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Post by sisyphus on Dec 20, 2006 1:30:26 GMT -5
lol. i just got a great image. i want to make a music video of miss america being lathed by nick cave to that very song. her hands could be raised at a podium while he belts out "who wants to die?!!!" her little bikini will get all bloody. poor dear. then she can be sacrificed to the god of the old testie true punk style.
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Post by Mary on Dec 20, 2006 1:31:52 GMT -5
lol. i just got a great image. i want to make a music video of miss america being lathed by nick cave to that very song. her hands could be raised at a podium while he belts out "who wants to die?!!!" her little bikini will get all bloody. poor dear. then she can be sacrificed to the god of the old testie true punk style. this sounds too much like a cradle of filth gig  |
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Post by sisyphus on Dec 20, 2006 1:33:25 GMT -5
lol. diamanda is at the top of my list for next music purchase, though. from what i've been hearing from you and thorn, i can't believe i have not gone down on her or something.
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Post by sisyphus on Dec 20, 2006 1:35:24 GMT -5
lol. i just got a great image. i want to make a music video of miss america being lathed by nick cave to that very song. her hands could be raised at a podium while he belts out "who wants to die?!!!" her little bikini will get all bloody. poor dear. then she can be sacrificed to the god of the old testie true punk style. this sounds too much like a cradle of filth gig [/quote i'd like to make it in the style of the strongbad emails from homestarrunner.com . in the end, a tiny plastic viking soldier could jump from her bloody bikini and declare "bloody bikini's are no place for a mighty warrior!" god i love that. (see the teen girl squad on the site) |
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Post by Mary on Dec 20, 2006 1:38:13 GMT -5
if you want me to ysi you any diamanda, or birthday party, let me know... (though i'll have to figure out exactly how!!)
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Post by Mary on Dec 20, 2006 1:40:05 GMT -5
lol. i just got a great image. i want to make a music video of miss america being lathed by nick cave to that very song. her hands could be raised at a podium while he belts out "who wants to die?!!!" her little bikini will get all bloody. poor dear. then she can be sacrificed to the god of the old testie true punk style. this sounds too much like a cradle of filth gig i'd like to make it in the style of the strongbad emails from homestarrunner.com . in the end, a tiny plastic viking soldier could jump from her bloody bikini and declare "bloody bikini's are no place for a mighty warrior!" god i love that. (see the teen girl squad on the site) what on earth is homestarrunner.com?? btw, re: diamanda - i'm sure thorny can help you out here, but do be careful about what you get as a starter album - there's a range of stuff she's put out (from mostly insane to completely fucking psychotic) and depending on what you want, you really have to be careful to go for the right album.... but if you want diamanda at her absolute MOST nuts, it's plague mass all the way. just don't expect to sleep with the lights out again for at least a week after hearing it! |
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Post by sisyphus on Dec 20, 2006 1:43:00 GMT -5
if you want me to ysi you any diamanda, or birthday party, let me know... (though i'll have to figure out exactly how!!) normally i would jump on that, but i need to add some space to my hard drive to do it and fix a few things on my lappy, cuz files don't seem to unzip. tis a mess. i loaded too much music onto my itunes and my puter almost burst. |
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Post by sisyphus on Dec 20, 2006 1:46:00 GMT -5
homestarrunner.com is a site with some funny animations. if you choose "sb emails" from the bottom it brings up a list of some good ones. "death metal," "radio," and "dragon" are some of my favorites. if you choose "toons" from the bottom it brings up an option for "teen girl squad," illustrated by the character "strongbad." they're pretty funny.
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Post by sisyphus on Dec 20, 2006 7:26:49 GMT -5
anyone else gagging on all this miss usa 2nd chance bleh? i've got cnn on here at work and sadly, it seems to be the top story. she probably let trump fuck her. oh god don't get me started. and since when is donald trump a worthy moral arbiter of...well, anything?? it's amazing, really. here is an insipid beauty pageant which has young girls parade around in teeny-weeny bikinis on television, an absolute cesspool of much-too-young trashy sexuality, all for the noble purpose of enlarging the bank account of one mr. donald trump, and then we are supposed to be shocked - SHOCKED! - that the winner of said contest occasionally consumes alcohol and makes out with another girl?? puh-leeeeeeeeez. besides which, at moments like this i really do wonder if adorno wasn't right that there is a massive conspiracy on behalf of 'the culture industry' to manufacture nonexist fluff as distractions from news that really matters. Miss Fallen USA gets half an hour on CNN, iraq gets 3 minutes... perhaps, but now that i think about it, i doubt it's a conspiracy. i think that news channels simply get better ratings from fluff stories. it's a sad reflection on us. i guess that's why we need more independant programming. |
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Post by phil on Dec 20, 2006 9:15:29 GMT -5
HÉ! This is about forgiveness and redemption ...
Like some kind of Prodigual Twat Son story !!
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Post by phil on Dec 20, 2006 9:17:29 GMT -5
And who cares about News Channels anymore
when you got Youtube ... !!
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Post by kmc on Dec 20, 2006 9:34:23 GMT -5
This is important:
Reality check: 95 percent of Americans had premarital sex
NEW YORK (AP) -- More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.
"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."
Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports.
The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38,000 people -- about 33,000 of them women -- in 1982, 1988, 1995 and 2002 for the federal National Survey of Family Growth. According to Finer's analysis, 99 percent of the respondents had had sex by age 44, and 95 percent had done so before marriage.
Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.
Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.
The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.
"The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government's funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12- to 29-year-olds," Finer said.
Under the Bush administration, such programs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
"It would be more effective," Finer said, "to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active -- which nearly everyone eventually will."
Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defended the abstinence-only approach for teenagers.
