Retroactive Thursday: Bloody Murder

Part 1: Dinner

There's a (relatively) new Japanese place near work, so I figured I would give it a try.  It's replaced another place that I seem to recall was a buffet style place.  

The yelp reviews suggested getting the sashimi combo, which is what I did.  I clearly did not read the menu sufficiently, as I was soon bombarded with piles of food.

1. Edamame.  I believe these were complementary.  Not as salty as I usually like, but not bad.
2. Miso soup.  Standard.
3. Tsukemono.  I don't like pickles, so I ignored them.  Sorry.
4. Salad. The lettuce was a bit pale, but it had a good dressing.  I'm not sure what it was, and the menu describes it as "house miso dressing."  There was something sweet about it, and I kind of thought it had a pineapple-y flavor.  I was offered more dressing for it, but by that time, the rest of my food had arrived.

1. Rice.  Duh.
2. Ahi sashimi.  Not much to say on this. It's ahi.  Sweet, delicious ahi.
3. Unagi.  This can't have enough said about it.  Properly grilled, so there's crispy burnt ends.  I think this was the best unagi I've ever had.   

Part 2: and a Show

It's been awhile since I've been to the theater, but I saw that they had a "comedy murder mystery," and couldn't pass that up.

Set.

See, I told you that was the title.

Generally enjoyable, although it can be a bit too much (such as the scene where the characters realize they're being played by Americans).  A bit too much direct influence from the Clue movie, what with the closing with "Shake Rattle and Roll."

I will admit that it took me far longer than it should have to realize that they were doubling up the characters. It should have been obvious, in a kind of Superman/Clark Kent fashion.

Now I kind of want to rewatch Clue and Dark and Stormy Night.

I also had the weird experience of seeing someone who you think you know, but then don't have a name for that person, so you assume that you really don't know them.  Weird.

PUT YOUR FUCKING PHONE DOWN, ASSHOLE!

Seriously, I hope you die in a fiery car crash.

Reasons why you should die horribly, you stupid fuck:

1. Driving 12 miles an hour.  Twelve.  What the fucking fuck?
2. Why are you three car lengths behind the car in front of you at the stop light?
3. Oh, I see, it's because you're FUCKING TEXTING WHILE DRIVING YOUR CAR!
4. When I notice the yellow line on the right side of your left rear tire, I assume you're probably not trying to kill everyone in the world, so I give a little beep.  For realsies, I did a tiny single beep.
5. Five seconds pass.
6. YOU FUCKING STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING ROAD?  Does it seriously take five seconds for you to process that a horn has been sounded somewhere?
7. Yes, you very nearly scraped the fuck out of the side of that oncoming car.  Nice job, asshole.
8. I hate this light, because it's so damn long.
9. And now you turn right.  We were stopped at that light for more than a minute, with no traffic anywhere, and you decide (without signalling) that you really want to turn right.  YOU COULD HAVE DONE THAT WHEN WE FIRST GOT HERE!
10. Did you see me doing the game of charades in your rear view mirror? No, of course not, you were too busy dicking around on your phone.  Here's what I was miming:
1. Two hands together, with thumbs frantically wiggling: you doing shit on your damn phone.
2. My right hand doing an over-dramatic arc pointing down at the passenger seat: put your fucking phone down, asshole.
3. Hands back up again, this time holding an imaginary steering wheel that I'm turning back and forth: just fucking drive your stupid car.
4. Me, holding up just one finger: do one damn thing at a time, jackass.

Thursday: Adventures were had

But due to the disk failure, I now have to resync four months of pictures.  So I'm just going to delay the adventure post until tomorrow.

• Squirrels!
• Squirrels!
• Dogs!

Wednesday: "Frankly, I'm somewhat surprised that worked so well, too."

It turns out that in a bizarre feat of mathematics, for mode X of the camera, the noise signal and the standard dark current are actually simply added together.  No scaling, no polynomial transformation, no nothing.  O = A + B.  Technically A' - A + B, but whatever.  The point is it actually works like you would hope it would, but then end up cursing at it because things never work like that.

Until today, I guess.

Plus it gives me an excellent opportunity to use this picture.

• Except I don't like gluing things into my book.  I do like it when I buy used books and they have ex libris stickers inside, but that's mostly so I can internet stalk people who decided they didn't want that book anymore.  Or they're dead.  Mostly the dead thing.
• There's no way to link to this without ruining the joke.  It's a pokemon related joke.

