MaisonBisson

Juliusblog on Coincidence: Bush Ratings vs. Terror Alerts

Juliusblog has a chart comparing approval ratings on a timeline with terror alerts. Guess what? Juliusblog makes the following observations: Whenever his ratings dip, there’s a new terror alert. Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings. Whenever there are many unfavorable headlines, there’s another alert or announcement (distraction effect). […] » about 300 words

Now Listed in Blogshares?

I moment or two of ego-Googling lead me to Blogshares, where MaisonBisson is trading me as a penny stock. Oh well.

Cronies

A co-worker just handed me Robert Bryce’s Cronies. From the Publisher’s description: Texans are running the country — maybe the world. Now the author of Pipe Dreams examines who they are, how they got into power, and how they reward themselves and each other, often at the expense of American taxpayers. No other province holds […] » about 300 words

Fear Aint the Word For It

Mix a born again Christian who confuses Christ and God (yup, check Molly Ivins for the quote), clinical and medicated depression, several million believers and call it the Church of Bush! Fear is just the beginning.

Village Voice: Church of Bush

I started to make noise about this a few weeks ago in my story about Fahrenheit 9/11: I’m growing increasingly uneasy about the cult-of-Bush-worship that Brittany Spears exemplified in her appearance in Fahrenheit. The Greeks expected questions and debate, so did the Romans before the fall of the republic. Egyptian pharaohs, Mayan emperors, and Soviet […] » about 200 words

MySilo

Knowing that everybody wants a missile silo, bari1001 has posted his for sale on eBay (thanks to DefenseTech for the pointer). Silo World has the skinny on Titan 1 silo design, NPR did a story on missile silo homes a few years ago, though most of the silos are empty, abandoned, and dangerous. Still, there are one or two realtors that specialize in missile silos.

News: Bush Bushed

I hadn’t heard of Capitol Hill Blue until a friend forwarded this story about Bush’s paranoid isolation. First, I should say that paranoid isolation isn’t all bad. It worked well enough for ol’ Howard — “I’m not a paranoid deranged millionaire; Goddamit, I’m a billionaire” — Hughes, but then Hughes wasn’t president and didn’t think […] » about 1000 words

‘Pod Happy

The new iPod came Monday. Stepping up to it from the second generation iPod I had is amazing. Most noticeable differences so far: I can now charge from the computer and play music (in the 2g iPod, it locks the interface and flashes “do not disconnect” any time it’s plugged in to a computer), the […] » about 300 words

Things You Have To Believe To Be A Republican Today

My father forwarded this to me this morning: Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion. Trade with Cuba is wrong […] » about 400 words

Woody Guthrie On Copright

Copyfight is reporting on the infringement lawsuit threatening the creators of the 2004 presidential election parody animation that’s getting all the laughs. They’re quoting TechDirt which apparently has a quote from Guthrie himself: This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ […] » about 400 words

Apple Fusses Over Fuse

Fuse, a music TV network trying to compete with MTV by actually playing music videos done some bilboards in NYC that look a lot like Apple’s silhouette ads, but with people pole dancing and masturbating and stuff. Gizmodo came through and posted images of the ads so low brow people outside NY (like me) could […] » about 200 words

These Aren’t Cubes

Also at Gizmodo: the Volume Macropod. They’re like cubicles, but cooler. They’re mobile, but useful. Ad agency Chiat-Day made big news about giving up structured offices and such back around 1995 [CNN Story & Supervert.com story]. The point, of course, is to have people working out of cube farms because they’re cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. Problem […] » about 200 words

This Land

Greg & Evan Spiridellis oever at Jib Jab have put together a damn funny flash movie about the presidential race.

From the lyrics:

…

Kerry: “You can’t say ‘nuclear,’ that really scares me. Sometimes a brain can come in quite handy”

…

Bush: “you’re a liberal sissy”

Kerry: “you’re a right wing nut job”

Bush: “you’re a pinko commie”

Kerry: “you’re dumb as a doorknob”

Bush: “hey, you got that botox”

Kerry: “but I still won three purple hearts”

…

That last bunch of insults from the cartoon helps frame the debate: What do you fear more: an intelligent, contemplative (perhaps metrosexual) president with real military credentials, or a dumb-sounding, dumb-appearing, evil-doing, Air National Guard deserting president? Ah, just watch the video.

