Luscious Pole Licking in Summer

Our good friend, AOC, says facial recognition is nasty.
You cannot argue with the truth.
And even a broken clock is right twice a day

The many faces of AOC

I'm sorry - sometimes the intra-cranial pressure builds up...

if Trump doesn't win in 2020, I'll have nothing to do!

let me guess - I left home without my makeup again. 

this is my lovey-dovey face, for my honey.

Don't tell them I'm only a little pissed today.

if I have to tell you one more time....

Hillary taught me to eat babies. Do you really want that on your conscience?

They caught me smiling. I'm ruined! They cannot know I'm actually pretty.

you take-uh da cheese, you put it onna capicola - capeesh?

I will not smile. I will not smile...

I see you taking this picture and I will kill you in your sleep

They're not watching.. I can rest my face now...

Good morning, people. I love you all.

• It's 23 outside. With the Wind Chill Factor, it's 15.
• Yearly rant: WTF is this - a new method of making you feel worse in the winter? 23 isn't cold enough, no sir, it's 15.  In Alaska, when it's zero degrees, the Wind Chill Factor says it's -40. 
• And they're wrong most of the time.

Remember the GirlsDoPorn scandal I wrote about a week back?
The website just went offline.
The owner fled to New Zealand and is still there.
He's also charged with child porn, after flying a 16 year old to California.

Today's item to ponder: is child porn with a 16 year old the same as child porn with a 5 year old? They're both illegal, as they should be, but is it the same thing?

• Ya know those beeps in astronaut audio? They're there for a reason.

Remember that Major League Baseball regulations prohibit the use of electronic equipment... ??

This only applies to you. They can and are using it against you.

• Dear Ebay: when I do a search for lefty guitars, "other things you might be interested in" probably shouldn't include righty guitars. Just a thought.

"Richard Nixon got kicked out of Washington for tapping one hotel suite. Today we're tapping every American citizen in the country, and no one has been put on trial for it or even investigated. We don't even have an inquiry into it." - Edward Snowden

• US Congresswoman reveals alopecia diagnosis
• That brave, courageous woman, telling the world she has hair loss.
• I told everybody about Male Pattern Baldness years ago.

IT NEWS
I'm (almost) sorry about including IT news today, but it's relevant to all readers.

With a spare 3 minutes, I decided to have a computer race: Win 10 laptop against linux laptop. It wasn't exactly fair... the Win laptop was brand new, with 16G RAM and current i7 snappy processor; the linux laptop was well over 6 years old, with 8G RAM and an obviously much slower processor. They would both boot from power off.

Off the line, linux in first, entering the first turn. Win10 coming up on the left. Coming up to the 2nd turn, we have definite activity, with the brand new Win10 machine having something on the screen. Turn 3 and we've selected which boot system we'd like on linux. Ladies and gentlemen, at the finish line, it's linux, reading its email, while the Win10 machine has yet to even put up one of its goofy pictures or a login prompt. Linux is drinking its coffee, when it's interrupted by a Win10 login prompt. This is exactly how it happened, except I drank the coffee, not the laptop.

New facial database used by the police. It's beyond creepy and disgusting.


Google and Microsoft weigh in on facial recognition technology and laws concerning it. Strangely enough, Google is finally on the right side of something. Microsoft, naturally, is on the wrong side.

• Apple is genuinely concerned about your privacy. Except if the FBI asks.

Over 1,000 devices went missing from London councils last year.
Now for some Real News<tm>: prosecutions of people who say 'fuck' and use 'racial language' are up! Prosecutions of people who say bad things online are also up. 1,337 people a week are thrown in the pokey, the most ever, for saying, "Not tea - I'll have coffee, please."


The final Win 7 update includes black wallpaper on some systems.
Good thing I'm not at my last job... I'd have the entire team spending the entire day changing backgrounds. The ticket system would die from volume alone. You'd think the entire company had gone down. The FBI would be brought in to investigate this cyberhack.

