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Yes, Vote, But …

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Democracy Can Be a Bitch!

Democracy Can Be a Bitch!

We have a local election coming up on Tuesday, March 7. I will vote, of course, but I will not make any political canvassers deliriously happy. In fact, I might avoid answering the phone at all. There will be strange invitations to “town halls” from Judy, my “personal assistant”; there will be oddly inopportune “surveys”; and there will be young volunteers claiming to represent people running for the School Board, the City Council, or referendum issues financed by lying bastards from the real estate developers’ interests. If I pick up the phone at all, it will be to swear at telephone volunteers, or, more likely, at robocalls which stand no chance of being heard in their entirety by me.

Don’t people know that all democracy has given us this particular four years is a bonehead real-estate developer with tiny hands and a  mind and penis to match. Politics is unspeakably foul; and anyone involved is suspect as far as I’m concerned.

My mailbox is jammed on a daily basis with expensive four-color pleas for my vote. Actually, they are helpful. Anyone candidate or issue that spends what I consider to be too much money is probably taking money from nefarious out-of-state interests, like the Koch Brothers and their ilk. I assume that most of what I hear or read will be outright lies, and that ultimately I am being romanced out of my God-given rights.

I can hardly wait for March 8 to roll along.

 

How to Stop Autoplay Videos

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Yes, You Can Retain Control Over Videos

Yes, You Can Retain Control Over Videos

Last summer, I wrote a blog posting entitled Streaming Agony in which I bewailed the tendency of websites to push streaming videos in your face when you open websites—particularly prevalent among news websites. Most of these streaming videos are controlled by Adobe Shockwave. Using your Internet browser, you could request that the video be grayed out, as in the three examples in the above screen shot from the Buenos Aires Herald, and activated only when you specifically request it. By clicking on “Activate Adobe Flash,” you can see the video once, or grant blanket permission to the website.

Because I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, I will reprint the instructions by Lincoln Spector from the February 2015 issue of PC World on “How to Stop Autoplay Videos” using this browser. If you should be a user of Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, reply at the bottom of this post and I will post the equivalent instructions for your browser. If you use Safari, you are out of luck.

Here are the instructions for suppressing autoplay videos on Firefox:

  1. Press Ctrl-L to go to the address bar and type in the local URL field: about:addons.
  2. Click Plugins in the left pane.
  3. Find Shockwave Flash in the list of plug-ins.
  4. Click the Always Activate pop-up menu on the right, and select Ask to Activate.

The article in PC World continues:

When you visit a page with an embedded Flash video, the video window will be in a box, but this time it will be white with Adobe’s Flash logo (a stylized letter ‘f’ in the center). A gray bar at the top of the page will give you options to continue blocking or allow the flash.

If you click Allow, you’ll get options to Allow Now or Allow and Remember. If you want to allow it at all, I recommend Allow Now.

Hopefully this will protect you from loud NSFW (Not Safe for Work) loud ads and most autoplay videos.

 

Spare Me the Fame

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Why Would Anyone Want My Help in Setting Up a Blog?

Why Would Anyone Want My Help in Setting Up a Blog?

Mine is not a particularly striking looking website, yet each week I get numerous requests for information on how I put it together, together with questions as to whether I would link to their website. The odd thing is that I don’t believe these people, especially since:

  1. Their e-mail address indicates they are in some dubious business, such as selling designer knock-offs.
  2. Instead of referring to a recent posting, they seem to be linking to my media file, especially to photographs from postings of several months ago.
  3. They never say anything that would indicate they actually read what I write—never any link to any actual content.

You never see these requests because I erase over 99% of the entries identified by WordPress’s Akamai (means “smart” in Hawaiian pidgin) Spam filtering system, and that’s where these usually end up.

Another group of pseudo-comments wants to see me get a lot more hits and to be at the top of Google searches. Why? Obviously, I’m not into blogging for the fame. If thousands of people daily visited Tarnmoor, my life would turn to crap: Imagine having to filter through hundreds of comments.

If you found this site because it was on page ten of a Google search, and you like what I do, you are most welcome. If you want to tell the world what a great blogger I am, I would think you would be doing me a disservice. If I have to spend all my time tending to this site, I would just as soon give it up.

