Furanet.com is now permanently banned

I do not know who you are.

I do not know what you do.

All I know is you have been eating 1GB of CinnamonPirate.com bandwidth every single month. That makes me unhappy. That makes my host unhappy. Therefore, I will not give you cookies anymore.

Rot in the land of 403s forever.

For anyone who may have been using the 195.78.228.* range legitimately: sorry.

Someone let out the stupids

It’s Sunday in Beijing, and for those of you who live here, you know what that means: the stupids are on the loose!

Yes, everywhere you go, you will find hundreds of people doing everything they can to possibly inconvenience and aggravate you.

Today, I had the misfortune of meeting a shop clerk who apparently does not understand English or Chinese.

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Fuck you, Denny.

I’ll see your evil and raise you one vindictive.

I have owned “D” since last July on all FreeNode servers. A week ago I began being unable to IDENTIFY with NickServ.

Now I know why.

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It’s not always the quiet ones

If you caught CNN on Monday, you may have seen the half-a-state chase as Michigan police and local offices tried to catch Anthony LaCalamita III: my 38-year-old high school accounting teacher from Notre Dame Preparatory, Pontiac.

LaCalamita wasn’t a quiet teacher. He was frequently on the announcements, and he never hesitated to scream at us when we ran in the halls. Honestly, none of the teachers there were terribly quiet or introverted. I could see a few of them being closet gays, but never a mad gunman.

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Sailing off the edge of the map

While walking home today, musing on the latest tidbits of gore news I’ve been glowing over the last week, my again thoughts turned to language and the words we use to express ourselves. The best part about gore news is how every story ends the same: in death.

No matter what language we use, death seems a sticky topic for us humans: especially in common speech. Reporters may use that sterile, icy word to describe the ‘passing’ of a celebrity, but we mostly avoid it in polite conversation.

Humans never die.

Your cat can die. Your cell phone battery can die. Your computer’s network connection can die. The chrysanthemums you keep on your windowsill will die if you don’t water them.

But grandma? Grandma doesn’t die: she ‘passes away’ or ‘passes on.’

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I got a grip full of Confucius

Today is Christmas in Beijing. That makes me unhappy.

Everywhere I go in town there are big stupid looking Santas and flashy lights mixed together with red lanterns heralding a Chinese festival. While I understand, in China, Christmas is little more than a commercial holiday akin to Valentine’s Day, seeing imagery traditionally associated with Western religion displayed so prominently throughout the city bugs me a lot.

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Harvesting the homeless, a modern proposal

According to the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), there are around 92,500 people waiting for an organ in the United States as of 11:40 p.m. August 1. However, this list has a problem: it is not compiled by UNOS, only maintained by it. The list is actually compiled by 256 different centers around the country who decide who lives and who dies based on their “own criteria,” that being how much money you have.

According to an ABC News story, as many as 25 percent of organ donations come from people with no insurance who, though they donate, will never be able to receive an organ transplant since hospitals will foot the bill for neither surgery no recovery.

The ABC News report quoted Laura Siminoff, a bioethicist, as saying.

From a very clinical point of view, you can ask what is the difference if the donor is dead? Except as a society we don’t view dead people as garbage.

Realistically speaking, we all know anyone without money to be in the overlords club—the rich WASPs who control America with an iron fist and make sure there’s plenty of Sesame Street and pornography to keep the rest of the country distracted—gets fucked by the system. That’s the way we decided the United States could best serve the interests of its people, so I don’t think anyone would argue against the right of the rich to harvest organs from the poor.

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Interesting things

Watching the interesting things humans do to themselves and to each other never fails to provide me with some amount of entertainment, and in that spirit, I decided to browse the CIA’s World Factbook for an upbeat topic: AIDS.

The country with the highest percentage of people with AIDS is the Kingdom of Swaziland. For Americans, I’ll add that this is between South Africa and Mozambique. If you aren’t sure where South Africa is, you may belong here.

According to the CIA Factbook, two in five Swazis are infected with AIDS. Isn’t that interesting? Given 70 percent of Swaziland’s population is below the poverty line, I’ll let you guess where all those AIDS cases are.

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Teaching in China (Part 1)

I was offered a position teaching at 外交学院 in May 2005. Starting from June, I prepared teaching material every day until I left the USA on August 22. However, arriving in China, I quickly realized how useless all my preparation would be.

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When Quotes Go Wrong

One of the best parts of living in China are 80-cent DVDs.

One of the best parts of DVDs in China are the quotes on 80-cent DVDs.

Aside from the totally incomprehensible Engrish that is scattered about “new releases” (theater bootlegs), there is also the joy of quotes from famous reviewers on the covers.

Hey, I think it’s a great idea. Having some kind of quote from a big name might change someone’s mind about trying a movie, right? If it couldn’t, movie reviews wouldn’t exist. The problem is this: DVD pirates cannot read, speak or spell English.

And I’m not talking about the language, I’m talking about the word.

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