Email notification to Brandon Starr's blog has been shown to reduce bad cholesterol in two-toed sloths, and has been used as an effective exfoliant.
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Sunday, November 14, 2004
Here's a perfectly-named religious blog, in my estimation:
"God-dependent"
This isn't one of those ugly political blogs, just a Christian psychologically dependent on his God like a baby to the bottle.
Remember, it takes an awful lot of chanting and repetition to get a falsehood into your brain. That's why you repeat so many things at church, and are asked to do more on your own, which they call prayer. They even have premade prayers so that you can make sure you stay on the "right path."
Happily for the rest of us, the good news is, when something is objectively true, it's pretty easy for your brain to accept. No washing of the brain necessary. Down is the way the Earth's gravity pulls. Paper cuts hurt. Julia Roberts is overrated as an actress. Dogs have a great sense of smell, yet they stink. Facts like these you don't have to repeat over and over in order to "accept" them.
But you really, really have to try hard to get your brain to "accept" Christ. It'd take a lot of chanting and repetitive indocrination to believe in anything invisible and unfelt that yet is supposed to be everywhere and has immense power and influence over your life and the entire universe--or to believe in anything false, say, right-wing politics; why do you think they're called "dittoheads?" In fact, a lot of folks go through the motions of their religion, doing their best NOT to think about their "chosen" religion 98% of the time. It's a form of denial. If you don't think about religion AT ALL, you can pretend you're an okay Christian and get on with earning a living and so on.
If you're going to to church today, enjoy your indocrination, and hope it holds you over until your next brain-soaking session.
But know this: you can live a very happy, giving life and not believe that there's a deity out there watching your every move, and just waiting for an excuse to torture you until the end of time, and asking for a handout every week.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Anyone remember Tom Swifties?
Tom Swifties (the link gives the description--but they're pretty self-explanatory after you've seen about two of them). I remember them from when I was a kid.
I even enjoyed making them up. Here's a few of my own, sometimes more obtuse, Tom Swifties:
"This tomb sure is dark," Tom said cryptically.
"I'm gonna sue you!" Tom cried plaintively.
"I've been working all day," Tom said laboriously.
"You can't charge a Senator for postage," Tom said frankly.
"I'm an expert plumber," Tom said wrenchingly.
"Where's my lithium?" Tom asked maddeningly.
"All I need is a pipe and a cobra," Tom said charmingly.
"I love Scott Joplin!" Tom chimed in entertainingly.
...as you can tell, I don't have a whole heck of a lot to write about today.
Friday, November 12, 2004
Outsourcing companies cheer Bush reelection
It's Wallace Shawn's birthday today.
Wallace Shawn is perhaps most famous for playing Fizzini, the not-quite-clever-enough criminal mastermind in "The Princess Bride."*
But he's been in some other good movies, too: "Manhattan," "Clueless," "Toy Story," and now "The Incredibles."
Plus, he's been on some of my favorite TV shows: "Family Guy," "King of the Hill," and "Taxi" among them.
Happy birthday, Wallace, and remember: the wines are BOTH poisoned.
It's perhaps appropriate to quote from Fizzini, only a week or so after the reelection of Bush:
On starting a war:
"It's a prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition."
On where NOT to start a war:
"Never get involved in a land war in Asia!"
* Though I've never really hashed out a formal list, "The Princess Bride" has got to be on my top 20 or so movies of all time.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Just a quick one this time. I don't think I've gotten less feedback on any regular topic than I have for oil.
Oil is dropping pretty steadily. Apparently the market is convinced the worst is over for the supply deficit.
I remain unconvinced, but certainly we've at least put the hurricane damage behind us. I still don't think oil prices will steady out in the low 30s, as some experts do.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I have a bullish position in Maverick Tube, which supplies pipeline to the oil industry.
Happy Veterans' Day, and good luck to the future veterans in Afghanistan and Iraq, including my cousin, who is pulling another tour in Iraq. (See the left column for the link to my entry about my cousin's stories that he told me after he was back from his first tour.) May your training and dedication overcome the lack of wisdom from the Bush Administration.