Tuesday: new disks

I've installed them after swapping around drive cables because I'm not fucking paying $22 for a fucking sata cable when I can get two for $3 from amazon.

Formatted and all that, with UUID values that I manually set so I don't forget which one is which.  I'm rsyncing the data I did have backed up, and I've deleted the important things from the DVR with the added command to rerecord them.  I know I'm unlikely to be able to catch up on some shows (like those that were cancelled), but I can at least try to recover somewhat.

I decided against doing the RAID solution, in favor of a JBOD solution.  I think the correct failsafe method is as follows:

1. Drive 00000000-0000-0000-0001-abcdefabcdef will be the master DVR drive, and serve the main copy of the mp3s, images, videos, etc.
2. Drive 00000000-0000-0000-0002-abcdefabcdef will be rsynced daily from the master, and serve as a hot swappable replacement if the primary fails.  Since this will be structurally equivalent to the master, I can repoint the DVR just by changing the symlink.
3. If either drive fails, I immediately replace it with the current $100-tier disk.  This suggests that in a year when one of these fails, I'll upgrade to a 3TB disk.  That allows a reasonable growth in data volume.
4. Keeping them out of RAID allows me to temporarily use the full free space if I need to backup a laptop or something.  It's more flexible than committing half the free space to unused RAID redundancy.
5. The external USB drive will still get the standard backups of the "valuable" data, such as the mp3s, images, videos, etc.
6. I should probably have an offsite backup solution, but that's slightly harder without having hardware I can control remotely.  I'll continue pondering this aspect.

Also, I know I didn't zero index the drives.  Since I was able to largely recover after the previous disk failure, I'm claiming that the one that just died was ---0000-.

Friends.

Squirrel!

• Wait, so to protest people being allowed to get married, you decided to show them all by shooting yourself?  That's...that's just a really poorly thought out plan.
• I know it's overly optimistic, but I really hope this bites him in the ass.  Either way, he's pretty much screwed on this one.  Option A, he tells his constituents that he doesn't give a damn about them. Option B, he shows that he's a hypocrite.
• Helen Mirren. Again. Being awesome. Again.
• Mario dog.
• I don't have a bear perspective today, but this link does.
• Remember when I called Peggy Noonan an idiot over the weekend?  Here's more details on why that's totally true.

Monday: Further adventures in fuck fuck fuckity fuck

1. Everyone in existence decided to get gas after work today.  It's like someone had claimed a tsunami was coming again.  My car was just regular out-of-gas.  The guy in front of me decided he needed to put fancy gas into his crappy jeep.  Given that I paid $4.259/gallon for the regular stuff, that seems somewhat wasteful.
2. Bought two new nice 2TB hard drives, and then went elsewhere to buy an external HD enclosure.  
1. Since when do hard drives not contain any cables?  I now need to go out and buy SATA cables tomorrow to make this thing work again.
2. Hard drive A (the one that died a year-ish ago) is elaborately wedged in place, and will require a lot of disassembly to extract from the case.
3. Hard drive B (the one that died yesterday) slid out nicely, slid into the enclosure without too much trouble, but refuses to respond.  Based on the sounds, it seems this is the click-of-death problem, which is effectively an irreparable hardware issue.  That of course means that all those shows I hadn't watched on the DVR are gone. As is the other miscellaneous data on that drive that I hadn't gotten backed up.
3. All the grapes at the store were either brown and mushed to fuck and back, or were moldy.  Proper moldy.  WTF?
4. Some crazy old man riding his bike decided that he needed to stop in the middle of my apartment building's driveway.  Not to one side, not on the large loading dock apron area, not in the grass or on the sidewalk.  Right on top of the yellow line that denotes the lanes.  He then stared at me as I slowly eased my car around him, trying not to hit him, the building, or anything else.  Reasons this crazy old man was crazy:
1. black socks pulled up to his knees with shorts.
2. and sandals.
3. and a giant (18+ inches) floppy pseudo-fedora hat.
4. his blinking lights on his bike that were still going despite him being stopped.
5. and it still being light out.
5. I'm simultaneously hungry, and not hungry for any food I can think of.  I think I have cookies, so that might be my best option.

You have got to be fucking shitting me.  Really?  A fictional character makes actual history more real to you.  I'm...I'm just going to go lie in bed for awhile, and hope for the entire universe to go away in a false vacuum collapse.  

