Been watching a BBC show (via BitTorrent, since it’s not available anywhere in the states) called Top Gear. It’s a show about cars, but rather than just being staid sorts of car reviews, they review cars, have a guy run the cars around a track, where they rank cars by lap time, they have a segment called “Star in a Reasonably-priced Car,” which has such luminaries as Patrick Stewart and Jamie Oliver taking a cheap Suzuki sedan around a race course.

And that’s the tame stuff. Other sements include playing darts with a bunch of used cars and a giant hydraulic ram, or trying to make it from London to Edinburgh and back on one tank of gas, or racing minivans with British Touring Car champions. It’s nuts, and entertaining as hell.

Gah! Both the windows, and the freakin’ Mini leak. There’s a leak in the Mini’s coolant system. I thought I caught it yesterday, but I guess not. Problem is, that everything anywhere near the leak is covered in rusty residue, but unfortunately, it’s also impossible to see *anything* near where the origin appears to be, ’cause it’s so cramped inside the engine bay.

*shrugs*

I suppose I’ll give it another go next weekend, if it’s sunny.

Also got a speeding warning, for going too fast through the Mandana/Lakeshore intersection. Oops. 😛 The cop was really nice.

Hoog. So the Mini’s had some sort of overheating problem. That is, it had one, single overheating problem, and that was that the radiator was empty. Empty? Yes, empty. Not a goddamn drop. Well, that is, there was liquid in it, but by the time I got to a place where I could stop the car, there was a lot of steam when the cap was opened (with sufficient protection, thanks for asking), but no liquid.

That seemed odd, yeah? So after filling it up, and driving it home, I realized that there was actually a leak somewhere. Water was spraying onto the engine block, and steaming up. It’s impossible to see while driving, and so when you stop, you end up with steam pouring out from under the hood. Yet, I couldn’t see where the leak was.

So, finally, after putting it off for ages, I tried to flush the radiator today, and check for leaks. I was only able to access one point towards the bottom of the radiator – it’s *really* cramped in the engine compartment, but was able to loosen a hose (if I had taken it off, I would have had to pull out the entire radiator just to get it back on) to let some water out, but then just undid the inlet to the radiator at the top from the block, and ran water through the whole thing. Not sure if that’s the *best* thing to do, but it seemed to clear things out. Once the water ran clear, I ran the engine for a bit (after putting the proper hoses back on, thanks for asking), and did the whole thing again. Whee. Then, I took the Mini for a spin around Piedmont, loosened that hose again to blow some of the hot water out the bottom, and topped the radiator off with coolant. I’ve probably got a relatively high water to coolant ratio, but it’ll have to do for now.

So, there’s this Armstrong Williams thing, where he was paid nearly a quarter-million dollars to shill for the No Child Left Behind thing. Pretty egregious, right? But at least you can say, well, minority conservative, paid to sell privileged white boy’s policy to people who aren’t quite as likely to just take everything privileged white boy says on faith. So you figure, at least they’re getting something for their, I mean our, money.

But then there’s this thing that this pundit Maggie Gallagher got paid by Health and Human Services to push Bush administration marriage and family policy. Link here.

Now, it’s much less money we’re talking about, but Josh Marshall brings up the point that this really doesn’t *do* anything. These aren’t people who are likely to push competing policy, and that this really just looks like a make-work thing, where the administration just hands out cash to people they like, and keep them employed. So that’s weird, right? Or is it?

I mean, let’s say there’s no other payola out there – that we’re just talking journalists, at this point, and there’s not egregious amounts of money changing hands. I know it’s unlikely, but it’s not necessary for the point. Let’s say that you’re a journalist. A conservative-leaning journalist, but a journalist nonetheless. Now, let’s say the Bush administration thinks maybe, since you’ve got a head on your shoulders, there’s some chance you’ll actually put 2 and 2 together and come up with 4. They, of course, want you to say 80 million.