• Why Win 7 users should switch to linux
• they list some good reasons...
• Win 10 should have started a stampede to other OSes

Above is a positive.
Now here's my negative: the announcement that Xubuntu 20.04 will include a dark theme. Absent actual vision problems, this is what we have as an announcement? Not 'it's faster and safer?'  We, as people, are way too focused on looks and blinky lights. In the earlier days of cell phones, there was great excitement over the ability to put a different startup automation on your phone.

Related: watch car commercials (like you have a choice). Very little about the actual car. Very much about the colors, On-Star or similar systems, how many cameras in it, and how you can make the driver's side door open with just your genitals. This bothers me (like most things).


Small Business Matters: Boeing seeks $10 billion in loans as 737 MAX crisis continues.  Good thing they have those huge military contracts....

But WAIT!  If you lend now, you get up to the minute news of 737 MAX issues, of which they just found another....



Today's Game: you're running for president. Your slogan is [name] 2020: [last thing you said to your dog]. I'll start..

lefty 2020: Ok, stay in bed with your mommy


It's 7am. Mrs lefty is in the bathroom, Penny is demonstrating her "I HAVE TO GO OUTSIDE" dance. Then she tries it on me. Being a dog, she's not entirely talkative, but she jumps up a lot when she wants something. No problem, I'll take her out. Penny, let's go outside.  PENNY - OUTSIDE (both of us). Finally get her to the door and she turns and runs. Apparently I don't take her out well enough. Mom leaves the house. An hour later, Penny appears, telling me she wants something. Yes, she wants to go outside. This time I'll be sufficient to let her out. An hour after we first asked.

I get my validation from the dog.


Speaking of dog, when her mommy got back home, she went out back to smoke. Penny did her traditional thing: came running to me, insistent on me taking her to find mommy. Penny fails completely in the recognition that I might be doing something. So she walks in on me and sits down, waiting for me to say something. Whoever had her before us (she was a stray) must've gone over manners with her.. if I don't see her, she hops up and gently touches my leg with her nose. Then she does it 4 more times until I do what she wants. She sits there, looking at me with those huge, sad brown eyes, deliberately being a spaniel.

When mom comes back and goes into the bathroom, she stands at the bathroom door and whines. But she whines softly.  It's definitely the house - she wasn't like that when she first got here. The house turns cockers neurotic. Yeah, that's it - it's the house.



People can be identified by the way they dance.
Kill me now.
Mood, level of empathy, how extroverted or neurotic can point to identification.

Every election cycle I get asked to participate in “get out the vote” public service announcements. But I figure if a TV game show host has to convince people to vote, they probably shouldn’t.   - Pat Sajak

Heroes of the Stupid

• PornHub sued by deaf man over lack of closed captioning in videos
• Woman: ooooh. yeah. baby.  Man: mrnmmmmph  Woman: ooooh. yeah. baby.  Man: I'm gonna explode   Woman: ooooh. yeah. baby.

SJW Symptoms  

Trinity College removes ad for 'Campus Reform Early Responder'
They wanted someone to monitor a 'right wing' website. Job ad pulled.





I saw this absolutely bizarre, hysterical show on public television. I was glued.
Some guy was standing there in a dress, and some other guy was on his knees, looking up the dress.

The dress was a kilt.
The show was Monty Python's Flying Circus.
I was young.
I was hooked.
Every week I had to wait for the night Python was on.
It was the Most Important Thing Ever, for most of my life. It completely corrupted my sense of humor, rendering me an honorary Brit and forcing me to seek out other British comedy.
I met other, similarly smitten, people who agreed: Life is Python - Python is life. No, we weren't deranged fanboys - we just noticed how inappropriate they were and used Python Quotes a lot. To this day, I still speak in Python. We all saw the movies when they came out. We bought anything Python. I have a t-shirt from the final live appearance at the 02 Center in England. We saw John Cleese a few months back.

