Decay of the system

Keep Your God Off My Body now carries Keep Your God Out of My Classroom merchandise. Buy shirts. Buy buttons. Buy onesies for your kid. Tell The Man he can fuck right off and take his god with him, and leave personal freedoms, government, and education alone.

Living as I do in the outskirts of Baltimore’s thriving crack district, I hear a lot of sirens. In fact I am rather inured to the sound of sirens after four years of

WHOOOOOOooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooOOOOOOOOOO BRAAAAAAAAAA BRAAAAAAAAAA WEEEEEOOOoooooooOOOOOOooooo

but I always sort of wondered what the hell made that noise, and how, and if it was really the same as the air-raid sirens you hear in old movies. I don’t know if any of you have looked into the world of sirens, but there’s a corollary to the law of if-it-exists-there-is-porn-of-it: if it exists, there is a small and deranged cadre of people who collect it for purely nonsexual reasons. Good examples of this include vacuum tubes, power-line insulators, and the whole spectrum of the siren family from horns and whistles all the way up to the most ridiculous noisemaker of them all, about which more later.

There are two sorts of siren, for most purposes, and the fire trucks that go under my window multiple times per evening (WHOOOOoooooooooooooOOOOOOOO BRAAAAAAAAAA BRAAAAAA WOOOOOOOOOO) are equipped with the pneumatic type, plus an air horn, while the police cars (NNNNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEE WOOP WOOP EEEEEEEEEEEE) have electronic sirens. The electronic ones can replicate the wail of a pneumatic siren but have a much tinnier sort of noise, higher and more nasal than their mechanical cousins.

Pneumatic sirens work on a principle so simple it’s funny. Sound is perceived as the result of air pressure variations hitting our little tiny delicate eardrums and billowing them in and out, so anything that causes a regular disturbance in airflow will make noise, viz. blowing raspberries. That is in effect what happens when you spin up a pneumatic siren. An impeller fan (rotor) turns inside a slotted housing (stator), sucking air in and blowing it out again through the slots in the stator drum. As the rotor turns, it chops the air-stream coming out of the stator slots into regular bursts: it carries vanes that turn past the stator slots and periodically block them off. Each time the rotor and stator holes align, a burst of air is forced through. The frequency of these bursts is the pitch of the siren.The alternating pressure wave propagates through the air and drives everybody nuts unless they’ve lived on Lombard Street and have learnt to ignore sirens for the most part.

These are the sirens you will be familiar with from the war films, the mournful minor-third wail of the British Carter air-raid siren and the single tone of the US Federal Thunderbolt. They take a lot of power to spin up to their maximum RPM/pitch, but can do this quickly; there’s no brake on the shaft, so once power is cut off it takes a long time for the siren to spin down out of audio frequency. You’ll notice this next time you hear a fire-truck or a volunteer-firehouse siren spin down: it sounds thoroughly desolate and discouraged. WOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Both the Carter and the Federal are dwarfed by the apotheosis of all sirens, the ridiculous, majestic, and fucking scary Chrysler Air Raid Siren. VictorySiren.com has a lot more information about this behemoth, but I shall outline a few of the more salient details for you, because it is just fucking unbelievable:

This siren is powered by a 180-hp V8 hemi from Chrysler’s industrial engine line. It runs a compressor capable of pushing 2610 cubic feet of air a minute through a rotor spinning at a maximum of 4600 rpm and forcing it out of its six aluminum throats at four hundred miles an hour. Under optimum conditions it can be heard more than thirty miles away. At one hundred feet from the monster its output is 138 dB. It is the loudest sound signaling device ever built. It is also the size of a car and weighs over five thousand pounds.

Looking at the Chrysler siren and listening to clips of it being run is looking into another era. I can’t think of another object that exemplifies the American approach to the Cold War: it’s huge, massively powerful, well-designed, and completely paranoid. And I want one. It would fit beautifully into my collection of Weird Shit I Find On The Internets.

There are some people in this world who, when you come across them for the first time, make you damn happy you've met them. And then there are some people who make you go all shivery and existential because you had to have imagined them: because real people aren't like that, they aren't that beautiful and vicious and elegant and bright. Because real people don't do things like sending people on their flists exquisite handmade ornaments for no other reason than that they want to.

And then when you've thought all that inside your head you go "...no, see, cause I've seen her tits on the internet. She must be real."

I love you. Thank you so much: it's hanging in my window and being beautiful, and by doing so is making this whole corner of the apartment a nicer place to be in.

Thank you for being real, and being you, and caring.

