SemiConscious Dot Org

So, um, when your job primarily involves talking on the phone all day to people who are going through one of the most stressful experiences of their lives, it goes without saying that skrieking, ear-splitting bursts of static and constant, random disconnects are not helpful.

Hello, Fairpoint Communications! Three fucking days of this torture, and no sign of a technician. They’ve already told us they fixed it once. Fittingly, the phone call in which they announced this to us was overwhelmed by static and disconnected.

Gosh, who could have ever figured that a company buying up all of the phone lines in a three state area, effectively forming a monopoly, and laying off or outsourcing a ton of employees would cause a reduction in service quality?

Well, pretty much everybody… except, of course, for the state regulators who approved this clusterfuck. Hopefully, whatever payoffs you received were worth it, lizards.

And hey, what do you know? Fairpoint is in serious trouble, filing bankruptcy while simultaneously hiring a new CEO for a shitload of money and continuing to spew happy bullshit about how everything is still hunky-dory.

Shocking.

(UPDATE: 3pm) The Fairpoint technician finally showed up! He went into the phone closet, fiddled around for 15 minutes, left without leaving a note or telling anyone what he had done, and lo and behold! The static/feedback/disconnect problem is now worse. Fairpoint Communications has now been officially added to my “Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers” list. The Revolution is coming soon, cobags…

Hey, kids, remember the early Oughts? Specifically, the time frame from say, oh, roughly September 12, 2001 through late 2005 or so? Remember how the defenders and apologists for George W. Bush spent that entire half-decade loudly questioning the patriotism of anybody who dared criticize any facet of DubYa’s foreign or domestic policy? (The phrase “Why do you hate America?” seems to ring a bell, for some reason.)

Remember those folks?

Yeah.

Yes, you heard that right: a guest and host on Fox News opening pining for a large-scale terrorist attack on American soil, essentially because such a horrific attack will allow them to…well, you can probably guess where this one is heading.

Well, it looks like yours truly is going to officially be a bonafide liberrian again. Today, I met with my boss and got the green light to move ahead with setting up an OPAC for our organizational library. Originally, I had planned on using a service like LibraryThing or Biblios.net to host the catalog, but have increasingly moved towards installing a full-fledged OPAC on a hosted server. I investigated all of the open source catalog options, but have finally settled on Koha. It appears to be the most robust and well-supported of the open source options out there, and there’s already a community of libraries here in Maine who use it.

The only remaining question is where to host this catalog. I’m trying to get it online as cheaply as possible, but I hear ominous rumors that Koha doesn’t work on shared hosting plans (ie, the cheapest plans) and I may have to go with a dedicated web server, which is significantly more expensive. Another option is to contract with someone like Liblime and let them take care of the hosting and tech support.

Anyone out there use Koha? If so, do you host it in-house or pay someone else to do it? What are your impressions of the software? Does is work on shared hosts, and if not, any recommendations for an open source catalog that would?

Not only does this dude have the pipes of a classic metal shouter, but he’s actually younger than Mr. Dio to boot! Better watch it, Ronnie, this young punk may just take your job…

(Thanks to Toft for the original link)

Hmmmm…...SATAN??!?!!??

A financial firm in Latvia is offering 90 day loans with no collateral except your immortal soul. Kontora doesn’t require a credit check or proof of employment, only a signed document agreeing that the company owns your soul if you fail to pay and that the soul in question is a “previously unmortgaged property.” The loans are also subject to a one-percent-per-day interest rate.

Something tells me Bill Gates might have a problem when that startup loan he took out for Microsoft finally comes due.

(UPDATE: 6/30) Further incontrovertible evidence of the Microsoft/Lucifer connection.

As you may have guessed from Monday’s post and from my latest poll, your boy ain’t in a very good mood. Spending day after day counseling people who are filing bankruptcy, losing their homes, businesses, and possessions, is starting to wear on me. The fact that so many of them are losing everything because they had the bad sense to get sick in the United States of America is infuriating.

And last week, when the Special Lady Friend injured her ankle, our inability to afford insurance meant we had to visit the emergency room to x-ray the foot and make sure it wasn’t broken. After seeing the bill for this visit…well, let’s just say that the next Republican or Glibertarian who refers to universal health care as “socialism” or “government-rationed health care” in my presence is going to have the emergency room bill stapled to their forehead. Preferably with a nail gun.

So yeah, I feel that people like this and this and this should be treated as the criminal scumbuckets they so obviously are. Wicked sorry if that’s too harsh for you.

On a slightly different topic: If that Street Sweeper Social Club clip from Monday’s post got your blood boiling, here’s some other protest music you might enjoy:

Gallows – Grey Britain
Angry, anarchist punk in the finest tradition of the Sex Pistols, Clash, and (especially) Minor Threat and Black Flag.

Mr. Lif – I Heard It Today
Protest hip hop has gotten depressingly scarce since Public Enemy drifted out of mainstream consciousness, but this guy’s picked up the torch…or, as the case may be, pitchfork. He really doesn’t like bankers.

The Felice Brothers – Yonder is the Clock
Music reminiscent of Basement Tapes-era Dylan, with lyrical sentiments straight from the Woodie Guthrie playbook.

