You have to give the record industry some credit. Orrin Hatch recently spoke about destroying the computers of people who break copyright laws. The industry is way ahead of him on this; copies of Tubular Bells 2003 are reported to be destroying CD-ROM, DVD-ROM and DVD drives. Nice. Why can't this technology be applied for good? If only all the copies of Fast Food Rockers CDs were similarly inflicted…
Okay, so that's the depressing news. To compensate, I present: THE GREATEST PRINTER IN ALL RECORDED HISTORY. I have to admit that it sounds a little far-fetched, but it looks really cool. I hope they're producing a henna ink-cartridge - instant henna tattoos!
Finally, in case you need a laugh, have a read of the latest RSS Wars. Yes, even software developers act like four-year-olds who take their toys home when things don't go their way.
Okay, so I dreamed I had pizza at McSweeney's last night. Eating foodstuffs at imaginary restaurants based on a literary magazine. Is that weird?
I should just stop talking now, right?
Well, new in the sense that you may not have heard them before.
Cat Power - Wonderwall
Chan Marshall does her deconstruction thing on Oasis. As a free bonus, the MP3 includes John Peel (i.e. I couldn't be bothered to edit it down).
Neko Case - Porchlight
Ooh.
Lauren Laverne - Mexico
Sigh. Could somebody get this girl back into a recording studio, and away from cheaply-made TV programmes? Thanks.
Mos Def - Travelling Man
Because rap isn't all about gangsters and money.
Shonen Knife - Daydream Believer
Bouncy! Japanese! Monkees!
RIAA to make criminals of almost every student in America. We'll accept asylum applications in the Fall…
Glastonbury webcam. I'll be watching it on BBC3.
UK Government accuses the BBC of lying. The BBC tells the Government what it can do with its demands.
The US Supreme Court strikes down Texas's anti-sodomy statute. Justice Scalia gets bonus points for referring to the "homosexual agenda". This man will most likely be Chief Justice when Rehnquist retires, everybody.
Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf turns himself in to American forces in Iraq. A TV series awaits…
UPDATE: The Supreme Court kicks further ass. Nike can be sued for false advertising over a publicity campaign to defend itself against accusations that Asian sweatshops made its footwear.
The next Pixar film:
Yes, I know that making fun of Scientology is like shooting fat fish in a small barrel, but this promotional leaflet from the 1970s is hilarious. My favourite part is when they talk about the Locational Assist Technique (yes! You can give people directions! And guide them when they're drunk!). Genius.
(link found via jwz)
How to know that you've been assimilated into the Cult of Mac: you spend far too much time hitting reload during Steve Jobs's keynote address, wanting to find out just exactly what features will be in the necessary $129 upgrade in the Autumn. I have crossed over to the dark side, my friends. Expect the black turtleneck jumpers soon. Oh, and when I go back to Chapel Hill in October, can people please keep me away from the Apple Store? For my own safety? Thanks.
From http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/senate12cp107.html:
Gen. Telford Taylor, an American prosecutor at Nuremberg, charged McCarthy with conducting "a new and indefensible kind of hearing, which is neither a public hearing nor an executive session." In Taylor's view, the closed sessions were a device that enabled the chairman to tell newspapers whatever he saw fit about what happened, without giving witnesses a chance to defend themselves or reporters a chance to check the accuracy of the accusations.
McCarthy and his staff also called hearings on short notice, and often outside of Washington, which prevented the other Republican senators from attending. Senators Everett Dirksen and Charles Potter occasionally sent staff members to represent them (and at times to interrogate witnesses). By operating so often as a "one-man committee,'' Senator McCarthy gave witnesses the impression, as Harvard law school dean Erwin Griswold observed, that they were facing a "judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one".
