I don't wanna be innocent, you know

Best movies of the decade

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 21:11:25 GMT

Alrighty folks, with the new decade nearly upon us, and being the movie buff that I am, it seems fitting to compile a list of the best movies of the 2000s. Here's what I've got:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
High Fidelity (2000)
Requiem for a Dream (2000) [top 2]
Snatch. (2000)
Traffic (2000)
Amélie (2001) [top 5]
Ghost World (2001)
The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)
Mulholland Dr. (2001) [top 10]
Spirited Away (2001)
Super Troopers (2001)
Adaptation. (2002)
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
City of God (2002)
Death to Smoochy (2002)
Hero (2002)
Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Secretary (2002)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) [top 10]
Lost in Translation (2003) [top 10]
Love Actually (2003)
The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
Oldboy (2003) [top 10]
Old School (2003)
Ong-bak (2003)
Closer (2004)
Collateral (2004)
Crash (2004)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Sideways (2004)
Batman Begins (2005)
Brick (2005)
Hard Candy (2005)
Serenity (2005)
Thank You For Smoking (2005)
Casino Royale (2006)
Children of Men (2006)
The Departed (2006) [top 10]
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Pan's Labyrinth (2006) [best movie of the decade]
V for Vendetta (2006)
Death Proof and Planet Terror (2007)
Juno (2007)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Orphanage (2007)
Superbad (2007)
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Burn After Reading (2008)
Cloverfield (2008)
The Dark Knight (2008)
Doubt (2008) [top 5]
Gran Torino (2008)
Milk (2008)
Revolutionary Road (2008)
Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
WALL-E (2008)
The Wrestler (2008)
District 9 (2009)
Inglourious Basterds (2009) [top 5]
Watchmen (2009)
Zombieland (2009)

Best scenes:
- Climax of Requiem for a Dream
- Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Dr.
- Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill: Vol. 1
- The final montage in Kill Bil: Vol. 1, capped off by Bill's "There is one more thing, Sofie..."
- The freeway chase scene in The Matrix Reloaded
- Oldboy corridor fight (a single take, nearly 20 people, 2 and a half minutes long)
- Final fight in Kung Fu Hustle
- Olive's dance in Little Miss Sunshine
- "Down in Mexico" scene in Death Proof (you know which one I mean)
- The scenes surrounding Shosanna's "film" in Inglourious Basterds
- The opening credits of Watchmen, set to "The Times They Are a-Changin'"

Best tagline:
- "Here Comes the Bride" for Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Best payoffs:
- The "Pikey reaction" in Snatch.
- The outro in Amélie
- In Serenity, the doors opening after River's fight with the Reavers
- Martin Scorsese, one of the best directors ever, finally getting a damn Oscar for it
- The climax of V for Vendetta
- Abernathy's axe kick in Death Proof
- Meryl Streep's final line in Doubt
- The final moments of Inglourious Basterds

Best performances:
- Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream
- Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love
- Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary
- Jennifer Carpenter in The Exorcism of Emily Rose (movie not on list)
- Ellen Page and Patrick Wilson in Hard Candy
- Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine
- Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
- Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight
- Literally everyone in Doubt
- Sean Penn in Milk
- Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler
- Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds

Also, most disappointing movie of the decade:
- Quantum of Solace (2008)

What did I miss? What do you think shouldn't be here?

Stairway to wha-?

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 03:57:22 GMT

Okay people, can someone please tell me why, basically everywhere I look, Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" is inevitably listed as having the bestest, greatest, most awesomest guitar solo ever? 'Cuz I'm just not seeing it. Sure, it's really good, but I can think of others that top it by a wide margin.

Exhibit A - Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," whose solo (beginning at 6:36) actually has a name, "Luke's Wall":

It suits the mood of the song perfectly and does a fantastic job of musically capturing the tragedy of the whole war machine business. (Listen to the whole song for the full effect.)

Exhibit B - Metallica's "Fade to Black," beginning at either 3:56 or 5:06 (pick your flavor):

For my money, this song as a whole is almost perfect, and the guitar work throughout is transcendent. It's hilarious to listen to cover versions of it, because they either completely skip the final solo or fail miserably at it. Poor bastards. Note: the person who made this particular video is a doofus, but this one has the best sound quality, so here we are.

