The Clever Shark

Whoopsi Gras: a carnival of ineptitude. Stick around for the parade!

FEMA’s poor performance can be explained by the people who run it. In particular, it can be explained by pointing out that the people who run it are purely bagmen for W who have no emergency management experience whatsoever.

Perhaps the problem with the federal response to the New Orleans disaster begin with the DHS chief thinking that Louisiana is a city. Sometimes there’s incompetence to such a staggering degree that it looks like malice. Sometimes malice disguises itself as incompetence to escape blame. It’s so hard to tell these days.

Was federal help deliberately withheld from the stranded in New Orleans? It’s an explosive allegation, but it does cite The Washington Post as a major source.

Cats in sinks. As its name indicates, this site features picture of cats. In sinks.

I know, I know; there’s been a relative dearth of activity on the site recently.

Actually there are a few reasons for this. The first is that I’m currently moving, and that I’m actually moving everything myself, save for my couch and bed; this is mostly due to my being cheap (not enough people clicking on the Google links, hahaha) and also to the fact that I’m moving within the same apartment complex to a larger place.

The second reason is that frankly I’m a little bored with the web these days. Sometimes you sit back, look at what’s happening on other web sites, and are forced to ponder on the ultimate futility of attempting to do, well, what thousands of others are already doing anyway. Really. I go to web sites, sometimes find a funny or interesting link, put it up on my page, but I can’t help thinking that in reality I’m only duplicating what tons of other people are doing. That’s not exactly a motivator.

The third, and probably most important factor, is that I really can’t seem to be able to write anything really worth reading these days. I’m not sure why that is. Sometimes I’ll start to write a piece which seems like it’ll be interesting, only to see the effort peter out in the third or fourth paragraph because the subject simply runs out of steam. Those are the pieces which I consider to have failed the “so what” test.

Fourth of all, there’s also my current “free agent” status which is forcing me to concentrate not on the “what” but on the “how”. I’m quite aware that no one’s going to hire me for the content on my site; I’m a web programmer and DBA, so as far as my professional life is concerned (and it is something which is of increasing concern to me at this point) the technology behind this site, and a few others I am working on, is vastly more important than the content which is displayed on it. I have to turn this site, to a great extent, into a technology portfolio, with the hope that this portfolio will eventually be instrumental in putting food on the table.

So, that’s pretty much the long and the short of it.

Wal-Mart may be known for its low prices, but they have some pretty expensive shit. Literally. Yet another article linking manure with the legal system. You can’t make this, er, stuff up.

A celebration of crap from The Idler. (via Metafilter) I must say that I agree with their choices of crap towns, except for Glasgow and Edinburgh which I thought were great…

The end of the line is nigh for Vladimir Putin. Policy failures, paranoia, concentration of power into one man’s hands… one has to wonder whether Russian politics haven’t turned back the clock about 20 years.

Here’s something you should probably read before getting on your next flight that passes through the US. Basically, with the powers the Bush Administration has decided to appropriate to itself, you really have no rights while on US soil… legally you are even declared to be “not within US territory.” As such the US government can, among other things, inflict “gross physical abuse” on your person (there are no formal guarantees against it, merely a limited protection), or deprive you of food, water or sleep. Perhaps you should consider flying through a civilized country like Canada instead.