I mean, that must be the case if we have the time, money, and resources to devote to legislation as to which parts of titties are allowed to be seen in strip clubs. Pending legislation would change the rules for strip clubs, including banning the sale of alcohol, requiring dancers to remain six feet from customers and other dancers, and banning full exposure of breasts, essentially requiring topless dancers to wear pasties. Titties = Serious business. Give me a fucking break. Let’s try and move out of the top 20 cities for crime per capita, then we’ll concern ourselves with anatomical breasticular legality.

The ordinance, which also requires dancers to stay 6 feet from customers and from one another during performances, aims “to destroy, and will destroy the market for live adult entertainment in the City of Memphis,” the suit contends.

I have no legal credentials, but IMO they have a pretty good case. Topless dancing/gentleman’s clubs/adult entertainment is a legal business, and the city, state, and county all make money hand over fist on permits and taxes for these businesses. Making most aspects of their business model illegal seems to directly infringe on their legal right to conduct business.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of strip clubs. I’ve never really understood the allure, unless you’re horrifically ugly. Most any decent looking guy with any hint of a personality can likely go to a bar, buy a couple of drinks and have a real chance of not only talking to a girl but actually sleeping with her. I’ve been to a strip club less than 5 times in my life, and each time was a birthday or bachelor party for someone else. That said, I think the recent legislation is pseudo-puritanical bullshit. Take their money for decades and give them shit the whole time for operating a business for which you granted a business license and make plenty of money on the tax revenues.

I’d be interested in averaging the salaries of the people involved in this legislation and finding out how much time was spent on the matter in order to get a rough approximation of how much we’re paying to have our government tell us which parts of funbags are acceptable. I think I have a new project for tomorrow.

So much shit to talk about, so little time and so much laziness

I’ll keep it brief and hit a big range of local and national stories, as most are so goddamn simple they really don’t require me to elaborate.

Grand Theft Auto 4 - Kids don’t do stupid shit because of violent video games. Kids do stupid shit because they either have mental issues, or environmental factors. The ability to separate fact from fantasy is an indicator of maturity. If your children aren’t mature enough to make this differentiation, it’s your job as a parent to control the content of their entertainment. It’s not society as a whole’s responsibility to make sure that all entertainment is suitable for all people of all ages. When did we become a society that’s so incapable of controlling a child’s recreationtional activity we need to make every entertainment venue child safe? Most of the population is adult right? What’s wrong with entertainment that caters to adults?

Disclaimer - I don’t game at all, they could stop making video games today, and while I would disagree in principal, it would have 0% effect on my life.

Edit - New story reported so I have to bitch about it: A new related story that annoys me: Some douche tried to steal some copies of GTA4 by macing the clerks and running out. Security chased him on foot and caught and arrested him. CBS morning news anchor: “…may have been influenced by the game”.

What? I would find it a lot more likely he was influenced by poor parenting, bad or no role models, or simple stupidity, greed, jealousy, or poverty. While I agree with the law in principal, I’m increasingly annoyed by the use of allegations, carefully worded to avoid litigation, that are simply unfounded speculation. People don’t hear the subtle disclaimers like “may, allegedly, might have, reportedly, possibly” etc, and assume that if the anchor mentions it, it must be in some way founded, which is almost never the case.

Obama/Pastor - Pastor dude is an attention whoring moron. Fuck him. Stop giving him attention, it’s obvious he’s actively seeking it.

Polygamist compund - Shut the fuck up about separating kids from their parents. It’s pretty clear that illegal activity is taking place, it’s within their responsibilities to remove minors from the situation until everything is cleared up. Don’t wanna lose your kids? Don’t move them into a wacko communal religious compound.

Random thoughts on local memphis news:

1. Stop putting people on TV to talk about how they were blessed by god when they survived a tornado that destroyed their home. Why did god destroy your home? Are there different degrees of blessed? Why do people have such a problem with accepting simple statistical luck? If I punch you in the stomach, will you thank me for not punching you in the face? Then why apply this logic to your favorite deity?

2. Stop fucking using scare tactics to promote your shit stories when it’s a slow news day. “HOW CROOKS WILL USE YOUR MAILBOX TO RAPE YOU!!!!1one” (paraphrased). There are any number of ways to mark a house as a target for a robbery, namely simply fucking telling your partner in crime “Hey, this one looks good!”. Stop trying to make already xanax-adled housewives have another source of angina every time they see their mailbox flag up.

I could not have said it better myself.

Jesus fuck.

In brief: Bridge users can expect delays

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Mississippi River

Motorists using either of the bridges spanning the Mississippi River between Memphis and Arkansas should expect delays overnight Monday and Tuesday.

The Tennessee Department of Transportation will stop traffic on the approaches of the Interstate 40 Hernando DeSoto Bridge and the Interstate 55 Bridge for thirty minute intervals between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. so crews can install new overhead message boards.

The message boards will be part of the new SmartWay system. The $31.5 million project includes a new traffic management center, 39 additional message boards, 90 additional traffic cameras and 16 highway advisory radio transmitters.

When complete by October, the system will have a total of 115 traffic cameras, 42 overhead message boards and a city-wide highway advisory radio system.