I didn't post this one already, right?  If I did, I'm sure this is a new caption.  "Whoa...those bricks look a bit slippery.  I'm just going to walk slowly with you under this umbrella until we get home, ok?"

• Really, Waco?  Just...wow.  Because the bible says the moon shines it's own light, it must do so.  Even when it's a new moon, and not actually bright?  I vow, that if I ever become president, I will force through legislation allowing Bill Nye to just straight up shoot people who are that dumb.  Not kill them.  Just like in the knee or something.
• I had a gif of this bear eating the camera, but it's pixelated, and a bit gross, so here's the youtube video so you can watch gross bear mouth in high quality.
• I'm torn between this being an interesting idea, and it being incredibly depressing.
• Bianca, with important facts for kids.
• So you defund higher education at the state level, and then veto their ability to raise tuition to cover expenses.
• 
• That sucks.
• Is the logic here that the government should have a tax repatriation holiday because otherwise corporations are just going to pretend they didn't earn that money and effectively evade?  As above, but Bill Nye is also able to nationalize companies for any reason he sees fit.

Sunday: Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

I'm calmly making something for dinner after a day of not doing a damn thing, when I hear a random "beep" from the computer in the living room.  Finish cooking, sit down to eat, and I see a "I/O error" on the terminal logged into that computer.  A series of futzing around later, I discover that the drive seems to have died in exactly the same way as the last one I had: randomly dies, and refuses to allow the computer to reboot while plugged in.

Fuck.  There goes all my DVR data.  Again.  Except this time, I didn't even have the chance to copy a bunch off.  I do have backups of the important stuff (photos and things like that), but if I can't get the data from these disks, I'll be starting my DVR collection over from scratch.  Wonderful.

I think my strategy is going to be to go to best buy tomorrow, and buy two disks, and either set up a proper raid array (somewhat time consuming), or do a quick rsync based A/B system.  Hopefully I can get a drive enclosure as well, and see if I can get the broken drives to respond that way.

I know frog, it could be worse.  My bathroom could be breeding Bolsheviks.

Wait, what?

• This is fucking stupid.  The followup article suggests that this is getting a decent amount of coverage, but the very fact that the state attorney would let the legal system be used to let people attempt to ruin someone's life is disappointing.  Although, it is Florida, which probably should just be sunk into the ocean.
• Tepig!
• I didn't see this the first time I was reading this page, probably because it's two years old.  Somewhat NSFW, since it's a review of a Star Trek porn, but it's worth it just for the phrase "It’s like trying to fuck an onion".

Saturday: Nothing interesting happened in the world today, so I have one damn link.

You don't count anymore, North Korea.  "Launching missiles into the sea" is functionally equivalent to "our missiles suck, and crashed into the water instead of Hokkaido."  Go read boy who cried wolf again, and contemplate structural reforms that have a chance of improving your crappy little country.

Today's sushi needed some structural reforms as well.

I like the tiny drawings next to things.  Even the ebi has a happy smile, despite his actual head being removed.

I can't tell if they're friends, or co-conspirators against the Hu-mans.

"Hi!"

• If this is true, then I support the new Mew2 design.  However, if they replace old Mew2 with new Mew2, I'm going to be unhappy.

Friday: These people need to pay some fucking attention.

Person 1: Girl walking her chihuahua with one of those retractable leashes.  Maybe it'd be a good idea to keep the leash reasonably short so it doesn't wander into traffic while you're crossing the street.

Person 2: Dad with his three kids walking through the parking lot.  Maybe it'd be a good idea to keep an eye on your kids as they run around in traffic instead of dicking around on your phone while walking twenty feet ahead of them.

Person 3: That same fucking dad, this time dicking around with his phone halfway down the ice cream aisle while those damn kids run into people as they chase each other around at the end of the aisle.

"Why would anyone buy these chairs?  They're not at all comfortable to sit in."

• Shy people.
• Peggy Noonan is an idiot.
• Whoever set up this table is an ass.
• All those scandals.

Thursday: I just realized that this crap I've been working on this week could possibly be useful sooner than I thought.

At some point, I'm just going to put all the text for a post in the title box, just to see if there's a limit to how long I can make a title.

I accidentally unplugged my laptop this morning, and it died.  This gave me a chance to finally swap over a memory stick from an old dead laptop that I've been meaning to put into this laptop for...um...looks like the oldest file on the system is from August 12, 2011.  So not quite two years.  Go me.  Good job being on top of things.

