Internet

I’ve added my Amazon Wishlist to my blog. It lets people see what I want and link to it to buy it from the Amazon site. This was made possible because of a great plugin that Ryan Prins made. After downloading it, I noticed a few issues that made the XHTML not validate and a small functionality issue.

I fixed them on my side and created a simple patch to fix the issues. After I sent it to Ryan via an email, he quickly updated it and thanked me on his site. I recommend you check out his plugin if you use WordPress and the Amazon wishlist functionaity.

Mucophagy
The Top 10 Craziest Science Stuff you didn’t know has quite a few awesome facts. For instance, regarding eating your boogers (mucophagy):

Some research suggests that mucophagy may be a natural and even healthy activity, which exposes the digestive system to bacteria accumulated in the mucus, thereby helping to strengthen the immune system.

I’ve been saying the same thing for years. 😉 Along with that awesome fact are “Men can breastfeed”, “The Gay Bomb”, “Erections After Death”, “Hypnotizing Chickens”, and a few others. You should go and read them all. Be sure to read the comments as well because I was literally LOLing after reading some of them, so don’t miss out on that.

Cranky old lady who hates musicMothers Against Noise is a group of old women that seek the elimination of all music they deem to be “noise”. You may ask, “What is ‘noise’?”

Noise is music that uses unpleasant or painful or extremely loud or discordant sound. Noise is also a very dangerous musical trend that is hell bent on destroying civilized culture, this anti-cultural movement is quickly sweeping the globe, and is very dangerous to our youth.

Everything on her “site” is “hell bent” on destroying america. She even invokes 9/11 as rationale for invading the foreign territory of popular culture, forgetting that she was once young. Naturally, Mothers Against Noise is trying to mobilize parents to inspect the music collections of their children and summarily destroy selected evil artists’ CDs such as Radiohead, Andrew WK, and Merzbow. What the hell is Merzbow, and where is Marilyn Manson in that list?

This cranky old lady isn’t the best writer in the world, as evidenced in a few choice passages:

Many will say even if some of the lyrical content of noise is not offensive, but ultimately it doesn’t matter because it is usually effected with a lot of well… effects and you cant tell what they are saying anyways. Then answer me this, if it doesn’t matter then why aren’t they singing about birds and waterfalls and living in a wonderful world??
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In this post 9-11 world we have to fight harder and smarter than our enemies. We must arm our self with knowledge and seek to shine light where there is only darkness.
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These people hide behind the guise of “artistic creativity” while in reality they are out to destroy any trace of art.(How contradictory is that folks?)

“I mean, what IS the deal?? And who do I talk to about airline food?”

She asks for stories from parents, and as far as I can tell on this one-page “site”, she has one horribly concerned parental story:

It comes with a lyric sheet of some of the most horrid descriptions of pedophilia and fantisies of sex with AIDS patients.
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Right now I amvery upset and do not know what to do. I do not want my son to become a pervert. I do not know how he got interested in this stuff at all. And I thought Marylin Manson was the sickest thing around.

Ahh, there Marilyn is!

The noise scene is also structured a lot like terrorist organizations, they work in small numbers with no clear leader and work feverishly on their ‘music’ often self releasing cds and records (I might add if you heard most of this stuff, youd see why). This makes our job a lot harder since we do not have a handful of larger record companies to boycott or pressure.

Poor her.

“M. Smith” invites you to email her or join her yahoo group to discuss “some of the biggest offenders conspiring to destroy the souls of our youth.“. I suggest you do; we must protect our children from the terrible secret.

[Thanks to Cat for the link.]

Here’s a catchup for some people. WordPress is the software that runs this blog. Kubrick is the default theme that comes with it. You’ve probably seen it on a million blogs and on this one. However, I wanted to customize mine with darker colors, like some of my previous designs. I also wanted to have my picture up in the header part and again, darker colors.

I thought I was going to have to open photoshop and try to individually change the rasterized images since I didn’t have any vector files (psd) to work with, but thankfully some guy (he didn’t put his name on his blog) created a PSD version of the Kubrick theme, including rasterized and vector layers. Naturally I went with the premade vector layers, overlaid a new image on top of it, and about 10 minutes later, I had the theme I had always dreamed of. Thanks “some guy”!

In other news, I got my roommate Courtney to start a blog. He wasn’t using his domain for anything except email, so I set up wordpress and a nice theme for him too. I even photoshopped his picture onto the green hillside 🙂 He couldn’t help but use it, after I did all the work.

Update: They did sell out of that stupid thing I bought. I wouldn’t have been able to believe that I could hate them more. They gave me a $5.00 coupon toward a future purchase, but even including that, I had to spend $15 more in order to get an item similar to the one I wanted to buy.

Sure, Overstock might lure you in with their ads featuring a seductive austrian woman prancing about in a white wonder world of online commerce, but what really awaits you on the web site? I hate Overstock.com. Don’t get me wrong, I shop there, but I hate it the same way I hate Wal-Mart, and I hate it too, but for different reasons. Read on to see why I hate Overstock.com.
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