Aaand Exhibit C - "November Rain" by Guns 'n Roses, beginning at 7:05, the solo so awesome, Slash had to stand on a grand piano to play it properly:

Or...Buckethead's impossibly technical "Jordan" (beginning at 1:27), or, of course, the Free Bird solo (beginning at 4:56).

Anyway, is this one of those things that everyone believes because they think it's what they should believe and because they're too afraid to "challenge the experts," e.g., mind-body materialism in the philosophy of mind or the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.

Kim Peek dies at 58

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:01:43 GMT

Y'all have heard of Kim Peek, the inspiration for the film Rain Man, right? Recently, he died from a heart attack at 58 years of age. Peek wasn't just a savant, but a megasavant, because of his vast expertise in something like 15 different fields. He read over 12,000 books in his life, and could recall almost every word in almost all of them. He had a few brain conditions: macrocephaly (unusually large brain), and he also lacked a corpus callosum, which is the bundle of nerves that connects the left and right sides of the brain. The latter allowed him to read two pages of a book simultaneously - one with each eye - and he'd get through a page in 8-10 seconds. (And remember all of it.) He was also what's known as a calendar calculator, which means that if you told him what your birthday was, or any other random date, he could instantly tell you what day of the week it was. In-credible.

In contrast to his essentially superhuman memory, though, he evidently lacked the ability for much abstract thought. So, he could memorize all of Shakespeare, or all of the Bible (I imagine he did exactly that!), but he couldn't tell you what any of the metaphors or symbolism meant. He had a lot of motor problems and would travel with his father, who took care of those things for him. He also had poor social skills (not from autism; it's thought that he had FG syndrome), and it was only later in his life that he began to understand humor.

RIP, Kim.

Another fascinating memory savant is Daniel Tammet. Like Kim, Daniel is a calendar calculator. Unlike Kim, Daniel is autistic, but he is a very high-functioning one, and that allows him to tell people (and scientists) what's going on in his head. He has number synaesthesia, so in his mind, every integer up to 10,000 has a unique shape, color, or feel, and if he mentally calculates something (his ability to do this is quite staggering, by the way), he intuitively "feels" the result. Four years ago, he could recite pi from memory to 22,514 digits, and I imagine that number has increased.

Even cooler, he's got quite the talent for language absorption. He claims to speak English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Urdu, Romanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh, and Esperanto. At one point, he was challenged to learn Icelandic (one of the most difficult languages in the world, I've heard) in a week, and after a week of studying in Iceland, he appeared on TV there and was conversing with people in Icelandic and answering questions. I suppose that if you have a computer-like memory, it would actually be pretty easy to learn a language, since people like Daniel and Kim could learn the vocabulary by looking at it once, in contrast to the rest of us, who have to repeat, repeat, repeat...

Aaand that's all for now. Savants are amazing.

Edit: Okay, I lied; I forgot to mention Stephen Wiltshire. He's been called "the human camera" because he can look at something once and accurately draw it. This allows him to produce drawings of cities like this:

After a 20-minute helicopter ride, he sketched an 18-foot panorama of a large portion of New York City and part of New Jersey. That took him 5 days. Here he is working on it:

Aaand here's his website, with a mini-bio and a huge gallery of his work.

Trip/eye candy

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:00:51 GMT

I drove back to NC today, leaving at about 6:40 am and rolling on in at about 3:30 pm. (It would have been 3, but I stopped at Costco...) 'Twas a gorgeous day for driving, and save for the same old god-awful stretch of I-95 S where everyone likes to go 30 mph on a 70 mph road for no reason whatsoever (DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE), it was a great ride.

So, I get back to the apartment, and I find a Christmas gift on top of my keyboard from my dear roommate, who obviously knows me well...

Yes, I know; nom nom nom, fap fap fap, etc. etc. etc. Fun fact: that image is from the cover of (I think) Men's Health, and they didn't want to run it at first because they accused him of having ab implants, which he doesn't.

Aside: If you can't tell that I have a man-crush on Ryan Reynolds at this point, your reading comprehension skills need some work.

Anyhoo, the fact that his abs are so exquisitely shaped (aside from his work at the gym/in the kitchen) is a result of his muscle attachments, which are something nobody can really control. Some pro bodybuilders have really weird-shaped abs, and they can't help that, either, so it's not typically held against them in competition.

Bonus pictures: Dina in my suitcase, before and after my trip, respectively.

