Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.

The Stupid, It Burns, Local Edition

Tim Blair has an update - 21 updates, in fact - on the world-class inanity that is Australia's new federal government.

And we have another 30 months of this crap to look forward to.

Update: Learned a new word: woftam.  Much like a wombat, but no brains involved.

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The Stupid, It Burns

Some of the later comments come from people with some sort of clue, but  there really are people who think Expelled has some sort of value, rather than being a lie based on a lie based on a lie.

Congratulations.  The Religious Right has found its Michael Moore.

(Via Instapundit, who writes At any rate, according to the comments, at least, there's more to the film than I.D. twaddle.  Yeah.  The film blames the Holocaust on Charles Darwin.  That's something more than the usual I.D. twaddle alright.)

Update: Stupidity abounds.  Again, some well-informed souls brave the fires of wilful ignorance, but the post and the comments thread alike are, for the most part, hot air.

Update the Second: Glenn has now added a link to Expelled Exposed - possibly because I emailed that link to him, though he adds:

I hate writing about this stuff because -- pardon me while I speak plainly -- the people on both sides of this issue are assholes. I mean, even by the low standards of Internet discussion. I'm getting email calling me a "theocon shill" for mentioning Stein, and email telling me I'll burn in hell for calling Intelligent Design "pernicious twaddle." Frankly, the rabid atheists and the rabid creationists seem an awful lot alike, and no proper hell could be truly hellish without the both of them yammering away at each other. Feh.

There's a certain degree of truth in this, but the two groups are not equally detestable.  While I dislike unnecessary rudeness at any time, if you insist on being rude, it helps to also be right.  cf. Gregory House.

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The Only Thing Worse

Than an ever-expanding cloud of rogue self-replicating robots is an ever-expanding cloud of rogue FTL self-replicating robots.

That can really ruin your entire day.

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This Would Make A Great Anime

Lexx, Season 2 Episode 13, Twilight

Aboard the Lexx, Stanley Tweedle (captain of the Lexx, arch-traitor, and the only human among the regular cast) has taken ill and collapsed.  790 (a robot head) diagnoses him with elevated levels of hydrogen peroxide in his blood and a depressed immune response, but lacks the facilities or specialised knowledge to determine the cause.

Luckily, the Lexx is near the planet Ruuma, and the planetary governor promises them medical assistance.  This is actually a scheme to get the Lexx to rescue the governor and his family before they are eaten by the zombie bodies of the Divine Predecessors - Ruuma has long been used as the burial ground for former hosts of His Shadow because of the unusual effects the planet has on dead bodies.  (By coincidence, the brains of the Divine Predecessors happen to be aboard the Lexx...  Or at least they were; their numbers have taken something of a beating of late.)

So Xev (half love-slave, half cluster-lizard, all hot chick) and Kai (last of the Brunnen-G, an undead alien assassin) take the comatose Stanley down to the planet, where the medical robot 792 diagnoses him with a selenium deficiency due to eating nothing but the goop generated by the Lexx's galley, and prescribes the governor's anti-dandruff shampoo as a treatment.  (Which is not entirely absurd - some anti-dandruff shampoos do contain selenium, and selenium deficiency can cause serious health problems and even death.)

Meanwhile, Kai has started feeling the effects of the planet, being, after all, dead himself, and has taken to spouting very, very bad poetry.  The governor's family lock Xev out of the fortress to be eaten by zombies while they make off with the Lexx.  792 opens the door again to assist the zombies, but not before Xev is bitten.  The zombies eat the Moth, the flying machine that is the only way the crew can return to the ship.  Everyone rushes upstairs to the communicator to contact the Lexx, with the zombies close behind.

Back aboard the Lexx, Lyekka (an alien space plant spore and hot chick) has woken up hungry.  Nothing edible is left aboard, so she heads down to the planet and there devours the governor's daughter and wife, while Xev, rapidly degenerating into zombiehood, eats the governor's brain.

Stanley makes it to the roof of the fortress, to find Lyekka and Kai and a Moth waiting.  Zombie-Xev tries to attack them, but they subdue her and return to the ship, where they effect a rather icky cure.

Then, before Stanley can order the Lexx to destroy Ruuma as a hideous waste of silicon, the entire planet is eaten by Mantrid drones.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:59 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Lexx

Finally started watching this, after having it on the shelf since about 2002.

Let me get this out of the way: this is classic bad sci-fi, cheesy as hell.  But it's fun, and the actress who plays the original Zev (I'm still watching season one) is stunning.  Shame they had to replace her in season two.

Apart from Zev, you have to admire the Lexx, a miles-long intelligent (but not exactly bright) organic spaceship that demolishes entire planets and uses the debris as a delousing spray.

Here, I'll let Lexx tell you the story.

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Not Sold On This Idea Either

Back on the food-poisoning weight-loss plan.  Well, the wake-up-feeling-ill-and-dizzy-and-then-throwing-up-repeatedly weight-loss plan, anyway.

I desperately don't want a repeat of last year's events, so a week of apple juice and matzo looms.

Update: Feeling much better now.  Not sure why it happened, and I'm being very cautious in what I eat (which today consists mostly of nothing), but it seems to have come and gone very quickly.

The one thing that scared me was that the main symptoms when I woke up feeling ill were that I was dizzy and photosensitive, and that I felt like I was running a fever.  I was running through all sorts of horrible diseases in my head when I started feeling seriously queasy as well.  Then a few moments later had to bolt for the bathroom, making it with about a second to spare.

And after that all the symptoms cleared up and by morning I was fine.  (But kind of wiped out...  It's not been a fun week.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:49 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Still Somehow Not Sold On The Idea

The day before yesterday I discoved that my lovely new notebook had a dead pixel.  This is one of those tiny but infuriating things; not enough to warrant the effort of getting it fixed, but still enough to annoy you.

Yesterday I dropped it.

It was in my bag, and I was just leaving home to go to work, when the strap on my bag broke and it fell straight to the ground.  It landed on the doormat rather than the tiles, fortunately, and the bag is somewhat padded.  I powered it up, and it seemed to have survived the fall just fine (though the remote control had fallen out of the card bay.)

Then I noticed: Dead pixel was no longer dead.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:39 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Pixy's Actually Useful Tip Of The Day, Part Two

If you INSERT IGNORE into a MySQL table with an auto-increment primary key, the counter will increment even if the INSERT is IGNORED due to a duplicate secondary index.

And if you're abusing this process in horrible ways, you can pretty quickly wrap a 32-bit int, in which case all your INSERTS will be IGNORED.

Solution: Use a 64-bit int.

Hey, I'm not saying it's a good solution.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Bugger And Double Bugger

I was thinking of doing a full system backup of mu.nu last night, but decided to leave it for another day because it was already very late.

Naturally, the system crashed overnight.  Drive failure.

The only thing on the plus side is that it was the backup drive that failed.

So we're back, minus backups.

mee.nu is actually on a different server, but relies on the mu.nu server for DNS.  I need to untangle that a bit so that this doesn't happen any more.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:16 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Five Years Of Assorted Miscellanea

Today!

Huh.  It's not immediately obvious even with that link, because April 15 2003 was also a Tuesday.  But yep, five years old today.

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