#848292 

<@lysol> is tubgirl a republican?
<jbroome> lysol: yeah, she believes in the trickle down theory

        (If you get that one, I’m very very sorry.)

#847598

<Amul Muzz> Why do I get the feeling that this is really a mob, just waiting for someone to say something they do not agree with?
<chrismjr> That’s the best description for the internet I’ve ever heard

#846801

<fugi> when mccain wins the election and invades iran, do we get to yell "Monopoly!" and put hotels across iraq, iran and afghanistan?

And more classic Bash stuff:

#849884

< FurnaceBoy> this is a waste of time
< FurnaceBoy> all he has to do is type what we told him
< Tonren> bluecake: When you run a command in a Linux terminal, it searches your path for the command.  type "echo $PATH" to see where Linux will look for commands you type.
< FurnaceBoy> stop trying to educate, Tonren. this is irc.
< FurnaceBoy> we yell at people

#847733 

l70uke: network connections says it cant find an IP address
dbbolton: open a web browser and type 192.168.1.1 in the address bar
dbbolton: what happens
l70uke: "please enter disk into drive a"
dbbolton: what the FUCK

#338364
<Alanna> Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OS’s is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders

For a majority of likely voters, meaningless bullshit will be the most important factor in deciding who they will vote for in 2008.

<Richad34> Oy I had a bad night
<Richad34> I couldn’t sleep, and had no idea what to do. My parents are still awake, it was midnight, and I was bored.
<Richad34> So then I remembered that I had a drama presentation the next class and I played a rich guy so I needed a suit.
<Richad34> I take out my suit, and get dressed. You know, the works. I even took out my top hat and my cane.
<Richad34> Now it gets a little weird. I had to go downstairs in order to see how I looked as it’s the only place with a full body mirror. My parents sleep on the same floor as me so I didn’t want to wake them up.
<Richad34> So I got this idea. I decided to turn on my TV so that my parents thought people were talking outside, and my footsteps would be noises they were making. I thought it would work, I was tired.
<Richad34> I ran downstairs, checked myself out. I looked fine, so I went back into my room
<Richad34> Now by then the running in a suit had made me kind of itchy (down south), so I quickly undo my pants and release what was stuck and to relieve my itch with my hand.
<Richad34> And my mom opens the door to the room and all I do is freeze in surprise
<Richad34> I don’t know what she was thinking, but I can tell you the following
<Richad34> It was midnight, I was in a suit and top hat, and I appeared to be jacking off to George from Seinfeld.
<Richad34> And my mom just stood there in disbelief
<Richad34> I can’t tell you what ensued, but it involved attempted exorcism and lots of crying
<Richad34> Best night ever

#809280

Casey: Yeah, writing paper.
Josh: want to be distracted?
Josh: want to play a game?
Casey: Dude…the paper…
Josh: *scizzors beats paper *
Josh: yes I know I misspelled it
Josh: and that
Casey: *pulls out rock*
Josh: *VOLCANO!
Josh: nothing beats volcano
Casey: ASTEROID.
Josh: MAGIC!!!
Casey: BLACK HOLE!
Josh: WHITE HOLE!
Casey: PATRIOT ACT!
Josh: not white house you phail
Casey: No, no, no. *Nothing* beats the Patriot Act, although I’m sure the ACLU is working very hard on it.
Josh: fine
Josh: ANARCHY
Casey: TOTALITARIAN STATE
Josh: EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN
Casey: STALIN
Josh: DEATH
Casey: RELIGION
Josh: RATIONAL THOUGHT
Casey: FUNDIES
Josh: NOISE CANCELING HEADPHONES
Casey: PEOPLE WITNESSING AT YOUR HOUSE
Josh: SHOTGUN
Casey: BOMBS

You can vote on this bash.org submission at  http://bash.org/?809280.

Chapter two opens with a quote:

"Physics is to mathematics what sex is to masturbation"

- Richard Feyman

I first saw Superbad the Monday after it opened while away at a conference.  I was hilarious.  There are a lot of great lines that you walk out quoting to your companions.  However, its hard to really pin down what it is that made the movie so funny.  When Brian and I first saw it we both laughed our asses of but in discussing it we decided that it was probably a guy thing and that our female friends would probably not enjoy it quite as much.   We were wrong.  By the following Saturday we had seen the movie three times, each time with different people.