Opposition

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:00:52 GMT

Had a "family Christmas" today, meaning, my parents and I met up with some extended family to exchange gifts and goof off. One of my cousins (a sophomore in high school) is really into history, so I got him Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, which is a history of the US told from the perspectives of women, black people, Native Americans, immigrants, the working poor, etc. - that is, it's the side of history you generally can only get by reading between the lines of most history books. My grandmother, on the other hand, got him the American Heritage DVDs, which are produced by the American Family Association (based on that, do I really have to further describe the content of the DVDs?). The two histories could not be more opposed, and I find it amusing that he received the two of them on the same day. I don't know much about my cousin's views, but he's really intelligent, so I can only hope that he can recognize propaganda when he sees it. (Not that Zinn's work is unbiased, mind you, but it's definitely closer to the truth than the AFA's dominionist rubbish.)

Oh yeah, and I plowed through Darkly Dreaming Dexter and am going to start working on the next book in the series soon. It was an enjoyable book, although the TV series differed from it in substantial ways. I suppose that was inevitable, though, since the first season alone is about 12 hours long, and it's only a 300-page book; there's simply not enough content in it to fill up that much airtime. Overlooking the content difference, though: the TV series is better.

Aaand I'm heading back to NC tomorrow. Back to school, back to work, back to reality. And back to a lonely cat.

The holiday(s)

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 04:16:50 GMT

Merry Christmas/Yule/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/whatever it is y'all celebrate.

My big gift this year was an Amazon Kindle, which is pretty spiffy. I've already got some great books loaded on it, including Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature,, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and the one I'm currently reading, Jeff Lindsay's Darkly Dreaming Dexter.

I have to say, though, that on top of the book-reading capability, I'm really excited about the Kindle's native .pdf support. A great deal of my reading for grad school consists of .pdf documents, and that will especially be true for this coming semester (during which time I'll be studying for my doctoral-qualifying oral exam, primarily from journal articles), and not being tied to a computer screen or a stack of paper will be so sweet. The e-ink reading system really is all it's cracked up to be, too, so the voluminous word-scouring I'll be doing will still be easy on my eyes.

So, once again, Merry [insert your preferred holiday] to you, and to all a good night!

Happy Festivus!

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:02:39 GMT

Today is December 23, also known as Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us. Years ago, Frank Costanza attempted to buy a doll for his son George for Christmas, but as Frank reached for it, so did another man. As Frank rained blows upon him, he realized there had to be another way. The doll was destroyed, but from its ashes rose a new holiday! To commemorate this great holiday, a donation has been made in your name to the Human Fund.

Today, we will gather 'round the pole, and don we now our gay apparel...(not that there's anything wrong with that.)

It's made of aluminum, which has a high strength-to-weight ratio. We will then have our Festivus dinner, prior to which will be the airing of the grievances. That's when each person at the table goes around the table and tells everyone else all the ways in which they've disappointed them.

I GOT A LOT OF PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE, AND NOW, YOU'RE GONNA HEAR ABOUT THEM!

Following the meal, we will conclude with the Festivus Feats of Strength. Who wants to try to pin me? LET'S RUMBLE!

Chronos

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:57:05 GMT

I recently read Stefan Klein's The Secret Pulse of Time, which was a really spiffy book that was largely concerned with our internal, subjective experience of time and how it differs from external, physical time. I highly recommend it, and it's pretty easy to read.

While packed with information (like the fact that we aren't stressed because we have no time, but that we have no time because we feel stressed), one of the more interesting theses was the relationship between memory and our view of how much time has passed. Our brains tend to store more information when we're engaged in something novel, like visiting a new place or meeting new people. When we're repeating the same thing over and over again, however, it doesn't tend to store the number of iterations of X that have taken place so much as it stores the fact that X occurred, or X was learned. Encoding new memories beyond that point is pointless.

This has fairly radical implications.

Think about periods in your life when you were doing something you hadn't done before, like when you visited a new place for the first time. I bet you can remember a lot of details if you try, especially relative to the length of that new experience. Now think about something you did repeatedly for an extended period of time, like a job that didn't involve much novelty (e.g., working as a cashier in a supermarket). How many details of that can you remember, especially relative to the length of time you spent there?

