MemeMachineGo!

Mozilla’s rules are that only official Firefox builds can use the official Firefox artwork, including icons. Unofficial efforts like Moox’s optimized compilations for Windows usually use the “default unofficial artwork” which means a blue globe icon.

Way back when, the Mozilla icon was an adorable little blue gecko. Later versions had an M or a big red Godzilla, and then I switched to Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox. All along I missed that little blue guy. (Gecko is the name of Mozilla’s page layout engine.)

I googled and googled for a copy of the gecko icon; finally, it occurred to me I could take matters into my own hands. I downloaded Mozilla 0.9.1 from June, 2001. After installing it, I used IconsExtract to, er, extract the icons.

Then it was just a matter of changing my shortcut icon and changing the icons internally.

You can click on the gecko to download the icon for yourself. Because I care.

…from about 0800 to 1700 PDT while PG&E has its way with the relevant power lines. Of course, this warning won’t do much good to those of you not reading via RSS.

I solemnly swear to actually have regular posting after we’re back Monday night. For at least a little while.

A quantum physicist has proposed there can be negative information.

Even the most ignorant cannot know less than nothing. After all, negative knowledge makes no sense. But, although this may be true in the everyday world we are accustomed to, it has been discovered that negative knowledge does exist in the quantum world. Small objects such as atoms, molecules and electrons behave radically different than larger objects — they obey the laws of quantum mechanics.

What could negative knowledge possibly mean? In short, after I tell you negative information, you will know less. Such strange situations can occur because what it means to know something is very different in the quantum world. In the quantum world, we can know too much, and it is in these situations where one finds negative knowledge. Negative knowledge (or more precisely negative information) turns out to be precisely the right amount to cancel the fact that we know too much.

I predict the most abused metaphor since chaos theory.

Once upon a time, when I was attending Hudson Valley Community College in scenic south Troy, New York, the landlord sent an electrician to the apartment.

I was the only one home, so I guess I showed him the problem — I forget now what it was. The one thing I do remember clearly is something he said.

“Study. Study hard, kid. So you don’t have to do what I do.”

This was delivered in deadly earnest, as if he had the most obviously undesirable job in the world. I found it peculiar at the time, having always considered being an electrician to be a perfectly good trade.

Recently, I had an electrician to my house to fix some small problems. Two hours later, I wrote him a check for $235 (all for labor, no parts.)

I studied pretty hard for at least some of my academic career, and that’s a better hourly rate than I made even during the Tech Boom.

So you can see what that electrician in Troy 20 years ago meant.

Yeah, me neither.

Even the deaf have inner voices.

No one seems to have studied the question of deaf people’s inner language, but Hauser, who is deaf, responded with insights I hadn’t anticipated. Most interesting was his assertion that deaf people who were born to deaf parents, and who read well, create sounds in their heads as they learn to read.

“My best answer to this,” Hauser wrote, “is that the brain has a special capacity to develop phonological representations, even when it does not have auditory input. The representations might be dramatically different from what hearing individuals hear. Nevertheless, they function in the mind as ‘sounds.’” Deaf schizophrenics, he continued, have auditory hallucinations, and blind schizophrenics have visual ones.

You don’t screw with the croissant supply.

On April 16, 1838 a French Fleet began the blockade of Mexico’s east coast seaports, launching a war. It was based on a claim that since Mexico had first gained its independence, various French citizens living there, had lost both lives and property due to actions by Mexicans. In one such incident, a restaurant owned by one Monsieur Remontel either in Puebla or in Tacubaya - reports of its location vary - had suffered an assault on its supply of pastry valued at 60,000 pesos. He pointed a finger at some inebriated Mexican officials as the criminals. The ambiguity of the restaurant’s location plus the size of the claim seem to cast doubt on the validity of all the French demands. However, this particular one caught the eyes of French Journalists who immediately made this incident a cause celebre and dubbed the event “The Pastry War.”

