it’s not “rape-rape” if you drug the little tease first.

So a bunch of actors and film directors got together and wrote a letter to express their outrage at the arrest of one Roman Polanski, film director and admitted child rapist.  The letter says that the American prosecutors are just really mean and vindictive, and that Polanski was arrested some thirty years ago for “a matter of morals.”

That right there strikes me as a slight understatement, to put it mildly.  It’s like saying Hitler had a bit of an ego, or Britney Spears may not be Rhodes Scholar material.  Without wanting to go into the salacious details, the “matter of morals” was the then-40-year-old Polanski approaching a woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter to ask the mom for permission to take pictures of the daughter for the French edition of Vogue.  He lured the kid to his house, and then to his pal Jack Nicholson’s place, got her zonked out on champagne and Quaaludes, and then proceeded to have sex with her against her expressed will.  (That’s when she says “no” and “stop” many times over, which in no language of the world means “I’m just playing hard to get, and I really want you to fuck me six ways from Sunday.”)

Let’s recap that “matter of morals”: a 40-year-old man plies a 13-year-old girl with booze and drugs to get into her panties, and then proceeds to have sex with her despite her refusal. Now, I’m not a prude, but where I come from, we call that “raping a child”.

Charges were brought, the court agreed, the defendant Polanski pleaded guilty, and promptly skipped the country before the sentencing to evade the punishment.

Therefore, my opinion on the Polanski case can be summed up thusly:

Roman Polanski is a child-raping shitbag, and anyone who puffs up and defends that piece of garbage in any way needs their moral compass severely recalibrated, preferably with a framing hammer.

The whole Polanski affair has just reaffirmed what I’ve known for a long time: When it comes to defending one of their own, Liberals are just as capable of hypocritical excuses for shitbaggery as Conservatives.

stolen from the desk of frodo.

So the new computer arrived today. In a fortuitous feat of good timing, the Brown Truck of Happiness came up the driveway right after I got the kids squared away for their naps, and I was able to spend my lunch break putting together the barebones kit I had ordered.

The new system is an nVidia ION box, and it’s tiny.  Here’s a shot of the desk post-rearranging:

As you can see, it fits comfortably in front of the mouse pad with room to spare.

It’s fanless, and dead silent, except for the occasional read/write noises from the hard drive.  Graphics performance seems to be pretty damn good for such a small box–I got about 40fps in World of Warcraft at native resolution (1280×1024), and all detail medium/high.

This is definitely not a barebones kit for the first-time system builder.  Because the case is so small, everything is a super bitch to put together.  The case only has space for one hard drive and one optical drive, and you have to install the RAM before putting in the HD, because there’s no clearance left above the RAM chips once the hard drive is in.  The assembly was an exercise in routing cables.  The whole thing is sort of like a Chinese puzzle box–you almost have to make a diagram before putting in the components, because you have to follow a  certain order to get it all in on the first try.

Here’s the case with motherboard and hard drive installed.  As you can see, the mainboard is only barely bigger than a 3.5″ desktop HD.  I had to remove the power supply for HD installation to have enough space for my hands in that little case.

Here’s a shot from the side, without the power supply or DVD toaster installed.  You can see there’s not a lot of space in that case even without the PSU in place.

The CPU is an Intel Atom 230, the same chip that’s in most netbooks.  The case is a mini-ITX, and they make mITX boards with more powerful CPUs, but I’m not sure I’d want to try something with more heat output than the low-voltage Atom.  As you can see, the Atom’s heatsink has no fan on it–it’s passively cooled.  A more powerful processor would require a fan, which would make noise…and sit right up against the PSU, with no clearance left.

Here’s the case with all the components in it.  You can see what a tight fit everything is, and how little space remains between the top of the heat sink and the bottom of the power supply.  The power connectors for the SATA HD actually sit on top of the RAM modules.

Here’s a shot taken during OS installation.  (I put XP Pro on it, which suits the Atom better than the bloated mess that is Vista.  The ION box feels just as responsive under XP as the Core 2 Duo system did under Vista.)  You can see the size difference between the old PC, and the new ION.  The old box (which will now be Robin’s gaming system) wasn’t exactly a hulking beast, but the new one is maybe a third its volume.

