~ chain store quotes:
“you must be a vegetarian”
“you can tell that from my selections?”
“yes…now i’m not going to charge you for any of this”
“roger that”

payphone quotes:
“who would beat you up [on the bus]?”
“let’s see, the skins would beat me up for listening to pink floyd, and the jocks would beat me up for listening to [SUB][HUM][ANS]”
“is that all?”
“and my friends beat me up for being in the band”

~ the servers hosting the angry red planet and its family of sites are located in orlando, florida, one of the targets of hurricane charley; if you have noticed an inability to reach any of the sites in the past couple of days you now know the cause to which you can attribute this misfortune.

~ while checking out the new system on the mac, we found that the background for the text boxes were missing. it has been like this for at least a month, we presume, though we know we checked at the time we put up the pngs. no one mentioned anything to us; maybe people thought that we intended them to read green text over an orange background, maybe no one has used internet explorer, or maybe no one cared that we were demonstrating our incompetence. are we the ones who are incompetent because mac/ie has native transparent png support but win/ie does not? however, mac/ie does not support background filters that win/ie does! regardless, the only solution we could find to this involved javascript; we found that idea unappealing, so we instead created a 2nd stylesheet just for mac/ie. if you are looking at this in mac/ie, for pete’s sake get safari or firefox [w].

~ it took us awhile to become a part of the fallout from six apart’s licensing change, but we have finally migrated from movable type [w] to wordpress [w]. we should already have been on wordpress, as it is open source, which excites us, and it is more compliant with our preferred browser. but we were hedging our bets to see what movabletype 3.1 might have to offer. however, there is a new feature for the angry red planet which we have been cooking up – a sort of open ended scene report – and we would like to move on it. we thought that it would be best to make the switch in publishing systems before adding a new feature, as opposed to adding the feature first, raising the possibility of having two things to screw up in the inevitable move.

we are aware that most of y’all don’t care about the behind the scenes work, as we rarely talk about the page and we resist any mingling with the blogging community. however, because of the structural changes, some of the content is now inaccessible, and we fell that an explanation is owed. for example, for the time being, the pre-2003 log entries are not linked. some of you may remember our tirades against codeless fucks like kazys and alex lin who were signing up to blogger and greymatter in 2000; as a result of this quest for purity, most of our log entries are tied up in static pages. should we maintain them, as evidence of a scheme designed in the halcyon days passed in los angeles, or try to enter the data into the wordpress system, which would result in a loss of format but would allow searching.

as previously mentioned, we avoid the blogging community, but as we found it was a minor ordeal to migrate the archives to the new system, we reckon we should make an outline of the particular requirements we had to meet, in case they might prove useful to the next group of movabletype dropouts. the tasks themselves were simple, but having to visit several sites for each step proved tedious.

~ the aforementioned “quicknote” should have been identified as an “extension”, rather than a “plug-in”. we apologize for any confusion and inconvenience that this oversight has caused.

~ reporter: “how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and federal and state governments?”

“Tribal sovereignty means that. It’s sovereign. You’re a … you’re a … you’ve been given sovereignty and you’re viewed as a sovereign entity…….and therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between s…sovereign entities.” -GWBush

hear it for yourself: mp3 or ogg.

~ from the most-humiliating-thing-since-NATO-flew-AWACS -over-USA-after-9/11 department:

“For the first time, a group of experts from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will travel to the US to observe the presidential election.”

~ from the we-said-so department [+]: back when the public was informed that torture is the policy of the USA, luminaries such president bush and Joe Lieberman were telling us that it is not in the nature of Americans to torture prisoners. even though Americans were torturing presidents; they probably had in mind that our nature is better exhibited by cretins who beat people to death for an x-box. [w]

~ someone out there is using our rss feeds to read the angry red planet, so we have added links to the feeds in the right column. we also switched from excerpts to full entries, mainly because it is our preference when viewing news sites to view the entire entry at once, rather than having to look in the browser halfway through the article. if you need an aggregator, we recommend feedreader [w]

~ also find at the bottom of this window a link to a page containing the log archives, sorted by month; the drop down menu has become too long and unwieldy.