Theoretically the committee, rather than the chairman, issued subpoenas, Army Counsel John G. Adams noted. "But McCarthy ignored the Senate rule that required a vote of the other members every time he wanted to haul someone in.He signed scores of blank subpoenas which his staff members carried in their inside pockets, and issued as regularly as traffic tickets.'' Witnesses repeatedly complained that subpoenas to appear were served on them just before the hearings, either the night before or the morning of, making it hard for them to obtain legal representation. Even if they obtained a lawyer, the senator would not permit attorneys to raise objections or to talk for the witness. Normally, a quorum of at least one-third of the committee or subcommittee members was needed to take sworn testimony, although a single senator could hold hearings if authorized by the committee. The rules did not bar "one-man hearings,'' because senators often came and went during a committee hearing and committee business could come to a halt if a minimum number of senators were required to hold a hearing.
If witnesses refused to cooperate, the chairman threatened them with indictment and incarceration. At the end of his first year as chairman, he advised one witness: " During the course of these hearings, I think up to this time we have some--this is just a rough guess--twenty cases we submitted to the grand jury, either for perjury or for contempt before this committee. Do not just assume that your name was pulled out of a hat. Before you were brought here, we make a fairly thorough and complete investigation. So I would like to strongly advise you to either tell the truth or, if you think the truth will incriminate you, then you are entitled to refuse to answer. I cannot urge that upon you too strongly. I have given that advice to other people here before the committee. They thought they were smarter than our investigators. They will end up in jail. This is not a threat; this is just friendly advice I am giving you. Do you understand that?'' In the end, however, no witness who appeared before the subcommittee during his chairmanship was imprisoned for perjury, contempt, espionage, or subversion. Several witnesses were tried for contempt, and some were convicted, but each case was overturned on appeal
In 1950, Senator McCarthy denounced "those Communists and queers who have sold 400 million Asiatic people into atheistic slavery and have American people in a hypnotic trance, headed blindly toward the same precipice.''
If witnesses disagreed on the facts, someone had to be lying. The Fort Monmouth investigation, for instance, had been spurred by reports of information from the Army Signal Corps laboratories turning up in Eastern Europe. Since Julius Rosenberg had worked at Fort Monmouth, McCarthy and Cohn were convinced that other Communist sympathizers were still supplying secrets to the enemy. But the Soviet Union had been an ally during the Second World War, and during that time had openly designated representatives at the laboratories, making espionage there superfluous. Nevertheless, McCarthy's pursuit of a spy ring caused officials at Fort Monmouth to suspend forty-two civilian employees. After the investigations, all but two were reinstated in their former jobs.
In July 1954, Vermont Republican Senator Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution calling for the censure of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a senator. The resolution was referred to a select committee chaired by Utah Republican Senator Arthur Watkins. In September, after the Senate had recessed, the Watkins committee issued a report recommending the senator's censure. Following the November congressional elections, when Democrats won narrow majorities in both the Senate and House, the Senate returned in a lame duck session to debate the Watkins report and vote on censure. Friends from both parties appealed to Senator McCarthy to avoid censure by apologizing for his conduct, but he would hear none of it. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy's conduct for having been "contrary to senatorial tradition.''
Yes, Ann. The man was a hero. As ever, you miss the point. Yes, there were Communists in the USA during the 1950s. Yes, there were spies. The reason why McCarthy is justly vilified is not because he tried to find spies, but due to the methods he used; the browbeating of witnesses, testimonies taken contrary to Congressional rules, shoddy investigations, and blatant scaremongering to try and drum up public support for his witch hunt. Your President recently railed against the idea of 'revisionist history', so perhaps you might want to turn your focus onto subjects more worthy of your attention, like, say, Tom DeLay's dubious attempts to redistrict Texas, the embarrassing lack of WMDs, or the increasingly Vietnam-like conditions around Baghdad and Basra? Just a thought.
Let me say that again: Somebody who has worked long hours his whole life to save for his son’s college has to pay taxes at more than twice the rate as his boss. Where I come from, that man’s hard work means at least as much to the future of this country – not half as much – as what his boss does. After the biggest lapse in corporate responsibility in our lifetimes, we shouldn’t be letting a CEO who pays himself hundreds of times more than his workers pay lower taxes than the workers themselves.Mr. President, I challenge you. Explain why you think a multimillionaire should pay 15% on his next million, while a fireman has to pay over 30% for each extra dollar of overtime. Mr. President, explain how you square that with America’s values.