Well, maybe it’s just that the public’s gotten lazy, or maybe it’s that Karl Rove is way more of a mastermind than I’d ever conceived. But basically, let’s say he’s instituted a tremendous program that our national media buys into, where conservative journalists, and even marginally conservative-leaning people are essentially told that they don’t have to actually do any work, but they’ll still be kept on the payroll, and to just kick back, relax, and let the cash roll in. Don’t worry about the journalism bit. We’ll tell you what to say – all you need to do is say it, and we’ll take care of all the work that you do. Oh, you’ll still have to print your name at the top of your column, and in some cases, you might even still have to write it yourself. But we’ll take care of the research, and we’ll take care of the fact checking. We’ll even brief you on the specific terms to use, so you won’t even have to come up with the language yourself.

Instead of working, go play a game of golf. Spend time with the kids. You won’t lose your job, because this is really how the institution works, now. Just come in after lunch, and you can have your weekly column banged out by 2:30, out of the office in time to catch a matinee with the kids. Or get high on Oxycontin. Or have phone sex with your producer. Whatever. No problem.

We’ve made the institution such that not only will no one care, all you have to do is ask whether they’re impugning your integrity when they call you on your bullshit. And your defense? “Everyone does it.” Don’t worry – they all do. We own *everyone*.

In essence, I’m saying that I think the *entire* right wing of “journalism” is in on this cash-for-hucksterism scheme. I don’t think they’re getting checks from the government, necessarily (though I’m sure that there will be many, many more that are discovered), but I do think that the government is basically doing their “work” for them, and that these so-called “journalists” are perfectly content to chill out, say what they’re told, and live the high life.

So, Starbucks has this “beverage” that’s called “Chantico” – it’s called “drinking chocolate,” by the marketing gurus at Starbucks. I was skeptical, but it was pretty good. So I decided to make something similar at home. Ended up taking three tablespoons of cocoa, half a cup of milk, and half a bar of Ghiradelli chocolate. If it’s not the same, at least it’ll utterly destroy any want I have for chocolate.

So Aura didn’t make the cut. It didn’t get onto the gbadev.org competition cart. I’m disappointed, and in some senses, almost disgusted, because some games are *clear* ripoffs of pre-existing games, like Battleship, or Magical Drop, which was expressly prohibited by the competition rules. One game has Battlezone’s original tank as the splash screen.

So, I’m disappointed. I’m irritated, and sort of pissed off as well, that after two months of waiting, we end up on the short end of the stick.

But, at the same time, I couldn’t be happier with Aura, I couldn’t have been happier with the experience, and it’s genuinely something I’m extremely proud of, and happy to have had a hand in creating. I think that we actually have a shot at making this a *commercial* success on the PSP or the DS, to be honest, and that rejection from these guys is like having your high school music teacher tell you you’re no good, then go on to write a piece of music that’s a tremendous critical and commercial success.

One thing that seems to me to be a recurring theme:

Republicans, by and large, seem to keep getting caught in scandals that make them seem explicitly hypocritical. “Family Values” types who get caught in illicit affairs, or gambling, or drug habits, say. O’Reilly and Limbaugh come immediately to mind, but Bennett, and a whole host of other right wingers, or evangelical Christians also come to mind. Then there’s the fact that while anti-abortion rhetoric and moral purity is supposedly high in the red states, abortion rates are higher, as is teen pregnancy and such.

And it seems to me that this is a critical distinction between extremists and moderates – and I’m not talking Republicans vs. Democrats, in this case, because moderates in both tend to avoid these sorts of traps, and extremists on both sides fall into them – it’s just the nature of extremism. The reason I use right-wingers in the previous paragraph is that they’re explicitly quite un-moderate. But the point being that the moderates tend to take human nature into account, whereas the extremists seem to think that idealism is all that’s necessary to form an ideology.

I’d love for the world to be a utopia, where there is no upper class, and no poverty. That’d be great. But it doesn’t take human nature into account. We will always want to strive to be better than others – to have someone subjugated, to have some lead. We’re not able, on a large scale, to accept forced homogenaity, and I think that that’s a *good* thing, not a bad one, and one that needs to be taken into account when forming an ideology. We also make mistakes. We also have desires that aren’t going to be controlled by rhetoric.

