SemiConscious Dot Org

I’m getting married tomorrow.

TOMORROW.

Gulp.

Last week, the government of Australia released a filtering program with which its citizens could protect their precious children from the scourge of internet porn.

And then a 16 year old kid hacked the filter in half an hour.

Total cost to the Australian taxpayer for this software that was rendered useless in 30 minutes? 84 million dollars.

One might hope there’d be a lesson for the authors of CIPA in all this, but somehow, I doubt they’re listening.

On Sunday, Alberto “Rape Rooms” Gonzalez, the most incompetent Attorney General in the nation’s history and a man who actually made me pine for the days of John “Cover Up the Boobies” Ashcroft, resigned, joining a long list of rats who’ve jumped off the sinking ship since November 2006.

Yet another self-hating Republican closet case was caught soliciting sex in a public bathroom. This is going to make the “Teh Gay Agenda Is Seducing Ur Children!” crowd soooo mad… or would, if they ever, even once, held one of their own up to the moral standards they expect from everyone else.

Later this week, Dear Leader is heading down to N’awlins to dance a little jig on the corpse of the city his administration killed. Not surprisingly, the itinerary for his tour is not being made public. Rumors that he’s planning on calling Heckuva Job Brownie out of retirement to award him the Medal of Freedom are unconfirmed at this time.

Wanna feel old in a hurry? It happened to me on Friday, as I sat in the employee break room at the ol’ liberry, eating lunch. I leafed through the pile of magazines on the table to find some reading material, and uncovered the August issue of Rolling Stone. And there, on the cover, I read the news that instantly made my bones feel brittle with age:

Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction is 20 years old.

The world has changed a lot in 20 years, but Appetite remains a king-hell monster. The third-best album of the entire 1980’s (trailing only Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Slayer’s Reign in Blood, but you knew that already) it singlehandedly began the long-overdue task of destroying the LA hair band scene (a task completed with crushing finality by Nirvana four years later.)

After one spin through its ugly, brutal tales of sleaze, drug abuse, and depravity, the hundreds of makeup-plastered poodlehairs who infested the top of the album charts before its arrival instantly seemed ridiculous and silly. After listening to Axl howl about overdose, death, and urban violence in that teeth-rattling shriek of his, who could ever take Poison and Bon Jovi seriously again? Answer: nobody.

The anger and desperation that fueled Appetite’s anthems would be impossible to maintain once Gn’R became the biggest band on the planet, and Axl’s rampaging ego and multiple personality defects certainly didn’t help. The monstrously bloated Use Your Illusion twin albums took over four years to complete, and the band dissolved in rancor a couple of years later.

Axl still tours under the Guns N’ Roses moniker (despite having fired all the other original members years ago), and rumors persist, sixteen years on and counting since the band’s last release, of another opus in the works. But if it ever sees the light of day, it will almost assuredly suck, and it will definitely not come close to matching Appetite’s brilliance. That album stands alone as the band’s crowning achievement, one of a handful of defining albums for an entire decade, and the soundtrack to a million high school keg parties.

And hey, if your band only gets remembered for one thing, you can’t do much better than that.

If you’re wracking your brains, trying to figure out what to get me, any of the items on this list will do quite nicely.

Aw hell, who am I kidding? Why torture yourself trying to choose between them? Just get me one of each, and we’ll call it good.

(link via The Authoritah)

Offered without comment.

BUENA PARK – The pastor of First Southern Baptist Church fired off an email to supporters this week saying they should pray against two adversaries by reciting a lengthy Bible passage that includes the phrase, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.’’

The adversaries are members of a watchdog group that had sent accusations to the IRS that Pastor Wiley Drake was illegally using church funds to endorse a potential presidential candidate.

Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State accused Drake of illegal electioneering for using church letterhead to write an endorsement for Republican Mike Huckabee.

“In light of the recent attack from the enemies of God I ask the children of God to go into action with Imprecatory Prayer,” Drake said in his Tuesday statement. His supporters should recite Psalms 109:1-31 that also includes, “let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

On Thursday Drake, 63, said in an interview that he was not, in fact, personally asking for the death of the Americans United members, rather that the Lord fulfill His will by condemning those who are against the Christian word.

“It doesn’t matter what I want – it matters what God wants,” Drake said of his call for prayer against the group. “It’s time Americans United was put in their place. We’re asking God to do that.”

Praise be to Dear Leader, for he, far more than the rest of us mere mortals, knows the mind of God. In the boundless wisdom born of one who has power lunches with The Almighty every day, Dear Leader has seen fit to extend the grandmotherly kindness of Compassionate Conservatism to those Americans not previously so blessed.

Namely, children:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a month-long Congressional recess.

In interviews, they said the changes were aimed at returning the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said today that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children by imposing standards that could not be met.

Each year, the Department of English at San Jose State University holds the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. This competition, named after the Victorian author who penned the infamous line “It was a dark and stormy night,” rewards that individual who submits the most cringe-inducing first line for an imaginary novel. This year’s winner, Jim Gleeson of Madison, WI, cranked out the following doozy:

Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.

Runners-up, Dishonorable Mentions, and “winners” in various specialized categories are all available here. (Do not read these literary abortions right after eating. You’ll thank me later.)

Still, I can’t help but think that all of these aspiring hacks are really just fighting for second place. After all, Bill O’Reilly can generate more ghastly prose by accident than any of them can manage on purpose.

Last night, the Special Lady Friend finished up her final night as Head Sign Language Interpretor at Seattle Hempfest. She’s been doing it every year for several years, and feels so strongly about legalization that she flew back to Seattle (two weeks before our wedding!) to interpret onstage for one more year, and to make sure that the reins are handed off to her successor properly.

As if to further underscore the blinkered lunacy of keeping marijuana illegal while far more dangerous and addictive chemicals remain perfectly legal, I stumbled across this article yesterday:

A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine—and US drug policy—that we still need “proof” of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years.

Strangely enough, despite mountains of scientific evidence to the contrary, there remain millions of benighted fools in this country who see no difference between marijuana and genuinely dangerous, addictive drugs like heroin and meth and Prozac. My hunch is that there’s probably strong overlap between this group and that 30% of the American public who, despite mountains of scientific evidence to the contrary, still believe that Dear Leader knows what the bloody hell he’s doing.

Perhaps I could get a research grant to study this phenomena…

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
– Revelation 13:1

Jenna Bush is engaged to be married.

Oh, joy.

You know what this means, don’t you? Allow me to spell it out:

In the bloody aftermath of the 2060 presidential election, Damien Mephistopheles Azathoth Belial Nyarlathotep Prescott Bush slithers into the Oval Office. After pausing briefly to gaze out his window at the smoldering remains of Washington, Bush (or “D.B.” to his Christian Right admirers) picks up the phone, sends an aide down to the deli for a bucket of sauteed baby heads, and orders the National Guard to begin rounding up and exterminating the few thousands of Americans brave enough to have voted against him in the previous fall’s election, despite his campaign promised to slaughter every last one of them. His prehensile forked tongue shoots out of his mouth, slapping down the button that will shortly cause nuclear missiles to rain down on Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, Paris, London, Ottawa…

In all seriousness, does this country really need another generation of the vile and despicable Bush crime family? What horrific sin did we as a nation commit to deserve this ongoing torture?