This is a Different Post, Just Like All My Other Posts

Over in England, the Ministry for Measuring Things has noted a 90% increase over last year's sales figures for cassettes. Yes, those things you couldn't wait to get rid of after you got a cd player for your car.

Every now and then I come up with an amazing idea and here's one: I am going to put my entire collection of Vintage Original cassettes on the market. They're worth a fortune! I will even include a few Vintage Original blank cassettes. The reason the Vintage Original cassettes are better is twofold: firstly, they have Vintage and Original in their title; secondly, over time, the magnetic particles have aligned with each other for smooth Vintage Original sound that one cannot approximate with New Non-Vintage Non-Original cassettes.

I won't be able to count my money fast enough. Either the tone of this blog is going to change or I'll stop blogging entirely. On the other hand, the guilt of abandoning the six of you would be too great. I will stay.

Just wait til I whip out my 8 tracks and reel to reel tapes!

• I like my neighbor the schizophrenic. He's a genuinely nice guy, who manages to spend most of his time on the planet with the rest of us. After he told me about the lasers shining on our house the other night, that looked like gun sights, he said he's really sorry and he knows we must be missing our little guy. 

It's a bad time to be an administrator or citizen of two municipalities in Alaska. The Alaskan Borough of Matanuska-Susitna (Mat Su) and the City of Valdez have both been hit with some really nasty ransomware. Let's say a few systems are down, like the electronic door key swiping system, nearly all of the workstations, 120/150 servers, email, property querying, library system, landfill weights and fees application, and animal shelter’s computers. The saddest part of this is that they had to dig out their typewriters. I'm sure there were courses available for the kids who had never seen one before. "Most" of the data is safe and credit card data was not stored there. Over 200 organizations have been hit.

The IT Director said:

I will tell you is that this isn’t some kid in his mother’s basement. This is very sophisticated and well-funded.  It would come from somewhere I believe outside the US. When we call it ransomware, that’s not its purpose. I believe its purpose was to disrupt our way of life.

ThermionicEmissions has done some digging in some very dark places and came up with some information: it's the Chinese, messing with the Russians. 

• Seeing a .DOC, .XLS, .PDF, .ZIP, or .7Z "paperclipped" to an email message should always tell you to proceed with extreme caution. These are the most dangerous extensions potentially used by malware authors.
• Remember: Don't

A Security Dood on Twitter has one smart bulb in his house. He found out the company went out of business months ago. The last settings he made are now permanent because the app no longer works. The Internet of Things became The Internet of Things That Don't Work.

• John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, is in Deep Doo Doo because he used the word 'poof' on British radio (poofter: slang for homosexual). Apparently this is a terrible thing to say. In response, Cleese said Graham Chapman was a poof and dead, so he's a double minority. Terry Gilliam, Python and filmmaker, said he identifies as a black lesbian in transition.
• The BBC has dedicated itself to finding comedy of color, so it's not six white guys, like Python. Because non-white comics are genetically funnier than white comics.
• Hopefully we'll all be alive to see this stop.

If you're a Gmail user, you shouldn't be.

Having said that, they offer a new feature called Confidential Mode. It should be called, more accurately, Sometimes Confidential Mode. Let's say that its somewhat confidential from most, except the biggest culprit last time: Google. Google can save and read all your email. Again. Still. Protonmail.com

• Just heard on tv: Don't put your penis in the cooking stove.

Folks... I hope you don't feel like I'm bleeding all over the blog, but I have to try to get this out somehow. Losing a 13 year member of the family you saw every day is traumatic. We're trying everything to get back to (ab)normal, but only time will help. There hasn't been nearly enough of it yet.

Dear Marshall:
I don't know if you read blogs wherever you ended up, but I'm putting this out there to the Universe.  There's a lot of disruption in the wake of your leaving. It's been 4 weeks but feels like forever. We miss stuff... stuff like..

