teh Mexigogue

My two arch nemeses, Hillary Cliinton and Puerto Rico have joined forces in the most harrowing alliance since Cobra joined forces with the Iron Grenadiers, except this is even more lame. I don’t know whether to be terrified or bored.

If this footage turns out to be real aliens, Steven Spielburg should sue them.

Smithers, send in the hounds!

This is bullshit. This woman’s actions would not have made people this angry if Fat Megan hadn’t committed suicide. Impersonating somebody on the ‘net is not a crime most people would tend to want to prosecute. Some drama queen offed herself in the biggest overreaction of all time and now people want somebody to hang for it. Grow up people, a little suicide never killed anybody. Or maybe it did, but this woman, as reprehensible as her actions were, did not CAUSE Fat Megan’s suicide. We should not be wasting our money prosecuting and incarcerating her.

This chick I know was singing a song to her baby. It went like this:

Prunes, prunes, the magical fruit
the more you eat the more you poop
the more you poop the better you feel
so let’s have prunes at every meal!

I have a problem with the logic. On the surface the conclusion might seem to follow from the given premises, but the conclusion is, in my opinion, a hasty generalization that suffers from from at least one critical flaw. If her syllogism were in fact correct then multiplying the sheer number of prunes consumed per meal would exponentially increase the pleasure of life, 50 prunes per meal and the resulting shit-storm would be better than 25, and so forth. But I find it more likely that there is perhaps an optimum level of pooping that caps the said happiness at a reasonable level, more likely tied in with the prunes’ ability to aid in the release of poorly digested food rather than being tied to the sheer volume of pooping itself.

While I admit I was initially disposed favorably to the above bit of motherly wisdom, it is with great regret that I must declare the above rationale as a specious oversimplification at best and to say that it is unworthy of being treated as a valid scientific conclusion for the above reasons. This is not intended as a disparagement in any way of prunes or their salutary health benefits. I do recommend eating them. I would, however, draw the line at recommending them for every meal.

Update:

A friend and statistics expert from an online mailing list has given me a mathematical formula to represent this concept. Her work is as follows:

Pr + F + (Pr*F) = Pp

Where Pr = the number of prunes eaten
F = The amount of non-prune food eaten
(Pr*F) represents the interactive effect between the two
Pp = Total Poop

The interaction effect makes this a non-linear relationship, since the amount of poop *should* be expected to increase multiplicatively as both the amount of prunes and food consumption increased.

It could also be a simple additive relationship, which you’d want to test too, in which case:

Pr + F = Pp

If multiplying Prune consumption times Food
(Pr * F) was statistically insigificant, then you’d just use the above additive formula to represent the relationship.

Then, for the poop/happiness connection:

Pp + Pp^2 = H

Where Pp is total Poop and Pp^2 is Total Poop Squared
And H is Happiness

Since that would be also be a curvilinear relationship - happiness would be low as poop were low, would increase to a certain level, but would then decrease when you had to spend half the day on the toilet due to an endless shit-stream.

Thank you, Tracey, for your tireless efforts in helping us to understand stuff!

Second Update:

Another member of the list has give some additional thoughts on this matter:

It’s not a continuous graph. It would be discrete, with each poop
session represented by a numeric happiness value. Given this, it
doesn’t make sense to compute the total daily poop volume. It makes
more sense to measure each individual crap, plug that number into P(x)
(defined in a sec). We should also define ‘j’ as the number at which
happiness decreases due to frequent trips to toilet. V(x) is the
volume of poop for session x. So, P(x) could be
V(x) + n {1 < n < j}
V(x) - n {n >= j}

Let mu be the total times that an individual craps daily, and
Happiness, H, can be defined by the sigma function from 1 to mu of
P(mu) (i.e. P(1) + P(2) + … P(mu) ). Obviously, as mu increases
above j, P(mu) becomes a negative number, decreasing from overall
happiness. Elementary operations research would show that happiness
is maximized when V(x) is maximized j-1 times.

Or, in laymans terms. Crap much. Crap often.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the “DC Madam”, committed suicide this week rather than return to prison for running a prostitution ring. On the surface this sounds like a no-lose situation for society. America is minus one criminal because she chose suicide rather than serving time for a crime she committed. That is until you really think about it.

Why is prostitution illegal in most jurisdictions in the US? Where consenting adults exchange services for money and no ones rights are violated, no wrong has been committed and therefore no crime should be legislated. You may venture at this point to say that you have a right to live in a world where people don’t exchange money for sex. I will counter that you can go fuck yourself. In a just society no individual or entity can claim a right that cancels out someone else’s right, in this case, the right of people to enter into contracts of their own volition.

The fact is that prostitution has been legislated against because the majority of people (myself included) find it repulsive. This cannot be the standard for criminalizing victimless activities. By that standard we should also criminalize gay sex, fat people sex, and an entire myriad of fetishes that the majority of people don’t enjoy. This is just dumb. We should not, as a society, engage the court system and the police to employ FORCE to persecute people for engaging in actions that we find gross. This is infinitely worse than the original action which is individuals voluntarily exchanging services for money.

In many cases, the criminal defendants are the ones in the right and it is society that is in fact wrong. Deborah Jeane Palfrey is no longer with us, not because she desired to violate the rights of others, but because she did not want to live in a world where hers were violated by society as a matter of law. Rest in peace DC Madaam.