Tuesday, November 02, 2004

I noticed two interesting quotes on Kim du Toit's weblog today. The first he attributes to Osama bin Laden: "...any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president, it means that it chose to fight us and we will consider it an enemy to us, and any state that will vote against Bush, it means that it chose to make peace with us and we will not characterize it as an enemy..." What's interesting about this is that bin Laden never said that. In fact, he never mentioned voting at all. The transcript of his speech is readily available, and anyone who hasn't read it yet could easily find it by spending a few seconds with Google. In fact, the closest bin Laden got to mentioning the election was his conclusion: In conclusion, I tell you in truth, that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaida. No. Your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security. Once again we see a Bushevik telling a really obvious lie that anyone who cares to can debunk in a matter of seconds. For that matter, since bin Laden's speech has already been widely discussed, most reasonably informed people wouldn't even need to take a few seconds, as they will have already read the transcript and be able to tell instantly that du Toit is lying. And then we come to Mr. du Toit quoting his wife: "For the record, if I discover that someone I know personally has voted for Kerry, they will NEVER be allowed in my home. I will discontinue our friendship. I will figuratively tear their phone number from my address book. They will be "disowned" in every sense of the word. We're at war. Voting for a traitor, putting our nation at risk in this way, is not forgivable." While I didn't vote for Kerry, I would nonetheless be proud to be considered an enemy by this family of brownshirts. 12:21:04 PM    comment () Late last week I got my copy of Jump to Lightspeed, the space expansion for Star Wars Galaxies. I was in the beta, and I'm pleased with how the final version turned out. Players can customize their spacecraft (mostly fighters, but there are some larger ships available to highly skilled pilots) using various parts that they buy from shipwrights or recover from destroyed enemies. Here is a picture of my highly customized Y-Wing, which I call Porco Rosso ("Crimson Pig"), for its color and handling characteristics. Playing a game like this basically requires a joystick and throttle combination. I bought a cheap one when I got into the beta, because I didn't want to spend too much money if it turned out that I didn't like it. Now I'm ready to upgrade to a serious controller set. Unfortunately, the good joysticks actually have one disadvantage over the cheap ones. My cheap joystick (a Thrustmaster model) has a twist handle that allows me to control roll, pitch, and yaw. The high-end joysticks are modelled on real aircraft controls, and only have two axes. I would need to buy a set of rudder pedals to use with them--which presents the problem of where I would put them. 9:22:53 AM    comment ()

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