I was reading about the “million” veterans marching on Washington DC (it was more like a few hundred) when I saw this peculiarly decorated car and learned something new.
Surely a car door so flamboyantly and colorfully decorated could not be carrying a lie — maybe smoking doesn’t cause cancer after all. I must check this out. I looked further for more details on this spectacularly informative vehicle. By the way, it’s true that Hitler was a fanatical anti-smoker, and the Nazi government had the first effective anti-smoking campaign.
Wow! Who is this person, “Smoker on Strike”? I must learn more about such a wise and authoritative person.
So I found her CV. It is amazing. Did you know she’s looking for work as a web designer?
She designs the most beautiful websites in the world. She says so herself.
By the way, I’m all puked out this morning, so I can safely navigate to those links and suffer barely a ripple of the dry heaves. If your stomach is more robustly occupied right now, you might not want to look.
Come on, right after Lunch!
Someone needs to tell him Hitler was also anti-abortion and anti-gay rights.
Her, my bad.
The ‘Edmonton’ thing shocked me until I saw ‘Kentucky’.
Wholly Hell!!!
that website
my eyes
my eyes
Oh dog, PZ, I already had a headache. That webpage almost pushed me into crying from pain.
After more than a decade in the web development biz, I’m calling it quits. I cannot possibly compete with such majesty.
I am … humbled.
Oh most Holy Rodents, my eyes! I clicked. The horror.
Wow – that is the most visually impressive train wreck I have seen since I helped elementary school students make a webpage back in the 90’s. I am pretty sure that they had better taste.
Is this a tactic for terrorizing the sick-bugs out of your body ?
I am consumed with jealousy. Why oh why can’t I create anything that beautiful?
That web page actually stung my eyes. Good to know that one of her qualifications is “SMOKER,” though, I guess.
Their — their pricing is based on the dimensions of the web page in inches. “ALL page sizes can be increased later for additional charge of $1.25/inch/page” I, um, I mean… really?
http://www.hosanna1.com/AAAWWW/page3.html
I… I’m really speechless here.
“It’s a good thing the EPA wasn’t around to tell God about the carcinogens in burnt offerings”. Yeah, that’s really on her site.
*sigh*
“Isn’t it a good thing the EPA wasn’t around to tell the Lord how many carcinogens are in a burnt offering?”
Words fail me. All I have left are facial expressions ranging from boggled to headdesk.
You could, like, just check how it looks in whichever Firefox or Chrome once or twice.
And anti-trade-union. And anti-France, so I guess he wasn’t ALL good.
Now we know where all the butterflies have gone.
lol. Did you know about all the nicotine in potato chips? I didn’t.
Everybody, all together now:
THE STUPID, IT BURNS!!!!!!!!!
I didn’t look at the web pages to spare my eyes, but given the vehicular decorations, I’m guessing this person cried when they deprecated the HTML blink tag.
Reminds me of when Oscar Wilde was asked why America is so stupid and violent; “because you have such ugly wallpaper.”
Then again, the Nazis, USSR, and imperial Japan all had beautiful art. As much as I’d like to believe that beautiful art calms the soul, it’s probably more precise to say that teabagger garishness is simply the product of a mindset that generally resists introspection and self-improvement.
By all that’s reasonable, my eyes! MY EYES! Please say she smokes more than baccy, that web page needs some excuse!
*Looks at site. Screams. Clicks View→Source. Dislocates jaw.
Sometimes I forget why Hitler is so universally hated, and then I remember that it was because of his anti-smoking campaign. Did he do anything else of note?
Bronze Dog, said “… I’m guessing this person cried when they deprecated the HTML blink tag.”
It appears she hasn’t noticed that change. Blink, blink. Know what I mean?
“My Dogs Vote”
I guess I’m okay with that one. Raises the average voting information of the household, anyway.
…..
Stunning. This pile of…well, something…had me pining for the understated elegance of the average geocities page.
Apparently she uses MS Publisher to produce “.html (hypertext mockup language)” files. Just…damn.
I like her page – seriously, not a joke. It’s like black metal for the eyes.
Y’all did heed the orders at the top of the page, right?
I’ve blocked ads, so sadly, I missed the awesome musical accompaniment. I’m sure the sounds matched the visuals.
“3rd Place Decorated Floats”
First place was a bunch of balloons tied to a carton of Marlboroughs, and second place was a spray-painted goat.
