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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   gin back into vagina
Tuesday, February 14 2006
It's an obscure technological issue, I know, but for me today it loomed up as a major thing: who the hell designed the interface for the WinAmp Shoutcast Digital Signal Processor? Perhaps more to the point, what was he smoking? I needed to use this interface to get a Shoutcast stream working for a local radio station I've been working for, but none of the sliders did what their labels implied, settings vanished the moment a different tab was pressed, and there was no way to finely control the input levels. In terms of input levels, what I needed was a step somewhere between the station's stream being "badly distorted" and "unprofessionally quiet" but that step didn't exist. Like I said, it's a obscure piece of software doing things none of you will ever have to do. But I feel the need to register my complaint. Software interface problems play an increasingly role in the world's misery, but unlike the fundamental cruelty of our valueless, Creator-free Universe, it doesn't have to be that way.

Speaking of the cruelty of the universe, I don't know anyone who is praying for the survival of Harry Whittington, the man who was shot in the face by our Vice President Dick "Aaron Burr" Cheney. Whittington was just another Texas fat cat asshole trying to brown nose his way to something he didn't deserve from a man who is only in office because of the self-contradicting logic of the Supreme Court and the brilliant jujitsu of Osama bin Laden. Alive, Whittington is a weak (but net) asset to our nascent national fascism. Dead, not only do his undoubtedly nefarious machinations die as well, but his corpse becomes a serious tear in the fabric that conceals all that is evil in the Bush administration, if only in metaphor.
Whittington took a step in the right direction today when he suffered a "mild heart attack" as a result of birdshot that had "migrated" to his heart. Of course, birdshot doesn't really "migrate" in the vertebrate body the same way that porcupine quills do. That birdshot was almost certaintly in Whittington's heart from the start and everything we've been told about the triviality of his injuries has been a lie.
I have no sympathy for these people since they (in keeping with right wing notions of empathy) have no sympathy for anyone but their own.

This evening Gretchen dragged me to a local performance of the Vagina Monologues. This was because one of our Buddhist friends from Rosendale would be one of the readers. We both were dubious of what to expect when we saw the verbiage that had been written up in the flyer for the show, which promised it would be an evening of "healing." Gretchen had seen Eve Ensler's original Vagina Monologues in other places and knew them to be hilarious, perhaps shocking, but hardly "healing." Mostly their intent had been to de-vulgarize the term "vagina" in our language.
The venue for the performance was in Woodstock's Colony Café and the first thing I noticed was that there weren't a whole lot of gentlemen turning out for tonight's show. I'd joked with Gretchen about the sad sort of guys we'd be seeing tonight in the audience, the milquetoast saps who would allowed themselves to be dragged to such a thing. It had been a joke before, but now I feeling genuinely uncomfortable, particularly given the fact that many of Gretchen's friends were near in in the audience but not a single one of their husbands was with them. Good thing I'd thought ahead enough to smuggle in a flask of gin. I was putting the "gin" back into "vagina."
I actually ended up liking parts of the performance (or at least the gin did), though the whole thing was wrapped in that off-putting delivery device called "healing," as if women and/or their vaginas are somehow inherently injured. The woman serving as mistress of ceremonies claimed to be some sort of priestess and she made us write our "prayers" onto little piece of paper before the show, to be burned afterwards along with sage and other trite Woodstock spices. She also made the claim that The Vagina Monologues are "a sacred work," whatever that means.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?060214

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