Faceyspaces Strikes Again

Sorry we're running late. As you might have read, we're experiencing more technical difficulties than we can shoot at with our available weaponry.



A Taiwanese hacker says he's going to delete Mark Zuckerberg's profile and stream it live. I'd watch it. Unfortunately it's being streamed on Faceyspaces itself.

Speaking of stupid, Faceyspaces engineers discovered a flaw on September 16th, which would have allowed hackers to take over fifty million accounts.

"This is a very serious security issue, and we're taking it very seriously, because we got caught" said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck (pronounced 'fuck') pointed out how sorry he is that he got caught, and promised swift action, because he'll get caught if he doesn't. The security team is being augmented, to avoid getting caught in the future.

Zuckerberg is up for a Nobel Peace Prize, but doubts he can reach the Peace Heights of Barack Obama, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for waging war across the globe.

UPDATE: Faceyspaces leaps to inaction and says that if people want to opt out, they should turn off 2 factor authentication. They should turn off an important safety feature. You can't make this stuff up.

• Perhaps I should've gone to college after all.  A professor, giving an intro to psychology course, accidentally ran porn instead of his video. The audience is described at being aghast. What group of 18 to 20 somethings is aghast at porn? Apparently students at the University of Toronto.
• One student had video of the accident and posted it online, where it was shared many times. Hmmmm.....
• The university said it was offering support to anyone who was disturbed. BAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Support! Break our the safe rooms, with soft pillows and puppies. And vagina hats.
• 10 students were home on Disability, 3 students were in Intensive Care, 5 were admitted to the Happy Place, and the course is booked solid for the next ten years.
• Education Pro Tip: stay away from the University of Toronto.

Gas prices in southern California are on the way to $4 gal.

Actual gas prices were $2 gal but the governor added a $2 gal tax for cleaning up some shit in San Francisco.

• An Italian man who slept with over 6,000 women just died. Italy mourns his loss.
• Mario Zanfanti died while having sex with a tourist one third his age. He died the way he lived.
• If you gotta go.....

War on Ants
The war continues. This particular battle happened in the kitchen. The clean kitchen, with no food laying out. Mrs lefty says, "If you see one ant, he has lots of friends you can't see." She put on her Sherlock Holmes hat, with the bill in the front and the bill on the back. This way the ants can't tell if she's coming or going. We got out our Secret Weapon<tm>, called Tero, or something like that. It's like really yummy cyanide they swarm on, eat, and carry back to their condos, apartments, and the Secret Ant Compound, where they go through a process called Eat and Die.  It's very technical. Part of it involves opening an odd plastic container, with "no spill packaging", which naturally wound up all over my shirt.

The process involves a bit of reality suppression, as they show up in numbers, even if you tape the bait on the ceiling. I don't want to discuss this any further.

Across the street, it looks like our neighbor has had it with the ants too. How do we know? There's a tank on his lawn, pointed at said house. Turns out it's a backup plan, as he's got some sort of Industrial Ant Stuff. This is a different method than Eat and Die.. the ants go for the bait and POOF - it puts tiny little dresses on them. The males are typically the raiders, so this embarrasses the hell out of them and they flee, fearing talk of their fetish, and sexual assault from the ants that like being in a fashionable frock. There are hundreds of books on the topic of Ant Dressing, which you can read in any ant library. Our neighbor said he'd let us know how it worked out. If so, we were free to use it. He didn't specify which... I'm hoping for the tank.

• Telegram desktop is a 'secure' messaging program. Unfortunately, it turns out to leak your private and public IP addresses. A leak in android is also possible. The vulnerability has been fixed.
• I've been suggesting Signal for encrypted messaging and phone calls for android and non-android phones. You can also put it on your desktop and sync it with your phone, so you can operate it from the desktop too. Do yourself a favor and install Signal. With FB, Zuck, Google, and the NSA listening to everything you do, why not use something that's incredibly difficult to crack?