Dense blocks of text with wacky assertions and twisted conclusions … must be right-wing.
Do I dare look at that site with an Android tablet?
I was disappointed there was no dancing baby.
This person actually EXISTs?! It’s good to know that she and her husband retired early rather than submit to smoke free work places and they boycott anyplace with a smoking ban. That’s really hurting our economy in Ohio, I can tell you. That is one peculiar bug to have up your butt. So she’s an addict in complete denial who thinks that it’s oppressive for her employer to not allow drug use in their workplace? Let’s try that with alcohol and pot too. What the hell, I’m going to “retire early” if my employer won’t let me do meth on the job. Come on, I code better on meth!
I also noticed they offer web hosting on their high performance server. Come on, don’t you think you could save money by moving FtB over there? I’m sure they can handle the load…..
Oh, and she has children at home. Those poor kids.
I´m under the impression that the lady confuses tobacco with other plants.
Okay, I dutifully cranked up IE and took a look. It still looks like a multicoloured, multi-fonted, distractingly awful backgrounded mess.
(And wtf is the point, by the way, of including a css sheet, and then putting three-quarters of the formatting in inline style-tags? The boggle doth deeply affect my mind.)
If you are into ‘weblogs’, linky-linky: http://www.hosanna1.com/aaaweblog/
@UnknownEric
Forget the baby, why aren’t there hamsters dancing in the background????
Back on the ridiculous argumentum ad Hitler, this tendency to argue by ad hominem, guilt by association, the genetic fallacy, and so forth really makes me wonder if wingnuts like this reject the concept of objective truth, where facts are facts regardless of who believes in them. Their reality is subjective and inconsistent, defined as the opposite of what their opponents believe, not a solid foundation used to inform them about who they should consider opponents.
From one of the dizzying array of awful animated gifs, comes this pearl of wisdom:
Even if we accept the dubious assumption that ‘burnt offering’ means ‘cigarette’, there is still the pesky matter of the risk ratio for heavy firsthand smoking being a solid 24.
There’s me thinking the first high profile anti-smoking activist was King James. The one who wrote “A Counterblast to Tobacco.” The one who said it was “hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.” The one who commissioned the King James Bible.
By their fruits you shall indeed know them.
regcheesman @40:
… Well, by golly.
You could read that ? When I clicked on that my brain ran off and hid, refusing to try and interpret that mess.
From one of the linkys:
Also, the number of people who die from non-murder vastly exceeds the number who die from murder, ergo, murder is perfectly safe. Or something.
I don’t get these people who claim that smoking isn’t harmful. It’s not as if this is some arcane matter that you can’t study without a long and expensive degree. Any smoker can test the idea on their own body, simply by quitting for a little while. You can feel a distinct improvement in your breathing in less than a week.
Anyone who denies the harmful effects of smoking isn’t just ignoring science; they’re ignoring the clear and immediate experience of their own lives.
Come on, that has to be a Poe. She is pro-puppy mills fer chrissakes!
#41 You win!
I can’t believe you all took the time (and presumably analgesics) to actually read the web page. It scared me away more effectively than a collection of rabid pit bulls.
The Nazis were also the first to publish epidemiological evidence linking smoking to lung cancer. That must mean that anyone who promotes tobacco control is a Nazi. :-)
Egads. That page could induce seizures. Judging from the following quote, the woman has a severely limited supply of adjectives. Everything is described as beautiful.
IIEEEEEEE!! The WWW.!? The gross misuse and abuse of proper capitalization and punctuation!!!
I am so happy she is not seeking more design work.
Washington was also a pot smoker, a slave owner and an adulterer
@nowimnothing: She appears to run a puppy mill. Puppy mills exist, therefore someone must own and operate them and make money doing so. One can only assume such people are pro-puppy mill. Or does it just not seem possible to bundle up that much odiousness in one person? I give you, the Tea Party. Where every evil is justified by the fact that there’s no ban on it in the original constitution. Besides, someone is actually out there in the real world driving that car.
Damn. Please put a warning up for that last link…that website is absolutely painful to look at. No wonder she doesn’t have work…
Afghan breeders are God. Good to know.
I had to check out what music was being automatically blocked. I am not at all surprised to learn that it is written by her talented son, and that he will write a “CUSTOM SONG JUST FOR YOU!!!”.
What are these BEAUTIFUL songs about? JEBUS!!!!!
My perverse curiosity does not feel the need to actually listen to the beautiful song, thank dog.