Also, Arafat's dead. That's one less terrorist. I would say something about how he made the world pay attention to the Palestinian cause, but as if being a terrorist wasn't bad enough, he was a thief, making off with billions of aid dollars that were supposed to help the beleaguered people of Palestine. So f*** him.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
U.S. says it holds 70% of Fallujah already (AP & Reuters, via MSNBC)
All this means is that most of the insurgents left while the U.S. made its wholly obvious preparations for invasion.
As if we needed more proof of it...
1) Insurgents have been "reduced to small pockets" already.
2) None of the nine hostages have been found. (Yet. Maybe they will be. But I'm thinking they're gone with most of the insurgents.)
Meanwhile, because so many troops have been moved to the Fallujah attack, insurgency attacks elsewhere in the country are higher.
And when Fallujah is completely "controlled?"
“We anticipate that in Fallujah, in addition to whatever damage might happen during the fighting, that there’s been a state of neglect and damage over time over the last few months that has to be repaired,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters.
“Once it’s back in government hands, we’ll be able to get on with these projects very quickly,” he added.
Trouble is, they haven't been able to "get on with these projects very quickly" ANYWHERE--spending on reconstruction projects, as I've linked to here before, has been reduced to a trickle because of the insurgency threat.
Remind anyone of any other wars the U.S. has been involved with in, say, the last forty years? Where brute force could clear an area, and where every major battle was won, yet the war itself was lost?
Happy birthday, Carl Stalling!
Carl Stalling was born November 10th, 1891.
Stalling was, as I'm sure many of you remember, the writer and conductor of the music of all of the great Warner Brothers cartoon shorts.
You may not know he started out at Disney, where he scored such famous shorts as "Plane Crazy (1928)," (one of the very first Mickey shorts), "Haunted House (1929)" and "The Skeleton Dance (1929)." Those last two are famous for their use of music to create mood in such early animation.
He was with Warner Brothers until the late 1950s. The Warner Brothers shorts were never the same after he left. Such composers as Bill Lava tried to emulate the formula, but it always rang hollow.
Stalling was a master of several things:
1) Use of music to create mood.
2) Use of classical music and the large Warner Brothers portfolio of songs to use music people already knew in a parodic or evocative way.
3) Use of music to add to what was being seen on the screen.
4) Use of silence when it was a better choice than music.
5) Use of instruments to mimic voices.
6) Use of music as a faux sound effect.
7) Taking advantage of the full orchestra on Warner Brothers' staff. Not many cartoons even COULD sound as good as Stalling-directed ones, even if they had a genius of Stalling's caliber on staff, for this reason alone.
Plus, he was a pioneer. He perfected the art of having a copy of the cartoon playing while he was conducting, to make sure that the sound was matching the visuals. This is something used even today, as "making of the movie" documentaries amply demonstrate.
He invented something used by many musicians to this day--he had the orchestra wear headphones, which would play a metronomic tone to keep everyone together.
It was well-known that the musicians LOVED playing for Stalling. His music was interesting, fun, and unbelievably challenging. It always included multiple time shifts, unusual pauses, changes in playing technique, and other difficult devices.
Stalling was the reason for generations of kids to fall in love with classical and orchestral music, or at least to have a basic understanding of it. Who hasn't laughed along to the music in "The Rabbit of Seville" or "What's Opera, Doc?"
If you've never heard "The Carl Stalling Project" or other CD compilations of Stalling's, check them out.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
For Ariana--on libertarianism
Ariana asked for some links to libertarian sites, and so on.
Well, I don't have any that I go to regularly. But there are some that spell out the basics.
For those who want the lowdown without clicking:
Libertarians, politically, believe in smaller government. They do usually for one or both of the following two reasons:
1) Distrust of big government,
2) Big government creates winners and losers through its complicated tax and pork-barrel structures. Government shouldn't be in the business of making winners and losers in its population.
How to connect this to standard liberal/conservative stances?
Liberals tend to believe in less government when it comes to social issues--abortion rights, free speech, minority rights, gay rights, and so on. They tend to believe in more government when it comes to fiscal issues--Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, affirmative action, and so on. This is a simplification, but you get the picture.