The true lesson of life.

You know that isn't a healthy meal, Jirachi.  At least Mew can claim that he "just got something to drink."  Second thought: do they have bendy straws at McDonalds in Japan? 

"Hey! I was just in the area and noticed a school bus way out here in the middle of nowhere.  Do you need assistance?  I can call my brother, he's a mechanic in Bearton, if your bus broke down.  Whoa! Cool camera, dude!"

• WTF, bunny?
• Dear Communists, you can go to Dearborn, but if you step into Kalamazoo, we will gun you down.
• Speaking of communists, here's Laurie Penny absolutely destroying a "xenophobic, sexist brony."  Yes, truly, "This is the best day EVER. LOL."
• And on the topic of infiltrating the bastions of the right wing, Texas will eventually vote Democratic.
• "White Cloud Public Schools Superintendent Barry Seabrook said Thursday allowing the pictures to appear in the yearbook would be contrary to the state’s mandate that public schools’ sex-education curricula be abstinence-based." In other news, White Cloud Public Schools Superintendent Barry Seabrook is a fucking idiot.  If you're teaching sex-education using a yearbook, you're doing it wrong.  Also: need to take a seat over there.
• Oh, I almost forgot the other hilarious story I saw today: "Toronto Mayor Rob Ford in 'crack cocaine' video scandal".  That is a proper scandal.

Wednesday: So it turns out my algorithm isn't exactly "novel"

But that's ok, because when I finally got it to work (fuck you, cfitsio, for storing data in a stupid manner), it became immediately clear that this was probably going to work.  I think this means that this week I've solved two major problems that have been around for years.  Problem one seems to be definitely solved, with my test cases immediately showing improvement.  I'm not sure how well it'll work for historical data, as we don't have the right images to do this correction for those, but maybe I can construct an estimate.

Problem two is where I came up with what seemed to be the correct algorithm.  There's noise, it's confined to certain regions of the FFT power spectrum, so that should be removable by doing some sort of smoothing over the peaks that contain the power for the noise.  Easy.  Turns out someone already wrote a paper suggesting that method, which I didn't find until after I had my implementation.  Oh well.  Still, the initial test suggests that it's probably going to help solve problem two.

Given that the time budget for these two problems was something like a month, this has been a remarkably productive week.

Really? 

"Dash dash dash dash FUCK! WET BRICKS!"

Well.  Thanks, Lois. Now I have to go buy this movie, I guess.

• Yes, Julie, this is exactly the kind of thing I like to read.
• Pat Robertson, still a fucking moron.
• That's unfortunate.

Ok, WTF?

I bought some pineapple juice last week.  It's been sitting there unopened, because I also bought a thing of lemonade, and that sounded tastier at the time.

I admit that I might have been thirsty while buying groceries last week.

In any case, it's this juice:

This is really happy to point out that it's organic.

I just had a drink of it, and it's super thick.  Almost like a smoothie.  I look at the ingredients:

• FILTERED WATER (SUFFICIENT TO RECONSTITUTE)
• ok
• ORGANIC PINEAPPLE JUICE CONCENTRATE
• yep
• NATURAL GUMS (GUAR, XANTHAN AND SODIUM ALGINATE GUMS)
• WTF?

My immediate thought: what's in Dole pineapple juice?  My first search stumped me, as Dole apparently assumes you understand that their juice contains juice.  However, Dole licences their name for juices to the PepsiCo conglomerate, which is more than happy to tell you what it contains: 

• FILTERED WATER
• ok
• PINEAPPLE JUICE CONCENTRATE
• wasn't expecting generic juice to be organic
• ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C)
• because Dole hates scurvy.
• also: pirates.

WTF is wrong with the world of juice, if the soulless multinational...

What?

Really?

Oh. 

Nevermind, then.

Tuesday: Another reason why Fourier transforms are magical.

Let's pretend we have an image, and that image is just a bunch of dots:

Here are three, with different numbers and positions for the dots (randomly distributed), except for the centered single dot case.

I've chosen Gaussians for the shape of the dots, because those are simple to work with.  Now, take the 2D Fourier transform of these three images.  What does the power spectrum look like?

Those curly-cue shapes are ~20 orders of magnitude smaller than the peak.  That's what I get for plotting logarithms.