Andy Warhol said something about everyone eventually getting their fifteen minutes of fame. The man could obviously see into the future. The latest reality show follows a number of spoiled rich kids sent to live as poor people. In case you think my characterization of spoiled rich kids is incorrect or personal, the commercial had one particular brat counting out $32,000 in pocketbooks (on one shelf among many). Oh, the horror.

Next up: rich people filling out the wrong tax forms and Daddy having to use his team of tax accountants work to solve this. The next show deals with the embarrassment and sheer horror of using the wrong fork. The show spends most of its time at the therapist's office, trying to work through a near fatal case of Social PTSD. As you read this, a new show is being pitched, where poor kids move in with rich families and hack into the family's finances, making them the poor family. In abject terror, rich people are phoning their buddies at the networks to have the show mothballed before it's accepted.

• So that global mass surveillance system to fight terror.... it's being used to spy on innocent UK citizens. Yes, ThermionicEmissions is correct again. We can't see into the future - if your government(s) puts in a spying system to fight 'terror', it will be used against you. As disturbing as this is in other countries, the US 4th Amendment guarantees against search and seizure. It has been violated. It is violated again and again.
• So let's get back to arguing republicans vs democrats, shall we? They both authorized this kind of thing.

From 2020 on, more than five million new Volkswagens will be fully connect to The Cloud. What could possibly go wrong? Lady - your Tiguan is trying to hack my router!

• God I love Windows. Forced to use it for work, I suffer from its aggravation. This morning it thought my second display was the primary display. It had gotten an 'update', of which I was unaware. Then it took my neatly arranged icons from the left side and moved them all to the right side, plus put them out of order. And this is just booting up. I'm waiting for it to decide the mouse is on the other side of the keyboard and to turn the display sideways. It locked me out last week, which I decided was a blessing. Oddly enough, this stuff doesn't happen at home on linux.
• No, at home on linux, I have a problem so weird that no one has even heard of it, much less knows how to go about solving it. And for once, I didn't do anything to cause it. I hope.

If the aliens have any doubt what we're up to, they don't even have to come to the planet... they just have to watch what happens to the moon when we get there. Nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, godfather of UFO research, has the best description of mankind:

Apollo 13 did an experiment to figure out the moon's crust. It involved explosives. Within the past few years, we somehow found it necessary to actually bomb the moon, allegedly to look for water. I happen to know that in 2020, we're going to bomb the moon to reaffirm the presence of moon dust. The astronauts were clearly filmed in moon dust, but we need to make sure it's still there. There is a proposal for 2025, which involves shooting the moon with a very large nuclear weapon, to see what happens when the moon splits in half. [HINT: women's periods will last 56 days]

• There is absolutely no reason I should like Procol Harum, except that Robin Trower was in the group for a bit. Yet completely without guitar pyrotechnics, I really enjoy them. Check them out... A Salty Dog is one of my favorites, from 1969, featuring a very young Robin Trower.  You'll definitely recognize this one. Lastly, Conquistador is a hit from waaaaaay back.

I was thinking of new interesting things to add to the blog.

One recurring feature idea was Words the Spellchecker Didn't Understand. The generously provided spellchecker by Google (they don't charge for it or for the space to blog) apparently didn't cost them anything, as it's European (flavour, colour, pyjamas), and doesn't understand words (internet, tv, Zuckerburg). It will not learn from my corrections, so I get to see them each time I spellcheck. 

So I won't be adding this feature, as it will take twice the time it takes me to make all this shit up in the first place.

He Was A Wanted Man

...by everyone but his wife.


I don't want you to stop using Faceyspaces because I say so. Do the research. Watch the video and become truly upset - it's how deep the data collection and profiling goes.

• The House has voted to renew mass surveillance. If you think these people have your back, you're sadly mistaken. Talk to your senators NOW.
• Irony: hacking group Fancy Bear is targeting Senate emails.  The senate would be subject to mass surveillance. Yeah, right.

According to Kaspersky, a whopping 88% of employees know little about their company's IT security policies. Only 88% ?  Good thing they didn't measure how many care.