• not being able to go on vacation. We now have the freedom to go anywhere (which we haven't)
• keeping doors open a little
• your food lady misses buying hot dogs for you and jumping when you bark
• tripping over you in the bedroom
• the shrieking to go out, in, or when you didn't get what you wanted
• Quality Time: when I got in bed and you'd come up and lay next to me, demanding attention til one of us got tired. The best time of my day. Mom was jealous. Was the extra cuddling because you knew?
• hell, we miss running to vets and paying the bills - we'd gratefully do it again for you
• the supervision and assistance we got whenever cooking or cleaning the kitchen
• looking at you and scratching your itches

I wanted to tell you how much we miss you but I think you know; you probably miss us too.

Explosive Farts

What - you think I'm kidding?
A patient was burned during surgery when the laser being used ignited a fart. Who says Silent But Deadly isn't deadly? They did her a real cervix.

• I'm not entirely sure of the country, but on the first of every month, there's a man who dresses as a white rabbit and waves at people by the river in Barnes. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Mexico is now celebrating Day of the Dead. We call that Kardashian Viewer Night.

• To support those with cancer, someone has decided November is No Shave month. The Social Justice Warriors want everyone to know that raising cancer awareness is oppressive because not all people who have prostates are men. Apparently anatomy is no longer a concern. I'd just like to say I'm the proud owner of a prostate and I'm a man.
• I'd also like to insert, as it were, some professional medical advice. Ejaculation is very healthy for the prostate, so get yourself going or have someone else do it. If you think I'm messing with you, do the research or ask your urologist (because we all have urologists).

Speaking of Social Justice, a conservative group on the campus of University of Redlands (no, I don't know where that is either) has been banned from holding a Funeral for Halloween due to an administrator's concerns that such a display would cause "emotional and psychological harm" to the campus community.  One concern was that the event was not clearly labeled as satire. Within a few years, this culture will eat itself. Colleges are already finding enrollment down.

• In England, hundreds of operations were canceled after malware hacked the hospital system. That was the headline, but the malware had to get there somehow. Much like the Internet of Things (IoT), medical devices are shit on security. Whether it's ransomware or a hack, these are among the last devices you want hacked. They had to shut the whole system down to find the malware but they remained open for other services. Lock em down, folks. This follows the crap we put in our houses.

Speaking of England, Admiral, a car insurance company, is going to price first-time insurance based upon Faceyspaces posts. Apparently they've developed an algorithm that will tell them what kind of a risk you are by your social media posts. It would be a blessing in the US, as none of us here uses Faceyspaces, so it would be free (well, the article doesn't exactly say that). Pictures of you drinking or drunk off your butt will not be scanned, so you're in luck there. One of the things they're looking for is detail, like saying 7pm instead of "tonight". This means that you'll get penalized if you care about privacy and post when you're not going to be home and specifically what time you're not going to be home. This program is voluntary.

Let's also consider the US programs that plug a sensor into your car to check your driving style/statistics. Add this to the black box and the car's cell modem tracking and you have a hell of a lot of information leaking out of you and your car. After that, it will be sold to advertisers, to better target the kinds of ads you receive. Sweet, eh?

• Did you know you can log into a certain satellite and watch for illegal fishing vessels? One vessel just got busted this way. It's very nice to stop illegal fishing and makes you feel good. Right up until you realize that a ton of these satellites are looking at YOU. Sit with that for a moment.

Pardon me for being late, but the one browser that doesn't hate Blogspot started hating it. Unfortunately for you, I found a different one.

• Bad news for white women: they have to stop wearing name tag bracelets. It's an issue of 'cultural appropriation'. Last week, Vanessa Hudgens (sigh) got in Deep Doo-Doo because she culturally appropriated the braids in her hair. I'm against it too, but only because she looks so much better without them.

I know Halloween is behind us (thankfully) but the Philly area made the list of Top Haunted Attractions. Places like City Hall, the building the State Police just raided for suspected election fraud, and the Parking Authority. All pretty frightening indeed.

• Ever wonder how Terry Gilliam (Monty Python) made those wild animations?  What - you didn't? Well, here's how anyway...

There is an awful lot of suspicion about skullduggery in the upcoming election. Here to save the day is Russia, which has offered to provide election monitors. This is the best and worst thing I've read all season.