Not many, I bet. For most of us, periods like that are pretty much lost, because our brains simply have no need to store all the information from something that isn't new or interesting. Details you do remember, I bet, are extra things you did outside the normal routine of the job (or whatever). For example, I worked as a grocery store checker some years ago, and most of what I remember is either conversations I had with people or mischief I perpetrated to pass the time when it was slow. (And there was A LOT of the latter, let me tell you.) Extrapolate this ahead a couple of decades. How would your life seem in retrospect if you frequently did novel things, and how would it seem if you did the same thing day in and day out? It shouldn't be hard to see that the answers are longer/richer and shorter/emptier, respectively.

It seems to follow, then, that if we want to be able to look back on our lives and remember much of what happened, as well as feel as though we really used our time as best we could, then drudgery, routine, and pointless meandering should be kept to a minimum. Not that those things don't have important places in our lives, of course, but that they should be implemented only when necessary.

I don't know about you, but being able to look back on my life when I'm much older and not have a giant chunk of it seem like it vanished into a black hole is pretty important to me. And obviously, it seems like implementing policies that will make my life seem richer in retrospect will allow me to enjoy it more in the present (if there is such a thing*)...

* SPOILER ALERT: _{_{there's not.}}

Discrimination at a Florida McDonald's

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 13:28:51 GMT

Quick 'n dirty breakdown: a manager at a Florida McDonald's refused to hire a transwoman, left her a voicemail saying "we don't hire faggots," got fired for it, and now that McDonald's is getting sued:

A Florida McDonald's has been sued for refusing to hire a transgendered woman. The applicant, 17-year-old Zikerria Bellamy, says that after she didn't check a gender box on the application, then reluctantly selected male, she was refused an interview by two managers, one of whom then left her an bigoted voicemail.

According to the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, Florida agencies in the past have ruled that gender identity is a protected class under Florida's human rights law, and the McDonald's manager didn't help things by leaving a voicemail insulting the applicant and telling her that "we don't hire [gay slur that is also an archaic unit of measurement for bundles of sticks]."

The audio from the call is here:

Unsurprisingly, many of the commenters on the article have shit for brains (especially the guy who said "I'm not sure why I should have to call a chair a table just because it prefers to consider itself a table." Wow.). Then again, a surprising number of them actually know what they're talking about. For once.

P.S.:

This week

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:48:31 GMT

(1) My final final exam of the semester is tomorrow in bioanalytical chemistry. After this, I get to take a break for a bit. w00t

(2) I learned that the "Seinfeld poppyseed drug test" concept is actually true. You know the one: Elaine tests positive for opium, and it turns out it's because she eats poppyseed muffins all the time, and opiates are made from poppies. Evidently, it's because the drug test (an immunoassay, probably an ELISA) they use has a low enough limit of detection to pick up trace quantities of opiate metabolites. But, if you test positive and aren't a drug user, you can get them to do a hair test, which has a substantially higher limit of detection and would show that you're not shooting up all the time.

(3) rechercher finally convinced me to start using Pandora. It's been a lot of fun so far. See, for example:

(Yeah, I know that these songs are radically different, and that's the fun of it!)

(4) 5-time World's Strongest Man, Mariusz Pudzianowski, has just had his first MMA fight:

He's basically 300 pounds of muscle and has 7 years of training in boxing and a green belt in some form of karate. I'd love to see him fight in the UFC just to see how far inhuman* amounts of strength and a decent amount of skill will take you against a highly skilled, fairly strong opponent. (He'd probably still lose.)

* He's nearly 100 pounds heavier for his height than would be possible for someone not taking anabolics, so my "inhuman" comment is fairly literal.

Hark, a Vagrant!

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:07:57 GMT

So I know that many of y'all are webcomic fans, and I notice that many of you don't have beatonna on your friends-list. That's the LJ for Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant!, which bases a lot of its jokes on history, but really, it has something for everyone.

First, something for you literary types:

Here are some of those letters to Nora from James, if you're unfamiliar with them. They're, uh, a little racy and kinky. Check out the final one in particular, but not if you've recently eaten. (Or better yet, don't check it out. I have one word for you: coprophilia.)

Now, something for the philosophy geeks:

This must have been what things were like for most of the great thinkers prior to recent times, since they were generally part of an educated elite amongst a mostly illiterate population. And if not illiterate, still fairly dumb by comparison - can you imagine having a chat with Kant?

And something for everyone:

The faces in the last panel kill me every time.

Also, this is Andrew Ryan with a Rapture reminder: we all make choices, but in the end, our choices make us.

