A Series of Tubes

I can’t believe that I haven’t posted this yet:

I want a crow vending machine. Then I can control them as my minions:

On an unrelated note you should check out this crazy animation.

So I started watching the film America: Freedom to Fascism. From the title I thought that it would be about declining civil liberties. Unfortunately it is about how some tax protesters don’t like the income tax. I was curious about this and decided to spend a little bit of time researching the issue. The whole movie becomes a bit comedic when it is watched with the following wikipedia page open at the same time: “Tax protester Constitutional arguments“. The people interviewed in the movie cite most of the court cases and arguments from that wikipedia page. Unfortunately the movie does not present the fact that almost every single court case against paying an income tax has been thrown out or rejected in some form or another.

The director of the movie interviews a tax expert and then proceeds to ask him about the court cases and constitutional law questions instead of questions about the tax code. Since the tax expert is not a constitutional lawyer and is not charged with litigating the legality of the 16th amendment he doesn’t have the answers that the director wants. The director then uses this as his big gotcha moment where the lying stealing government is caught with its pants down. I didn’t watch too much past this since the director was obviously not being even handed. I know that Ron Paul is interviewed later on and that since Ron Paul wants to abolish the income tax I’ll go ahead and assume it is a glowing interview. It’s interesting to peer into the mind of libertarians and their hatred of taxes. It turns out that it is a bit frightening.

I might watch the rest of it but probably not. Instead I’ll probably watch this video about Monsanto. (the video got pulled since I posted it)

Update: It looks like the tax protester people got to Wesley Snipes. He decided to not pay taxes for 3 years and got 3 years in Jail.

So after talking about Chiropractic care I realized that I was getting a ton of ads for chiropractors. The thing is that my reader base is probably less likely to click on ads to go get a chiropractor after I just discussed how chiropractors have a shady history and use pseudoscientific instruments to give them the illusion of technical and scientific knowledge. The only way someone would click on one of those ads is if the ads were for pirate chiropractors (come on google… show me some pirate chiropractor ads). “Yar! Yer spine be like the captain’s hook.”

The thing is that I’ve made various unflattering statements about many groups. One of these days I’m going to need something from a jehovah’s witness chiropractor who is married to a mormon that really likes homeopathy. That would be karma. Of course I don’t believe in karma either. And naturally I’m now thinking of a post that I could write about karma. I wonder if I would get ads on how to get better karma. I’m sure someone has written a book about it.

I need to make sure that my next post is about something that I like. That way the google ad gravy train makes its next stop right here on my blog.

It looks like I’m going to be doing some coding at work. In order to do the 1337 coding I purchased a very expensive keyboard. The price is worth it. I might mod it so that it is water instead of air cooled and possibly add some leds. Check it out:

So recently I have been using a computer that does not have firefox installed and instead only has internet explorer 6 installed. This is basically puts me in a computer user vortex of evil torment. I noticed that my blog does not display properly under IE 6. As a matter of fact IE 6 crashed completely about half way through writing this post. I might have to change my theme in order to correct the rendering errors. In the mean time I’m going to complete my post in the computer lab. What I really want to tell you about is not my  computer and browser difficulties but rather something that happened during lunch.

The area in front of the bookstore is the place where you get accosted to sign petitions, are given various fliers, and whatnot. Recently all the frats and sororities have their tables set up which is probably a topic for yet another post. Next to the fratties there is a guy with a demo for action chiropractic center. I always wondered if chiropractors were legitimate or snake oil vendors.

So I went to go talk to the person in front of the action chiropractic center demo, Dr. Ron Schmidt. According to his bio on his website, he graduated from Palmer west. This institution gets it’s name from Daniel David Palmer, the founder of modern chiropractic therapy. Palmer had previous experience as a spiritual and magnetic healer. From the wikipedia entry on the guy:

While working as a magnetic healer in Davenport, IA, he encountered a deaf janitor who he discovered had a palpable lump in his back. He theorized that the lump and his deafness were related. After a reported successful restoration of the man’s hearing^[2], it led to the beginning of Chiropractic history. His theories revolved around the concept that altered nerve flow was the cause of all disease, and that misaligned spinal vertebrae had an effect on the nerve flow. He postulated that restoring these vertebra to their proper alignment would restore health.

Also from wikipedia is the following juicy quote from DD Palmer: Read more

I just watched The Story of Stuff which is mostly things I already knew but is edited and put together really well. I think that I’d be preaching to the choir with most of the people I showed it to. I’m sure that my legions of fans will spread the word to those that don’t think about consumerism and environmentalism. I currently don’t have much of an environmental impact mostly due to the fact that being a grad student tends to pay so little. The thing is that this blog is poised to bring in millions so it will be important for me to keep the tenants of the story of stuff in mind when it comes to using my imminent fortune.

On an unrelated note, I blogged earlier about my awesome idea for a christmas card. Unfortunately my chief artistic developer was pretty busy over winter break so my awesome Christmas card remained a brilliant idea instead of a brilliant card. I’ll probably try to use it next year instead of ruining the surprise by announcing my brilliant idea on the internet. My legions of fans will be held in suspense for a year. You will have to trust me that it will be well wort the wait.

I noticed that there was a distinct lack of pirates on the front page now that my original pirate post has floated into the archives. To remedy this I will combine my love of pirates with my love of Christmas, and will throw in my card making in there for good measure.

So if I didn’t already have a brilliant Christmas card idea I would totally get these cards:

Yes that is Santa with a peg leg and an eye patch. If anyone is looking for a card to get me for Christmas…look no further.

Happy thanksgiving to all of my loyal fans who have been with me these long and hard past few days. You’ve been so good through the tough times of Monday and the slightly better times of Tuesday.

So news of my website spread through the family this Thanksgiving.  I must say that there was quite a lot of interest in the Pirates and farting.  My sister pointed out that the combination puts new meaning to the phrase “Thar she blows.”

Tomorrow I plan on ice skating, a good dinner, and a general avoidance of any place where people will be shopping.

Well I’m not going to generate my millions with those vacuum tube ads on the right which means I need to stop talking about them or else google with think that all I care about are things that predate transistors (notice my clever wording so as to avoid saying vacuum tubes again).

To fix this problem I have decided to write about things that my legions of fans, I’m looking at you Jess, will find enjoyable and that google will deem is the proper intent of this blog. That thing that I shall write about is pirates.

I’m hoping that by writing about pirates, ads for eye patches, hooks, peg legs and the like will start appearing on the right hand side. Everyone that visits the site will be drawn to this awesome assortment of vendors to fulfill their pirating needs and then the millions start getting delivered. Perhaps I can get that in doubloons. Yar.

Here is an example of the supplies.