I just thought I’d squeeze in one last post for April.
Hi.
Monthly Archives: April 2001
Outta site
The more astute amongst you may have observed that I have trimmed some of the fat off the Lucubus. First on the chopping block was ShanDo! – An Avantgarde New Media Art Piece Disguised as a Shannen Doherty Fan Site. I had grown quite tired of various international personalities e-mailing me and asking me to send nude photos of myself, presumably although not necessarily under the impression that I was Shannen herself. Also holding my interest no longer are e-mail messages from assorted Charmed fans both foreign and domestic, who do not seem to get the joke that I neither love Shannen nor hate her, but am entirely indifferent, and thus are inclined to call me a dickhead or a retard or possibly a retarded dickhead. Don’t get me wrong, I love being insulted, but I’d rather the insult be well-informed, you know? Anyway, the page is still up in its original location, but I’ve removed all the links to it. It will ultimately be available for viewing in a site archive I’m building, although that probably won’t stop it from going into the search engines, dammit. At any rate, all messages sent to [address deleted] or [address deleted] will, from here on in, go straight to the trash.
Also removed from mass linkage is the homepage of The Complacents The Real Life Band. The Complacents The Real Life Band have not played a show for about two years now. The most recent news update congratulates Jeremy on his marriage, and he’s not even the most recent Complacent The Real Life Band Member to get married. That would be Mike. (Congratulations, Mike! Even though it happened six months ago and I’ve congratulated you in person since!) So, out-of-date combined with probably-defunct results in internet litter, and thus shall be swept into the rubbish bin of the not-linked-from-the-main-page site archives. Taking its place in the link is the homepage of The Complacents The Fictional Cartoon And/Or Radio Show Band, or complacents.com for short, which has a halfway decent prayer of being updated in the next few years.
The final, most minor deletion was that of the “Something Else” section, ironically named as “Nothing Else At All” was ever put there. At various times I thought I could make it a photo gallery of my toenail clippings, or of my customized Lego action figures, or possibly instructions on how to perform a nosefart. But “Something Else” fell by the wayside, and few will mourn the passing of the Most Pointless Single HTML Document On The Internet. Or at least in my zip code.
Anyway, the end result is a smooth, efficient site. And also I have tweak the bottom menu frame so it looks right again.
The Lucubus. Bringing you webby fun and internet good times since, oh, 1996 or so.
Missississipeepeeinyoureye
I have changed my mind about the Confederate flag .
I used to think that the continued display of the Confederate flag was entirely inappropriate, given the fact that the Confederacy lost the Civil War, after all, fighting for an indefensible cause.
Then I thought, wait a minute. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction, in which some progress towards racial equality was actually achieved. After a couple decades, Reconstruction began to lose its potency, and the racist Democrats came back into power. It was around this time that the most active variant of the KKK appeared and started catching tigers by the toe and hanging them by their necks. In Texas, “sundown towns” started popping up. These had billboards at the city limits reading “Nigger, don’t let the sun set on you here!” It’s no longer so extreme, of course, but racism – the nasty, active kind as well as the ignorant passive side – persists and thrives. There are “United Daughters of the Confederacy” monuments in states that were not in the Confederacy, and, indeed, in states that were not states at that time. It kinda seems like the South rose again, doesn’t it? And now, they’re patriots!
So, why shouldn’t Mississippi celebrate its racist heritage? Sure, racism is a festering hemmorhoid on the anus of society, but who says our state flags have to be prescriptive? It’s a true part of their history. And maybe they’ll look at that flag and it’ll make them think about racism – what it is, what it means, how it makes them feel.
I mean, look what it did for the Duke boys. No truer heroes ever joyrode through Hazzard County.
I am drunk.
So it snowed today. It SNOWED today!?!? It’s the middle of fucking APRIL!!!! Goddamned Chicago. I’m going to move to Hawaii. Also my gay marriage will be recognized there.
So no one ever leaves any comments, not that anyone visits the site or that I say anything worth commenting on, but maybe I’ll get rid of them since they’re so damn UNPOPULAR.
I still can’t believe George W. Bush is president. STOP THE WORLD, I WANNA GET OFF! I’M GETTING DIZZY AND STUFF!
I will delete all of this later.
O, I am April’s fool!
Complacents.com is live, if that means anything to any of you.