Life Goes On…

Sandee called me from home Friday to say she was having trouble playing music from our primary music server. Every time she selected a song iTunes complained that it couldn’t find the file. I had a plausible explanation at the time and didn’t think much of it, but Sandee was really reporting something much more serious: the complete loss of all our music.

Over the past five years or so, we’d built a collection of about 65 gigabytes of music, just under 20,000 files that could play 24/7 for over two months straight without repeating. The sense of loss was — and is — palpable.

The hard drive sounds like a vacuum cleaner sucking up pennies, so I’m not really surprised that the recovery software has failed. I’m always a strong advocate for personal backups, so more than one person has pointed out the irony that I don’t have a real backup of this data. Anyway, I’m rebuilding. I’ve recovered the contents of my iPod, I’ve got a few scattered files backed up here and there, but most of it is being re-encoded from the source CDs.

If nothing else, please back up your data.

Mapparium, Boston

Religious landmarks usually don’t interest me, but the Mapparium really is a sight to see. …The Mapparium, located within the Christian Science Publishing Society. A thirty-foot stained-glass globe room in lobby of the Christian Science Publishing Society gives one an ‘inside view’ of the world. Standing on the thirty-foot glass bridge, which traverses the diameter […] » about 300 words

You Can Take It With You: DVDs on Palm/Clie

Junglemike has an interesting post on compressing video for Palm playback at the 1src Forums (n the ClieSource Forums): This guide explains in detail how you can prepare video to watch on you Palm handheld. It [is usefull] for converting full-length 1.5-2 hour movies to be stored on even a small 128mb sd-card with uperior […] » about 200 words

Fox and Conservative Pals Out Spreading More Slander and Libel

Welcome the flacks. I don’t get many comments on stories here at MaisonBisson, so I was interested when I found a comment to my story about the Outfoxed documentary just an hour after I’d posted it. Here’s my theory, and it’s supported by stories in Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media and Al Franken’s Lies: conservative […] » about 1200 words

OutFOXed

OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism is out on DVD and VHS now. Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a “race to the bottom” in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s […] » about 300 words

Another Military Family Against Bush

Another Military Family Against Bush bumper stickers and other products available. Another Military Family Against Bush Value T-Shirt Another Military Family Against Bush Long Sleve T-Shirt Another Military Family Against Bush Frisbee Another Military Family Against Bush Mug Another Military Family Against Bush Big Mug Another Military Family Against Bush Messenger Bag Another Military Family […] » about 200 words

Cheap Food, Cheap Labor

I’ve found myself in a number of conversations about food safety lately. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal comes up regularly, but I keep wanting to mention Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America. Why? Because Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose did such great job explaining the political context […] » about 300 words

Old News, Big Story

Google just lead me to Wage Slave Journal where I found an August 2003 story about American casualties in Iraqi. It turns out Fox News was comparing Iraq to California and claiming the former was safer than the latter. Fox can’t do math, but others can. Should anybody ask, you should know that if Californians were dying at the rate US soldiers in Iraq are, the governator would be facing 385 deaths per day. Or, at least that’s what it was a year ago. The death rate has risen since then.

…and civilian deaths are just abominable.

DRM Snuffs The Constitution

TeleRead brought me this story about a copy protected version of the US Constitution that’s now selling on Amazon. Among the restrictions: it can only be printed twice a year. For those who don’t understand the irony already, the US Constitution is in the public domain in so many ways it’s funny, yet a commercial […] » about 300 words

Fahrenheit 9/11

We expect Fox News And the Washington Times to hate it, but the reaction from the left seems to prove the old adage that a liberal wouldn’t join his or her own side in an argument. My own arguments against it relate to how little new information it revealed. The audience at the show I […] » about 300 words

More Japanese Ice Cream

I got all excited about some unappealing Japanese ice cream flavors when I found the story in Mainichi Daily News a while ago. I thought the lineup of fish, octopus, squid, ox tongue, sweet potato, fried eggplant, crab, corn, rice, wasabi, shrimp, eel, noodle, chicken wing, miso, and cactus flavored ice cream had everything pretty […] » about 200 words

More About Clie TH55

PalmZone has a nice story about the TH55 with a number of links to software, updates and more information. What everybody should appreciate is the link to the Clie Movie Recorder. I thought I was so smart in an earlier story when I linked to the Google query I used to find this file. That […] » about 100 words

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a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about