.

Apparently this has been the sleeping method of choice for people like DaVinci, Erdős and Bucky Fuller. So of course I've got to try it.

Whee!!!

This is funny on so many levels.

I like to subscribe to the wingnuts emails to find out what shit they're shoveling on any particular day. On Jan 5th I received a gem from RedState, a plea for cash which reads, in part:

You see, when we started RedState in May of 2004, we used a website program called Scoop — the same program a lot of similar sites on the left used. But, as the number of visitors to our site grew, Scoop kept crashing on us. If we’d been a liberal website, we would have been able to fix the problem quickly and relatively cheaply. The online left loves Scoop. Unfortunately, there weren’t really any conservative Scoop developers out there to help us. We kept crashing and were out of money. We had to close down or take drastic action.

Jesus. Where to begin?

RedState is actually asserting that while there are droves of liberal blogs that use Scoop and they can't find a single, solitary conservative-friendly developer to work on their code?

Scoop is written in a language called Perl which is twenty fucking years old. Throw a gyros sandwich into any crowd at the CES convention and you have better-than-even odds of hitting someone who knows Perl for fucks sake.

Hell, *I* know Perl.

But the most absurd part is the assertion by RedState that this is somehow a free speech issue. Look...

The right to free speech is a right to be heard, not a right to an audience. That's their first mistake.

Second, the fact that RedState can't find a single developer to work on their code is a testament to their assholery -- "free speech" doesn't come into play in the slightest. Nobody is preventing them from being idiots posting on their site. Nobody has denied them bandwidth.

And not to beat a dead elephant but show me one single, solitary conservative blog that stood up for "free speech" when Clear Channel refused to allow liberal messages on their billboards which is, I should point out, actually a free speech issue.

Name ONE.

I watched a weatherman this morning explain how it was raining where it was and then followed up with an erudite "you might be able to see [the rain] going from the top of your screen to the bottom."

Jesus Christ on a greased-up pogo stick.

I'm a complete sucker for New Years Eve. Couldn't care less about any others.

Oh, and the best line of the night comes from Stacey who said:

Ooo, look, it's 11:53 which is only seven minutes away from [BEEEEEEEEEEEELCH].

I thought this was interesting...

Apparently Bhutto was planning to meet with Patrick Kennedy and Arlen Specter about four hours after she was killed. During that meeting she planned to give them both "a report accusing Pakistan's intelligence services of a plot to rig parliamentary elections, sources close to the slain former Pakistani prime minister told CNN Tuesday.

From that report:

"Ninety percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakistan to fight terrorism is being used to monitor and to keep a check on their political opponents."

That's funny in a perverse kind of way.