Archive October 2010

When I'm purely hypothetically a politician running for office, I'm going to backhandedly subsidize someone to print a little short-run newspaper with an official-sounding name that contains an article which says something like "(Political Opponent X, Political Opponent Y, all other opponents) are all politicians. Some nasty completely unrelated person commits violent crimes and another unrelated person drowns sacks of kittens."

Then in my attack ads on TV, I will say "(political opponent X) [...] commits violent crimes. (Florida Observer, Jan 2010)" and "(political opponent Y) [...] drowns sacks of kittens. (Florida Observer, Jan 2010)".

Since the newspaper doesn't say anything defamatory, they're not doing anything illegitimate. Since my attack ads are genuinely quoting from a source article, they're not doing anything illegitimate either. Flawless plan. This idea brought to you by the attack ads on TV that probably already do basically this, and by the number "23 million dollars". [15:27] [0 comments]

An amusingly fitting pair of not really related things from today:

First, I finally got my scythe and a decent sharpening stone together for an attack on the waist-high finger-thick weeds of our garden. In this situation I can't recommend a scythe highly enough - a weedwhacker/strimmer makes almost no progress at the cost of a lot of noise and aggravation and shooting foliage crap up into your face and needing its stupid wire changed constantly. A lawnmower jams and chokes if you can even get it to go into the weed stack at all. A scythe, appropriately sharpened, does about three hours of weedwhacker work in about twenty minutes, quietly and cleanly, and instead of feeling like fighting against a frustrating contraption it feels like a free trip to the gym. On the down side, it does cost about twice as much as a decent weedwhacker.

And thing two, I watched Machete, which was surprisingly fun. Afterwards, in recommending it to someone, I went to say "it's like a cross between Robocop and..." before realising that it is actually almost identical to Robocop. The characters and relationships are all the same, the over the top comedy gore is the same, the thinly veiled political commentary is the same. The only differences are trivial things necessary to remove the sci-fi setting, eg. in Robocop the hero dies in the opening scene, to create the superhero. In Machete, since that wouldn't work, it's the hero's partner that dies. Also trivially different, there are two female companions in Machete to Robocop's one. But basically, if you like Robocop, and that isn't solely based on the sci-fi-ness of it, then you'll like Machete. [01:58] [0 comments]

Friday 8 October 2010

There's an upcoming election for Florida's governor, and this leads to all TV ads being one of two things:

1. "Democrat candidate says she is against wasteful spending and corruption, and accuses Republican candidate of it, but she wasted X amount of money doing bla bla, and did corrupt thing Y."

2. Republican candidate says he is against wasteful spending and corruption, and accuses Democrat candidate of it, but he wasted X amount of money doing bla bla, and did corrupt thing Y."

It's the classic "Kang or Kodos" voting situation as usual, and makes me feel like I should run for something-or-other as an independent in some future election. My campaign message would be "the other candidates claim to be against corruption, but they do all the corrupt things their opponent accuses them of. I will only be half as corrupt as they are! Obviously I still want something out of this position of power, and I'm going to exploit it, and you - all the elected politicians do. But I will exploit you less than all the other options do. Vote Raven for something-or-other 2014." [19:42] [0 comments]

Monday 4 October 2010

Our wedding cake is entered into a cake contest. Tell them it is a 10 because apparently "who has the most friends" is how fair merit-based voting is done these days. Also get all your friends to tell them it is a 10, and get all your enemies to tell them it is a 10, and use public computers to tell them it is a 10 an extra time, and use your hacked botnets to tell them it is a 10 thousands of times. Cheers! [11:54] [2 comments]