Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Coming out $29 over, when I can't remember more than $10 in tips. (Okay, it could be worse.)

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your girlfriend's body conspire against you.

I had to shower to wake up and after I ate it was basically time to leave for work then.  Left work around 9, went over to dad's and watched the tape of the Lakers whomping Minnesota in game 5 while washing clothing for the next five days of work. Got back here at 11:30, took a shower, talked to Malaya for a couple of hours and by then it's nearly 4am, and I'm ready to go to bed to get back on a more normal sleeping schedule.

The only problem; I wasn't tired.  Not a bit sleepy.

So I made a big potato/onion/green pepper stir fry and a Boca burger, watched an hour of LotR:TTT (yes, more evidence of evil file sharing) and and then surfed some and wrote up the news items below, and bang, it's dawn.  So I posted a couple of news items on the D2 site with the first interesting new v1.10 info in about 6 months, and now it's 8am and I meant to be asleep about 4 hours ago, and I'm still not sleepy.  I have to get up for work Thursday at noon, and if I go to bed at about 9am, I'm going to be hurting.

I am so bad at ever going to bed early.  Just can't stand to lie there and try to go to sleep when it's dark out, and I could be writing.

On a blogging/travel note, the grand, long-awaited trip to SF/Malaya visit has been postponed again, but for the last time.  She has signed all the papers for the condo she's buying, and will have the keys to begin moving in within a week.  But since I was to be arriving there May 6th, and she didn't want me coming to an unfurnished condo, we had to back it up two weeks, to my next work vacation.  So now I'm going the 20th-26th, and all should be wonderful.  *he said, forcefully*

The delays just make our luh... luh... like grow stronger.  Or something.

Seriously, all is fine, we're getting along very well, and I'd write more about it but I would begin to sound very corny and sappy, and I only do that for Malaya's ears.

As an antidote to the sappiness, here is an unedited (other than some typo/capitalization fixes) ICQ transcript between me and a friend yesterday.  Despite being just 18, he is quite bright, and one of the very few people I know who I can go full out sarcasm and double-meaning speech to, and have him get it all. And give it back as well.  This is all tongue in cheek humor, of course. I put him in purple, just to make it easier to follow who is saying what.

Me: You sleep too much. you should cut back on the heroin.

Him: Finals week :p

Me: Whatever. you should be drunk by now, it's almost noon.

Him: Bah.  Circuits exam at 11:30

Me: Go pry out your motherboard and stare at it for a while. that'll help.

Him: Nah I'm going to ace it. I have the highest score in the class.

Me: For now.

A debate I have with my imaginary GF all the time: Are you smart, or is everyone else just stupid?

Him: In this case? Everyone else in the class is just sort of below average

Me: So they're stupid then.

She never agrees when I say she's smart, she
just thinks everyone else is stupid. I guess
it depends on if you grade life on a curve or
not.

Him: Yeah girls do that a lot. I liked this girl in high school and she was a genius, but she would never admit it. she's at Vassar now like, studying neuroscience and writing better music than i ever will

Me: Probably sucks better cock than you too.

In Malaya's case, she's just deeply cynical about human stupidity. Which she has every right to be, since there's so little evidence of it in the modern world.

Him: Right. This girl I liked is gay. She likes to make her own rules about things, including sexuality.

Me: Okay, then she eats better pussy too.

You might as well just become a monk.

Oh wait, you're going to engineering school.  Same thing.

Him: Yeah, exactly =)

Whenever I go back home I'm so afraid of seeing her. She's so much better than me

Me: Knock her down and sit on her. Show her that men are bigger and stronger, and no matter how much hairy dyke pussy she gets, that will never change.

Unless of course she's bigger than you are
too?

Him: No she isn't, she was a dance major in my high school.

So at least he has some hope remaining.  Even though he's sort of Asian and therefore undersized for knocking down and sitting on girls who need to be knocked down and sat upon.

Why must life be so complicated at times?

few interesting news articles.

¤ I mused briefly yesterday on how the 9/11 events would have been seen by right wing types if Gore had been president, rather than Bush. In an odd bit of synergy, Ted Rall's newest editorial is on that very topic, and goes about 50 miles further than I did with it.  He basically details the last 2.5 years of Bush's actions exactly, but has Gore doing them, and the media and Republicans reacting as they did to everything Clinton did. I have to say this is a brilliant bit of satire and sarcasm.

A few of the best quotes:

Few political observers anticipated the widespread resentment that followed Al Gore's controversial assumption of the presidency in December 2000. "The U.S. Supreme Court merely adhered to the Constitution when it refused to hear Bush's appeal of the Florida ruling," notes a Harvard law professor now living in exile in France. "Federal courts have no jurisdiction over election disputes, which in the United States are a state matter." Although the ensuing recount ultimately gave Florida to Gore by a comfortable thousand-vote margin, Republicans refused to accept the results. Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh continued to refer to Gore as "Vice President Gore" and "Resident-in-Chief" and listed the time remaining in Gore's first term as "days left in captivity for the American people."

Gore's polls, already falling due to the lagging economy, hit rock bottom in the weeks after the September 11^th attacks. "People rightly blamed the Commander-in-Chief for not doing anything to intercept planes that had clearly been hijacked and for ignoring warnings of an imminent threat," says a GOP pollster.

Choosing to ignore Pakistan's role as chief host and financier of Al Qaeda, Gore waged a strange too-little-too-late bombing campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden escaped.