So… what’s the point? The point is that the less an ideology takes human nature and diversity into account, the more doomed it is to abject failure. And the more radical someone is in buying into an ideology that doesn’t take human nature into account, the more stupid they’re going to look when *their* nature makes them do something that doesn’t line up with that ideology.

Yeah, it’s obvious. I know. But that doesn’t explain why so many people continuously look like morons by falling into that trap.

I wonder if what the left needs to do to become effective again is to basically bitch and whine until it’s so. I was looking at cnn.com, and their “quickpolls” are always either biased towards conservative-appealing answers, or they’re so vague that they’re completely worthless as even unscientific polls. And I thought, you know, the reason they’re set up that way is that right wingers bitch and whine whenever there’s a poll like, “Is Bush as dumb as he looks?” and the response is 90%/10%.

So, CNN simply doesn’t ever put up polls like that, because they fear the whiny, bitchy right wing backlash. But when completely inane polls like, “Did you find President Bush’s Inaugural Speech Inspiring?” go up, no lefties send them irate hatemail saying, “Christ, that’s a fucking stupid poll question,” because it’d be a whiny, bitchy thing to do, and really not worthy of anyone’s time, as an individual cause. But the right wingers don’t give a shit about the big picture – they’ve gotta have everything their way. So, they’re crazy/stupid enough to actually take time out of their day to scream “bias” even where none exists.

So, while you can have lefty think tanks, and whatever, it seems to me that really, what the left needs to do to really change the dynamic in the media is just become the most obnoxious, petty shits you can imagine, and make sure the media *knows* that every single time they run anything even remotely favorable about the right wing (we’re not talking neutrality here, that wouldn’t be enough. We’re talking “complete shutout”) there will be a really vituperative, obnoxious campaign mounted against them for even uttering the words “Iraq invasion” and “democracy” in the same sentence.

Yes. I know it’s awful. I’d rather not have anything to do with it at all. But is there *anything* on the left’s side that’s even remotely as effective as this sort of activity on the right?

Games:

Haven’t played much Live recently. Can’t really explain it, other than a general lack of impetus. I don’t know – there are people I haven’t talked to for a bit that I could actually keep in touch with via Live, but just haven’t been on. Ei-Nyung’s sister & nieces were here over the weekend, so I’ve been … busy, I guess.

Have squeezed in a few hours of Resident Evil 4, which is a tremendous, astronomical jump up from Code Veronica, or even RE:0. The shift in perspective is *such* a startling difference that it’s surprising they haven’t done it before, except for that it did require a full 3-D world. So there is that, I suppose. But the other thing is that at least thus far, it hasn’t been all inventory management and “how close can we keep the player to death all the time, and here’s some really obtuse and ridiculous puzzles,” all the time. So it’s quite an improvement.

Other crap:

Mobi’s getting a friend tomorrow, I hope. Friend from college just moved out here, and he’s got a dog ’bout Mobi’s size named Monte. So hopefully, they’ll get on alright.

Can someone explain to me why Democrats are saying, “Well, we’re all going to approve of Dr. Rice’s appointment, but we want the chance to debate it…?”

What the fuck? So, you’re going to sit there, and say that her appointment is a foregone conclusion, despite her monumental, catastrophic fuck-ups as the National Security Advisor, yet you wanna sit there and publicly wank about it, depsite already having acknowledged that you’re going to let an incompetant buffoon be appointed *regardless* of what is said during the debate? You DUMB FUCKING SHITS ARE TOO GOD DAMNED STUPID TO BE AN OPPOSITION PARTY.

Grow a goddamned spine. Learn to fight for what is *right*, you dumbasses. It’s because of your spineless, brainless, gutless idiotic complacency that Bush gets to slide on *SO MUCH BULLSHIT*. Ok? Do you understand? It’s not only his fault he’s an evil, megalomanical psychopath, ok? It’s *YOUR* fault, too.

Except Boxer and Kerry. You two are awesome.

Thank you.