I’ve spent the last several days with the “Electric Company” theme in my head. I have the Noggin network on digital cable, and they show “The Electric Company” on a regular basis. I credit my overall successful education to the hours clocked watching it and “Sesame Street”, which also appears on Noggin, back in the first four years of my life. Why, that’s why my generation is better off than today’s teenagers… why, those baggy-pants-wearin’ gun-totin’ baby-havin’ to-N*Sync-listenin’ whippersnappers woulda been eaten alive back in my day. Because back then, we didn’t have any food. Food had not been discovered, and so we ate each other, for warmth, as neither heat nor hunger had been defined either. Sure, things were tough back then. But we weren’t grumbly, sullen punks. Of course, we are now. Being grumbly and sullen are what your twenties are all about. What, then, are your teenage years about? Being hormonal and underappreciative, that’s what! Being unwilling to see any sort of larger picture, that’s what! Perpetuating the career lifespans of various undertalented yet highly commercial pop stars, that’s what! I mean, that’s what my generation did when we were that age!
I am going to go drink some milk.
a 150 proof
BACKGROUND.
I was on Usenet a couple of weeks ago, and some idiot was trying to defend use of the phrase “a 150 years”. He claimed that “a 150″ was how to say “a hundred and fifty” as opposed to “one hundred and fifty”, which he claimed sounded “stilted and pompous”. When people told him he was wrong, he launched into a diatribe about how this is English, not French, and there is no governmental agency determining the rules of the language, and thus the rules of the language were to be determined by popular usage. When informed that he was the only one defending this phrase, and thus that it was not popular at all, he said that he wrote “150” on a card, asking random people to pronounce it. He said most of them said “a hundred and fifty” and so that made him right. When told he was missing the point, and that “a 150″ would mean “a a hundred and fifty”, he would accuse people of being “language fascists”. He refused to listen to what anyone had to say because they “gave no reasons to support” their arguments. So I wrote this formal proof.
PROOF.
Prove: “a 150 years” is a silly phrase.
Given:
1. The numeral 300 is pronounced “three hundred”.
2. The numeral 200 is pronounced “two hundred”.
3. Numbers can be used as nouns AND adjectives.
4. Adjectives modify nouns.
5. Nouns can be modified by multiple adjectives.
6. Nouns cannot modify nouns.
Assumed:
1. The indefinite article “a”, being singular, is roughly equivalent to the adjectival number “one”. Thus, “a year” equals “one year” equals “1 year”.
2. The adjectival phrase “hundred” minus the “one” or “a”, as in “hundred fifty” or “hundred and fifty” or “hundred-dollar bill”, implies a singular hundred, or 100, unless other numerical modifiers are added, as in “two hundred”.
3. The phrase “one hundred and fifty” is equivalent to “one hundred fifty” is equivalent to “150”.
4. In the phrase “150 years”, “years” is the noun, and “150” serves as the adjective that modifies that noun.
5. The phrase “a one year”, when “year” is the object noun, contains a redundancy. (When there is a hyphen, as in “a one-year trip”, “one-year” becomes an adjectival phrase.)
6. Redundancies are silly.
Point #1
a. The numeral 100 is pronounced “one hundred”. (G1, G2)
b. It can also be pronounced as “a hundred”. (A1)
Point #2
a. “[one hundred fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A3)
b. “[one hundred and fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A3)
c. “[a hundred and fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A1, A3, P1b)
d. “[hundred and fifty] years” is equivalent to “[150] years”. (A2, A3)
Conclusion #1
[150], [one hundred fifty], [one hundred and fifty], [a hundred and fifty], and [hundred and fifty] are all variations on the same numerical “word”. In the case of “[150] years”, the numerical “word” serves as an adjective. (P2a-P2d, G3, G4, A4)
Point #3
a. “a [one hundred fifty] years” contains a redundancy. (A3, A5, C1)
b. “a [a hundred and fifty] years” contains a redundancy. (A5, P1b, C1)
c. “a [hundred and fifty] years” contains no obvious redundancy. However, as we showed in Conclusion #1, [hundred and fifty] equals [one hundred fifty]. Therefore, the phrase contains a redundancy. (A2, A5, C1)
d. “a [150] years” contains a redundancy. (A3, A5, C1)
Conclusion #2
The phrase “a 150 years” is silly indeed. (P3d, A6).
POSTSCRIPT.
The poster acknowledged that I did back up my reasoning, but then he went back to the “one hundred and fifty sound stilted and pompous” argument, which means he continued to miss the point. The guy was almost certainly a troll, although seeing as the thread went on for weeks (to which this proof was my only contribution), it may not have been a troll, as trolls have much shorter attention spans than that. People on crack also have short attention spans, so that can’t be it either.
And yes, I am a loser for (1) writing out a formal proof on something so inane (2) using usenet lingo (3) using usenet and (4) enumerating the reasons that I am a loser.