Ain't that the truth

We are lying on the couch watching Constantine (a good script and great visuals ruined by Canoe (he either goes upstream or down) Reeves displaying his one facial expression and one of his two vocal ranges, when we watch the scene where Rachel Weisz says that her twin insisted on seeing visions of demons for so long (stupid girl, she really should have learnt to shut up) that they forced her... to take ... antipsychotics...

When I comment to my partner that there is a highly disturbingly scientological anti-psychiatry bent to Hollywood.

Well yes, she says, because if they embraced science then...

They wouldn't have as many storylines? I finished.

Yes, she confirmed.

I reckon that Hollywood needs some competent fucking scriptwriters. I'm beginning to wonder how much sympathy I have for the scriptwriter strike.

N.B.: Competent scriptwriting: House: Occasional woo-woo religious spiritualism crap explained by cold hard medical neurological disorder or hallucination. Six Feet Under. We know they're hallucinating or dreaming. Douglas Adams said in one interview how disappointed he was with X-Files having the spooky explanation as the true one week after week, when he remembers Doom Watch which, week after week, explained human credibility through noisy drains and light diffraction through low-lying clouds and... Come on people, how bad was your basic high school science education??

I'm helping pay for what exactly?

This really pisses me off.

I have just received a letter from MBF telling me that thanks to an increasing cost of payouts to members, my health insurance premiums are about to go up again. Along with which there was a notification of improved and added services: Increases in various optical care limits, which I will benefit from, and:

MBF MemberCare services will now include chiropractors.

This is the part that really pisses me off. Chiropractic therapy is based upon a deeply flawed theory of illness derived by an idiot who clearly knew nothing about any scientific processes and made one observation, once, which gave him an idea. Chiropractic treatments are not just useless, they're actively dangerous, having been linked to instances of stroke and crippling neck pain (ironic, that). And now a nation-wide provider of financial health care assistance is legitimising this pursuit of charlatans and dangerous fools by funding members using funds partly provided by me.

I think I would be justified in complaining about that. Surely if a medical insurance organisation are going to pay out for somebody else's medical care, they should have some expectation of that care being effective and preventing the need for future payouts? Chiropractic has comprehensively failed to provide any proof of any efficacy outside of the placebo effect.

I'd go looking for an alternative provider, but I have a sinking feeling that I won't receive any joy anywhere else either.

How to make an Apple sexier

A present like this would just about justify getting married.

A steampunk Apple Mac Mini.

Damn that's sexy!

Like beating someone else's head against a door

Douglas Adams is frequently quoted as having written, or said, something along the lines of "Apple Computers may not have got everything right, but at least they worked out that the Century was going to end."

Let's look at something else, shall we? And this, weirdly, may be down to Microsoft getting something right on the Mac platform that they most emphatically didn't get right on their own fucking operating system.

On a new(-ish) Mac, if you go into the settings for Microsoft automatic update (for Office, basically), it says "Automatic update will only run when you have a network connection".

I can tell you right now that if you have a Windows machine and the network connection is not established at boot up, it will still, sure as fuck, try to run automatic updates and then complain about not being able to.

This is not rocket science!

You mean there's more to it than just drinking more?

As a service to all my friends and random encounterers, I would like to point out, for your use and profit, Caffeine: A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired.

Enjoy.

Is this what Deckard has on his wall?

These are so awesomely cool I'm still wetting myself laughing.

Who would have thought of taking old animal-shaped robots and turning them into cute little hunting trophies that have motion sensors and snarl at passers-by?

I think the lion's the cutest.

"How about just a little bit of terror?"

This astounds me so much that I am at a loss for how to respond. Be sarcastic about their how ironic it is that they were more effective than they wanted to be? Attempt a "well, they're not really hardcore terrorists, are they?" comedy routine? The most bad-taste response eludes me.

I just cannot believe that someone could plan a bombing of a public place, in order to kill people, but declare it unacceptable that they had killed as many people as they did. And yet this is exactly what some of the Bali bombers have just said (ABC News).

What the fuck did they think they were trying to do? Get just the right amount of carnage, death and suffering to cow people without getting them pissed off? I don't believe that terrorists are automatically mentally ill or any other standard of not-normal, but I can not see where the fuck their thought patterns were leading them if that was the end result.