Trying to Ban Atwood in Canada

A parent is trying to seek justification for a school using A Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood in his son's senior English class in Toronto, Canada. He doesn't want to ban books, says the father, he just wants to know how such a vulgar book can be used in a school...

Maybe because it's one of the best damn books in the English language that everyone should read... oh, and it was written by a Canadian.

This idiot objects to the same crap that lots of the "moral christians" object to. It has sex, it has violence, it denegrates christians (okay, that parts pretty funny to me), blah blah blah. It also teaches a lot of good points about what happens when a bunch of crazy fundamentalist fucks do when they get full control of a situation.

The funniest part of the whole situation to me... "After Edwards complained, his son was assigned another book, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and will step out of class during any discussions on The Handmaid's Tale."

Really? Seriously? What the hell? BNW instead of Handmaid's? The father's going to fucking flip when he reads that one and the first scene depicts two 8 year having sex behind a bush.

All I can say is HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I think the school is just screwing with the guy by doing that.

Anyway, take a gander at the article, and if someone can tell me who the picture of the old woman is (with proof), I'll buy you a cookie. I think it's Atwood herself, but I'm not sure.

*Update: It has been confirmed that the old lady is in fact Atwood. The winner is the girlfriend. Sorry everyone else, better luck next time.

Apple iTunes and DRM free content

As everyone's probably aware of by now, Apple will now be allowing their customers on iTunes to download their music without the Digital Rights Management (DRM) on them.

Basically what this means is that when you download a song from iTunes and put it on your computer, your iPod, your phone, your Zune, your other computer, your other computer, your other computer (I'm not the only person with like four computers right?)

It doesn't matter. People were stripping the DRM off the songs anyway so they could move them around. Apple finally got smart. Gee, you bought something? You should be able to do whatever the hell you want with it then? Good for Apple for finally standing up to the recording industry.

Trust me, I still hate Apple almost as much as Micro$oft, but at least they're selling music for a buck. They're at least trying to help with all the piracy instead of just complaining about it and sueing people. And they're usually the ones to realize that if something isn't working, maybe we should try something different.

Maybe Microsoft will learn something from this, or even Apple will learn from themselves and take some of the restrictive DRMs off their softwares. Yeah! Right! Well, here's hoping.

Religulous - Completely Illegal

Hello anyone out there. It seems that "someone" (no, seriously, not me - do not come knocking on my door FBI) has put up, on Google Video, the entire Religulous movie . Now, I'm not saying you should download it. I'd much rather people actually support this movie by renting or buying it... now if I could find a copy of Expelled out there somewhere... but I digress.

If someone really is interested in watching the movie on your computer (in on your iPod or PSP or something since it is downloadable in MP4 format) go right ahead, but be quick about it; it'll probably be taken down once Google finds out about it.

Now, if for some reason someone has problems playing MP4s on their computer (no, I'm not saying this video, it's an illegal copy remember), but would still like to watch MP4s, there is a super player out there that plays everything... seriously, everything. It's called VLC Media Player and it's part of the VideoLAN project, a completely open source project that thinks proprietary video and audio files are stupid ideas. They're open source so they want you to download their product for free and use it, use it, use it.

Have fun.

*Update: Apparently, this is all perfectly legal to have up online. For some reason it's allowed to be circulating the internet, some big sites have it on their pages. Now, it's still illegal to download it, but with a lot of the nice computers out there, it's not too bad to watch a movie online anymore.

Opposing Viewpoints

I just found a great site. It's called Opposing Views and it has discussions about everything. Then, verified experts about the subject post short articles about each side of an issue. There's a culture section, health section and best of all, a whole section devoted to religion. There are some big names on the site too, FFRF, American Atheists, etc. Some individuals, but I don't really recognize many of them, let me know if you do.