Thoughts on Don't Ask, Don't Tell

So, the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy (wherein they kick people out of the armed services if they find out they're gay) has been in the news lately. Well, it's been in the liberal news lately, because President Obama has failed to repeal the policy like he promised to in the campaign. Not exactly the first broken promise that has the left in an uproar, but you won't hear about any of them on Fox News. It might interfere with their "he's a rotten commie socialist that's ruining the country" theory if their viewers were to somehow notice that ideologically the guy seems to fall somewhere between Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

But anyway, all the coverage has got me thinking.

For instance, why is it that so many of the people kicked out have been Arabic translators? That's where this new round of outrage originated. Apparently a whole shitload of Arabic-speaking interpreters have been kicked out of the military (for being gay, please try to keep up) just when we really need them to read those intercepted messages to us. Now I agree that that's a pretty boneheaded thing to do, but I just can't figure out what the connection is between gayness and speaking Arabic. Was it some crazy trend that swept through the gay community in the early 90's? Were all the gay clubs having wacky Arabian theme nights or something? Or is it just that gay native speakers tend to get the fuck out of the backwards little theocracies they were born into? Probably a wise move if they did. Maybe I figured this one out.

But interpreters aside, isn't this an incredibly easy way to get out of the Army/Air Force/Marines/Navy (OK, maybe not the Navy)? I mean suppose you're about to go on your 4th tour in Iraq or Afghanistan, and you're really fucking sick of of shitty food, sand in your asscrack, and being shot at. Can't you just go to your commanding officer and say, "Sorry, but I'm not gonna be able to ship out. See, turns out I'm gay."

And what if you do do that? Do they start processing the paperwork to throw you out right away? And what if they don't believe you? I figure the conversation goes something like this:

Soldier: Sir, I'm not going to be able to ship out. You see, I'm gay.

CO: Aw bullshit, you just don't want to do another tour. You're always bitching about the shitty food, sand in your asscrack and being shot at.

Soldier: No sir, I love the Army. But not as much as I love cock.

CO: You have a wife and kids at home!

Soldier: I was in denial, sir. I didn't realize I was hopelessly gay until showering with the other guys in the barracks.

CO: Mr. Crawford, get in here!

(A man in civilian clothes enters the room and drops his pants.)

CO: Alright, if you're so gay, suck this man's dick.

So what do you do if you're a straight guy trying to get out of the military? Do you suck Mr. Crawford's dick? I'm guessing you do. Sucking one dick to get out of the army doesn't make you gay, it makes you a fucking pragmatist.

Thing is, Mr. Crawford has to be a civilian contractor, or else he'd get thrown out of the army too, because last time I checked getting blown by a dude was pretty gay. Maybe that's why we're spending so much money on contractors, because we have to keep a guy on every base willing to have his dick sucked by soldiers of questionable homosexuality. Waste of money if you ask me. I'm sure there's guys at KBR who would do the job for free.

Now on the other side of this already convoluted coin (I'm not sure what that means either) we have the gay soldiers who want nothing more than to serve their country in the military. In a time when most people don't want to be in the army, they're upset about being forced out.

But here's the catch: Christians and right-wingers (redundant, I know) think that gayness can be cured. Some of them have even said, "Being gay is a choice." This makes me wonder if they came to this conclusion because they want to fuck members of their own sex but choose not to. That would explain a lot about most of them.

So if you're a member of the armed services and somehow it comes out (pardon the expression) that you're gay, couldn't you just say you're not gay anymore? I figure it would go like this:

CO: Sorry soldier, it says here you're gay. I'm afraid you're being discharged.

Soldier: No sir, that was last week. I'm straight now.

CO: What are you talking about?

Soldier: I was reading The Bible, I asked Jesus to make me not gay, and he did.

CO: Miss Conway, get in here!

Now of course we wonder does the gay man wolf down the pussy to get out of the army? But the gay man has an advantage here. Just because Jesus made him not gay doesn't mean Jesus made him straight. Jesus could have made him asexual, and that should be fine with the US Army. Far as I know they don't have any rules that say you have to be a heterosexual, only that you can't be a homosexual.

So there you go. You want out of the army? Say you're gay. You're gay and want to stay in the army? Jesus made you asexual. What could be simpler?

Happy Easter

Let's not forget where those eggs have been.

I wonder what prompted this.

How do you say "fuck off" in Russian?

