Say goodbye to the next 30-or-so minutes of your life

If you're like me, at some point you took a language course and figured that you would just breeze through it with the help of Babelfish (aptly named after Monsieur Adams' brilliance) or Google Translate - and without actual effort, the purchase of a textbook or any man-hours spent studying or making index cards. And you, like me, probably failed epically. Why? Because we placed our faith in a pretty crappy online translator. But hark! Some good may come out of our failure:

Enter Translation Party, a widget that uses Google Translate to take an English sentence or phrase, translate it to Japanese, then translate back to English, then back to Japanese and so on until two English translations come back the same; they call it the equilibrium.

My original sentence: I certainly am afraid of all sorts of God-awful shenanigans, including but not limited to tea bagging.

My equilibrium:I am afraid of a certain type of God. However, fraud, poor people are not limited to the package of tea.

You must play around with this.

Sam Brownback says fuck you Pan!

You little human-goat-thing. Nobody likes you!

This is what happens when you have a group of crazies who are no longer in the majority that are so far to the right that they don't even want to tell people they are in the Senate anymore, and they're getting bored. They start writing legislation, and the legislation starts getting pretty friggin' weird.

Take Sammy's last little gem he authored on Friday: the Human-Animal Prohibition Act of 2009. This legal masterpiece prevents science from creating some kind of human-animal hybrid; so if you're a mermaid and you're reading this right now, you are illegal. Piss off.

Okay, now that we are merpeople-free, let's continue. From Sam's blog comes some sort of explanation:

This legislation works to ensure that our society recognizes the dignity and sacredness of human life. Creating human-animal hybrids, which permanently alter the genetic makeup of an organism, will challenge the very definition of what it means to be human and is a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice.

My background is in agriculture, and for a number of years we have been working with crops and animals to produce a superior soy bean, a superior cow, and so-on. We can genetically engineer safe products and herds that are disease resistant or that possess more desirable attributes. But doing this in plants and livestock is very different than doing this in humans.

Damn. Well, looks like creating Ender-like beings are off the table. Son of a bitch!