Vital Liquor quotes from Desmond Morris’ The Human Zoo, 1969.

Under normal conditions, in their natural habitats, wild animals do not mutilate themselves, masturbate, attack their offspring, develop stomach ulcers, become fetishists, suffer from obesity, form homosexual pair-bonds or commit murder. Among human city-dwellers, needless to say, all of these things occur. Does this, then, reveal a basic difference between the human species and other animals? At first glance it seems to do so. But this is deceptive. Other animals do behave in these ways under certain circumstances, namely when they are confined in the unnatural conditions of captivity. The zoo animal in a cage exhibits all these abnormalities that we know so well from our human companions. Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

Salon writes about Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance, 1999.

The scientist gasps and drops the binoculars. A notebook falls from astonished hands. Graduate students mutter in alarm. Nobody wants to be the one to tell the granting agency what they’re seeing.

A female ape wraps her legs around another female, “rubbing her own clitoris against her partner’s while emitting screams of enjoyment.” The researcher explains: It’s a form of greeting behavior. Or reconciliation. Possibly food-exchange behavior. It’s certainly not sex. Not lesbian sex. Not hot lesbian sex.

Conversations at a Bookstore. No quote, you’ll just have to read the whole thing. It may or may not be for you, but I can’t tell you whether it is without spoiling the end.

But if it’s for you, it’s really for you.

People, people, we have a report of bad salad.

British soldiers were secretly drugged with [Jimson Weed] (in their salad), while attempting to stop the Bacon’s Rebellion. They spent several days chasing feathers, making monkey faces, generally acting like lunatics, and indeed failed at their mission.

Finally, a mostly happy ending to this story about the Livermore library mosaic mural covered with misspellings. The muralist fixed it.

Wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and working under a tent, she wagged her finger at a television cameraman and threatened to throw a rock at a Chronicle photographer. “No pictures of me!” Alquilar yelled, standing behind a barrier that officials had put up to separate her from the public. “If I’m in it, I’m going to sue you.”

Her blunders netted her another $6000 for the correction job — California state law is very protective of public art, and prohibits its alteration without the artist’s consent.

Dan Savage is subbing for Andrew Sullivan (boggle), and suggests:

I have a policy proposal: Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution shouldn’t enjoy the benefits of evolution. No eyes, no walking upright, no opposable thumbs. It’s back to the primordial ooze for members of the Kansas Board of Education.

God, I love geeks. Movie Physics’ Spider-Man review:

A web strand would probably need to be at least 0.5 cm in diameter to support Spider-Man’s web-swinging antics. If such a strand were 100 meters long, it would have a volume of 0.00196 m3 compared to Spider-Man’s estimated volume of 0.0726 m3. Spider-Man will lose 2.7% of his volume every time he shoots a 100-meter-long web. Web swinging a mere kilometer of horizontal distance would use up 38% of his body volume (assuming his web makes a 45° angle with the vertical at the beginning and end of each swing and each web is 100 meters long). He would be skeletal by the time he arrived and would have to eat huge volumes of food to compensate.

The Dvorak Zine: keyboard layout agitprop in comic book format.

A few months ago, it occurred to me that one could process the Berkeley Police Department’s PDF-format police bulletins, look up what the codes meant, and generate a map with the Google maps API.

I’m grateful that someone else did it.

Auto burglary looks more popular than I thought.

Focus on the Family warns against the perils of prehomosexual tendencies.

Evidences of gender confusion or doubt in boys ages 5 to 11 may include:

1. A strong feeling that they are “different” from other boys.

2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy. […]

5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag” and “gay.”

If we only work together, we may be able to eradicate the threat of geeks in our lifetimes.

They note further:

“By the time the adolescent hormones kick in during early adolescence, a full-blown gender identity crisis threatens to overwhelm the teenager,” warns psychologist Dr. James Dobson. To compound the problem, many of these teens experience “great waves of guilt accompanied by secret fears of divine retribution.”

