“Re-launching” this Jalopy
Jalopy outside of Wells, NV
And about to get a lot more technical. We have a blog over at d27n which no one really used, I’ve decided to reboot the d27n site and retire the blog yet I still needed a place to share long-form content.
Less politics, because seriously, what’s the fucking point?; a lot more jQuery, Node.js, and big data. Yay?
More startup tips, culture, and what not, ‘cuz I’ve been there, done that, and this time I’m at the nucleus. I have to admit it’s a bit weird doing it now at 38, I’ve kinda seen everything, the first giant meltdown, the rebuild, the energized children who really don’t have a clue as to what they’re doing (God bless their drunken optimistic hearts). Oddly, I don’t see it as an advantage. Rich people love bug-eyed kids with great hair product and whacky ideas. My self-determined pass/fail comes December 22, the winter solstice, thus the name: Project Solstice. More on that later.
Also photos. Love taking photos, I may suck at it, but it gives me peace.
Well, Hello There, Blog Peoples!
So, I don’t update this too often any more. (Look at those election results in the last post! Relevant, right? OMG, who won?! Was it the black guy?! NOOOO WAYYYYY!)
I guess I went all “rogue” and “mavericky.” I heard that’s how to be a real Murkin now.
But, fear not, you can still find me on the internet machine:
Facebook (oh, just go look it up if you know me…)
Nothing new here. I heard there were some financial troubles and I’ve learned I can reproduce asexually… cool, huh? What’s up with you?
Two-thirds of my company went to some National Parks recently. That there’s a photo below.
Crack is Whack!
After learning just last month that Osama longed to give Whitney Houston his meat kebab, it should come as no surprise that Whitney no longer wants to be Mrs. Bobby Brown.
My bet’s on irreconcilable crack differences.
During rehab last year she used the power of prayer to overcome the evils of drugs.
This time we’re all praying for you, Whitney.
Al Gore, Liar
The large number of dairy cow deaths have overwhelmed the rendering plants that normally dispose of the carcases.
“If you don’t bury them, you have to deal with the stench and flies,” said John Ferreira of the Cotta & Ferreira Dairy in Stockton.
The state Department of Food and Agriculture has issued a waiver in eight counties allowing animal carcases to be disposed of in landfills.
Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the department said his agency believes thousands of head of livestock have died, but he could not provide a specific number.
Mmmmm… rendering plants.
CNN
Waking up this morning, hungover and stricken with that “OMFG! what did I do last night?” fear, I popped on CNN to distract me from searching my liquor-soaked brain for evidence of something which will require me to leave the state and change my name.
Anyway, it’s official — CNN is now 100% relevance-free. So some woman got cold feet two days before her wedding and bolted on trip through Nevada and New Mexico. They’ve been on this shit for two days now, apparently killing time until the Pope has a fucking bowel movement or something.
The “kidnapping” story existed for only a few hours this morning, and here like 16 hours later it’s the lead story on CNN.com and they’ve got 2 fucking videos, including her 911 call and a “how the case unfolded” dissection. They’ve got “experts” talking about “wedding stress.”
Unfuckingbelievable. Are we this stupid? Is CNN this fucking contemptuous?
Why I Fear Bananas
If you happen to come across giant spiders in your kitchen every now and then, you might want to pay attention to this one. A British chef bitten by the world’s deadliest arachnid was saved after snapping a photo of it with his camera phone.
According to a story in the Times Online, Matthew Stevens was bitten twice on the hand by a Brazilian Wandering Spider as he cleaned behind the freezer of his pub. The creature, not generally associated with life in England, is believed to have arrived as a stowaway in a box of bananas.
USS San Francisco
Had no idea we had a nuclear submarine named after our city, that is, until it ran aground today 350 miles off the coast of Guam. Charming.
And the USS San Francisco is a “Los Angeles-class” sub. Makes a lot of fucking sense to me.
