So we had our company dinner tonight, and they held a white elephant gift exchange. You can read about it on Wiki if you like, but the gift of the year was most certainly the Shake Weight. Actually, it was so popular that three of them showed up from different people. Of the three, the best one was most definitely the one that came packaged with creme fraiche. So congratulations to the dude who brought that for winning this year’s unofficial best gift.

Happy new year, everyone. And man, this year is already off to a good start!

Yes, it seems that Bill O’Reilly is trying to improve ratings on his show by appealing to a certain segment of today’s hip youth: ICP fans. Keen to play off of their lack of knowledge on how magnets work – and more importantly, their mistrust of scientists – BillO tried to prove God exists through logic:

I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam. In my opinion, all right? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can explain why  the tide goes in… #

Surely science cannot explain the tides! Except for that whole moon thing. But you can’t trust the scientists.

I’m currently reading Last Argument of Kings, the final book of the First Law trilogy by Joe Ambercrombie, and I came across this little gem. Probably the funniest thing I’ve read all year. It’s location 903 in the book, whatever page that corresponds to.

With each thrust her head tapped against the plaster… With each thrust the table made an outraged creaking, louder and louder every time, as though they were fucking over the back of some disapproving old man.

Happy new year, all!

So the other day I was on a flight, and ended up sitting next to a Yale student. Honestly I’m not sure how she got into Yale, because she was thwarted by the credit card swipe on her screen. For reference, this is the type of device I’m talking about.

She was trying to buy a film, but just could not figure out how to pay for it. First she tried to swipe the card outside of the screen itself (in the holder, basically) but that did nothing. Then she turned on the light and saw the little graphic that indicates you need to swipe. Imagine that! What a revelation!

So her next action was to put the credit card in vertically, so it would have been impossible to read the strip. Excellent. Finally she figured out how to put the card in properly, but couldn’t swipe across. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to her to angle the screen out, either. I suppose I could have aided her, but my girlfriend and I instead just decided to watch her struggle. Eventually she just gave up. So if you’re that girl, well.. sorry, I guess. (And how did you find this post?)

Politics have seriously gone off the deep end in the last week or so. Obama has capitulated to the Republicans by extending the Bush-era tax cuts, but also stacking on his own for the middle class. I don’t really have an opinion on this, though I’m mildly concerned how the government is going to take in any money. But whatever!

Anyway. The backlash against the president has been, well, crazy. There were a whole lot of posts on DailyKos about how the president sold them out, how he’s a traitor and a turncoat, and that he’s all noise. One particularly hilarious post was written by someone who unsubscribed from the Organizing for America mailing list, and then proceeded to weep about it. It’s true that some senators and representatives have been rather upset about the president as well, but they’re keeping it in line a little bit better.

The thing I find funniest of all is that opposition to the tax cuts bill comes from two very different groups: the progressives, and the teabaggers. Yes, apparently the teabaggers also oppose the bill, though for different reasons. I can only imagine what’s going through the mind of the crying unsubscribe guy when he reads that article – and he will, because it’s at the top of dKos right now. Must be a strange feeling to be united in a front with your mortal enemy. But really, what does that say about the viewpoints of the two respective groups?

I’ve looked at dKos at least once a day for roughly five years or so, and it’s very interesting to me how it’s melted down since then. The actual rhetoric there is gone; anyone who dissents from the perceived majority opinion is downvoted pretty hard. Actually, there’s been an uptick in the number of flounce posts (referred to there as GBCW, goodbye cruel world) written by more moderate people who basically think that the site has really lost the plot. An article titled Is Barack Obama Stupid? made it to the Recommended list rather quickly the other day, though the author received a huge number of downvotes for the title – not the content. That doesn’t change the fact that it made it to the recommended list in the first place.

Personally, these days I find ThinkProgress and Little Green Footballs to be among the more sane sites out there. Strange times indeed.