"One of its values is to help young people delay the onset of sexual activity," he said. "The longer one delays, the fewer lifetime sex partners they have, and the less the risk of contracting sexually transmitted disease."
He insisted there was no federal mission against premarital sex among adults.
"Absolutely not," Horn said. "The Bush administration does not believe the government should be regulating or stigmatizing the behavior of adults."
Horn said he found the high percentages of premarital sex cited in the study to be plausible, and expressed hope that society would not look askance at the small minority that chooses to remain abstinent before marriage.
However, Janice Crouse of Concerned Women for America, a conservative group which strongly supports abstinence-only education, said she was skeptical of the findings.
"Any time I see numbers that high, I'm a little suspicious," she said. "The numbers are too pat."
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Post by skvorisdeadsorta on Dec 20, 2006 11:02:44 GMT -5
Dude, you gotta check out the goods before hand, man. What's wrong with people?
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Post by phil on Dec 24, 2006 10:54:29 GMT -5
2006: a vintage year for ideas that will change our world
Thanks to some truly original thinking - on subjects as diverse as the web and global warming - mankind stands on a glorious threshold
Will Hutton
Sunday December 24, 2006
The Observer
When words fade, it is the great ideas and arguments that move the world on. John Maynard Keynes couldn't bear the 'practical' men and women who forged economies and societies by getting their hands dirty and mocking the thinkers. All, he said, were, in truth, slaves to some intellectual, theorist or philosopher (usually dead) who had given them their lines. He was right. We need an intellectual compass to make sense of reality around us.
And yet the ideas that illuminate and change our lives are hard to spot among the turkeys. Arguments need not only to be insightful, but they have to be useful. After a year of reading, watching and listening, here are five ideas that meet those criteria, all produced by people very much alive and kicking. They are five ideas that I think have moved humanity forward in 2006.
Youtube and the new web community
Predictions that the net was going to change everything have proved wrong - until now. So argues influential web guru Tim O'Reilly. Web 1.0 was the first phase when we used it as little more than a vast library and efficient messaging system. We surfed from website to website and sent emails to each other.
But now we are in the era of web 2.0. A new architecture is emerging, which allows people to connect with each other in revolutionary ways. Hence blogging or YouTube, where users post and exchange videos they have taken themselves The mushrooming of participative and enabling sites such as MySpace, Wikipedia, Skype, Flickr, Facebook, Second Life and so on are all part of the same trend.
This is but the precursor of web 3.0, when the architecture will become yet more sophisticated. Search engines will no longer list data; they will answer your questions. Web 3.0 will mean that the web becomes a permanent part of our consciousness, conversation and cognition. Ultimately, a chip in our brain will connect us in real time to the entire web, adding immeasurably to the power of memory.
Immortality is on its way
If web 3.0 stretches the limits of the possible, inventor, entrepreneur and author Ray Kurzweil goes into realms of apparent fantasy. Moore's law (named after George Moore, co-founder of Intel) predicts that computing power will double every year. Kurzweil pushes the logic to its conclusion; chip power is growing so exponentially that by the late 2020s there will be sufficient cheap computing power to reproduce every single minute function of the human brain. Kurzweil sounds crazy, but his track record of predictions over 20 years has been eerily accurate.
Machines and human beings, he argues, are on a convergent course. Machines will increasingly assume human characteristics and humans the facilities of machines. Kurzweil even dares to believe that via three 'ibridges' - bio-engineering, artificial intelligence and new foods - human beings will keep death at bay. Chips in our brains and bodies will freeze the ageing process and via the successors to web 3.0 ensure that everyone will be at the frontier of knowledge.
Happiness is what counts
For two or three decades, economists and philosophers have questioned whether technology and rising wealth automatically mean greater well-being. In 2006, we finally realised that we are too inattentive to what makes us happy, a crucial step forward. Happiness is about earning the esteem of others, behaving ethically, contributing selflessly to human betterment and assuaging the need to belong. We have finally understood it is not economic growth that delivers these results - it is the way we behave
David Cameron caught the mood by saying that the object of the next Tory government would be greater well-being. The Observer published Professor Richard Layard's Depression Report, arguing that because one in six of us suffers from anxiety or depression, the greatest contribution the government could make to promoting well-being is to prioritise the improvement of mental-health care.
We're independent, stupid
For more than a decade, neoconservatives and Eurosceptics have denounced every shackle on national sovereignty; 2006 was the year they lost their self-confidence. Part of the story was the unfolding disaster in Iraq; even the US began to accept that allies have uses. The news that the Iraq war would cost the US taxpayer as much as $2tn with no one to share the burden was immensely sobering. One of the central tenets of the Iraq Study Group, set up by President Bush to review the US's options in Iraq, was that the US would have to talk to Iran and Syria if it wanted to withdraw in good order from Iraq. In Britain, even Eurosceptics, like the Tory leadership and acolytes of Gordon Brown, began to make more soothing noises about the EU. Globalisation makes countries more interdependent. Perhaps, after a decade of interference, there is about to be a great leap forward.
None of this matters if we fry
Campaigners have been doughtily insisting for decades that the explosion of carbon particles in the atmosphere is associated with a rise in temperatures. But the combination of 2006 being the warmest year on record and a series of epic reports, notably Al Gore's book and film An Inconvenient Truth, meant that only conspiracy theorists could carry on believing that the Earth is not warming. It was the beautifully presented argument that began to change the minds of Americans.
There were dark arguments in 2006, among them a generalised fear of the foreign other, but the force of ideas expressed above will, I feel, carry us forward. And that is cause enough for celebration.
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Post by rockysigman on Dec 27, 2006 1:30:19 GMT -5
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