So you're a Russian. You've got porn or magic dick pills or something to sell. You decide to spam blogs. This makes you an asshole.

But you know what makes you a stupid asshole? That you spam my blog with it. Is there something about my pathetic little ramblings that appeals to the Russian populace so greatly that my site is an ideal place to try to sell your wares? You guys really like when I make fun of American TV commercials? You're also pissed off about Comedy Central's handling of Futurama?

And has any one of your spam comments ever made it onto the site? Even the ones where you just post an odd line of text that you can later search for to see whose blogs are vulnerable, do those even end up posted?

If your answers to the above questions are no, then why the fuck are my comments constantly filled with Cyrillic text?

Curse You, Twitter!

OK, so yet again, I've all but abandoned my blog. Much like Richard Hell's love, my blogging seems to come in spurts.

Lately the problem has been that the things I have to say I can say in less than 140 characters, so I just put them on twitter. See? http://twitter.com/FatDave

A Little Less Detail, Danny

I've got kids in grade school, so this week was spent preparing for their classes Valentine's Day celebrations. The only things that have changed since I was a kid is that these days they hand out candy with the little paper valentines, and there's more Pokemon valentines than there are Star Wars valentines.

But anyway, my oldest son, who is nine, was working on decorating his valentine box. I think a video card from newegg.com came in it originally, but with the addition of a strategically placed rectangular hole, it became a receptacle for little paper valentine cards. And he was decorating it with Pokemon, Spongebob, and other decidedly non-Valentine's Day related stuff.

So I said, "Why not put a heart on there for Valentine's Day?"

He goes to work and I hear giggling, so I look over and notice that the heart he drew also had a sword piercing it.

I said, "What, no blood dripping from the sword?" This turned out to be a great suggestion, and soon there were little drops of blood dripping from the tip of the blade and pooling below.

But then he started to erase the blood and told me, "That's probably a little too much detail."

I agreed that it might be.

Then he said, "My teacher told me not to draw things so detailed."

"Oh? When did she tell you that?"

"At Halloween. She told us to draw monsters and I drew a zombie."

"And your zombie was too detailed?"

"Yeah. I drew him taking a bite out of a brain and there was blood squirting out of it."

"Squirting out of the brain?"

"Uh huh."

"Yeah, that might've been a bit too detailed. Did you change it?"

"Yeah. I just made him holding the brain. He wasn't biting it and there was no blood."

"And the teacher said that was OK?"

"Yup."

Sometimes it's great to be a father.

A Geeky Second Fast Approaches

In Unix, derivatives of which run pretty much the entire internet (and quite a few desktop systems these days), the time and date is tracked internally as the number of seconds since midnight on January 1st, 1970. In *nix circles, this moment is known as the beginning of the epoch, and about 4,717,800 seconds into the epoch, I was born.

Well tomorrow, February 13, 2009 at 18:31:30 Eastern Standard Time (23:31:30 Greenwich Mean Time) the number of seconds since the beginning of the Unix epoch will be 1234567890.

I first noticed this was approaching last October 7th (I can pinpoint it because found a chat log where I mentioned it to a co-worker). I was working for yet another company who, for reasons unknown, liked to store all dates in a database as epoch seconds rather than use the handy built-in date/time types every modern database has (which still use seconds in epoch internally of course, but have lots of handy functions for adding and subtracting units of time, converting for time zones, daylight savings time, not to mention displaying the info back in a way understandable by humans). But whatever, you're the boss. You wanna pay me to code the conversions every time, I'll do it.

Wait, where was I? Oh yes...

So last October I noticed the epoch seconds at the time were at 1223355600(ish) and wondered when it would be 1234567890. As a perl hacker, my curiosity was quickly settled by typing perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1234567890;' at a Linux command line. It would be on the evening of February 13th, 2009. I immediately set a Google Calendar reminder.

A quick search of 'epoch 1234567890' showed me that I was not the first geek to notice this was coming. A guy named Chris Rowe has made a cool epoch countdown timer. I don't know what he's going to do with that domain name after tomorrow, though I suppose if he keeps it for a few years it will read 2222222222 on June 1st, 2040 at 23:57:02. There is another one here, more accurate (because it's based on a time server instead of the viewer's system clock) but not nearly as cool looking and with an even more soon-to-be-obsolete domain name. It also doesn't link to xkcd, so more win for Chris.

But anyway, celebrate that second tomorrow evening in the knowlege that myself and countless other geeks will be celebrating it with you.