To within the floating point accuracy of my computer, these power spectra are all identical.  No matter where the dots are on the image, the power spectrum is identical.  How does that work?  Basically, the power spectrum just says "the image is this big, and the things that show up on it look like this."  All of the position information is stored in the phase information between the real and imaginary components:

The single dot has a constant phase image.  The other two have phase images that look like random noise, but are actually encoding the position information for each dot.  Next interesting thing:  what happens when we increase the size of the dots:

Bigger dots have a smaller sized dot in the power spectrum, as wider things are dominated by smaller frequency terms (also the fact you can directly calculate that F(Gaussian(sigma)) = Gaussian(1/sigma)).

Just some fun math I spent part of today playing with.

"Wow. The service here sucks."

• People are stupid.
• Not racist, but #1 with racists.
• This thing blowing up everywhere was kind of funny to read about today.
• Ice King, you know you're just going to get all donked up for this, right?
• Did I post this robot comic before?  Go read it again.  Robots.

Monday: I have an enormous headache

It may be partially due to me looking at pictures like this all day:

It turns out that for the one chip of the detector, this is (a fast model) of the underlying noise.  It's amazing what you can find out with Fourier transforms.  Zoom in and out to see the various modes.  As the scale changes, the aliasing allows different spatial frequencies to be more or less obvious.

"WHO DID YOU DECAPITATE!?"

I needed to get groceries today, and when I went to the mall, I decided I might as well get dinner at Arby's as well.  It turns out that despite introducing a new "Hawaiian roast beef sandwich," they've actually shut down almost all Arby's in Hawaii.  Seems like odd timing, as all the advertisements don't really make me want this new sandwich, but they at least get my brain thinking about Arby's, especially when they talk about Hawaii.

• This is worth reading.  I've never read any of his books, and I suspect I should keep not reading them.
• I support this idea, even if it has no chance of ever happening.  One concern I would have would be on inflation.  I guess things like food here should be largely unaffected, as the supply is larger than necessary.  Most places shouldn't have housing issues, either, since the fraction of homeless people isn't usually that great (and many places can simply build out, as they've been doing).  It does shift power to the workers, though, so again, no chance of ever happening.
• "its design suffers from having too many on/off ramps, short distanced on-ramps, and on-ramps that enter the freeway almost immediately before an off-ramp (opposite of current design standards)." It's like I wrote that entry (I didn't).
• I kind of want a Charmander cake now.
• I assume he changed after the flight?  Or it's staged, yes, but still.  I'm also probably not supposed to point out that she's wearing a clone trooper helmet, either.  These are things that I notice.
• Statistics.
• If you get it, good. If you don't, enjoy the tiny sketch of a silly chicken.
• I think I have a tag specifically for cases like this.

Sunday: yadnuS

It's hard to follow up a long elaborate post with a crappy one.  However, I brought a bear, so that kind of helps.

"Wait, why am in this picture with this plane and an ejector sear?"

"OH, FUCK YOU, YOU ABSOLUTE ASSHOLES!  I AM SO EATING YOUR FUCKING ASSES AS SOON AS I GET OUT OF HERE!"

• No, seriously, they tested their ejector seats with bears.  WTF is wrong with you, Cold War military industrial complex?
• Squirrel!
• Boring post about how raising tax rates would actually help a lot, probably, based on the tricky science of "looking at what happened in the past."
• Or, you know, we could try austerity and hope all the problems just kill themselves.  WTF is wrong with you, economically illiterate anarchists posing as members of Congress?

This post turned out to be significantly more depressing than I anticipated.  To balance it out: dogs dressed as other animals:

Saturday: yadrutaS

I'll be glad when this week is over, and I can use unthemed titles.  Today's would be "BBQ?"

It turns out there's actually a BBQ place in Hawaii.  Proper BBQ.  Not this, or this, or this, or this.  Like this, but better.  I'll freely admit that Dixie Grill isn't the absolute best BBQ ever, but it's certainly up towards the top.  The brisket was very good, perfectly tender and juicy.

Served on a tray covered in paper.

I went with the meat plate, because duh.  I went with the four meat, as the maximum threshold of turkey is far below that of pig and cow.  It would just be a waste of time.  Clockwise from the obligatory white bread that I ignored:

• Cornbread casserole.  Super thick cornbread, with a tasty sweet crust on the bottom and a sprinkling of cheese on top.
• Brisket.  Cut about a quarter inch thick, and tender enough to cut with my fork.
• Pork belly.  Yes, it's bacon.  Deep fried bacon if I guess correctly.  Crispy and not too heavy, and worked wonderfully with the sweeter sauces.
• Tri tip.  I would not get this again, I think.  Cut very thin, and it had a decent flavor, but it reminded me more of an Arby's roast beef.  Acceptable, but overwhelmed given the competition on the plate.
• Pulled pork.  Mine's better, but this wasn't bad.  The two things that make that true are that I rub the pork with a lot more spices than they did, and I also make sure to pull out the clumps of fat.
• Mac&cheese.  It was cheesy.