Food service guerilla terrorism

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:43:31 GMT

While serving champagne at Thanksgiving dinner today, I referred to our house as "the luxurious Pressman hotel." Nobody got the reference. Just be glad for them that we weren't having soup today, particularly not cream of mushroom soup.

Happy Thanksgiving to y'all. Let us pause and reflect on the historical significance of this day, one that is truly a microcosm of American history: a bunch of white people royally fucking over colored folks.

P.S. boobs
P.P.S. Stolen from charlycrash: kittens - something we can all be thankful for:

Writer's Block: Time in a bottle

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:32:54 GMT

Imagine that you have a time machine. Which deceased musician would you most want to travel back in time to watch perform live?

Submitted By crazyprotein

View 1507 Answers

Stevie Ray Vaughan, aka SRV. Just after getting over a serious substance abuse problem, he died in a helicopter crash at the age of 35. What a damn shame. Check out his "Pride and Joy" (#2 on the playlist on my stickied entry) to see why I picked him.

Attack of the killer meme

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:44:13 GMT

stolen from charlycrash:

"Comment here and I will tell you why I like/love you.

Even if we don't talk much, I want EVERYONE to participate. If you want to share the love and do the same at your journal, go ahead. You're under no obligation to carry it on if you comment here."

So yeah.

Pre-Thanksgiving fun

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:44:51 GMT

To-do before Thanksgiving:

1. Complete my half of a mock grant proposal for bioanalytical chemistry (bulk of work must be done by 11/18)
2. Study for (11/19-11/20) and take (11/21) cumulative exam on acid-base chemistry
3. Combine my work and my partner's work and nicely format/edit it to complete mock grant proposal for bioanalytical chemistry (desired completion date: 11/22; actually due 11/24)
4. Sit back, relax, have a Coke and a smile, begin reading George Eliot's Middlemarch (upon completion of 1-3)
5. Fly back to PA (11/24)

Fun fact #1: We can't use calculators for this cume, just logarithm tables.
Fun fact #2: George Eliot was actually Mary Anne Evans. Writing during the Victorian era, she chose a male pen name to ensure that her works would be taken seriously. (And also to keep people from prying into her personal life, since she was deeply involved with a married man.)

Take that, alt-"medicine"

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:24:47 GMT

Do y'all remember the case earlier this year, where a teenager with cancer (Hodgkin's lymphoma, one of the most treatable forms of cancer) refused chemotherapy because it made him sick, and his family was insisting that he should get some kind of alternative quack treatment instead? And then his family was ordered by a court to see him through chemo and radiation anyway? Well, his treatment is now complete, and there's no evidence that he still has cancer.

Score: +1 for science-based medicine.

To live and die on the chessboard

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:34:51 GMT

1. One of my friends in the department has been trying to get me to play him at chess for like a year, and he finally managed to get me to go to the campus chess club on Wednesday. It's not terribly big, but all the people there seem pretty cool, and they're all roughly around my strength. That's good; playing someone much better than you is no fun, because nobody likes getting slaughtered. Conversely, playing someone much weaker is also no fun (unless you really dislike that person), because it's not challenging at all. While I've forgotten most of my openings, my tactical abilities are evidently just mildly rusty, so that's good. Time to start actually playing again, now that I have some folks to play! Oh yeah, and I beat my friend twice, bwahaha.

2. Last night, Dina and I watched To Live and Die in L.A.. I picked it up years ago for ~$4 in a bargain bin at Best Buy, based on the fact that it had an interesting premise and a 30-year-old Willem Dafoe as the villain. Also, CSI's William Petersen plays the main character. And yes, I did say a 30-year-old Willem Dafoe - the movie is from 1985, so you can just imagine what the soundtrack is like (mostly Wang Chung, who, I just found out, aren't even fucking Chinese, the cheeky bastards). It was a lot of fun, and it features a spiffy car chase up the wrong side of the highway, complete with an endless stream of bad guys just showing up out of nowhere with guns. That made me happy, as I love car chases in movies (I know, I know, my taste is so highbrow).

3. As of ~8:45 a.m. last Friday, my Separations class is complete. This means that I have just three in-class exams remaining, ever (my Bioanalytical final this semester and a midterm and a final in Microfab next semester). Not that I'm counting or anything.