John Edwards comes out fighting.
The Senate Commerce Committee starts to reverse the recent FCC ownership adjustments.
A guarded Hurrah! all round, I think.
The ITC has reported back on the complaints it received during the recent war in Iraq. Fox News has been cleared of all charges of bias. I'm in two minds about this; while I don't believe that Fox should be taken off air, the channel does have a definite bias, which is something that news channels in this country are not supposed to have. The ITC say that
Our own monitoring of Fox News suggests that a range of opinions are heard on the station.Which is true, I suppose, but differing viewpoints do tend to be shouted down if they disagree with the Fox line. And I would be appalled if any news organization treated a guest in the way that Bill O'Reilly did a few months ago. So I'm a little baffled with parts of the ITC decision.
In other, possibly related, news, rumours are flying that Al Gore is looking to start up a new US news channel. The intriguing part is the suggestion that the new channel would rely on amateur footage and reporting; using mobile phones, digital cameras, and blogging tools to create a format so far yet unseen on a news channel. If there's any truth to any of this, we could be in for some interesting times in the near future...
A glimpse at some of the songs currently rotating through my playlist:
The New Pornographers - Your Daddy Don't Know
Completely cheesy, over-the-top piece of power pop, featuring the sublime vocals of Neko Case. Almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
Yoz - Ripping Kids of Death
A bootleg mix of Saint Etienne's Cool Kids of Death and Michael Greene's speech from the 2002 Grammy Awards. It works surprisingly well; it's one of my favourite bootleg mixes.
Saturday Looks Good To Me - Meet Me By The Water
One of the standard theories of pop music is that after you turn 21, you no longer fall in love with bands with the same zeal that you did in your teenage years. This is, of course, complete gibberish. Hurrah! Welcome to my latest obsession. It's like Wes Anderson decided to make music. With hilarious consequences. This track is one of the highlights on their latest album, All Your Summer Songs. Swoon as the circuitry of the song disappears, the lyrics melt, and the acoustic guitar coda reaches infinity.
500g minced pork
500g minced beef
(Vegetarian option? Erm, pass…)
1 tablespoon olive
1 onion (again, optional)
1 tablespoon chili powder
1⁄2 teaspoon ground cumin
2 teaspoons dried oregano
A pinch of salt
50ml vinegar
250ml beef stock
Sauce from Part One
Oil for frying
8-10 corn or wheat tortillas
Lots of grated cheese
Crushed chilies
Put the beef and pork in a frying pan and cook until browned and crumbly, breaking up the meat with a spoon. Add the olive oil and onion, and cook until soft. Stir in the chili powder, cumin, oregano and salt, then add the vinegar and stock. Simmer for 10-15 minutes, then drain off the excess liquid. Remove from the heat and cool.
Spread a little of the chili sauce across the base of a large baking dish. Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the tortillas quickly on both sides, trying not to crisp them up. Remove them and drain on kitchen towel.
Dip the tortillas into the chili sauce, and put about two tablespoons of the meat in the centre of each tortilla. Fold and arrange in the baking dish.
Pour the remaining chili sauce and meat over the top, and scatter with grated cheese. Sprinkle the crushed chilies over the dish. Bake in a preheated oven at 180˚C/350˚F for 20-30 minutes until bubbling and golden brown.
5 small dried red chilies
425g canned chopped tomatoes
4 tablespoons oil
1 onion (optional)
4 tablespoons boiling water
3 tablespoons tomato paste
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
11⁄2 tablespoons wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
Place the chilies and boiling water in a blender or food processor. Drain the tomatoes, keeping the juice, and add them to the blender. Blend until smooth. Heat the oil in a frying pan and sauté the onion until soft. Stir in the in the blended tomato mixture, the juice, the paste, cumin, coriander, vinegar, and sugar. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes.