~ if you are using firefox [w] , which you already should be, you should add the quick note plug-in [w] if you find yourself copying and pasting in to a text editor or your email client too often.

~ only two days after our suggestion [+] that the decompression of language be applied to trite headlines, george w bush takes the idea to its logical conclusion for the ‘war on terror’:

“The struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world”

this would almost be a perfect success of the lessons of the angry red planet; however, we believe that gwbush spoke the term ‘conscious’, instead of ‘conscience’.

“Intelligence indicates suspected al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan “contacted” at least one person in the U.S. in recent months, sources tell CNN. Details soon.”

what stunning details could soon follow? a map of the united states was found in south east asia? a man in indonesia was heard to be practicing english? a lebanese woman has opened a custodian checking account for her preteen daughter at a new jersey bank? the sky is falling!!

~ in other stupid news, we have a headline: “U.S. Struggles to Grasp Scope of Threat”. a more accurate headline would be: “if al queda even exists, they are grinning ear to ear as they watch americans bring more damage upon the United States with expensive and time consuming responses to rumors of threats of threats of attacks than the actual attacks would bring.” maybe nothing is going to catch on fire now, but the effort put into preventing the fire would have greater benefit to all if it had been put instead into preventing ignorance and want, perhaps at the expense of the aforementioned fire. yes, it would be safer to make cars out of jello and titanium and have them driven by robots, but it is cheaper to use plastic and aluminum and have them driven by puny humans and just hope that the pile ups and jackknifings are kept at a manageable level.

~ john kerry needs to knock off that salute schtick right now. for one thing, it is against military protocol for any civilian – even the president – to salute active duty officers and enlisted men; this is not the primary reason he should cut it out of his campaign speeches, however. kerry seems to have gotten a big kick over how well that tacky ‘reporting for duty’ gimmick went over at the beginning of his nomination acceptance speech. since that time, we’ve seen numerous images of him repeating the move whenever he makes an appearance on his bus/train tour. the kerry talking points are that bush didn’t go to vietnam, and kerry volunteered to fight in vietnam; okay, that lesson has been learned by anyone who plans to vote this november. nevertheless, many of kerry’s ‘supporters’ are still sore over how the democratic party administration swindled the anti-war dean out of the nomination; also note the only other candidate who received delegate votes is the only other anti-war candidate, the honorable dennis kucinich. the new lesson is that the continued conjuring of militaristic imagery and sloganeering by the democratic candidate whose vague hints about his strategy for iraq suggest that his plan is indistinguishable from bush’s plan is a turn off for the idealistic supporters of the progressive former candidates whose tenuous loyalty to kerry is one of convenience, not affinity.

even the pedants at the angry red planet, recently troubled by the bedfellows whom ralph nader has chosen in his efforts to have his name on the ballots in certain states, from whom he has chosen to accept money, and who he has chosen to publish his latest book, hesitantly considered a concession that kerry is the last best hope for the united states. however, a bitter attack upon the angry red planet by fellow liberals and/or progressives over our announcement that we believe that dekalb county/metro atlanta would better be served by cathy woolard than by cynthia mckinney brought us to reevaluate the value of doctrine and our place within its confines; the result of this examination has been a new lease on the life of our nader votes. as far as john kerry goes, though, he still looks like a jackass to everyone who isn’t gung ho about the fiasco in iraq or in vietnam every time he salutes other civilians.

~ after five good years of eudora [w], we have made the switch to thunderbird [w]. we’ve only had it open for a day, and though it seems slow in sending mail – this perception is probably due to the progress window that pops up instead of running the background – thunderbird’s handling of multiple email accounts and identities is far superior to eudora’s abilities, which is why we made the switch in the first place. even so, we would like to see all the email accounts place the incoming mail in the same inbox whilst still using imap.