Holy shit, that's a level of accountability and responsibility I have never seen in a webmaster. Thank you, so much, and jesus fuck does anybody know if I can use LJ Book on IJ accounts??

Fucking University of Baltimore wouldn't let me in. I mean, this is not University of Maryland, people, this is University of fucking Baltimore.

Unhireable, uneducatable, undateable and not particularly good at what I do, this is definitely a personal hat-trick. I got into fucking Bard College. Must've gotten a lot stupider since then.

Thanks, UBalt. Appreciate that.

Another frothingly ignorant cunt speaks out on behalf of God, who honestly must be getting rather tired of this (if he is the I-Love-You-You-Love-Me NT god, not the FUCK ALL Y'ALL OT god).

I am particularly amused that she touted Lincoln as some sort of vague basis for her "you should not exist, this is the land of god" rhetoric. Lincoln was, as far as I know, agnostic. THIS IS THE LAND OF ILLINOIS, THE LAND OF....MAYBE GOD OR MAYBE NOT, WE DON'T REALLY KNOW, UM.

Fuck you, woman. Fuck you and your idiotic reactionary vitriol. I pity the children of Illinois who are being protected from horrible, horrible reality by you and your ilk.

In other news, I can now open and look into my fridge without wanting to die. There were some really interesting cultures in there, and I really should have kept samples and had a look to see if I was growing anything that could be of use in the happy fight against MRSA, but all, all are cloroxed into oblivion.

You know the bit in Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul where Dirk is staring at his fridge, which has now begun seriously to lurk? That was my fridge. And now I can open the door and identify all the contents without having to resort to classification via kingdom.

I also had to pay the excise-man $130 something for federal taxes, which did not make me a happy panda, but that was ever so offset by the fantastic news that the state owes me $27. I cannot WAIT until I get that refund. Time to book me a cruise.

Presumably all the rest of you lot get massive refunds because you have had too much tax withheld from your paychecks and the gummint has to give it all back in one go. I'd...really honestly rather come out even, with no refund and no balance, because at least then I wouldn't have either lent to or borrowed from the government throughout the year. It does get a bit galling when people bounce about and squeal over their four-figure refunds, but it could be worse; one year I had to pay a whole year's worth of tax in one big fat-ass check, due to the vicissitudes of Human Resources. I think I shall file for church tax-exempt status and conduct ritual sacrifices in my kitchen, since I can now easily store portions of sacrifice in my gleaming and sterilized fridge.

So Hell's Kitchen is entertaining for the following reasons:

1) Gordon Ramsay is a dick, and
2) Gordon Ramsay is my kind of dick.

I've been vaguely, dully aware of his existence since I started getting interested in actual cooking, and kept getting him mixed up with food personality and narrator of Iron Chef America Alton Brown, who is not him (& vice versa). Emphatically not him. Ramsay has one of those squashed belligerent Scots faces that make me think of angry hobbits, and is prone to standing around with his arms folded wearing a white jacket that is cut specifically to show off said arms (when he is not shrieking invective, jumping up and down, or throwing food at walls). He is the Simon Cowell of chefdom, if you took Cowell, changed his vocabulary gear to "dock worker," and injected him with enough Benzedrine to keep a whole dorm of 60s college students happy.

I have to say that I absolutely love watching incompetent people be shrieked at, and this seems to be the premise of Hell's Kitchen. However, I have a few questions:

1) Are candidates on this show specially selected from "Ignorant, Hubristic, and Unable-to-Detect-the-Presence-of-Pancake-Makeup Twits Backwards R Us"?

2) How come the guy with the white-chocolate-flavoured scallops even got far enough to become a candidate, and why was he not immediately disqualified when Ramsay threw up?

2a) What the livid fuck would possess someone to mix seafood with a substance that is basically cocoa butter, sugar, and milk?

3) Why, knowing that they would be called upon to produce items on a specific menu, did the male contestants decide that they did not need to learn the menu at all?

4) How is it that people with apparent skill--apparent enough to get them a candidate spot on this show--are incapable of frying eggs, sautéing scallops, or working together in any kind of systematic effort?

I can't cook and I know it; I have had no formal training whatsoever besides that I received from my parents. I'm lousy with sauces, consistently fuck up roux, have never made pastry that was edible, and can't be arsed to learn how to properly brine things. But I can guarantee that what I would make as a "signature dish" would be--while blonde, boring, and uninspired--edible without immediate emetic response.

I cannot wait for the next episode.

So elegant that one cannot ever be quite sure if the troll actually believes what he or she is fakeposting. If, in fact, the posts are fake.