In fact, I like to write. I like to use the process to think things through. And I like interacting with my friends. So don’t offer any suggestions how I could crud up this site by using clickbait the way that Weather.Com and most news websites do. There’s no clickbait here, and no advertising. If you like what I write, well and good. If not, there are other places you can go.

Support Our Troops in Garcinia Cambogia

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It’s Somewhere Between Krung Thep and Aguas Calientes

I Think It’s Somewhere Between Krung Thep and Aguas Calientes

It’s all over the internet: You can lose weight, lengthen your dingdong, make the power company mad at you, date luscious Asian women, save money by buying stuff you don’t need, and taking advantage of Obama’s secret super-special refi plan.

The upshot is that, sometime over the last twenty years, we’ve let our brains drain out our ears or accidentally given ourselves lobotomies while on the way to the fridge to get more beer. Bring up any major news website, and you will see links to Motley Fool directing you to a twenty-minute video that purports to (but doesn’t actually) tell you why the Chinese economic miracle is over, or how you can make trillions by investing fifty cents in some odd 3-D printing stock for a company out of Liechtenstein.

Here they all are: everything that everybody really wants. Who cares about ISIS taking Baghdad or the Russian convoy to Ukraine being full of atomic waste? You can never be too rich or too thin—or too sexy, which I guess is a combination of both. (I mean, if an aging, decrepit troll like Donald Sterling can parade around with hot babes, so can you!)

We have become a nation of cheapsters. We don’t care about anything but massaging our pleasure principle, or, better yet, having our pleasure principle massaged by Girls Gone Wild.

What is Garcinia Cambogia anyway? Whatever it is, it sounds as if we should have boots on the ground there.

I Seem To Have Become Hispanic

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I Didn’t Know One Could Change One’s Ethnicity

I Didn’t Know One Could Change One’s Ethnicity

For some reason, I seem to have spooked the marketing algorithms behind some web sites: Now I find myself getting ads in Spanish. Could it be because of all the Google searches I have done regarding my upcoming vacation in Peru? In any case, I am amused by the whole thing—provided I do not have to fear getting nabbed by the migra and deported to Tijuana.

I guess this is the way I look to the marketers:

Which One Do I Resemble Most?

Which One Do I Resemble Most?

The painting above is John Sonsini’s “Christian and Francisco” (2013), which hangs in the Autry National Center in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, which Martine and I visited yesterday.

In the meantime, I hope to improve my colloquial Spanish so that I can be worthy of my new identity.

 

 

Streaming Agony

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This Junk Is Everywhere

Video Is Great—When You Want It!

Over the last year, I’ve noticed that when I visit many websites, I automatically activate videos, usually advertising some sh*t I don’t want. Even if my mouse rolls over some areas of the screen, it is interpreted as a wish to be sold to. In that case, my first reaction is to turn down the sound; and then I hunt for active video screens and hit the stop button.

Webmasters are allowing advertisers to push them around. One instance is the “obliterad” that covers the screen and forces you to hit the X to shut it down. I have complained to several websites, but it was like asking them to empty their cash registers into a bag I am holding. They need the money, but they also need not to annoy their readers. I know I can get many more readers at Tarnmoor.Com if I started running ads, but the intention is not to become the most visited site on the Internet. In fact, greater popularity would force me to spend gobs of time interacting with people with whom I would prefer not to interact.

One easy way to counteract the automatically activated videos is for browsers to ask whether you want to run any videos. That way, I retain the ability to choose. YouTube is great, but I don’t need video when looking at a news story about Syria or our dysfunctional Congress.

Unfortunately, many of the news website stories involve activating a video. CNN, MBCNEWS, and others are trying to ram not only their stories, but their stupid ads down my throat. Do you wonder why I sometimes feeling like spewing back at them?

If, on this website, you see no ads or involuntary streaming video, it’s because I’m trying to apply the Golden Rule.

 

Things Not Worth Doing: One of a Series

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Do You Know Anyone Whose Opinion Was Changed by One?

Do You Know Anyone Whose Opinion Was Changed by One?

I have always wondered why people are so willing to advertise their political opinions, especially by sticking bumper stickers on their cars. I can think of at least three reasons why this is not such a good idea:

  1. There are parts of town where I would not like to advertise my political beliefs, such as in Orange or San Diego Counties. My car is not a new one, but at least it still runs for now.
  2. IIt is distinctively possible that your favorite candidate could turn out to be an unregenerate louse. After all, why would someone want to go into politics any more unless one is on a power trip? (It didn’t used to be that way, but it is today.)
  3. Bumper stickers are a lot like tattoos: They’re a lot easier to apply than to remove.

