Nigel's OK in My Book

Watching some classic (old) music videos, I found a song called Making Plans for Nigel (XTC). Never mind the song... I just like the title. The video is bizarre.

While we're at it, Kate Bush sounds like she's huffing helium.

• Of note: when the doctor sedated Marshall, he used Propofol; the drug that killed Michael Jackson. Fortunately Marshall experienced a better outcome.

Congrats on 100 years of freedom for Finland!

Finland is known for heated underwear, anchovy pizza, and Finns. 

The national animal is the elephant (there are no elephants in Finland. They imported one from Africa, but it chose to walk back to Africa, rather than freeze).

Finland's national flower is grass.

• 'Music' star Pink will raise her kids gender-neutral. Please make it stop. The Child Welfare Bureau has been called - these kids don't have a chance.

As I continue to tune in old videos, Instant Karma (John Lennon) comes on.. I've never seen it before.

The first thing I see is Yoko.. this is never a good thing. She's sitting onstage, toward the back of John; blindfolded and knitting. This would be delightfully absurd if anyone else did it. With Yoko it's Art, or as I call it, "a screw loose and a pathological need for attention."

There's a British guy playing tambourine. How can I tell he's British? He's wearing a full tan suit and huge, brown, horn rimmed glasses to play tambourine. There are also two bass players, for a reason John took with him to the grave. Maybe Chapman shot him to keep this from getting out.

It's a wonder I never got hired to review videos in the 80s.

• If anything I write fails to offend you for the entire time you've been reading this, I'd like to share something with you, in the spirit of Christmas: "Simply,  Having, a Wonderful Christmastime."  This song has now invaded your brain and you will sing it incessantly for the next three weeks.
• You're welcome.

Many women suffer silently from vaginal discharge and dryness, according to a commercial. Many people don't know I got out of the army on a vaginal discharge.

I would like to apologize, humbly and unreservedly, for the previous paragraph.

• If you're having a Stupid Day today, remember: it could be worse. You could live in Mecklenberg County, where county records are being held hostage for $23,000 in Bitcoin. You could be the genius who opened the email attachment, unleashing the ransomware upon the county.

The Stupid is also great with the authors of a virtual keyboard app for android and iDevices, called Ai.Type. The app collects keystrokes, contacts, phone numbers, email addresses, social media profiles, and locations, among other things. The data is uploaded to, you guessed it, The Cloud. The 577gb database, on 31 million users, was left open to the public, so anyone who could find it had full access to it.

There is no word on whether the app let on that the user's data would be stolen uploaded to the company's (unsecured) server. Everything the user typed would be available, in addition to the information the app collected. Financial information, love emails, sexts, and all those pictures of women with one more penis than provided for in the original design specification.

If you rushed past the text about your data and clicked I AGREE, this is entirely your fault. If there was no warning, the developers should be sued out of existence and fined by the appropriate authorities for theft and negligence. 

I'll say it again: nothing you use is worth the invasion of your privacy and data.

You could also just use the phone's keyboard. This way, your data will only go to Google or Apple.

• 28 senators wrote the FCC to urge holding off their decision on Net Neutrality because of irregularities in the data of public comments. 50,000 comments may not have been included in the public record. Hundreds of thousands of filings featured stolen addresses and there were half a million entries with Russian email addresses. Not included in the data were the rude comments directed at chairman Ajit Pai's nationality. You don't think there was anything suspicious about this, do you?

A lot of people blame the Russians for interfering in the 2016 election (and when I say a lot of people, I mean the losing side). I view this from the other side (of course I do): the Russians are not interfering - they're propping up American  democracy.

Hear me out: American citizens have become so fat and lazy, they can barely be bothered to go out for milk, no less vote. By hacking into our social media and voting systems, the Russians are making it look like our democracy is functional. People blame Trump for 'colluding' with Russia, when in reality, he was encouraging Putin to have his people vote to make it look like the election mattered. Meanwhile, the people who should have voted all stayed home, where they ran into the streets and online to protest and whine incessantly.

A brief investigation by the Boy Scouts of America, Special CyberSquad, turned up a few other places the Russians made a difference:

• a West Virginia little league game
• the decision not to tax online porn in the US
• a $4 billion appropriation for Congressional bathroom remodeling and donations to Dick Cheney's various humanitarian charities

Have you rented a car lately?

If you did, your locations, smart phone identifier, and entered locations (including schools), are all available, if you attached to the car's infotainment system (the radio).  Privacy International rented cars and analyzed the information available in the systems. Personal information was on every single car.

Just to make things more interesting, the rental companies were not able to provide clear internal policies on handling drivers' personal data. The companies that responded said, as laid out in the Terms and Conditions, the responsibility is on the renter. The future is here and we're shooting it square in the nuts.