Stuff

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:37:28 GMT

Well as you all know, as of yesterday, same-sex marriage is now illegal in Maine again, by a slim margin. I could type an impressive volume of vitriol against the people who passed this, and why it's such a stupid idea to allow the majority to vote on a minority's rights to begin with, but I won't. Instead, I thought I'd post this:

(hat-tip to ms_daisy_cutter for the screencap)

That's how much the Catholic church donated in favor of banning same-sex marriage. (You can check for yourself here; it's under question 1.)

Questions:
1. Would Jesus approve of spending over half a million dollars on banning same-sex marriage instead of, you know, feeding and clothing the needy? I know that Maine gets mighty cold this time of year, and I bet that cash could have heated an awful lot of homeless shelters.
2. Here, we see a church getting financially involved in politics. We saw the same thing with the LDS church with Prop 8 in California; they donated many MILLIONS for that. Why do these churches still have tax-exempt status?

Stuff like this is why I stopped considering myself Catholic many years before I ever quit being a believer altogether.

Victim in Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:38:57 GMT

HH

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:59:57 GMT

Fever gone but itchy.
Hungry and eat doggy food.
Itchy itchy Scott came.
Ugly face so killed him.
Tasty.

Itchy.
Tasty.

The Onion does it again

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:43:15 GMT

U.S. Continues Quagmire-Building Effort In Afghanistan

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN— According to sources at the Pentagon, American quagmire-building efforts continued apace in Afghanistan this week, as the geographically rugged, politically unstable region remained ungovernable, death tolls continued to rise, and the grim military campaign persisted as hopelessly as ever.

In fact, many government officials now believe that the United States and its allies could be as little as six months away from their ultimate goal: the total quagmirification of Afghanistan.

"We've spent a lot of time and money fostering the turmoil and despair necessary to make this a sustaining quagmire, and we're not going to stop now," President Barack Obama said in a national address Monday night. "It won't be easy, but with enough tactical errors on the ground, shortsighted political strategies, and continued ignorance of our vast cultural differences, we could have a horrific, full-fledged quagmire by 2012."

Added Obama, "Together, we can make Afghanistan into a nightmarish hell-scape Americans will regret for generations to come."

The U.S. plan to build a lasting quagmire in Afghanistan calls for the loss of at least 5,000 coalition troops, nearly 1,500 of whom have already been killed, and a wasted investment of nearly $1 trillion, a quarter of which has thus far been spent.

With more than 80 percent of the country currently under Taliban control, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that U.S. nation-dismantling efforts are actually proceeding ahead of schedule.

"We've made a complete mess of local institutions, and moving forward this substantial lack of infrastructure will be the cornerstone of our strategy to ensure long-term chaos in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region," said Gates, gesturing to a complex, 6-foot-tall wall map of what were either newly established al-Qaeda bases in Waziristan, tribal trade routes over the Hindu Kush, or perhaps U.S. military outposts of some kind. "I couldn't be happier with our progress. This place is a complete clusterfuck."

A number of Pentagon officials said they were proudly holding on to their false glimmer of hope for a victory that remains forever out of reach, and explained that waging a war that can only end in sorrow has validated all their efforts.

The U.S. effort in Afghanistan hasn't always looked so bleak. In 2004, when Afghanistan ratified a new constitution and directly elected a leader for the first time in its history, a number of government officials feared the quagmire would fail and perhaps even lead to relative peace and security. But American military and diplomatic initiatives to prop up the corrupt regime of Hamid Karzai paved the way for this year's utterly fraudulent presidential election, an event which gave the quagmire-building effort a much needed shot in the arm.

"Some say the war in Afghanistan is already a quagmire, being as it's gone on for eight years and the situation on the ground continues to rapidly deteriorate," said Gen. Stanley McChrystal. "But I know we can do better. There are still dozens of tribal allies to alienate, troop morale could sink even lower, to the point of mutiny, and by continuing to fire a bunch of missiles from unmanned predator drones we have the opportunity to scare the living shit out of every last civilian in the region."

Continued McChrystal, "If we play our cards right, the word 'Afghanistan' could soon replace the word 'Iraq' as the agreed-upon successor to the word 'Vietnam' in the American political lexicon."

The loose network of warlords who rule the Afghan countryside were also optimistic about quagmire-building efforts.