As for myself, this blog is my bumper sticker. If, after reading it, you think I am a political conservative, you must not have read it very carefully.

 

What the Democrats Don’t Get

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Do What’s Right First, THEN Ask for Money

Do What’s Right First, THEN Ask for Money

I am daily besieged by dozens of almost identical e-mails asking me for support. At first, they want me to just sign a petition. That’s fine with me. Then they hold out the tin cup, asking me for money so that the evil Koch Brothers, the Nazgul of our own time and place, do not hurl us all into a pit of unrelenting misery.

Look, I hate the Koch Brothers as much as they do—but I also hate television. All these Democratic-aligned organizations are doing is arranging for millions in political ad buys on a medium which I do not support, and for which I have active contempt. I am also getting a little bit suspicious: Just whom are these organizations supporting? Is it the issue named? Or is it the collective broadcast and cable television networks? And has anyone ever checked to see whether there are kickbacks taking place?

That reminds me of a snippet I read last night from Christopher Isherwood’s South American travel journal Condors and Cows: “In Bogotá, he says, the milk was always sold diluted with water. One day, a pure-milk dairy was started but soon went bankrupt. It had been deliberately ruined by the directors of the water-works, who feared a serious drop in water-consumption.” In other words, are the TV ad people involved in these movements as a way of drumming up business?

These are questions that need to be asked, because I, for one, am reluctant to respond to any of these ads—regardless of my political beliefs.

When Did We Become So Trashy?

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Yeah, Eat Plenty of Maggots and Lose Weight

Yeah, Eat Plenty of Maggots and Lose Lotsa Weight

There is a new spate of ads on the Internet aimed at idiots. They are usually aimed to appeal to more ignorant Internet users and are frequently sponsored by DoubleClick and related enterprises that would love to load your computer with malware. Once they have you, you’ll see plenty of ads featuring big-breasted middle-aged women, old codgers joyful at reducing their mortgage debt, and finding ways to get your beanpole to extend to ridiculous lengths.

What I find interesting is, that if you click on one of these, you will be directed immediately toward other bonehead ads that make ridiculous promises. You will probably even forget what you were looking for in the first place. Just follow the pendulous boobs and you will be directed to Pleasure island where, in no time at all, you will turn into a donkey.

 

The Bogeymen

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It Costs a Ton of Money to Fight These Bogeymen

It Costs a Ton of Money to Fight These Bogeymen

Under no circumstances am I a follower of the infamous Koch brothers and their right-wing causes. On the other hand, I feel the Democratic fund raisers are too busy targeting these misguided nut jobs rather than changing the voters’ minds with a good political program and real accomplishments. The following is an e-mail I received this morning from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), virtually identical to about eight hundred other e-mails I’ve received over the last year:

James — With just 72 hours until the FEC deadline, we’d usually write to tell you how incredibly close we are to hitting our goal. Bad news: That simply isn’t the case.

Because of the Koch brothers’ UNPRECEDENTED early spending, we just dramatically boosted our fundraising targets for 2014. Right now, we still have a $300,000 hole in our January budget. If you can’t fill it, the Republicans can open a massive lead in the neck-and-neck battle for the Senate.

If we fall short this early — when MSNBC already projects the Republicans are favored to take the Senate — we simply won’t be able to respond to the Kochs and karl Rove, which will doom our chances to protect Democrats who are under attack. Will you step up and renew your DSCC membership for 2014 before the deadline on Friday?

So unless I personally go head to head with a couple of multi-millionaires in the political contribution department, Karl Rove and the Koch brothers will prevail because—as we all know—what it takes to win an election is money for otiose advertisements on television. Of course, everybody votes based on the candidate’s advertising budget alone. I’m supposed to step up and take it on the chin for the team. The Spineless Team. The Circular Firing Squad Team.

To be sure, I want Democratic candidates to win; but I will not be contributing hundreds of dollars for an off-year Congressional race. I have better uses for my money than making a bunch of big corporations that own television stations even richer. And all because Karl Rove and the Koch brothers don’t think the way I do.