A giant of American culture has left us:

An uncharitable or undiscerning critic might say McMahon had an easy job: Laugh at the boss’ jokes, read a few cue cards, sell a little dog food, cheerfully absorb whatever cracks are made at his expense, slide further down the couch as the evening’s guests arrive. (Phil Hartman’s “Saturday Night Live” impression of him—the over-hearty laugh, the booming “You are correct, sir”—has replaced the actual McMahon in the minds of a couple of generations of viewers.) But the way McMahon told it, that was the point: “My role was to make him look good while not looking too good myself,” he wrote, and “to get Johnny to the punch line while seeming to do nothing at all.” Carson, for his part, left the air saying, “This show would have been impossible to do without Ed.”

There is a kind of genius in knowing how to live with a genius. Did anyone want to grow up to be Ed McMahon? Maybe not. (Though I would rather be Illya Kuryakin than Napoleon Solo.) But they also serve who only sit and laugh—and cry “Hey-yo!” once in a while. Of all the things Ed provided Johnny, continuity was perhaps the most meaningful: Guests came and went; wives came and went; the world turned. But where there was Johnny, there was always Ed, the witness, the audience, one of us.

I thought of posting a clip of Hartman bellowing “YEEEEEEESS!!!” during one of his many Ed impressions back in the day, but then I figured it would sound like I was celebrating his death, and then I remembered that Hartman is also dead, so it just seemed like bad Karma all around.

So have this one instead. HIYO!!!

Yo, this one goes out to AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Stanford Financial, and our boy B-Mad. We haven’t forgotten the credit card companies and the oil companies either.

This one’s for y’all.

And just in case you couldn’t make out the lyrics to that song, here they are!

Now you tumble and fall
Down your grand marble stairway
May the caviar pâté you were eating
Block your airway
May your manservant deliver
The Heimlich, with honor
May this make you vomit on your dolce gabbana
May your wife’s worried face show her horrific expression
May you realize she’s not worried, that’s just Botox injections

May all the commotion cause you to crash the chandelier
and propel into your rear the sharp diamonds from debeers
May your Ferrari break down
May your chauffeur get high
And smash up your stretch rolls
Up on rodeo drive
Off the breaking backs of others
Where you got all your bucks
Till we make the revolution I just hope your life sucks

All my people in the place put your fist in the air
All my damn motherfuckers get up out of your chairs
All my real down peoples we got love for you here
Except for that motherfucker right there!
Get’em!

wo ohohoh
wo ohohoh
wo ohohoh oh
100 little curses

May your champagne not bubble
May your pinot be sour
May that white stuff you snorting be 96% flour
May the famous rapper you bring
To your daughter’s sweet sixteen
Get some pride and walk out, as if born with a spleen
May the death squads you hire be bad with instructions,
and by mistake be at your mansion with the street sweepers bustin

may this make your parties guests forsake white russians
dive behind the chimney all cryin and cussin
may your chef be all pissin in the bisque in the kitchen
may I assume your autobiography is filed under fiction
cuz off the breakin backs of others is where you got all your cash
Till we make the revolution I hope your life sucks ass

All my people in the place put your fist in the air
All my damn motherfuckers get up out of your chairs
All my real down peoples we got love for you here
Except for that motherfucker right there!
Get’em!

Here’s the official video, if you want something a bit clearer. You know, to appreciate all the subtle nuances.

Dear Seattle Peeps,

It’s been almost two years since I left your drizzly environs, but since moving back East, I’ve tried to keep my finger on the pulse of a place I consider my second homeland. I’m connected, you know? I hear things. And not all of the things I’ve heard recently are good. Do you want the good news first or the bad news?

Ok, good news it is:

Thanks to the Herculean efforts of our good friend Kables, the Emerald City is now immeasurably safer from the imminent threat of zombie attacks. This is no small matter. Already, the rising tide of Undead has claimed victims in cities such as N’awlins and NYC. Seattle peeps will be at the forefront of the Zombie Resistance movement. Wolverines!
(all zombie links stolen from Kables)

Unfortunately, however, if certain dire new theories are true, all of that preparation could be moot:

Is a supervolcano brewing beneath Mount St Helens? Peering under the volcano has revealed what may be an extraordinarily large zone of semi-molten rock, which would be capable of feeding a giant eruption.

(snip)

If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park.

Every few hundred thousand years, such chambers can erupt as so-called supervolcanoes – the Yellowstone one did so about 640,000 years ago. These enormous eruptions can spew enough sunlight-blocking ash into the atmosphere to cool the climate by several degrees Celsius.

For those of you who may not have been alive at the time, here’s a quick refresher on what happened the last time a supervolcano erupted. (Short version: it would create a climate very conducive to zombies.)

Run for your lives, people. Flee Seattle and the doomed Northwest before it’s too late! Come to the East, where you will be free from the danger of colossal natural catastrophe and…umm…what was I saying?

When I posted those oh so exciting pictures of my fledgling garden last month, I promised updates. No doubt, you’ve all been on the edge of your seats since then, eagerly awaiting more thrilling photos of plants. Well, here you go! You’re welcome.

Full set nyah.