In 2002 The New York Times revealed that oil companies with close political connections to the Democratic Party had schemed with Gore to run an oil pipeline across Afghanistan from Turkmenistan to Pakistan--and that this was why he had attacked Afghanistan and cozied up with the Pakistani dictatorship.

Incredibly, the next move of the man dubbed "Gore out of control" by Fox News was to declare an unprovoked war on Iraq. "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, he's an evil dictator and he's a threat to world peace," Gore railed to a joint session of Congress.

¤ Interesting article about a homeless guy with clinical depression who decided he'd rather go to jail than back on the streets, after he was turned away from a homeless center due to lack of space.  So he walked around for a while, saw a cluster of banks, went into one, and said it was a robbery.  The teller got all nervous but handed him all the money she had in the drawer, pulling out over $3000.  He took just one $20 bill, and asked her to pull the alarm.  Once she did he walked outside and sat down on a bench to wait for the police to show up.

The case is unusual since obviously the guy wasn't trying to hurt or rob; he actually wanted to go to jail at the time since he was in a very low mental state.  But since he's been getting treatment since then and is not a danger to society, why put him in jail at great cost to the tax payers?  Obviously he did the crime, but since juries in the US can decide whatever they want, and if they don't agree with the law or circumstances, they can say "not guilty" regardless of the evidence.  That's how Kevorkian got off so many times on the assisted suicide trials, for example.

The article details his behavior before and after the arrest, his treatment for problems and the rehabilitation he is undergoing now, and even the jury deliberation. It ends with them deciding that he was guilty, and the judge weighing the sentencing he should receive, with his lawyer asking for clemency since he's improved a lot in his mental state and is non-violent and in a treatment program, while the DA wants 17 years in prison, since... well since prosecutors want everyone to be in jail for as long as possible, regardless of the actual circumstances.

So what happened? The follow up two days later explains, and the story has what I'd consider a happy ending.

A $20 bank robber was sentenced to 10 months in prison Monday, but is not expected to serve any prison time.

Gardie Shine already served 207 days in prison waiting for his trial. U.S. District Judge Napoleon Jones Jr. ordered that he serve the rest of his sentence at St. Stephen's Cathedral Church of God in Christ, where he is already living.

Prosecutors had wanted Shine to serve more than 17 years in prison because of his lengthy prison record.

However, Shine's defense attorney Frank Mangan argued that his client only committed the crime because he believed he had nowhere to turn as a mentally ill, homeless man.

Think I'm a bleeding heart and wish he were in prison, since incarceration is the solution to all of society's problems? Well, since the whole thing took place in San Diego, if he knifes me for $20 next time I'm downtown, I'll know I was wrong.

¤ Article about Libya being willing to admit to "civil responsibility" for the Pan Am 103 flight that exploded over Lockerbie Scotland back in 1988, and pay massive penalties/reparations to the relatives of those killed.  In exchange for the removal of UN and US sanctions against them.

The family of each of the 270 victims will receive $10 million in three installments, he said.

After a first payment of $4 million, U.N. sanctions on Libya would be lifted, and after a second $4 million payment, U.S. sanctions would go, he said. After the final installment, Washington would have to remove Libya from its list of states sponsoring terrorism, Shalqam said in a telephone interview.

It's an interesting case.  Libya sponsored the terrorism, the explosion was tracked back to terrorists from Libya, and when they were proven to be in Libya, they were handed over to international police.  But how does the world government, the UN, act against an entire nation that has sponsored terrorism?  I mean you can't invade them, that would just be killing more people, and as in most wars, it's always the innocent civilians who suffer the most. So there are trade bans and conditions to be met.

A U.N. Security Council resolution passed in 1992 banned arms sales and air links to Libya to force it to hand over the two Libyans indicted in the Lockerbie bombing. After the men were handed over in 1999, the sanctions were suspended, but not lifted.

In 2001, a Scottish court convicted a Libyan intelligence agent, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, of the bombing and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Libya surrendered al-Megrahi for trial after lengthy negotiations. A second Libyan was acquitted.

Under U.N. resolutions, Libya must acknowledge responsibility for the Dec. 21, 1988, explosion, pay fair compensation, renounce terrorism and disclose all it knows of the explosion.

I don't think anyone ever thought that they would really meet the conditions.  You might think that with Bush sending the US army running around the Middle East on one adventure after another, maybe that got the Libyans worried enough to try to get off the shit list?

I don't think so, they agreed to these terms many months ago, and this has been in the negotiation stage for years.  Plus as a check of a map will tell you, Libya is in Africa, not the Middle East, and perhaps more importantly, they don't have any huge oil reserves 

Call me cynical if you must.

¤ Yet another pedophile (well, underaged teen girl) news story, with a funny twist.  The horny man seeking cyber and then an in-person hook up was talking to a spoofing male cop, as usual.  Irony abounds:

• The would be chickenhawk was the Elmwood Place police chief.
• Had been the chief for just eleven days when he got busted for using a work computer to troll for jail bait.
• The best part?

Alley, who was computer officer for the 2,700-resident village before becoming chief, resigned Wednesday - the same day deputies seized the department's three computers.

Village Council will hold a special hearing next week to discuss the issue. But Philpot said one of the biggest concerns is getting the computers back.

The temporary loss of the computers will not affect everyday police work, but "we can only go without them for a short time," Philpot said.

Yes, all of their computers were impounded as part of the case evidence.  That is just pathetic.

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