And he believed multiple blood-lettings could cure a cold. Turns out he was right, after his last blood-letting his cold symptoms were completely gone. Of course he was also dead, so there’s that.
My mother died of lung cancer, so I’m a pretty rabid anti-smoker. Nonetheless, a tiny part of me wants to ask her if she still believes all this when she gets a smoking-related disease such as emphysema or cancer. I bet that she’ll feel that the ACA is evil, socialized medicine even as she goes on to Medicaid and eventually Medicare.
That horrible car! That horrible car! That horrible car! Looking at it almost made my eyes bleed. I thought it cannot exist for real, for no-one would do something like that right? There is some basal level of taste under which nobody can sink, right? Then I clicked on the link…
I wonder why Dunning and Krueger won Ig-Nobel for their seminal work. They were spot-on. Some people are really so stupid, they cannot fathom how stupid they are.
My dad died of lung cancer and emphysema because of tobacco. Believe me, it was ugly. I literally wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. I can’t begin to express how angry seeing anyone deny the disastrous health effects of smoking makes me feel.
Except for smoking, my father led a pretty healthy lifestyle. He at a good diet (mostly due to my mother and later stepmother, but still…), and always got lots of exercise. He worked out almost daily, and played serious tennis and racquetball several a times a week. He had actually quit smoking some years before the disease came on, and I’m sure quitting extended his life by at least a few years, but it got him in the end.
Like PZ, I am a college professor. Although smoking rates are certainly much lower among college students than when I was in school, it still distresses me to see how many of our students are smokers. I sometimes wish I had a film of Dad on his deathbed I could make them watch. I won’t go into details except to repeat that I said above: it was ugly. I really wish I could just go smack the damn cigarettes out of their hands, but I would get into all kinds of trouble for that (and rightly so, of course: you can’t go around assaulting your students, even for a worthy cause).
Holy shit. That is more beauty than the human mind can handle. It is so beautiful I have to go lie down.
The fuck. That shit doesn’t even line up.
I think I’ve seen worse.
Out of words.
Oh. I missed that, so hidden in the corner.
So, when I saw your comment, I allowed the popup that Firefox had blocked, and reloaded the page. The popup… is an advertisement for music one of her relatives writes. You can buy it.
Wow, how stupid.
The horror!
Wow. I can hear it.
0.7 Tc.
The IgNobel Prize is awarded for research that cannot or should not be reproduced. Whether it’s spot-on is irrelevant to that.
Oh no. This woman’s Alma-matter is the college I currently attend, Florida Atlantic University.
Why?
Oh. I assumed it was because she thought the Internet is sorted alphabetically.
She seems to subscribe to the “more is better” aesthetic. Colour enlivens a website, so use moar colour! Why put one slogan on your car, when you can completely cover it? I’ll bet her house is a nightmare for dusting, because she probably has knick-knacks on every available surface.
Let’s be fair, though: her CV reveals the reason. She used to be an APL programmer. That stuff fucks you up. Kids, just say no!
Has anyone done studies on whether that web site causes eyeball cancer? Because I am pretty sure it killed something in me by viewing it, maybe it was just my hope for humanity dying.
Well, at least she plans ahead. At the bottom of the “blog” page:
——–
Afghan Hounds? Not what I’d expect from someone who is likely anti-Islam and probably despises most Middle East cultures. Well, I doubt she makes the connection.
I’m just going to leave this correspondence here.
We’re looking to re-do our website here. Thanks for the link. That page is awesome!
My boyfriend knows something of webdesign… and the website broke him. ;_; He was left sputtering incoherently for some time after viewing the coding for the page. Then I started reading him some of the comments here and we’re both horrified she has reproduced. Which brought up the idea of treating her as simply a bunch of single celled organisms, and maybe she budded like yeast.
Which in turn brought up the following comments:
“No, yeast could design a better webpage than that” from me.
And promptly followed by “You could probably make a better webpage out of yeast!” from Ben.
mouthyb #65
That is awesome.