Conservatives tend to believe in more government when it comes to social issues--abortion rights, prayer in schools and other tear-down-the-wall-between-religion-and-state issues. They tend to believe in less government when it comes to fiscal issues--lowering taxes even when it causes deficit spending, privatizing Social Security, mandating work and setting other limits on welfare, and so on. Where massive corporate subsidies fit in, I don't know--maybe that's more of a neocon thing. Anyway, another simplification, but there you have it.
For years, I didn't even know about libertarianism. When asked, I'd say, "I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative." I didn't know for a long time that when that's your belief, you're a classic libertarian. In both cases, you want less government. (The converse would be a statist. Statism has autocracy, dictatorship, or bureaucracy as its ideal form of government.)
The Libertarian Party is the largest third party in the history of the United States, and is also the most well-entrenched. It has a very hard time breaking through the Democrat/Republican stronghold, though. I think that's for three reasons:
1) The Dems and Repubs have set up the system to make it hard for third parties to get funding or on the ballot, let alone elected. Partly this is momentum--power leading to power. Partly it is through adding laws that make it tough for third parties to get visibility of any kind. Unlike the Greens, the Reformers, etc., Libertarians have had Presidential candidates on the ballot in all 50 states for decades, now, yet they are never allowed into the "Presidential debates."
2) It's tough to find the right kind of candidate--you have to find someone who wants the office, yet believes in small government. Similarly, it's tough to find funding--the Democrats have the unions and the lawyers, the Republicans have the rich and the corporations. Not many groups want to fund a party whose main philosophy and claim is, "We won't favor anyone over anyone else." Nice and ethical, but not attractive for funding. Power groups would rather fund someone who claims, "We'll favor YOU over EVERYONE else."
3) To a degree, they have the same problem as every other out-of-power third party: the only ones active in the party are the "true believers." This leads to a tendency to extremism, when the U.S. has historically favored balance and centrism, November 2004 excepted.
Anyway, here are some links on libertarianism:
Libertarian.org
The home page of the Libertarian Party--including a "where do you fit?" quiz to help you figure out if you're liberal, conservative, or libertarian-leaning, based on how you answer questions about issues. The paper version of this quiz is what led me to realize there was a political stance and a party that actually fit my beliefs almost completely, instead of half-and-half. And it's fair, too--it'll tell you if you're liberal or centrist or whatever, it doesn't stack it in favor of libertarianism. You can just click here to go right to the quiz.
The Free State Project--Libertarian thinkers across the country decided to move en masse to a small, already freedom-friendly state, and really try to make a difference in that one state. The state they voted on? New Hampshire--"Live Free or Die" indeed. The Free State Project is now underway. Interesting idea, anyway. I don't plan on moving from my beloved Pacific Northwest, but I love utopian and dystopian literature, and this is like a utopian libertarian experiment.
Monday, November 08, 2004
You can't get pregnant from...
...giving a hand job, or can you?
Abdomen-to-arm ovary transplant a success
The woman should be fertile after having cancer, getting an "autotransplant" of her ovary from its normal position to her arm, and soon having the ovary put back in its normal place.
I've heard of a similar technique used to save parts of the cranium for someone who is undergoing brain surgeries. The cap of the skull is removed and put elsewhere in the body to keep it alive. After everything is finished, the piece of the cranium is replaced.
In the case of the ovary, a technique which removed the ovary and froze it to accomplish the same thing (later pregnancy after cancer treatments that would have caused permanent infertility) has been successful, but can damage the ovarian tissue.
If the ovary can be verified cancer-free, this should be a very viable option for a lot of women. I hope, I hope, I hope that a similar technique will never be used in men.*
* Fortunately, I don't think it ever will be. The ovary is nearly unattached to any other part of the body, releasing eggs into the fallopian tube without being connected directly. In fact, eggs sometimes travel across the body and travel down the other fallopian tube! Indeed, this may have led to my own wife's very lucky pregnancy. Anyway, the ovarian situation is far different from the setup in the testes.
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