Okay, so Mark at A Bunch Of Us may have posted this clip first, but that’s only because he turned 37 before I did. However, I swear on the Little Baby Jesus that I didn’t get the idea from him, and had independently thought of this weeks ago. Weeks, I tell you!

So yeah, it’s my birfday. There’s a thunderstorm going on outside, and I’m watching The Holy Grail while sipping slowly and respectfully on a Dogfish Head 120 Minute IPA. Yes, at 10 o’clock in the morning. Your point?

And now, onto the presents:

• The Special Lady Friend got me this and this. My father bought me this. Quite the haul.
• The Celtics made the NBA Finals for the first time in 21 years! I’m not sure if this qualifies as cooler than the Red Sox throwing a no-hitter on my wedding day, but it’s damn close. Hopefully they’ll kick the living crap out of the LA Lakers, a franchise that ranks behind only the Yankees on the Loathesome Scale.
• A new, high-end Belgian beer cafe just opened here in Portland. Just check out this draft list! Yeah, we’ll be heading there tonight.

And there was much rejoicing.

Last month, in response to terrifying news that monkeys had developed the ability to make their own weapons, we posed the grim question “Today, Spears; Tomorrow, Suitcase Nukes?” However, even we, while ever-vigilant against the impending subjugation of humanity by The Monkey God and his innumerable simian followers, did not in our darkest nightmares assume that their technological prowess would increase that quickly.

How very, very wrong we were!

The results were appeared in the journal Nature’s online edition on Thursday. The arm is controlled by a network of tiny electrodes called a brain-machine interface, implanted into the motor cortex of the monkeys’ brains—the region that controls movement.

It picks up the signals of brain cells as they generate commands to move and converts those into directional signals for the robotic arm, which the monkeys eventually used as a surrogate for their own.

Christ on a stick! The monkeys are constructing robotic battle suits in which to run roughshod over us all! No doubt they got the idea from watching Iron Man. Thanks for selling us out to the enemy, you objectively pro-monkeyfascist Hollywood liberals! You’re all even bigger traitors to America than Rachel Ray!

One can only imagine how much worse the monkey invasion would have been if those America-hating Commie atheist egghead scientists had been allowed to continue their nefarious efforts to breed a “humanzee.” Thank the Baby Jesus that our own intrepid Dear Leader is at the forefront, protecting a frightened America from the imminent threat of human-animal hybrids. Bless you, Dear Leader!

(Many, many links via the feverish rants of the late, great Dr. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, beamed in via telepathic mind-meld from his whorehouse in the 23rd dimension.)

What’s daffier than daffy?

Writing a book about the future of libraries (you know, those places where they lend books to people)... and then charging twenty dollars to download it.

Who out there has the pun, the barb, the eloquent poison-pen quip, to sum up the silliness of this situation in devastating fashion? Let’s hear ‘em. Seriously, I’m tapped out. I got nothin’...

Lately, I’ve noticed that we appear to have settled into a comfortable pattern here at the ol’ bloggy blog: ie, “The World is Ending Next Tuesday After Lunch” political rants interspersed with helpful geek posts. Alrighty, then. Since today is Wednesday, it must be time for one of the latter.

It has lately come to my attention that some of you out there still use Windows. Now, as a dedicated IT professional, it is my carefully considered opinion that Windows is a worthless piece of shit and no one should ever use it for any reason at all. Everyone unfortunate enough to own a computer infected with Windows should immediately download and install Ubuntu (or some other flavor of Linux), thus instantly making their lives better forever. Seriously, there’s no conceivable rationale for why anyone should put up with Windows when better operating systems are available for free. None whatsoever.

However! I grudgingly understand that some of you may feel attached to your ol’ jalopy. Its many stalls and crashes are comfortably familiar to you, and new things are scary. Sure, someday you’ll end up in a ditch when it inevitably throws a rod or seizes up or all four tires spontaneously burst into flames…but until then, you’ll grimly press on, pouring quarts of oil into its leaking pan and applying liberal coats of Bondo and duct tape.