I don’t know. In a way I feel bad for her. Looking at her resume with that frazzled photo and her wacky website and that tacky looking van she reminds me of the parents of those poor kids who would come to school and get teased like crazy, winter jackets covered in animal hair and smelling of smoke and you’d see them trudge out of class at the end of the day, friendless, shoulders slumped, eyes downward, get into some beat up car, mom at the wheel smoking, flipping her butt out the window before pulling away. You’d try to befriend them, and you’d go to their house, and it would be weirdly decorated and reeking of cigarette smoke, and their parent might greet you with a hello and some small talk mumbled around a lit cigarette, maybe offer you a soda or snack cake. The poor kid would try to entertain you while their strange parent sat in front of the TV chain-smoking away, commenting or laughing loudly at some TV program while the kid cringes every time you cough. You suggest going outside and tossing a ball around which fails completely because a different dog tries to hump your leg every ten seconds and you finally give up and tell the poor kid dinner is on the stove and your mom said you had to be home by now and you feel bad because you know it is a lie. I want to mock that woman and her husband and their poisonous ideas, but then the bleeding heart liberal in me thinks of that poor, weird kid from elementary school. Where do these people come from?
PZ, that link was *mean*! I don’t often recoil in horror from my screen, but good grief!
But I am indebted to hjhornbeck at #41 for reproducing that admirable blast of invective from King James I & VI—it’s probably the best thing I know of him, and the spelling adds considerable character.
nich: You mean the children of people who are not neurotypical and/or mentally ill? That’s quite a few of us around here.
In my experience, these people mostly come from their parents (and their parents’ way of living.)
That site hurts to look at. And I’m saying this as someone who used to think x0ff on x888 was a good idea.
King James I would have made an awesome youtube commenter.
This is the first in a series of posts by PZ. Some upcoming attractions:
Alcohol and the Mormons.
Pork and Islam.
Compromise and the GOP.
“Most people use Internet Explorer”? Ehh, not for about 6 years, but thanks for playing.
Yeash! Don’t even want to look at the markup on that. Pretty sure its not using CCS (Probably thinks that is some sort of liberal conspiracy, or something), she apparently doesn’t comprehend that different machines would have different page sizes, so doesn’t even have scaling, or even tiling, enabled, for the backgrounds, and.. guessing those things are like… javascripted butterflies? Though all the non-interactive, stupid flapping shit went out of stile at least 10 years ago…
Err. Yeah, and that too.. lol
One can tell everything they need to know about the site and the web designer skills from the very first words in the upper left hand corner of the page:
BEST VIEWED WITH INTERNET EXPLORER Ver 6+ WHY?
TO HEAR AWESOME MUSIC DO NOT BLOCK POPUNDER
That says it all.
To cut her a small amount of slack, it looks as though most of the web site was created over 10 years ago, around the same time Geocities was the big thing (remember how awful most of those web pages were?).
That doesn’t help with the crazy claims and ideas that fill the page, for sure, but comparing the page design with the standards of today is a little bit unfair.
Please, #29, this was in very bad taste coming just after PZ’s recent joust with Teh White Pedestal!
King James tried to outlaw smoking through an Order in Council. A court shot the Order down because laws passed by parliament superseded Orders and there was a law allowing recreational fires.
Her central motivation seems to be defending her right to chain smoke and blow her cigarette exhaust into the faces of the afghan puppies ‘she’ breeds.
There will always be wackos like this. The problem is that the U.S. has voted so many of them into State and federal government.
I found this ironically amusing about the liberty van… Above the rear wheel is the sticker proclaiming “My Dogs Vote!” *ring ring* “Hello, Kentucky board of elections…”
That website reminds me, very strongly, of Mirsky’s Worst of the Web. Anyone else remember that?
The butterflies are something, but what really got me was the Afghan hound with the halo and wings.
Aaarggh!! MY EYES!!
I haven’t seen such an eyesore since that Simpsons episode where Homer created his “greatest webpage on the internet” … and that was supposed to be Stylistic Suck. I didn’t even dare to look at the code … How in Neumann’s Name can anybody who has learned the basics of coding (even if it was “only” COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC) come up with such an abomination?
I guess she should rephrase the first line in here resumé: “I have access to the internet and I’m not afraid to use it.”
I suppose you’ve notice that it’s not just anti-smoking laws they are opposed to. It’s all “nanny” laws, such as seat belt laws. What the hell are they doing in Kentucky which has a seat belt law. In fact, all but one state has seat belt laws…so they should move to New Hampshire, and then they can’t go anywhere else. New Hampshire also allows smoking in some public places, so they should be happy as a lark.
This is priceless:
An anguished plea to the evil “State.”
Tacitus said, “it looks as though most of the web site was created over 10 years ago” Yes but when you’ve got something so perfect, so right…why mess with it.