All in all, that little ION rig is pretty neat: whisper-quiet, virtually no heat, and small enough to fit into a large-ish purse.  I measured the power draw at the wall, and it pulls 32 watts under load while playing World of Warcraft.

That said, if I worked for a company that had a hundred of those as user desktops, and I had to maintain that fleet, I’d take up custodial engineering instead.  That tiny little case takes up little space on the desk, and it’s neat to see that much capability in such a small form factor, but working on it isn’t much fun.

you go, girl.

BBC brings us the heart-warming story of Rukhsana Kauser, a teenage girl living in Kashmir.  When militants came to her house to force her into marriage with their leader, and started beating her parents, Rukhsana and her brother basically uttered the local version of “Oh no, you di’nt”.  The girl disarmed one of the militants, grabbed his AK-47, and shot the militant commander dead.

Once again we see that a “no” tends to be far more effective against rapists, thieves, and other freelance thugs when it is spoken over the sights of a firearm.

I’ve long held the opinion that if NOW really and truly cared about empowerment, they’d include a .38 with every membership package, along with coupons for gun handling and shooting lessons.  You can’t be free and equal unless you have the tools at hand to cancel out any physical force used against you.  (That’s why gun control is a fool’s errand, by the way—even if you could magically transport all the world’s guns into the heart of the sun, you’d still have force disparity.  A 200-pound man usually doesn’t need a gun to subjugate and dominate a 120-pound woman.)

You want to stop the rapes in Darfur? Send in the Green Berets with planeloads of rifles, and have them teach the women how to use them.

monday search term safari LXX.

raccoon sounds like

I can tell you from recent experience that a raccoon being mauled by four dachshunds sounds like a 15-pound mouse squealing at the top of its lungs.  Not a pretty sound, and not something you want to hear before you’ve had your morning coffee.

munchkin kill some nazis

Quinn is currently on iSpy Fantasy and iSpy Spooky mansion.  I think I’ll wait another year or two before I let him play Call of Duty: World at War.

public jack-off bar

Can you tell me where that one is, so I can avoid the fuck out of it?  That just sounds nasty.  The words “public” and “jack-off” just don’t belong together, especially not in an establishment where food and drink are served.

alphasmart versus samsung nc10 for writing

The Alphie has way longer battery life (700 hours versus 8-ish hours), and a nicer keyboard.  That said, the Sammy’s keyboard isn’t bad, it’s nice to have the connectivity if you do need to do some research, and the NC10 is one of the nicer netbooks out there.

jenny mcarthy booster vaccinations

Jenny McCarthy is a moron, and there’s no booster vaccine against idiocy, unfortunately.

best device for writers

“Best” is such a subjective term…but in all honesty, I’d nominate the pen.  Works damn near anywhere, without a power outlet nearby, and lends character to your writing. 

chuck e cheese kanye west

“Yo, Timmy, I’m really happy for you, and I’mma let you finish, but Jerome had the best fifth birthday party of all time.  Of all time!”

Due to recent events, you’re getting the abbreviated version of the MSTS today, and I’m going to head upstairs for a nap.  Later, Internets.

too much excitement before breakfast.

How you probably didn’t spend your morning:

You probably didn’t let the dogs out at 5AM to have them encounter a raccoon in the enclosed porch.  Your dogs probably didn’t proceed to go into full Mortal Kombat mode, and they probably didn’t engage in an all-out fight that took them from the porch out into the yard.  You probably didn’t try to pry four dachshunds off a screaming raccoon while trying not to get bitten in the process.  You probably didn’t finally pry the dogs off the poor raccoon long enough to end the fight with two rounds of .38 Special*, and you didn’t spend a half hour afterward with the patching up of puncture wounds and claw scratches.

Of course, that also means you won’t have to go out to the vet this morning with four dogs in tow, for emergency rabies booster shots.

If dachshunds could talk, they’d talk of this day for the next few years as “that time when we cornered that raccoon and totally brought it down like the bitch it was.”  We adult human members of the household will remember it in a slightly less glowing light, considering the inconvenience of having to pay an unexpected vet tab for four dogs, and having to call Fish & Wildlife.

Ah, rural life.  Should have remembered to check the enclosed porch for raccoons.  Still, could have been worse—could have been a skunk, or a fisher cat…or a black bear.