What Christ-like compassion they have, to seek to spare them this guilt.

Their advice is self-parodying.

Girls can continue to grow in their identification with their mothers. On the other hand, a boy has an additional developmental task—to disidentify from his mother and identify with his father. At this point [beginning at about eighteen months], a little boy will not only begin to observe the difference, he must now decide, “Which one am I going to be?” In making this shift in identity, the little boy begins to take his father as a model of masculinity. At this early stage, generally before the age of three, Ralph Greenson observed, the boy decides that he would like to grow up like his father. This is a choice. Implicit in that choice is the decision that he would not like to grow up to be like his mother. According to Robert Stoller, “The first order of business in being a man is, ‘don’t be a woman.’”

Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

But that hasn’t stopped Fafblog from parodying them.

One MeFite sees a business opportunity.

Man, I gotta set myself up as a psychologist that turns kids straight. Then I can say “Hey, look, so long as you live in your parents’ house, keep this on the down-low. They’re fundamentalist lunatics and the rest of the world isn’t like them. Bide your time, then go to college and suck cock like it’s your job. In the meantime, I’ll split the money your folks are paying me with you, so that you can save up to get the hell out of here.”

LA Times writer Patrick Goldstein slighted Rob Schneider.

It’s a funny thing, but today’s movie studios are no longer in the Oscar business. If there’s one common thread among this year’s five best picture nominees, it’s that they were largely financed by outside investors. The most money any studio put into one of the nominees was the $21 million that Miramax anted up for “Finding Neverland.” The other nominated films were orphans — ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that eagerly remake dozens of old TV series (aren’t you looking forward to a bigger, dumber version of “The Dukes of Hazzard”?) or bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.

Schneider responded in a full-page ad in Variety.

My name is Rob Schneider and I am responding to your January 26th front page cover story in the LA Times, where you used my upcoming sequel to ‘Deuce Bigalow’ as an example of why Hollywood Studios are lagging behind the Independents in Academy nominations. According to your logic, Hollywood Studios are too busy making sequels like “Deuce Bigalow’ instead of making movies that you would like to see.

Well Mr. Goldstein, as far as your snide comments about me and my film not being nominated for an Academy Award, I decided to do some research to find what awards you have won.

I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind, Disappointed, I went to the Pulitzer Prize database of past winners and nominees. I though, surely, there must be an omission. I typed in the name Patrick Goldstein and again, zippo—nada. No Pulitzer Prizes or nominations for a ‘Mr. Patrick Goldstein.’ […] Maybe, Mr. Goldstein, you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for “Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter, Who’s Never Been Acknowledged By His Peers!” […]

For the record, Patrick, your research is shabby as well. My next film is not ‘Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo 2.’ It’s ‘Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.’ [Note that Goldstein didn’t attempt to give the follow-up’s name — Zed]

From Roger Ebert’s 0-stars review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo:

Reading [Schneider’s tirade], I was about to observe that Schneider can dish it out but he can’t take it. Then I found he’s not so good at dishing it out, either. I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a RockCritics.com award, and the Publicists’ Guild award for lifetime achievement.

Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.

But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. […] As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

Daily posting has left me pooped, so I’m off to sunny SoCal for a week. We’ve got a housesitter to mind home and cats, an empty house to crash in down south, and pretty much no packing done.

See you in next week. In the meantime, please visit my sponsors the fine sites on my blogroll.

=v= The bike fora are abuzz about a new high-tech bike rental program in Paris. I was more abuzz about its name: Vélo'V. What the heck does that mean, especially the 'V part?

I asked my French roommate, who pointed me to the original article in her morning online newspaper. An American friend also explained that weird apostrophes and abbreviations often signify English. The 'V is for love. They're sneaking English into French!

Stunned, I looked up the website for Paris' other bike rental program, and I found this oddly reassuring:

English version of our website in construction, please apologize for this.

Okay! Okay! I'm sorry already!