There is a distinct pattern of hard rightists plastering every inch of their vehicles with bumper stickers or other slogan-bearing “decorations.”
I saw one in South Carolina that was decorated with slogans advertising the Christian Exodus movement.
I haven’t smoked for twenty-five years but for some reason I felt like I needed a cigarette after leaving this woman’s god awful web site.
Now just a gosh darn minute!
This woman is willing to come out of retirement to create a custom 8″x12″ website (with up to one image) and host it for a year for the price of a carton of Lucky Strikes.
< witnesses the full power and glory of her portfolio >
Yeah, okay. I… I can’t defend that.
The giant winged Afghan made me laugh. The site is awful all right, but I’ve seen worse. It’s lacking in flashing orange and other neon crap, and the cherry blossom and sky background softens things a bit.
Ha! Does she know that Hitler was devoted to his pet dogs?
It didn’t stop him making a packet out of taxing it!
As a political activist, it perpetually amazes me how many genuinely fervent young anti-capitalists are paying multinationals to poison them.
I have to admit some admiration when I see a site like this. It shows that the person was, at one time, on the cutting edge of programming. They were on the web when it was brand spanking new, and trying all the new cool stuff out. So at some point in time, she was right there, man. She just…stayed there, is all.
Tethys at 53 – I do like Rich Mullins’ music, and was very sad when he died, although the Jesus Record wasn’t one of my favorites even though it has the emotional appeal of being the last thing he recorded. It was published in 1998, so goes right along with the time frame of the rest of the site.
What, no blazing torches or “under construction” animated GIFs?
That is really something.
PZ @ 28:
Yeah, because sites which harbor popups and autoplay videos and ads that trigger (normally non-paranoid) anti-malware software are not good places.
Oh, wait…
Nick @ 92:
Indeed. As far back as high school (early 70s) I remember being dumbfounded at my peers who thought they were being rebellious and anti-establishment by addicting themselves to a poisonous carcinogen manufactured and sold by some of the most ruthless, soulless corporations in the history of predatory capitalism. And paying lots of money for the privilege.
As I said, cigarettes killed my father. They also contributed to the poor health my mother suffered from all her life and were a factor in the relatively early deaths of both my grandfathers and one of my cousins. I had all kinds of respiratory problems in my youth, which plague me to some extent still. Growing up in a small house with smoking parents undoubtedly exacerbated these problems, although there were other causes, as well.
When I see tobacco apologists like this it makes me madder than I can possibly express. Is Rush Limbaugh still claiming there is no evidence tobacco is bad for health?
So the only thing I need do to keep these maroons away is to post a “This is a smoke-free environment” sign on my door?
More news from the million vets march.
Nope, no racism there….(eyeroll)
I checked the source code, as I often do when presented with such stunning design, and I found this:
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Publisher 2000 and SWiSH Max3 (2009.11.30) www.swishzone.com">Yep. We’re done here.
So, I visited the “Mysamples” page. There, I clicked on the link to the jukebox (.
New tab that contains animated GIF:
then is overlain by blinking
then
then the flag next to in red, white & blue
then
then – that’s right, with a slash at the end, and housed in the independent country of (Western) Samoa, not even in American Samoa (.as), let alone in these united states (.us). Strange patriots.
And like yesterday, the page that opens (of course in a new tab) when I click on doesn’t make any sound.
Ah, I am falling into a vast pit of dark disp… oh, wait, its the optical illusion of that absolutely horrid background… Sorry.
Urg.. Knew I should have escaped those bloody brackets. :p
“BEST VIEWED WITH INTERNET EXPLORER”
May I beg to differ? Best viewed with a pair of very dark sunglasses.
Then I got to a page that said ‘The lord is my shepherd” and “404- file error”. Seems that Dog is leading his flock astray.
Moggie@62:
Hey! My first programming language at age nine or so was APL, and I’m perfectly normal!
*looks at pile of code in languages ranging from APL to BASIC to C to WSL (Waterloo Systems Language) to PROTEL (Nortel’s internal language) to Forth to hand-written Postscript to Python to C++…*
Well, normal-ish, at least.
Yeah, also if you actually adhere to a few simple design rules and valid HTML (ie not using specific microsoft tags) then the browsers should all render pretty much the same, also there’s the old div vs tables dilemma, I’ve had less issues using tables for layout but tables come with their own issues.
Yegads!