The special edition of Hail To The Thief is a wonderful thing. The design is based on the style of McSweeneys, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and of course, the venerable and setter of trends that is The Weekly. And it has a fine gatefold poster, plus a Book of Lyrics that Gentlemen (or Ladies, if they so choose) may wise to peruse whilst listening to the audio recording.
Amusingly, however, the CD is not a proper CD. Instead, it is a Copy Controlled disc, that is intended to prevent people from ripping it to MP3 (a rather pointless move, considering that the album has been available on the Internet since March, but anyway). I discovered this after cdparanoia had happily ripped every single track. Back to the drawing board, lads…
Yesterday was a computer day. I've upgraded the installation of Movable Type to version 2.64, and I spent the rest of the day working on an AppleScript program that allows me to upload and post pictures simply by selecting them in iPhoto and pressing a button. It started out as a simple idea, but of course took the best part of five hours to get working. Computers. Love them.
And no, I have absolutely no idea what the comments in the previous entry are going on about.
I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house. And that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard, but he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted, if I could hit 'em, but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.
Three years ago, I wrote an extension to The Gimp, an open source image editing program, allowing users to create text representations of their images. For example, here's a picture of the Linux mascot, Tux:
And here's the same image after my extension has created an all-text version (you might need to look at the enlarged image to actually see the text):
The script had a few fancy options, like being able to select different fonts and sizes, plus it could read huge amounts of text (say, if you wanted to paint a picture of Hunter S. Thompson with the words from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas). It only took me an afternoon, and I was fairly pleased with how it worked.
Being one of those no-good Free Software types, I placed it on my old web site under a license known as the GPL, which gives anybody the right to use, distribute and modify the program, providing that they continue to allow access to the source code (and any changes they may have made). I added it to a website which lists various different additions for The Gimp, and promptly forgot about it.
Today, I was searching through Google, and came across a link to my code. Only it was on a different website from my old one. Curious, I started another Google search, looking for references to my program. It seems to have spread far and wide across the world. People have made additions and changes to my original work; updating it to work with the new version of The Gimp, and bundling it with a bunch of other programs and selling the collection on CD.
Scattered across the world, in thousands of different places, my name still resides in the source code. It'll remain there until the CDs biodegrade, roughly a hundred years from now. I'm not quite sure how to deal with that.
A scary moment from yesterday: my sister and I are having a conversation about a wall. About a minute into the conversation, we stop in horror as we realise that we're talking like Aaron Sorkin characters. The scary insane ones. The moral of the story? Watching too many Sports Night episodes in succession can do strange things to your mind. We're now taking a little break.
My final cheque from Chapel Hill arrived this morning, so I'm $600 richer today. After working it out, it seems like I left America $1,000 worse off, as I took $6,000 with me last August, and I now have roughly $5,000 in several different accounts on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, I still have several thousand pounds of student loan debt from my time at Manchester, but let's not think about that, shall we?
Weather forecast for Saturday's barbeque: 22˚C and sunny. Come one, and come all…oh. Well, it did say earlier that it was going to be sunny. I promise. Still, 19˚C isn't too bad, I suppose.
Another trip to Oxford. Last time I went, they were digging up most of Cornmarket street. Obviously, they thought that this wasn't acceptable, so they've started work on the front of the Waterstone's bookshop as well. The jackhammers are a nice touch.
They say never judge a book by its cover. I am really bad at this, as I've bought many books simply because the cover caught my attention (Thomas Pynchon's V popped out of a bookshelf in Manchester one day, and I spent the next six months buying every one of his books). I'm also fascinated by changes in cover design when books are reprinted. Today in Oxford, I saw two horrible new book designs: The US edition of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay has a wonderful period cover, evoking the book's pulp comic themes. The UK version has a picture of a tied-up man. Even worse is the new printing of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. They've dropped the classic Ralph Steadman art and replaced it with a horrible late 1990's medicine bottle design. Ugh.