Teaching Ravens to Fly Under Water

Continuing the ThermionicEmissions hatred and coverage of selfies, we have an 18 yeard old Florida woman who police said took selfies as she was having sex with her pitbull. Not known was whether the pictures were posted to Faceyspaces or Instagram.

• While we're continuing, here are the top ten passwords from the Ashley Madison hack: 123456, 12345, password, DEFAULT, 123456789, qwerty, 12345678, abc 123, pussy and 1234567. ThermionicEmissions readers know better than to use these kinds of passwords.

Husband bites estranged wife's nose off and eats it after she fails to return his calls. "When I said 'eat me,' what I meant was...."

• Countdown to Popemageddon continues: US sex victims say Church remains obstacle to justice. 
• A pastor committed suicide six days after his name came up in the Ashley Madison hack. 
• Men of God, all of them.

As it turns out, reports of Monty Python Terry Gilliam's death are premature. He has not joined the choir invisible, he is not pushing up daisies, he was not nailed to the perch and no one will have to come home from holiday to a dead Gilliam. For his part, Gilliam apologized for being dead.

• Dereliction of Parenting Department: Irish Dad sues Facebook after eleven year old daughter sent provocative pictures of herself to men and had chats. Ummm... Dad... if your eleven year old daughter behaves like this, Facebook might not be her only issue, eh?

California legislators approve bill allowing doctors to give patients suicide pills. They should give this over to the Pentagon's 'secure' virus labs. Perhaps they'll send them to DC by mistake.

• Both Chrissy Hynde (Pretenders) and Grace Jones have had their say about today's female stars: “They dress up as though they are challenging the status quo, but by now, wearing those clothes, pulling those faces, revealing those tattoos and breasts, singing to those fractured, spastic, melting beats – that is the status quo."  If you told me I'd be quoting Grace and Chrissy, I'd tell you that you were driving the short bus, short a few wheels.

Pentagon computers hacked again - this time it's the Food Court!  Never mind the Office of Personnel Management - this is WAR.

• When they came to tax my salary, I was silent. When they came to tax my drinks, I was silent. When they came to tax my internet, I was silent. Now who is going to speak up for me, now that they have come to tax my porn?  Yes, Alabama, rather than fixing their problems, has levied a massive porn tax.

America gets a D in science: 22% confuse astronomy with astrology. We are a nation of morons. Now ask yourself who this benefits....

• Tired of the endless iDevice hype? This puts it in perspective.

Forty-two percent of registered voters think Hillary Clinton is the presidential candidate most qualified to protect the United States from cyberattacks. Occasionally there is a headline so stupefying that I have no choice but to reproduce it. We not only fail to remember last we - we actively ignore it.  What was I saying about a nation of morons?

• A few weeks back, at work, I was in the men's room, doing what one does in the men's room. Also in the men's room was another fellow, doing what one does in the men's room. He starts singing, which I found weird, as well as being outside of the Accepted Rules of Rest Room Etiquette (ARRREQ). "Oh Sara... Oh Sara... Oh Sara..." he went on. After a few of these, it began to seem that this guy had a problem, ostensibly named Sara. He sounded hurt. I felt sorry for the guy - we've all experienced this. Not so sorry that it wouldn't make it to the blog, of course. Unless I completely forgot.
• Today I was back in the men's room, doing what one does in the men's room, when I heard some dude talking to the loo. No, not talking - singing. "Oh Sara...oh Sara...oh Sara..." he continued, with the familiar tone of sadness.  Along with his singing, I hope he wasn't also practicing his dancing.

Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant Monday began releasing previously contaminated water into the sea. Previously contaminated? Is this some sort of code? New math? Triplespeak? Rest assured that whatever comes out of TEPCO (Japan's nuclear authority) has been marginalized and homogenized to within an inch of its life, much like American politicians. From the initial incident, TEPCO has sought to minimize any impact. Yet here they are, inventing the state 'previously contaminated'. Do you suppose all of the nuclear waste we bury in Yuma, AZ, is previously contaminated? Would you mind it being dumped in the ocean?