I'm not totally sure if it was the fact that I was sitting at an open air table within sight of the ocean on a tropical island, or if it was just the regular run-of-the-mill meat sweats, but after eating half of this plate, I was done.  Stuffed full of tasty meat, with enough leftover that I know what I'm doing for lunch tomorrow.

Six pack of sauce.

They make and bottle their own sauce, too, although they don't really do that great of a job cleaning the caps between uses.  They're all place based sauces, so east to west:

• Eastern Carolina.  Thin, not very flavorful, made a mess when I tried to pour it.  No thanks.
• Savannah. Mustard based. Not my type of sauce.
• Memphis.  Honestly? I've forgotten.  I kind of liked it, and I think it had a decent spice.
• Kansas City.  Too sweet.  Kind of a generic bbq taste.
• Southwest Texas.  Good enough that I bought a bottle to take home.  Heavy on the roasted pepper flavor, but not overpowering
• Hawaiian.  My second favorite.  Sweet and fruity (pineapple? guava?), but without being cloying.

I tried to find out how long they've been open, since I hadn't heard about them until about a month ago.  Yelp has reviews dating back to 2007, so...I must have just missed it.  It's run by the Auntie Pasto's people, which kind of surprised me.  I like this place far better, enough to put it on the "list of places my parents would probably like next time they visit."  I need to have shorter named lists.

I then went to target and bought new trash cans.  I've been disappointed with the ones I have, and have now switched to the "swingy-top" style.  I like them, although the back swing bit extends beyond the base, so you have to have them backwards to do the "drop trash, trash magically disappears" thing.  Today was also the day that I discovered that you can in fact change the battery in your car key, and that makes it actually unlock the car on the first push, instead of making you swear at it while walking closer, tugging on the door handle, and frantically mashing the button.  It's like magic.

• It's a bit long, but this is an important bit of economics that probably should be shared everywhere.
• Nobody likes you, Window Satan.  You're just the worst.  And would it kill you to put on a damn shirt?
• I have never seen this thing before.  From the stories, it's apparently an abomination designed to ruin birthdays.
• Puppy haet everything.
• I just liked the colors in today's Sinfest.

Friday: yadirF

"RAR!" "DOUBLE RAR!"

"My telescope has nautical themed wheels."

Thursday: yadsruhT

It turns out there was another partial solar eclipse today.  I didn't know about it until this morning, when news showed up in my twitter feed.  I am the best astronomer ever.

In any case, I didn't have a chance to make a pinhole camera to view it, so I did the next best thing: use nature to do the work for me:

Excellent!

Basically, if you have sufficiently good trees around, and they block almost all the light, but occasionally let some through, you have a bunch of automatic pinhole cameras.  It's the same idea: most of the light is blocked out, but some of it is allowed to pass through a confined aperture, and constructs the image on a screen.  Or, in this case, constructs the image on the ledge outside my office window.

• Odd that I see this thing about Time magazine being dumb on the same day I see this Onion report about Time's upcoming "Time for Adults" (unfortunately video only).
• Huh.  This makes so much sense that it's clear it will never get through Congress.  I mean, if the government made student loans at the same rate the Fed gives to banks, then the banks would be unable to compete with the government.  Who then would profit on the backs of students?
• Wait, wasn't this Elizabeth Bathory's theory?
• Elizabeth Bathory, just in case you're not up-to-date on your historical foundations of vampire stories. 
• Wow.  Those are the least inspired TV premises I've ever seen.  "This show stars X, but wait, he's Y and lives in Z! Plus, his wife is K, but she likes to L, but only after M! Isn't that wacky?"

Wednesday: yadsendeW

I was going to title this post "you're a fucking liar, and you know it," but that would break the pattern for the week.

There's a show on NPR called CounterSpin that airs every Wednesday.  It's generally on as I'm driving home from work, as is generally interesting to listen to.  It's clearly left-leaning, and although they're a bit crazy about some points that I don't totally agree with, they largely point out crappy media coverage of important news stories.  At the beginning of the show, they usually do quick news briefs, alternating between the hosts.  It always ends with Janine saying, "Thanks, Peter. You're listening to CounterSpin."