We were sad when Graham Chapman died.
We are now sad that Terry Jones (77) died (of a rare dementia that first took his speech). The other Pythons are more worried than a parrot going to a pet shop in Ipswitch.

There is some bad footage of Graham Chapman's funeral that's really funny - an appropriate sendoff. Maybe there will be some Terry Jones footage too.

This dying stuff has to stop.

Playing Hopscotch on the Telephone Pole

There is an issue with Chrome-based browsers (Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave and most that aren't Firefox). If you're especially concerned about your privacy and rely on blocker add-ons like uBlock, Chrome screws the way they work and your info could get past them and/or you'll get ads. This does not happen in Firefox, so I'll continue to recommend it as a safer browser, even though it needs some de-googling.



OnePlus' smartphone has a 'disappearing' camera.
Let's take it one step further and have a disappearing phone, for when people talk too loudly in public.

MIT scientists made a shape-shifting material that morphs into a human face.

• ALIEN TECHNOLOGY! Aliens! Maybe Reptilians. Or maybe MIT scientists. They're a pretty smart bunch, those aliens scientists. But I kid.

A father took his son to Mongolia just to get him off his phone.
Child went through detox so bad, he had to be airlifted out of the country.

• Mariah Carey's Twitter account was hacked.
• Nobody noticed until she started making sense.

60 Minutes is investigating the death of Jeffrey Epstein. That's funny.
Since you're a ThermionicEmissions reader (even if by force), you know that he was murdered. You knew this before any photos came out. Having seen a photo, it's obvious he didn't hang himself with bedsheets, at the same time the security camera failed and the guards forgot to look in on him.

I believe Epstein was sacrificed to send a warning: this is what will happen if you tell. Dat's a nize neck you got theyah. It would be a shame for anyting t' happen to it, capeesh?

• Remember the Cambridge Analytics disaster, where it misappropriated 87 million Faceyspaces profiles? It's worse than you thought. The manipulation was obscene.

Troubleshooting follows a logical path: check one element at a time until you locate the bad one. The other day, my laptop went POOF and powered off: this is not normal. Laptop batteries can fail and prevent the machine from powering up. So I pulled the battery and ran off the power supply. And the machine failed to power up. Soooo, the battery AND power are bad?  After a bit more testing, the battery WAS bad, plus Penny had turned off a power strip that controlled the laptop. Troubleshooting should not include the results of dog.

Sooooo.... I needed a laptop battery - off to Ebay.

For obvious reasons, sellers of laptop batteries and memory are plentiful and really easy to find. You don't even have to know what battery or memory your machine takes: just search for "[machine brand and model] battery" and you have 400 listings. 

Unfortunately, to purchase a battery on Ebay, you have to log into Ebay. This, naturally, was an issue. As you've read, online purchases are one of my most reliable triggers. Simply buying a battery, which anyone can do almost instantly and without a fuss, is like negotiating world peace for me; only I get much angrier.  Typically the process involves discovering that the site doesn't like locked-down browsers or linux browsers. This time it was more insidious...

It wanted my phone number.

It already has my phone number.

But it wanted it again.

I tried clicking, making up phone numbers, and hitting escape - no luck.

If I don't want to give you my phone number, why are you bothering me?

Finally I found a set of numbers that worked.

Joyous at my login, the next screen wanted me to get through a CAPTCHA. 

I hate CAPTCHAs. My browsers hate CAPTCHAs. The industry hates CAPTCHAs. This one was particularly evil, involving putting a puzzle piece in place. Normally this would've been easy, but I couldn't see the puzzle piece.

NEXT BROWSER, please.

Ok, now I can see the puzzle piece and move it to the slot. Such joy in accomplishment.

But Wait!!!!  Now it wants me to pick security questions!

Wife knew I was making an online purchase because the house was shaking, there was high level screaming, and the dog was in panic mode.

Listen, Pig Fuckers.... I've been on Ebay for lots of years. Never hacked, never a fraud. LEAVE ME ALONE. Plus you already have my security questions - I document this stuff.

