This came to my attention thanks to the wonderful Charles P. Pierce. I think the image nicely encapsulates the fucked up state of this country. Presumably the National Guard presence is to keep people eager to save two dollars on some cheap crap from killing each other. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn it was to keep the employees from picketing the store.

A few days ago I wrote about my displeasure over the cost of razor blades for systems like the Gillette Mach 3 (which I’ve been using for a very long time). I placed my order with West Coast Shaving last Sunday evening. They emailed me Monday morning to say the items had been shipped. On Wednesday the USPS delivered a Baxter of California Safety Razor Baxter of California Best Badger Shave Brush D.

Being single and a long way from my mother and brother I went to the movie theatre today and watched “The Theory of Everything“. It is a certainty that Eddie Redmayne will be nominated for the Academy Awards best actor category. He should easily win the award for best actor. I haven’t been so enthralled by a portrayal of a living or historical person since I watched Daniel Day Lewis in last years “Lincoln“.

Today we learn that a woman living near Ferguson, Missouri who was afraid bought a gun and killed herself accidentally. The new contestant for a Darwin Award was waving the gun in the car driven by her boyfriend. Which understandably distracted the driver causing him to rear-end another vehicle. Which in turn caused the new gun owner to shoot herself in the head. Dear NRA, please tell me again how wonderful it would be if every yahoo with no commonsense purchased and open carried a gun.

Today I ordered a double-edge safety razor. The type of razor my grandfather used. Why? Because I’m tired of paying through the nose for replacement blade cartridges. Not to mention that if I skip shaving for a couple of days the multi-blade cartridge clogs so easily as to be rendered almost useless. I’ve used a Gillette Mach 3 razor as my daily shave for longer than I can remember. Before that I used other disposable cartridge blade razors.

If you use Verizon for your phone service you really should switch to a company that is less evil. This paper by the Electronic Frontier Foundation describes how Verizon surreptitiously modifies your Internet browsing to make it possible for anyone to track your browsing across sites. They do it in a manner that means your usual techniques for limiting such tracking are useless. Furthermore, it also modifies HTTP requests from apps on your phone (not just the web browser) which makes it possible to correlate application use with other web browsing.

Today I read several stories (such as this story) about a judge who forced a critically ill woman to undergo a cesarean section. Causing the death of the woman and the fetus. This is the sort of thing that happens when the views of fetus worshippers hold sway. If this incident was an anomaly it would be bad enough. But this sort of thing is the predictable outcome when people base their morals on bronze age religious beliefs rather than rational moral decisions.

Yesterday I received an FRC Action Alert email (i.e., Family Research Council) that wasn’t the usual request to pray the gay away. Instead it directed me to electionforum.org that would help me “vote my values”. Which is Christian dog whistle meaning “vote for people who will legislate to shove Jebus/Jesus/God/Yahweh down everyones throats”. I was ecstatic. Unlike most email from the FRC that link was something I could actually use. Specifically, I could use it to avoid inadvertently voting for theocrats intent on subverting the secular principles our nation was founded upon.

Recently I purchased an AUVIO Universal Remote Receiver for Playstation 3 to make it easy to use my Logitech Harmony remote control with my Sony Playstation 3 (PS3). In this post I described the challenge of doing the initial setup given the odd mapping of Sony BluRay player commands to PS3 commands. In particular, the mapping of “Stop” to the PS3 “X” button which is typically used as an “enter” or “execute” function for most PS3 software.

Update: See my second post where I talk about dealing with the Auvio receiver always being assigned as the first controller. Which tends to make the PS3 gamepad unusable inside a single-player game. A Sony Playstation 3 (PS3) is a decent Blu-Ray DVD player in addition to being a game console. So it would be nice if you could use your normal infrared remote control to play and interact with DVDs.