My feet and legs are now killing me. I'm still breaking in my new boots. Yes, for the first time in almost six years, I'm wearing boots that aren't black. They're a bit smaller than my old ones, so my leg muscles need some time to get used to the change. Ow ow ow…
One of my current projects is to finally watch the whole of My So-Called Life, having spent close to $200 on getting the DVD release (long, long, long story). Two observations from watching a few episodes: firstly, Angela has worn the same shirt in several episodes so far, which is somehow cute and endearing (considering that in most TV shows, people wear an outfit once only). Secondly, it seems that even MSCL (as all the cool kids are calling it these days) wasn't completely immune to the phenomenon that is the "magic teacher" episode.
It seems to be a staple of drama and film; a teacher with an unconventional method of teaching arrives in town, causing chaos in her or his wake. The students are inspired, but the parents and the rest of the teachers plot to remove the new teacher. Ultimately by the end of the film or episode, the teacher is run out of town, but the children Have Been Changed. Cue end credits.
Did anybody actually have a teacher like that? Is it more of an American culture difference? I have many teachers that I remember fondly, and yes, they were unconventional, but they stayed. The teachers that left after a term or so tended not to be very good. So I've never really understood film and television's obsession with this idea of a rogue teacher (okay, I understand to the point that it's a good way of creating conflict, and easy for a a TV show to cast the role for a one-off performance, rather than keeping the actor on the staff).
Happily, the episode in question did its best to make things as ambiguous as possible; the teacher turned out to have an outstanding arrest warrant for failure to pay alimony, and he ran away at the first hint of trouble. Hurrah for subtly subverting teen drama clichés!
(Oh, and the dance Claire Danes does in the middle of Why Can't Jordan Read? Simply magical.)
Important things that Should Be Remembered: the distance back to your house is always greater than what you think it is, and the rain is heavier that it initially seems. Failure to keep these details in mind will result in a half-hour trudge through pouring rain.
As you can imagine, I failed to remember these two important facts at Luke's barbeque tonight, and so I'm currently dripping onto my keyboard. Luckily, it was a lovely day today, so the rain was more cool and refreshing rather than "you will die of exposure before the third roundabout". And a Yay! for my Dad for making me a mug of hot chocolate when I finally stumbled in through the garage door.
Yes, it's barbeque season once more. This is the short period of time from June to August when you can sometimes safely cook outside for five hour periods without getting soaked. There are certain traditions about our barbeques. The first is that my friend Gavin always does the cooking. I'm not quite sure how it started, but none of us would even think about usurping his position (mainly because he's really good at it). Gavin has a tendency to cook everything in sight, so it's a wise idea to hide a few things to prevent him from cooking all the food in the first hour. The second tradition is that there is always, always too much food. At the end of the night, there's normally a plateful of sausages left uneaten (they're nasty things, so I understand why). The third tradition is that if the event is held at my house, then I am honour-bound to make my Mexican dish (Chorizo Enchiladas). Before I left for America last year, I gave the recipe to Gavin, only to be told "it's far too complicated. You have to make it." So in the next few weeks, it'll make a return, along with my experiments with Carolinian BBQ sauces. I'm calling Greenpeace and the EPA in advance, just in case something goes horribly wrong.
For a moment there, I had thought they'd changed the format of Later... to eliminate the annoying Jools Holland bits. How wrong I was. Still, it was nice to see Radiohead playing live again. I'm also really warming to Zwan as well, which is weird considering I wasn't too much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan (liked a few singles, have an album or two kicking about somewhere upstairs). Mind you, I love Celebrity Skin, and if half of the rumours are to believed, that's little more than a Billy Corgan record sung by Courtney Love.
I think I've finally managed to settle on a script to concentrate on, so I'm working on that at the moment, inbetween cardboard sword fights with my sister. Important things first, you understand.
How sad am I? I see Peter Saville in the audience, and go "Ooh. It's Peter Saville!" When you've got to the point where you recognise record sleeve designers, do you have to admit that you have a problem?
Er, yes. It appears that the Wolfowitz piece from yesterday was a garbled translation from the German newspaper Die Weit, and the traditional game of Chinese Whispers transformed his comments quite far from his original intent. So I apologise. I am rather annoyed at The Guardian for not bothering to cross-check it with the DoD's transcript, and for pulling the link with no explanation.
