So this is what it’s like if you cat a large binary to /dev/audio

Oh, come now. This is Mjollnir we’re talking about! Personal weapon of Thor, god of Thunder. Of course there’s going to be thunder! Lots of it, and pretty loud too, I would imagine. I mean, he’s not called Thor, god of Taser Sizzles, now is he?

Nasrudin called at a large house to collect for charity. The servant said “My master is out.” Nasrudin replied, “Tell your master that next time he goes out, he should not leave his face at the window. Someone might steal it.”

If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.

Public media should not contain explicit or implied descriptions of sex acts… Ponography is pornography, regardless of the source.

Whenever I think that the human race has reached the ultimate level of stupidity, I see the benchmark get 1-upped… amazing.

Gimme charcoal to the measure two,
Send the bullet where you want it to.
Gimme sulfur to the measure three,
Make that powder gonna keep you free.
Gimme saltpeter, measure fifteen –
Sweetest shootin’ that you’ve ever seen!

Amid all the fuss about the impeachment proceedings, a friend who fled here from a country without democracy raised a truly amazing thought the other day: In the entire year the Monica thing has been going on — or in all the years Ken Starr has been searching for something indictable — not once has it occurred to any of us to look at a Potomac River bridge and wonder if tanks are going to roll across. As my friend said, there are a lot of places where, with the civilian government this weakened or ridiculed, and the legislature this paralyzed by politics, the army would roll on in and take over. And it never occurs to us to wonder that it doesn’t happen. Maybe that says more about America than anything else.

There is an intermittent debate, in these last dying millennia of puritanism, about the connection between sexual orthodoxy and the exercise of power. If a President can’t keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I’d rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which case it would make sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I don’t say we should pardon them — on the contrary, we need to fan their guilt. But by
harnessing this useful emotion we restrict their sinning to the erotic sphere, and produce a countervailing integrity in governing. That’s my theory, anyway.

[I]n an age that is beyond embarrassment, it’s rarely clear what a “reasonable person” would find offensive. For every Duchess of York who objects to being captured, by telephoto lens, in a topless romp, there’s a Jennifer Ringley, a twenty-one-year-old exhibitionist in Washington, D.C., who has a camera trained on her bedroom twenty-four hours a day, transmitting images on the Internet at Jennicam.org. Who’s the more reasonable person—Fergie or Jenni?