One of these guys is going to be President of the United States. Wait, one of them already is! If a company -- some kind of person selling company -- offered two varieties of person for sale, and those two varieties were on display last night, that company's out of business this morning. We are so screwed.

This is quite amusing. There might be an unmined bonanza of satire in Amazon's database of user reviews. I remember one guy wrote a large series on how his life was profoundly changed by various household appliances. Another guy, imitating the New York Review of Books, wrote a series of ponderously serious reviews of Family Circus comic books, stressing how socially important they were. But Amazon apparently has an unwritten policy with regard to such reviews, and actively seeks to remove them. I guess it's just the well-camouflaged ones that get by them: who can really say whether or not Jewel is an exemplar of "the Economics of Romantic Individualism"?

I learned of this new search engine from Google News of all places. It has a nice feature where it categorizes search results, but it lacks Google's beloved Cached link (I still don't think I can live without that). Here's an article about Clusty.

This article in the Washington Post describes a split between native Iraqi insurgents and foreign terrorists. Apparently the local insurgents have begun killing the foreigners, whom they also consider terrorists, because they attract the attention of US warplanes, cut off people's heads, plant road-side bombs, and try to impose their wacky religious rules on the locals. So that was GWB's plan!

I just want to take a moment to thank John Kerry for affording me my rights.

Transcript:
But I also believe that because we are the United States of America, we're a country with a great, unbelievable Constitution, with rights that we afford people, that you can't discriminate in the workplace. You can't discriminate in the rights that you afford people.

For some reason I thought the Constitution protected my rights. Mainly from people like John Kerry. I guess I just didn't know.

Google Desktop was released today. It's pretty useful actually -- it indexes your documents (including visited web sites) and lets you search through them as if through Google. And it works. Unlike that thing they put in Windows.

They elect those things for life huh, those Popes?

Ah well. It would have been pretty cool if the team from Massachusetts and the team from Texas went to the World Series around election time. Then the Ralph Nader team could have heckled them from the stands, and the Libertarian team could have stomped around angrily in the parking lot.

John Kerry may be stomping around Ohio with his best-gun out but in the Senate he's voted against every gun ownership bill that he's ever seen. And I wonder if he ate that goose he killed. I hate geese. They stomp around like they own the place, cover the ground with shit, block traffic, make those annoying honking sounds. It's best that John Kerry shoot them.

You know things are bad in North Korean when North Koreans seek asylum in China.

And I'm sure the CIA was saying "finally!" when Fidel Castro fell down. It sure took a while for that poison to kick in. Around forty years!

I was recently directed to Mozilla's new browser, which so far I think I like better than Opera or IE. Also check out their email client, which is a decent replacement for Outlook (finally), lacking only a calendar.

As a major media outlet I was recently presented with a screening of episode 101 of the new Battlestar Galactica series, and I'm happy to report that it remains as good as the mini-series that piloted it. In some ways it reminds me of the underrated classic SF film Outland; it has a feeling of realism and authenticity that is difficult to achieve in a space opera. Even Farscape, as good as that series was, never really felt realistic, or even plausible -- it was always best when it was at its most (space) operatic. This Battlestar Galactica series is much better than the original, and it's actually pretty original too, considering it's a copy of a series that originally tried to copy Star Wars (albeit originally).

Just as Star Trek was essentially a submarine story, BG is essentially a story about an aircraft carrier -- the last aircraft carrier -- with a fleet of mostly civilian vessels that it must somehow protect and escort well the hell away from their psychotic enemies. At some point it must have occurred to the producers that they were portraying a genocide, and while that may have been all shits and giggles [odd phrase] back in the 80's, turns out it's kind of a serious subject now. But they've been doing fairly well with it, the pitch of the drama seems about right, the military ambiance believable, and even the space noises and universal gravity aren't too objectionable (although it's odd that some of the ships spin for artificial gravity while others don't -- maybe those ships use older technology?).

There is a calendar for the new Mozilla stuff, and it's pretty good too.

While I'd personally recommend banishment or Libertarianism as a third alternative, odds are that most people will be choosing between GWB and Jean Le Kerry on Tuesday (as a result of all the chastising by celebrities to go out and vote or be killed). Whoever you vote for, consider splitting tickets, so that the congress will be owned by the party that isn't in office (since legislative gridlock is the only way to keep the madness within the asylum). Unless of course you vote Libertarian, in which case vote Libertarian (for you are free, you are free!).

If Le Kerry wins, I hope he does so by electoral votes only, since that might finally shut those hippies up about stolen elections. Part of the fallout from Election 2000 -- where one candidate won over the other despite the popular-vote count -- is that a lot of Democrat activists feel justified in doing whatever they can to help escort Le Kerry into office, even if it means cheating. So that makes Republican activists feel justified in doing whatever they can in order to compensate. Or so the infamous Dr. Jones (a staunch Republocrat) informs me. Given all the weird stories so far about election fraud, voter intimidation, and armies of lawyers, it seems inevitable that Election Day will be ugly for both maddened crowds.

And ugly for the rest of the world too, which seems as fixated on our Election Day as we are (and more so than many of us). Even the leering gargoyle of Osamastan feels he can help one or the other by mouthing off (although it remains unclear who he prefers, or even if he understands what an election by infidels entails). Which caused the media to wonder about Tom Ridge's alert levels, but the Sec-HLS declined to go orange. Maybe he would rather wait until Monday night. If This Administration^TM is as evil and conniving as the Democtivists claim, then ‘ole Tom will raise the alert to RED on Monday night, claim the Terrorists plan to attack voting booths (possibly with several hundred tons of Iraqi explosives), and urge everyone to stay home on Election Day. That could work well for GWB since low voter turn-out would favor his chances. Or so the bloated Beefy Lou (a staunch Demolican) tells me.

Whatever happens, I'm resentful toward the DNC and all Democratic Primary voters for saddling us with Jean F. Kerry. We really could have used a good alternative this time. Most people I talk to expect to lose on Nov. 2 no matter who wins, which is now the state of our political machinery. But hopefully after the election we can at least stop hearing about the Vietnam War (which nobody won, and nobody continues to win). Mr Kerry has insisted he intends to fight the terrorists as zealously as he fought the Vietcong. Which might sound ridiculous if Mr Bush hadn't claimed the terrorists would fight back so "vociferously". These are metaphors we can do without. I'm not even sure at this point who the most vociferous one is; that seems to depend largely on the media.

But listen: if Badnarik can earn even 1% of the vote in your state then the Libs won't have to spend all their money there next time just getting on the ballot. They'll be able to invest more in advertising and campaigning. Maybe even produce a television commercial that doesn't suck. Now how could that be a wasted vote?