I meant to promptly update this entry to include xpm versions of the Mozilla gecko icons, for use with Linux. Here they are.

=v= Two dogs meet each other in the park. They have humans leashed to them, and as the dogs swap a little friendly spit, the humans smile. The dogs move on to butt-sniffing, which prompts the humans to tilt their bodies away at awkward angles, and start to speak, as if to change the subject.

Except what they talk about is what they feed their dogs. This is essentially the same conversation the dogs are having.

The humans discuss their philosophies of feeding and eating, and then segue into the topic of their own diets. Sensing that this could be a preamble to more butt-sniffing, your humble narrator decides that this is a good time to exit the scene.

While I was on vacation, I had a dream in which Captain Kirk was Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s father, and the ST:ToS crew teamed up with her to fight evil. It was also explained that vampires were a hybrid descendant of aliens the Trek crew knew of (which makes no sense in terms of what we’ve seen of the vamps in BtVS, but what the heck — it’s not like either series is famed for its rock-solid internal consistency.)

Daniel Abraham suggests that movies are increasingly more important to our culture than books because there are fewer of them.

It is physically impossible for anyone to keep up with the body of literature we’re producing. The best anyone can do is pick and choose, creating idiosyncratic personal reading lists. And maybe someone else at the table also read Tevis’ The Queen’s Gambit. Maybe not.

Credo: Just being well educated doesn’t make you civilized. Something can only be socially relevant if it can be shared and discussed. Furthermore, it is only civilizing (that is to say something that brings people in a culture together in a way that strengthens the basic social fabric) if it can be shared across socioeconomic and sub-cultural lines. Books are now being produced at a rate that undermines this role.

Movies (with their incredibly high production values) are still sparse enough that they can act as a shared context for both CEO and roofer. Red and blue America (to use the idiom of the day) could sit across the table and discuss the merits of Drew Barrymore in a way that they couldn’t talk about Tom Clancy (much less Georges Perec).

=v= When a fundamentalist cleric calls for the head of a rival, it tends to be front-page news. When a follower of the fundamentalist's dogma is sentenced for terrorist acts, that also tends to be front-page news, and of course the connections are pointed out.

Yet somehow, when fundamentalist cleric Pat Robertson calls for assassination, it's bumped from the front page by a staged photo-op in Utah; and when fundamentalist follower Eric Rudolph is sentenced for his terrorist acts, that's buried somewhere as well, and no connections are mentioned.

It's up to the meme-o-sphere. Repeat after me: Pat Robertson Issues Fatwah. Spread the word. Let the meme be fruitful and multiply.

Someone set up MemeMachineGo! syndication as a livejournal feed last February. Ron, was that you? Anyway, LJers can add MMG to your friends list.

Metroactive has an article on Robert Anton Wilson.

Decades before the crossover cult film What the Bleep Do We Know!? popularized the idea that the principles of quantum mechanics could be applied to the world at large, Robert Anton Wilson had laid out much the same theory in his book, Prometheus Rising. Venture further into Wilson’s oeuvre and you’ll find equally prescient material on longevity research; you’ll likely even stumble across source materials that inspired Dan Brown to write The DaVinci Code.

“I think I’m the most ripped-off artist of our time,” says Wilson, seated in the living room of a modest Capitola apartment adorned with an array of pookahs, Buddhas and at least one Loch Ness monster. “People keep coming out with books 30 years after—books on things I wrote about—and they all become bestsellers.

“I wrote about them too early,” says Wilson, raising a thin arm and shaking his finger to emphasize his point: “Don’t be premature.”

Lance Bauscher agrees. “This whole DaVinci Code thing with Dan Brown, I mean, that’s all Bob’s material,” says Bauscher, who directed a film about Wilson called Maybe Logic and also runs an academy through which Wilson’s online course, “Tale of the Tribe,” begins on Aug. 14. “Dan Brown has read all of Bob’s books. But Bob doesn’t really compromise his storytelling—not that Dan Brown does—but it’s for a general audience, and Bob just doesn’t go there.”

