My Quiet Life

napoleon dynamite

Well, we just saw Napoleon Dynamite. There's 82 minutes of my life I'll never get back. It was awful.

It struck me as a Rushmore rip-off by someone that didn't grasp why Rushmore was funny -- that you weren't supposed to be laughing at the main character, but with him.

i love gender, how bout you

cars.about.com has some dumb article listing the "top 10 cars for women":

Women tell us they prefer a car that's agile, easy to park, with good visibility.

Because men, as we know, prefer cars that are slow and cumbersome, impossible to park, and have low visibility.

They like to sit higher and rightly insist on storage for purses.

Okay, I'll give them this one, because while Amanda is learning to drive, we've had trouble figuring out where to put her purse while I'm in the passenger seat.

Low price and running costs are important for working women.

.. but not for men. Nope. Men like to pay at lot and keep paying, for no reason.

Space for growing families is essential in many cases and safety is a major factor.

While men don't actually have families, if they did, they would definitely prefer a car in which any minor accident would result in their prolonged, fiery death. Isn't gender funny like that?

Good times. Stay tuned for the "Top 10 Cars for Black People".

yes, I still listen to music

Some albums I have been enjoying lately:

Rufus Wainwright, Want One
Rufus Wainwright, Poses
Destroyer, This Night

I would link to allmusic, but it has ceased to exist as far as I am concerned.

poster children

posterchildren.com is totally broken in Opera. I wonder if they know.

christmas in cambodia

This whole "christmas in cambodia" thing has to be one of the stupidest smear attempts I've ever read, and yet another reason why reading instapundit's partisan buffoonery should be avoided. But since I accidentally did, let me now quote Kevin Drum, who puts this one to bed:

So let me get this straight. Kerry did go to Cambodia -- even though that was supposedly impossible, he did take CIA guys in -- even though that was supposedly absurd, and he did get a hat from one of them -- even though that was supposedly a sign of mental instability. The extent of Kerry's malfeasance is that instead of doing it in December, he actually did it in January and February.

Considering that he's mentioned this story only twice, most recently 18 years ago, and it turns out that his only crime is to have tarted it up with a bit of holiday pathos, I think I'll pass on following it any further down the Swift Vets rabbit hole. But thanks to everyone who displayed their deep unseriousness about this election by participating in this smear. It will be remembered.

tax man

Bill Hobbs quotes Jeff Cornwall on the CBO report, possibly quoting this NRO piece? Or was he the original author, maybe?

Anyways, the post says:

Acura RL

In other automotive news, Acura is revamping the RL. The new RL will be a sharper-looking design (one that almost reminds me of the B4 VW Passat), AWD, 3.5L V6 with an SMG gearbox. Quite an upgrade!

McLaren & Mercedes

Now that is a work of art. McLaren and Mercedes have teamed up to bring us the 2005 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. I like it. It's a good looking car. It looks a little weird from the side, though.

Relevant numbers:

a thousand points of light

A good summation of the state of Jabber:

As anyone who subscribes to the JADMIN mailing list can tell you, the existing server options all have issues, from difficulty of installation to lack of documentation to missing protocols to inability to run the existing gateways to non-Jabber IM services. As anyone who talks with Jabber users knows, there are hundreds of Jabber clients but almost all of them are close to useless. I chat with server admins and end users all the time, so I hear these complaints in abundance. I'm beginning to think that it's time to do something about it.

Fortunately he proposes some solutions:

shock and awe

The WP covers some startling news from the CBO:

Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign.

...

The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.

Over that same period, taxpayers with incomes from around $51,500 to around $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase. Households earning around $75,600 saw their tax burden jump the most, from 18.7 percent of all taxes to 19.5 percent.

Shocked! I am SHOCKED! However, Republicans don't agree, of course:

They point to a different set of numbers within the CBO study that show that the rich are actually paying more in individual federal income taxes. If Social Security, Medicare and other federal levies are excluded, the rich are paying a higher share of income taxes this year than they would have paid with no tax changes, the CBO found.

Yes, if you eliminate entirely from consideration the taxes that fall heaviest on the lower and middle class, they are hardly paying anything! Those cheapskates! This is no surprise, since it's well-known that the lower class is actually extremely lazy, doing practically nothing all day, if you exclude their jobs.