• OOPSIE: Nuclear weapons systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, which could at worst lead to compromise and inadvertent launches. Unfortunately, they were designed pre-digital. Wasn't it recently that we discovered they use floppies?
• President Trump today apologized, in a phone call, to Putin for the inadvertent destruction of the Kremlin.

Microsoft is adding end-to-end encryption to Skype for secure and private conversations. This is what we call irony, as Microsoft has backdoors to itself and the NSA.

• It's not that the weather is weird, but we've had three weeks of sub-freezing temperatures. The other day, it was so warm, we shut down the second heater. Today, there are no heaters, because we have to run the fan. Not to worry, though; it's been raining or sleeting for the majority of the time. I'm renewing the call for a telethon for the purpose of getting us a climate.

I want to advise my people to be very careful in purchasing or using their sex robots, because a hacker with a warped sense of humor can weaponize them to kill you. Do you really want this kind of headline upon your passing?

• In Ireland, there's a town with a little sign that says Welcome to Muff. I think I'd like to eat there.

Despite taking in record individual-income-tax revenues, the federal government ran a deficit of approximately $225 billion during the quarter. Once they get their hands in your pocket, they will never come out. Stop re-electing them - they couldn't organize a sock drawer.

• Next year's self-driving Chevrolet Bolt will have no pedals or steering wheel; leaving the driving entirely to the car. What could possibly go wrong?

Ultrarunner accused of winning races by hiding in Port-a-Potty.

I've finally found my exercise plan. Wife says this is a shitty job.

• President Trump had a physical, which revealed he's in excellent health. House democrats have subpoenaed records, claiming there was no physical. Salon wants to know why Melania didn't have one. Hillary said that physicals are for mortals. Rachel Maddow voted for cancer. CBS wants the exam gown. CNN put together a six-part series on how he could get away with this, called Physical-Gate: Shock and Outrage.
• While all of this was going on, Trump sent another volley of troops and who knows what else to Afghanistan. Endless war, you know.

NOTE TO WIFE: Putting those healthy snacks in a bag that looks just like my bag-o-junk is not going to make me eat them. Dried chips of this and that have all the appeal of liver smoothies.

• My spiritual friends from Free the Nipple are taking their case to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.  After being told to cease their topless bathing, the women refused, got ticketed, and are now suing for the right to go topless. They claim their rights are being violated and that it is discriminatory that men are allowed to walk around with their nipples exposed. Further, there are no laws against being topless.
• This is the kind of legal wrangling I like to get my hands on. So to speak.

If you have any reason to be in Turkey, I'd recommend not being in Turkey. Or at very least, not getting near the airport.  This plane found a very inappropriate parking spot.  Apparently the pilot was going for a water landing when the copilot suggested the airport instead. They compromised.

What I Learned At The Mall

I like to get out of the house once every month or so on a non-work expedition.

This is usually made difficult by weather, scheduling conflicts, aches, fibromyalgia, pains, and/or just plain inability to be up and functional before three.  Today we overcame many obstacles and ventured forth.

Since it has been so warm, it was somehow necessary to go down to the teens today. You have to wear several layers of clothing because if your nipples get hard and freeze, they may break off (it's ok, I am a doctor).

I remember when malls were malls.

(then what are they now?)

We wanted to see the Disney Store because it was closing and might have some must-have Eeyore merchandise. Silly humans... there wasn't so much as a mug and they no longer carry adult t-shirts (or Eeyore merchandise of any type). Small wonder they're going out of business.

For a Saturday at the mall, it was suspiciously free of customers, not that we minded. Wife found a Vietnamese place in the food court. Wife is not from there, nor does she know anyone from there, so naturally she wanted the food. I can't tell you if it's the same with all Vietnamese people, but these particular examples had an interesting method of running a business: either not showing up or hiding in the back to get away from those pesky customers. Like idiots, we stood there. I strongly suggested she pick up a metal chair and BANG IT REPEATEDLY on the metal counter to test their hearing. As you might have guessed, I'm the funny one in the family. Several other ... what do you call them.... yeah - customers.. several other potential customers had less patience and walked away. While it is physically possible that there are people who have less patience than me, I don't really believe there are any. So she wound up at the Generic Chinese Place with the nice Chinese lady out front, giving out samples. Apparently they had many different varieties of grease, most of which she purchased. For a person trying to be nice to her stomach, this was puzzling. 