But today, I come not to judge. Today, I come to help. When the day comes – and it will – that your Windows install becomes so buggy, infected, or spyware-ridden that the only sane choice is to wipe the hard drive and start over, I’m here to introduce you to a nifty little piece of freeware that will make this unpleasant task significantly easier. Download and install this tool, and through the magic of slipstreaming, you can create a custom Windows cd that includes all service packs, security updates, drivers, activation codes, usernames and passwords, etc…and doesn’t include any annoying Windows components you don’t want. (Buh bye, Internet Explorer. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.)

In other words, you can pop in the install cd and then go for a bike ride. If you are the type of person who enjoys clicking “Next” thirty seven times in a row, this news will no doubt come as a disappointment to you. However, in that case, you have far more serious problems than I can solve for you.

You’re welcome.

What’s even scarier than learning that our government is selling nuclear reactors to a nation run by terrorist-supporting religious lunatics?

The idea that the country in question, which also happens to be the world’s biggest oil producer, might actually need the plants to generate power, because they’re running out of oil.

(all preceding links via Badtux)

Still think those gas prices are going to magically go back down?

Today, after a bruising, 666 year primary battle, Great Cthulhu declared victory over Elder Party adversary Yog Sothoth. A spokessquid was dispatched from Cthuhu’s Sunken City of R’lyeh to conduct a press conference announcing the nomination. Unfortunately, in a tragic error that will ultimately hasten the grisly deaths of the entire human race, Aussie fishermen captured and killed the spokessquid:

The six-metre long, 230-kilogram squid was still alive when it was netted by commercial fishermen last night.

Fisheries Victoria says the creature is being kept in a freezer and will be transferred to the Melbourne Museum.

The museum is yet to confirm whether it will be used for scientific research or put on display.

(link via Pharyngula)

No official statement was issued by the Cthulhu For President campaign in reaction to this event, but since all reporters covering the candidate were summarily dismembered and eaten, it’s safe to assume that His reaction was not a positive one.

You may have all thought us premature for endorsing Great Cthulhu’s campaign last month, before he had even clinched the nomination. In the aftermath of this grievous insult to The Elder Gods’ dignity, who’s laughing now? Our pledge of eternal servitude will buy us a few extra horrific, blood-soaked moments on Earth, laughing and gibbering insanely as the rest of humanity is slurped unceremoniously into Great Chulhu’s stomach.

Jealous much?

Cthulhu Fthagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Ia! Ia!

With Memorial Day tomorrow, Our President gets it:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Downright Christ-like in his empathy, isn’t he?

Ever since my XO laptop arrived, I’ve been tinkering with it, looking for ways to make it behave more like a traditional laptop. While the hardware on this technological marvel is neat as hell, the childlike operating system quickly grew tiresome. I looked into ways to load Ubuntu onto it, but the complexity of the process, XO’s lack of a cd drive, and small amount of storage space on the internal solid-state drive made that proposition a dicey one.

However, there is a less intensive way to make your XO grow up, one that doesn’t involve wiping out the operating system or trying to boot a second one from the flash drive: namely, you can install a new graphical interface right next to the one that already exists. The Xfce desktop, being very small and lightweight, is perfect for a machine like the XO, and detailed install instructions are already readily available on the web. I followed these, and had the new desktop up and running and most of my desired software installed in about an hour and a half. Yeah, most of the config has to be done from a command line, but you can cut and paste lines in from the website, and it only needs to be done once.

When I finished, I had a tiny little laptop that could pull in a wireless signal from anywhere, browse the web in Firefox, run Open Office, and play media from an SD card or USB drive. (Although I’m still looking for a media player that will play mp3’s, since Fedora, the underlying Linux operating system, apparently doesn’t include mp3 codecs on any of its media software.) All in all, I was pretty pleased with myself…

But then I heard a certain Snarky Penguin crowing about his brand new Asus Eee, a tiny, commercially available laptop similar in design to the XO… but with a much bigger internal drive.

So now I have Eee Eeenvy.

Found in my fortune cookie this afternoon at lunch:

“Your business will attain vast proportions.”

Awww yeahhh, baby. Vast.

So, you want to start swiftboating me before I even win the nomination, George? Okay, asswipe, have some of this.

(link via The Goat)

UPDATE: Lest the context be lost in all this, it would behoove us to remember that the person currently accusing his political opponents of “appeasement” is, um, this guy.