And here is where it all breaks down into nasty little artifacts, because if it is fakeposting they are so brilliantly wonderful at it one wishes to jump up and down in a boob-bouncing manner suitable for iconing, but if it isn't, SOMEBODY IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET, and we cannot have that: it gnaws at us, it tears at our vitals, and we must fucking tell everyone about it lest they not know how WRONG the person is.

Case in point.

Someone called _allecto_ over at LJ posted a lengthy exposition on how and why Firefly, Serenity, and Buffy are foully sexist and vilely misogynistic from stem to stern, shiny with the juices of male-dominated societal norms, etcetera. Other, less vitriolic, posters read this rant and spread it around the internet because, as remarked above, when someone is WRONG ON THE INTERNET it is necessary to tell others all about it. The rant contains the message that no sex between a man and a woman can ever be consensual, all men are rapists when they have sex with women, and that nothing is ever funny ever ever ever ever. Also, Joss Whedon totally rapes his wife and stuff.

So I go to have a look at this elucidated sister's userinfo, and here is how she identifies herself:

26, radical feminist, lesbian, descendant of a First Nations people, vegetarian, child-care worker, creative, passionate, alive, inspired, woman. I am a Spinster, a Virgin, a Nag. I am a Harpy, a Fury, a Fate. I am a Witch, a Webster, a Muse (and I read too much Mary Daly). I believe that Sisterhood is the most powerful force in the Universe.

(What's a Webster? Can I get her to write more revenge tragedies, or perhaps expand the English lexicon?)

Shenanigans or no shenanigans? It seems just that little last bit too pat. If she'd left out the First Nations bit, or the vegetarian, perhaps it would ring truer. In any case, it's a jolly good laugh and you should all go and read it, if for no other reason than to marvel that anyone who might seriously believe the ridiculous bigoted twaddle she's spouting could manage to put together a reasonably tight and readable sentence.

It's astonishing to realize that I have now not had a cat for over two months and I am still cringing in horrified fury every time I read about or hear of other people's cats' misbehaviour.

The difference between a cat person and a non-cat person is as follows:

You hear a story about a cat repeatedly damaging personal property/needing incredibly expensive surgery to extract things it should not have eaten/displaying pathological inability to bury its own excrement. If you are a cat person, you will smile tolerantly and say "awww, but they're so cute." If you are not, you will want to throw something.

I never understood before how my father felt about the things; I had always fondly imagined myself to be a cat person, being as how I very much enjoyed the company of other people's cats. Fuck, was I wrong. Almost a year of exposure to a real live cat burned every last atom of tolerance or patience out of me with the intensity of a thermite reaction.

If I can't even stand Felis silvestris I certainly won't be able to stand Homo sapiens, and it's a good thing I'm unlikely ever to breed.

From this day forth there shall be no more Basic accounts registerable. Of those who are already registered as Basic accounts, all but two shall live; the rest shall stay as they arenothing is supposed to happen to you, although we have our serious doubts on this score.

Not only did they fail to announce this officially in a separate news community post, preferring to mention it in passing in a comment, but they apparently bothered to ask Founder Brad what he thought about it, and when he said "what the fuck is wrong with you," promptly ignored him and went ahead anyway.

SUP!LJ: all about the benjamins since 2007.

If I hadn't already for the most part left LJ for all purposes other than bitching on the vivian_shaw account, I'd do it now.

Watch this with the sound off. It is adorable.

EDIT HOLY SHIT IT IS THE BAGGER 288 IN ACTION EATING A MOUNTAIN

I wish to add Jeremy Clarkson to the list of people with whom I wish to have extremely loud middle-of-the-afternoon headboard-percussion-championship coitus.

That is all.

Dear Baltimore,

It's nice that you like to salt roads and sidewalks. What I don't get is your odd habit of apparently dancing with twinkling little engineer boots down the sidewalk sprinkling your halite just here and just there, twirling and fluttering and leaving random stretches of sidewalk glazed with ice the consistency of super-polished industrial diamond.

It's a good thing my snow boots have steel heels, bitches.

I expected better of you, CNN.

The goo exuded by one's mucous membranes is mucus minus an O. Something covered in or oozing mucus is mucous.

Learn this. It's about as simple as women/woman.

Mirror journal. This is mostly for my own sake: the one over at thoughtcrime international is going to remain, but I'll be spending considerably less time over there.

I might set this up to be accessible through a feed, if I think it's worth it. In the meantime, HIGH TOWER TEXT, YO.