If the Da Vinci code rips off anything, it’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail. That RAW wrote extensively about its hypotheses in at least one book doesn’t make him the ripped off party — one could just as uncharitably describe him as having ripped off HB, HG. And I’m doubtful that Prometheus Rising in 1983 was the first book to explore applying QM principles to the macroscopic world.

None of which is to say that RAW hasn’t been an important influence on a lot of people (myself included.) But the Illuminati game seems a much better candidate as an uncredited rip-off of his work than those above.

Sadly, he’s ailing.

In fact, one day this past spring, after Santa Cruz moviegoers had lined up to see What the Bleep Do We Know!? in sufficient numbers to justify its three-month run, Robert Anton Wilson was lying alone, conscious but unable to move, on the floor of this one-bedroom Capitola apartment for 30 hours.

“It really didn’t seem that long,” says Wilson of his collapse, which ended when his daughter arrived and broke down the door. “And I remember thinking, as I’m lying there trying to move and unable to move: Hey, I may be dying now. And it didn’t frighten me or bother me at all.” […]

“I know I’m going to die sometime soon: five weeks, five months, five years,” says Wilson. “I don’t know, maybe 50 years if stem cell research moves along. But I don’t know and I don’t care. And I can’t take it seriously anymore. If George Bush is president of the free world, who can take anything seriously?

(Via Corpus Mmothra)

I found a new comment-spammer technique. I just deleted some comments from a bot that was obviously googling the first few words of the entry and using the excerpt from Google’s top response as the body of the comment. It’s to be presumed this was a lame effort at achieving the verisimilitude of relevance.

Though only four days old, my entry Free the Gecko 2: Linux Boogaloo is Google’s top response for that phrase (go figure,) and so the excerpt from Google was from that entry itself. Totally meta, man.

I need a better comment spam solution.

Defective Yeti plays The Game and I had to quote this part.

I start to wonder why on Earth I have voluntarily put myself in the position of being the dumbest person in a room of 150. […] This was a mingler, and Galactic Consortium has an assortment of tricks to ensure that this roomful of geeks, with the combined social skills of one homecoming queen, would have to do just that.

Dan Savage replies to the Focus on the Family-endorsed advice I mentioned.

Joseph Nicolosi, a quack conversion therapist whom Feldhahn cites approvingly, has an interesting theory on how to make little boys straight: “[A father should] take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.” This is wrong on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin. I can’t recall ever showering with my dad, and I’m certain my dad didn’t drag my two older brothers into the shower and waggle his penis in their faces. (I asked.) And yet both my older brothers grew up to be straight. How’d that happen? And if exposure to great big cocks makes a guy straight, how come 10 years worth of exposure to my boyfriend’s great big cock hasn’t made me straight?

He also offers a deal to another cultural commentator.

Shaunti Feldhahn, “a conservative Christian author and speaker,” recently wrote an op-ed touting conversion therapy for homosexuals. I speak for all gay people everywhere when I say that I’m sick to fucking death of listening to straight fundies yapping about how easy it is for other people to change their sexual orientations. Think it’s easy, Shaunti? Prove it, bitch, by putting your twat where your mouth is. After you convert your skanky ass from hetero to homo, I will convert my skanky ass from homo to hetero. Give me a call when you’re a carpet-munchin’, vag-fistin’ bulldyke—and bring the video, because I’m going to want proof—and I will give up ass-munchin’, butt-fucking faggotry. Until then, shut your stupid fucking mouth.

More great strides for the abolition of personal responsibility were taken last February.

Teenagers in Orlando, Fla., are leaping between 80-foot high public parking garages in a new trend called “garage jumping.” […] Tim Bargfrede […] was following friends when he attempted to garage jump and did not make it to the other side. Bargfrede fell six stories and was knocked unconscious on impact.