– From staff reports

Ok, so Memphis is a major transportation hub, and the I40 bridge is on the busiest bridges for over the road transport in the region. The I55 bridge doesn’t move as much traffic as the 40 bridge, but it’s still a very major interstate corridor. I realize the improvements are a good thing, and I applaud the decision to do it at night, as opposed to the usual TDOT policy of beginning work at 8:30am, but seriously, both bridges closed at the same time, for thirty minute intervals, all night?

Here’s an idea:

1. Close I40 bridge.
2. Divert traffic to I55 bridge.
3. Upgrade/repair/improve I40 bridge.
4. Divert traffic back to 40, repeat process for 55

Seems like it would be easier on everyone to shut it down and fucking do it, as opposed to closing and opening the bridge every half hour, all night.

It’s this kind of shit that makes me insane. Large corporations/government agencies with apathy engineered right in. No one is getting paid to think, or to make decisions that make sense. They’re getting paid to show up and put form A into slot 3B or make sure no worker spends more than 7.5 minutes working under incandescent light. Or to make sure the TPS reports are filed in reverse alphabetical order by 18:36 GMT. Why do they care about those things? Because that’s the policy sir. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.  War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength!

Ok, I’m back. Seriously though, it does drive me fucking insane to be told that someone can’t make an obvious and logical decison because “That’s not our policy” or “I’m not authorized to do that”. I think the same applies to the fact that no one has suggested, I dunno, maybe just closing one bridge at a time, accomplishing the work in less time with less trouble for both workers and drivers. Maybe the impending recession will force a rethink in the current prevailing policy that seems to not only condone, but actively promote, a system in which personal responsibility doesn’t exist.

Warm Regards,
Winston Smith

I’ll make a real post this evening.

And said, “Vonnegut! Fuck!”

4/11 was the first anniversary of his death. A little history:

Vonnegut called himself a religious skeptic, and disbelieved in the supernatural.^[30] He considered religious doctrine to be “so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash,” and believed people were motivated by loneliness to join religions.^[37]

Vonnegut played himself in a cameo in 1986’s Back to School, in which he is hired by Rodney Dangerfield’s Thornton Melon to write a paper on the topic of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Recognizing the work as not Melon’s own, Professor Turner tells him, “Whoever did write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut.”

Following his death, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central gave Vonnegut a small tribute frame before the closing credits with his own famous phrase on death–”so it goes”. There is also a short clip of him being interviewed by Jon Stewart, in which he claims that gonorrhea, giraffes and hippopotami are evidence of evolution being controlled by a divine power. This is also a theme used in his print artwork. Confetti print #26 states “Evolution is so creative. That’s how come we got giraffes and the clap.”

He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today—or so he claims

“I’ve given up on it … It won’t happen. … The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”

Vonnegut died at the age of 84 on April 11, 2007, in Manhattan after a fall at his Manhattan home several weeks prior resulted in irreversible brain injuries.^[2][18][19]

So it goes.

So I went to go grab some stuff from walgreens late Friday night/saturday morning, and had to go to midtown because the fucking downtown walgreens closes at sundown.

So I get to the walgreens at Poplar and McLean, and they have a sign on the door that says “Temporarily closed due to power outage”, yet the power was on. I guess maybe it knocked out their computers. Anyway, I finally found an open Walgreen’s at Highland and Park, grabbed my shit, and headed back home. I took highland down to central, then was cutting down Cooper to Union. I noticed a car on the southbound side of the road that looked like it was pulled up kinda facing the curb. I thought it was a cop shining his lights on something at first.

I got closer and noticed it was clearly wrecked, pretty solid hit into the light pole. The door was open, but I couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. There was a car coming on that side of the road, and they pulled over, so I figured I would just call it in and keep going. I called 911 and told them a car had hit a pole, someone else had stopped to check it out, and I didn’t know anything else.

I turned on Union toward downtown and got a few blocks, and started to feel bad for not stopping, so I make a huge block, down McLean to Central, and then back to Cooper. Car still sitting there, no one inside or around. 14 minutes had passed, still no cops there. I took a shitty cell phone pic and left.

At least if you use multiple computers. PortableApps.com is a free and open source software suite that contains a bunch of useful programs that execute from your flash drive and leaves nothing on the host computer when you’re done. It includes a browser, calendar and contact client, mail client, antivirus software, openoffice, and bunch of other cool stuff. There’s also like 11ty other programs you can add. The main suite is around 90Mb.

My 8GB thumb drive now sports Firefox with add-on’s for an FTP client, adblock, and gmail notifier, a full office suite, a picture editor, pidgen IM, a full financial suite, a backup utility, an antivirus that’s capable of checking both the drive and the host computer, an html/code-centric text editor, a compression/extration util, and a media player, all executable from the thumbdrive ftmfw.

/nerd

Oh yeah, and there’s over 7GB left over for storage

It’s a lot smaller than I expected, I’ll make a more through post when I get sick of playing with it in a few hours. 7.51GB after a fresh format.

Does anyone really think shitty puns like “Club Fed” are funny or clever? Jesus fuck man, just stop.