• Obamacare enrollees must double to make budget projections work. Ain't socialized medicine grand? I'd love to give you an 'I told you so,' but I'm paying for this just like you.
  

Two Muslim fundamentalist preachers were discussing the question of “whether wives should be beaten or not” when two topless activists jumped onstage. Ummm... if it's feminist to not believe women should be beaten, call me feminist. In yet another case of extreme journalistic bad taste and incompetence, the Telegraph put black bars over the women's breasts. All of the news, guys... censorship will not be tolerated.

TECH

• Malibu Phone Home: Chevy reports to parents on teens' driving habits.  If this car can report on your teen...
• Oops - GM performed a stealth update because of a long-term vulnerability (2010-2014) to OnStar. The only way to truly fix this issue is to completely disable the hardware (it's easy).
• Remember this blog reporting on California optical internet cables being cut about eleven times? Systems of the US Department of Energy were breached more than 150 times between October 2010 and October 2014. I believe this need some serious study. What would happen if either went down? Shades of the east coast US power blackout, allegedly caused by a squirrel. I hope to be mistaken here.

As if Windows 10 isn't enough of a pervasive, spying data sinkhole, Windows is now downloading it to your computer, even if you didn't ask for it. Just in case, you know.

Make with the Music

Superstar is frequently used but not frequently earned. In this case, I'm sure you'll agree that Queen neatly embodies the term. From their humble beginnings to stardom beyond expectations, this incredible band of audio and video experts truly entertained.

Queen could not have been without the outrageous frontman and composer, Freddie Mercury. Born Farouk Balsara, he could certainly command attention. Less publicized is his ability to musically direct the band in the studio. He sometimes came in with complete musical scenarios, which the band ably saw to completion. Freddie's personal life is fairly well known and a biography turned up a great line: Freddie's parties were truly something to behold, but I can't say more without the advise of my attorney.

Brian May, the guitarist who built his own guitar, is responsible for large amounts of Queen's sound, with his wall of amplifiers and multitracked, delayed harmony guitars. Yet somehow he manages to carry the excess off live. Brian is also a doctor of astrophysics, perhaps the doctor with the tallest hair of the title. `39 is a more acoustic song that Brian sings. It deals with the very interesting, and sometimes sad, topic of time travel and time relativity. The chorus harmonies are right out of the Queen playbook.

The spirit of show business shines through on The Show Must Go On. And it must*.

Successes are complex beasts but often have a great sense of humor, not to mention boundless creativity. I Want to Break Free is a good example. I can't say I'm crazy about the song, but the video is absolutely hysterical. I understand it was popular in Britain but didn't translate well Across the Pond. This does not strike me as requiring any translation at all.

One of my favorite Queen tunes, from the Sheer Heart Attack album, is Brighton Rock. Unless you're a rabid fan, you might not know it. As if you didn't know why I like it, the reason might start around 1:50 in. It's a solo symphony.

Freddie and the band will live forever in our ears.

After Freddie's death, Queen toured with the great Paul Rogers singing (an unfortunate mismatch), then Adam Lambert. One day, after viewing Adam, Freddie's ghost was heard to say, "Unh-uh. No way. Too gay."

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen cocker?

* RELEVANT ANECDOTE: Back in my musical comedy performing days, I had a weekend show in Bumfukt, PA. Hungry, we set out for some local food pre-show. A pizza place was down the street so off we went. I ordered a meatball sandwich because it's harder to screw up, plus gray meatballs were a favorite target of mine.

After the show we went home, as we were wont to do after shows. The next morning, I begged my girlfriend for help in stopping the bed from spinning rapidly, in the opposite direction that the room was spinning. Things got no better from there, at which point we made the difficult diagnosis of gray meatball-induced food poisoning.

As the spinning was getting faster, we called our agent, requesting he put in another act. Ever accommodating, the agent told us there was no other act.  As a result, I had to stand onstage, buffered on each side by a group member. While there was great internal debate about the hilarity of projectile vomiting, I decided against it. Afterwards they packed me in with the gear and took me home. Eventually the room stopped its rapid rotation.

The Show Must Go On.