*(To pre-empt the “Why’d you have to shoot the poor little thing?” comments: it was badly injured, killing it was the only way to get the dogs to stop tearing into it, and if it had scampered off in its state, it would have most likely died anyway.  Also, an absent raccoon can’t be checked for rabies.  Trust me, I didn’t enjoy shooting the little bugger, and I would have just as soon let him be on his way.)

UPDATE: Autopsy pics after the cut.  Not particularly gruesome, but do not click if you don’t like the sight of dead animals.

i fail to be all torn up about this.

Dear news media: Susan Atkins was only technically speaking an “ex-Manson follower.”  That term makes her sound like a naughty groupie.  More accurately, she was a murdering sociopath who knifed a woman who was eight months pregnant, killing her and the child she was carrying, and then scrawling the word PIG in her blood on the front door of her house.

The only troubling thing about Susan Atkins’ death is the fact that it came almost forty years too late.  She should have been strapped to the chair in the gas chamber at San Quentin back in the early 1970s, after her rightful conviction.

If I had been on her parole board, I would have told her that I supported her request for compassionate release…just as soon as Sharon Tate and her murdered child got a compassionate release from being dead.

I’m not a huge fan of the death penalty in general, but some people turn rabid on occasion…and just like a rabid dog, you have to remove them from civilized society, for your sake and theirs.  (Ideally, of course, Susan Atkins should have caught two to the brisket from a .38 snubbie in Sharon Tate’s hand that night.)

thursday randomosity.

• Jeebus H. Chrysler, the footage from the League of Nations United Nations shindig looked like the pilot episode for The Bedouin Hillbillies.  Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad, and Chavez get lectern time at the U.N.?  Any organization that turns over the podium to an avowed terrorist sponsor, a bugnuts insane Holocaust denier, and a chunky vest pocket tinpot Marxist has a severe credibility deficit.  All that was missing was Kim Jong Il walking in with Fidel’s limp husk in tow, and you would have had 90% of the world’s heavyweight asshole dictators all in one spot.  Shit, let’s just kick the whole lot off that prime real estate they’ve been taking up in Manhattan, and convert the U.N. complex into prime apartment space.  With the revenue from uncollected parking tickets alone, we should be able to pay the U.N.’s entire moving expenses as we send them packing to their new headquarters in Caracas or Pyongyang. 
• I’m busy backing up my data to external hard drives right now, because we ordered a new PC, and Robin is getting my old Core 2 Duo system.  I’m downgrading to an nVidia ION box, which will be an interesting experiment.  Robin’s P4 is finally at the point where playing World of Warcraft in high-traffic zones is a bit of a drag, and she plays a ton more than I do, so I’m letting her take command of my old PC…while I get a shoebox-sized, low-wattage, fanless system that can still play WoW capably on the weekends.
• There’s news on the Nugent front, but I’m not quite free to divulge any details yet.  For now, let me say that an agreement is in the works, and that I’ll be satisfied once all is signed and sealed.
• Quinn is hooked on iSpy puzzles on the computer.  He’s been begging for computer time for the last week or two, and he spent three hours on the eMac in the office this morning solving all the puzzles in iSpy Spooky Mansion.  I can’t say the apple is falling far from the tree there, but if he starts asking for Hot Pockets, I’m pulling the plug.  At this rate, he’ll want his own WoW account next year, and if his main out-levels mine before the kid is even in elementary school, I’ll feel positively ancient.
• The sequel to Great Big Military SF Novel is coming along fine…three to five pages a day, every day, plodding right along.  At this rate, it should be done by the time the snow recedes in April, maybe even sooner.  This one’s outlined to be about 20-30,000 words shorter than the first one, but I have a tendency to underestimate word counts for the final product.  (Terms of Enlistment was supposed to be 90-100,000 words, and ended up weighing in at almost 120,000.)
• I have a post on health care in the works, but I didn’t get around to finishing it today, so I’ll save it for tomorrow or Saturday.
• Lastly, can Michael Moore be any more of a douchebag?  Dude is worth $50 million, and says he doesn’t count himself among the top 1% he says control 99% of the country’s wealth.  When your bank statement shows eight fucking figures, you’re well inside that one-percent bracket, Mikey.   Like I said on Twitter: Capitalism is the only system under which one can amass $50 million of personal wealth by making movies that criticize the system. (Try finding a North Korean or Cuban who got wealthy by criticizing his own economic system.  Hell, find me a wealthy North Korean or Cuban, period…one who isn’t a member of the ruling political caste, that is.)

