Say No To Shitty Ad Practices

I've recently bailed on 2 of my favorite sites - Addicting Info and Little Green Footballs - because their ads got way too pushy and intrusive.

Don't get me wrong, ya gotta pay for things, and these websites don't stay in the Content Business for very long unless somebody ponies up.  

So I'm good with just about everything, but not when (eg) MacKeeper pops up and freezes my browser so I can't do anything if I don't click on their OK button.  Go fuck yourself with a pine cone, MacKeeper.

I'll go back to those sites eventually - I suppose - but for now, this is just one more of my little protests.

About That Christmas Story

So everybody's holiday favorite is the story of how a kid is growing up in Ohio, and he has a toy gun, and how everybody warns him about not getting hurt because of it and his dad buys a weird lamp and some kid gets his tongue froze to the flag pole and it all turns out OK because Ralphie's a white kid and the local cops don't murder him for no fucking reason.

A Tweet And A Quote

Racism doesn't usually look like someone shouting slurs, it's looks like people eagerly looking for a reason why a black kid deserved to die

— Lou Schumaker (@LouSchu) December 24, 2014

Today's Tweet

Ohio is an open carry state, and the cops say they thought Rice was an adult, so what law, exactly, was he breaking?

— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) December 28, 2015

Chris Hayes has fallen way off - along with practically all of MSNBC - but hey, even a blind hog roots up an acorn once in a while.

Show A Little Love

A nice profile from Daily KOS

The only podcast combining politics, humor, outrage, kittens, science fiction and marital bliss is The Professional Left with the husband-wife team of Driftgass and Blue Gal. A new edition comes out every Friday (including Christmas and New Year’s!) and I never miss it, usually listening on bike rides around the park.

They just won a coveted Swifty for Episode 295 (July 31, 2015): "Is Cecil the Lion a Proxy War?"

The Professional Left Podcast 

Teach The World To Sing

The Message Manipulators seem to be bent on stripping away the soul from all of us by reducing everything to a transaction and creating a world of de-humanizing commercialism.

I've been part of that.  I was with them for a long time.  No more.  And never again.

But there are times when my eternally insistent skepticism (which always teeters on the brink of The Cynical Abyss) is tested.  

Wouldn't it be nice if this was more than just another attempt to co-opt something that should be a lot more meaningful than making us smell less like humans. (not that there's anything wrong with smelling better - just sayin')

hat tip = Facebook friend MH

Today's Pix

Today's Tweets

Actually, this is a screen cap of the tweet that showed up on Facebook (hat tip = DR), but hey - social media is social media, and it's only there to serve us up to the advertisers and propagandeers anyway.  But, I digress.

If something good happens because of it, that's just a lucky coincidence.  

And if something bad happens because of it, well - shit happens; whaddaya gonna do?

My favorite thing - when you post a pic, you can 'tag' the faces in the pictures, and somebody tagged this guy "Asshole'.  

Poe's Law states that sometimes, it's not possible to differentiate between an actual statement of an extreme and a parody of the extreme.  So the guy could easily be a 'Poe'.  But seeing how weird USAmerica Inc has gotten over the last few decades, and looking thru the guy's Twitter feed, I'll go with the obvious and say he really is the jackwad freak he's trying so hard to convince us he is.

Late Breaking: Online scuttlebutt is that the guy lost his job because that tweet just went a little too far (hard to believe that's the one that did it, considering practically everything on his feed is "White Genocide" and "Hitler-Was-Right" etc).  His feed has nothing posted after Dec 24th, so I guess he took everything else down or his account was frozen or whatever.

The winning response so far:

@14Resistance @BillBurgin_VA pic.twitter.com/3gaciq86Z9

— conan the librarian (@jamesdupuis2) December 27, 2015

Torching

Moonbeam  --Sinne Eeg

Fragile  --Nils Landgran

My One And Only Love  --Sinne Eeg

With Every Breath I Take  --Janis Mann

Kissing A Fool - George Michael

Today's Bumper Sticker