Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign. God throws his hands up in despair and deems humanity "Too stupid to bother with any more." Santa crosses everyone off his List, says "No, even though this woman eventually won, it's too late; you people just aren't worth the trouble. Make your own fucking toys."

Burt Prelutsky is troubled:

Recently, two events took place that bode ill for the future of America. The first of these was the election, which saw such buffoons as Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel and Harry Reid, assume power and influence they are no better equipped to handle than Daffy Duck or Elmer Fudd.

Fudd was the old round-faced man who was always shooting people in the face while hunting, right ? Yeah, I think we've got more than enough of those guys.

The second event was the release of the movie, “Borat.” Of the two, “Borat” is probably the more troubling. After all, thinking adults can entertain opposing points of view when it comes to such things as Iraq, the economy and even affirmative action, but I'm afraid that the astonishing box office success of this movie heralds the end of western civilization as we have known it.

Uh oh. There's a bad moon on the rise and the end times draw near ! Some old guy thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket because people these days are just too dumb!

A few of my friends, knowing what a low tolerance I have for dumb movies, were surprised that I went to see it. Well, naturally I knew that the movie was in bad taste, but I thought that just meant that it trampled all over the tender sensibilities of those who adhere to the strictest tenets of political correctness. I thought that it merely made fun of feminists, minorities and other sacred cows. Instead, I found it was filled with bathroom humor of the first grade level. I would have thought its natural audience would be six-year-olds.

Six year olds ? I think you'd have to be at least ten to truly appreciate the humor in watching a bunch of bigoted misogynistic rednecks letting their inner hate run free on camera. And I'm not sure even a ten year old would understand what's funny about a stadium full of people cheering when Borat says he wants Bush to drink the blood of all the Iraqis.

To my mind at least, it's no coincidence that the name Borat has the same root as such words as bore, boor, bozo and brat.

Right. Now that's the kind of stuff a six-year-old would find amusing.

Many years ago, when fractals were new and exotic, I spent a lot of time creating fractal images. Here is a gallery of images that I use as a demonstration for our ThumbNailer application.

Here's one of my favorites:

I wrote my own app to create them, of course. And spent weeks optimizing the inner loops to run as fast as possible (integer-based math, in assembly. duh). I even went so far as to write my own window-based user interface for the app, so it would be easy for me to use. Note that I didn't write "Windows-based" - No, I actually created my own windowing interface, in a hi-res DOS graphics mode and drew all the stuff myself. This was back in the day before Windows 3.1, and I was trying to copy X-Windows and Solaris, not Windows. It was event-driven, had overlapping windows, sliders, buttons, text boxes and screen savers! Quite slick. I also used the windowing system for a primitive coin cataloging application (during a brief interest in coin collecting).

I can still run the fractal app, but because I can't recompile it (I can't find the VESA graphics libs it needs), I can't change the type of fractals it makes. And I just don't have the energy to rewrite it for Windows. So, it's stuck with basic Mandelbrot calcs forever. So sad.

I finally went ahead and got him... my pet dromaeosaurus.

This is the original image, which used to live here (but has now vanished, in Yahoo's site update).

And this is how it turned out on me.

She (Christy) did a great job, IMO.

And this is what the first bandage looked like after i took it off...

Roaaaarrrrr!

Matthew Yglesias worries that thinking Nirvana's covers of all those Vaselines songs are superior to the originals is "a crappy opinion to have". He needed worry - Nirvana's covers are better than The Vaseline's originals. Some songwriters are really good at writing songs that need to be performed by other people before the song can fully blossom. Bob Dylan and Neil Young fall into this category, too.

Normally, the filters here do a good job, but, in the past couple of days, some cocksucker has managed to get a few past them. So, I'm going to increase some of the filters' settings.

Hope it doesn't break anything... (:

Someone got a picture of Bush and Putin chatting in their new Wizard Robes, during their recent visit to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.