Yesterday, we received the following email from our good friend Cardinal Ugenesis:

As the most exciting election of my lifetime winds down, there is more than one voice that I have missed. With all the weirdness and bad craziness of this campaign, with all the red-meat hope, marbled through with fear and loathing, I should have dearly loved to have heard the nut-job ranting of Hunter S. Thompson. In the end, he was too old, crippled and bitter to live, so he ate a bullet. But Lord, what a show he missed. “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’08.” Mahalo, Dr. Thompson. Wish you had stuck around to see this.

Doc took himself out in February 2005, at a point when it looked like all hope was gone, that the Long Night of Permanent Republican Majority was at hand. I, too, wish he could have stuck around long enough to see this.

I also find myself wishing Bill Hicks was still around to witness tonight’s results. We’ll just have to content ourselves with this magnificent rant from 1992, the last time the American people rose up and drove a gang of criminal Republican scumsuckers out of the White House on their asses.

In a more sane world, the righteously brutal stomping the Republicans are taking tonight would cause the entire party to shrivel up and dissolve, as the Religious Loony Wing and Corporate Greedhead Wing turn on one another in an orgy of recrimination. However, we are probably not that lucky. Conservatism is like cancer; no matter how many tumors you cut out, the malignant cells attach themselves to a new host and begin to grow anew.

But that is a topic for another day. Now is a time to celebrate.

Boys, I hope we’ve done you proud.

Happy Yankees Elimination Day!

Yeah, I know, I’m a bit late with this one: Yankees Elimination Day officially fell on Tuesday, when the Sox beat Cleveland 5-4 to extinguish any last mathematical shred of hope the Evil Empire had of making the playoffs. (What can I say, I was on vacation.)

This year has been a bonanza for Yankee-haters the world over: not only is The Toilet That Ruth Flushed going to be smashed into rubble in a couple of weeks, but YED falls on its earliest date in 13 years! Huzzah!

Ah yes, it’s truly a great time for those of us who love America, babies, puppies, and freedom.

See, this is what I get for enjoying myself immensely at party after party over the long holiday weekend and deliberately ignoring the teevee and interwebs. It’s only now I find out that Jesse Helms is on his merry way to Hell! Damn, had I known about it at the time, the weekend would have been even more enjoyable.

Some of you may recall that, not two weeks ago, during lamentations over the passing of the great George Carlin, yours truly opined:

Vonnegut died in April of last year, and Jerry Falwell departed this mortal coil for Hell barely one month later. There’s a certain Karmic symmetry: take one of Ours, you have to take one of Theirs to balance it out.

Which means that [Pat Robertson] had best be updating his will.

Hey, I was close, wasn’t I? My prediction was prophetic; I just erred on the specific identity of the vicious old right wing scumsucker who would shortly be called home to his Dark Master.

And as for the question of how Saint Hicks felt about dear ol’ Jesse… well, you know how the Googles work, dontcha? I don’t want to spoil all the fun.

UPDATE: And for anyone who finds my exulting in the old monster’s death to be tacky… yeah.

Found in my fortune cookie this afternoon at lunch:

“Your business will attain vast proportions.”

Awww yeahhh, baby. Vast.

Is it true??? Can it really be true? Christ on a cracker, it is!

FAFBLOG IS BACK!!1!!

(Props to Keith for noticing this momentous event.)

Goddamit, this had best not be a cruel joke at humanity’s expense. Fafblog went dead, suddenly and with no warning whatsoever, almost a year and a half ago. It took me a long time to get over the loss, but I finally made it through the Five Stages of Grief and was able to go on with my life.

Now they’re back, but the cynic in me can’t help but notice that their glorious return occurred on none other than April 1st. And there’s nothing more aggravating than some would-be comedian posting a bunch of silly horseshit they don’t really mean, just because it happens to be April Fool’s Day.

There’s a special place in Hell for people like that.

At long last, the final present of Christmas 2007 has finally arrived: I hold in my hot little hands none other than an XO laptop. In fact, I’m writing this post on it!

No, my hand is not in the foreground. It really is that tiny.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the One Laptop Per Child program, the rather ambitious aim of which is to put $100 $200 laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in developing nations worldwide. For a short time last year, they ran a special “Give One Get One” promotion, wherein you could purchase one XO for yourself if you also purchased one for donation to a child in the developing world. On the very last day of the G1G1 program, yours truly, deciding he needed to both repair his fractured karma and purchase a new toy, plunked down the mad scrilla.

Last night, it finally arrived.

All the crazy stories you’ve heard about this machine are true: the screen really is visible outdoors in direct sunlight, the twin wifi antennas really can pull in a signal from a ridiculously long distance, the touchpad really can be used as a writing tablet with a stylus, it really is impervious to dust and heat, and it really does have no hard drive (all internal storage is handled by a combination of ROM and flash memory.) This is an amazingly well-designed piece of hardware.