"Our nation is already impossibly fragmented, but I believe the United States has the ability to make things even worse here," said a local tribal leader, who asked to speak anonymously due to his constantly shifting alliances with the two sides. "Afghanistan has a proud, ancient tradition of quagmires: Soviet Russia, the British Empire, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan. These are big shoes to fill, but if anyone can do it, these foolish Americans can."

With President Karzai's government maintaining ties to known drug traffickers, and 68,000 U.S. soldiers struggling to police a harsh, challenging landscape, all the conditions for a multigenerational quagmire seem to be in place.

For many analysts, the question now is: How will Obama ensure the U.S. entanglement in the region remains permanent? By deploying more troops, by withdrawing them and leaving behind an unspeakable disaster, by increasing sympathy for the Taliban in nuclear-armed Pakistan? There are so many options on the table that many feel a quagmire is virtually guaranteed.

"We have so much to thank the Americans for," said Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, a notorious warlord who will become vice president if Karzai wins a runoff election scheduled for Nov. 7. "Not only have they created a lawless environment that has allowed us to capture 90 percent of the opium market, but their heroin habits have made a few of us very rich."

"I love the Americans and I hope they stay for many years," he added. "Many, many, many, many years."

Writer's Block: Seeing stars

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:10:58 GMT

Which character from any film, television show, or book would you most like to take on a date and why?

Submitted By blue_mariposa88

View 2286 Answers

Samantha from Garden State. Why?

'nuff said.

Oh yeah, and it doesn't hurt that in addition to having that smile, Natalie Portman herself has at least one scientific publication (in psychology, I think), speaks multiple languages, is active in liberal politics, etc. etc.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:52:59 GMT

Some year around Halloween, when I have the cash, I'm going to buy a black hearse. I'll pay somebody to put hydraulics on it, install a wicked sound system, and then drive around on Halloween, dressed as the Grim Reaper, blasting Rob Zombie's "Dragula" and "Superbeast" at ungodly decibels, tilting the hearse from side to side when necessary. ("Master of Puppets" would work pretty well, too.) Imagine it - *tilt to one side* DIG through the ditches and *tilt to the other* BURN through the witches and *tilt* SLAM in the back of my *tilt* DRAGULA!!!! It would be really fucking cool to have an exhaust pipe that could spew fire at that point, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal. Even if it's not, if another car happened to be behind me at that point, the driver would be mighty displeased.

This year, though, I'm going as Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Patrick Bateman was my first choice - I'd wear a suit, poncho, put fake blood on my face and neck, carry a (fake blood-coated) plastic axe, and ask people if they like Huey Lewis and the News - but I just got the suit I'd wear, and I don't want the first time I wear it to be that. Perhaps next year. Ah, ideas, ideas.

Oh yeah, and the day after Halloween, I'll be 25. How about that? Looks like I'll be imbibing my fair share at midnight that night.

In other news, I've been playing through the original Resident Evil games lately. I can appreciate RE1 for what it is, but as good as it was when it came out, I honestly can't say it's held up over time; the graphics are abysmal compared to modern systems (or even RE4 on the PS2), and the controls are really crappy compared to later games. None of this is to say that it's not fun to play, and to this day, there are few sounds more satisfying to me than that of a Hunter's death scream immediately following a magnum round being fired, but it still pales in comparison to modern stuff. I'll work my way through 2, 3, and 4 again, and then actually buy RE5, which I have yet to play. I can't wait.

'Til then, I have plenty of zombie movies to see this week to keep me busy: Zombieland, some other zombie movie that's in 3D, and Diary of the Dead. Oh, and of course, Return of the Living Dead. Tarman would be very sad if I didn't visit him this year:

I will eat your soul

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:25:33 GMT

Despite the unseasonably cold weather, it's been a good weekend. For one thing, my knee is almost better; I can move it through a full range of motion and walk without any pain or discomfort, which I most certainly could not do last weekend. I murdered the cume I had on Saturday, and that aside, I've been studying for my upcoming midterm in my bioanalytical chemistry class, which will be on Tuesday. I currently have five in-class exams remaining in my entire academic career (unless I go batshit insane and decide to pursue another graduate degree), and after Tuesday, it will be just four. w00t.

Also, since it's October and Halloween is coming up, I thought I'd go ahead and post something scary. See this picture?

It's from the video for Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy," which is the only music video I've ever seen that I'd say is legitimately terrifying. Enjoy:

Careful what you wish for

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:46:11 GMT

This fulfills my ironic image quota for the day.