Hello boys and girls! After a day of trying, I’ve finally managed to get Frankly Curious transferred over to its new host. You see, the bad people over at Lunar Pages have clearly outgrown their infrastructure, and rather than investing in more are depending upon the fact that it is a total pain in the ass to move a website to a new server. Proof of this is that after all the work I’ve done, at this moment, individual articles are displaying with the Curiously Clever logo. But regardless of the trouble, I could not continue on with Lunar Pages. It seemed that every day the site was down for at least a couple of minutes and the night before last, it was down for almost a half hour. This resulted in my starting three problem tickets with tech support, billing, and sales. Not one of these have been answered.

So I’m taking a chance with Host Gator. They cost a tad more after the first year, but they have a 99.9% guarantee, which, if my calculations are right, means that if they are down for more than 45 minutes during a month, I get the month free. At that rate, I never would have paid Lunar Pages.

I don’t know much about Mark Twain. Here are a few things I do know: what he looked like in his later years; he gave life to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; he was very intelligent and witty and liked cats; and he is considered one of the greatest American authors. I probably even read Tom Sawyer at some point in my life, but it didn’t choose to linger in my mind. After a little research, I found out that he was probably an atheist. Sounds like someone I would have liked to have met.

The reason I even mention Twain is that I stumbled across this quote on Patrick McDonnell’s Mutts comics web site:

Mark Twain’s summing up of reality wasn’t, in itself, a fresh insight. John Milton (another author whose works I’ve never read) had a similar view in Paradise Lost:

Milton and Twain (along with thousands of other writers, artists, and philosophers throughout history) knew then what cognitive therapists know today: how you think can affect how you feel. Some people have the good fortune of living within minds caressed by calming breezes. Some poor souls suffer unpredictable, destructive gales. Others are oppressed by gloom and discouraging drizzle with intermittent sunshine.

Today I’m thinking gloom and feeling tired. Just posting to distract myself for a little while. I’d write it in a journal, but then I’d have to burn it someday. This way, if I die suddenly, there’s less for everyone to throw away. Just select all and delete.

According to the MPAA, “A motion picture’s single use of one of the harsher sexually-derived words, though only as an expletive, initially requires at least a PG-13 rating.” This is just a really fucked-up way of saying that in a PG-13 film, you can say “fuck” once, but only if you use it the way it is almost always used: the way it wasn’t first used. They say it must be used as an expletive. That would mean it can only be used as when a bullet rushes past the hero and he says, “Fuck!” But this isn’t the case, based upon actual films. For example, in the PG-13 rated Bourne Identity, Bourne says, “Fuck it!” In that sentence, fuck is clearly a verb, even if the clause serves as an expletive. It is not shocking that the MPAA is ignorant of basic grammar; they are ignorant about just about everything.

The only way that you cannot use the word “fuck” in an PG-13 film is as what Ruth Wajnryb, author of the excellent Expletive Deleted: a good look at bad language, calls its referential sense. That is, you cannot say, “I want to fuck you.” Why? Who knows! It makes no sense. Wajnryb, in particular, would likely be very unhappy about this. In her book, she spends a lot of time lamenting the fact that fuck has all but lost its referential base. It’s used in many and various ways, but increasingly not for the act itself. And the truth is, we don’t really have any good replacement for it. “Make love”? A lot of times, people are just fucking. “Having sex”? That’s awkward. And why not just “fuck”? Everything else is either too clinical (coitus) or too silly (hide the salami).

But the MPAA continues to hold onto its power: restricting children from seeing homosexual kissing, doing drugs, and saying bad words. But most of all, children cannot see realistic depictions of violence. What’s left? Idealistic depictions of violence where children can learn that guns are safe and they just cause people to fall down. Thanks a lot you fatuous, ignorant, conservative bastards.

I highly recommend Kirby Dick’s great documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated. Check it out!

I gave up on PolitiFact a couple of years ago—long before the recent ridiculousness about the claim that House Republicans voted to end Medicare was named their Lie of the Year. The truth is that if you go to PolitiFact (I don’t recommend it, so I won’t provide a link), you will see that in general, the Republicans do worse than the Democrats. But even still, this greatly understates how much more lying goes on amongst conservatives than liberals. The biggest problem has to do with what PolitiFact chooses to fact check. For example, George Will’s constant stream of lies and misinformation about climate change never seem to interest PolitiFact.

Today, PolitiFact checked a number of things in the President’s State of the Union speech. In particular, they found his claim that businesses had created three million jobs in the last 22 months “half true.” Why? What was wrong with that claim? Nothing. So why did they say it was half true? Because PolitiFact had divined that Obama implied that government policy had something to do with it. Hence: half true. Apparently, the people at PolitiFact have never seen Dragnet; Just the facts, Ma’am.

This morning, Paul Krugman wrote about when facts aren’t facts about the half true designation. He was one of many. So PolitiFact, showed, in addition to being useless, they have no backbone; they changed the “half true” into “mostly true.” This did not help matters, because what the President said was in fact true. Krugman wrote again on finding the truth. He wrote

Rachel Maddow provides an excellent summary. And she ends it properly: “You’re fired!” Better late than never, everyone. Welcome to my world!

I present the following video (a catch from Ezra Klein’s Wonkbook) as an illustration of what it is like to be a freelance writer: lots of work for little pay. This young man made a $100 bet with his father than he could do a backflip every day in 2011. Watch it. It is really interesting. Shockingly, it only has a couple hundred views.

This is a lot of work for very little money. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

I would be worried what people would have to say about this article, but no one reads my political writing. So I will go ahead and pretend to be brave.

I don’t understand all the uproar about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons program. First, of course, there is the issue that the evidence is pretty poor that they even have one. Second, and more important, is the issue that the uproar just seems racist. Why are European countries allowed nukes, but not Iran? Why are Asian countries allowed nukes, but not Iran? Why is Israel allowed nukes, but not Iran?

I know the standard answer: the Iranians are crazy and they’ll actually use it. But this exact argument was used against the Soviets. Remember what a big deal détente was? The idea that the Nixon administration would treat the communist countries as if they were rational like we were? Shocking! And that’s how I feel about Iran. Would they actually use a nuclear weapon? I just don’t see it. Would they give it to a terrorist group? Give me a break! A millionaire won’t even give a bum a dollar; you think Iran would go to all that trouble just to create a bomb to give it away to some terrorist group that just as well might use it against Iran itself? Preposterous.

The bad side of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon is that it would likely set off an arms race in the Middle East. But could it really be worse than anything that brought the US to have almost 10,000 warheads and Russia, a similar amount?

We need to stop pretending that countries we don’t like are irrational. They never were and they aren’t now. So can we all just lower the rhetoric before we start another war? Is it so much to ask that we all stay calm and peaceful?