The software, however, is another story. It’s a special, stripped-down version of Fedora Linux called Sugar, and it’s designed to be very simple for kids to use. I think it’s a little too simple, personally: installing new software is very difficult. The visual look of the GUI is like no operating system you’ve ever seen, so different in fact that it’s quite jarring. And the included web browser is just hideous: it’s slow, breaks formatting, and forget about playing embedded audio or video content.

However, all of these things are fixable. The good folks at Opera have already created a version of their browser specially modified for use on the XO, which I was able to install in just a few quick steps. And lo and behold, there are already several hacks for installing Ubuntu as an alternative operating system, to give the laptop a much more grown-up feel. (There are even rumors that the Redmond Borg Collective will attempt to shoehorn XP onto the XO, but I prefer to pretend that’s just a horrible, horrible nightmare.)

So, yeah: a qualified thumbs up. It’s not a mobile workstation, but it ain’t a toy, either. And it was cheap and it helps out kids in need. I heartily approve of both the concept and the execution of this program.

I’d say run out and buy one immediately, but you can’t. The Give One Get One ended on December 31st, and there are no plans to revive it. I am, and will always continue to be, the only person you know who has one of these babies. Ha ha!

You can still give one to a kid in a Third World country, however. So go do it, you stingy bastard! Now! What are you waiting for?

As we shovel out of the 97th snowstorm of this wretched winter and gear up for yet another Arctic blast, here’s some news to brighten your day:

The American College of Physicians wants to legalize marijuana.

So does Rick Steves.

So does the US 9th Circuit Court.

(all links via Technoccult)

And as if that wasn’t wonderful enough, there’s this:

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP)—A federal appeals court has overturned a statute outlawing sex toy sales in Texas, one of the last states – all in the South – to retain such a ban.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by as many as two years in jail, violated the right to privacy guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

It’s almost summer.

After all the non-stop paranoid pessimism I’ve thrown at you in this, the fledgling two thousand and eighth Year of Our Lord, I feel it’s my civic duty to dish out some good news.

No doubt you’ve already heard about the Indian car company that just unveiled a $2500, 50 mpg automobile.

That’s pretty awesome and all, but you know what? The very same company is working on a zero-emission car that runs on compressed air and uses no fossil fuel at all.

And just because I’m feeling generous, here are ten more things that might cause you to nurture a sliver of irrational hope that the human race and the world might possibly not be completely and irretrievably fucked.

Dear Sweet Mother of All that is Holy and Pure, our long national nightmare is nearly over. The next presidential election is now less than a year away:

It is now safe to imagine. It is now becoming increasingly easy to actually dare to think that, in less than one year’s time, Dubya will begin packing his bags, jamming into his Spongebob duffel his map of the world coloring book, English-to-English translation dictionaries, mangled pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, Bibleman action figure set and a “Mission Accomplished!” sweatshirt, and heading off to face his destiny as one of the bleakest, most morally repellent chapters in all of American history.

Obviously, the natural reaction of any sane, rational human being to such news would be to spend about a week getting rip-roaring drunk and celebrating the imminent departure of this vainglorious intellectual pygmy and his handpicked cabal of liars, thieves and killers. However, we don’t have the luxury of partying, because there’s way too much work to be done:

It will take every month and every week and every single day from the moment you read this until November 2008 to compile, to gather, to list all the names and all the horrors and all the deeply entrenched policies that are still clawing at the face of America as a result of Bush’s reign, to fully get your mind around just how deep is the disease and how widely it has spread, so we may begin to excise the policies one by one like the malignant tumors they so very much are.

While George W. Bush will soon be headed to the ash heap of history, the political party that rubberstamped his decade-long rape of the American Dream remains largely in place. They are now in the Congressional minority, but by razor-thin margins, and could easily regain both the Congress and White House if we, for even one second, make the mistake of forgetting what an unmitigated disaster their reign has been for this country on every conceivable level.

This must not be allowed.

Now is the time. The coming year will slide by rather quickly and the feeling of urgent change and upheaval will only build and it doesn’t really matter if it’s Hillary or Obama or Edwards leading the shift, because no matter who gets the nod, they will require — from me, from you, from anyone who professes to care — a roiling tidal wave of progressive momentum behind them to help them cleanse and haul away the overwhelming mountain of moral fecal matter Bush has left behind.

Mark your calendar. Set your ringtone. Take a deep breath, feel the wave build, and then dive the hell in. Right now, it’s the only option that really matters.

Bulgarian women wins the World’s Best Bottom Contest:

Beyond a 10,000-euro (14,400-dollar) cash prize, Kristina Dimitrova, 19, and 24-year-old Andrei Andrei each won a modelling contract for the company’s next international advertising campaign as well as a year-long insurance policy for their rear ends in case of injury.

Plane ticket to Sofia, Bulgaria: Priceless.