• In case you didn't learn the first time, Ashley Madison, the website for cheaters, that leaked its database, has... wait for it... leaked its database of private and explicit photos again. So if you're the kind that insists on getting parts of you wet, you haven't learned your lesson. You know what they say - the third time's the charm.

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Marshall Strikes Again

For once, it's not what you think.
I found myself, certainly not by accident, at the Philly Guitar Show. The amplifier company known as Marshall, named after my dog, Marshall, put out a cute little series of amps called Code. They were being demoed at a booth at the show. It was an adorable little thing (models from 25 watts up) and I haven't bought anything in I can't remember how long. The 1958 lefty Stratocaster I saw last week was $60,000, so I figured it might have to wait a little while. I saw other Interesting Stuff at the show, which I will detail in another post (I know you're waiting anxiously).

The salesguy's main point was that this little guy could be controlled by your phone, using BlueTooth. Yes, instead of turning the knobs on your amplifier, you could turn them on your phone (android and the other one - I checked). While this might be nice for someone who has mobility issues, I can turn a knob with the best of them.   One of the things Marshall forgot to advertise was that the box is so sharp that it will give you a Cardboard Cut. So I bled for a bit, which is never a good thing. Passing out while driving is not encouraged, except for some places in Philadelphia.

I don't know if this is part of getting older or one of my many deficiencies but I don't get nearly as excited as I used to when I was younger. It took me a nap and a few hours to get around to trying it out. I opened the box, without urge to take pictures or video of the box and posting it on YouTube for everyone to see. This is actually a thing: you take video of the box and opening it. They call it 'unboxing'. There is usually no actual information or tryout of the item in question - just physically taking it out of the box, plus a few shots of the device itself. We're a weird bunch, we are.

Setting something up in my house is a unique challenge, requiring lots of cursing and being assaulted by cables, grabbing and twisting themselves around you like a cat who's in the way and demanding attention. Or a constricting, venomous snake. Putting aside a very jealous Fender Mustang amp, the last next-to-couch amplifier venture, I fired the bugger up. It has that cute Marshall white script logo. One day I'll take a picture of it with Marshall the cocker next to it and send it to Marshall Amps. It's got all sorts of blinky lights, which should keep the current generation of Faceyspaces players interested. I declined to play with the BlueTooth feature, exercising my rights to turn knobs. Since I have the attention span of a pregnant gnat, I chose to go through the outrageous presets to get an idea of what it could do (unfortunately it could not vacuum, but at least I wasn't expecting it, hence very little disappointment).

The little beast is actually pretty cool. It came up rather rapidly, as it has no tubes in it. It makes some fun noises, from old clean to high-powered stacks of LOUD amplifiers. It will be fun and hold my limited attention for a while. No, it's not quite my large Marshall, but it's not supposed to be. And Jeebus, this bit was certainly much larger than I had intended.

• Watch the skies for the Supermoon. You will be able to identify it by its humongous size and its red or blue cape, depending on time of year and temperature coefficient.

Samsung is buying Harman International, provider of sound systems and components for cars, in a push toward smart devices. And apparently exploding cars.

• Reince Preibus: why? When vetting him, they should have tried to figure out where his name came from. Or what planet.

Here's a little ditty called "So You Think You Can Be A Morning Person" Seriously? I know they're supposed to exist but they're very rare in the wild.

• Ok, let's call a timeout in the War on Elections. The left needs to stop damaging stuff (and people). The right needs to stop gloating and deifying the president-elect (as the left would if their candidate got in). It's time to get on with things. (Libertarians, you can keep crying quietly)
• And while we're on the topic, I've seen a LOT of foreign commentary and concern around the election. It's odd to see foreigners more wound up than some of the locals. One day I hope to be so frustrating that I cause demonstrations and riots in foreign countries. I'm a simple man, with simple desires.
• I can't forget this: VP-elect Mike Pence is seriously anti-abortion. In a move that could only happen in 2016, people are making donations to Planned Parenthood in his name. For each donation, notice is sent to him. Laughter is the greatest form of protest. Or something.
• About these protests: I harken back to when Obama was elected (both times)... remember all the fun we had, rioting in the streets, peeing on or own shoes and setting babies on fire? Good times.

Yet another NFL Sports Dude has sat out the national anthem before a game, over the 'joke' election.  Now I'd sit out the national anthem to protest the national anthem being played, but we're getting a little silly here. South Park suggested they invite everyone to sit or stand for the anthem, which would thwart some of this nonsense. If the players are seriously upset, I encourage them to not show up for games for a year and donate their salaries to an appropriate charity, like the Kneeling Sisters of Beryl, or some other deserving group. That should bring the entire brouhaha to a screeching halt.

• I hope my New Zealand readers are ok after their serious earthquake. Two people lost their lives, which is probably two people more than read this blog from New Zealand.