But hey, who needs Wolfowitz, when you've got Ashcroft on the loose? And then from yesterday, there's this wonderful bit of legalese:
But Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff told the three-judge panel that the Sixth Amendment right did not extend to questioning foreign enemy combatants held by the military overseas. Even if Moussaoui did have the right, he said, the request should be denied on national security grounds.Just so we're clear:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.Now, where does it say that national security means that the amendment doesn't apply? Yes, I know that in times of war, governments are allowed to get away with certain actions in the name of the national interest. But then, that allows things like this to happen. The law courts should not repeat the mistakes they made then.
We're part of the Wal-Mart family now!
It seems that now, after having got their way, they're talking more openly about why we attacked Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, known as one of the leading hawks in the Bush Administration. His comments from a conference in Singapore at the weekend, on why North Korea is being treated differently than Iraq:
Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.That sound you hear is Tony Blair's quiet sobbing, as our trusted ally happily tears his arguments to shreds.
The US media may not pay too much attention to Wolfowitz's comments (I'm not there, so let me know if I'm wrong), but I guarantee that this'll be all over the British newspapers tomorrow. The Press is beginning to smell blood.
EDIT: This story is wrong. See the June 5th entry for an explanation.
Behold the majesty of the Red Swingline Stapler!
Having problems today. I made a list of all the stories I'm currently working on. It comes to a grand total of nine, all in various forms of completion (two have most of the plot fleshed out and two-thirds of a script, while one is little more than a sentence). All I have to do is pick one, and see it through to the end.
Obviously, this is where the problems start.
Every time I sit down to work on something, my thoughts automatically shift to one of the other ideas. I think that it might be a better idea to do the New York story, or a way of fixing a fatal flaw in the road-trip script suddenly comes to me. And shouldn't I work on the other thing before my memories become unreliable?
This goes on for a while, and I end up writing very little at all. It's most annoying.
On a brighter note, I hope to be hearing about the Top Secret thing in the next few days, and it appears that my final paycheque from Chapel Hill will be in the capable hands of the Royal Mail by next week. Yay for extra cash (mind you, by the time it arrives the current exchange rate will make it worth £5)!
I'm fascinated by the history of computing. I love knowing about the people who created the protocols and applications that we use today, the squabbles and lawsuits, the claims and counter-claims. Who invented the Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointer system that we all use today? Who owns UNIX anyway, and why is that important? Why did the man who created the mathematical language of how all computers work commit suicide? Just how did Bill Gates get where he is today?
But all of this is insignificant compared to the momentous event that occurred on the 19th of September, 1982. For it was then that three ASCII characters were combined to form the smiley, and text communication was transformed forever. I love the idea that, five hundred years in the future, data archeologists might be able to trace the origin of the Western smiley (Asia actually uses a different set of smilies — look here for some examples) to the exact date and time of a post on a long defunct CMU bulletin board.
I'll go and take off my geek hat now.
Just as expected.
We now return you to your local AOLTimeFOXVerizonHearstClearChannel programme.
Just to show that it's not all doom and gloom, and that sometimes the big companies don't get everything their way: the Austin branch of the EFF has managed to defeat the Texan version of the Super-DMCA Bill, sending the MPAA back home. A small victory which doesn't help the residents of, say, Florida or Michigan, but it's a start.
"We have 200 couches where you can sleep tight"
Interpol must have a big house. Must be expensive, considering NYC estate prices.
It's just occurred to me that despite spending a year in America, I neglected to pass on the secret of the KitKat straws to the New World. This is obviously a tragedy which must be rectified at the earliest opportunity. Like now:
KitKat Straws.
What You'll Need:
A KitKat (chunky works best, but in a pinch the old 4-blocks are good)
Tea/Coffee/Hot Chocolate
Instructions: Take the KitKat and bite both ends off. Place one end in the cup, and suck the drink through the other end. Delicious goodness. But don't suck for too long, or else the KitKat will melt and fall into your drink. This Is A Bad Thing.
What? Why is everybody looking at me like that?