Total time: 20 minutes to log in, 2 minutes to purchase.

If Ebay gave a care in the world about their customers, I'd drop them a line to tell them about my feelings. 

• Blinded by the Light was a huge cover hit for Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Don't let that be your only impression of them - they have some pretty cool music. Check them out.

If you're looking for some interesting online radio, I found 2:

http://www.radiorockuk.com/

Radio Rock is a British station that plays what can be described as 70s progressive, with bands like Yes, Camel, Cream, and the occasional Jeff Beck or Peter Frampton. It's pretty interesting listening, even for background music. I can guarantee you've never heard radio like this, for better or worse.

https://kgraradio.com/
KGRA is a really interesting conspiracy-ish station. It features shows all day and night dealing with all the typical topics: ufo, paranormal, news, etc. It's a good place to pick up some knowledge, handed down by good people in their fields. Use your discretion as to whether it's good information or not.

They can be listened to in your browser, your audio player, and your cell phone, via browser, player, or one of the net radio players, like Online Radio Box (android, not sure about iDevices). There are bunches of free net radio players available on all platforms. All of them go to Faceyspaces and other ad networks first.

• A startup called Byton is producing a small electric SUV. They got tongues wagging because the 'infotainment system' will feature a 48" screen. From pictures, it doesn't look like it could transport a 48" screen home from the electronics store. When phones and displays started making it into cars, the worry was that drivers would get distracted. How could anyone possibly be distracted by an infotainment system that is literally the dashboard, stretching across the windshield...  We won't even discuss the voice recognition and privacy implications.

22 young women were tricked into doing porn by GirlsDoPorn, and were awarded $13 million by a judge. In legalese, this means the girls will get to split $3 million, and the lawyers the rest. I am not a lawyer, but I have seen commercials for lawyers, so I feel qualified to comment. The girls answered ads for clothed modeling. When they showed up, it was porn. But they were assured it wouldn't wind up on the net; only recorded to DVD, for collectors in Australia and New Zealand.

So naturally it wound up on the net, and lawyers are claiming "severe harassment, emotional and psychological trauma, and reputational harm." I am not unsympathetic to their plight, and believe GirlsDoPorn is on the hook for damages, but I think this went too far. Yes, this clear misrepresentation, but at no point were the ladies held against their will and prevented from leaving the building. In fact, they were lured with the promise of making $5,000 per day shooting. At that point, the women agreed to the shooting. The naked shooting. Their own greed assisted the shooter (a con man). Since the trial, the con man disappeared from the country and shifted assets overseas. This doesn't sound shady at all, does it? Good luck collecting the award.

The defense used my argument, which was rejected due to the coercion tactics of the con man and company. I think seeing lawyers in commercials really helped me in this instance. Unfortunately I won't be entitled to any of the proceeds.

• A man's cleverly-hidden 5.5" horn delayed his cancer diagnosis for years. Yeah, that huge horn growing out of his back must've hidden from him and his doctors.

Whoever you are, whatever your values, recognize the historic importance of this: it is second time the US government's retaliation against *the same whistleblower* has been found equivalent to torture. Telling the truth has become the greatest of crimes.  - Edward Snowden

• the sex toy banned from CES last year is unlike anything ever seen....
• it won an award from CES, then they banned it. Good group, those folks.

More sad news: RIP Neil Innes. Neil did the music for a lot of Monty Python bits and starred in Holy Grail as one of the minstrels. He was also in the aforementioned Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. He died of natural causes at 75.

The man was just plain FUNNY. He wrote funny songs, very well, so he was dear to me. If you haven't seen The Rutles - All You Need is Cash, you should get your posterior to wherever you can find it and see it now. The whole thing is a sendup of the Beatles, including the band members, Barry, Stig, Nasty, and Ron. Aside from being funny, the creation was pure genius. Listen to the songs and if you ignore the words, they could damn well be Beatles songs. That takes some doing (I know).


Today I identify as  the slightly worn "A" key from my keyboard.