Interesting bit of trivia about subs: last bastion of all-male personal in the military, cuz of the close quarters and all, and you can not wear deodorant of any kind as it interferes with the CO2 filters. I’m sure there’s a lovely bouquet once you pop the top on a recently surfaced sub. *shudder*
Fox “bored” with Tsunami
Whereas rival CNN has torn up its regular programming and dispatched an army of staffers to the ravaged region, Fox News appears to be going through the motions on the colossal story. Rather than breaking news, Fox feeds off partisan sparks. And it’s hard to get angry about a natural disaster because empathy does not lend itself to outrage — although that hasn’t stopped the high-priced talking heads at Fox from trying to turn the tsunami into a contentious issue.
If the Republican National Committee doesn’t have an angle on the story, then neither, apparently, does Fox News. And the last time we checked, there were no GOP talking points on natural disasters of biblical proportions. The best Fox News could do in terms of political spin was to bolster claims by the Department of Defense that the Bush administration was not slow to react to the crisis. Fox also routinely referred to the White House’s “initial” aid package as being worth $35 million, not the more accurate and paltry sum of $15 million. At one point during the Dec. 31 telecast, a picture of George Bush appeared in the upper left-hand corner of the Fox News screen with the words “Stop the Bush Bashing,” according to News Hounds, a Fox News watchdog site.
[…]
Mostly, though, the coverage has been nasty. Fox News host John Gibson bemoaned the fact that U.S. relief — getting water, food and shelter to millions of destitute people — might be part of an insurance scam to simply pay for the cost of rebuilding a resort community. “This is the travel industry, major big hotel companies,” he said last week. “How is it that United States taxpayers are going to be convinced you have to build hotels in Phuket?” He worried aloud that “Thailand, Indonesia, India, the countries that got hit [will] say, ‘We need dough and we need buckets of it to fix all this so Swedes can go on vacation in Phuket again.'”
O’Reilly blamed the “liberal press, which hates Bush” for criticizing his early response to the disaster, noting the initial $15 million pledge gave “secularists” an opening to go after Bush. (Secularists?) Belittling a Democratic strategist on his show, O’Reilly bellowed, “Nothing in your liberal world is going to be good enough. You guys — you’ve got to get off your contempt, your hatred.” Yet the only ones surrounding the tsunami coverage with hatred were the team at Fox News, which apparently feels naked without it.
O’Reilly also mocked Germany for only donating $27 million: “They’re America’s biggest critics, France, Germany. And they’re just pounding us day in and day out. And they — and when it comes down to crunch time, they don’t have anything to give.” Germany has since upped its pledge to nearly $700 million, dwarfing the U.S.’s aid package.
Meanwhile, Hannity decided that the wake of the killer tsunami was the perfect time to attack the United Nations: “The U.N. has proven themselves incapable, not trustworthy enough, to handle this or any other humanitarian effort.” Hannity dismissed the suggestion of his guest, Bill Orme of the U.N. Development Program, that, “This is a time to concentrate on the victims of this troubled disaster and what we can do together to help them out first.”
Of course, this being Fox News, it’s not surprising that partisan pundits bungled the facts. Hannity blasted U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland for having “the unmitigated gall and audacity to lecture North America and America and the world about being stingy.” Egeland did no such thing. And Fox-friendly pundit Ann Coulter accused former President Bill Clinton of attacking Bush in public for being too slow to respond to the disaster, which is patently false.
Leave it to Fox News to make the tsunami story about Clinton. And leave it to Fox to grow bored with the biggest natural disaster news story in nearly half a century.
Look, I’m not saying CNN is great, and its no big secret that Fox is the media wing of the GOP. Nor is it shocking their coverage of the biggest natural disaster in memory was turned into a despicable partisan hackfest.
But when it comes to TV news in the US, CNN’s one of last places where even basic lip-service is paid to journalistic ethics AND it has at least enough viewership to have a pulse. Sure, they get it wrong — a lot — but CNN has a semi-reputable foundation and 20 year history which they seem unwilling to throw away. And that should be encouraged. I suppose.
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