Google announces new drink product: Google Gulp
Think Geek announces new products; among them:
USB Fondue set
The iCopulate ipod-to-ipod transfer thingy
If you buy anything over $10 on thinkgeek, you get the fake April 1st t-shirt. For real.
The Boing Boing Parody — Boring Boring
Also, Motorola’s new iTunes enabled phone.
I pray that God bless and care for the Pope and ease his suffering, and forgive him for persecuting gay people.
A new Japanese craze is modding a Suzuki van to look like a VW Micro Bus. Cool. Since I can’t actually get a new microbus (VW decided not to produce the new concept car) I might have to do this, instead.
Judging by how many there are, this seems like a pretty big trend over there. I’m going to try to hunt down what the original Suzuki van looks like. It seems they don’t make an American version.
In the event that I die, which I’m quite certain will be 50 years from now and not any time soon, I really want to have this cool headstone from Lundgren Monuments. Because it’s glass and is really cool looking.
I started to leave for lunch to get some sunshine a little while ago. Unfortunately, although I remembered my wallet and key card, I forgot to take my car keys with me. And on my car keys is the elevator fob to get past the security block on the elevator. So to get back to my floor, I either had to climb the stairs and use my key card to get in, or ride up the elevator with someone else going to my floor.
So I started back inside, and although I called out to a woman from my floor to hold the door, she didn’t bother, and I couldn’t get on the elevator. So I waited around 10 minutes, but never found anyone else who worked with me. So I reluctantly climbed the stairs and came back to my cube. I think I should have waited longer for the elevator. I’m exhausted. I was planning on getting my keys and heading back out, but I think I’ll sit here instead.
I wrote a couple of years ago about one of my favorite quirky contests, the World Beard and Mustache Championships. Now National Geographic covers the contest in a recent issue. This years event occurs October 1st in Berlin.
Stephanie and I met with an attorney last night to arrange to get living wills. She’ll draw them up and then send them to us next week. She charges $230 an hour (wow!) and it should take her a couple of hours to get it done. Ouch. But it’s better than the alternative.
Here in Indiana, living wills don’t address the condition of persistent vegetative state, which is the situation Terri Schiavo is in. Indiana living wills cover only terminal conditions where extra-ordinary care would be taken to prolong an unquestioned terminal condition.
So I’ll only be able to specify my wishes legally in that case. So let me say it here, so there’s no question or mistake — if I were in a persistent vegetative state where I had no brain activity and a large portion of my brain had atrophied, like in the case of Terri Schiavo, I would rather be taken off life supporting measures and allowed to cross over peacefully into the afterlife, instead of lingering indefinitely.
Of course they don’t consider Christian Terrorists like bomber Eric Rudolph and the Anthrax killer “Terrorists.” Because these are the people who give money to Republican election campaigns. Can’t offend the people who put you in office, even if they do blow shit up and kill democrats and gay people.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation’s security.
According to the list — part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security — between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.
It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.
Some bittersweet political humor on the subject of living wills, shared on the occasion of me getting a living will in preparation for my upcoming heart surgery.
By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
Published March 27, 2005Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events (Terri Schiavo) to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here’s what mine says:
- In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semi-existence. Fifteen years wouldn’t be long enough for me.
- I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.
- I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.
- I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.
- I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.
I’ve noted it before, but President Bush’s “town hall” meetings aren’t really open to the public. The people allowed inside are hand-picked by the president’s staff. Here’s even more evidence of that: a local news story on how three people were removed from a town hall meeting because of a bumpersticker on their car.