For those of you who enjoy high art, daysofleisure.com brings you The Animated GIF Museum.

A bit late, but I have resolved to resolve. I know I have balked at resolutions in the past, but it is common knowledge that all said and done here is steeped in fallacy and deception.

I woke up the other day cranky and just plain ornery. I thought to myself, "What if I tried not to be such an ass today?" Then it occurred to me that I could try not to be such an ass in general.

Imagine now that I am standing on a mountain top, or some other large structure, not too high though, with a safety railing, because I'm afraid of heights, maybe a nice berm over at the park...hands raised, and my long golden locks flowing in the breeze...

"For the year 2005, I will try not to be such an ass!"

140 words ( counted by Text Area Word Counter, brought to you by the fine folks at scribbling.net )

I totally made one of these in high school. Except, I don't have asthma, and I didn't plug the end with asthma medication, and it didn't have a spinny thingie. Oh, and it was made out of an old honey bear container. So really, it was nothing like this. But it was awesome!

via - gizmodo

President Bush plans to reactivate his reelection campaign's network of donors and activists to build pressure on lawmakers to allow workers to invest part of their Social Security taxes in the stock market . . . The campaign will use Bush's campaign-honed techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and using the politics of fear to build support -- contending that a Social Security financial crisis is imminent when even Republican figures show it is decades away.

Washington Post
Social Security Push to Tap the GOP Faithful
January 14, 2005

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas . . . only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.

Adolph Hitler
Mein Kampf
1925

via - Wiskey Bar

warning: incoherent and mind numbingly boring technology rant follows:

The comment form here at bitterpill.org is set up to send me an email when, in the rare occurrence, someone posts a comment. However, the email functionality has been broken for some time. Why? To be honest, I have been too lazy to figure it out, and frankly, this wasn't a bug high on my list of bugs to fix. Today I gathered up the gumption to sort it out. It turns out that the least likely of culprits was to blame. I imagine many a reader now pondering, "You mean it wasn't your crappie code or your even crappier system configuration that was causing your mail problems?" On most days this thought would be right on the money, but today my dear friends my incompetence was not to blame. It turns out it was was those Stanford brianiacs at google.

Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to bundle the java.mail API in their google API jar, and in the process broke my mailing code. The java.mail API doesn't take too kindly to having multiple instances of its self in the class path, it's selfish that way. It took me forever to figure out why it was failing, and only after Nick pushed me in the right direction by convincing me to look through all the java APIs in the bitter pill webapp to see if some dope had bundled the mail APIs in their code. Google was the culprit, those bastards!

For posterity, a quick glance at some saving grace bash scripting:

for file in `ls`; do
    echo $file; jar -tf $file | grep mail;
done


Team Pill has been hard at work on a new look and/or feel. After 48 months of development, we have finally launched the new design. I'd like to take a moment to thank the team for all their hard work.

Andrea, you put your heart into this project. I can only offer my thanx, in lue of pay.

Philip, your emotional and financial support helped make this project a reality. I am happy to call you friend, even if I barely know and mostly dislike you.

Rueben, You lost your leg when rendering HTML on an old Mac IIci. Sure, your performance suffered greatly after the accident, but we kept you on so not to get sued. Your diligent QA and tech support was barely completed in time.

Klaus, you quit in the last month, the home stretch, and for that I will never forgive you. This is the last time anyone on Team Pill will speak of you.

The development group in Building C, you did nothing, but we stole your soda and went through your stuff on many a late night, so thanx.

My ex wives and many children, your love and devotion has made me a richer man. This project would have never been possible if I didn't slack a bit in paying your alimony and child support, so thank you.

And finally, most thanks go to me, for whom without this project wouldn't have been possible. My vision and intelligence made it all come together. How can I thank me enough.

We were at Julie's parent's house in Jamestown for the New Year. There is a chain of stores up in Rhode Island called the The Christmas Tree Shops (CTS) (warning: link contains blaring Christmas Tree Shops jingle). The CTS is a discount seconds and irregular product heaven, or hell depending on your perspective. Oddly enough, they don't seem to sell Christmas Trees, at least any that I have seen. We always go to the CTS while in Rhode Island regardless of my never ending diatribes involving my disdain for the store. While shopping at the CTS Julie spotted a pizza stone for three dollars. At this point I was done with the CTS. I was done with shopping, and I was done, fucking done, with buying three dollar items that we just don't need. This did not go over well with Julie and Tamara who felt that a pizza stone was exactly what we needed. I put my foot down, and basically dragged them out of the store without the pizza stone.

This is not the end gentle reader. The topic of the lost pizza stone was brought back into conversation at least once an hour for the rest of the weekend, and on occasion was followed by a plea to return to the CTS and purchase the much coveted stone. I was regaled with stories of the pizza making, blissful world we could be living in if we only had that stone. But I had said my piece, and luckily for me the CTS was in Newport, which was a toll bridge ride away, and just enough deterrent to keep us from returning to the CTS on a whim. We drove back to New York a couple of days later, not without many a mention of the stone and the easily obtainable pizza nirvana that was almost within our grasp.

A few days later, Charlotte, Julie's sister who had come to Jamestown and had stayed a few days longer, stopped by our house on her way back to Georgetown. I passed by Tam's work on the way home that night to to say hello and discuss our dinner options for that evening. Tamara mentioned that Charlotte was going to make pizza. I paused, "What?" "She's gonna make pizza." Tamara repeated. Immediately I saw this as a ploy, a way to one up the scrooge of pizzas stones, a way to show me what a world with home made pizza could be like and how much of a fool I had been that I wouldn't accept this new and better way of life. I responded, "You guys are trying to make a pizza fool of me. That pizza she's making is a big fat round manipulation." Tam just smiled at me. I was standing in the waiting room of the veterinary clinic where she works, and I noticed that the patients, and their owners, were staring at a raving idiot. I smiled half heartedly and eased my way out the door.

What I didn't realize as I walked home was that this was not a ploy to show me what I fool I was for not letting them buy the stone. Charlotte had bought the stone and brought it to New York for Tam and Julie. Julie had called Charlotte and asked her to stop at the CTS and buy the forbidden stone. When Charlotte pulled it out of the shopping bag I was stunned. This was a coup d'�tat. The very fabric of our simple apartment empire was tearing apart before my eyes. I had ruled against the stone. I had passed judgment and laid down the law. There would be no stone. And yet, here it was. The stone had materialized as if in a bad dream, and it laid there mocking me in my own kitchen. I thought Charlotte was an ally. She hated the CTS as much, maybe more than I, and yet she had brought the stone. She had help thrust the stone upon me. Et tu Charlotte?

Julie and Charlotte saw the anger in my eyes when they unveiled the pizza stone, and I saw the fear in their faces. They stepped back. And yet, in their eyes of fear I saw my shame. I saw clearly for the first time. I saw what I had become. I was a madman, a lunatic filled with a hate that had tainted my very soul. My heart had turned, dare I say, to stone. In an instant I had seen what must be done. I would turn my reign of terror into a legacy of hope. I would turn my cold stone heart into a warm cheese pie with sausage and olives. I would make a pie. I would make a pie so stuffed with love and compassion for pizza stones everywhere that one single slice would fill the masticator with a hope and joy for pizza like none they had ever known. I would make a pie.

A dead finback whale lies in shallow water along the rocky coast at Brenton Point State Park in Newport on Friday.

- New Port Daily News

We drove by Brenton Point State Park on Saturday to see the beached whale. It was both amazing and terrible to see the great animal lying dead on the beach.