We located a Fruity Fresh Smoothie-type place and took a look. For a place that had a lot of fruit, it looked good. Fortunately, hidden over to one side, was the ice cream menu. We can't let the hippies win, people. I have to admit, strawberry banana yogurt sounded halfway decent, but I'm a clever type and got them to substitute vanilla ice cream for that tasteless probiotic yogurt crap. So I ate my first fruit of the year; possibly my last.

There are few people on the planet who will deny Carlos Santana is one serious guitar mofo. Turns out he designs guitar straps, paints, and has a shoe line for women. Strangely enough, they're pretty nice. When Wife wanted a pair, I told her only if the purchase included the ability to play like Carlos. Naturally she got them anyway.

Speaking of shoes, I don't get some of the ideas on display. Everybody gets hooker shoes and hooker boots - they're cool and vaguely normal these days. I want to know why some of the women's shoes look like they've been through a shredder. There are many slices actually missing from these shoes. Continuing the theme, other shoes seem to be missing their front or back, sometimes both. So you're either walking around with shredded shoes or shoes that expose your toes or heel. Any way you go, you better wear them at night because sun exposure is gonna look weird on your feet.

What's really weird is that the Disney store is not the only one closing. There appeared to be about four in a row, closing within a few days. Someone suggested high rent. Another said people are only buying online. I thought kids liked malls, online aside. Plus even I have to leave the house once in a while, and it's not going to be playing outside in ten degree weather (with a wind chill of minus 8). We found a nice pet accessory store, where we discussed the relative merits of chicken parmesan versus sweet potato flavored treats. We could tell that this was a good pet store, as they had cocker coasters with an actual black cocker (almost all accessories have a light colored dog). We went with the chicken and he sort of looked at them, sniffed, and walked away. This is a dog that eats raw Brussels sprouts. We also got him one of those military bomb proof snake things with the squeakers in it. He attacks and disembowels them, removing the squeaker for the safety of himself and his family. Tonight he watched Mommy throw it and went elsewhere. Picky bastard, ain't he?

I will never forgive this mall for letting Cinnabon go. I don't want to suggest that this was the genesis of mall failure to thrive, but it sure is coincidental. And like most malls, you could buy as many cell phones as you wanted, along with women's shoes and women's clothing. One shoe store had four aisles of women's shoes and some small shelf in the back with men's. Every now and then I let my wife buy me some white socks, but what is this telling us? The mall is in a decent area with some upscale stores and a few magnets (JC Penney, Sears, etc).

Speaking of location, there's an adult store around the corner. I used to joke about it with my parents. One day Mom called to let me know they had added another floor to the store. She is a model for moms everywhere. Well, most of the time. She sometimes travels to get things, like spices. She found a Spice Shop around the corner and went in to check things out. After a very short look around, she discovered that Spice did not refer to smelly things in little bottles. In fact, it looked spicy, like that adult store she told us about. Yes, Mom walked right into the lingerie portion of the store. I don't want to think about what would have happened had she wandered further back. The Big Gay Bob doll with the twelve inch vibrating penis wouldn't look right in her closet. And if it did, I sure as hell don't want to know about it.

My local mall has four levels of shoe stores. They too allowed Cinnabon to escape. Now there are four levels of shoe stores and one level of cell phones and cell phone accessories. And pocketbooks that routinely cost more than my first few cars. Combined. Last year we got warning notices that they were opening an Apple store in the mall. This is because any store carrying more than ten percent Apple products is required to warn the surrounding area (5 mile radius). It's a good thing they did, so I can stay off that level. If I really need to get to that level, I have to put on a flameproof suit and cling tightly to the store on the other side. Sometimes I still hear the lights and sirens, as well as my skin starting to burn, which is really bad when you're in a closed astronaut suit. When I die and go to hell, it will look like a Chuck E Cheese. Either that or a left-handed guitar store right next to an Apple store.