D’Assaro [Bargfrede’s family’s attorney] is filing a lawsuit against the city of Orlando and the private garage owner for making little effort to correct a potential deadly risk. “There was a very, very short length of fence that was completely ineffective in preventing this from happening,” D’Assaro said.

I guess they’re trying to be this kid.

The assignment of syllables to the musical scale, e.g. representing notes as do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti is called solfege. It used to be ut-re-mi-fa-so-la-si. These were taken from Ut queant laxis, a hymn to St. John the Baptist.

Ut queant laxis
Resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
Famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
Labii reatum,
Sancte Ioannes.

(So that (Ut) these your servants (Fa) may, with all their voice, resound (Re) your marvelous (Mi) exploits, clean (Sol) the guilt from our stained lips (La), O Saint John.)

Taking Ut-re-mi from Ut queant laxis is usually credited to Guido of Arezzo, an 11th century Benedictine monk and music theorist. Much to Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s relief, ut evolved into do, and replacing si with ti was popularized by John Curwen in the 19th century.

RonE has uncovered reality TV’s horrible secret.

Think about all the horrible, disgusting, awful things that people will do to get on TV. Now think of all the seminal psych tests done decades ago that can no longer be done due to ethical concerns, such as the stranger electrocution test or the Stanford prison experiment. What’s the psychological establishment to do? Why, get in league with the TV networks and stage their experiments as reality TV shows. People will be so eager to try to reach the show that there’ll be endless fodder for all these shows. Best of all, they’ll sign away their rights just so they can get on TV. The psych people can then just buy the data off the TV networks. No fuss, no muss. Hell, this could spawn its own network!

Movable Type 3.2 is out, and the personal edition is only $40, through 9/30. You still get discounted past contributions, so, after the $20 I gave them three and a half years ago, I could update to the current version for just $20.

So, eventually, there will be a grand upgrade to MemeMachineGo! You may wait on tenterhooks.

At the moment, the last 7 links to MemeMachineGo! on Technorati are from 4 new blogs. They were obviously automatically created by the same script, which creates a Blogspot account and blog, and then populates entries with the results of websearches.

I assumed at first they were trying to make themselves a target for searches on their topics, to sell Google ads, but there’s no advertising. Maybe that comes later, or maybe it’s an experiment.

Either way, it’s another flavor of spam, and I don’t like it.

(This article coming soon to the new blog, “Internet spam resources.”)

In June, the Supremes ruled that the Feds can prosecute medical marijuana users regardless of whether they were following the letter of their states’ laws permitting it. The justification was an interpretation of the Commerce Clause, empowering Congress “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

Clarence Thomas’ dissent got it right.

Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything—and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.

Didn’t we once have a Tenth Amendment?

You’ve probably heard of skirt length theory.

The idea that skirt lengths are a predictor of the stock market direction. According to the theory, if skirts are short, it means the markets are going up. And if skirt are long, it means the markets are heading down.

At long last, it’s been put into practice.

PERL [sic] scripts (running under Linux) extract and analyze stock prices from online stock market quote pages on the internet. These values are sent to a program which determines whether to raise or lower the hemline via a stepper motor and a system of cables, weights and pulleys attached to the underside of the skirt. When the stock price rises, the hemline is raised; when the stock price falls, the hemline is lowered.

Incredible.

When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be. Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?

The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it’s obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults. […] His own prosecutors have warned Acosta that prioritizing adult porn would reduce resources for prosecuting other crimes, including porn involving children. According to high-level sources who did not want to be identified, Acosta has assigned prosecutors porn cases over their objections.

(Via Memory Blog)

English.

English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.

English is essentially Low German plus even lower French minus any sense of culture.

English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.

Written English is essentially a variety of Old French invented by somebody who spoke only Saxon and read only Latin.

English is essentially a West Germanic language that’s trying very hard to look like a Romance one.

English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that.

English is essentially all exceptions and no rules.

English is essentially a Germanic language that has eaten far too many French dishes for its own good.