In talking to some of the ladies I know who have seen it, I discovered they found it every bit as enjoyable.  as anyone who has read a review probably knows, the acting by the the three younger male leads was superb.  They captured that perfect level of feigned coolness laid over an intense, visceral feeling of awkwardness.  The jokes, while coarse and often mysogenistic do not come across as rooted ina  truly misogynistic world view.  They are more like the fag and nigger jokes me and my friends repeated to each other when we were kids because that is what we heard at home and our unique personalities had not yet gelled into a state where we felt strong enough to buck the system.

Th extremely candid feel of many of the exchanges between Evan and Seth reminded me of the kinds of ridiculous in retrospect but critcally important at the time conversations I had with friends when I was a teenager.  That connection to my younger self allowed the jokes and gags to reacher deeper into my mind and made them that much funnier.

As Heinlien pointed out so well in Stranger in a Land, what is funny to humans is frequently the misfortune of others.  Much of the laughter you will experience watching Superbad comes from an deep feeling of "Thank God that’s not me!".

I’m clearly not alone on my love of this movie.  After over 30,000 votes on IMDB, Superbad has a average rating of 8.4 out of 10.   That puts it at #128 of the IMDB’s top 250 movies of all time (based on User voting).

One of the first exchanges in the film is quoted below.  It is dialogue like that which sets the stage for everything that follows.

Evan: You could always subscribe to a site like Perfect Ten. I mean that could be anything, it could be a bowling site.
Seth: Yeah, but it doesn’t actually show dick going in which is a huge concern.
Evan: Right, I didn’t realize that.
Seth: Besides, have you ever seen a vagina by itself?
Evan: No.
Seth: (shakes his head) Not for me.

The second point worthy of discussion is the act that Sen. Craig was accused of. He was caught in a men’s bathroom trying to solicit sex from another man. The man happened to be a police vice squad detective. Craig was entrapped, and sexual entrapment is a violation of fairness and an abuse of power.

This all brings me back to a conversation I had last weekend over dinner with friends.  With all the sex scandals and odd behavior coming out of congress lately I think there is only one solution to the problem.  The US Congress must implement a Congressional Mothers program.   Trying to separate right from wrong while juggling the interests of their big donors has created the cognitive equivalent to a denial of service attack on their poor little consciences.  Each politician and their entourage needs to be assigned a person to fulfill the role of the politician’s conscience.  In much the same way that the Secret Service protects the bodies of certain US politicians, the Congressional Mothers would protect the reputation and ‘soul’ of their charges.

 Most American’s who were in Scouts or just a public elementary classroom understands the concept of a Den Mother or Room Mother (are there Room Fathers now?).   These were the the kind of no nonsense American women that kept the peace and made sure that each kid in their care got at least one of the cupcakes or Rice Krispy treats that they had brought in to celebrate a holiday.  It’s become clear that many politicans have forgotten the basic rules they learned in kindergarten regarding sharing and not touching. 

With a Congressional Mother, selected from that politicians own district, sitting in on all meetings and sitting at the congressman’s side during voting sessions I would be able to go about my day  without worrying what kind of mischief my representative is getting up to in Washington.   I’d be fine with Congress Mom’s rotating their duty.  I’d love to see a vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage take place with a PFLAG mom sitting next to each elected official as he casts his or her vote.

How long would it take to get No Child Left Behind fully funded with a Congressional Mom from Watts or North Philadelphia staring down the budget committees?  If one of the moms from Military Families Speak Out moonlighted as a Congressional Mom do you think congress would keep rolling over for Bush?  I think if Pat Tillman’s mom was taking a turn we would see a lot more transparency in government. 

My mental image for one of these keepers of the national standards is my partner Brian’s mom, Dawn.  She is a smart, funny, and steady handed homemaker who raised three smart and talented sons on her husband’s factory by growing and canning a good portion of the food they ate every year.  She knows what it’s like to have her well first get polluted, and then essentially go dry due to chemical fertilizer run off from farms and suburban sprawl creeping inexorably closer to her rural village.  She is sweet and softspoken, but I doubt even her former Senator Rick Santorum could have handled voting to benefit his contributors instead of his constituents with her watching.

<Ich> I’ve discovered that people on IRC don’t get offended or riled up by racism
<Ich> nor politically incorrect jokes
<Ich> nor feminism, nazism,
<Ich> nor goatse, or even tubgirl
<Ich> not even jokes about 9/11 get a rise out of anybody
<Ich> but as soon as I tell somebody that macs are better than PC’s, things get ugly