Stolidus

I had knee surgery about 2 weeks ago (ACL reconstruction), and I’ve been filling all of this free time that I have with pain management, TV, and occasionally some video games (inFAMOUS is flippin’ great!). I’m trying to keep things level because becoming addicted to pain meds has certainly gotta suck, and also too many video games increases my risk of contracting FPSD. I gotta say, knee surgery is horrible, but at least Percocet kicks ass.

This one’s for you, Z:

Ever sat through a long movie with an enormous drink, only to miss the climax because you had to run to the bathroom? Well worry no more RunPee.com happily solves that problem by providing a list of the best times to take a pee break during the latest Hollywood releases.

… although i wish i wasn’t. Michell Hurwitz has a new cartoon out, “Sit Down, Shut Up“, with voices by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Henry Winkler… sadly no Tobias :’( I suppose it was silly of me to think that it would ever live up to my expectations of it being just as good as Arrested Development, but, at least it’s not terrible. In fact, it has its moments - some hilarious, and some which end up in rumours of cancellation before the end of the first season. dammit. hopefully it wont go the way of Clone High and The Undergrads. At the very least I expect this to hold me over until next year when the alleged Arrested Development movie is supposed to be released.

At the risk of this blog turning into a youtube mirror, here ya go:

Today is a great day people and I’m going to tell you why. Not only is the original “Secret of Monkey Island” being remade with brand new graphics, full voice dialogue, and re-recorded music but there’s also… I gotta pause for dramatic effect here… TellTame Games is giving us even more Guybrush Threepwood in 5 NEW Monkey Island episodic games! I’ve been waiting for this day for a long, long time and now I’m exhausted from sheer excitement. Enjoy videos below.

When N and I (Z) started this site (for the second time) we were confident that we would write articles on a regular basis, get visitors to the site, offer interesting content like tutorials, etc but as it turns out we are still very lazy bastards. However, once I am finished my current project (which is SRED and I hate it a lot), I will try to write a few things. One of the things that I have been meaning to talk about is my phone, the HTC Touch Pro, and how it compares to the iPhone (which is a turd in my opinion). Also, I might finally get to do some WPF stuff (yay!) and I definately want to write about that. I guess we’ll see. As for N, well, he might write something next year… maybe.

I recently added a feature to my company’s main software product that enables it to send out alerts, but it requires access to an SMTP server (understandably.) Anyway, I tried to configure Windows XP’s built in SMTP service, but the stupid thing just queues up the emails somewhere (I have no idea where) and never actually sends anything. Does anyone have any idea where these messages go? How do I get the friggin’ thing to actually, you know, email someone?!

There’s an interesting article found here written by Randall Kuhn, an assistant professor and Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies. It explores the San Diego vs. Tijuana analogy that Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, uses to justify the Israel vs. Palestine situation. It’s a short read, please take the time to go through it.

There’s a new single out from USS’s upcoming album “Einsteins of Consciousness”. It’s called “Laces Out” and you can listen to it below. Thanks go out to Adam from The Edge. You can find the song here. I’ll embed it as soon as I figure out how (stupid WordPress keeps encoding my ampersands and breaking the link.)

An interesting talk from Jewish British Lawmaker Sir Gerald Kaufman. He compares the Israelis to Nazis much like I did earlier but whereas I come off as an angry pissant he is articulate and he presents his case well. It’s a short video, about 5 minutes, and I urge you to watch it. If you would rather read what he had to say, the text of his speech is below.

Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab): “I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.

I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me.

I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence.

My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.

On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians—the total is now 1, 000. She replied instantly that
“500 of them were militants.”

That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.

The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said:

“You make peace by talking to your enemies.”

However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.

It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.”

God bless this man and others like him who are in a position to make themselves heard and who censure Israel’s barbaric actions. I still can’t believe Canada of all countries voted in favour of Israel at the UN. So much for giving the Conservatives a chance.

If anyone believes that Israel’s latest assault against Hamas and the Palestinians is fair, justified, and balanced please stop deluding yourself. The Israelis are nothing short of mass murderers committing the same types of atrocities that made Hitler so detested, with the major difference being that the Israelis have the support of the UN. Click here to see pictures of Israel’s completely outrageous and unjustified response, as well as the extent of the damage that Hamas managed to cause. Beware though, some of these are kind of graphic.