That’s all I have for right now.  Tune in again tomorrow, when I’ll try to take a shot at the concept of fairness in health care coverage…

what i did over lunch today.

I made this:

Robin needs to get her mouse closer to her arm for health reasons, so I shopped for some mouse platforms online.  There’s stuff available commercially, but the affordable stuff is terribly unstable-looking, and the solid-looking stuff is ridiculously expensive.  So I looked around for some scrap wood, and rigged up this little number over lunch.

It incorporates the remnants of a broken kiddie chair and a never-used conversion kit for a toddler bed.  I attached it to the bottom of the armrest with a double-length bolt that replaced one of the original armrest bolts.  An hour of time, a few pieces of leftover wood, three bolts, and two washers later, and Robin has a double-articulated, adjustable, and removable mousing platform attached to her chair.

For those of you with professional toolshops in your basement, that’s probably not an impressive achievement, but anyone who knows my general level of handiness will stand in awe.  I usually can’t even build a house out of playing cards without it being condemned by the authorities.

bike envy.

I sold my beloved Ninja sometime between Quinn and Lyra.  I had a few close calls with inattentive cagers in crowded parking lots down in Knoxville, and I decided that being around for my kids was more important than the ability to ride.

Fast forward through a few years and a relocation to scenic NH, and I have to admit that seeing all these motorcycles on the roads up here gives me a severe case of envy.  I’ve been checking out used bikes on Craigslist for a while now…not that I’m in a position to splurge on a motorcycle right now, but it’s always good to stay on top of the market, right?

I did pay to transfer my motorcycle endorsement when I got my NH driver’s license.  Just in case, you know…

monday search term safari LXIX.

make your own munchkin

You take a prospective Mommy and Daddy, a box of Franzia merlot, and a stack of steamy DVDs, and combine all those ingredients in a bedroom on a cold and rainy Saturday night.

what is collective right

Something that doesn’t exist, except in the minds of statist booger-eaters who want to ignore certain articles in the Bill of Rights by making them dependent on (government-controlled) group membership.  If your right to bear arms is satisfied by having the National Guard around, then your right to free speech ought to be satisfied by the existence of a government-run newspaper, and your right to free exercise of religion by the existence of military chaplains.

future fanny pack

In the future, fanny packs will almost certainly be made from advanced materials, and have built-in electronic gadgets.  They’ll also still be considered fashion faux pas.

she is 17 in a porn

If she’s 17 in a porno, she’s underage, and anyone downloading or distributing that particular thespian effort would be dabbling in child porn.  A child porn conviction may be a slight disadvantage when looking for work or renting a place to live later on in life.

beretta 93fs for sale

Good luck with that.  There are fewer transferable Beretta 93Rs in this country than there are politicians with a grasp on economics.  I’m going to assume that you mistyped, and are really looking for a Beretta 92FS, a model that is pretty thick on the ground.

german beer with coke is called a

…”Drecksack”, which translates to “dirtbag” (because of the dirty appearance of the beer foam).

asset forfeiture abuse stories

Just Google “asset forfeiture abuse” to get a good idea of why it’s not so terribly great for liberty if you give police agencies a financial incentive to seize property on the mere suspicion of drug-related activities.

day care is to expensive

Well, how much would you charge per hour to take care of a pack of kids that aren’t your own, with all the attendant safety requirements and liability issues?

Ooh, I know! We can just pass a law that requires the government to provide day care for every child above the age of two, like they have in all those enlightened European countries like Germany!  That way, child care will be free! </economicsfail>

apache chopper drawing

There’s a drawing to win an Apache?  Where?  That would be just the ticket for a quick dash into town, providing I can find a way to rig kiddie seats onto the thing.  (Maybe on top of the stubby little wings?)

 

That’s the take for this week, imaginary Intertubes pals.  Tune in again next week for another trip through my blog’s Stats page!  Now back to work with you, kulaks!