Welcome to my life.

I'm a self-avowed WordPress Whisperer with a specialization in front-end design. I live in Maryland. I take lovely photos, go to the gym a lot, and opine strongly over design, aesthetics, and politics. I'm prolific on Twitter; I used to post to Flickr; I have a moblog and in my spare time I help out at the SemperFi WP Support forums. Read more about me.

No freakin way

So the sister rented The Village: the M. Night Shyamalan film produced by M. Night Shyamalan, and created by… well we all know. This, dear friends, is the ultimate self-parodic M. Night Shyamalan film, just as Miss Congeniality was the ultimate self-parodic Sandra Bullock movie. Spoiler? No need, but here’s what I IMed my friend:

I’ll tell you this. Early in the movie you may end up figuring out the plot twist but you would find it SO UNBELIEVEABLE that when you actually get to the plot twist and find out it was what you thought all along, you would gag.

M. Night plays a game of “gotcha” and pokes an eye at his own reputation as a master twistmaker. I think, now I am in the mood to see Halle Berry play Catwoman, which I hear is so blatantly cheap and shallow it actually becomes fun.

Care for a dose of apologists, anyone?

Is there a “We’re sorry, Zarqawi” site yet? I mean, I’m pretty sure the ones who wanted Iraq’s elections to fail would want to apologize to the terrorist-overlord-in-chief for their failure to delegitimize the elections by abstaining in large numbers.

Just wondering.

Because I’m so corny

And because Iraq’s elections today are making me gush like crazy.

Let freedom ring
Let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know that today is the day of a reckoning
Let the weak be strong
Let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away
Let the guilty pay
It’s Independence Day

— Martina McBride

Eureka!

You reek, ugh!
You, Rica?
You wreckah?

Whatever. This is the app I’ve been trying to find for the longest time and I’m so happy about it I’ll celebrate publicly on my blog by mangling “eureka.” I’m that happy. And I know that I’ve said this before but Guster kicks so much ass. And Crown Royal is good for the soul. Chased with Classic Coke. Ohhh yeah.

By the way if anyone has a better substitute to the linked-to app, please share.

The Hopeful and The Strong

Godspeed to the citizens of Iraq, and towards their election tomorrow. It’s beyond our words and it’s all in their hands now.

Oh the torment!

I’m having Operating System envy and ogling at the KDE desktop is making me salivate even more.

What do I have ahead of me? Well. Finding analogous applications for what I do, reformatting two hard drives to make them actually work, and backing shit up, which is not easy without an external HDD. Staring at what I have to do I’m pressed to just wonder if I’m just being fidgety about my Windows installation, which isn’t really that bad, even for me.

I tried Ubuntu live but it wouldn’t notice my USB2 wireless antenna nor would it my sound card. I’m not even gonna contemplate FC3 until I have my data backed up. So. I doubt there’d be any linux updates on this here blog for a while since I have a work-packed weekend.

Riddle me this…

Is it just me or is the Elton John song, Rocketman, about being a closet case?

I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone

By the way this past weekend I got introduced to Family Guy and Stewie Griffin’s performance of the song is, well… Awesome.

Big dreams, high goals

When I missed the delivery of Bush’s inaugural address I had to rely on the transcript to get his message. (As of this writing I have not had the time to look through video links and what not.) Apparently, the grandiose vision is chilling classical Republicans and making the isolationist streak come out in Bush allies such as Peggy Noonan.

Ed Koch is getting tired of war.

Peggy Noonan is getting tired of war. (See also Gandelman.)

The White House is backpedalling.

I, for one, am not a big fan of the nation being the world’s “freedom police,” but it is in our interest to foster freedom in other nations. This has been the message of the Bush administration for years now, but it seems that there are people who are afraid that the only phrase not mentioned by the President was “manifest destiny.” Maybe it isn’t “destiny,” but it is our manifest responsibility to foster freedom in other nations, it is also our manifest responsibility to be the enemy of totalitarianism. The end of the “terror war” does not mean that we get to go back to the joyful ignorance of the Clinton years. War-weary Americans are willing to forget that the price of freedom is constant vigilance.

The other matter that people like Noonan, whose plea for “realistic” goals will no doubt resonante in this pussyfooting admnistration as usual, keep forgetting is that failure to meet the highest goals leads to results greater that when one fails to meet mediocre goals. When you shoot for the moon and crash, you hit the roof, so they say. But if you shoot for the roof and crash, you hit the ground.

In the post-address punditry, Bush was praised not for the eloquence or poetry of his address, rather, for the grandiose vision which he shared in very simple words. If it frightens those among us who are not willing to ride along, let us stop and consider how it frightens our potential targets, after taking a look at those who are willing to walk beside the President and choose to live a life uncommon.

Morbidity and mortality

What I’m about to link to isn’t gonna be pretty. It’s not meant to be pretty, but it’s also something I wonder about a lot. Many of us—especially myself, bio background and all—have thumbed through books about diseases, and these books have pictures of how these diseases manifest themselves.

Now, there is a purpose to showing how diseases look like, superficially. For one, pictures should help you see if that little discoloration on your skin is a mole or something more insidious. Or, let’s take goiter for example. Wouldn’t it be more educational to show students how a “young” goiter would look like, so that it can be caught at its earlier stages, than to show a morbid example? How about the case of syphillis, or necrotizing fasciitis photos? I have a hunch that either of these two diseases get treated long before they get morbid, so I just wonder why the medical literature uses the most bombastic examples in their photos.

Could it be because the median pathology is just too “boring?” Describing disease isn’t supposed to be entertainment, and a little bit of “disease porn” isn’t exactly a class act in medical lit. Just wondering out loud, y’know, and all that.

Sexy

Michele Catalano has a question for us guys, about “sexy:”

So what I’m really wondering here – guys, this is for you – is this: What is sexy? And I mean physically, so don’t cop out and give me that “a woman with a brain is sooo sexy” line. Do you honestly like a woman who looks like she hasn’t eaten since the last time the Mets won the world series? Is a woman whose protruding rib cage could conceivably pierce you during sex hot? Would you prefer a woman with a D cup and few pounds on her or an A cup with a child’s waistline? Would you date a woman who is over a size 7? Over a size ten? Do you hold yourself to the same standards of physical perfection that you do the women you choose to date/pick up/marry?

Short answer? Sexy isn’t a “physical thing” at all.

“Sexy” isn’t just a matter of being beautiful in either the classical or nouveau sense; it’s more a measure of what is, quite frankly, arousing. There are some beautiful women who just seem untouchable, like lofty statues (Elle McPherson and Claudia Schiffer come to mind). There are those who seem sterile, like Liv Tyler (one could argue that she’s not beautiful, again, eye of beholder thing, etc etc).

“Sexy” is definitely beyond what is simply visible. “Sexy” comes from one’s attitude towards life, towards one’s appearance. People can be sexy on the sheer confidence with which they carry themselves, and the kind of presence that they have over those who see them.

“Sexy” is very difficult to quantify or even to articulate. Indeed, there are really thin women who I find sexy (Lara Flynn Boyle, let the gasping begin, I know) and there are Rubenesque women who definitely are. When we consider lists of who are sexy and who are not, it’s easy to see that such lists are as diverse and disparate as there are people. While there are standards of beauty (symmetrical face, a “healthy” constitution, healthy skin, etc), “sexy” is definitely a personal standard that I cannot describe.

It would be easier for me to be asked who I find sexy than for me to describe the shopping list that makes someone sexy.

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