No.  You're a fucking liar, Janine, and you know it.

Do you want to know how I know?  Because you, Janine, just read the last blurb.  Peter didn't have a damn thing to do with it.

Seriously, that bothers me every damn week.

"Yeah, I think you're right.  Those campers won't be thinking to look in a tree for bears.  Then, BOOM! Bear attack. From the sky."

• Disney movie characters.
• From the sky.
• I'm sure everyone has heard, since the internet pretty much exploded when the news came out this afternoon. Allie Brosh and Hyperbole and a Half are back again.
• Fucking Republicans.

Tuesday: yadseuT

I have no more suitable pictures.

• Fuck.  I never saw any of these flavors anywhere.
• This is a really good idea.
• Squirrel girl.
• I'd forgotten this character.  I'm pretty sure I read all these notes, though.  This puzzle, on the other hand, is something that I will never forget, no matter how long I live.
• That's unfortunate.

Monday: yadnoM

"This is not where I parked."

"You know, maybe 'bear' wasn't what I was destined to do.  I could have been like...an architect or something."

I hate those facebook "we are controlling transmission" commercials.  The main character is at a museum, on a tour, and is actively ignoring everything to find out what her friends are doing.  Why are you at the damn museum, then? Why didn't you invite the friends you so clearly want to be with?  Why is this a selling point at all?

• This largely sums up my thoughts.  It's impractical, and people using this to say "see, you can't regulate guns at all" are morons.
• That bee is super happy.
• Toaster.  You know that thing is designed to burn you.
• Wizardry was one of the first video games I played.

Sunday: Mostly random videos

Red panda eats sandwich.

Pokemon Snap.

Fancy first class.

• Japan loves Bob Ross?
• Simpson's house.
• Good idea, but they're a bit expensive.  I also would rather not have stickers.

Saturday: That security guy was looking at me weird for making rocketship sounds while driving my shopping cart

You're a jerk, coupon. There aren't any Dunkin Doughnuts anywhere close to here.

Pile of links.

• College tuition again.  Nice plots and things showing that state governments are basically attempting to murder higher education.
• Niall Ferguson is still a jerk, even if he did apologize.
• This is why the Chrysler building is best.
• Squirrel!
• The logo in that first ad is impossible to read.  Top to bottom: "National Bank The Commercial of New York And Trust Company." Outer to Inner: "National Bank and Trust Company The Commercial of New York." Actual name: "The Commercial National Bank and Trust Company of New York." WTF?
• Japan. Cookies.

Friday: here's a bunch of random stuff

"You've just entered the bad part of the forest."

• Lego pokemon.
• Yeah-ah!
• Dating cat.
• Scientists of the past were just flat-out jerks.
• "“The nickname for Trig is ‘Trigger,’” she said, referring to her youngest child." Sarah Palin. Officially the stupidest fucking moron on the planet, for coming up with a nickname that's actually longer than the original fucking name.
• Niall Ferguson. Wrong, consistently wrong, and perpetually hoping no one notices that he's devolved to straw men and ad hominem attacks.

Thursday: "I may or may not have just drawn a smiling rocket ship in my work notebook."

Entirely possible.

Don't judge, Marcy. It's been a difficult week.

• I noticed something reading this comic yesterday.  Emily is a new-ish character in the comic, but after having her pun pre-empted in the previous day's comic, went to the coffee shop run by the other characters to try again.  Does she not know anyone else that she could tell her pea-pun to?  It's like she has no actual past before her appearance, and therefore only can have ties with the other characters in the story.  This in turn makes me wonder what existential hell the extras in panel 1 live in.
• Wait, this one company actually owns every real estate company I could think of?
• Oshawott.
• Pizza.
• Why can't people figure out how not to fuck up a Superman movie?  

Wednesday: Headaches make science hard

It doesn't help that every advertisement now has to have loud, annoying music.  I'm looking at you credit score scam band.  I hope each of you die in a fire for making such shitty songs.

• That fucking sucks.
• "There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it."  Basically, "some people on my side are fucking psychopaths."
• That dog didn't even slow down.
• I could probably do an entire post about these paintings.  I'll just put the link here for now.
• Cute tiny squirrel.  A happy thought for the end of the day.