Shmoo Mentality
MY RECENT COMMENTS
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comment. Sorry it took so long
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back to you; I
wanted…”
September 24, 2009 11:40AM - “Athens. I'm studying
there for four months.”
September 07, 2009 04:56AM
Shmoo Mentality's Links
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- For Reading
- Orcinus
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- Mark Morford
- The Escapist
- The Infinite Limit (defunct *sad*)
- Pharyngula
- WarCry
- My Work
- Escapist Magazine and WarCry Compilation (scroll down to Recent Articles)
- Fuck the Media
The Syrian Preoccupation
Shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after Saddam's government was toppled, I wrote an article for my then high school newspaper discussing the possibility of a United States-led invasion of Syria as the next step. It was an article meant to satirize Bush Jr.'s “Mission Accomplished”… Read full post »
Here Superman, Have My Umbrella
Sir Spider of Bag
Santorini
Santorini is beautiful. Duh. It's one of those places that has been photographed in so many ways and showcased in so many tryptophantic post-vacation family slideshows that it's difficult to do anything worthwhile with a camera. At sunset in a place like this, it is often better to… Read full post »
Kiosk Kwestions
One of Athens' many paradoxes that I have an ongoing fascination with is that of its kiosks, squat huts with goods hanging off of every surface—snack food, ice cream, cigarettes and beer—like the trashiest part of a supermarket condensed and transplanted onto every street corner. T… Read full post »
illegal characters
Don't Quit Your Day Job, Or Your Night Job
A friend, Amy, had a pair of friends of her own stay here for a couple of days. They had been studying in Lancaster and were now taking a whirlwind tour of the Continent, presumably before heading home. Athens was their first stop. The very first word they learned was &Omicron… Read full post »
Breaking News: Greece Actually Albania
More Lispthing Municipal Policthp Officthps, Pleasthp
My Modern Greek teacher has a lisp. No one should be allowed to teach a language if they have a lisp, unless you want a whole generation of bamboozled amateurs lisping up your language. That might do the English language some good, on second thought. Also, as I suspected, it… Read full post »
Better Than Unsolicited Windshield-Washing
A man steps into the middle of a busy intersection and does a red light's worth of baton twirling. When the light turns green, he rushes for the cars with his hat in his hand, hoping to get a few alms from drivers before they speed off. When… Read full post »
Welcome to the Metropolis
Obama, he is good?
Yeah, he is. I voted for him, anyway. Would you have voted for him if you could?
Better than Bush.
Mhm, at least Obama tries to talk to people instead of bombing them.
The taxi driver smiles politely and resumes… Read full post »
Really, This From the New York Times?
The New York Times put out this editorial some time ago. I shuttled it around the intertubes with an extensive, unabashedly ranty rant attached. Now, I repost it here—or is it riposte, ha-ha!—after cleaning it up some.
The editorial itself is pretty good stuff—as one would ex… Read full post »
QED: 8.12.2009
Question to Entertain toDay:
TechReport.com (which everyone even moderately interested in "hard," concrete technology should read) linked to an article on ArsTechnica.com (another tech site that everyone should read in conjunction with TechReport for a "softer," cultural focus on techn… Read full post »
The God Damned Sexual Tyrannosaurus Rex of Advertising
Finally, Virgin America fully exploits the advertising potential of their name:

But it's just not visually...stimulating enough to beat out Iceland's long standing tradition of unnecessarily incorporating hilarious innuendo:

There's that titan that Brandon… Read full post »
Retrospect in Armageddon
I was filling in a gap in my semi-regular gorging of Jon Carroll’s archives, which pairs nicely with Mark Morford’s column, like a sedating digestif after the flaming main course struck through with pink hair dye—ineffably for the pubic region because dying the hair on your head jus… Read full post »
File System Check, Indeed
who | grep -i brunette | talk; cd ~; wine; talk; touch; unzip; touch; strip; gasp; finger; gasp; mount; fsck; more; yes; gasp; umount; make clean; sleep
Credit is "AnonymousProgrammer" of 4chan's /wg/.
"fsck" is the best part, in many ways, for many reasons. Read full post »
QED: 7.17.2009
QED: 7.10.2009
Question to Entertain toDay:
Can a deregulatory, anti-welfare state political stance be interpreted as pragmatically Marxist? Read full post »
QED: 6.24.2009
Question to Entertain toDay:
It may be insensitive to say all religions are fundamentally the same in purpose, but is it incorrect? Read full post »
Homeward Bound
This is the first entry of more that will chronicle a Californian summer and a Grecian autumn with a series of entries far more frequent than this blog or blogger are accustomed to.

I was anxiously itching with the corpse-worms of Marx himself to arrive home from college, st… Read full post »
Make-Believe War Never Changes, But Real War Changes It All
“War...war never changes” is the perpetually pessimistic opening of the popular irradiated wasteland romping video game “Fallout 3”'s dreary diatribe against humanity's predisposition towards total annihilation. What utter nonsense—war has changed fundamentally, f… Read full post »
Should Obama's Special Envoy Pay a Visit to Hamas?
Senator George J. Mitchell, a special envoy to the Middle East and Europe, departed on Monday for a whirlwind tour of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, France, and Britain. The New York Times reported today that the purpose of his trip will be as a “listening and learning exercise,&rd… Read full post »
Webcomic Addiction Has its Intellectual Upsides, Too
"Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal" by Zach Weiner

Stick that in your panegyric and smoke it, Johannes de Silentio! Read full post »
A Proposition 8 Retrospective, Condensed
I had begun to write a substantial piece to serve as a retrospective on the recent passing of Proposition 8 in California, but after a long period of abandonment, I remembered Occam's Razor, a rule I frequently ignore and secretly deplore.
So, to summarize.
By taking the passage of Proposition… Read full post »
Let's Play Global Thermonuclear War. You Go First.

First of all, welcome. Let's get down to serious business.
The idea of the post-apocalyptic world has inhabited the American and human cultural consciousness for decades; in literature, film, and most recently gaming. At its core, it is an idea both romantic and terrifying… Read full post »

Salon.com